THE PROPHET AND THE AGE OF THE CALIPHATES Dr Kennedy gives a full and clear account of the Near East in the formative period of Islamic society. Beginning with the life of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, he goes on to examine the great Arab conquests and the golden age of Islam from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The book closes with the period of political fragmentation in the tenth and eleventh centuries when the early unity was lost, never to be recovered.