"Journalistic" and not "scientific", on the one hand, "amateur religious texts" or "texts about Islam", on the other hand: this is how the texts of this book are self-identified, which the author did not have the chance to see printed.
Indeed, the genre of journalism as well as the amateurism that V. Raphaelides treated are at their best here. Although the book has religion as its dominant axis, it extends and embraces anything substantial related to the Arabs: from their ethnic origin and historical evolution, to their culture, art, and philosophy. Having to deal with a huge body of information and material from the chaotic relevant bibliography, it manages to summarize and distill the essence of Arab culture and history, in a concise work that floats above the flood of regional details with graceful wit and depth.
With lively writing, with disruptive humor, with the gift of communicability and popularization (without losing substance), but mainly because the narrator stands at a point equally distant from various religious and other dogmas, it achieves a sober, demythologizing, and multifaceted recording of the Arab phenomenon. At the same time, with its penetrating dive into the deep cultural and religious structures of the Arabs, it offers the reader an unexpected handbook not only of heterognosis but also of self-knowledge, as it makes the internal layers from which the various metaphysical quests of the most "different" civilizations originate clearly discernible.