From the perspective of the Īlkhānids, who seized Iraq in 656/1258, Basra was peripheral. In the mid-eighth/fourteenth century, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1368–9 or 779/1377) found the city largely in ruins, its canals deteriorating. Basra was already moving towards its modern location at al-ʿUbulla. By the early tenth/sixteenth century, the move was complete and the city began an important period in its history. Basra was of strategic significance in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries because…

Basra (al-Baṣra), on the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab, is Iraq’s major port city. The mediaeval city was built on the site of a Persian settlement called, in Middle Persian, Vahishtabadh Ardashīr. In the eleventh/eighteenth century, a new city was built near the site of the ancient al-ʿUbulla. ʿUtba b. Ghazwān, a Companion of the Prophet, reportedly founded Basra as a military camp, on orders from the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–44), allowing Muslim troops to control the route from the Persian Gulf and launch campaigns to the east. Basran t…

The time of the so-called “Sunnī revival,” which had its origins in the ascent of the Saljūqs around the middle of the fifth/eleventh century, can be considered the beginning of a period of crisis for Arabic literature. At that time, those Eastern regions that had provided a most fertile ground for Arabic literature in the centuries before began to adopt Persian in place of Arabic as the preferred language of literature. Neither Fāṭimid Egypt, where an Arabic literary culture was still in a form…

Anthologies in Arabic literature are held to begin with the celebrated collection of pre-Islamic  qaṣīdas, the  Muʿallaqāt. Countless other poetry anthologies followed. As the genre developed, it came to include anthologies organised on themes such as valour, various sorts of curiosities, laments, and a wide range of other subjects. The  adab anthology, epitomised by Ibn Qutayba's  ʿUyūn al-Akbār, illustrated an array of topics with anecdotes, as well as carefully chosen poetry,  rasāʾil, and examples of eloquent speech. The fifth/eleventh century, with the ascen…

Medina is a city in the Ḥijāz (in modern Saudi Arabia), approximately 340 kilometres north of Mecca; its early history up to the Ottoman period tells of its development from a small town into a holy city and a centre for Islamic learning. The name is usually said to derive from the term madīnat al-nabī (the Prophet’s city), which was the name adopted for the settlement sometime after the prophet Muḥammad’s migration (hijra) to the area in 1/622. For much of the pre-modern era, the area of Medina has been a collection of smaller settlements bounded within tracts of v…

From the eleventh/seventeenth through the early thirteenth/nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire made heavy use of mamlūks, or elite slaves converted to Islam and trained for military and administrative service, from the Caucasus. In doing so, the Ottomans were not so much reviving the institutions of the Mamlūk sultanate as exploiting an alternative pool of military and administrative manpower to the devşirme (devşīrme), the distinctive Ottoman system of enslaving boys from the empire’s rural Balkan and Anatolian Christian populations, converting them t…

The Indian Ocean during the early modern period (tenth-twelfth/sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) was characterised by new political arrangements and by acceleration of contacts amongst the ocean’s coastal populations, as trade increased and the demand for migrant labour rose to fill the ranks of sailors, dockhands, agriculture workers, and household servants. Another characteristic was the increasing presence of western Europeans backed by governments with commercial and imperial aspirations. India’s two long coastlines faced two parts of the Indian Ocean: the …

Archery is the aspect of Islamic military technology that has received the most attention from historians because it played such a significant role in Islamic military history. It certainly enjoys an elevated status in ḥadīth and was sometimes regarded as an almost mystical activity. However, it is important to note that Islamic archery traditions were not synonymous with horse archery. Archery amongst the early Muslim Arabs was an infantry affair and largely remained so until after the ʿAbbāsid takeover of the caliphate in the …

The Caucasus range, which constitutes a natural barrier between Europe and Asia, was called in pre-900/ 1500 Muslim sources al-Qabq (Ibn Ḥawqal, 306, 319; Ḥudūd al-ʿālam, 67, 145, 201; al-Kabkh (al-Masʿūdī, 399). Pre-Islamic Persian sources referred to it as Kaf Kof, a Middle Persian name that appears in Sāsānid-era inscriptions (MacKenzie, 535) and resurfaces in variant form in the Islamic-era Persian tradition, when Firdawsī (c. 328–410/940–1020) refers, in his Shāh-nāma (“Book of kings”), to the Caucasus mountains as the Kōh-i Kāf. The earliest etymon of the n…

Arabs (ʿarab) as a designation for groups of people in Arabia and adjacent areas is documented continuously from the middle of the ninth century B.C.E. to the present. 1.The pre-Islamic evidence The term appears for the first time as the epithet of a person called Gindibu ar-ba-a-a (= arbāya), whose name is found in a list of kings of Syria in the monolith inscription of the Assyrian king Salmaneser III (r. 858–24 B.C.E.), describing the battle of Qarqar in 853 B.C.E. In Assyrian inscriptions from the time of Tiglath Pileser III (r. 744–27 B.C.E.) on, people called arab are mentioned as dwe…

