History and Impact of Islam

This video is brought to you by, well, all of you. Thank you to my patrons for supporting the channel and making these videos possible. Al Muqaddimah is funded only by Patreon, and as you can see, the videos take a long time to research, edit, and produce. It's only because of my patrons that I can put this kind of time into these videos and keep them free from any kind of paywall. So if you want to pledge a dollar or more to support the channel, you can head over to my Patreon. The link is in the description. You can also become a member right here on YouTube. There are no benefits attached to it because I don't get the time to work on them. So, if you want to support Al Muqaddima financially, please go ahead. Otherwise, just like, comment, share and subscribe. That's also supporting Al Muqaddima. Hi, welcome to Al Muqaddima. My name is Siavash. What is Islam? A religion? A culture? A civilization? In the nightly news, the name of Islam used to be associated with terror and suicide attacks. Now it's like that on social media. The Middle East is synonymous with violent clashes. Cities like Baghdad and Damascus are considered the most dangerous to travel to. When you search for Middle Eastern history books, you get a dozen layers of books about... before you get to any other type of history. However, there was once a time when Baghdad and Damascus were among the most prosperous cities in the world. There were seats of an office that sponsored, among others, scholars and scribes that kept the light going as Europe struggled in the so-called Dark Ages. Within a single generation, the Arabs went from tribal nomads to the rulers of mighty empires comparable in their prestige to the emperors of Rome and China. They built palace cities such as the ones in Cairo, Samarra, and Cordoba. It is thanks to them that two-thirds of the stars that have names have Arabic names. They created prosperous pockets of Islamic civilization in Spain, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, and India. Eventually, the honor of the caliphate was taken from them by the Turks, who, like the Arabs, were nomads. These Turks opened the gateway into Europe and in many ways outperformed their predecessors until they came to be known as the sick man of Europe. This is the story of Islam in roughly 49 minutes. Islam was born in Arabia in the city of Mecca where the Prophet Muhammad received revelation in 610 from the God of Abraham. He immediately started preaching to the people of Mecca but he was unsuccessful and was eventually forced into exile. He had to find shelter in a nearby city which came to be known as Medina. From here, Prophet Muhammad ran the first Islamic state and came into conflict with his former countrymen as he raided them and they well wanted him dead. Eventually, he conquered Mecca and then most of Arabia. He even challenged the Byzantine Empire but never came into conflict with it himself. The revelations he received set the outlines of Islam for an individual and a state, but more for an individual. After 23 years as a prophet and a leader, he passed away in 632 at the age of 63. His succession plan was not clear, but to this day, this is debated. In the modern day, with the benefit of hindsight, his son-in-law and cousin Ali seems like the obvious choice. This created the first rift in Islam and created two groups which would eventually become Shias and Sunnis. However, Prophet Muhammad's political successors, were the Rashidun Caliphs. The Prophet's close ally and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, took over as his successor or Khalifa, which literally just means successor or deputy, and is Latinized as Caliph. The office of the Caliph was established. Immediately, chaos was rooted out and armies were dispatched against the exhausted Persians and the Byzantines. Abu Bakr died after a short reign of two years and his successor, Umar, led the campaigns against the Byzantines and the Persians. When the dust settled, Muslims found themselves in possession of the rich provinces of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, as well as the hugely diverse population that lived in them, speaking a European Union's worth of languages. Arab Muslims, a small minority, was now the ruling class that ruled over a large non-Arab and non-Arab community. Muslim population. Umar's successor, Uthman, was brutally murdered by rebels who accused him of corruption. Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, was finally made Caliph, but Uthman's cousin Muawiyah wanted retribution for the murder and it broke out into the form of the first civil war or the first fitna as the Muslims call it. Unfortunately, Ali did not live to see the end of the war and his rival Muawiyah became Caliph after Ali's son gave away his claim. Muawiyah founded the Umayyad dynasty which ruled the Islamic empire for almost a century. The seat of their power was in Damascus. They expanded the empire to the Indus in the east and Iberia in the west, making it one of the largest empires in history. However, with the exception of one man, Umar ibn Abdulaziz, all Umayyad Caliphs were deeply unpopular. They were already considered illegitimate rulers as many believed Ali's children deserved the caliphate more than anyone else. After all, Ali's sons, Hasan and Hussain, were the grandsons of the Prophet. Hussain, the younger, was brutally murdered by the caliph. Muawiyah's son Yazid. An annual commemoration of this day is still observed throughout the Muslim world. In addition to that, the large non-Arab population was now slowly converting to Islam. Arab Muslims were becoming an increasingly small percentage of the Muslim population. percentage of Muslims. These new Muslims wanted more power and the Umayyads kept alienating them. Their empire was incredibly unstable and had around 14 different caliphs in 90 years and no less than two major civil wars and countless rebellions that failed and one that succeeded. In 750, a revolution overthrew the Umayyad dynasty and replaced them with the Abbasids, who were descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas. They were members of the Prophet's house, no doubt, but not the ones the people were hoping for. The Abbasids were supported by by non-Arabs who felt like second-class citizens under the Umayyads. They consolidated their rule over their new mighty empire and built a new capital at Baghdad which became the heart of the Islamic Golden Age. The establishment was now opened to non-Arab Muslims as well as Christians and Jews on several occasions. Speaking of Christians and Jews, even though they were never completely equal to Muslims, they were still treated with remarkable tolerance for the time. In addition to all that, the Abbasids defeated the Chinese Tang Empire and halted its expansion into Central Asia. Hence Central Asia fell into the Islamic orbit rather than the Chinese orbit. This will become important in a moment. Great Caliphs like Al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid and Al-Ma'mun oversaw the peak of the Abbasid dynasty and built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of all faiths, cultures, languages and ethnicities could work together. Scholars were translating manuscripts from all over the world and working on them further. During this time, Islamic jurisprudence also got developed. Basically, the sayings and actions of the Prophet were collected in the form of Hadith, and interpretations by various scholars led to the development of the Sharia. When all was said and done, four schools of Sunni jurisprudence came out on top. On the other side, the Shias didn't have such a necessity because they believed in their Imam. the leader. These Imams were descendants of Ali whom people considered to be divinely guided, and there are various chains of them accepted by one sect of Shias or the other. Nevertheless, Imam Jafar as-Sadiq did develop Islamic jurisprudence for the Shias as well. Here's my friend Arkam from Almost Wise to talk a little bit about the philosophy and jurisprudence in Islamic thought. Islamic philosophy has its roots in the early centuries of the Islamic era, notably during the 8th to 10th centuries CE. The origins of Islamic philosophy can be traced to the translation movement which took place in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and other centers of learning in the Islamic world. During this period, scholars translated classical Greek works, particularly those of Aristotle, Plato and other Hellenistic philosophers into Arabic. This translation movement marked the crucial intellectual exchange between the Greek philosophical tradition and the burgeoning Islamic civilization. Early Muslim scholars such as Al-Kindi played a pivotal role in this. role in assimilating Greek thought into the Islamic intellectual framework. They sought to harmonize reason or akhld with revelation, aiming to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology. But even before that, even before the introduction of Greek thought, there still was philosophy at the root of it all. What transpired after the battle of Siffin, for example, was in fact a philosophical rift between the two. What part does Plotinus'Neoplatonism play in the foundations of Islamic philosophy? I cover all of this and a lot more. Head over to my channel if you're interested. Thank you. Almost Wise has made an entire video about Islamic philosophy and thought over on his channel. So after you're done watching this one, be sure to check that out. It's a companion video to this one, so it's pretty good. Back to the golden age of Islam. All good things have to come to an end. The Abbasids added, Turkic slave soldiers from Central Asia to their military and promoted them to all high offices. All of the establishment which had previously been Arab and Persian was now replaced almost entirely by the Turks within a single generation. The two sides clashed constantly and so a new capital at Samarra was created but it didn't help that much. The thing about slaves and mercenaries is that they come to the realization that the caliph isn't their patron. The Caliph is essentially their hostage because the Caliph relies on them more than they rely on him. So they turned the Caliph into a puppet. Corruption and instability ran rampant and the empire broke apart. Within the 9th century, the Abbasids lost almost everything they had. Persia, Syria, Egypt and Arabia all walked away. The Abbasids hardly exercised any control outside the walls of their palaces. Around 950, Two centuries after the Abbasid Revolution, a Persian Shia dynasty from Northern Persia swept into power and took over Baghdad, replacing the Turks as the puppet masters. The Caliph, who was Sunni, became a vassal for the first time in history. This went on for a century, until a Sunni dynasty from Central Asia named the Seljuks broke into Persia with remarkable speed. They defeated the Buids and took over all of their former lands. The Caliph was, once again, a puppet. But this time the overlords were Sunni, so at least that's a little better I guess. The overtake by the Seljuks was accompanied