The Islamic Timeline

The Isra and Mi’raj: Prophet Muhammad is carried by night from Mecca to the farthest mosque in Jerusalem, then ascends through the heavens, meeting the prophets who came before him. The five daily prayers are ordained during the ascension. The journey binds Jerusalem to the Islamic faith forever; it serves as the first qibla (direction of prayer) before the Kaaba.

At the wells of Badr, 313 ill-equipped believers face a Quraysh army nearly three times their size, and win a decisive victory. The Quran calls it the Day of the Criterion (al-Furqan), when God distinguished truth from falsehood. Badr transforms the fledgling community of Medina into a power the tribes of Arabia can no longer ignore.

Ten thousand Muslims enter Mecca almost without bloodshed. Facing the people who had persecuted him for two decades, the Prophet declares a general amnesty: "Go, for you are free." The Kaaba is cleansed of its 360 idols, and Bilal ibn Rabah, the formerly enslaved Abyssinian companion, climbs it to make the call to prayer.

Umar ibn al-Khattab becomes the second caliph. During his decade-long rule, the Caliphate expands from North Africa to Persia, more than tripling in size. He establishes the Diwan (government register), the Islamic calendar, and a sophisticated administrative system.

The same year as Yarmouk, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas defeats the Sasanian grand army under Rustam at al-Qadisiyyah. The Persian capital Ctesiphon falls the next year, its legendary White Palace and treasury taken intact. Two ancient superpowers have now been broken by the armies of Medina within a single decade.

The Muslim conquest of Egypt is complete after the siege of Alexandria, the capital at the time, ending seven centuries of Greco-Roman rule. Muslims considered their conquests as liberations of subjugated peoples, since many populations had lived under oppressive Byzantine or Sasanian rule. Egypt would become a jewel of Islamic civilization.

As Islam spreads far beyond Arabia, Caliph Uthman ibn Affan commissions Zayd ibn Thabit, the Prophet’s own scribe, to produce a standard codex of the Quran, building on the collection made under Abu Bakr and safeguarded by Hafsa, the Prophet’s widow. Master copies are sent to the great garrison cities. It is this text that Muslims from Senegal to Sumatra recite, letter for letter, today.

The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi drives the conquest across Ifriqiya and founds Kairouan as a garrison capital in the North African interior. Its Great Mosque, rebuilt in stone by later emirs, becomes the oldest place of Muslim worship in the Maghreb and the model for its mosques. Tradition holds that Uqba rode his horse into the Atlantic surf and called God to witness he could conquer no further.

The second fitna concludes with the martyrdom of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr after the siege of Mecca, reuniting the Caliphate under Umayyad control. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of the earliest and most iconic works of Islamic architecture, is completed during this period.

Birth of Abu Hanifa, "the Great Imam" of Sunni jurisprudence. A theologian and jurist of Persian origin, he pioneers a rationalist approach to Islamic law (fiqh) emphasizing analogical reasoning. His Hanafi school becomes the most widely followed school of jurisprudence in the Muslim world, dominant from Turkey to South Asia.

Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses the Strait of Gibraltar with a Berber-Arab army, defeats the Visigoths at the Battle of Guadalete, and begins the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The rock where he landed bears his name: Jabal Tariq (Gibraltar). Al-Andalus would become one of the most brilliant civilizations in medieval Europe.

The Umayyads throw an enormous land and sea force at Constantinople. Behind the Theodosian walls, Leo III answers with Greek fire, and a brutal winter does the rest. The failed siege fixes the frontier between the caliphate and Byzantium for centuries; the city will not fall to a Muslim army until Mehmed II arrives with cannon in 1453.

The Frankish and Burgundian forces under Charles Martel halt the Umayyad army at the Battle of Tours (also called the Battle of Poitiers), marking the furthest extent of Muslim advance into Western Europe. Though Muslim historians considered it a minor skirmish, Western historians often regard it as one of the turning points of European history.

Abd al-Rahman I, the sole prince to survive the Abbasid massacre of the Umayyad family, flees across North Africa to Iberia and founds an independent emirate in Cordoba, earning the name al-Dakhil, "the Immigrant." The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur is said to have marveled that a lone fugitive could raise a state on the empire’s far edge, calling him the "Falcon of Quraysh." Al-Andalus would remain under Umayyad rule for nearly three centuries.

Imam Malik completes the Muwatta, the earliest systematic collection of hadith and legal rulings. Caliph al-Mansur had urged him to make it the empire’s single binding code, but Malik refused: the Companions’ knowledge, he said, had already spread to many lands. The Muwatta becomes a foundational text of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, dominant across North and West Africa to this day.

