Early Middle Ages

The Rise of Islam

Explore the rise of Islam from 7th-century Arabia through the Arab conquests, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and the flowering of Islamic civilization.

Topic guide

Few events in the history of the Early Middle Ages proved as decisive as the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Within little more than a century of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, Arab Muslim armies had overthrown the Sasanian Persian Empire, stripped the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire of its southern provinces and much of North Africa, and crossed into Visigothic Spain. A new civilization, bound by a single faith, a sacred law, and a shared language of administration, had been called into being on the arid margins of the late antique world. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century, that civilization was producing some of the most sophisticated philosophy, science, medicine, and literature anywhere on earth.

The story of how this happened is, in essence, the story of a transformation. A region of Arabia that had been peripheral to the great empires of late antiquity became, in less than a hundred years, the heartland of a polity stretching from the Pyrenees to the Indus. The religion that had begun as a reform movement in a single trading city was, by the ninth century, the faith of perhaps a third of the world’s population. The Arabic language, once confined to the Arabian Peninsula, was becoming a global medium of learning, governance, and trade. And the early medieval world, which had seemed to be fragmenting into regional successor states after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, found itself reconnected by a vast new network of commerce, scholarship, and pilgrimage.

This article surveys the rise of Islam in its full Early Medieval context, from the Arabia of Muhammad’s birth in the late sixth century to the high Abbasid age. It traces the life of the Prophet, the extraordinary expansion of the Arab conquests, the political consolidation of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and the flowering of Islamic civilization in theology, law, philosophy, and science. Along the way, it links to deeper treatments of each topic in the cluster and long-tail articles collected in this section.

Pre-Islamic Arabia

To understand the rise of Islam, one must begin with the Arabia into which Muhammad was born. The Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century was a mosaic of climates, economies, and polities. Its vast interior deserts were the home of Bedouin Arab tribes who lived by pastoral nomadism, moving camels, sheep, and goats between seasonal pastures and whose politics revolved around kinship, blood feud, raiding, and the long custom of tribal alliance. Bedouin society was organized into patrilineal clans grouped into larger tribal federations, and security of person and property depended on the size and reputation of one’s kin group. The obligations of blood vengeance, of hospitality, and of protection extended to clients (mawali) and allies as well as to blood relatives, and the whole was governed by unwritten codes of conduct that the seventh-century poets would celebrate as the ancestral Arab muruwwa, or manly virtue.

The peninsula’s southern and western fringes were different worlds. Yemen in the sixth century was dotted with terraced highland agriculture and irrigated lowland fields producing grain, frankincense, myrrh, and other luxury commodities. The Hejaz, the western coastal strip, was home to caravan cities whose prosperity depended on overland trade. The greatest of these was Mecca, situated in a barren valley some seventy kilometers from the Red Sea coast. Mecca owed its prosperity to two long-distance trade routes: a northbound summer caravan that brought goods from Yemen and the south to markets in Syria, and a southbound winter caravan that brought goods from Byzantium and the Mediterranean to the markets of the south. In between, the city administered a major sanctuary, the Kaaba, which attracted pilgrimage from across Arabia.

Mecca’s ruling clan, the Quraysh, had by the sixth century absorbed most of the city’s trade into its own hands. The leading families invested the profits of caravan commerce in property, in client relationships with neighboring Bedouin tribes, and in the administration of the pilgrimage. The Quraysh were not kings in any formal sense; their power depended on wealth, on the prestige of their custodianship of the sanctuary, on intermarriage among the leading families, and on the careful management of tribal alliance. It was into this commercial aristocracy that Muhammad was born, around 570, into the Hashimite branch of the tribe.

Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia, the period known to Muslim historians as the Jahiliyya or “Age of Ignorance,” was similarly diverse. Most Arabs practiced some form of polytheism associated with tribal deities, often centered on local sanctuaries and sacred objects. The Kaaba, a cube-shaped sanctuary at the heart of Mecca, housed a number of cult images, including statues of Hubal, al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat, and the surrounding region was studded with other holy places, including the pilgrimage site of Arafat and the running water of the well of Zamzam. Pilgrimage was a major seasonal activity, drawing tribes from across the peninsula for trade fairs, poetry contests, and ritual observance. The great Arab suq, or markets, at places like Ukaz and Dhu al-Majaz combined commerce and poetry recitals with religious festivals and were a major arena for the elaboration of a shared Arabian high culture.

