Writing the History of Egypt for the New Cambridge History of Islam

The general purpose of the Cambridge Histories is to provide an up-to-date narrative of the subject into which the themes of economic, social, administrative and other kinds of history. In the context of a History of Islam, it is evidently from the aspect that the longue duree must be seen. That in turn requires a view of Islamic history, to see how Egypt was affected by Islam, and what its contribution to that history may have been. The Arabs, the last of the heretics in the Biblical tradition, were also the last of the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire and meanwhile overthrew the Persian. The Ottomans, who had profited in their own way from the Mongol conquests to create their own warrior state on the frontiers of Islam, had no need of Egypt as a seat of empire, and turned it back into a mere province.