by a large number of Turks moving all over the Middle East. The Seljuks started raiding Anatolia regularly, which robbed the Byzantine Empire the wrong way. They tried to fight back but the Seljuks broke them decisively at Manzikert in 1071 and well, Anatolia was open to them. A number of Turkic tribes moved into the area and fought for dominance over the next decades. This certainly demanded a response from the Christians. After all, God willed it. Let's take a step back. In 750, when the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, one of their princes, Abd al-Rahman, established a small state in Muslim Spain that grew to control almost all of the peninsula. For three centuries, the dynasty thrived there. Eventually, When the Abbasids began to falter, the Umayyads declared themselves Caliphs in 929 under the great Abdur-Rahman III. Abdur-Rahman III created the beautiful palace city of Medina del Zahra. However, his young grandson became a puppet to his Grand Vizier, or Hajib as they called him. The Caliphate broke apart, leaving behind small pieces which were easy for the Christians to pick up, which they did. The Reconquista came together with full power. Over the next four centuries, two Amazigh empires from Morocco, the Almoravids and the Almohads, tried to sustain it but failed. Slowly, the Christians took over the entirety of the peninsula except for Granada, where a dynasty called the Nasrids awkwardly tried to survive for two more centuries, but they couldn't. The last Muslim ruler in Iberia, Muhammad XII of Granada, was expelled in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed the ocean. blue. Back in the Middle East, a Christian army marched all the way from Europe to Jerusalem and despite all odds, conquered it in 1099. The Middle East at the time was busy with a pretty intense Shia-Sunni rivalry. Back in the 10th century, a Shia dynasty called the Fatimids had risen up from North Africa and taken over most of North Africa, including Egypt. They founded the city of Cairo to serve as their capital, and they claimed the caliphate because they claimed descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima. For those keeping track at home, there were three caliphs at the time. The Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, the Umayyad Caliph in Cordoba, and the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo. It was the Fatimids whom the crusaders had to defeat to take Jerusalem. The Shia Fatimids and the Sunni Seljuks were more occupied fighting each other than defending against the crusaders. The Seljuk Turks were more effective in battle and to counter that, the Fatimids did the same thing that the Abbasids had done. They added Turkic slave soldiers to their ranks. Again, the elements of the military started to take over the entire establishment. The Caliphs became puppets at the hands of their generals. This pattern repeats again and again in Islamic history. I'm so glad we've resolved that now. The Sultanate of Egypt was finally taken over by a former vizier and general of the Fatimids. You might know him, he was named Salahuddin. Salahuddin Ayyubi reconquered Jerusalem from the Christians and established his own dynasty. However, the Turkic establishment was once again the power behind the Sultan until they became Sultans themselves. The Turkic slave soldiers decided to take over as the Mamluk Sultans in 1250. They established a formidable and wealthy empire that would legitimize its claim to power by stopping the unstoppable curse of God, the Mongols. The period between 1200 and 1400 is a period of extreme turmoil in the Islamic world and completely changed Islamic history. In that period, the Islamic world saw three scourges of God. First, in 1218, Genghis Khan sent a trading mission into Persia, which was then ruled by the Khwarizmian dynasty. The Khwarizmian ruler, thinking that they were spies, confiscated their goods and executed them. Genghis Khan demanded reparations, which were refused, and well, Genghis Khan decided to take some... bold steps for the climate by executing as many of those pesky humans that like to exhale carbon dioxide as he could. He invaded Persia which collapsed really fast. Then his sons and grandsons expanded quickly into the Middle East and Muslim-controlled Anatolia. Hulagu Khan sacked the symbolic heart of Muslim power, the seat of the Caliph Baghdad. Abbasids were independent at the time and weren't able to defend themselves. By that time, the Mamluks were the ruling force in Egypt. They met the Mongols in 1260 at Injalut. The Mongols were defeated and it was proven that the Mongols do, in fact, bleed. Mongol expansion into the Middle East was halted. This, in addition to the Mamluks giving refuge to the Abbasid Caliph after the sack, made them the saviors of Islam in the eyes of many. The Mongol Empire broke apart soon after. The Middle Eastern part came under the control of the Ilkhanate which then converted to Islam. A little late but we'll take it. The Ilkhanate broke apart in 1335 and only a little over a decade later, the world was hit by the Black Death. The people who hadn't been killed by the Mongols now had to survive the Black Death. the second Scourge of God. The Middle East was depopulated and in ruins. The heart of Islam now shifted away from the Middle East to the only two places that were relatively prosperous and stable. Egypt under the Mamluks and India under the Delhi Sultanate. Yep, there were Muslims in India. Did I forget to mention that? Okay, let's take another step back. In the 8th century, The Umayyad Caliphate, yeah the original Damascus based one, had conquered Sindh in modern day Pakistan. However, over the next three centuries, it was too far to actually control. It pretty much broke away and apart. Although around the year 1000, the Ghaznavids, who were a Turkic dynasty based in what is today Afghanistan, started attacking India and captured the city of Lahore in 1030. Their power dwindled over the next century, until they were taken over by the Ghurids who expanded further into India. They were replaced by the Mamluks, different Mamluks than Egypt, but yeah, very similar Turkic slave-soldier structure. They were the ones who founded the Delhi Sultanate. The Delhi Sultanate was a collection of dynasties of which the Mamluks were just one that ruled North India from their capital of Delhi. It was an unstable empire, but somehow it was internally pretty okay. They were almost always able to fend off Mongol attacks. Neither the Mongols nor the Black Death could ravage India under their control. Although the last scourge of God, Timur the Lame was able to do that. Timur the Lame rose up from Central Asia in the second half of the 14th century. He conquered almost all of the Middle East. By the time he died, he had conquered everything from Delhi to Damascus. He not only conquered these cities but also almost destroyed them, killing more than 15 million people over his 40-year career. He also ventured into Anatolia, where he defeated a relatively new but quickly emerging Ottoman Empire Ankara in 1402, breaking the Ottomans into two. The Ottomans would recover, so would India, but the Middle East would struggle for another hundred years. It was no longer the home of the Caliphate, as the Abbasid Caliph had moved to Cairo after the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols. All of its artisans and scholars had moved outwards as well, to either Egypt, Anatolia, or India. All three of them were ruled by Turks. At this point, You can say that Islam went from being a civilization to being a collection of civilizations. Before this time, being a Muslim in Spain was largely the same as being a Muslim in Iran, not exactly but largely. Although now that would change as Islam would expand to distant places like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Let's get back to the story. Remember those Ottomans that Timur had broken into? Well, they came back, in a big way, after putting their empire together. They had already broken into Eastern Europe. In 1453, they did the impossible and captured Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire once and for all. The Ottomans kept expanding in both directions, east and west. In the east, around 1500, a new Shia dynasty called the Safavids rose up and quickly took over Persia which had been unstable almost since Timur's death. The Safavids directly challenged the Ottomans for dominance in Anatolia but were pushed back by the Ottoman Sultan Salim who thought while I'm in the area I might as well visit Egypt. I mean people always say that if you're in the area you should visit Egypt and then he did. He took over Egypt, Syria and the holy cities of Makkah and Medina as well as the title of the Caliph. For the first time in almost 900 years the title of the Caliph was held by a non-Arab. In the West, the empire grew into Greece, the Balkans, and along both banks of the Danube. It reached Vienna, where it lost the siege of Vienna twice. The Ottoman army was a formidable force, thanks in no small part to being one of the first non-Chinese empires to use gunpowder. On top of everything, the empire produced at least 10 great consecutive rulers. all of whom were men of considerable skill in civil and military administration. Also, they developed a good bureaucratic system which was fueled by the Devshirme. So basically the Ottomans took Christian boys by force if needed, converted them to Islam and trained them to take over various roles in the government and military. The empire hit its peak around 1683. While it slowly declines and collapses onto itself, let's check in on the east. After the collapse of the Timurid dynasty in Persia, there was a constant battle between various Turko-Persian groups until from Azerbaijan, a young charismatic man named Ismail rose up. And young is right, he was around 12 or 14 when he seized most of Persia and labeled himself Shah in 1501. The title of Shah hadn't been used since the first wave of the Islamic conquests under the Rashidun in the 630s. The new dynasty, the Safavids, as I mentioned before, developed a rivalry with the Ottomans as they were Shias and the Ottomans were Sunnis. The Safavids pushed Shiism on their subjects, even forcing conversions on Sunnis, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. They too used a slave army because that had worked so well for the previous empires. Under the brilliant Shah Abbas the Great, the empire prospered and turned into another gunpowder empire. After him, the empire fell into something of a hidden decay. Both of its rivals, the Ottomans and the Mughals in India were busy elsewhere and its borders were pretty much secure. So it seemed like the empire was strong but it wasn't as it was made so rudely obvious by an undisciplined Afghan tribal army who broke the Safavids and captured their capital city of Isfahan which was a shock to everyone involved including the Afghans. The Safavids were turned into puppets controlled by the Afghans until one man by the name of Nader Shah rose up and captured Isfahan in 1730. He installed a new Safavid puppet on the throne as well but got