There were, alongside the polytheists, significant minorities of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, particularly in the caravan towns and in the south. The Yemeni kingdom of Himyar had embraced Judaism in the late fourth or fifth century, and Jewish communities flourished in oases such as Medina and Khaybar. Christian Arab tribes on the Syrian frontier, most famously the Ghassanids, served as clients and allies of the Byzantine Empire, and a Monophysite Christian community endured in Najran in southern Arabia. The great powers of the region - the Byzantines and the Sasanian Persians - had long fought over the Arabian marches, and the wars of the early seventh century, in which the Sasanians briefly occupied much of the eastern Mediterranean, had destabilized trade and unsettled the political order.

It was in this world of caravan commerce, tribal politics, and competing faiths that Islam would take root. The sixth-century Arabian Peninsula was not the isolated desert that older Western historiography sometimes imagined, but a region deeply entangled with the surrounding empires, exposed to monotheistic ideas, and primed for religious and political change. The Qur’an itself would refer explicitly to the same kinds of moral and social questions - the proper treatment of the poor, the obligations of justice and honesty, the reality of the resurrection and the day of judgment - that Jewish and Christian preachers had long been pressing on late antique audiences. The distinctive contribution of the new religion would be to combine those questions with a vivid sense of divine unity and a sweeping program of social reform.

The Life of Muhammad

Muhammad ibn Abdallah was born in Mecca around 570, into the Hashimite clan of the Quraysh. Orphaned in early childhood and raised first by his grandfather and then by his uncle Abu Talib, he grew up within the trade networks of the Hejaz. As a young man he worked in the caravan trade and, according to tradition, gained a reputation for honesty that led to his marriage, around 595, to the wealthy merchant Khadija bint Khuwaylid. The biographical tradition preserved in the sira literature and the hadith reports portrays him as contemplative, given to solitary retreat in the caves around Mecca, and troubled by the social inequalities and religious divisions of his city. The Quraysh, though wealthy, were not always just; the treatment of orphans, of slaves, and of the poor was a recurrent scandal; and the tribal feuding that periodically convulsed the city seemed to contradict any higher sense of moral order.

Around 610, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began to receive revelations that he understood to be the words of God, transmitted through the angel Gabriel. These revelations, gathered over the following two decades into the Qur’an, proclaimed the strict oneness of God (tawhid), the reality of judgment and the afterlife, and the obligation of believers to live in justice and submission to the divine will. The earliest Meccan suras of the Qur’an emphasize God’s power, the signs of the natural world, the brevity of earthly life, and the need to care for the poor and the orphan. The later Medinan suras lay down the more detailed legislation of the new community: rules of worship, of marriage and inheritance, of commercial conduct, and of war and peace. Together they form, in the view of Muslims, the literal word of God; in the view of scholars, a complex body of religious, legal, and ethical material that became the foundational scripture of one of the world’s great civilizations.

The early community in Mecca was small. It drew largely from the poorer and more marginal members of Meccan society - clients, freedmen, members of weaker clans, and a few members of important families such as Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. The Quraysh establishment met the movement with persistent opposition, which saw Muhammad’s monotheism as a threat both to the Kaaba cult and to the trade it generated. The early Muslims were subjected to a boycott of Muhammad’s Hashimite clan and to occasional physical persecution. The pivotal year in the Meccan period was 619, when both Khadija and Abu Talib died, and Muhammad’s protection from the clan was lost. In 622, in the face of an assassination plot, he and his followers secretly migrated to the oasis city of Yathrib, later known as Medina.

