Alright, let's talk about Dar al-Islam, which when being translated means the House of Islam, or everywhere Islam was the majority religion around 1200. And to quote an eminent historian of this period, that's a big ol'honkin'house. So if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, well, let's get to it. To begin, I need to tell you about three of the major religions that interacted with one another during that time, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
And you're going to need to know something about the core beliefs of each of these and how these beliefs affected the societies in which they were practiced. Oh, and by the way, if you want note guys to follow along with this video and cram all of its contents into your brain folds, then check the link below. So Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jews, and it originated in the Middle East.
And probably the most important thing you need to remember about this religion is that it was monotheistic, which is to say they worshipped one god and not many gods. And that's the important piece because Judaism was the soil out of which the other two monotheistic faiths grew. So Christianity was established by a Jewish prophet, namely Jesus Christ.
Maybe you've heard of him. Now Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, or the Savior, that the Jews had long been waiting for. And after his crucifixion at the hands of Roman authorities, his followers began to spread his message of salvation.
by grace. And while the earliest Christians were a persecuted minority, eventually the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and that began the most significant influence of Christianity upon society. In fact, entire states in Europe and Africa were organized and influenced by a growing hierarchy of popes and bishops and cardinals.
But now let's consider the third major monotheistic religion you need to know, namely Islam. And it was founded by the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century right here on the Arabian Peninsula. Now Muhammad claimed to be the final prophet in the line of God's messengers that stretched all the way back through Jewish and Christian scriptures. And he taught his followers that salvation would be found in righteous actions like almsgiving and prayer and fasting.
Now after the death of Muhammad in 632, the faith that he established began spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East. East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, into Europe, and all the way down to South Asia. And this is what we call Dar al-Islam, or the House of Islam. And Islam... deeply affected the societies where it was practiced, but perhaps no effect was more important than the trading connections that existed between the various places within Dar al-Islam.
It just so happened that before he was a revelatory prophet of Allah, Muhammad was a merchant, so he was all about the tradesies and so were his followers. Now compare that to Jesus'teachings on accumulating wealth, which can be summed up in about one word. Uh, don't.
And so it's not hard to understand why Islamic states in general became far more prosperous than Christian states prior to 1200. Now in addition to the Islamic faith facilitating trade throughout Afro-Eurasia, it also facilitated the rise of giant honking empires as well. And for our purposes, let's begin with the Abbasid Caliphate, which was founded in the 8th century. And you're like, the course starts in 1200, why are you talking about the 700s, ya doink?
Well, my dear pupils, first of all, 1200 is kind of a squishy date. Like, the course starts around 1200. But secondly, in order to really understand the new developments going on in Dar al-Islam from 1200 to 1450, you have to know what came before. So back to the Abbasids, and there are two things you really need to remember about them.
First, they were ethnically Arab. Second, the Abbasids were empowered during what became known as the Golden Age of Islam. During that time, there were metric buttloads of innovations and advancements in science and mathematics and literature and technology, all of which we'll talk about later. But by 1200, well baby, it ain't the golden age anymore because the Abbasid empire was fragmenting and beginning to lose its place of ascendancy as the center of the Islamic world. And I'll throw in a third thing to note, just for funsies.
As I mentioned a second ago, the Abbasids rose to power around the mid-8th century, replacing the Umayyad Caliphate. And the Abbasids engaged in lots of battles against the Umayyad to get there, but you wanna know how they finished the job? I know you do.
After they had squarely whipped the Umayyad, the Abbasids invited about 80 members of the Umayyad to the battle. of the Umayyad court to a nice dinner and then hacked their crap to pieces. And that's how you do it. Anyways, the power of the Abbasids began to wane right before the beginning of our period. This is the important part.
Listen. Several new Islamic empires began to rise in its place. Here's the spicy part.
Those new Islamic empires were largely made up of Turkic peoples, not Arab peoples. Why are you not falling out of your seat right now? That's a huge development. Look, from the time of Muhammad to the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, Islamic empires were run by Arabs. But not now, the Turkic Muslims start coming in and setting up new rival empires out of the crumbling edifice of the Abbasid Empire, and let me tell you about three of them.
