This volume reflects the huge upsurge of interest in the Near East and early Islam currently taking place among historians of late antiquity. At the same time, Islamicists and Qur'anic scholars are also increasingly seeking to place the life of Muhammad and the Qur'an in a late antique background. Averil Cameron. '... The work included here remains influential ...' Bryn Mawr Classical Review '... a valuable repository of (mostly) Anglophone scholarship on early Islam and a tremendously helpful resource for libraries, not least because of the admirable Variorum practice of maintaining the formatting and pagination of original articles throughout.' Medieval Archaeology