The Hijra, the migration to Medina, was the political breakthrough of the new faith. In Medina, Muhammad served as arbitrator among the city’s tribes, drafted the so-called Constitution of Medina, and built the first Muslim community (umma). The Constitution is preserved in early sources: it identifies the various parties of the city as a single umma, binds them to mutual defense and consultation, and provides for the joint defense of the city against external attack. It is a remarkable document, because it incorporates the Jewish tribes of Medina as full members of the political community while reserving religious leadership to Muhammad and his followers. The following decade saw armed conflict with Mecca, including the battles of Badr (624), Uhud (625), and the Trench (627), alternating with truces and ultimately with the Muslim conquest of Mecca in 630. By the time of his death in 632, Muhammad had united most of the Arabian Peninsula under the political and religious authority of the new faith.

A more detailed treatment of Muhammad’s life, including the early revelations, the Meccan opposition, the Hijra, the Medinan constitution, and the consolidation of the new community, can be found in the The Life of Muhammad. The Hijra itself, as the event that marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, is treated in the What Is the Hijra?.

The Arab Conquests

Within months of Muhammad’s death, the Arab Muslims embarked on one of the most extraordinary waves of territorial expansion in pre-modern history. The sources for the conquests are uneven, mixing later historical and literary traditions with material from the conquered lands, but the broad outline is clear. The first great prizes were the Sasanian Empire’s provinces in Iraq and the Byzantine Empire’s wealthy southern territories of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. By the mid-630s, Arab armies had taken Bosra and Damascus, and by 636 they met the Byzantine field army at the Yarmuk, a battle whose outcome ended Byzantine rule in Syria. Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, fell in 637, and by the middle of the decade, the conquest of Egypt was underway under the command of Amr ibn al-As. The conquest of Mesopotamia, completed in the following years, ended Sasanian rule and added the rich provinces of Iraq to the new polity.

The pace of conquest slowed but did not stop. The Arab armies crossed the Oxus into Central Asia, took Isfahan and the plateau of Iran, and pushed into Transoxiana and Sindh. They conquered North Africa piecemeal, founding the great mosque of Kairouan in 670 as a base from which to expand into the Maghreb. In 711, an Arab and Berber force under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, defeated the last Visigothic king at the Battle of Guadalete, and within a few years had overrun most of the Iberian Peninsula. The new emirate of al-Andalus, which would endure in some form until 1492, was a brilliant and, by the tenth century, supremely wealthy civilization in its own right. By the early eighth century, Arab rule extended from the Atlantic to the Indus, ruling a population comparable to that of the former Roman Empire.

The conquests transformed the political map of the Early Middle Ages: the Sasanian state disappeared; the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a Greek-speaking, Anatolian rump; the Visigothic kingdom of the Spain collapsed in the face of a single Berber-led invasion; and new political and cultural frontiers were established from the Indus to the Pyrenees. The Arab advance into western Europe was finally checked at the Battle of Tours in 732, by the Frankish mayor of the palace Charles Martel, and again in 759 at Narbonne. The two sieges of Constantinople, in 674-678 and 717-718, were also beaten off, with the use of Greek fire, by the Byzantine emperors. The Umayyad armies had reached the practical limits of their expansion.

A detailed account of these campaigns - their chronology, key battles, the organization of the Arab armies, and the responses of the conquered populations - is given in the The Arab Conquests.

The Caliphate: From Rashidun to Umayyads

After Muhammad’s death, the question of who should lead the new community became urgent. The earliest caliphs, beginning with Abu Bakr (r. 632-634), were chosen from among the Prophet’s earliest and closest companions. The period of the so-called Rightly Guided Caliphs (Rashidun) - Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali - coincided with the first wave of conquests and the consolidation of Islamic political practice. Under Umar, in particular, the basic institutions of the new state took shape: a register of pensioners funded from conquest lands, a treasury at Medina, and a system of provincial governors (walis) and military districts (junds). Umar was also remembered for the simplicity of his life, his personal supervision of the welfare of the poor and the orphans, and his careful distinction between the personal property of the caliph and the public revenues of the state.

The caliphate of Uthman (r. 644-656), a wealthy Qurayshite of the Umayyad clan, presided over the completion of the conquest of Iran and the consolidation of Muslim power in North Africa. It was also marked by a major scandal: the production of a unified text of the Qur’an, an undertaking that has ever since been a touchstone of Muslim reflection on the canon of revelation. Uthman’s assassination in 656 led to the caliphate of Ali (r. 656-661) and the First Fitna, the first civil war of the Islamic community, pitting Ali against Muawiyah, the governor of Syria and a member of the Umayyad clan. The war was complicated by the secession of the Kharijites, an egalitarian movement that had broken with Ali over the question of arbitration. Ali’s assassination in 661 and the failure of his son Husayn’s rising at Karbala in 680 hardened the division of the Muslim community into what would become the Sunni and Shia branches, the two great branches of Islam that have endured to the present day.