Rabia al-Adawiyya dies in Basra. Born poor and once enslaved, she refuses marriage and worldly comfort to devote herself wholly to God, worshipped, she insists, neither from fear of hellfire nor desire for paradise, but for His own sake alone. Centuries before the Sufi orders exist, this uncompromising woman becomes the mother figure of Islamic mysticism.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, working at the House of Wisdom, publishes Kitāb al-Jabr wa-l-Muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing), founding the discipline of algebra. His name gives us the word "algorithm," and his work introduces Hindu-Arabic numerals to the Western world, transforming mathematics forever.

From their capital at Kairouan, the semi-independent Aghlabid emirs launch the conquest of Sicily, beginning two centuries of Muslim Sicily whose scholars, irrigation, and citrus groves long outlast its emirs. Aghlabid raiders found the short-lived Emirate of Bari on the Italian mainland and even strike the outskirts of Rome, while their ribats and the great cisterns of Kairouan mark a golden age of the central Maghreb.

When a Byzantine raid sacks the frontier town of Zibatra, Caliph al-Mu’tasim answers with one of the largest campaigns of the age, marching on Amorium, the emperor’s ancestral city, and razing it. The tale that he mustered the army at a captive woman’s cry of "Wa Mu’tasimah!" becomes a byword in Arabic letters for the ruler who answers his people. From his new capital at Samarra, al-Mu’tasim also raises the Turkish soldier corps that will reshape the caliphate.

Muhammad al-Bukhari completes Sahih al-Bukhari, widely considered the most authentic collection among the six canonical hadith books (Kutub al-Sittah). He reportedly examined over 600,000 traditions and selected roughly 7,275 for inclusion, applying rigorous criteria for chain-of-transmission verification.

Al-Razi (Rhazes) is born in Rayy. Choosing the site for Baghdad’s great hospital by hanging meat around the city and building where it rotted slowest, he directs it with equal empiricism: his Kitab al-Hawi (the Comprehensive Book) becomes a standard of European medicine for centuries, and his treatise on smallpox and measles gives the first clinical distinction between the two diseases in history.

Abd al-Rahman III assumes power in al-Andalus, becoming its greatest ruler. He declares himself caliph, rivaling the Abbasids of Baghdad and the rising Fatimids of North Africa. His Cordoba becomes the most advanced city in Europe. He famously reflected: "I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to Fourteen. O man! Place not thy confidence in this present world!"

Almış, king of Volga Bulgaria, embraces Islam and requests teachers and builders from Baghdad. The embassy’s secretary, Ibn Fadlan, records the journey in a famous risala, including the only eyewitness account of a Viking ship funeral. A Muslim state now stands at the latitude of Moscow, planting roots that survive in Tatar Islam to this day.

Al-Biruni is born in Khwarazm. Using a mountain in Punjab and spherical trigonometry, he measures the Earth’s radius to within about one percent of the modern value. His Kitab al-Hind studies India’s religions and sciences with a dispassion centuries ahead of its time, earning him a claim to be the world’s first anthropologist, alongside some 146 works on astronomy, mineralogy, and history.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is born in Bukhara. A polymath who mastered medicine early, he devoted his life to philosophy, seeking to prove that philosophy and religion lead to the same truth and the ultimate oneness of God. His Canon of Medicine remained the standard medical textbook in Europe for centuries. He also made pioneering contributions to astronomy, psychology, logic, and mathematics.

The Umayyad Caliphate in al-Andalus collapses and dissolves into dozens of Taifa kingdoms (petty states), each ruled by a local "party king." Though politically fragmented, this era paradoxically produces brilliant cultural achievements: the Taifa courts compete for the finest poets, scholars, and artisans.

Al-Ghazali is born in Tus, becoming one of the most influential theologians in Islamic history. His Revival of the Religious Sciences remains studied in halaqas to this day. His Incoherence of the Philosophers mounts a systematic critique of Ibn Sina’s rationalist philosophy, reshaping the relationship between faith and reason in Islam.

The Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan decisively defeat the Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV at the Battle of Manzikert. This opens Anatolia to Turkish settlement and Islam, fundamentally altering the region’s demographic and religious character, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the Ottoman Empire.

The Almohad movement, founded by Ibn Tumart among the Berber Masmuda tribes, establishes a state in Tinmel in the Atlas Mountains. Preaching a puritanical reform of Islam, the Almohads eventually conquer all of the Maghreb and Muslim Spain, creating one of the largest empires in the western Islamic world.

Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher, is born in Córdoba under Almohad rule. He later serves as court physician to Salah ad-Din’s family in Egypt and writes his masterwork, the Guide of the Perplexed, in Judeo-Arabic, a testament to the deep intellectual cross-pollination of the Islamic world.

Ibn Arabi is born in Murcia, al-Andalus. Known to the Sufi tradition as al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, he pours visionary metaphysics into the Meccan Openings and the Fusus al-Hikam. His doctrine of the unity of being pushes so close to the boundary of orthodoxy that scholars still argue over him eight centuries later. He dies in Damascus, where his tomb remains a place of visitation.

Salah ad-Din’s forces decisively defeat the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin near the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem is liberated after 88 years of Crusader occupation. Saladin’s mercy toward the city’s inhabitants, in stark contrast to the Crusader conquest of 1099, earns admiration across the medieval world.

Jalal al-Din Rumi is born in Balkh; his family flees the advancing Mongols and settles in Konya. A respected jurist until his transformative meeting with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, he pours the rest of his life into poetry. His Masnavi is honored as "the Quran in the Persian tongue," the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes forms around his memory, and eight centuries on, he is a best-selling poet in America.

The Mamluk Sultanate emerges in Egypt: a unique system where slave warriors (Mamluks), rigorously trained from childhood, rise to become sultans based on merit rather than bloodline. This military elite proves devastatingly effective: they destroy the remaining Crusader states and stop the Mongol advance, protecting the heart of the Islamic world for over 250 years.

The Mamluk Sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars lead the Egyptian army to a historic victory over the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine. This is the first major defeat the Mongol empire suffers, halting their seemingly unstoppable westward expansion and saving Egypt, the Hejaz, and North Africa from devastation.

Ibn Taymiyyah is born in Harran, fleeing with his family from the Mongol advance. A Hanbali jurist, theologian, and mujaddid (renewer), he personally rallies troops against the Mongols and is imprisoned seven times for controversial fatwas. Perhaps the most influential Islamic scholar since al-Ghazali, he wrote on theology, philosophy, politics, and interfaith polemics.

On the Byzantine frontier of Anatolia, Osman I leads a small warrior beylik of ghazis. Legend tells of his dream: a great tree rising from his chest to shade the world. From this obscure principality in Bithynia grows the Ottoman Empire, a state that will endure for six centuries on three continents and carry the caliphate to the twentieth century.

Ibn Battuta reaches Kilwa on the East African coast and calls it "one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world." From Mogadishu to Sofala, Islam has traveled south with the monsoon trade, and the Swahili civilization, its very language a weave of Bantu and Arabic, flourishes in coral-stone cities crowned by the Great Mosque of Kilwa.

Ibn Battuta (1304–c.1377) returns to Morocco after nearly three decades of travel spanning approximately 120,000 km, three times the distance Marco Polo traveled. Setting out from Tangier on pilgrimage at age twenty-one, his journey encompassed Syria, Baghdad, southwestern Iran, Yemen, East Africa, Oman, the Gulf, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, southern Russia, India, the Maldive Islands, and China before returning through the Maghreb, al-Andalus, and the Sahara. A trained qadi (judge), he received judicial appointments in both Delhi and the Maldives, testament to how Arabic learning opened doors across the entire Islamic world. His Rihla provides an irreplaceable portrait of 14th-century Muslim civilization, its interconnected cities, and the shared scholarly culture that bound them together. Today, Tangier’s airport bears his name.

A student of Ibn Taymiyyah in Damascus, Ibn Kathir grows into one of Islam’s most influential scholars of the Quran and of history. His Tafsir, which explains scripture through scripture and the earliest traditions, remains among the most consulted commentaries in the world. His universal chronicle al-Bidaya wa’l-Nihaya narrates history from the creation to his own age.

Zheng He (born Ma He, a Muslim from Yunnan and son of a hajji) sets sail on the first of seven treasure voyages with fleets dwarfing anything Europe will float for centuries. His expeditions call at Muslim ports from Malacca and Sumatra to Hormuz, Jeddah, and Mogadishu. His story is a window onto Islam’s deep roots in China, where the Hui community numbers in the millions today.

In Samarkand, the Timurid prince Ulugh Beg, a grandson of Timur, rules as much astronomer as king. He builds a colossal observatory with a marble sextant three storeys high and gathers the age’s finest mathematicians to compile the Zij-i-Sultani, a star catalogue so precise its values are cited for centuries. His madrasa on the Registan teaches the sciences to any who seek them, a last brilliant flowering of Islamic astronomy before the telescope.

The Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula, surrenders to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. After nearly 800 years, al-Andalus comes to an end. The subsequent Spanish Inquisition forces Muslims and Jews to convert or flee. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sends ships to evacuate Sephardic Jews, welcoming them into Ottoman lands.

