Archives Islamic History

25:40

The Timurid Golden Age (part 4): The Uzbeks Arrive

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/19

Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last great Timurid ruler of Herat, died in 1506 while setting out on a military campaign to hold his kingdom together. The next year, an Uzbek army led by Muhammad Shaybani took the city, and a hundred years of rule by Timur's own descendants came to an end. Herat changed hands again in 1510, when Shah Ismail, the first Safavid ruler of Iran, took it from the Uzbeks. This final episode follows what happened to Herat's royal painting workshop once the dynasty that bu...

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25:48

The Timurid Golden Age (part 3): The Poet and the...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/17

Ali-Shir Nava'i was a senior official and adviser at the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, ruler of Herat from 1469, and head of the sultan's supreme council from 1472. Over his lifetime he founded, restored, or supported some 370 institutions, including, in Herat alone, forty inns for travelers, nine bathhouses, and nine bridges: infrastructure that reached ordinary people far beyond the palace. This episode follows two threads of that patronage. Nava'i wrote his own poetry mainly in Chagatai ...

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27:03

The Timurid Golden Age (part 2): The Book Workshop

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/15

Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg were sons of Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad, grandsons of the conqueror Timur, and two of the central figures of the Timurid Golden Age in fifteenth-century Herat and Samarkand. Baysunghur governed Herat and was himself a trained calligrapher. Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and was a working astronomer, not just a patron of one. This episode follows both men's signature projects. In Herat, Baysunghur commissioned a new copy of Firdawsi's Shahnama, the Book of Kings, in 1426....

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30:04

Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 4): What He Left Behind

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/13

Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, spent nearly his entire adult life at war, building an empire that ran from the edges of China to the Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1405, in his late sixties and still leading his army in person, he set out to conquer Ming China. He never got close. A fever caught up with him at a camp near Otrar, and the man who had outlasted nearly every rival he ever faced died the same way he'd made countless ene...

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26:50

The Timurid Golden Age (part 1): Shah Rukh Rules from...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/13

Shah Rukh was a son of Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror whose armies had carved out an empire stretching from the Mediterranean toward India. When Timur died in 1405 without a settled succession, that empire became something to fight over. Shah Rukh's nephew Khalil Sultan seized the capital, Samarkand, along with its treasury, and held it for four years before Shah Rukh finally took the city back in 1409, without a fight. What Shah Rukh did next is the real subject of this episode. Ins...

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30:56

Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 3): The Field at Ankara

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/11

Timur, the Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent 1402 to 1404 doing two things that seem to contradict each other and turn out to be the same story. At Ankara, his army broke the strongest military power in Anatolia and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, known as the Thunderbolt, the only Ottoman sultan taken alive in battle across six hundred years of that empire's history. Then, rather than holding the territory he had just won, Timur restored several of Anatol...

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27:06

Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 2): The Road to Delhi

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/09

Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent the years around 1400 destroying three of the great cities of the Islamic world: Delhi, Aleppo, and Damascus, with Baghdad still to come. This episode follows his army south across the Indus into the Sultanate of Delhi, where a hundred and twenty armored war elephants met a line of burning camels, and follows it west again into Syria, where a besieged Damascus produced one of the strangest document...

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32:38

Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 4): Saladin Closes the...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/08

Saladin, the Kurdish general who would later retake Jerusalem, arrives in Egypt in 1164 as a young officer serving his uncle Shirkuh, in the service of Nur al-Din, the ruler of Syria. Within five years, and after a vizier named Shawar burns his own capital's trading city, Fustat, rather than surrender it to the Crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem, Saladin finds himself vizier to the Fatimid caliph al-Adid at the age of thirty-one. This episode closes out the four-part "Fatimids: Cairo Begins...

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31:12

Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 1): The Amir Who...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/07

Timur, the fourteenth-century Central Asian commander English readers usually know as Tamerlane, is the subject of this episode's opening chapter. Born near Kesh to the Barlas, a Turkic clan of Mongol origin, he rose through the wreckage of the Chagatai Khanate, the Central Asian successor state to Genghis Khan's empire, at a time when it had splintered into rival commands fighting over what was left. An arrow wound in his twenties left him permanently lame, the origin of the nickname Timur-i...