Muawiyah’s assumption of the caliphal title in 661 marked the beginning of dynastic rule. The Umayyad caliphate (661-750) was the first hereditary Muslim dynasty and one of the largest states the world had seen. Its capitals were moved from Medina to Damascus and briefly to Harran, and its ruling family presided over an empire that stretched from al-Andalus to the Indus. The Umayyads developed the institutional apparatus of an Islamic state: Arabic became the language of administration in place of Greek and Pahlavi, a new coinage was struck, an extensive postal and intelligence service was created, and the legal and fiscal systems of the conquered lands were gradually adapted to Islamic norms. The Umayyad period also saw the first major Muslim expansion into Central Asia, the Maghreb, and Iberia, as well as the famous Arab repulse at Tours in 732. The full story of this dynasty is told in the The Umayyad Caliphate.

The Abbasid Revolution

The Abbasid revolution of 750 was at once a political coup, a religious movement, and a social upheaval. Claiming descent from the Prophet’s uncle Abbas, the Abbasid movement drew on Persian administrative traditions, on the grievances of non-Arab Muslims (mawali) who felt marginalized under Umayyad rule, and on messianic Shia sentiment. The Abbasid agents organized a long underground campaign, and after the decisive Battle of the Zab in 750, the last Umayyad caliph was killed. The surviving Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman fled westward and eventually to al-Andalus, where he founded an independent emirate that would later become the caliphate of Cordoba.

The Abbasids moved the capital eastward, founding Baghdad in 762 on the Tigris as a round city of palatial and administrative grandeur. The new dynasty presided over what is often called the Islamic Golden Age: an extraordinary flowering of translation, scholarship, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and literature. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the patronage of caliphs such as al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid, and al-Ma’mun, and the systematic translation of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac works into Arabic laid the foundations of a culture that would later transmit much of this learning to Latin Europe. The Abbasid period also saw the emergence of the four major schools of Sunni Islamic law, the great syntheses of hadith scholarship, and towering figures such as the philosopher al-Kindi, the mathematician al-Khwarizmi, and the physician al-Razi.

The political unity of the Abbasid caliphate did not long survive its first flowering. From the ninth century onward, the empire fragmented in practice as semi-independent dynasties - the Tahirids, Samanids, Buyids, and later the Seljuks and the Fatimids - took effective control of the provinces. The caliphs themselves were often the captives of their own Turkish soldiery. The Abbasid institution survived in Baghdad, formally recognized by much of the Sunni Muslim world, until the Mongol destruction of the city in 1258. The story of this long and varied dynasty is told in the The Abbasid Caliphate.

Islamic Civilization and Learning

If the conquests gave the early Islamic world its political shape, Islamic civilization gave it its intellectual and cultural identity. From the eighth century onward, the lands of the caliphate became a vast laboratory in which the religious sciences of Islam - Qur’anic exegesis, hadith scholarship, jurisprudence, and theology - were developed alongside the Arabic translations of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac philosophical and scientific traditions.

The religious sciences were in part a response to a problem unique to Islam: how to interpret the Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition into a coherent framework for life and law. The result was a remarkable scholarly tradition that produced, by the tenth century, the canonical collections of hadith, the four great Sunni schools of law, the great syntheses of Kalam (speculative theology), and the Sufi mystical tradition. Sufism in particular would become a major force in popular piety and Islamic thought from the ninth century onward, with figures such as al-Hallaj, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, and al-Ghazali developing a rich vocabulary of mystical love, divine presence, and the stages of the spiritual path.