tired of the system and crowned himself in 1736, ending the Safavid dynasty. He proved to be a mix of Napoleon, Timur and Stalin. He was an effective but brutal ruler and he was assassinated in 1747. As Nalur Shah did in 1739, let's now head to India. As I mentioned before, Temur's empire broke apart and many Temurid princes tried to build their own realms. However, all but one failed. The one that didn't fail, Babur couldn't build this empire in Persia or Central Asia, so he headed to India, where he defeated the Lodhi dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate in 1526, taking over major portions of North India and Afghanistan. After surviving one minor road bump under his son, the empire grew and became the dominant force in India. India was different than most areas under Muslim control because it was here that the Muslims made up the smallest portion of the empire. portion of the population. The local Hindus were reluctant to convert but that changed with the Mughals as they brought Sufism with them. Mughals became great patrons of science, art and architecture. Most of their rulers were also very tolerant of the local population, although the empire hit its peak under Aurangzeb. The Mughals became the last of the three so-called gunpowder empires, none of which primarily spoke Arabic but rather mostly spoke Persian. Around the time of the Mughals, peak, the Mughal Empire was home to around 150 million people, second only in the world to China. A combination of unending wars of conquest in the south that depleted the empire's monetary resources, wars of succession that depleted the empire's human resources, and Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi in 1739, which depleted everything, culminated in the rapid decline of the empire. By 1757, the empire was a puppet to the great Marathas, who had risen up in the south. The same year, they had lost the Battle of Plassey, which would become one of the most important battles in human history. This enemy was not local. It was an unexpected force known as the British East India Company. Okay, let's take one final step back. Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, landed in India in 1498 by traveling around the African continent. The Europeans now had a permanent trade route to India that didn't go through the increasingly hostile Muslim movement. Middle East. This had significant consequences for the Middle East as their trade route dried up. Now, Islam had been consolidating in Eastern Africa since shortly after the Prophet's death when Egypt was conquered. Merchants and scholars brought Islam up the Nile all the way to the Swahili coast. Significant ports were established all the way to Zanzibar and Mozambique which by the way is named after a Muslim man called Musa ibn Biyaq. These Muslim states, the Fung Sultanate being a prominent one, became somewhat Arabized through constant contact with the Arab world through trade. Among other things, ivory and slaves were traded here. When the Portuguese came, they conquered and sacked these coastal cities to establish dominance in the Indian Ocean. This trade in the Indian Ocean had previously been a monopoly of the Arabs which they used to trade all the way from Africa to China. On the other side of the African continent, Islam was also flourishing, again having arrived there with merchants and scholars who traveled to cities such as Timbuktu and Gao trading salt, gold, and slaves. By the 14th century, Islam had become the dominant dominant religion in sub-Saharan West Africa along the Atlantic coast. This gave birth to, among others, the Mali Empire and perhaps the richest man in all of history, Mansa Musa, who became famous after visiting Mecca with thousands of camels loaded with gold in 1324. As the 16th century came about, both West and East African Muslim states came into conflict with European powers who wanted to control every single drop of trade. trade between China, India, the Middle East, Africa and the New World. Muslim and Arab monopoly over the entire North African and Pan-Saharan trade was broken leading to the destabilization of many empires in both Africa and Asia. The first European power as I mentioned was the Portuguese who came to control major port cities along the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean. First naval trade from China went through the Malay Archipelago which by this time had quite a bit of Muslims, thanks to nearly a thousand years of trade with Muslims. These Muslims had arrived as merchants and had settled in various coastal cities in Southeast Asia. They accumulated a lot of wealth and hence a lot of power. First they entered royal courts as ministers and then they started building their own Sultanates, the Sultanate of Malacca and the Sultanate of Brunei being among the very first. The arrival of the Europeans and their brutal domination of the area led to increased Islamization of the archipelago as Muslim noblemen led the resistance against the Europeans and many people joined them. This resistance was the bridge that locals used to convert to Islam. By the end of the 16th century, the Portuguese controlled most of the trade through Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese were able to do this thanks to two very significant technological advancements. First, better sales. And second, better cannons. Forts in the Islamic world had better cannons than the Europeans but not the Navy. The fact that no one in the region had a significant Navy to begin with helped as well. Also this trade being redone directed took a significant toll on the economies of Muslim empires. These innovations, along with New World Silver, combined with the fact that by the year 1700, the three Muslim empires that controlled everything between Bengal in what is today Bangladesh and the Danube were in decline, leaving a vacuum of power that the Europeans were eager to fill. Now, there are a million explanations for this decline, but at least in two of these three empires, the Mughals and the Ottomans, a big reason was untrained rulers succeeding the throne as a result of courtly intrigue rather than their usual method of proving themselves in the battlefield, often against their brothers. The French, the British, the Dutch, and the Spanish entered the colonization stage in the 17th century and displaced the Portuguese, looking to fill the power vacuum and jumpstart the era of colonization. From 1700 to 1900, 1900 most of the Islamic world came under the control of European powers India was completely taken over by the British by the 1850s after they defeated the fragmented Indians and also the French who were trying to gain ground in India the Dutch took over the Malay Archipelago where they disrupted production in a devastating way the Russian Empire Expanded into the Muslim Transcaucasia and Central Asia this eventually culminated in 50 million Muslims living in the Soviet Union. The British took over Egypt and the Sudan while the French took control of Algeria, Tunisia and other West African countries. Obviously, there were various resistance movements against European imperialism. These were led by charismatic leaders who often belonged to Sufi or other religious orders and led some bands of warriors tied together by tribal or religious ties. In addition to resistance, there was also reformation. To many Muslims, the reason that the Europeans won was that Muslims had lost God's favour, and so reform was required. Some of these movements advocated for Islam to adapt to modern circumstances and learn from the Europeans, while the other asked for, quote, a return to Allah. Among these, the Wahhabi are the most infamous. Many of these reformist movements are still around in different forms and capacities. The tale of the development of Islam is a story for another time, but do check out Almost Wise's video on the topic. Okay, let's now return to the Ottoman Empire, which had lost most of its European territory between 1700 and 1900. When World War I broke out, it controlled only Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and some parts of Arabia. It had had a pretty dramatic meltdown over modernizing and was now known as the sick man of Europe. It joined the first world war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary which turns out was the wrong side. They were defeated and the Ottoman borders were slashed to only Anatolia which the allies actually wanted to divide further just like they had with the previously Ottoman Middle East but Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was able to fend them off and retain the Turkish core of the country and founded a new country, a republic, formally ending the Ottoman Empire in 1922. In 1924, the office of the Caliph was finally formally abolished, ending the chain of Caliphs that went back 1300 years, all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad. Ataturk served as the first president of the Republic of Turkey and led a secularization effort, the success of which is still too early to talk about. In the early 1900s, the British legally separated Indian Muslims and the people they called Hindus. This led to Muslims and Hindus dividing into different camps, regarding the fate of the Indian subcontinent after the British left. Some Muslims and some Hindus wanted a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan composed of respectively the Hindu majority areas and the Muslim majority areas. The other Muslims and the other Hindus wanted a secular state which would be home to every ethnicity and religion that called India its home. In 1947, after the Second World War, the British left India after dividing it between a Hindu majority India and and a Muslim majority Pakistan. As the borders were rather arbitrary, it led to conflict between the two states that culminated in some three wars and East Pakistan becoming an independent country called Bangladesh. Although Pakistan did a pretty good job alienating its eastern half on its own. Pakistan turned into an Islamic Republic, while India, with its significant Muslim population, continues to be a secular republic. The success of this secular democracy is also a little too early to talk about. Fingers crossed. It's gonna be fine. I'm sure. Although things are not really looking good. It's gonna be okay, I'm sure. Down to this day, Pakistan and India continue to be hostile. The Muslims under the former Russian Empire were consolidated further into Moscow's fold after the Bolshevik revolution. During the 1930s, In the 1930s, Stalin cracked down on Muslims under his rule and even practically outlawed Islam. He also divided Central Asia into rather arbitrary borders to break a potential sense of unity among the people there. He even moved Muslims around during the Second World War because he didn't trust them. Well he didn't trust anyone to be honest. Fast forward to the 1980s when the Soviet Union tried to expand into Afghanistan but failed when the US along with the people Rambo 3 thanked, stopped them. As the Soviet Union's power declined, Islam saw a resurgence in Central Asia. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, five republics came into existence. