Archives Islamic History

Episoade

• Saladin (part 4): The Lion and the Empty Treasury 19.05.2026 35min

  After Jerusalem, the Third Crusade arrived. After two years of war with Richard the Lionheart, Saladin signed a peace and went home to Damascus to die. Full Description: This is the closing episode of the four-part Saladin series. After the fall of Jerusalem in October 1187, Saladin made one strategic mistake that the chronicler Ibn al-Athir said was the worst of his career: he could not take the fortress port of Tyre, and Tyre became the bridgehead that brought the Third Crusade to the Holy...
• Saladin (part 3): Hattin and the Fall of Jerusalem 18.05.2026 35min

  This is the climax episode of the Saladin series. On the fourth of July, 1187, on a twin-peaked hill in Galilee called the Horns of Hattin, the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed in a single afternoon by exhaustion, smoke, thirst, and the patient battlefield management of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Twelve thousand Crusader knights and infantry were dead or prisoners by sundown. The True Cross, the gold-encased relic carried before every Frankish field army for eighty-eight year...
• Saladin (part 2): The Patient Sultan 17.05.2026 31min

  In the spring of 1175, the Abbasid khalifa in Baghdad recognized Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub as Sultan of Egypt, Syria, and the Maghrib. He was thirty-seven years old. The Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem sat just over the river, watching him, waiting for him to come. He did not come for another twelve years. This second episode of the Saladin series covers the long middle years, 1175 through 1186, that most narratives skip. We follow the two assassination attempts by Rashid al-Din Sinan's Has...
• Saladin (part 1): The Boy from Tikrit 16.05.2026 37min

  Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known to Europeans as Saladin, became the most famous Muslim ruler of the medieval Mediterranean. He took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187, fought Richard the Lionheart to a standstill in the Third Crusade, and died in Damascus in 1193 with forty-seven dirhams in the treasury. But before all of that he was a Kurdish boy born in flight from a citadel called Tikrit, raised in Mosul and Baalbek and Damascus, schooled in Sunni jurisprudence by the most patie...
• Mansa Musa (part 4): A City of Books 12.05.2026 31min

  This is the final episode of the Mansa Musa series. It is the legacy story. Not the gold in Cairo. The books in Timbuktu. Mansa Musa returned to Mali in 1325 with an Andalusian scholar named al-Sahili, possibly four Hashimite Sharifs, and an unrecorded number of Egyptian and Maghrebi jurists, calligraphers, and copyists. The chronicle tradition says al-Sahili built the great mosque of Timbuktu, the Djinguereber, but modern architectural history says the Sudano-Sahelian style is indigenous an...
• Mansa Musa (part 3): Half a Continent to Stand Here 10.05.2026 27min

  In the autumn of 1324, after eight months on the road, Mansa Musa I of Mali reached the Hijaz. This episode covers what he did there, who he found, and what it cost him to come home. The plain at Arafat, the central rite of the Hajj, is the place where Muslim pilgrims ask, in white ihram cloth, for whatever it is they came to ask for. The Tarikh al-Fattash preserves a tradition that what Mansa Musa came to ask for was kaffara, atonement, for the accidental death of his mother Kanku. The Cair...
• Mansa Musa (part 2): Four Months in the Sand 08.05.2026 32min

  Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire. In late winter 1324 he led the largest pilgrim caravan in recorded history out of his capital at Niani and pointed it northeast, toward Mecca. Four months and roughly twenty-seven hundred miles later, the column came over a rise west of Giza and saw the Pyramids. This episode covers the road. The Massufa Berber caravan-masters who took over from the Mande guides at Walata. The salt-house village of Taghaza, with its camel-skin roofs and br...
• Mansa Musa (part 1): The Richest Man on Earth 06.05.2026 35min

  Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire, an African Muslim kingdom that in 1324 covered more land than the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ilkhanate combined and produced somewhere between half and two-thirds of all the gold in the medieval Mediterranean basin. By the standards of disposable wealth, he was the richest human being on the surface of the planet. The Mediterranean had barely heard of him. This episode covers the world Musa ruled before his Hajj. The goldfields of Bambuk and...
• The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 3): The Trust Network 04.05.2026 37min

  In a moneychanger's office in Basra around 950 CE, a merchant could hand over 100 gold dinars and whisper a password. Two months of desert travel away, in Samarkand, the moneychanger's counterparty would pay 100 dinars to whoever produced the password. No gold crossed the desert. The ledger would balance later against a reverse flow. This was a hawala, and it predated modern wire transfer by a thousand years. It worked because if either broker cheated, he would be excommunicated from a mercha...
• The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 2): Sufis, Gold, and Shahada 02.05.2026 35min

  In July 1324, Mansa Musa of Mali crossed the Nile into Egypt at the head of a caravan of 60,000 people, with 500 enslaved attendants in silk, each carrying a six-pound gold staff. He stayed in Cairo for three months, giving away gold. By the time he left, the Egyptian dinar had lost roughly 12% of its value, and the market would take twelve years to recover. Al-Umari, the Mamluk bureaucrat who recorded the episode from Cairene eyewitnesses, described what they saw: "He left no court emir nor ...
• The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 1): Dhow Sailors and the Muslim Quarter 30.04.2026 34min

