Muslim conquests (Arabic: الغزوات‎, al-Ġazawāt or Arabic: الفتوحات الإسلامية‎, al-Fatūḥāt al-Islāmiyya) also referred to as the Islamic conquests or Arab conquests, began with the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He established a new unified polity in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun (The Rightly Guided Caliphs) and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion of Muslim power.

They grew well beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a Muslim Empire with an area of influence that stretched from the borders of China and the Indian subcontinent, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Edward Gibbon writes in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

Under the last of the Umayyad, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days’ journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. And if we retrench the sleeve of the robe, as it is styled by their writers, the long and narrow province of march of a caravan. We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Quran were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville: the Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris.

Mohamed Fathi Osman (March 17, 1928 – September 11, 2010) was an Egyptian author and scholar who advocated on behalf of cooperation between Islam and other religions and whose writings include an overview of the Koran for the general public.

Osman was born on March 17, 1928, in Minya, Egypt. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s and worked on its weekly journal. Osman was awarded an undergraduate degree in 1948 from Cairo University where he majored in history in 1948. He broke with Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1950s and wrote the 1960 book Islamic Thought and Change, which presented a more progressive view of the religion, earned a law degree in 1960 from Alexandria University in 1960 and returned to Cairo University where he received a master's degree in Islamic-Byzantine relations in 1962. He was on the faculty of Al-Azhar University during the 1960s, where he worked on restructuring the teaching of Islam at universities and colleges in Egypt. He was granted a doctorate in Near Eastern studies in 1976 from Princeton University, where he wrote a dissertation on the subject of Islamic land ownership and taxation and later taught history at Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Saudia Arabia.