The History of the Saracen Empires is a book written by Simon Ockley of Cambridge University and first published in the early 18th century.
Simon Ockley, vicar of Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, devoted himself from an early age to the study of eastern languages and customs and was appointed Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge in 1711.
[5] Stanley Lane-Poole in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that: The work was based upon a manuscript in the Bodleian Library ascribed to the Arabic historian El-Wâkidî, with additions from El-Mekîn, Abû-l-Fidâ, Abû-l-Faraj, and others.
Hamaker, however, has proved that the manuscript in question is not the celebrated 'Kitâb el-Maghâzî' of El-Wâkidî, but the 'Futûh esh-Sham,' a work of little authority, which has even been characterised as 'romance rather than history'citing the opinion of William Robertson Smith in the article on Ockley from the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[6] Lane-Poole notes that the History formed for generations the main source of the average notions of early Mohammedan history.Alfred Rayney Waller described the author's work: His English is pure, and simple, his narrative extraordinarily vivid and dramatic, and told in words exactly suited to his subject—whether he is describing how Caulah and her companions kept their Damascene captors at bay until her brother Derar and his horsemen came to deliver them, or telling the tragic story of the death of Hosein.