Archives Islamic History

Epizódy

• 
  The Abbasid Revolution (part 4): The Faceless Man Must Die 27.07.2026 30min

  This is the fourth and final part of the story of the Abbasid Revolution, and it begins where a triumph is supposed to end. In January of 750, the Abbasid armies broke the last Umayyad field force at the Great Zab, and the most powerful dynasty on earth began to fall. What happened next was not a victory parade. It was a reckoning, and it fell on enemies and friends alike. The episode follows the winners past the moment of victory. It tracks the last Umayyad khalifa, Marwan, fleeing the lengt...
• 
  The Abbasid Revolution (part 3): The Blood-Shedder and the Falcon 25.07.2026 29min

  In January of 750, the last Umayyad army broke on the banks of the Great Zab, and ninety years of Umayyad rule began to come apart in a matter of months. Part 3 of The Abbasid Revolution follows what victory actually looked like once the fighting stopped. The revolution had made its move early, proclaiming Abu al-Abbas as the first Abbasid khalifa in the mosque at Kufa before the decisive battle had even been fought. He gave himself the name al-Saffah, a word Muslims have argued over for twel...
• 
  The Abbasid Revolution (part 2): The Umayyad Blind Spot 23.07.2026 29min

  By the 740s the Umayyad dynasty ruled the largest empire on earth from Damascus, stretching from Spain to the edge of Central Asia. From the outside it looked unbeatable. Underneath, it was tearing itself apart. A reigning khalifa had been murdered by his own kin, the ruling family had fallen into civil war over the throne, and the Arab tribes that manned its armies had split into the old feuding blocs of Qays and Yaman. Into that crisis stepped Marwan the Second, a hardened frontier soldier ...
• 
  The Abbasid Revolution (part 1): The Abbasid Revolution 21.07.2026 29min

  In the year 747 the Umayyad Caliphate was the largest empire on earth, ruled from Damascus, and the province that would bring it down sat two thousand miles away on its eastern edge. That province was Khurasan, and this first episode of a four part series is the story of how a revolution was built there in plain sight, one careful conversation at a time, while the capital looked the other way. The episode walks into a single street in the city of Merv to find not one grievance but three, livi...
• 
  Ibn Khaldun (part 5): The Historian and the Conqueror 19.07.2026 30min

  Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century North African judge, diplomat, and scholar, and he is widely regarded today as the founder of the science of society, a thinker who anticipated sociology, the philosophy of history, and parts of modern economics centuries before anyone in Europe. Born in Tunis in 1332 into a family that had already lost its ancestral home in Muslim Spain, he spent his life asking one question that no teacher could answer: how does a whole kingdom rise, and why does it alwa...
• 
  Ibn Khaldun (part 4): The Book and the Shipwreck 17.07.2026 30min

  Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century scholar, judge, and diplomat from North Africa, born into a family that had once been nobility in Muslim Seville and lost everything when al-Andalus contracted. By his forties he had burned through twenty years in the unstable courts of the Maghreb and Granada, serving sultans, running secret correspondence, sitting in prison, and watching clever men fail to understand the forces that were about to destroy them. This episode is where he stops trying to ste...
• 
  Ibn Khaldun (part 3): The Castle and the Book 15.07.2026 30min

  Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth century North African scholar and statesman, born in Tunis in 1332 into an exiled noble family that had once helped lead Seville in Muslim Spain. He spent more than two decades inside the courts of the Hafsids, the Marinids, and the Nasrids of Granada, rising to become keeper of the seal, switching sides to survive, and spending nearly two years in a prison in Fez. He watched dynasty after dynasty rise, grow comfortable, and collapse, and by 1375 he had had enough...
• 
  Ibn Khaldun (part 2): The Road Back to Seville 13.07.2026 31min

  Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun is remembered as the founder of the science of history, the man whose Muqaddimah laid the groundwork for sociology, economics, and the philosophy of history centuries before those fields had names. But before he wrote the book that made him immortal, he lived the material. This episode follows the years he spent inside the machinery of power in the fourteenth-century Muslim world, gathering the evidence he would later turn into a theory of how civilizations rise and ...
• 
  Ibn Khaldun (part 1): Ibn Khaldun 11.07.2026 31min

  Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, is often called the founder of the scientific study of history and society. Centuries before the words sociology, economics, or the philosophy of history existed, he set out to explain something no scholar of his age treated as a science at all: why civilizations rise, and why they fall. This first episode is the origin story of that question, told through the two forces that planted it in him as a child. The first force was memory. The Banu K...
• 
  Suleiman the Magnificent (part 5): The Price of the Throne 10.07.2026 30min

  Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire for forty-six years, the longest reign in its history and, by common agreement among historians, its highest point. This final episode of our five-part series is not about his conquests. It is about what they cost him. The story turns on a single brutal law. Generations earlier, Mehmed the Conqueror had written into the Ottoman code that a new sultan should put his own brothers to death for the good order of the empire. It was a smaller horror...
• 
  Suleiman the Magnificent (part 4): The Friend He Raised and Killed 08.07.2026 29min

