The aim of orientalist, historian and ethnographer Nickolay Petrovich Ostroumov was to describe the past and the present of Islam. The first part was on the history of Arabia; he planned to write also a biography of Prophet Muhammad, and the history of the text of the Quran, and an essay of the evolution of Moslem law, and to publish a short review of the doctrine by Abu Hanifa. In the published first part of the research O. gave a detailed description of the Arabian Peninsula, its geographical position, history and culture of Yemen; he also gave a characteristic of the dynasty of Arabs-Christians Lakhmids and Ghassanids, as well as the religious beliefs of Arabs before Islam. The book is concluded with the author’s considerations on the further destiny of the peninsula in the context of the Islamic awakening and the growing self-identification of Arabs, which disturbed him in the contrast of the passivity and the failure of faith in the Christian world.