Preferably non-academic, I am looking for a leisure book (on the same lines as Guns, Germs, and Steel) that covers the emergence of Islam and its spread, the caliphate that grew alongside, its internal politics and the creation of different sects of Islam and its effects on the Arab/Islamic world.
I would suggest either Robert Hoyland's In God's Path or Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers. They're both written by academics but have the benefit of being short, well-written, and very readable.
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