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Although there are still local independence movements by Muslims in parts of Russia, the most famous being in Chechnya. Plus there's a small chunk of Muslims living in Ukraine called the Tatars. The Pashtunis The Pushtun Empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani was founded around 1747 when he gathered Pashtun tribes to form a confederacy. This laid the foundation for Afghanistan. Though by the time the 19th century rolled around, the Durranis were gone and Afghanistan was now the ground for the great game between the Russians and the British. In 1880, the British installed it as a buffer state between the Russians and their crown jewel, India. The Emirate of Afghanistan was established with Amir Abdul Rahman, who started the modernization of his country. It was under his grandson that Afghanistan finally gained complete autonomy and continued with modernization. Though this had a reaction from the conservatives who overthrew him in 1929. The Kingdom of Afghanistan served as a pawn during the Cold War and tensions kept building with its neighbors and within it, leading to the Soviet invasion. of 1979. The US propped up religious fundamentalists known as the Mujahideen against the Soviets. While they were able to fight and push the Soviets back, they also took over the country. The rest I'm sure you know. After the Safavids, the Qajar took over Iran in 1789. While it didn't come under the direct control of European powers, it was heavily under the influence of Britain and Russia, which most of the time didn't see eye to eye. Europeans have had an interest in Iran since 1908 when oil was first discovered in the country. As you'd expect, the Qajar bending over backwards for the Europeans wasn't popular at all, so local religious and political leaders forced the Shah to implement something of a constitutional monarchy, though this project was ended when the Russians intervened and restored the Shah's autocracy in 1911. The Qajar were eventually overthrown by the Pahlavis who for the most part tried to modernize the country but were also subservient to the Europeans and later the Americans. By this point the country was quite democratic and even elected a prime minister, the famous Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1952 who was overthrown by the CIA when he tried to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian oil company. This blatant disregard for the will of the Iranian people culminated in the fall of the Persian in them uniting behind a religious leader named Ayatollah Ru'ullah Khomeini. This led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which put the country under the supreme leadership of Khomeini and then his successors which continues to this day. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the French and the British divided the previously Ottoman Middle East among themselves. Britain controlled the Ottoman Empire and the French and the British Palestine, the Transjordan and Iraq while France controlled Lebanon and Syria. During the war, this land had been promised to the Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, so they could create an Arab state. In return, the the Hashemites had revolted against the Ottomans and had been one of the final nails in the empire's coffin. However, in a plot twist that I'm sure everybody saw coming, the Europeans had no plans to let such an Arab state come into existence. The British secured Palestine as a refuge for Jewish immigration from Europe and other Middle Eastern countries, which had begun under the Ottomans already, and established puppet monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan under the Hashemites. military coup ended the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, the Kingdom of Jordan still exists under the very same dynasty. Although the Hashemites had initially been open to the establishment of a Jewish state after World War I, this had been contingent on the creation of their own United Arab State. With that door closed, neighboring Arab states united to defeat Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War. which of course the Israelis called the War of Independence. I guess the War of Colonization was too on the nose. When the Arabs failed and most especially when Israel agreed to assist Britain and France in the Suez Crisis, it hastened the rise of an Arab nationalist bloc dominated by Egypt. However, repeated Israeli victories against its neighbors led to the decline of Pan-Arabism. Egypt and Jordan later made peace with Israel, while shifting alliances in the Cold War and resurgence of Islamist politics around the region, especially in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, quickly transformed the conflict from a nationalist cause to a more religious cause. With Israel occupying Palestinian lands, the state of Palestine shrunk to only a only the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. And the conflict, if you can call it that, between the two countries doesn't seem any closer to a resolution, even though more and more Muslim countries are starting to build diplomatic ties with Israel. From the 16th century onwards, Western Arabia, which houses the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, fell under Ottoman authority. The control of the Sultan back in Constantinople over this region was subject to its own fluctuating central authority. At various stages, local forces would rise up and establish their own states. One of these was established by the Al Saud dynasty, which still governs Saudi Arabia to this day. The emergence of the Saudi state was underpinned by a pact made between the Saudi family and the religious leader, Muhammad ibn Wahab, founder of Wahhabism, in the mid-18th century. In 1938, oil was discovered there, allowing the Saudis to become the most powerful and immensely wealthy and secure the means for the eventual modernization of their country. Along with Saudis, other smaller states appeared along the eastern coast of Arabia which are known as the Gulf states. Due to their strategic location across the Indian Ocean, they were vital for trade and hence came under European influence. Eventually, however, they became independent and their discovery and subsequent exporting of black liquid gold or oil allowed these small states to maintain their sovereignty and modernize at a faster rate than most of their other Muslim counterparts. Egypt hadn't been independent since the Mamluks lost it to the Ottomans in the 1510s. From then to the 19th century, the region of Egypt was under the Ottomans until Napoleon invaded in 1798. The British helped defend it and it fell into the control of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman general and governor who carved it out for his own. own dynasty. Technically, the dynasty was under the control of the Ottoman Sultan but in reality not really. They managed to stick around through British colonial rule and the construction of the Suez Canal which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and hence shortens the trip from India to Europe by a lot. In a revolution in 1952 led by Jamal Abdul Nasser and Muhammad Najib, Egypt became independent and overthrew the Muhammad Ali dynasty. Out of it came the Republic of Egypt and the Republic of the Sudan. The Republic of Egypt remained a dictatorship until the Arab Spring of 2011. Most of North Africa east of Morocco had been under the control of the Ottomans since the 16th century. In 1830, the French took over what is today Algeria and then in 1881, they took over what is today Tunisia. Libya was nominally under Ottoman control until 1911 when the Italians invaded and took over. European hegemony over North Africa ended in the 1950s with Libya declaring independence in 1951 from both the British and the Italians who had jointly been controlling it since the end of the Second World War. Libya was initially a kingdom under a king but in 1959, oil was discovered there which led to complications over who should rule. 10 years later, in 1969, the kingdom was overthrown by a military revolution led by Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi himself was overthrown in 2011 during the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the locals had fought valiantly for independence during the Algerian Revolution which led to the creation of the Republic of Algeria in 1962. The republic fought a civil war with Islamist elements in the country from 1991 to 2002. The Republic of Tunisia came into existence in 1956 after it declared independence from the French. It saw only two presidents from then until 2011 when it actually became the first country in the Arab world to overthrow its government and inspired other Arab countries to do the same, jump-starting. the Arab Spring. Portuguese success in North and West Africa back in the 16th century had led to growing discontent among the people there. Morocco came under the control of the Saudis who fought back so successfully that they actually destroyed a great Portuguese army at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578. This scared off foreign powers including the Ottomans. No European power would challenge Morocco for the next three centuries. The great King Al-Mansur then went further and even conquered Timbuktu. Though the dynasty was internally in a bad shape, so it fell to the Alawite dynasty who claimed descent from the prophet. In 1911, the French invaded and declared it a formal protectorate which remained till 1956 after the revolution of the king and the people. It remains a monarchy to this day with the Alawites still in power. Okay so that was a quickish recap of the story of Islam. I know I skipped over a lot of Details and countries and people but well that's kind of the point of the video today Muslims make up the second largest religious group in the world There are over 50 countries in the world that have a Muslim majority not to mention all the countries where Muslims make up a significant minority as well the Islamic civilization is now recovering from the impacts of colonialism in many ways it is still stuck in the time before colonization happened and is trying to find its way forward. This is a civilization that of course did not experience a reformation or enlightenment in the European sense of the words. Ideas are being discussed on how Islam can cope with life in the 21st century. The relationship between Muslims and the rest of the world isn't helped by the rampant Islamophobia that we see in today's world. Whatever the case, the story of the world's second biggest religious group is indeed a fascinating one. Be sure to check out the video by Almost Wise which covers the history of Islamic philosophy and thought in a similar manner to this video over on his channel. Leave a comment telling him that Al Muqaddima sent you. See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon. On the screen right now you can see the names and tiers of the patrons. You can join them by pledging a dollar or more to support the channel. Thank you for watching.

