This podcast started as a log of my journey through multiple classical Arab histories. Listeners are now invited to join me as I construct a narrative out of the long and often contradictory accounts left to us by the earliest Arab historians. We’ll use their material - and more recent scholarship - to try and understand the political evolution of the Arabs from warring nomadic tribes at the edges of civilization, to the proud rulers of the greatest empire of their time, and then back again. Our vantage point into this world will be their leaders, the “successors to God’s prophet Mohammad”: the caliphs.
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This podcast started as a log of my journey through multiple classical Arab histories. Listeners are now invited to join me as I construct a narrative out of the long and often contradictory accounts left to us by the earliest Arab historians. We’ll use their material - and more recent scholarship - to try and understand the political evolution of the Arabs from warring nomadic tribes at the edges of civilization, to the proud rulers of the greatest empire of their time, and then back again. Our vantage point into this world will be their leaders, the “successors to God’s prophet Mohammad”: the caliphs.
For the very first time in Arab history, a child became the umma’s caliph. The 13 year old had not yet left his royal harem and was totally under his mother’s control. She used her influence over al Muqtadir to to extend her personal wealth and authority. It was a fundamentally corrupt setup that encouraged the worst types of administrative abuses. This cancer at the very top of official power lasted so long it devastated the caliphate far more than any war with a foreign enemy; it was a fall the Abbasids never recovered from.
The Caliphs
This podcast started as a log of my journey through multiple classical Arab histories. Listeners are now invited to join me as I construct a narrative out of the long and often contradictory accounts left to us by the earliest Arab historians. We’ll use their material - and more recent scholarship - to try and understand the political evolution of the Arabs from warring nomadic tribes at the edges of civilization, to the proud rulers of the greatest empire of their time, and then back again. Our vantage point into this world will be their leaders, the “successors to God’s prophet Mohammad”: the caliphs.
