The Islamic world in ascendancy : from the Arab conquests to the siege of Vienna / Martin Sicker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sicker, Martin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Islamic Empire--History.

Islamic Empire.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (239 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024

Place of Publication:

Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the view of Dr. Martin Sicker, it was with the emergence of Islam that the combination of geopolitics and religion reached its most volatile form and provided the ideological context for war and peace in the Middle East for more than a millennium. The conflation of geopolitics and religion in Islam is predicated on the concept of jihad (struggle), which may be understood as a crescentade, in the same sense as the later Christian crusade, which seeks to achieve a religious goal, the conversion of the world to Islam, by militant means. This equates to a concept of perpetual war with the non-Muslim world, a concept that underlays Muslim geopolitical thinking throughout the thousand-year period covered in this book. However, as Sicker amply demonstrates, the concept often bore little relation to the political realities of the region that as often as not saw Muslims and non-Muslims aligned against and at war with other Muslims. The story of the emergence and phenomenal ascendancy of the Islamic world from a relatively small tribe in sparsely populated Arabia is one that taxes the imagination, but it becomes more comprehensible when viewed through a geopolitical prism. Religion was repeatedly and often shamelessly harnessed to geopolitical purpose by both Muslims and Christians, albeit with arguably greater Muslim success. Islamic ascendancy began as an Arab project, initially focused on the Arabian peninsula, but was soon transformed into an imperialist movement with expansive ambitions. As it grew, it quickly registered highly impressive gains, but soon lost much of its Arab content. It ended a millennium later as a Turkish-more specifically, an Ottoman-project with many intermediate transformations. The reverberations of the thousand-year history of that ascendancy are still felt today in many parts of the greater Middle East. A comprehensive geopolitical survey for scholars, students, researchers, and all others interested in the history of the Middle East and Islam.

Contents:

Cover

THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN ASCENDANCY

Contents

Introduction

NOTES

1 Empire of the Quraish

2 The Umayyad Empire

3 The Abbasid Empire

4 Abbasid Decline and Imperial Disintegration

THE RISE OF THE GHAZNAVIDS

5 The Rise of the Seljukids

6 The Period of the First Crusades

7 The Era of the Zengids

8 Saladin and the Ayyubid Empire

9 The Early Thirteenth Century

THE BRIEF ASCENDANCY OF KHWARIZM

10 The Mongol Onslaught

11 Between Mamluks and Mongols

THE END OF MONGOL ASCENDANCY

12 The Rise of the Ottomans

13 The Era of Murad and Bayezid

14 Tamerlane

15 End of the Byzantine Empire

16 Mehmed the Conqueror

THE GEOPOLITICAL SITUATION IN SOUTHWEST ASIA

17 The Rise of the Safavids

18 Ottoman Expansionism under Selim

19 The Era of Suleiman the Magnificent

20 The End of Islamic Ascendancy

Bibliography

Index

About the Author.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-222) and index.

ISBN:

9798400673023

9780313001116

0313001111

OCLC:

49870047