Worlds of Islam: A Global History

about history, we're trying to bracket it. You know, we're going to talk about the history of India or Japan or the Southern United States in a given period. That's actually impossible, to be honest with you, That's like looking at only a small section of a painting. At the moment that you back up, you realize the scope of what it is that you're supposed to actually be looking at. And that's what this book does. I highly recommend picking it up. It's available today if you're listening to this,

and the link is in the show notes. And I hope you enjoyed the interview. And so after these brief messages, my interview with James McDougall talking about Worlds of Islam A Global History. All right, and welcome back. As I mentioned before, I'm sitting down today with historian James McDougall, and we're talking about his most recent book, Worlds of Islam, a Global History. Now there's a lot that we could discuss with this book. It's several hundreds of pages, it's

very detailed. Anybody who's interested in learning more about this subject or history in general, is going to love it. As I mentioned before, but you know, we'll confine ourselves to a couple sections of the book today in order to give a more coherent narrative so you can understand

what you might expect when you pick it up. But I want to start with, I guess a pretty general question, which is, you know, I think a lot of people in the West have a lot of misconceptions about the history and the spread of Islam, And I'm going to ask you. I know it's a big question, I understand, but if you could give, like what you think is the number one misconception or something that you're constantly correcting, I think that would be helpful for the audience for sure.

of history. So I think the main misconception that I guess the book is trying to address, and then I find myself often, you know, in teaching over the past twenty five years addressing as well, is the assumption really, and it's not a prejudice or anything, right, It's just an assumption that people just just come to this question without even thinking about really or really noticing that they hold this assumption that there is a thing called Islam

which has a completely separate history to a thing called the West, right, and that it's an entirely self contained,

civilizationally defined kind of monolith, this history of Islam. And I think one of the ways that you know, the book is trying to change the narrative on that is by pointing out that what Islam means and what it means to be Muslim has in fact changed radically and has always been enormously diverse over the whole of Islam's history, and you can't understand the history of what is meant to be Muslim in the world, or what being Muslim has meant to people in the world, without understanding the

multiplicity of different worlds in which they've lived, which of course includes things other than Islam. It includes you know, politics, ecology, trade, migration, languages, cultures, food, and of course other people who are not Muslims with

whom Muslims have always been in relation. So that's the number one misconception, that there's a thing called Islam that just moves the history, that's kind of fully defined as a religious system that has its own separate civilizational history, and that can so be understood separately from another world of the West. I want to say that Muslim history has always been intertwined with other worlds.

And also because people need usable histories, people and just just kind of to be a regular kind of informed citizen, but especially for interested in history, you need a kind of usable narrative, and usually that narrative takes a particular and chronological form and takes a particular geographical or cultural center.

One of the things that global historians have been doing in the last twenty five years is to problematize that a bit and to look at what happens when you start looking at things that move rather than things that are centered. So, I mean, yeah, it's absolutely right that it's completely inevitable that we have those kind of centered, compartmentalized histories, and they're very they're perfectly legitimate, right, I'm not saying that that's not a legitimate way to do history.

And of course for learning history, it's a it's a kind of essential first step, but it does mislead us when we start thinking, especially in terms of the significance of history for contemporary issues about the world is separated into these different civilizational compartments. And of course, in the you know, since the nineteen nineties, we have this kind of narrative of the world going through a clash of civilizations, which has been politically enormously problematic and I would say,

you know, dangerous and actually quite pernicious. And so again one of the things that again the type of the subtitle, because of global history, and one of the things the Global Historian has been trying to do is to rewrite some of those histories to look at connections rather than compartments.

the Roman Empire. I talked about that a lot but you know, this caliphate expands over much of the known world faster than it takes the Romans just to defeat the Carthaginians, you know, just just simply across the pond. And I want to read a quotation here from the very beginning of the introduction of your book says, quote, when ubig in Nafi, not sure about that pronunciation, reached the Atlantic Ocean, it said that he galloped straight into

the sea. Big had been or born only a few years before the death of Prophet Mohammad fifty years earlier now, in six point eighty one CE, he led an Arab Muslim army that set out from southern Tunisia and skirmished with Byzantine forces as far as Tangier. We're talking about huge, huge, rapid expansion here, really that only the Mongols are going to sort of come close to, Like, how do we put that into context?