The link is in the description. You can also become a member right here on YouTube. There are no benefits attached to it because I don't get the time to work on them. So, if you want to support Al Muqaddima financially, please go ahead. Otherwise, just like, comment, share and subscribe.

That's also supporting Al Muqaddima. Hi, welcome to Al Muqaddima. My name is Siavash. What is Islam?

A religion? A culture? A civilization? In the nightly news, the name of Islam used to be associated with terror and suicide attacks.

Now it's like that on social media. The Middle East is synonymous with violent clashes. Cities like Baghdad and Damascus are considered the most dangerous to travel to. When you search for Middle Eastern history books, you get a dozen layers of books about...

before you get to any other type of history. However, there was once a time when Baghdad and Damascus were among the most prosperous cities in the world. There were seats of an office that sponsored, among others, scholars and scribes that kept the light going as Europe struggled in the so-called Dark Ages.

Within a single generation, the Arabs went from tribal nomads to the rulers of mighty empires comparable in their prestige to the emperors of Rome and China. They built palace cities such as the ones in Cairo, Samarra, and Cordoba. It is thanks to them that two-thirds of the stars that have names have Arabic names. They created prosperous pockets of Islamic civilization in Spain, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, and India.

Eventually, the honor of the caliphate was taken from them by the Turks, who, like the Arabs, were nomads. These Turks opened the gateway into Europe and in many ways outperformed their predecessors until they came to be known as the sick man of Europe. This is the story of Islam in roughly 49 minutes.

Islam was born in Arabia in the city of Mecca where the Prophet Muhammad received revelation in 610 from the God of Abraham. He immediately started preaching to the people of Mecca but he was unsuccessful and was eventually forced into exile. He had to find shelter in a nearby city which came to be known as Medina.

From here, Prophet Muhammad ran the first Islamic state and came into conflict with his former countrymen as he raided them and they well wanted him dead. Eventually, he conquered Mecca and then most of Arabia. He even challenged the Byzantine Empire but never came into conflict with it himself.

The revelations he received set the outlines of Islam for an individual and a state, but more for an individual. After 23 years as a prophet and a leader, he passed away in 632 at the age of 63. His succession plan was not clear, but to this day, this is debated. In the modern day, with the benefit of hindsight, his son-in-law and cousin Ali seems like the obvious choice. This created the first rift in Islam and created two groups which would eventually become Shias and Sunnis.

However, Prophet Muhammad's political successors, were the Rashidun Caliphs. The Prophet's close ally and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, took over as his successor or Khalifa, which literally just means successor or deputy, and is Latinized as Caliph. The office of the Caliph was established. Immediately, chaos was rooted out and armies were dispatched against the exhausted Persians and the Byzantines. Abu Bakr died after a short reign of two years and his successor, Umar, led the campaigns against the Byzantines and the Persians.

When the dust settled, Muslims found themselves in possession of the rich provinces of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, as well as the hugely diverse population that lived in them, speaking a European Union's worth of languages. Arab Muslims, a small minority, was now the ruling class that ruled over a large non-Arab and non-Arab community. Muslim population.

Umar's successor, Uthman, was brutally murdered by rebels who accused him of corruption. Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, was finally made Caliph, but Uthman's cousin Muawiyah wanted retribution for the murder and it broke out into the form of the first civil war or the first fitna as the Muslims call it. Unfortunately, Ali did not live to see the end of the war and his rival Muawiyah became Caliph after Ali's son gave away his claim.

Muawiyah founded the Umayyad dynasty which ruled the Islamic empire for almost a century. The seat of their power was in Damascus. They expanded the empire to the Indus in the east and Iberia in the west, making it one of the largest empires in history. However, with the exception of one man, Umar ibn Abdulaziz, all Umayyad Caliphs were deeply unpopular.

They were already considered illegitimate rulers as many believed Ali's children deserved the caliphate more than anyone else. After all, Ali's sons, Hasan and Hussain, were the grandsons of the Prophet. Hussain, the younger, was brutally murdered by the caliph. Muawiyah's son Yazid.

An annual commemoration of this day is still observed throughout the Muslim world. In addition to that, the large non-Arab population was now slowly converting to Islam. Arab Muslims were becoming an increasingly small percentage of the Muslim population.

percentage of Muslims. These new Muslims wanted more power and the Umayyads kept alienating them. Their empire was incredibly unstable and had around 14 different caliphs in 90 years and no less than two major civil wars and countless rebellions that failed and one that succeeded. In 750, a revolution overthrew the Umayyad dynasty and replaced them with the Abbasids, who were descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas. They were members of the Prophet's house, no doubt, but not the ones the people were hoping for.

The Abbasids were supported by by non-Arabs who felt like second-class citizens under the Umayyads. They consolidated their rule over their new mighty empire and built a new capital at Baghdad which became the heart of the Islamic Golden Age. The establishment was now opened to non-Arab Muslims as well as Christians and Jews on several occasions. Speaking of Christians and Jews, even though they were never completely equal to Muslims, they were still treated with remarkable tolerance for the time.

In addition to all that, the Abbasids defeated the Chinese Tang Empire and halted its expansion into Central Asia. Hence Central Asia fell into the Islamic orbit rather than the Chinese orbit. This will become important in a moment.

Great Caliphs like Al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid and Al-Ma'mun oversaw the peak of the Abbasid dynasty and built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of all faiths, cultures, languages and ethnicities could work together. Scholars were translating manuscripts from all over the world and working on them further. During this time, Islamic jurisprudence also got developed. Basically, the sayings and actions of the Prophet were collected in the form of Hadith, and interpretations by various scholars led to the development of the Sharia.

When all was said and done, four schools of Sunni jurisprudence came out on top. On the other side, the Shias didn't have such a necessity because they believed in their Imam. the leader.

These Imams were descendants of Ali whom people considered to be divinely guided, and there are various chains of them accepted by one sect of Shias or the other. Nevertheless, Imam Jafar as-Sadiq did develop Islamic jurisprudence for the Shias as well. Here's my friend Arkam from Almost Wise to talk a little bit about the philosophy and jurisprudence in Islamic thought.

Islamic philosophy has its roots in the early centuries of the Islamic era, notably during the 8th to 10th centuries CE. The origins of Islamic philosophy can be traced to the translation movement which took place in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and other centers of learning in the Islamic world. During this period, scholars translated classical Greek works, particularly those of Aristotle, Plato and other Hellenistic philosophers into Arabic. This translation movement marked the crucial intellectual exchange between the Greek philosophical tradition and the burgeoning Islamic civilization. Early Muslim scholars such as Al-Kindi played a pivotal role in this.

role in assimilating Greek thought into the Islamic intellectual framework. They sought to harmonize reason or akhld with revelation, aiming to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology. But even before that, even before the introduction of Greek thought, there still was philosophy at the root of it all.

What transpired after the battle of Siffin, for example, was in fact a philosophical rift between the two. What part does Plotinus'Neoplatonism play in the foundations of Islamic philosophy? I cover all of this and a lot more.

Head over to my channel if you're interested. Thank you. Almost Wise has made an entire video about Islamic philosophy and thought over on his channel. So after you're done watching this one, be sure to check that out. It's a companion video to this one, so it's pretty good.

Back to the golden age of Islam. All good things have to come to an end. The Abbasids added, Turkic slave soldiers from Central Asia to their military and promoted them to all high offices. All of the establishment which had previously been Arab and Persian was now replaced almost entirely by the Turks within a single generation.

The two sides clashed constantly and so a new capital at Samarra was created but it didn't help that much. The thing about slaves and mercenaries is that they come to the realization that the caliph isn't their patron. The Caliph is essentially their hostage because the Caliph relies on them more than they rely on him.

So they turned the Caliph into a puppet. Corruption and instability ran rampant and the empire broke apart. Within the 9th century, the Abbasids lost almost everything they had. Persia, Syria, Egypt and Arabia all walked away. The Abbasids hardly exercised any control outside the walls of their palaces.

Around 950, Two centuries after the Abbasid Revolution, a Persian Shia dynasty from Northern Persia swept into power and took over Baghdad, replacing the Turks as the puppet masters. The Caliph, who was Sunni, became a vassal for the first time in history. This went on for a century, until a Sunni dynasty from Central Asia named the Seljuks broke into Persia with remarkable speed. They defeated the Buids and took over all of their former lands.

The Caliph was, once again, a puppet. But this time the overlords were Sunni, so at least that's a little better I guess. The overtake by the Seljuks was accompanied by a large number of Turks moving all over the Middle East.

