A Tale of Two Cities In the grand historical narrative of the Islamic world, two cities have stood out as dominant forces: ...

Inside the Abbasid palace of Baghdad, built in around 12th century. The caliphates (Islamic states) were governed by a caliph. They were the successors to Muhammad. The first major caliphate was ...

Muslim scholars collected and translated books from across the known world. In Baghdad, the Abbasid caliph created a centre of learning which was known as the House of Wisdom, or the Grand Library ...

More than a millennium ago merchant-informants and officials at the service of the Abbasid caliph, from Baghdad or Basra, put to paper eyewitness accounts of North Europeans (Vikings), Indians ...

Samarra was the second capital of the Abbasid Caliphate after Baghdad. Following the loss of the monuments of Baghdad, Samarra represents the only physical trace of the Caliphate at its height. The ...

When he fled from his mayors of the palace and became a shadow in Egypt, that pretension was maintained and was assumed by the Turkish Sultan Selim, when in 1517 he took the Caliphate from the hands ...