as the borders of India. So that is an extraordinary expansion only in the first sort of fifty fifty two hundred years right of the Caliphate, And indeed the most significant expansion really is much much quicker than that. Even the prophet Mohammad dies in six thirty two of the Common era, right only ten years after the New era, the Islamic calendar that he's created is inaugurated and the

first community is founded. And by the six forties only, you know, ten to fifteen years after the death of the prophet, the Muslim Arabs have collapsed the Persian Empire and driven the Roman or Byzantine Empire out of Egypt, Palestine and Syria right up to the borders of what's now modern Turkey, where the border between the Caliphate and the Roman Empire, the Basant and Empire will remain for the next three centuries. And I guess there were three

things before we need to take into account. And before we take our three things into account, we also need to remember that for the Muslims themselves, the early expansion of the Caliphate or the establishment of the Calivate and then it's territorial expansion out of the Arabian Peninsula and into what we now know is the Middle East could only be understood by, you know, by reference to it

as being the work of God. Right, they see it as only understandable as a work of divine providence, you know. And the same way as the Pilgrim Fathers think of you know, that the way that they come to establish themselves in America as only understandable as a work of divine providence. These are things that are astonishing on a world historical scale, and often human consciousness itself has been

inadequate to understanding them. And that sense of, you know, the early expansion of the faith as being literally the work of God is really important to understand in the ideological self perception that those early Muslims have of themselves. I think that's the first thing to say. Obviously, that's not a historical explanation. That's the kind of the way that they saw themselves. If we think about it historically,

there were three things that are important. One, I think is the community of Muslims themselves, and that the significance of that ideological self understanding that I just referred to in motivating the community in its early expansion. This is a community which is found as a kind of persecuted group of exiles by the proper Muhammad in the city of Medina in western Arabia, and which within only two within a generation, really becomes this kind of mobilized, highly mobilized,

highly ideologically cohesive, conquering force. The leading historian of the early Conquests, Fred Donner, wrote that the early conquest, so I'm going to quote from him. He says they were a remarkable testament to the power of human action mobilized by ideological commitment, in other words, what people can do when they put their minds to it. Right. So that's one explanation that there's this extraordinary ideological cohesive force of what it means to be Muslim in this early period

that gives people this extraordinarily kind of mobilizing energy. The second thing is again to to go back to what you said earlier about context. There has been a major superpower war between the Romans and the Persians which lasts for twenty five years, right a quarter of a century between six o three and sixty two eight of the

Common Era, which really which is a crisis. In six twenty six, when the Persians are besiege in Constantinople, it looks like the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, which still thinks of itself as continuous with the classical Roman Empire. You know, these will call themselves what a mayoi, This be Greek, but they call themselves Romans. That they're almost

at the point of collapse. That's then averted when the famous Roman emperor Heraclius, whom I'm sure you and your listener so familiar with counter attack spectacularly gets to the gates of testifon the Persian capital and almost takes the capital itself. The Persians have to suit. They're exhausted. The Byzantines have exhausted crucially within within the Persian or Sicanian Empire that the end of the war in the six

twenties leads to a collapse of the empire. Effectively, there's the collapse that internally fragmented, there's a coup in the capital, that their territory has been occupied by Roman forces. The empire is kind of on the verge of collapse. The Banzaron Tines have just won the war, but they're also exhausted. Right, They've been paying very large amounts of money to keep armies in the field for a very long time. They've had their richest provinces in Egypt and Syria taken away

from them for a long time. They've been under Persian occupation, and so when the Arab suddenly appear in the six twenties, six thirties, early six forties, they're facing a much weakened Persian Empire and also a Byzantine Empire that can no longer afford to keep large armies in the field. They do field a couple of quite significant armies, especially in Syria, but those armies don't stand up to the Arab attacks, and then and then they basically get withdrawn because they

can't afford to keep them in the field anymore. And that the third final thing is what is it like to be conquered? So one of the things that we know about the early conquest is they're very rapid, especially in Syria and Palestine, and with relatively little bloodshed. Right, Certainly, there's there's there's pillaging, there are people who are masacred in the countrysides, but most of the major cities of

Rome and Syria and Palestine. So Jerusalem Damascus negotiate with the our bamis to the gates and let them in. They've just gone through this war, been occupied by the Persians. They don't want to see this it is destroyed by another conquering army. So they basically cut a deal, and of course, the Caliph Omar enters the city of Jerusalem guarded, has it guarded tour of the Temple Mount at the hands of the patriarch of the Christian Church, Sophronius, who

takes them up and shows them the sites. And that's another explanation, right that the world into which the Muslim other conquerors come is one which is already undergoing something of a er geopolitical crisis. And it's also one in which people are, you know, not necessarily predetermined in their actions by any sense of kind of religious antagonism. Right, They're perfect. You've partegy deals with each other, and that's what happens.

totally rested, totally ready to go, you know. And so you've got these two champions, but they're tired, you know, and they've fought a lot. And I think you get at something really important here, which is, you know, we tend to look at the map of the Roman Empire, the map of any empire at n see it's well, okay, well it's read from here to here, so that means

there's total control. But actually within all of these cities and communities, there's local elites and factions, and you know, they're looking out for themselves at the end of the day, you know, and if somebody else shows up with a strong army and they don't have protection from whoever whoever's color is over that section of the map right now, you know, it's much more likely that a cut of deal, you know.

He's a lot smaller, but he's more like can he can he can land some pretty rapid kind of stingy blows, right, And that's right. The other thing is, and also in particular this is relevant to the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. One of the things that's been happening religiously for the last couple of times in those territories is

there's enormous split within the Christian Church. Right. There have been a not very you know, sometimes quite violent doctrinal disputes over the nature of the nature of the person of Christ, the relationship between Christ, between the Father and the Son, what it means to be you know, a Christian.

And many people who are what historian Princeton Jacksnese called simple believers or no people are in the countryside, who are not literate, who do not you know, who have a sense of themselves belonging to a particular Christian community, but do not have a strong, you know, ideological understanding of doctrine or of the issues that are being fought fought out in these church councils over heresy and orthodoxy.

They're actually surprisingly receptive to an incoming religious system that is not going to persecute them anymore, because frequently they have been persecuted. One of the things that the byzant And Empire has been doing is declaring that certain beliefs are Orthodox and others are heretic, and they've been persecuted

in the heretics. And interestingly, when the Muslims turn up, they're perfectly've pared to tolerate everybody's religious opinions as long as they stay in their place, pay their taxes, you know, acnology, Muslim supremacy, and don't cause trouble.

you know, So it's not you know, we have again. This is so important because we're going about the global context, right and put and putting this these these sorts of things into images where if you take a snapshot, you probably come out with one image of what happened in a period. But if you back the lens out even a little bit, you start to realize that there's actually a lot more people in the picture than I thought that there were. Yeah, exactly, it's really important.

afloat and keeps your armies in the field. And you know the effects of the plague is certainly to depopulate some of those provinces that have been paying the taxes

that keeps the Byzantine armies in the field. So although they are able to put troops in the field, you know in Syrian pasta, indeed, Heraclius is there for a while commanding those armies himself, they their taxpace is definitely shrunk a lot, and they and they don't have the resources that they need to fight yet another war having just won one.

way that Christianity is for Muslims. The vocation of the believers to bring the word of God to the whole of humanity. And when Nephew, the little bit that you quoted, you know, from the beginning of the book, rides you know, into the Atlantics because he kind of sees himself as carrying that message. If the Atlantic Ocean had not prevented him, he would have written on to the ends of the Earth, continuing, you know, to bring God's message to human to humanity.

So there's a kind of there's a there's a universalism implicit in Islam, which makes it potentially global or globalizing force. It has a reach unto the ends of the earth, right kind of universalizing religious message, and more basically more materially geographically, Islam also becomes a global force in that

it does reach out. All these Muslims move out globally from the birthplace of the faith and the Western Arabian Peninsula into what we now call the Middle East, across North Africa, across Central Asia and into South Asia, and then ultimately across across to Mariatim, Southeast Asia, to the Philippines, to China, to Western East Africa, and then to you know, to Europe and to the Americas and to Australasia and Japan and to basically, if we're looking at you know,

the expansion of Islam globally today into basically every country in the world. So there's a there are two ways in which which Islam is a global force or has a global history in that sense. Part of course we've just been talking about the way in which we need to understand Islam contextually is part of global history, of

the history of the world's into which it comes. And also, you know, the vision of Islam for the world is one that kind of comes into the whole of the world, both culturally and geographically.

this is an ideologically driven religion. How long you know, did let's say Christians in Egypt or anywhere like, like, how long were they willing to hold on to and I know obviously some do forever, but you know, at what point can we say that, Okay, well this is you know, this is a tipping point where more people are converting to Islam that are holding through old religion.

Is that something that happens very quickly? Is it something that takes a long time like where like because it would seem to me that would provide stability for the regime and so how how long does that sort of process take in it as this expansion is going forward? If you can answer that, yeah, yeah.

to join that community, particularly to start with. So the movement, although it has this, as I said, a universalizing kind of missionary impetus, it also kind of belongs to the Arabs in the early years, and the Muslims will remain a minority religiously speaking, in the kind of what we think of as the heartlands of Islam in the Middle

least until about the twelfth century. So it takes a good you know, three to four centuries for large numbers of Christians and Jews, overwhelmingly in the former Roman Byzantine provinces Christians to convert to Islam. Now that happens in various it's not kind of at a regular rate. Over time, there are moments at where people begin to convert in larger numbers, and certainly elites probably convert relatively quickly, especially

those in the cities. So people who two three generations down the line, you know, if you're a physician, you're a lawyer, or an administrator. Certainly administrative elites in what was the Sasanian Persian Empire seem to convert relatively rapidly.

So people can come into Islam relatively rapidly. They become Muslims in order to maintain the social status and the prestige of the position, the access to the court, that access to resources, the membership of the ruling elite, right or no. People in the countryside takes much much longer. So over the first few centuries of the Muslim presence, really in most of the Middle East, it takes quite

a long time for people to convert. And as I say, it's by the twelfth century, basically by the eleven hundreds, Muslims have become a majority in the Middle East. But it's taken them that long to do that.

quote part. What were ISLAMI I mean, we're coming out of civilizations where slavery was practiced as well, So I think this doesn't Again, this isn't something new, This isn't something that was people's created. Okay, the Romans had plenty of slaves, all right, you go to the coliseum. It

wasn't free folks who built a lot of that. So what were the views of the Islamic world towards slavery and did they did they change at some point, I'm assuming, but you know, what were they like at least initially.

omex speaking Worll to their west. When the caliphates again comes in and conquers these areas, they become a new imperial power, just like the old imperial powers they have.

They accept the legitimacy of slave owning or slaveholding that some people can belong to other people, and it's quite an important part of the workforce in certain parts of the of the New Muslim Empire, certainly in the cities where they inherit a kind of enslaved workforce from the Roman Empire, and in certain areas, especially in southern Iraq, where there are kind of large scale agricultural operations that will allow on slave labor and will continue to rely

on slave labor, kind of very large scale slave labor for a few centuries. The Again, there were a couple of extremes in you know, people's perceptions of this that we need to be careful to avoid. One is a kind of apologetic narrative that you know, Muslim slavery quote unquote or kind of Islamic kind of legal understanding of slavery are kind of much more liberal and much more kind of humane than those practiced elsewhere in the world.

Or sometimes we see this in African historiography, right that there's a.

those kinds of arguments. On the other hand, there's a polemical, you know, kind of Islamophobic tradition of writing about Islamic slavery as somehow kind of you know, much much worse and much longer lived and kind of much more kind of inherent somehow to Islamic civilization than slavery would be in kind of Western history, which again is historically untrue

and obviously deeply problematic. Within Islamic law, fairly early on there is established a set of norms governing the conduct of slave owners, which tends to limit the extent to which people are unfree in Islamic law. Right, So the one crucial thing really is that slaves are considered as persons in Islamic law, not as property, so they're not considered chattle, so unlike in English law. In the Americas, you know, with the establishment of plantation slavery and the

Americas and the American colonies. In the Caribbean, slaves are not where slaves are treated simply as property as chattels. Right, slaves are never chattels in Islamic law. Now that doesn't mean that all Muslim slave owners treat their slaves great right, but it is technically true that slaves are persons, not property,

and they have the rights of persons. If a slave mother gives birth to a child, the child is free, and the child of a free born man and a slave mother sore concubine, which happens a lot in the Middle East, the child is born free, the child is not born as slave right again, and that's legally speaking, a really crucial distinction from slavery in the Atlantic world, where children born to slaves, children born to slave mothers

are born slaves in respective with their fathers. So there are these legal norms which are tending in the case of Islamic law towards manumission, towards limiting slavery, which is the opposite of what happens in the Atlantic complex, where legal status of slaves tends to expand. Slavery tends to bring children into slaverty. So to keep women in slavery. A mother of a freeborn child who gives birth to a freeborn child who is fathered by a freeborn Muslim

