No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam.  It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes  terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war.  In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of  years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short  history demonstrates that the world’s fastest-growing faith is a much  more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest.