PanThe Guardian (UK)I lost count of the number of beheadings and executions in this book, all told with a grisly relish. Muslim chroniclers are Marozzi’s sources, of course, but like all chroniclers they rexaggerate for political reasons or simply to impress the reader...Marozzi has a wide-eyed credulity about such numbers to match that of those literalistic Muslims wedded to every detail of the prophet’s life story ... His intellectual history is equally shaky ... Time and again Marozzi treats us to lusty descriptions of \'wine-soaked, hashish-perfumed\' parties or the sexual prodigiousness of slave girls. Entertaining enough, if that’s your kind of thing; but the licentiousness is made to bear too much historical weight ... Gender relations are not examined with any depth here, even though there is much fascinating material outside elite, male-dominated circles ... The unspoken message to Muslims? Make your nations great again by becoming more like us. So this is less a book about \'Islam’s superiority complex\', as the author puts it, than about the west’s. It says so much that of all the thriving modern cities with large Muslim populations Marozzi could have explored – Delhi or Jakarta or Amman – he prefers to visit Dubai.