Ottoman Sultan Selim I defeats the Mamluk forces and conquers Egypt and Syria. The last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay II, is captured and hanged at the Bab Zuweila gate in Cairo. The Ottomans absorb the Mamluk territories, gaining control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and claiming guardianship of the Hajj.

Babur, a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, defeats the Delhi Sultanate at the Battle of Panipat and founds the Mughal Empire. The Mughals rule the Indian subcontinent for over three centuries, creating architectural masterpieces like the Taj Mahal and presiding over one of the wealthiest empires in world history.

The Süleymaniye Mosque is completed, crowning Istanbul’s skyline. Its builder, Mimar Sinan, a Janissary engineer turned chief imperial architect for half a century, will raise more than 300 structures, culminating in the Selimiye Mosque at Edirne, finished when he was about eighty and called by Sinan himself his masterpiece. The classical Ottoman skyline is, in large part, one man’s life’s work.

As France invades Algeria, Abdelkader, a young scholar and Sufi, is proclaimed emir and forges the tribes into a disciplined state that resists the occupation for fifteen years. He builds a mobile capital, mints his own coinage, and wins the respect even of his enemies for his mercy toward prisoners. Exiled after his surrender in 1847, he later settles in Damascus, where he shelters thousands of Christians from massacre and becomes a lasting emblem of principled resistance and tolerance.

The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France partitions the Ottoman Arab provinces into spheres of influence, drawing borders that ignore ethnic, tribal, and religious realities. These artificial boundaries create the modern states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, fueling conflicts that persist to this day.

In the mountains of northern Morocco, Abd el-Krim destroys a Spanish army at the Battle of Annual and proclaims the Republic of the Rif. His guerrilla tactics and modern administration inspire anti-colonial fighters from North Africa to Vietnam, until a combined Spanish and French army of hundreds of thousands, using aircraft and poison gas, forces his surrender in 1926.

For nearly twenty years the Quran teacher Omar al-Mukhtar leads a desert guerrilla war against Italy’s colonization of Libya, his mounted bands outriding a modern army among the caves and wells of the Green Mountain. Italy answers with barbed wire and concentration camps that kill tens of thousands of civilians. Captured at the age of seventy-three, the "Lion of the Desert" is hanged before his people in 1931 and becomes an enduring symbol of resistance.

The British Mandate ends, Israel declares statehood, and war follows. Around 750,000 Palestinians are driven from or flee their homes (the Nakba, "the catastrophe") and hundreds of villages are erased. Jerusalem is divided. No event weighs more heavily on the politics and conscience of the modern Muslim world, and none remains less resolved.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalises the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel invade Egypt in a secret plan to seize it back. Militarily the invaders advance; politically they are routed, forced into withdrawal by American and Soviet pressure. The crisis ends the age of European empire in the Middle East and makes Nasser the towering hero of the Arab world.

In six days, Israel destroys the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and seizes the Sinai, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Arabs call it al-Naksa, "the setback": a defeat so total it shatters the confidence of Pan-Arab nationalism and the standing of Nasser. Into the vacuum step new forces, Palestinian nationalism and a rising political Islam, that define the decades to come.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, having stunned the world by flying to Jerusalem, signs the Camp David Accords with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Egypt becomes the first Arab state to recognise Israel and recovers the Sinai; Sadat wins the Nobel Peace Prize and, three years later, is assassinated for the same treaty. The Arab League suspends Egypt, and the dream of a united Arab front is over.

A generation raised under occupation rises in the First Intifada, a mass uprising of strikes, boycotts, and stone-throwing youths facing tanks. Largely unarmed and led from the streets rather than from exile, it returns the Palestinian cause to the centre of world attention and gives it a new language of grassroots defiance. It winds down only with the Oslo Accords, whose promise of a Palestinian state remains unfulfilled to this day.

When the peace process collapses, the Second Intifada erupts, far bloodier than the first. Five years of clashes, Israeli military incursions, and suicide bombings leave thousands dead, the great majority of them Palestinian. Israel reoccupies the West Bank cities and begins the separation barrier; the hope of a negotiated two-state peace, so bright at Oslo, all but dies in the rubble.

For years Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison: some two million people, most of them refugees and their children, sealed behind a blockade that controls everything entering or leaving. After the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel answers with more than a year of relentless bombardment. Entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, and universities are levelled; tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, are killed, and famine spreads as aid is choked off. South Africa brings Israel before the International Court of Justice; UN experts, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch reach the verdict the ruins make plain: genocide.