This site is dedicated to persons, places and events in the history of Islam.

Starting with Islam’s origins in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE.

Wikipedia… “According to the traditional account, the Islamic prophet Muhammad began receiving what Muslims consider to be divine revelations in 610 CE, calling for submission to the one God, the expectation of the imminent Last Judgement, and caring for the poor and needy. Muhammad’s message won over a handful of followers (the ṣaḥāba) and was met with increasing opposition from Meccan notables. In 622 CE, a few years after losing protection with the death of his influential uncle ʾAbū Ṭālib ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, Muhammad migrated to the city of Yathrib (now known as Medina). With the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community during the Rāshidūn Caliphate.

By the 8th century CE, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from Muslim Iberia in the west to the Indus River in the east. Polities such as those ruled by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (in the Middle East and later in Spain and Southern Italy), the Fatimids, Seljuks, Ayyubids, and Mamluks were among the most influential powers in the world. Highly Persianized empires built by the Samanids, Ghaznavids, and Ghurids significantly contributed to technological and administrative developments. The Islamic Golden Age gave rise to many centers of culture and science and produced notable polymaths, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers during the Middle Ages.

By the early 13th century, the Delhi Sultanate conquered the northern Indian subcontinent, while Turkic dynasties like the Sultanate of Rum and Artuqids conquered much of Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. In the 13th and 14th centuries, destructive Mongol invasions and those of Tamerlane (Timur) from the east, along with the loss of population due to the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centers of the Muslim world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, but saw the emergence of the Timurid Renaissance and major global economic powers such as the Mali Empire in West Africa and the Bengal Sultanate in South Asia. Following the deportation and enslavement of the Muslim Moors from the Emirate of Sicily and other Italian territories, the Islamic Iberia was gradually conquered by Christian forces during the Reconquista. Nonetheless, in the early modern period, the states of the Age of the Islamic Gunpowders—Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Safavid Iran—emerged as world powers.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the Muslim world fell under the influence or direct control of the European Great Powers. Their efforts to win independence and build modern nation-states over the course of the last two centuries continue to reverberate to the present day, as well as fuel conflict-zones in regions such as Palestine, Kashmir, Xinjiang, Chechnya, Central Africa, Bosnia, and Myanmar. The oil boom stabilized the Arab States of the Gulf Cooperation Council, making them the world’s largest oil producers and exporters, which focus on capitalism, free trade, and tourism.”