The Seljuks started raiding Anatolia regularly, which robbed the Byzantine Empire the wrong way. They tried to fight back but the Seljuks broke them decisively at Manzikert in 1071 and well, Anatolia was open to them. A number of Turkic tribes moved into the area and fought for dominance over the next decades. This certainly demanded a response from the Christians. After all, God willed it.

Let's take a step back. In 750, when the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, one of their princes, Abd al-Rahman, established a small state in Muslim Spain that grew to control almost all of the peninsula. For three centuries, the dynasty thrived there. Eventually, When the Abbasids began to falter, the Umayyads declared themselves Caliphs in 929 under the great Abdur-Rahman III. Abdur-Rahman III created the beautiful palace city of Medina del Zahra.

However, his young grandson became a puppet to his Grand Vizier, or Hajib as they called him. The Caliphate broke apart, leaving behind small pieces which were easy for the Christians to pick up, which they did. The Reconquista came together with full power.

Over the next four centuries, two Amazigh empires from Morocco, the Almoravids and the Almohads, tried to sustain it but failed. Slowly, the Christians took over the entirety of the peninsula except for Granada, where a dynasty called the Nasrids awkwardly tried to survive for two more centuries, but they couldn't. The last Muslim ruler in Iberia, Muhammad XII of Granada, was expelled in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed the ocean.

blue. Back in the Middle East, a Christian army marched all the way from Europe to Jerusalem and despite all odds, conquered it in 1099. The Middle East at the time was busy with a pretty intense Shia-Sunni rivalry. Back in the 10th century, a Shia dynasty called the Fatimids had risen up from North Africa and taken over most of North Africa, including Egypt.

They founded the city of Cairo to serve as their capital, and they claimed the caliphate because they claimed descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima. For those keeping track at home, there were three caliphs at the time. The Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, the Umayyad Caliph in Cordoba, and the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo.

It was the Fatimids whom the crusaders had to defeat to take Jerusalem. The Shia Fatimids and the Sunni Seljuks were more occupied fighting each other than defending against the crusaders. The Seljuk Turks were more effective in battle and to counter that, the Fatimids did the same thing that the Abbasids had done.

They added Turkic slave soldiers to their ranks. Again, the elements of the military started to take over the entire establishment. The Caliphs became puppets at the hands of their generals. This pattern repeats again and again in Islamic history.

I'm so glad we've resolved that now. The Sultanate of Egypt was finally taken over by a former vizier and general of the Fatimids. You might know him, he was named Salahuddin.

Salahuddin Ayyubi reconquered Jerusalem from the Christians and established his own dynasty. However, the Turkic establishment was once again the power behind the Sultan until they became Sultans themselves. The Turkic slave soldiers decided to take over as the Mamluk Sultans in 1250. They established a formidable and wealthy empire that would legitimize its claim to power by stopping the unstoppable curse of God, the Mongols. The period between 1200 and 1400 is a period of extreme turmoil in the Islamic world and completely changed Islamic history.

In that period, the Islamic world saw three scourges of God. First, in 1218, Genghis Khan sent a trading mission into Persia, which was then ruled by the Khwarizmian dynasty. The Khwarizmian ruler, thinking that they were spies, confiscated their goods and executed them. Genghis Khan demanded reparations, which were refused, and well, Genghis Khan decided to take some... bold steps for the climate by executing as many of those pesky humans that like to exhale carbon dioxide as he could.

He invaded Persia which collapsed really fast. Then his sons and grandsons expanded quickly into the Middle East and Muslim-controlled Anatolia. Hulagu Khan sacked the symbolic heart of Muslim power, the seat of the Caliph Baghdad.

Abbasids were independent at the time and weren't able to defend themselves. By that time, the Mamluks were the ruling force in Egypt. They met the Mongols in 1260 at Injalut. The Mongols were defeated and it was proven that the Mongols do, in fact, bleed. Mongol expansion into the Middle East was halted.

This, in addition to the Mamluks giving refuge to the Abbasid Caliph after the sack, made them the saviors of Islam in the eyes of many. The Mongol Empire broke apart soon after. The Middle Eastern part came under the control of the Ilkhanate which then converted to Islam.

A little late but we'll take it. The Ilkhanate broke apart in 1335 and only a little over a decade later, the world was hit by the Black Death. The people who hadn't been killed by the Mongols now had to survive the Black Death. the second Scourge of God.

The Middle East was depopulated and in ruins. The heart of Islam now shifted away from the Middle East to the only two places that were relatively prosperous and stable. Egypt under the Mamluks and India under the Delhi Sultanate.

Yep, there were Muslims in India. Did I forget to mention that? Okay, let's take another step back. In the 8th century, The Umayyad Caliphate, yeah the original Damascus based one, had conquered Sindh in modern day Pakistan. However, over the next three centuries, it was too far to actually control.

It pretty much broke away and apart. Although around the year 1000, the Ghaznavids, who were a Turkic dynasty based in what is today Afghanistan, started attacking India and captured the city of Lahore in 1030. Their power dwindled over the next century, until they were taken over by the Ghurids who expanded further into India. They were replaced by the Mamluks, different Mamluks than Egypt, but yeah, very similar Turkic slave-soldier structure.

They were the ones who founded the Delhi Sultanate. The Delhi Sultanate was a collection of dynasties of which the Mamluks were just one that ruled North India from their capital of Delhi. It was an unstable empire, but somehow it was internally pretty okay. They were almost always able to fend off Mongol attacks.

Neither the Mongols nor the Black Death could ravage India under their control. Although the last scourge of God, Timur the Lame was able to do that. Timur the Lame rose up from Central Asia in the second half of the 14th century.

He conquered almost all of the Middle East. By the time he died, he had conquered everything from Delhi to Damascus. He not only conquered these cities but also almost destroyed them, killing more than 15 million people over his 40-year career. He also ventured into Anatolia, where he defeated a relatively new but quickly emerging Ottoman Empire Ankara in 1402, breaking the Ottomans into two. The Ottomans would recover, so would India, but the Middle East would struggle for another hundred years.

It was no longer the home of the Caliphate, as the Abbasid Caliph had moved to Cairo after the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols. All of its artisans and scholars had moved outwards as well, to either Egypt, Anatolia, or India. All three of them were ruled by Turks. At this point, You can say that Islam went from being a civilization to being a collection of civilizations.

Before this time, being a Muslim in Spain was largely the same as being a Muslim in Iran, not exactly but largely. Although now that would change as Islam would expand to distant places like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Let's get back to the story.

Remember those Ottomans that Timur had broken into? Well, they came back, in a big way, after putting their empire together. They had already broken into Eastern Europe.

In 1453, they did the impossible and captured Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire once and for all. The Ottomans kept expanding in both directions, east and west. In the east, around 1500, a new Shia dynasty called the Safavids rose up and quickly took over Persia which had been unstable almost since Timur's death. The Safavids directly challenged the Ottomans for dominance in Anatolia but were pushed back by the Ottoman Sultan Salim who thought while I'm in the area I might as well visit Egypt. I mean people always say that if you're in the area you should visit Egypt and then he did.

He took over Egypt, Syria and the holy cities of Makkah and Medina as well as the title of the Caliph. For the first time in almost 900 years the title of the Caliph was held by a non-Arab. In the West, the empire grew into Greece, the Balkans, and along both banks of the Danube.

It reached Vienna, where it lost the siege of Vienna twice. The Ottoman army was a formidable force, thanks in no small part to being one of the first non-Chinese empires to use gunpowder. On top of everything, the empire produced at least 10 great consecutive rulers. all of whom were men of considerable skill in civil and military administration.

Also, they developed a good bureaucratic system which was fueled by the Devshirme. So basically the Ottomans took Christian boys by force if needed, converted them to Islam and trained them to take over various roles in the government and military. The empire hit its peak around 1683. While it slowly declines and collapses onto itself, let's check in on the east. After the collapse of the Timurid dynasty in Persia, there was a constant battle between various Turko-Persian groups until from Azerbaijan, a young charismatic man named Ismail rose up. And young is right, he was around 12 or 14 when he seized most of Persia and labeled himself Shah in 1501. The title of Shah hadn't been used since the first wave of the Islamic conquests under the Rashidun in the 630s.

The new dynasty, the Safavids, as I mentioned before, developed a rivalry with the Ottomans as they were Shias and the Ottomans were Sunnis. The Safavids pushed Shiism on their subjects, even forcing conversions on Sunnis, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. They too used a slave army because that had worked so well for the previous empires.

