Archives Islamic History

When Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492, the terms were negotiated, not imposed. The Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the kingdom's Muslims their religion, their property, their own law, and their language. This episode is the fourth and final installment in the Al Andalus series, and it covers the century that almost never makes the popular retelling: the slow, deliberate unraveling of that guarantee.

The story moves from Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros's forced conversions in 1499, through Castile's 1502 decree ordering Granada's Muslims to convert or leave, to the same ultimatum reaching Aragon in 1526. It follows the...

Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain.

After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of Cordoba collapsed into civil war and then into roughly thirty small, competing kingdoms called taifas. These courts were militarily weak but culturally extraordinary, producing...

This episode covers the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and the century and a half that followed, when al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain and Portugal, fractured into roughly thirty rival kingdoms known as the taifas, and then watched two North African dynasties, the Almoravids and the Almohads, arrive as rescuers and stay as rulers.

It opens with al-Mansur ibn Abi Aamir's 997 raid on Santiago de Compostela and traces the fitna civil war, the 1031 abolition of the caliphate, the wealthy and militarily fragile taifa courts of rulers like the poet-king al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad of Seville, the mercenary career...

In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, ruler of Cordoba, took the title of caliph, rejecting the lesser title his family had held for five generations and setting himself against two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim world, in Baghdad and in North Africa. This episode follows what he built to back that claim up: Madinat al-Zahra, a purpose-built palace city on three stepped terraces outside Cordoba, complete with a mint, a reception hall built specifically to overawe foreign envoys, and, under his son al-Hakam II, one of the largest libraries the medieval world had seen, run day to day...

In 929, Abd al-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, took the title his ancestors had refused for a hundred and seventy three years: caliph. Seven years later he began building Madinat al-Zahra, a palace city outside Cordoba with a reported four thousand marble columns and fifteen thousand doors, designed to make foreign ambassadors feel the size of his claim before a word of diplomacy was spoken.

This episode covers the peak of Umayyad Cordoba: the caliphal proclamation and its rivalry with the Fatimid caliphate in North Africa, the construction of Madinat al-Zahra, and Caliph al-Hakam II's royal library, said...

In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber general serving the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic, opening a peninsula already fractured by a royal succession crisis. Within seven years, most of Iberia was under Muslim rule, won through a mix of battlefield conquest and negotiated treaties like the one signed with the Visigothic nobleman Theodemir in 713.

This episode covers the two founding chapters of Al-Andalus: the invasion of 711 and, forty-five years later, the arrival of Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya, a young Umayyad prince who escaped...

In the year 711, a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the narrow strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated Roderic, the last Visigothic king, in a battle whose exact location history still cannot confirm. Within seven years, most of the peninsula had changed hands, not only by conquest but by negotiation, as the Treaty of Theodemir shows: a Visigothic lord who kept his lands, his people, and his church in exchange for an annual tribute of wheat, honey, and vinegar.

This episode covers the two founding moments of Muslim Iberia, known to history as al-Andalus...

This is the third and final episode in a series on the Mamluks, the purchased slave-soldiers who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. It covers the sultanate's final year: the Ottoman-Mamluk war of 1516 to 1517, the betrayal at the Battle of Marj Dabiq, and the execution of the last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay II, at Cairo's Bab Zuwayla gate.

By the early 1500s, Egypt had absorbed roughly two dozen waves of plague since 1347 and was poorer for it. Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri, an aging patron of poetry and Sufi mystics who had actually tried to build a modern cannon...

This episode covers the second stretch of the Mamluk Sultanate's story: the 1260 Battle of Ain Jalut, where the Mamluk army under Sultan Qutuz, with the commander Baybars leading the decisive maneuver, handed the Mongol army its first major defeat anywhere. It also covers what happened fifty-one days later, when Qutuz was killed by his own commanders on the road home, and Baybars became sultan of Egypt by the end of that same day.

The episode then follows the sultan who came after, Qalawun, a former slave-soldier bought for a price that became his own nickname, who built...

A Mamluk was, by definition, "one who is owned." From 1250 to 1517, the sultanate of Egypt and Syria was ruled from Cairo by men who began their lives that way: boys of ten to fifteen, bought from slave traders on the Kipchak steppe and later in Circassia, shipped through Black Sea ports, and sold into a seven-year military education in the barracks of Cairo. At the end of it, they were manumitted, legally freed, and armed. What they built with that freedom is the subject of this episode.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on the Mamluk...

