As Puritan religious fervor sweeps across Islam, God-inspired militants rise up to purge Arabia of corrupt foreign influences, to secure the Holy Places of Islam from idolatrous Westerners and Western-backed Egyptian mercenaries. The time is early in the 19th Century, but the bitter clash between the Egyptians and the Wahhabis will reverberate through the 20th Century. John Sabini’s masterly narrative paints a vivid historical canvas of the period, full of incident, anecdote, portraits and pageantry. The Egyptian-Wahhabi War coincided with the era when the Hijaz and the Holy Places, once terra incognita in the West, were revealed in fascinating detail by a band of perceptive and sometimes disreputable travelers. The cast includes Ali Bey, the mysterious Spanish Jew in the pay of Napoleon, John Lewis Burckhardt, the Anglo-Swiss traveler later to be revered as a Muslim saint, Captain Richard Burton, the notorious scholar, explorer and anthropologist, and many others. Armies in the Sand will plunge the reader into the harsh world of the desert and into the extraordinary spiritual drama enacted by the pilgrims to Mecca and Medina. Written with a deep understanding of Arab culture and history, this is a story which throws striking light on the resurgence of militant Islam today.