  Ibrahim of Parga was the son of a Christian fisherman on the Greek coast, taken as a boy into the Ottoman system that turned captured children into the servants who ran the empire. He grew up beside the young prince Suleiman, reading and making music with him, and when Suleiman took the throne he raised Ibrahim faster than the court had ever seen a man rise, all the way to grand vizier, the second man in the empire. For thirteen years they ruled side by side. Then, one night during Ramadan in...
• 
  Suleiman the Magnificent (part 3): Kanuni, the Lawgiver 06.07.2026 32min

  Suleiman the First ruled the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, from 1520 to 1566. To the kings of Europe, dazzled by his court and his conquests, he was Suleiman the Magnificent. But to the millions who actually lived under him, he carried a different name, and it was the one that lasted: Kanuni, the Lawgiver. This episode is about the two things he built in the years after his armies reached their limit at the walls of Vienna, and why both of them outlived the empire itself. The fir...
• 
  Suleiman the Magnificent (part 2): Two Hours at Mohacs 04.07.2026 29min

  Suleiman the Magnificent inherited the richest and best organized state of the sixteenth century, and in his first campaigns he took the fortresses that had defied even Mehmed the Conqueror. This episode, the second in our series, follows him to the two battles that defined the peak of Ottoman power in Europe. On the twenty-ninth of August, fifteen twenty-six, on the marshy plain of Mohacs, the young King Louis the Second of Hungary rode out with the finest heavy cavalry in Christendom. Sulei...
• 
  Suleiman the Magnificent (part 1): Suleiman the Magnificent 02.07.2026 30min

  In 1520, a twenty-five-year-old named Suleiman became the tenth sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He was the only surviving son of Selim the Grim, the most feared conqueror of the age, so the crown passed to him without the usual war between brothers and without the strangling of rivals that so often opened an Ottoman reign. He inherited a state that spanned three continents, the richest and most powerful of its day, and with it the guardianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Isla...
• 
  Avicenna - Master Healer (part 5): Avicenna 29.06.2026 30min

  Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, known to Europe as Avicenna, was the finest physician of his age and one of the most influential minds in human history. In this fifth and final part of our series on the Prince of Physicians, we leave the philosopher behind and meet the healer, then follow him to the end of his road. The episode opens with the famous case of the lovesick prince: a young man wasting away from an illness no court doctor can name, and Ibn Sina diagnosing the truth by laying two finge...
• 
  Avicenna - Master Healer (part 4): Avicenna 27.06.2026 29min

  Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the greatest physician and one of the boldest philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age. This fourth part of our series follows him into the city of Hamadan around the year 1015, where curing a Buyid emir of a brutal illness won him the highest office in the land. He became vizier, the chief minister of the state, and for a few years he lived an almost impossible double life: running a government by day, and dictating two of history's most important boo...
• 
  Avicenna - Master Healer (part 3): Avicenna 25.06.2026 29min

  Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the most brilliant mind of his century: a physician, philosopher, and scientist whose work would shape both the Islamic world and Christian Europe for centuries. By his early thirties he was also a refugee, a homeless wanderer carrying the largest education on the planet from one court to the next after the fall of Bukhara. This episode follows the most dangerous chapter of his life. At the brilliant court of Khwarazm, working beside the great scient...
• 
  Avicenna - Master Healer (part 2): Avicenna 23.06.2026 30min

  Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was the most important physician and one of the most important philosophers of the medieval world. This is the second part of his story, and it covers the years when a teenage prodigy in Bukhara became famous enough to be summoned to the bedside of a dying king, and then lived to watch the entire civilization that made him collapse around him. The episode opens in the sickroom of the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur, whose own court physicians have run out...
• 
  Avicenna - Master Healer (part 1): Avicenna 21.06.2026 30min

  Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna and in the Islamic East as al-Shaykh al-Ra'is, the Preeminent Master, was one of the greatest physicians and philosophers in human history. This first episode of our deep dive into his life follows the child before the legend: a boy born around 980 near Bukhara, the dazzling capital of the Samanid dynasty and one of the brightest cities of the Islamic Golden Age. We trace his astonishing youth as he tells it in his own autobiography, the one true ...
• 
  The Great Mosque Builders (part 4): The Shah Mosque of Isfahan 20.06.2026 29min

  Shah Abbas the Great was the ruler who pulled the Safavid empire back from collapse, reorganized its armies, and around 1598 moved his capital to Isfahan, where he laid out Naqsh-e Jahan, the Image of the World, one of the largest public squares ever built. In 1611 he began the mosque meant to crown it. This is the story of how it was made, and of the price of building in a hurry. This is the seventh and final episode of The Great Mosque Builders, the relay that began with the Umayyad Mosque ...