Under the brilliant Shah Abbas the Great, the empire prospered and turned into another gunpowder empire. After him, the empire fell into something of a hidden decay. Both of its rivals, the Ottomans and the Mughals in India were busy elsewhere and its borders were pretty much secure. So it seemed like the empire was strong but it wasn't as it was made so rudely obvious by an undisciplined Afghan tribal army who broke the Safavids and captured their capital city of Isfahan which was a shock to everyone involved including the Afghans.

The Safavids were turned into puppets controlled by the Afghans until one man by the name of Nader Shah rose up and captured Isfahan in 1730. He installed a new Safavid puppet on the throne as well but got tired of the system and crowned himself in 1736, ending the Safavid dynasty. He proved to be a mix of Napoleon, Timur and Stalin. He was an effective but brutal ruler and he was assassinated in 1747. As Nalur Shah did in 1739, let's now head to India.

As I mentioned before, Temur's empire broke apart and many Temurid princes tried to build their own realms. However, all but one failed. The one that didn't fail, Babur couldn't build this empire in Persia or Central Asia, so he headed to India, where he defeated the Lodhi dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate in 1526, taking over major portions of North India and Afghanistan. After surviving one minor road bump under his son, the empire grew and became the dominant force in India.

India was different than most areas under Muslim control because it was here that the Muslims made up the smallest portion of the empire. portion of the population. The local Hindus were reluctant to convert but that changed with the Mughals as they brought Sufism with them. Mughals became great patrons of science, art and architecture.

Most of their rulers were also very tolerant of the local population, although the empire hit its peak under Aurangzeb. The Mughals became the last of the three so-called gunpowder empires, none of which primarily spoke Arabic but rather mostly spoke Persian. Around the time of the Mughals, peak, the Mughal Empire was home to around 150 million people, second only in the world to China.

A combination of unending wars of conquest in the south that depleted the empire's monetary resources, wars of succession that depleted the empire's human resources, and Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi in 1739, which depleted everything, culminated in the rapid decline of the empire. By 1757, the empire was a puppet to the great Marathas, who had risen up in the south. The same year, they had lost the Battle of Plassey, which would become one of the most important battles in human history. This enemy was not local. It was an unexpected force known as the British East India Company.

Okay, let's take one final step back. Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, landed in India in 1498 by traveling around the African continent. The Europeans now had a permanent trade route to India that didn't go through the increasingly hostile Muslim movement. Middle East. This had significant consequences for the Middle East as their trade route dried up.

Now, Islam had been consolidating in Eastern Africa since shortly after the Prophet's death when Egypt was conquered. Merchants and scholars brought Islam up the Nile all the way to the Swahili coast. Significant ports were established all the way to Zanzibar and Mozambique which by the way is named after a Muslim man called Musa ibn Biyaq.

These Muslim states, the Fung Sultanate being a prominent one, became somewhat Arabized through constant contact with the Arab world through trade. Among other things, ivory and slaves were traded here. When the Portuguese came, they conquered and sacked these coastal cities to establish dominance in the Indian Ocean.

This trade in the Indian Ocean had previously been a monopoly of the Arabs which they used to trade all the way from Africa to China. On the other side of the African continent, Islam was also flourishing, again having arrived there with merchants and scholars who traveled to cities such as Timbuktu and Gao trading salt, gold, and slaves. By the 14th century, Islam had become the dominant dominant religion in sub-Saharan West Africa along the Atlantic coast. This gave birth to, among others, the Mali Empire and perhaps the richest man in all of history, Mansa Musa, who became famous after visiting Mecca with thousands of camels loaded with gold in 1324. As the 16th century came about, both West and East African Muslim states came into conflict with European powers who wanted to control every single drop of trade.

trade between China, India, the Middle East, Africa and the New World. Muslim and Arab monopoly over the entire North African and Pan-Saharan trade was broken leading to the destabilization of many empires in both Africa and Asia. The first European power as I mentioned was the Portuguese who came to control major port cities along the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean.

First naval trade from China went through the Malay Archipelago which by this time had quite a bit of Muslims, thanks to nearly a thousand years of trade with Muslims. These Muslims had arrived as merchants and had settled in various coastal cities in Southeast Asia. They accumulated a lot of wealth and hence a lot of power. First they entered royal courts as ministers and then they started building their own Sultanates, the Sultanate of Malacca and the Sultanate of Brunei being among the very first. The arrival of the Europeans and their brutal domination of the area led to increased Islamization of the archipelago as Muslim noblemen led the resistance against the Europeans and many people joined them.

This resistance was the bridge that locals used to convert to Islam. By the end of the 16th century, the Portuguese controlled most of the trade through Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese were able to do this thanks to two very significant technological advancements.

First, better sales. And second, better cannons. Forts in the Islamic world had better cannons than the Europeans but not the Navy.

The fact that no one in the region had a significant Navy to begin with helped as well. Also this trade being redone directed took a significant toll on the economies of Muslim empires. These innovations, along with New World Silver, combined with the fact that by the year 1700, the three Muslim empires that controlled everything between Bengal in what is today Bangladesh and the Danube were in decline, leaving a vacuum of power that the Europeans were eager to fill.

Now, there are a million explanations for this decline, but at least in two of these three empires, the Mughals and the Ottomans, a big reason was untrained rulers succeeding the throne as a result of courtly intrigue rather than their usual method of proving themselves in the battlefield, often against their brothers. The French, the British, the Dutch, and the Spanish entered the colonization stage in the 17th century and displaced the Portuguese, looking to fill the power vacuum and jumpstart the era of colonization. From 1700 to 1900, 1900 most of the Islamic world came under the control of European powers India was completely taken over by the British by the 1850s after they defeated the fragmented Indians and also the French who were trying to gain ground in India the Dutch took over the Malay Archipelago where they disrupted production in a devastating way the Russian Empire Expanded into the Muslim Transcaucasia and Central Asia this eventually culminated in 50 million Muslims living in the Soviet Union. The British took over Egypt and the Sudan while the French took control of Algeria, Tunisia and other West African countries. Obviously, there were various resistance movements against European imperialism.

These were led by charismatic leaders who often belonged to Sufi or other religious orders and led some bands of warriors tied together by tribal or religious ties. In addition to resistance, there was also reformation. To many Muslims, the reason that the Europeans won was that Muslims had lost God's favour, and so reform was required.

Some of these movements advocated for Islam to adapt to modern circumstances and learn from the Europeans, while the other asked for, quote, a return to Allah. Among these, the Wahhabi are the most infamous. Many of these reformist movements are still around in different forms and capacities.

The tale of the development of Islam is a story for another time, but do check out Almost Wise's video on the topic. Okay, let's now return to the Ottoman Empire, which had lost most of its European territory between 1700 and 1900. When World War I broke out, it controlled only Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and some parts of Arabia. It had had a pretty dramatic meltdown over modernizing and was now known as the sick man of Europe. It joined the first world war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary which turns out was the wrong side. They were defeated and the Ottoman borders were slashed to only Anatolia which the allies actually wanted to divide further just like they had with the previously Ottoman Middle East but Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was able to fend them off and retain the Turkish core of the country and founded a new country, a republic, formally ending the Ottoman Empire in 1922. In 1924, the office of the Caliph was finally formally abolished, ending the chain of Caliphs that went back 1300 years, all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad.

Ataturk served as the first president of the Republic of Turkey and led a secularization effort, the success of which is still too early to talk about. In the early 1900s, the British legally separated Indian Muslims and the people they called Hindus. This led to Muslims and Hindus dividing into different camps, regarding the fate of the Indian subcontinent after the British left. Some Muslims and some Hindus wanted a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan composed of respectively the Hindu majority areas and the Muslim majority areas.

The other Muslims and the other Hindus wanted a secular state which would be home to every ethnicity and religion that called India its home. In 1947, after the Second World War, the British left India after dividing it between a Hindu majority India and and a Muslim majority Pakistan. As the borders were rather arbitrary, it led to conflict between the two states that culminated in some three wars and East Pakistan becoming an independent country called Bangladesh.

Although Pakistan did a pretty good job alienating its eastern half on its own. Pakistan turned into an Islamic Republic, while India, with its significant Muslim population, continues to be a secular republic. The success of this secular democracy is also a little too early to talk about.

Fingers crossed. It's gonna be fine. I'm sure. Although things are not really looking good. It's gonna be okay, I'm sure.

Down to this day, Pakistan and India continue to be hostile. The Muslims under the former Russian Empire were consolidated further into Moscow's fold after the Bolshevik revolution. During the 1930s, In the 1930s, Stalin cracked down on Muslims under his rule and even practically outlawed Islam. He also divided Central Asia into rather arbitrary borders to break a potential sense of unity among the people there.