  On a hill above the Chinese port city of Quanzhou in the spring of 1417, a Ming admiral named Zheng He burned incense at the tombs of two men whom tradition identified as Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). His father and grandfather had made the Hajj. His ancestors had come from Bukhara. In a few days he would raise a Chinese-language stele and take 28,000 men and 317 ships south on the northeast monsoon, the largest navy the world had ever seen, to a port on the coast of...
• The Alhambra: What They Tried to Erase (Part 4) 28.04.2026 35min

  In late 1499, Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros stood in the Bibarrambla plaza of Granada and watched thousands of Arabic manuscripts burn. The Treaty of Granada, signed seven years earlier, had guaranteed the Muslims of the conquered city that this would not happen. The Treaty was now, in practice, dead. In 1526, Charles V arrived on his honeymoon, stayed in the Alhambra, and commissioned a Renaissance palace to be built inside it. In 1568, the Moriscos of the Alpujarras rose in rebelli...
• The Alhambra: Gardens of Paradise (Part 3) 26.04.2026 34min

  On January 2, 1492, Muhammad XII, called Boabdil, rode out of the Alhambra and kissed the arm of Ferdinand of Aragon. He handed over two keys to the main gates of the fortress and a gold ring with an Arabic inscription that had, he said, governed Granada since it was ruled by the Moors. "God loves you very much," he said, in his own language. "These, my lord, are the keys to this Paradise." Ten months later, Columbus sailed. Seven years later, the treaty Boabdil had signed began to be broken....
• The Alhambra: The Court of the Lions (Part 2) 24.04.2026 33min

  Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib was the vizier, the historian, the plague-treatise writer, and the court polymath of Nasrid Granada in its golden age. Ibn Zamrak was his student, the brilliant young poet whose verses are carved on the Fountain of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the Comares throne. In 1374, Ibn al-Khatib was strangled in his cell in Fez on charges of heresy. His former student helped organize the trial. His body was exhumed and burned. This second episode of a four-par...
• The Alhambra: The Last Muslims in Spain (Part 1) 22.04.2026 33min

  Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar was a plowman when the mosque assembly of Arjona acclaimed him emir in 1232. Four years later, Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, and turned its great mosque into a cathedral. Twelve years after that, the Nasrid emir rode at Ferdinand's side into the surrender of Seville. Returning home, hailed as "victor for God," he replied with the line that would define his dynasty: wa la ghalib illa Allah. There is no victor but God. His descendant...
• Nana Asma'u: A Legacy They Couldn't Erase (Part 3) 20.04.2026 18min

  The final episode in the Nana Asma'u series follows the Yan Taru network forward in time, from Asma'u's death in 1864 through the British conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903, the colonial period, Nigerian independence, and into the twenty-first century. This episode examines why the Yan Taru survived when almost every other institution of the Sokoto Caliphate did not. It explores how British indirect rule inadvertently preserved the social infrastructure the network depended on, and how...
• Nana Asma'u: War Comes Home (Part 2) 18.04.2026 28min

  Part 2 of the Nana Asma'u series goes deeper into the years that shaped her most enduring achievement. It covers the Battle of Gawakuke in 1836, when Asma'u fled on horseback through a war zone and later turned that experience into poetry. It covers the death of her brother, Caliph Muhammad Bello, in 1837, the succession crisis and civil war that followed, and how that collective trauma became the catalyst for the Yan Taru. This episode examines Asma'u's war poetry and elegies in detail, exp...
• Nana Asma'u: Born in a Revolution (Part 1) 16.04.2026 31min

  This episode traces the life of one of the most remarkable women in African history - a scholar who wrote in four languages, advised caliphs, documented wars in poetry, and then, in the aftermath of civil war, built an educational network for women that no empire, no colonial power, and no government has ever been able to destroy. The Yan Taru — "those who congregate together" — sent trained women teachers walking across the Sahel with nothing but memorized poems and a distinctive straw hat, ...
• The Ottoman Siege of Vienna: The Largest Cavalry Charge In History (Part 3) 14.04.2026 32min

  This episode covers the relief of Vienna and the Battle of September 12, 1683. It traces Emperor Leopold I's desperate diplomacy, Pope Innocent XI's role in funding and framing the holy war, and the Treaty of Warsaw that brought Poland into the fight. We profile Jan III Sobieski — his military career, his victory at Khotin, and his march of 435 miles through the Vienna Woods with his teenage son. The episode covers Kara Mustafa's decision to split his forces rather than abandon the siege, the...
• The Ottoman Siege of Vienna: The Tunnels Beneath the Walls (Part 2) 12.04.2026 30min

  This episode covers the two-month siege of Vienna from July to September 1683. It examines Vienna's fortification system, the flight of Emperor Leopold I, and Count Starhemberg's defense with a garrison outnumbered ten to one. Without heavy artillery, Kara Mustafa turned to the lagimcilar — Ottoman military miners — to tunnel beneath the walls and plant gunpowder charges. The episode traces the underground war in detail: how defenders used water buckets and dried peas on drumheads to detect d...