Archives Islamic History

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 sult...

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...

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 rea...

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 yo...

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 powe...

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 awa...

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 impos...

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 d...

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 o...

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 Isl...

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 seve...

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 rul...

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 poi...

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...

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 b...

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...

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 bou...

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 swi...

This is the first episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions of the Muslim world, and the astonishing reversal that followed. It opens with a survivor of the sack of Bukhara, who summed up the fate of his city in nine words, and then pulls back to show the world as it stood before the catastrophe: Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid khilafa for nearly five hundred years, a metropolis of clo...

After Jerusalem, the Third Crusade arrived. After two years of war with Richard the Lionheart, Saladin signed a peace and went home to Damascus to die. Full Description: This is the closing episode of the four-part Saladin series. After the fall of Jerusalem in October 1187, Saladin made one strategic mistake that the chronicler Ibn al-Athir said was the worst of his career: he could not take the...

This is the climax episode of the Saladin series. On the fourth of July, 1187, on a twin-peaked hill in Galilee called the Horns of Hattin, the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed in a single afternoon by exhaustion, smoke, thirst, and the patient battlefield management of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Twelve thousand Crusader knights and infantry were dead or prisoners by sundown. The...

In the spring of 1175, the Abbasid khalifa in Baghdad recognized Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub as Sultan of Egypt, Syria, and the Maghrib. He was thirty-seven years old. The Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem sat just over the river, watching him, waiting for him to come. He did not come for another twelve years. This second episode of the Saladin series covers the long middle years, 1175 through 1186,...

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known to Europeans as Saladin, became the most famous Muslim ruler of the medieval Mediterranean. He took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187, fought Richard the Lionheart to a standstill in the Third Crusade, and died in Damascus in 1193 with forty-seven dirhams in the treasury. But before all of that he was a Kurdish boy born in flight from a citadel called Ti...

This is the final episode of the Mansa Musa series. It is the legacy story. Not the gold in Cairo. The books in Timbuktu. Mansa Musa returned to Mali in 1325 with an Andalusian scholar named al-Sahili, possibly four Hashimite Sharifs, and an unrecorded number of Egyptian and Maghrebi jurists, calligraphers, and copyists. The chronicle tradition says al-Sahili built the great mosque of Timbuktu, th...

In the autumn of 1324, after eight months on the road, Mansa Musa I of Mali reached the Hijaz. This episode covers what he did there, who he found, and what it cost him to come home. The plain at Arafat, the central rite of the Hajj, is the place where Muslim pilgrims ask, in white ihram cloth, for whatever it is they came to ask for. The Tarikh al-Fattash preserves a tradition that what Mansa Mus...