should also become free right in the Islamic law. So there are attitudes to slavery within the legal tradition which tends to restrict slavery, which certainly emphasized manumission or freeing slaves as an active piety. And we know that on people's deaths, very often their slaves are free. That's a kind of active of piety that people perform kind of

before they die in their will. And most of the time slavery in the Middle East is a kind of domestic slavery, and that's the way in which it kind of comes slightly closer to this idea of it being a kind of a more extended kinship kind of structure. Right that the slaves of people who work in domestic service often women who are enslaved for domestic s us rather than men who are enslaved for you know, large

scalar cultural works and so on. That does happen though, especially in the Middle East, especially in southern Iraq, and some of the biggest slave revolts in fact in history are known to have occurred in the early and the early caliphates in southern Iraq, where you have these very large numbers of black African slaves who enslaved on these really atrocious kind of agricultural estates in southern Iraq, clearing the ground, draining marshes, preparing the ground for agricultural product

of that kind of thing. And these are there were some major major slave revolts that are actually also legitimated, interestingly enough, by kind of Islamic ethics, a kind of Islamic redempative message that the leader of the slave revolts, a guy called Mohammed min Ali, mobilizes the slaves behind this message of like were Muslims too, and we actually should be freed.

the you know, Antebellum American South as well too. Whether the domestic slaves are they're they're better treated, so it's still slave okay, you know, And if you're a female domestic slave, you're you're probably subject to at least the threat of almost constant you know, sexual abuse, and like that's I think, you know, if we're going to start to talk about like, well, this wasn't as bad, like I don't know, like it's it's still it's still pretty

bad here, guys, Like let's like let's drop the attitude, but you know, kind of turning away from the slavery for the moment. One of the questions that I'm fascinated about is how did empires in the pre modern world manage all of this? How on earth? Because if you look at the abbess at Caliphate, right, and and I'll ask you to talk about how large it was, and it's the largest extent, but then also like how do they manage it? It's could you be centralized? Is that

even possible given the limitations of communication a lot. Let's just sorry about communication, not anything else. Like how do you do that with a territory that's this big? And if you could start by saying just how big.

So if we if people think of like where the ol Sea is, well, there's much there's not much left of the Olca now, but in the ninth century it

was much bigger than it is now. So the ol Sea and kind of what's Central Asia through with an Oxus, down through Afghanistan to the borders of northern India and north up as far as the Caucasus h and the frontiers of Turkey and south obviously as far as the desert lightened and southern the edges of the Arabian Peninsula towards the Indian Ocean, and all this is ruled from Baghdad. And as you say, it's truly centralized rule obviously over

a territory that wide is pretty impossible. And from very early on we have rival dynasties in the far West in Morocco, and in Spain, and also in the Far East, in Central Asia and the eastern frontieres of Uan beginning to contest the centralized well to contests that that that their subjection to the ambassad Califfin Baghdad. Right, But interestingly, one of the ways in which the Empire is able to maintain its effective jurisdiction over that period is precisely

through communication. So the one thing really that keeps the empire together under the basids when it's working well is the cir called buddied the postal system, which is partly in inheritance from the late Roman and Ssanian postal system and partly a kind of creation of the caliph it itself. And this is an amazingly well organized, efficient system which has been studied in great death by a medieval historian

called Adam Silverstein. And there is a system of placing postal rest stops with fresh horses and fresh messengers at a day's wide from any place within the within the empire.

part to the efficiency of the postal system. And then at the core of that, at the center, at the court itself, you have this again, especially under the Abasids, a very experienced and professionalized bureaucracy staffed by mainly Persian speaking secretaries, the whole kind of class of imperial courtiers known as the ketebs, the secretaries in the Islamic historic historiographical tradition, and these people have inherited an Iranian set

of Sicanian you precedents have the science in the empire itself was governed becomes very important. These are the people who kind of who write this kind of moors for prince's kind of literature, the guides for good governance that come down to us in the literary tradition. And similarly in the early Caliphate, you know the provinces of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, these are all run by administrators who are initially largely

not Muslims. So again going back to those Christian elites that we talked about earlier, who continue to administer in Greek initially at least until the end of the seventh beginning of the eighth century, and who and who are familiar with, though. You know how you how you manage taxation, how you manage the cadastal survey, how you how you know how much land is under cultivation, how you know how many people who are to pay taxison in a given area, how you raise troops, how you move your

