The Islamic Golden Age
1 AH – 656 AH60 items
empiresscienceFrom Medina to the fall of Baghdad
Six centuries, from the Hijra of 622 to the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Arab armies built an empire from the Atlantic to Central Asia within a century, and under its caliphs Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo and Bukhara became the places where Greek, Persian and Indian learning was translated, argued with and extended: algebra, optics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy.
How to read it
Bands for the caliphates and the dynasties that ran beside them, and one for the translation movement that fed the rest.
Filter by tag to follow one thread:
translation,science,medicine,philosophy,architectureorwar.
Dates in the Hijri calendar
Most dates here are entered as the Arabic chroniclers give them, in the Islamic (Hijri) calendar, and the app converts them. Its year is twelve lunar months, 354 or 355 days, eleven days shorter than the solar year, so Hijri years run ahead: 33 of them pass in about 32 solar years. That is why 656 AH, the year Baghdad fell, is only 636 solar years after the Hijra. Year 1 began on 1 Muharram, 16 July 622 (Julian), the start of the year in which Muhammad left Mecca.
The app uses the tabular Hijri calendar, a fixed 30-year cycle with 11 leap years, not the sighting of the new moon the chroniclers relied on, so a converted day can sit a day or two off. Where a source gives only the year, the item spans the whole Hijri year. The few events the sources date by the Christian era are entered in the Julian calendar.
Items
The Hijra: Muhammad reaches Medina
Death of Muhammad; Abu Bakr becomes caliph
Battle of the Yarmouk
ʿUmar makes the year of the Hijra year one
ʿAli is struck down in the mosque of Kufa
Al-Husayn is killed at Karbala
The Dome of the Rock
ʿAbd al-Malik strikes coins with no pictures
Al-Walid I begins the Great Mosque of Damascus
Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses into Spain
The Abbasids win on the Great Zab
Battle of Talas
Al-Mansur founds Baghdad, the Round City
The Great Mosque of Córdoba begun
Paper comes to Baghdad
Al-Khwarizmi writes the book that names algebra
Al-Maʾmun’s astronomers measure the Earth
Al-Maʾmun’s House of Wisdom
Al-Kindi explains how to break a cipher
Great Mosque of Samarra finished
Hunayn ibn Ishaq lists his Galen translations
Fatima al-Fihri founds al-Qarawiyyin in Fez
Al-Razi tells smallpox from measles
ʿAbd al-Rahman III proclaims himself caliph
Madinat al-Zahra begun
Al-Farabi, the “Second Teacher”, dies in Damascus
Al-Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars
Jawhar founds Cairo
First Friday prayer at al-Azhar
Young Ibn Sina reads the Samanid library
Al-Biruni compares the world’s calendars
Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh
Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics
Mahmud of Ghazni takes Khwarazm
Ibn Sina finishes the Canon of Medicine
Al-Biruni finishes his book on India
Tughril Beg enters Baghdad
The Nizamiyya opens in Baghdad
Omar Khayyam solves cubics with conic sections
The Jalali calendar begins
Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers
Al-Idrisi finishes the Book of Roger
Gerard of Cremona translates the Almagest
Ibn Rushd answers al-Ghazali
Saladin takes Jerusalem
Maimonides writes the Guide for the Perplexed
Genghis Khan takes Bukhara
The Mustansiriya opens in Baghdad
Ibn al-Nafis describes the lungs’ circulation
Al-Mustaʿsim surrenders
The last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad is put to death