The translation movement of the eighth and ninth centuries, in which the Abbasid court took a leading role, brought the works of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, and many others into Arabic and then built upon them. Muslim scholars made original contributions in algebra (the very word comes from the title of al-Khwarizmi’s treatise), trigonometry, optics, astronomy, and medicine. The great hospitals of Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba were centers of medical education. The libraries of the caliphs and viziers, and the institutions of higher learning attached to mosques, anticipated the medieval university by several centuries.

Islamic civilization was not confined to the caliphal heartlands. The Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba were each, in their own way, major cultural centers. Cordoba in the tenth century was one of the largest and most cultured cities in Europe, with hundreds of mosques, a great library, and a court that attracted scholars from across the Muslim world. North Africa, Sicily, and the Yemen each contributed their own strands to the wider Islamic culture. A more detailed survey of this civilization is given in the Islamic Civilization and Learning.

Islam and the Early Medieval World

The rise of Islam was the central political fact of the seventh and eighth centuries and the central cultural fact of the ninth. The Arab conquests did not, as older historiography sometimes implied, halt the development of the Eastern Roman Empire; rather, they forced it to adapt. Anatolia, deprived of the wealthy southern provinces that had fed Constantinople since Constantine, became the Byzantine heartland. The Byzantine state, by the late seventh and eighth centuries, was a Greek-speaking, militarized polity whose principal concerns were the defense of Constantinople and the Anatolian frontier. The long crisis of Byzantine iconoclasm was, in part, a response to the catastrophic losses of the seventh century, and the development of themes and a Greek fire-touting navy were direct answers to the Arab threat.

In the West, the Arab conquest of Spain transformed the Iberian Peninsula, and the Berber and Arab settlers of North Africa became a dynamic new factor in Mediterranean politics. The Umayyad emirate of Cordoba and the later caliphate were at once rivals and imitators of the Carolingian Empire across the Pyrenees. The two civilizations, Christian and Muslim, exchanged ambassadors, prisoners, scholars, and ideas throughout the Early Middle Ages, and the long history of Christian Spain begins with the Arab conquest of 711. The Battle of Tours in 732, which checked the Arab advance into Gaul, took place within a generation of the Arab conquests and shaped the political map of France for centuries to come. Charlemagne’s dealings with Harun al-Rashid in the early ninth century, including the gift of an elephant named Abul-Abbas, are among the more colorful episodes of early medieval diplomacy.

The economic consequences of the rise of Islam were equally significant. By linking the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the overland routes to China, the caliphate created a vast trading zone in which goods, ideas, and technologies circulated on an unprecedented scale. Paper, originally a Chinese invention, was introduced into the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas in 751 and, in the following centuries, spread westward to al-Andalus and, ultimately, to Latin Europe. The Arabic silver dirham became a major international currency of the Early Middle Ages, turning up in Viking hoards as far north as Scandinavia. Muslim merchants, sailors, and scholars were, for several centuries, the principal intermediaries between the civilizations of the East and those of the West. Indian numerals, which would later come to be called Arabic numerals in the Latin West, were transmitted through Arabic to Europe in this period and would revolutionize the mathematics of the Latin Middle Ages.

Chronology of the Rise of Islam

The following timeline places the principal events of the rise of Islam in their early medieval context. A more detailed treatment of periodization and dating can be found in the Timeline and Key Dates of the Early Middle Ages.

  • c. 570 - Birth of Muhammad in Mecca.
  • 610 - Beginning of Muhammad’s prophetic revelations.
  • 622 - The Hijra; migration to Medina; year 1 of the Islamic calendar.
  • 630 - Muslim conquest of Mecca; unification of much of Arabia.
  • 632 - Death of Muhammad; succession of Abu Bakr as the first caliph.
  • 636 - Arab victory at the Yarmuk; loss of Byzantine Syria.
  • 637 - Arab capture of Ctesiphon; fall of the Sasanian capital.
  • 641 - Arab conquest of Egypt completed.
  • 656-661 - The First Fitna; caliphate of Ali.
  • 680 - Battle of Karbala; martyrdom of Husayn.
  • 711 - Arab and Berber armies cross into Visigothic Spain; Battle of Guadalete.
  • 717-718 - Arab siege of Constantinople repulsed by Leo III.
  • 732 - Frankish victory at the Battle of Tours.
  • 750 - Abbasid revolution; overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate.
  • 751 - Battle of Talas; transmission of paper-making westward.
  • 762 - Foundation of Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.
  • 785-805 - Construction of the Great Mosque of Cordoba.
  • c. 830 - Peak of the House of Wisdom under al-Ma’mun.
  • c. 1000 - Effective political fragmentation of the Abbasid caliphate; flourishing of regional Islamic cultures.