In 2012, the militant group Ansar Dine, backed by al-Qaeda's regional branch, occupied the historic city of Timbuktu in Mali and began enforcing its own version of religious law at gunpoint, banning music, carrying out public punishments, and demolishing the city's centuries-old Sufi shrines and the sealed door of the Sidi Yahya mosque.

This is the third and final episode in our three-part arc on Timbuktu, the West African city that traded in salt, gold, and books for a thousand years. It picks up four hundred years after Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti's own library was confiscated by an occupying...

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti was the most eminent jurist and teacher in Timbuktu, a member of the scholarly Aqit family, at the moment his city stopped belonging to itself. This episode opens with the popular myth of the "University of Sankore" and replaces it with the real system: mosque courtyards and private houses, a teacher and a student reading one book together until it was finished, and an ijaza, a written authorization naming a specific book and a specific teacher, as the only diploma that mattered. Books arrived on the same camel caravans as salt and gold, imported all the...

Timbuktu has no founder, no charter, and no founding date. Tradition holds that Tuareg nomads left an older woman, Buktu, in charge of a well around 1100 CE, and a city grew outward from the water she guarded. This episode traces how that accident of geography, a well eight miles from the point where the Niger River bends deepest into the Sahara, turned into the meeting point of two trade systems: camel caravans carrying salt down from the desert, and river canoes carrying gold up from the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure.

The episode follows Ibn Battuta's 1352 journey...

This is the fourth and final part of the story of the Abbasid Revolution, and it begins where a triumph is supposed to end. In January of 750, the Abbasid armies broke the last Umayyad field force at the Great Zab, and the most powerful dynasty on earth began to fall. What happened next was not a victory parade. It was a reckoning, and it fell on enemies and friends alike.

The episode follows the winners past the moment of victory. It tracks the last Umayyad khalifa, Marwan, fleeing the length of his own empire to a lonely...

In January of 750, the last Umayyad army broke on the banks of the Great Zab, and ninety years of Umayyad rule began to come apart in a matter of months. Part 3 of The Abbasid Revolution follows what victory actually looked like once the fighting stopped.

The revolution had made its move early, proclaiming Abu al-Abbas as the first Abbasid khalifa in the mosque at Kufa before the decisive battle had even been fought. He gave himself the name al-Saffah, a word Muslims have argued over for twelve hundred years, meaning either the generous one or the blood-shedder...

By the 740s the Umayyad dynasty ruled the largest empire on earth from Damascus, stretching from Spain to the edge of Central Asia. From the outside it looked unbeatable. Underneath, it was tearing itself apart. A reigning khalifa had been murdered by his own kin, the ruling family had fallen into civil war over the throne, and the Arab tribes that manned its armies had split into the old feuding blocs of Qays and Yaman. Into that crisis stepped Marwan the Second, a hardened frontier soldier and the last Umayyad khalifa, a man who never got a single quiet...

In the year 747 the Umayyad Caliphate was the largest empire on earth, ruled from Damascus, and the province that would bring it down sat two thousand miles away on its eastern edge. That province was Khurasan, and this first episode of a four part series is the story of how a revolution was built there in plain sight, one careful conversation at a time, while the capital looked the other way.

The episode walks into a single street in the city of Merv to find not one grievance but three, living side by side and refusing to...

Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century North African judge, diplomat, and scholar, and he is widely regarded today as the founder of the science of society, a thinker who anticipated sociology, the philosophy of history, and parts of modern economics centuries before anyone in Europe. Born in Tunis in 1332 into a family that had already lost its ancestral home in Muslim Spain, he spent his life asking one question that no teacher could answer: how does a whole kingdom rise, and why does it always fall. In a remote desert castle he answered it, in a book called the Muqaddimah...

Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century scholar, judge, and diplomat from North Africa, born into a family that had once been nobility in Muslim Seville and lost everything when al-Andalus contracted. By his forties he had burned through twenty years in the unstable courts of the Maghreb and Granada, serving sultans, running secret correspondence, sitting in prison, and watching clever men fail to understand the forces that were about to destroy them. This episode is where he stops trying to steer history and starts trying to explain it.

Covering days seven and eight of the series, part four...

Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth century North African scholar and statesman, born in Tunis in 1332 into an exiled noble family that had once helped lead Seville in Muslim Spain. He spent more than two decades inside the courts of the Hafsids, the Marinids, and the Nasrids of Granada, rising to become keeper of the seal, switching sides to survive, and spending nearly two years in a prison in Fez. He watched dynasty after dynasty rise, grow comfortable, and collapse, and by 1375 he had had enough of politics.

This episode follows what happened when he walked away. Sheltered...

Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun is remembered as the founder of the science of history, the man whose Muqaddimah laid the groundwork for sociology, economics, and the philosophy of history centuries before those fields had names. But before he wrote the book that made him immortal, he lived the material. This episode follows the years he spent inside the machinery of power in the fourteenth-century Muslim world, gathering the evidence he would later turn into a theory of how civilizations rise and fall.

We pick up in the wreckage of the Black Death, which killed his parents and...

Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, is often called the founder of the scientific study of history and society. Centuries before the words sociology, economics, or the philosophy of history existed, he set out to explain something no scholar of his age treated as a science at all: why civilizations rise, and why they fall. This first episode is the origin story of that question, told through the two forces that planted it in him as a child.

The first force was memory. The Banu Khaldun were once a leading noble house of Seville, in...

Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire for forty-six years, the longest reign in its history and, by common agreement among historians, its highest point. This final episode of our five-part series is not about his conquests. It is about what they cost him.

The story turns on a single brutal law. Generations earlier, Mehmed the Conqueror had written into the Ottoman code that a new sultan should put his own brothers to death for the good order of the empire. It was a smaller horror chosen to prevent a larger one, the endless civil wars that...

Ibrahim of Parga was the son of a Christian fisherman on the Greek coast, taken as a boy into the Ottoman system that turned captured children into the servants who ran the empire. He grew up beside the young prince Suleiman, reading and making music with him, and when Suleiman took the throne he raised Ibrahim faster than the court had ever seen a man rise, all the way to grand vizier, the second man in the empire. For thirteen years they ruled side by side. Then, one night during Ramadan in 1536, after Ibrahim broke his fast at the...

Suleiman the First ruled the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, from 1520 to 1566. To the kings of Europe, dazzled by his court and his conquests, he was Suleiman the Magnificent. But to the millions who actually lived under him, he carried a different name, and it was the one that lasted: Kanuni, the Lawgiver. This episode is about the two things he built in the years after his armies reached their limit at the walls of Vienna, and why both of them outlived the empire itself.

The first is the law. Working with his chief...

Suleiman the Magnificent inherited the richest and best organized state of the sixteenth century, and in his first campaigns he took the fortresses that had defied even Mehmed the Conqueror. This episode, the second in our series, follows him to the two battles that defined the peak of Ottoman power in Europe.

On the twenty-ninth of August, fifteen twenty-six, on the marshy plain of Mohacs, the young King Louis the Second of Hungary rode out with the finest heavy cavalry in Christendom. Suleiman hid his cannon behind his own lines, chained them wheel to wheel, and let...

In 1520, a twenty-five-year-old named Suleiman became the tenth sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He was the only surviving son of Selim the Grim, the most feared conqueror of the age, so the crown passed to him without the usual war between brothers and without the strangling of rivals that so often opened an Ottoman reign. He inherited a state that spanned three continents, the richest and most powerful of its day, and with it the guardianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. Europe called him the Magnificent. His own people called him Kanuni, the Lawgiver...

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, known to Europe as Avicenna, was the finest physician of his age and one of the most influential minds in human history. In this fifth and final part of our series on the Prince of Physicians, we leave the philosopher behind and meet the healer, then follow him to the end of his road.

The episode opens with the famous case of the lovesick prince: a young man wasting away from an illness no court doctor can name, and Ibn Sina diagnosing the truth by laying two fingers on the patient's wrist...

Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the greatest physician and one of the boldest philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age. This fourth part of our series follows him into the city of Hamadan around the year 1015, where curing a Buyid emir of a brutal illness won him the highest office in the land. He became vizier, the chief minister of the state, and for a few years he lived an almost impossible double life: running a government by day, and dictating two of history's most important books, the Canon of Medicine and the Book of Healing, late...

Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the most brilliant mind of his century: a physician, philosopher, and scientist whose work would shape both the Islamic world and Christian Europe for centuries. By his early thirties he was also a refugee, a homeless wanderer carrying the largest education on the planet from one court to the next after the fall of Bukhara.

