A book review from the Movie Snob.

Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians, by F.E. Peters (Princeton 2003). As an introduction to Islam for the totally non-initiated, this book was decent but not great. Peters' accounts of pre-Islamic Arab civilization and the life and times of Muhammed are pretty good, as is his description of the Quran, but his account of Islam after Muhammed got a little confusing at times. Sentences like this one were killers:

"There was a considerable Ismaili apparatus in Iran, which, with schism and political impotence in Cairo, was taken over by the dai Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, who sometime before 1090 installed himself in the impregnable fortress of Alamut in Daylam, south of the Caspian Sea."

Whaaaa?!?!