This extraordinary book was written in a tower house in Sana’a in Yemen during the current war. Heaven knows what the author’s internet connection was like, but he has managed to assemble a formidable array of primary sources, primarily in Arabic, to produce this brilliant perspective on a people and their civilisation.

Mackintosh Smith, like William Dalrymple, is a one of those Oxbridge types gone native and, when Western scholarship is engaged with a profound knowledge of a foreign culture and language, the results can be truly rewarding.

It would be impossible to do justice to a 2000-year history in 300 words but the reader can be assured that Arabs delivers a reliable overview, beginning with the pre-Islamic kingdoms, which emerged in Biblical and classical sources, and then the advent of Islam and the Arab empires of the Umayyads and Abbasids, and then the long decline as a political power from about the 12th century CE and on to the post-Colonial modern era.

What makes the book special is the author’s evident love for and appreciation of the language and culture. Mackintosh-Smith traces how the centrifugal forces embedded in Arab society – the eternal conflict/symbiosis between the Bedouin and agriculturalists, interacts with the centripetal force of language and, sometimes, religion.

Since at least the Crusades the Arab succeeded the Persian as the existential ‘other’ in the European mind but, as those dreadful postmodernists such as Said (Orientalism), like to point out, we have mainly made it up ourselves. This lack of understanding has reasons: the language is insanely difficulty (not just prefixes and suffixes but infixes as well); the culture opaque and the geography challenging. Islam is poorly understood, and most Westerners have no conception that it is just as diverse as Christianity. Mackintosh-Smith does a great service in producing a serious but highly readable – and brilliantly written – account of this massive subject.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen