Conquest to Conversion: The Formation of the Islamic World

How did the Arabs, originally a small group of tribes, come to conquer and rule a vast region from Spain to Iran? And how did their faith – Islam – become a major world religion? Moving between past to present, we will use the evidence of texts, landscapes, architecture and images to examine how an Arab state emerged, to explore what it meant to be Muslim and/or Arab, and to follow the spread of Islam.