Fascinating book, but you need ready access to an Arabic/English dictionary (lots of Arabic terminology, no glossary!)

VERY DIFFICULT TO READ AS AN E-BOOK. Be warned -- I wish I'd bought the hard copy. The book is fascinating and wide-ranging, but the author always uses Arabic terms, which makes sense since many (most? all?) of them have no direct parallel in English. But there is no glossary, so if you don't happen to remember what an Arabic word refers to, many pages after its first appearance, you're stuck. The only alternative that I can think of is trying the Index -- but on Kindle that means making a note of where you are in the text, then going to the Index to find the term, and going back into the text to try to find the appearance of the term when it's first described. But since the Index of course refers to specific pages in the hard copy version, this will be only a vague indication for an e-reader. I can only wish that the author and publisher had included a glossary in the Kindle version. At this point (I'm about halfway through) I'm not really prepared to go back to the very beginning to compile my own glossary. So it's all very frustrating, particularly since the book itself is so interesting.

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