troops around. So those kind of basic technologies of government, if you like, are really well established because the Caliphate inherits them pastally partly from the late Byzantine and the Sicanian states, and because they develop their own spins on

those things. But from very early on it also kind of breaks down, right, So, as I said, you have rival dynasties already in the eighth century, ninth century and the in the far West, and then also in Nyulan, Afghanistan and the East, we start to get rival dynasties beginning to take up their own sovereignty, usually people who start off as governors of provinces under the Abbasids, who begin to appropriate the tax offer use to their own purposes starting in the in the tenth century.

easiest path forward. And sometimes, you know, I think a lot about the Roman Empire and the sustaining it, the party and and so on and so forth, and they have they have very different like troop types militaries, and you know, I'm not a historian, but I like to do wargame what ifs a lot, you know, and you think kind of think of like the Romans have got this really strong, heavy, tight packed infantry which is real great in tight spaces and in Europe and so on

and so forth, but it gets out on the planes of the Middle East and it's just doesn't work as well. And then and then you've got this sort of cavalry oriented system that a lot of the Parthian military is and which is obviously coming from the Persians originally, and they're very effective in those spaces. But gosh, you know, the Islamic armies, particularly of the Caliphate, they just can't get past Constantinople, you know, until fourteen fifty three, they

just can't get past there. And so I wonder if I could ask you, like, is there just a limit based on the type the way their military functions that you know, this is you know, the caliphate stretches to so that they get turned back at tours, you know, so they get you know, they kind of get pushed into this area, but there's just a natural limit to as far as they're going to be able to go. I've always wondered if that's the case, what do you think about that?

you can mobilize resources beyond your core territories. So the early color of fate again, you know, it depends on these highly mobile, highly disciplined, but quite small, mainly cavalry armies. They do lay siege to cities right in the first wave of the conquer. The main kind of phase of

the conquest that we're talking about. Earlier in Syria and Palestine, they lay siege to cities, but their sieges don't tend to last terribly long, again partly because, as we said, the inhabitants of the cities decide to make a deal rather than risk having the city actually sacked and destroyed, right, so that they have some siege you know, technology that they're familiar with with siege, orly become familiar with siege technology fairly early on. But they're mostly mobile cavalry armies.

They're not large standing armies set up for long campaigns in the field. They're mobilized for particular campaigns and then they're in the again in the early Califate. The veterans of those campaigns are settled as as kind of veterans, you know, in the garrison cities that are built for them in in Barcelona and Kufe in Iraq in particular,

which become the centers of the new Muslim community. And yeah, in terms of how how far they extend, I mean that they get as far as a bunch of natural bowriers in a way, as far as the Indus River in India, interestingly across the mountains right but down into the Indus Valley, and then again as far as the Oxus and the across the Oxus River and too Transaxoniana in Central Asia. But then you're faced with, you know, the vastness of the steps of Central Asia in which

you need to be mobile in order to survive. The one kind of lots of once you've passed kind of Bukada and Samarkan, the major population centers to to kind of be interesting to you as kind of points of conquest.

And similarly in Europe, Yeah, you know, once the Arabs her and their Berber allies importantly in North Africa have conquered the Physigothic Kingdom and Spain, you know, they push up a little bit briefly into southern France, but there's no indication they have a particularly interested in staying there, you know, that would have that would have overextended their their lines too far.

lot of it is distance. It's yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's a long way from Macedonia to the Oxas River. That's a long difference at that time.

don't have the artillity to get through the walls. When the Ottomans are using explosive shells in four and fifty three, when they actually take Constantinople, you don't You don't have that kind of technology until you have the kind of heavy gunpowder firepower that is there's really only becoming available anywhere in Europe or the Middle East in the middle of the in the middle of the fourteen hundreds.

So many things change as a consequence. Now, of course, you know, the Arabs and the Muslim world has been dealing with Crusader wars, you know, since you know, the Urban the Second made the call to crusade at Clermont in ten ninety five, you know, so that's been going on for a while. But they've kind of managed that

at this point. But then suddenly the Mongols come sweeping in from the east, and to me, this has always seemed like a huge turning point for the Muslim world, and so I wanted to ask you sort of and I know it's a huge last question, but like how big of a I'll use the word catastrophe for the Muslim world. Maybe that's not the right word. Were these Mongol invasions? Just how big of a variable are we suddenly introducing onto our board.

historical tradition, But they don't loom very large for the Muslims. Actually, interestingly, they're just not that important, first of all, because the Muslims have kind of them by the early thirteenth century, and the Mongols are much more important and much bigger deal. Certainly a much bigger catastrophe. I mean, the loss of Jerusalem to the Crusaders in the twelfth century is a

big deal. But then Jerusalem gets reconquered and everything's fine again, and the Mongols, you know who, show up in Baghdad in twelve fifty eight Lacey's Baghdad sak Baghdad, kill the Caliph, put an end to the Bastid line again. In you know, a classical Islamic historiography kind of bring to an end the golden age of kind of Islamic civilizational history. That's often the way there's been seen, you know, within the Muslim tradition as well as by secular historians of kind

of Islamic civilization. And again those terms that we talked about the beginning of our conversation, it's it's an absolutely

cataclysmic world chattering moment. And interestingly, you know, for later descendants of the Mongols as well, like the Muggle emperors in India, you know, the rise of the Mongols is kind of the second most important world historical event of the millennium when they're looking back at you know, the last thousand years from the perspector of say fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, the first great world historical event of course being the rise of Islam for them, and

then the rise of the Mongols right to which they become the heirs. So within the Islamic tradition on the one hand, and the Arabic tradition, the emergence of the Mongols is this absolute calamity in what's often a Persian speaking, Persian writing tradition from further east, especially from South Asia. You know, the rise of the Mongols is equally momentous, but maybe not such a terrible thing. And that's quite interesting, right, And I think I showed that tell us a number

of things. So partly the kind of catastrophe thesis, if you like, of the Mongol conquest is obviously influenced by

the way it's perceived from the West. And when I say the West, I mean the western part of the Muslim world, from places where the Mongols never conquer, so Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and the medieval tradition of writing about the mongo conquest from these areas Mongols who are calamity, They're a plague, you know, they're the worst thing ever to be seen in the face of the earth, not

likely to be repeated before the end of time. But when the Mongols turn up to Baghdad, they have Muslims with them, right, And indeed they have Muslim historians with them who will go on to write a rather different tradition, which is all about how the Mongols, you know, actually are part of an instrument of God's plan for the salvation of humanity, and that they're kind of a scourge

on sinful human kind. But the Mongols themselves, of course, within a couple of generations, will also be Muslims from the end of the eleventh century, so from the end of the thirteenth century, most Muslim rulers in Central Asia and the Middle East are are themselves Muslim, and they go on to kind of be the origin point of a bunch of dynasties, most notably the Timurids or them Goes in South Asia, who will rule up until the eighteenth century as kind of the most significant Muslim dynasty

in South Asian history. So what's really interesting about the Mongols, I think again from a kind of global history perspective, is the extent to which yeah they that marks a watershed, a turning point in Islamic history. It shift from a kind of Arabic speaking Eastern Mediterranean centered history to a

Persian at Central and South and Asian history. The importance of Baghdad shifts from being kind of the center of the world to being a peripheral city on the east, on the western part of this persian at world which the mainly looks east, looks into Central Asia, looks to China, looks for the Indian Ocean, and it's kind of a moment of a shift of the center of gravity of the larger Muslim world as a whole, the Muslim ECUMENI right as I call it, kind of the shared world

of different cultures that's united by belonging to Islam, and that center of gravity shifts from what we think of as the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean into Central Asia, South Asia, and the world that's connected by the Mongol conquests all the way across to northern China, and that in that world, you know, Islama is going to flourish and to have a whole another whole life in architecture, in art, in painting, and in literature, poetry, in painting and so on, you know,

for the next several hundred years. So the that's certainly a catastrophe for the people of Baghdad, right if you're on the receiving end of it in twelve fifty eight, it's it's absolutely horrendous. The city is sacked, large numbers of people are killed. You know, the chronicles, even the Mongol chronicles themselves, are pretty clear, at least the chronicles written under Mongol patronage are pretty clear about the extent of the slaughter the Mongols don't have any problems about,

you know, foregrounding their reputation for as slaughtering conquerors. But what's interesting is that after that, it's more of a shift of the center of gravity and the force of the expansion of Islam around the world than it is clear kind of endpoint to what we think was a kind of classical Islamic civilization.

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