Ottoman and modern Turkish didactic poetry, referred to in Turkish as hikemi, talimî, and öğretici, aims to inform, teach, and provide moral education. The content of Ottoman and modern Turkish didactic poetry ranges from religious, Ṣūfī, and moral themes to scientific and encyclopaedic topics. Such treatises, called in classical Ottoman literature nasihat-name ( naṣīḥat-nāme, on advice), are categorised by topic, for example, siyaset-name ( siyāset-nāme, on government and politics), fütüvvet-name ( fütüvvet-nāme, on devotion to duty), menakıb-name ( menāqıb-nāme, on grea…

The Armenians in the period 1100–1895 lived—except for the period of Mongol domination and under the minor aristocrats of northeastern Armenia—under Turkish rule before the Ottoman expansion into Armenia (during the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century). 1. 494/1100 to the Mongol invasions (620s/1220s to 640s/1240s) In northeastern Armenia, in the remote regions around Lake Sevan, lay a series of small, independent Armenian principalities, which, with some differences, constituted the remainder of the late classical and early mediaeval naxarar system (that of a local…

In its general sense, the word “ education” denotes the act, process, and result of imparting and acquiring knowledge, values, and skills. This expression applies to both early childhood instruction and basic and higher learning that has the goal of providing individuals or groups of people with the intellectual, physical, moral, and spiritual qualities that will help them to grow, develop, and become useful members of the community and society. It also has applications in more purely spiritual or reli…

The encounter between Islam and Christianity in modern sub-Saharan Africa has varied widely and substantially. The first contact between Christians and Muslims on African soil was peaceful, but, after followers of Muḥammad found refuge in Axum (in northern Ethiopia) about 615 CE, the Arab conquest of North Africa in the first/seventh century was accompanied by violent confrontations, although many Christians welcomed Muslim rule. The virtual disappearance of Christianity from the Sudan and the Maghrib co…

The history of Libya (Lībiyā) until 1500 can be told through the history of its three constituent lands: Tripolitania (Ṭarābulus), Cyrenaica (Barqa), and Fezzan (Fazzān). Before 1500, no geopolitical entity by the name of “Libya” had been demarcated and what we today call “Libya” was simply a vast space separating Egypt from Ifrīqiya (the latter deriving its name from the African province of the late Roman Empire). With this understanding, a distinct feature of the area we now call “Libya” can be said…

The origin of the Qarawiyyīn Mosque (lit., mosque of the people of al-Qayrawān, named after the eponymous neighbourhood of Fez) goes back to the Idrīsid period (second–fourth/eighth–tenth centuries). 1. From the Idrīsid to the Merinid period A foundation inscription, concealed by subsequent modifications but rediscovered in the 1950s inside the building, reads “this mosque was built in the month of Dhū l-Qaʿda 263 [July–August 877] by order of the imām—may God strengthen him—Dāʾūd b. Idrīs” (Deverdun; Lintz, et al., no. 28). This text is more reliable evidence fo…

Georgia resides in the Caucasus isthmus, a crucible of cross-cultural encounter linking the Eurasian steppe and the Middle East. Across the pre-modern epoch, the area named for the Caucasus Mountains was diverse and cosmopolitan: “[i]t would be hard to place such peoples as Georgians and Armenian unequivocally within any one major ‘civilization’” (Hodgson, 33). While Hodgson astutely perceived Caucasia’s cross-cultural condition, subsequent research has exposed the region’s long-term participati…

The importance of the written word in the premodern Middle East meant there was no scarcity of books, and, accordingly, libraries were a salient feature of the urban topography (much less is known about rural areas). Especially with the book revolution of the third/ninth century (Gründler), collecting books and making them accessible became a widespread cultural practice, with further impetus from the subsequent popularisation of the written word from the sixth/twelfth century onwards (Hirschler, Written word). Libraries in the Middle East came in two main forms: Those …

Crete (Ar. Iqrīṭish; Tr. Girit; Ott. Girīd; Gr. Krētē) is an island in the eastern Mediterranean, at the southern edge of the Aegean Sea, approximately 256 kilometres long and from 12 to 57 kilometres wide, with a total area of 8,336 square kilometres. The fifth largest island in the Mediterranean, it is part of present-day Greece. Historically, it was twice under Islamic rule. 1. The early Islamic period Already by the first/seventh century, Crete, then in Byzantine hands, had been the object of Arab raids. In 202/818, a revolt of the inhabitants of Córdoba aga…

The term Kipchak may refer to (1) one of the tribes of the second/eighth-century Kimek tribal union, (2) the nomadic tribal union occupying the area between western Siberia and the lower Danube from the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century to the seventh/thirteenth-century Mongol invasion, (3) the eastern division of the aforementioned tribal union, and (4) a branch of the Turkic language family. 1. Etymologies The etymology of Kipchak is unknown. Sources refer to Kipchaks by the following names (and their variants): Kipchak (Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Ar…