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.
The Abbasid fall from grace was long and messy. It’s been a while since the dynasty produced a powerful caliph, the last one being the almighty restorer al Mu’tadid who reigned until the opening years of the 10th century. The subsequent decades saw a sustained and accelerating erosion of the state’s wealth, prestige, and authority. Whenever things looked like they couldn’t get any worse, what was thought to be rock-bottom gave way to reveal a deeper abyss. The ruling clan’s enfeeblement crescendoed in the 940’s, until it became a simple matter for another dynasty to swoop in and take all that the Abbasids had inherited.
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.
