Archives Islamic History

Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire. In late winter 1324 he led the largest pilgrim caravan in recorded history out of his capital at Niani and pointed it northeast, toward Mecca. Four months and roughly twenty-seven hundred miles later, the column came over a rise west of Giza and saw the Pyramids. This episode covers the road. The Massufa Berber caravan-masters who took over from...

Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire, an African Muslim kingdom that in 1324 covered more land than the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ilkhanate combined and produced somewhere between half and two-thirds of all the gold in the medieval Mediterranean basin. By the standards of disposable wealth, he was the richest human being on the surface of the planet. The Mediterranean had barely hear...

In a moneychanger's office in Basra around 950 CE, a merchant could hand over 100 gold dinars and whisper a password. Two months of desert travel away, in Samarkand, the moneychanger's counterparty would pay 100 dinars to whoever produced the password. No gold crossed the desert. The ledger would balance later against a reverse flow. This was a hawala, and it predated modern wire transfe...

In July 1324, Mansa Musa of Mali crossed the Nile into Egypt at the head of a caravan of 60,000 people, with 500 enslaved attendants in silk, each carrying a six-pound gold staff. He stayed in Cairo for three months, giving away gold. By the time he left, the Egyptian dinar had lost roughly 12% of its value, and the market would take twelve years to recover. Al-Umari, the Mamluk bureaucrat who rec...

On a hill above the Chinese port city of Quanzhou in the spring of 1417, a Ming admiral named Zheng He burned incense at the tombs of two men whom tradition identified as Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). His father and grandfather had made the Hajj. His ancestors had come from Bukhara. In a few days he would raise a Chinese-language stele and take 28,000 men and 317 ships so...

In late 1499, Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros stood in the Bibarrambla plaza of Granada and watched thousands of Arabic manuscripts burn. The Treaty of Granada, signed seven years earlier, had guaranteed the Muslims of the conquered city that this would not happen. The Treaty was now, in practice, dead. In 1526, Charles V arrived on his honeymoon, stayed in the Alhambra, and commissioned a...

On January 2, 1492, Muhammad XII, called Boabdil, rode out of the Alhambra and kissed the arm of Ferdinand of Aragon. He handed over two keys to the main gates of the fortress and a gold ring with an Arabic inscription that had, he said, governed Granada since it was ruled by the Moors. "God loves you very much," he said, in his own language. "These, my lord, are the keys to this Pa...

Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib was the vizier, the historian, the plague-treatise writer, and the court polymath of Nasrid Granada in its golden age. Ibn Zamrak was his student, the brilliant young poet whose verses are carved on the Fountain of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the Comares throne. In 1374, Ibn al-Khatib was strangled in his cell in Fez on charges of heresy. His former stude...

Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar was a plowman when the mosque assembly of Arjona acclaimed him emir in 1232. Four years later, Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, and turned its great mosque into a cathedral. Twelve years after that, the Nasrid emir rode at Ferdinand's side into the surrender of Seville. Returning home, hailed as "victor for God," he replied...

The final episode in the Nana Asma'u series follows the Yan Taru network forward in time, from Asma'u's death in 1864 through the British conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903, the colonial period, Nigerian independence, and into the twenty-first century. This episode examines why the Yan Taru survived when almost every other institution of the Sokoto Caliphate did not. It explor...

Part 2 of the Nana Asma'u series goes deeper into the years that shaped her most enduring achievement. It covers the Battle of Gawakuke in 1836, when Asma'u fled on horseback through a war zone and later turned that experience into poetry. It covers the death of her brother, Caliph Muhammad Bello, in 1837, the succession crisis and civil war that followed, and how that collective trauma...

This episode traces the life of one of the most remarkable women in African history - a scholar who wrote in four languages, advised caliphs, documented wars in poetry, and then, in the aftermath of civil war, built an educational network for women that no empire, no colonial power, and no government has ever been able to destroy. The Yan Taru — "those who congregate together" — sent tra...

This episode covers the relief of Vienna and the Battle of September 12, 1683. It traces Emperor Leopold I's desperate diplomacy, Pope Innocent XI's role in funding and framing the holy war, and the Treaty of Warsaw that brought Poland into the fight. We profile Jan III Sobieski — his military career, his victory at Khotin, and his march of 435 miles through the Vienna Woods with his tee...

