Princess (ca. 1540 AD) How old are the Arabian Nights stories? People in India and Iran have been telling these stories for a long time - nobody knows how long. Around 850 AD, an Iranian [...]
An Islamic oil lamp like Aladdin's lamp, from the University of Michigan Scheherazade tells Aladdin's story This is one of the stories Scheherazade told the king. Scheherazade's Arabian Nights Sinbad [...]
Tomb of Ali, the first Imam and the fourth caliph, in Iraq (it was rebuilt about 1500 AD by the Safavids) Mohammed died in 632 AD. His second wife's father, a rich [...]
Sultan Mehmed II (by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, 1479 AD) After the old Seljuk kingdom in Anatolia (Turkey) fell apart, one of these Seljuks, a man named Osman, started in 1299 AD to [...]
Cordoba mosque, Spain By the late 600s AD, the Moors, people from North Africa who had converted to Islam, were regularly attacking Visigothic Spain. At first these raids were not very serious, and the Spanish [...]
The Seljuks defeat the Persians (1040 AD) The Seljuks were Turkic nomads from Turkmenistan. They were related to the Uighurs. They entered the Abbasid empire around 950 AD and gradually converted to Sunni Islam. By 1030 AD the Seljuks [...]
Shirij Madrasa, Fez, Morocco, about 1350 AD - built by the Marinids When did the Marinids get power? By 1217 AD, the Almohad dynasty in North Africa and Spain was collapsing. One [...]
Mamluks: A Mamluk inn for merchants in Cairo Mamluks were enslaved soldiers The Mamluks were originally enslaved bodyguards of the Abbasid caliphs of the Islamic Empire (the word "mamluk" just means "slave" in Arabic). Starting around 850 [...]
Late medieval Islamic history: Fatimid gate of Cairo Bad al-Futuh (1087 AD) The Abbasid Empire In 750 AD, it seemed like the Islamic Empire would last a thousand years. The Abbasid caliphs ruled a giant [...]
Islamic History: the Dome of the Rock mosque, Jerusalem Before the Islamic Empire In 600 AD, West Asia had been divided for centuries between two big empires, the Romans and the Sassanians. People [...]
