Year 4 of the JBJ Academy Islamic History track. Eighteen lessons — one every two weeks over a 36-week year.
After Baghdad fell in 1258, authority did not pass straight to the Ottomans. For nearly three centuries it sat in Cairo: the Ayyubids under Salah ad-Din, then the Mamluks who stopped the Mongols at Ayn Jalut, sheltered the caliph, and guarded Makkah and Madinah until the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517.
The year runs alongside the Muslim West — the long decline of al-Andalus from the taifa kingdoms to the fall of Granada and the expulsion, and the Islamic empires of the Sahara.
This year did not exist in the original plan. It is the link that made the sequence from Baghdad to Istanbul intelligible.
Course Information
Course Instructor
Cairo, the Mamluks and the Muslim West (1171–1517)
After Baghdad — Where Did Authority Go?
Salah ad-Din and the Ayyubid State
The Recovery of Jerusalem, 1187
Ayn Jalut, 1260 — The Mamluks Stop the Mongols
The Mamluk Sultanate — Slave Soldiers Who Became Kings
The Shadow Caliphate in Cairo
Custodianship of the Haramayn — Guardianship as Legitimacy
Ibn Taymiyyah — Scholarship Under Mongol Pressure
Ibn Kathir, adh-Dhahabi and the Damascus School
The Later Crusades and the End of the Frankish States
Mamluk Cairo — Trade, Architecture and the Black Death
Al-Andalus After the Caliphate — Taifas, Almoravids, Almohads
Ibn Khaldun and the Birth of Social History
The Reconquista and the Fall of Granada (1492)
The Expulsion — The End of Muslim Spain
Islam Across the Sahara — Ghana, Mali, Songhai
Mansa Musa and Timbuktu — A Centre of Learning
1517 — The Ottomans Take Cairo and the Caliphate Moves