This episode follows the most dangerous chapter of his life. At the brilliant court of Khwarazm, working beside the great scientist al-Biruni and his teacher the physician Abu Sahl al-Masihi, Ibn Sina found something...

Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was the most important physician and one of the most important philosophers of the medieval world. This is the second part of his story, and it covers the years when a teenage prodigy in Bukhara became famous enough to be summoned to the bedside of a dying king, and then lived to watch the entire civilization that made him collapse around him.

The episode opens in the sickroom of the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur, whose own court physicians have run out of answers. In desperation they send for...

Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna and in the Islamic East as al-Shaykh al-Ra'is, the Preeminent Master, was one of the greatest physicians and philosophers in human history. This first episode of our deep dive into his life follows the child before the legend: a boy born around 980 near Bukhara, the dazzling capital of the Samanid dynasty and one of the brightest cities of the Islamic Golden Age.

We trace his astonishing youth as he tells it in his own autobiography, the one true window we have into these years, dictated late in life...

Shah Abbas the Great was the ruler who pulled the Safavid empire back from collapse, reorganized its armies, and around 1598 moved his capital to Isfahan, where he laid out Naqsh-e Jahan, the Image of the World, one of the largest public squares ever built. In 1611 he began the mosque meant to crown it. This is the story of how it was made, and of the price of building in a hurry.

This is the seventh and final episode of The Great Mosque Builders, the relay that began with the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus in 705 and has crossed...

This is the third episode of The Great Mosque Builders, a series on seven monuments and seven builders across roughly a thousand years, each one an answer to the one before. This episode takes the two that sit at the heart of the story, and they make a strange matched pair: two men, two centuries and a continent apart, each trying to outbuild death.

The first is Sultan Hasan of Cairo, a Mamluk ruler crowned as a boy, deposed, restored, and forever controlled by the hard men around him. In the years after the Black Death emptied...

In the year 868, a soldier's son named Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent to govern Egypt as a deputy and quietly turned himself into a king. This episode of The Great Mosque Builders follows the mosque he raised on a rocky hill in Cairo, the building tradition says he made from fired brick and carved stucco because he would not strip columns from the churches and temples of others. Its arches were pointed a full century before Europe's cathedrals discovered the idea, its outer courts wrap it in a deliberate silence, and its spiral minaret is a transplanted memory of...

In the year 705, the Umayyad khalifa al-Walid ruled an empire that reached from Spain to the edge of India, and at the heart of Damascus he raised the first great monument of Islam. On a walled site where a Roman temple, then a great church, had stood for a thousand years, his craftsmen covered nearly four thousand square meters of wall in gold glass mosaic, rivers and trees and palaces that early worshippers said looked like the gardens of paradise. The shrine of the prophet Yahya, John the Baptist (peace be upon him), was kept and honored inside it...

This is the fifth and final episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It begins outside the walls of Damascus in 1401, with one of the medieval world's greatest minds being lowered on a rope to meet one of its most destructive men face to face.

The episode tells the story of Timur, the man the West called Tamerlane. A Turco-Mongol amir born near Samarkand around 1336, he was not a descendant of Genghis Khan in the male line, which is why he ruled through puppet khans and married into...

This is the fourth episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. After the destruction of Baghdad and the turning of the tide at Ain Jalut, this episode tells the strangest part of the whole story: how the storm that came to erase Islam ended up praying toward Mecca, and how the empire built to destroy the faith became the machine that spread it farther than the first Muslims ever had.

The episode opens in 1295 with Ghazan, the great-grandson of Hulagu, declaring himself a Muslim and making Islam the...

This is the third episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It tells the story of the day the unstoppable were finally stopped: the Battle of Ain Jalut, fought on the twenty fifth of Ramadan, the third of September 1260, in the Jezreel Valley of Galilee.

The episode begins with the men who marched out of Egypt, the Mamluks, slave soldiers bought as boys on the same steppe the Mongols came from and raised into the most disciplined heavy cavalry in the Islamic world. We meet Sultan Qutuz, a...

This is the second episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It tells the story of the single most catastrophic day in the political history of the medieval Muslim world: the fall of Baghdad in 1258.

The episode follows Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, as he leads an enormous army west to finish what his grandfather began. We watch him switch off the feared Assassins of Alamut in a single campaign, then close in on Baghdad, a city that had been the capital of the Abbasid khilafa...