“Journalistic” rather than “scientific” on one hand, “amateur texts on religion” or “texts about Islam” on the other: this is how the texts of this book define themselves, which the author did not have the fortune to see printed.

Indeed, the type of journalism and amateurism that V. Raphaelidis practiced is here at its finest hour. Although the book has a dominant axis of religion, it extends and embraces anything significant concerning the Arabs: from ethnogenesis and their historical evolutionary path, to their culture, art, and philosophy.

Having grappled with a vast body of information and material from the chaotic relevant literature, it manages to summarize and distill the essence of Arab culture and history into a compendium that skillfully navigates the flood of regional details with playful grace and depth.

With lively writing, subversive humor, and the gift of communicability and popularization (without diluting the substance), but mainly because the narrator stands at a point equally distant from the diverse religious and other dogmatisms, it achieves a sober, demystifying, and multifaceted account of the Arab phenomenon.

At the same time, with an insightful dive into the deep cultural and religious structures of the Arabs, it offers the reader an unexpected manual not only of knowledge about others but also of self-knowledge, as it makes clear the internal layers from which the various metaphysical quests of the most “different” cultures draw their origin.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]