He even moved Muslims around during the Second World War because he didn't trust them. Well he didn't trust anyone to be honest. Fast forward to the 1980s when the Soviet Union tried to expand into Afghanistan but failed when the US along with the people Rambo 3 thanked, stopped them. As the Soviet Union's power declined, Islam saw a resurgence in Central Asia.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, five republics came into existence. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Although there are still local independence movements by Muslims in parts of Russia, the most famous being in Chechnya.

Plus there's a small chunk of Muslims living in Ukraine called the Tatars. The Pashtunis The Pushtun Empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani was founded around 1747 when he gathered Pashtun tribes to form a confederacy. This laid the foundation for Afghanistan. Though by the time the 19th century rolled around, the Durranis were gone and Afghanistan was now the ground for the great game between the Russians and the British.

In 1880, the British installed it as a buffer state between the Russians and their crown jewel, India. The Emirate of Afghanistan was established with Amir Abdul Rahman, who started the modernization of his country. It was under his grandson that Afghanistan finally gained complete autonomy and continued with modernization.

Though this had a reaction from the conservatives who overthrew him in 1929. The Kingdom of Afghanistan served as a pawn during the Cold War and tensions kept building with its neighbors and within it, leading to the Soviet invasion. of 1979. The US propped up religious fundamentalists known as the Mujahideen against the Soviets. While they were able to fight and push the Soviets back, they also took over the country. The rest I'm sure you know.

After the Safavids, the Qajar took over Iran in 1789. While it didn't come under the direct control of European powers, it was heavily under the influence of Britain and Russia, which most of the time didn't see eye to eye. Europeans have had an interest in Iran since 1908 when oil was first discovered in the country. As you'd expect, the Qajar bending over backwards for the Europeans wasn't popular at all, so local religious and political leaders forced the Shah to implement something of a constitutional monarchy, though this project was ended when the Russians intervened and restored the Shah's autocracy in 1911. The Qajar were eventually overthrown by the Pahlavis who for the most part tried to modernize the country but were also subservient to the Europeans and later the Americans. By this point the country was quite democratic and even elected a prime minister, the famous Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1952 who was overthrown by the CIA when he tried to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian oil company. This blatant disregard for the will of the Iranian people culminated in the fall of the Persian in them uniting behind a religious leader named Ayatollah Ru'ullah Khomeini.

This led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which put the country under the supreme leadership of Khomeini and then his successors which continues to this day. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the French and the British divided the previously Ottoman Middle East among themselves. Britain controlled the Ottoman Empire and the French and the British Palestine, the Transjordan and Iraq while France controlled Lebanon and Syria.

During the war, this land had been promised to the Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, so they could create an Arab state. In return, the the Hashemites had revolted against the Ottomans and had been one of the final nails in the empire's coffin. However, in a plot twist that I'm sure everybody saw coming, the Europeans had no plans to let such an Arab state come into existence. The British secured Palestine as a refuge for Jewish immigration from Europe and other Middle Eastern countries, which had begun under the Ottomans already, and established puppet monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan under the Hashemites. military coup ended the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, the Kingdom of Jordan still exists under the very same dynasty.

Although the Hashemites had initially been open to the establishment of a Jewish state after World War I, this had been contingent on the creation of their own United Arab State. With that door closed, neighboring Arab states united to defeat Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War. which of course the Israelis called the War of Independence. I guess the War of Colonization was too on the nose.

When the Arabs failed and most especially when Israel agreed to assist Britain and France in the Suez Crisis, it hastened the rise of an Arab nationalist bloc dominated by Egypt. However, repeated Israeli victories against its neighbors led to the decline of Pan-Arabism. Egypt and Jordan later made peace with Israel, while shifting alliances in the Cold War and resurgence of Islamist politics around the region, especially in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, quickly transformed the conflict from a nationalist cause to a more religious cause.

With Israel occupying Palestinian lands, the state of Palestine shrunk to only a only the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. And the conflict, if you can call it that, between the two countries doesn't seem any closer to a resolution, even though more and more Muslim countries are starting to build diplomatic ties with Israel. From the 16th century onwards, Western Arabia, which houses the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, fell under Ottoman authority. The control of the Sultan back in Constantinople over this region was subject to its own fluctuating central authority.

At various stages, local forces would rise up and establish their own states. One of these was established by the Al Saud dynasty, which still governs Saudi Arabia to this day. The emergence of the Saudi state was underpinned by a pact made between the Saudi family and the religious leader, Muhammad ibn Wahab, founder of Wahhabism, in the mid-18th century.

In 1938, oil was discovered there, allowing the Saudis to become the most powerful and immensely wealthy and secure the means for the eventual modernization of their country. Along with Saudis, other smaller states appeared along the eastern coast of Arabia which are known as the Gulf states. Due to their strategic location across the Indian Ocean, they were vital for trade and hence came under European influence.

Eventually, however, they became independent and their discovery and subsequent exporting of black liquid gold or oil allowed these small states to maintain their sovereignty and modernize at a faster rate than most of their other Muslim counterparts. Egypt hadn't been independent since the Mamluks lost it to the Ottomans in the 1510s. From then to the 19th century, the region of Egypt was under the Ottomans until Napoleon invaded in 1798. The British helped defend it and it fell into the control of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman general and governor who carved it out for his own.

own dynasty. Technically, the dynasty was under the control of the Ottoman Sultan but in reality not really. They managed to stick around through British colonial rule and the construction of the Suez Canal which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and hence shortens the trip from India to Europe by a lot. In a revolution in 1952 led by Jamal Abdul Nasser and Muhammad Najib, Egypt became independent and overthrew the Muhammad Ali dynasty. Out of it came the Republic of Egypt and the Republic of the Sudan.

The Republic of Egypt remained a dictatorship until the Arab Spring of 2011. Most of North Africa east of Morocco had been under the control of the Ottomans since the 16th century. In 1830, the French took over what is today Algeria and then in 1881, they took over what is today Tunisia. Libya was nominally under Ottoman control until 1911 when the Italians invaded and took over. European hegemony over North Africa ended in the 1950s with Libya declaring independence in 1951 from both the British and the Italians who had jointly been controlling it since the end of the Second World War. Libya was initially a kingdom under a king but in 1959, oil was discovered there which led to complications over who should rule.

10 years later, in 1969, the kingdom was overthrown by a military revolution led by Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi himself was overthrown in 2011 during the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the locals had fought valiantly for independence during the Algerian Revolution which led to the creation of the Republic of Algeria in 1962. The republic fought a civil war with Islamist elements in the country from 1991 to 2002. The Republic of Tunisia came into existence in 1956 after it declared independence from the French.

It saw only two presidents from then until 2011 when it actually became the first country in the Arab world to overthrow its government and inspired other Arab countries to do the same, jump-starting. the Arab Spring. Portuguese success in North and West Africa back in the 16th century had led to growing discontent among the people there. Morocco came under the control of the Saudis who fought back so successfully that they actually destroyed a great Portuguese army at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578. This scared off foreign powers including the Ottomans.

No European power would challenge Morocco for the next three centuries. The great King Al-Mansur then went further and even conquered Timbuktu. Though the dynasty was internally in a bad shape, so it fell to the Alawite dynasty who claimed descent from the prophet. In 1911, the French invaded and declared it a formal protectorate which remained till 1956 after the revolution of the king and the people. It remains a monarchy to this day with the Alawites still in power.

Okay so that was a quickish recap of the story of Islam. I know I skipped over a lot of Details and countries and people but well that's kind of the point of the video today Muslims make up the second largest religious group in the world There are over 50 countries in the world that have a Muslim majority not to mention all the countries where Muslims make up a significant minority as well the Islamic civilization is now recovering from the impacts of colonialism in many ways it is still stuck in the time before colonization happened and is trying to find its way forward. This is a civilization that of course did not experience a reformation or enlightenment in the European sense of the words. Ideas are being discussed on how Islam can cope with life in the 21st century. The relationship between Muslims and the rest of the world isn't helped by the rampant Islamophobia that we see in today's world.

Whatever the case, the story of the world's second biggest religious group is indeed a fascinating one. Be sure to check out the video by Almost Wise which covers the history of Islamic philosophy and thought in a similar manner to this video over on his channel. Leave a comment telling him that Al Muqaddima sent you.

See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon. On the screen right now you can see the names and tiers of the patrons. You can join them by pledging a dollar or more to support the channel. Thank you for watching.

Transcript for:History and Impact of Islam

Transcript for:
History and Impact of Islam