This episode covers the two-month siege of Vienna from July to September 1683. It examines Vienna's fortification system, the flight of Emperor Leopold I, and Count Starhemberg's defense with a garrison outnumbered ten to one. Without heavy artillery, Kara Mustafa turned to the lagimcilar — Ottoman military miners — to tunnel beneath the walls and plant gunpowder charges. The episode tra...

This episode covers the events leading up to the 1683 Siege of Vienna. It explores the Ottoman Empire at its territorial peak, the military system that powered it — Janissaries, Sipahi cavalry, and the Devshirme child levy — and why the empire structurally needed to keep expanding. We trace the first failed siege of Vienna in 1529 under Suleiman the Magnificent, the concept of the Red Apple (Kizil...

It is the 960s. In a palace carved into a hillside outside Cordoba, a woman sits under lamplight, annotating a manuscript of Euclid's geometry in elegant Andalusi script. Her name is Lubna. She was born a slave in this palace. The biographer Ibn Bashkuwal will later write of her: "No one in the palace was as great as her." Not the ministers. Not the generals. Not the khalifa's...

This episode traces the full arc of Razia's reign -- from her father Iltutmish, the slave-turned-sultan who looked past every convention to choose his daughter over his sons, to the Turkic military aristocracy that allowed her to ascend but never intended to let her actually rule. We cover her extraordinary public appeal to the people of Delhi in the red garments of the wronged, her systemati...

This episode traces the full arc of Arwa bint Ahmad al-Sulayhi, from orphan girl in a highland palace to the sole sovereign of Yemen for over fifty years. It covers the education that shaped her, the assassination that shattered the Sulayhid dynasty, and the unprecedented Fatimid decree that made her Hujjah -- the Proof -- the highest spiritual rank beneath the Imam himself, a title no woman had e...

This episode traces the full arc of her life, from the fall of Granada and the psychology of Andalusian exile, through her education in the mountain fortress of Chefchaouen, to her rise as governor of Tetouan, the city the refugees called "Granada's Daughter." We explore how she built a corsair fleet that terrorized Spanish and Portuguese shipping for nearly three decades, how she f...

This episode traces the life of a Kipchak slave girl who was swept up by the Mongol invasions, sold into the household of an Ayyubid prince, and rose to become the only woman to rule Egypt as sultan in the Islamic period. We cover the fall of Damietta to the Seventh Crusade, the death of Sultan al-Salih Ayyub in his tent at Mansourah with a Crusader army camped across the canal, and the astonishin...

This episode tells the story of Fatimah al-Fihri, a merchant's daughter from Kairouan whose family fled to Fez as refugees in the ninth century. When her father died and left his fortune to her and her sister Mariam, both women made the same choice: build. Fatimah founded al-Qarawiyyin on one bank of the river. Mariam founded al-Andalusiyyin on the other. Two sisters, two mosques, two displac...

This episode traces the full arc of the collapse: the tribal factionalism that split the army in half, the betrayal of millions of non-Arab Muslims who were promised equality and taxed like outsiders, the four khalifas in a single year, and the most sophisticated underground revolutionary movement the pre-modern world had ever seen. It follows the Battle of the Zab, where a wall of Khorasani spear...

This is the story of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the fifth Umayyad khalifa, who inherited a shattered empire and forged it into the most powerful state on earth. When he took power in 685 CE, he controlled only Syria and Egypt. He was paying daily tribute to the Byzantines. His rival held Mecca. Rebels burned through Iraq. Within twenty years, his empire stretched from the Atlantic to the borders of...

In 711 CE, Tariq ferried seven thousand men across the Strait of Gibraltar on borrowed ships, hiding an invasion in plain sight. He landed at the base of a rock the Greeks had called a Pillar of Hercules, renamed it after himself, and within months had shattered the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania - a state that had stood for three centuries. His men fought fasting, in the heat of a Ramadan summer,...

October 10th, 680 CE. A flat, dry plain beside the Euphrates River. 72 men, plus women and children, surrounded by an army of thousands. They haven't had water in three days. The river is close enough to hear. This is the story of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and the stand he made at Karbala. Not the version you got in a textbook. The version built fro...