Archives Islamic History

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 rough...

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 sulta...

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...

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-pa...

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, an...

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:...

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...

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 h...

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...

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...

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 aski...

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 un...

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...

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 Musl...

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...

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...