First was the Seljuk Empire, which was established in the 11th century in Central Asia. Now the Seljuks were a pastoral people from Central Asia who were brought in, irony of ironies, by the Abbasids as a professional military force both to expand their empire and to culturally integrate their empire by force. But by the 1200s, those Seljuk warriors began to claim more and more power for themselves.
And in the end the Abbasid Caliphs were still in power. power and claimed to speak for all of Islam, but the Seljuqs had most of the political power because, you know, when you're really good at killing large swaths of people, it's relatively easy to gain power. Okay, second was the Mamluk Sultanate over in Egypt, and it's kind of the same story over here. Now, prior to the Mamluk takeover, the Ayyubid Sultanate ruled Egypt under the leadership of Saladin, otherwise known as He of the Pointy Turban.
I'm kidding, don't write that down. Anyway, in order to advance the goals of his state, Saladin needed more labor, so what did he do? Well, Saladin went ahead and enslaved a group of fierce Turkic warriors, who were known as Mamluks, which just means enslaved person. So Saladin dies, and the sultans who followed him were pretty incompetent, and so what happened?
Well, the Turkic Mamluks went ahead and seized power, giving rise to yet another Turkic Muslim state. So what's the lesson here? Well, if you're ruling over a Muslim empire in the post-classical period and want to stay in power, don't bring in the Turkic warriors, because eventually they're going to take all your crap over. See? Who said that world history wasn't practical to your life?
The third Turkic Muslim state to arise during this period was the Delhi Sultanate over here in South Asia. Here the invading Turks established a Muslim state in the north and ruled over the Indian population for about 300 years. Now they had all kinds of problems as well, but we're gonna save that for the next video. But the main point here is that as Arab Muslim empires like the Abbasid declined, new Muslim empires made up of Turkic peoples were on the rise.
That was a big change. However, these new Muslim states also resembled the former Arab empires in several ways. For example, in these new states, it was mostly the military which was in charge of administration.
Additionally, they retained the Islamic practice of implementing Sharia law, which was a code of laws established in the Quran. Okay, now during this period, Islam continued to expand in places all across Afro-Eurasia, and that spread was carried out in basically three ways. First, military expansion, and we already saw how that worked with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. Second, Islam expanded through merchant activity, which is to say, trade.
For example, much of North Africa was ruled by Muslims, and that reality stimulated trade and movement of merchants throughout Africa. Further south, the Empire of Mali gradually converted to Islam for many reasons, but chief among them was the increased access to trade among Dar al-Islam. And then third, Islam expanded due to the efforts of Muslim missionaries, a large branch of which was known as the Sufis. During this period, Sufism was a new and emerging form of Islam that emphasized mystical experience.
Furthermore, it emphasized that those spiritual experiences were available to anyone, regardless of class or religion. gender. And although the Islamic scholar class pooh-poohed this innovation, what with its lack of theological rigor, it became a significant force for the spread of Islam across the world.
Okay, now the last thing you need to know is that all across Dar al-Islam there were an awful lot of thinky-thinky kinds of people and their developments were kind of astonishing. First of all, there were innovations in mathematics. And for this let me introduce you to my boy Nasir al-Din al-Tusa. I mean, this guy invented trigonometry, so, you know. And the whole reason he developed it was so he could better understand how planets and stars move through the sky.
And look, if you believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around, then you have Al-Tusi to thank, because later Nicholas Copernicus used Al-Tusi's mathy-mathy stuff to develop the heliocentric theory of the universe. Not the universe. Is it the galaxy? No.
What's... Sun is at the center. Additionally, during the Golden Age of Islam, under the Abbasid Caliphate, the House of Wisdom was established in Baghdad.
This was a massive and world-famous library to which scholars from all over the dang world came to study religion and the natural sciences. And even spicier, scholars at the House of Wisdom were respon- They were responsible for preserving the great works of Greek moral and natural philosophy by folks like Plato and Aristotle. They translated them into Arabic and made extensive commentaries on them, and without that effort, those works would likely have been lost forever. But they weren't, and instead those Arabic translations of classical texts were transferred to Europe where they became the basis for the Renaissance and all the cultural flowering that resulted. Alright, click here to watch my other videos on Unit 1. And click here to grab my video note guys to follow along with these videos if that's the kind of thing you're into.
If you're having trouble reading your textbook and you still want an A, then these puppies are for you. And now on the flip flop. Heimler out.