The rise and fall of the medieval Islamic Empire - Petra Sijpesteijn & Birte Kristiansen
In the 7th century CE,
one man started a chain of events
that would change
the world order for good.
The prophet Muhammad united the people
of the Arabian Peninsula
through the formation of Islam.
These people included both
nomadic Bedouin tribes
and the inhabitants of oasis cities
like Mecca and Medina.
Until Muhammad’s time, the region
hadn’t been considered a serious match
for the powerful neighboring
Persian and Byzantine empires.
But the alliance Muhammad formed
was political as well as religious,
an empire with Medina
as its political heart
and a force to be reckoned with.
Muhammad was a one-of-a-kind leader.
He had been a member of the Quraysh,
the tribe that controlled Mecca.
After Muhammad’s death,
those close to him deliberated
who should succeed him—
a contentious question.
Abū Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law,
emerged victorious and became
the new caliph, or successor.
Over the next 30 years, four caliphs,
all from Muhammad's tribe,
conquered vast areas beyond Arabia,
including their mighty neighbors,
the Persians and the Byzantines.
But as the empire expanded,
dissent within it grew
and a civil war erupted.
The fourth caliph, Ali, was assassinated.
Afterwards, the Umayyad Dynasty
came to power.
The Umayyads were from the same tribe
as Muhammad,
but from a different, rival clan.
They extended the empire’s reach
from present-day Spain to India
and made Damascus their capital.
But an empire this vast,
full of many different peoples,
was at risk of conflict and fracture.
The Umayyads stabilized it by replacing
the ruling elite in conquered territories
with Muslim officials,
while largely allowing the day-to-day
customs of local populations—
including their religious preferences—
to continue.
Arabic was used
as the administrative language,
unifying political affairs
across the empire,
but people continued to speak and write
local languages, too.
Still, many in the empire were
dissatisfied with Umayyad rule
and questioned the dynasty's legitimacy.
The Abbasid family capitalized
on these sentiments,
promoting themselves as more direct
descendants of the prophet,
though their actual relation to Muhammad
was more tenuous than they claimed.
They overthrew the Umayyad caliphate
in 750 CE,
becoming the second great dynasty
of the Islamic Empire.
To establish themselves as the new rulers,
they relocated the capital once more,
this time building a new city: Baghdad.
Under Abbasid rule, the elite
enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury,
thanks to extensive trade networks
that brought both products and people
from all over the known world to Baghdad.
Byzantine, Persian, Indian and Arab
cultures and knowledge intermingled,
leading to artistic and scientific
advancement.
The caliph was wealthy and powerful
beyond imagination.
But there was never a clear line
of succession
dictating who would become
the next caliph.
Any male relative of the former caliph
was eligible,
so brothers, nephews, and uncles
fought to gain power.
Within the court, army officers, wives,
concubines, and government officials
all demanded their share of the treasury.
Because the caliph depended
on his entourage to stay in power,
each transition of rulership opened
the doors for favoritism and corruption.
Outside the court,
many questioned the legitimacy
of the caliph,
noting that the caliph’s religious duty
to moral excellence
was at odds with the court’s
decadent displays of wealth.
In 1258 CE, the Mongols
approached Baghdad.
They encountered little resistance
as they thoroughly destroyed the city.
Legend has it that they rolled
the caliph in a rug
and had horses trample him to death,
and that the Tigris River ran
black from the ink of the manuscripts
that were thrown into it.
The siege of Baghdad laid bare
a longstanding reality:
for centuries, the caliphs had
ruled mostly symbolically.
Local leaders throughout the empire
had grown more powerful,
and they refused to pay taxes,
spending the money on their own courts
instead.
The time of one united Islamic Empire
was over,
but its influence
through written and spoken Arabic,
Islam, and the ideas
of its greatest intellectuals,
left a lasting mark on the world.