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31:06

Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 3): The House of Knowledge

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/06

Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah became the sixth Fatimid caliph of Egypt in 996, at the age of eleven, and ruled in his own right for twenty-five years. In March of 1005 he opened a section of his own palace to the public as Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge, a library and academy that taught Quran and hadith alongside logic, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics under one roof. The historian al-Maqrizi put its holdings at as many as a million and a half volumes, open to scholars regardless of sect, at...

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31:30

Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 2): A City on New Ground

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/04

In 969, the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, once enslaved and risen to command an entire army, conquered Egypt without sacking its capital, Fustat. Instead of moving into the existing city, he marked out a new walled enclosure beside it with cord, stakes, and a rope hung with bells, meant to signal the single astrologically correct instant to break ground. A bird landed on the rope early. The digging started anyway. This episode follows what Jawhar actually built in the four years that fol...

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31:57

Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 1): The Missionary and...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/09/02

Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i was an Isma'ili Shi'i missionary from Kufa who spent nearly two decades, starting in 893, living among the Kutama Berbers of North Africa's Kabylie highlands, earning their trust before ever asking them to fight. Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi was the man that mission was built around, the claimant descended from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through his daughter Fatima and Ali ibn Abi Talib, who would become the first Fatimid caliph without ever leading a single battle...

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29:19

The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/30

Bayezid I, known as Yildirim, "the Thunderbolt," was the fourth ruler of the House of Osman and the most powerful the family had produced: he crushed a European crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, blockaded Constantinople for years, and annexed most of the independent Turkish beyliks of Anatolia. In July 1402, on a plain outside Ankara, that empire collapsed in an afternoon. This episode closes out the four-part series on the House of Osman's first hundred years by covering the Battle of Ankara, wh...

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31:12

The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/28

In June of 1389, Sultan Murad of the Ottomans leads his army against a coalition of Serbian and Bosnian lords under Prince Lazar on a plain in Kosovo. By nightfall both commanders are dead, killed in different ways and for different reasons, and Murad's son Bayezid has been acclaimed sultan on the same field where his father fell. Within hours, Bayezid has his own brother, Yakub Celebi, strangled to remove any rival claim to the throne, the opening act of a practice that would later become fo...

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32:22

The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/26

This episode follows the Ottoman dynasty's first sustained foothold in Europe, from the moment Orhan's son Süleyman Pasha crossed into Thrace as a mercenary fighting someone else's civil war, to the Ottoman victory over a Serbian coalition at the Battle of the Maritsa in 1371. The story turns on a single night in March 1354, when an earthquake tore down the walls of Gallipoli and emptied it of its Byzantine inhabitants. Süleyman Pasha's forces didn't just occupy the ruins, they rebuilt the wa...

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31:40

Devsirme - The Collecting (part 3): The Auspicious...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/24

This is the third and final episode in a series on the devsirme, the Ottoman practice of levying Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia and raising them into the sultan's own household and army. It follows the institution from its founding logic through Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the devsirme boy who became grand vizier for three sultans, to its violent end. On 15 June 1826, the janissary corps, the descendants of that same devsirme system, overturned their ceremonial cauldrons in Et Meydani...

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29:40

The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/24

Osman was one of a dozen or more minor Turkish frontier chiefs operating along Byzantium's crumbling Anatolian border around the year 1300, and almost nothing about his own lifetime survives in writing. The only contemporary source, the Byzantine chronicler George Pachymeres, gives him a few lines: a defeated relief army at the battle of Bapheus in 1302, and a note that men came to join Osman afterward. Everything else, including the famous chronicle story of a dream in which a tree grows fro...

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32:18

Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 4): Convert or Leave

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/19

This is the final episode of a four-part series on Al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia. It covers the century after Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, tracing how a negotiated treaty protecting Muslim religion, property, and law unraveled into forced conversion, clandestine religious practice, and the mass expulsion of 1609 to 1614. The episode follows Cardinal Cisneros's forced-conversion campaign in Granada, the 1502 pragmatic that gave Castile's Muslims an impossible cho...

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33:23

Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part...

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/18

When Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492, the terms were negotiated, not imposed. The Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the kingdom's Muslims their religion, their property, their own law, and their language. This episode is the fourth and final installment in the Al Andalus series, and it covers the century that almost never makes the popular retelling: the slow, deliberate unraveling of that guarantee. The story moves from Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros...

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30:43

Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 3): Thirty Kingdoms

Archives Islamic History ·

2026/08/17

Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain. After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of Cordoba collapsed into civil war and then into roughly thirty small, competing kingdoms called taifas...

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