Recently finished Tom Holland's "in the shadow of the sword", basically a popular history book about the origins of Islam. It had some interesting stuff in but Holland is really bad at differentiating clearly when he's saying things that are common knowledge and when he's making controversial points (which he does, arguing that Muhammad was based near Palestine not in Mecca). His ethnography is also a but lazy, presenting Arabs, Romans and Persians all in quite culturally homogeneous terms even across a period of centuries. It's a fun read and well written, but I'd take it with a big pinch of salt, basically.