Religion, Law, and Society

A distinctive feature of the early Islamic state was the close integration of religion and political authority. From the time of Muhammad, the Prophet was understood to be the seal of the prophets and the supreme judge of the community, and his successors, the caliphs, were understood to be his deputies, charged with upholding the faith, administering the law, and defending the lands of Islam. The result was a polity in which there was no formal distinction between the religious and the political realms: the same official administered the prayer, the legal system, and the tax system, and the same learned class served as both jurists and theologians.

The early development of Islamic law (sharia) was a long and largely informal process. The Qur’an itself contained relatively few detailed legal rulings, and the great bulk of early Islamic practice was worked out by jurists on the basis of the Qur’an, the sunna (customary practice) of the Prophet, the consensus of the scholars, and analogy. The major schools of Islamic law - the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools in Sunni Islam, and the Ja’fari school in Shia Islam - had all taken shape by the early tenth century, and their works would provide the basis of Islamic legal thought for centuries. The hadith scholars, working to authenticate the reports of the Prophet’s sayings and actions, developed an extraordinarily rigorous historical criticism, producing by the ninth century the six canonical collections of Sunni hadith, including the Sahih of al-Bukhari and the Sahih of Muslim.

Society under the early caliphate was, in many respects, a society in formation. The new religion cut across the old tribal divisions, creating a supratribal umma whose members were bound by common faith and common law. Slavery, already widespread in late antiquity, persisted in modified form: manumission was encouraged, and former slaves often rose to positions of substantial influence. The status of non-Muslims, the so-called dhimmis, was defined by a set of regulations that, in theory, restricted their dress, their public worship, and their building of new places of worship, but that in practice varied widely from place to place and from century to century. The position of women in the new faith was, in many ways, an improvement on pre-Islamic Arabian practice: the Qur’an restricted polygamy, regulated inheritance, and gave women property rights; but the later elaboration of Islamic law substantially narrowed those rights in the direction of patriarchal seclusion and male control. Both the achievements and the limits of the new order would be debated by Muslim scholars for centuries to come.

Art, Architecture, and Material Culture

The rise of Islam brought with it a distinctive material culture, the early phases of which can be studied through archaeology as well as through texts. The first great wave of Muslim building in the seventh and eighth centuries - the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (completed 691/2), the Great Mosque of Damascus (706-715), the Great Mosque of Kairouan (built 670, enlarged 695 and 836) - drew heavily on the late antique and Byzantine architectural vocabulary of basilicas, domes, and columned courtyards, but adapted it to new functions and a new aesthetic. The mosque, with its large hypostyle prayer hall, its courtyard (sahn), its minaret, and its orientation toward Mecca, became the principal architectural type of the new faith, and the early Abbasid caliphs endowed great new congregational mosques in their capital cities.

A distinctive Islamic art, with its own repertoire of vegetal arabesques, geometric interlace, stylized calligraphy, and, in the high medieval period, figural representation in the secular context, emerged over the eighth and ninth centuries. The early prohibition on figural representation in religious contexts, while widely observed, was never absolute, and the umayyad palaces of the Syrian desert and Abbasid Samarra produced extensive figurative wall paintings. The textile arts of Egypt, the metalwork of the Iranian plateau, the glass of Syria and Iraq, and the pottery of Mesopotamia and Egypt made Islamic luxury goods a major presence in international trade throughout the Early Middle Ages. The Chinese Tang dynasty sources speak of Arab merchants in Guangzhou and the ports of the South China Sea, and the excavations of Samanid and Sasanian-Islamic sites in Central Asia and the Indus Valley have illuminated the depth of the trading network that linked the caliphate to the civilizations of the East.

Why the Rise of Islam Matters

It is easy, looking back over fifteen centuries, to underestimate the speed and scale of the rise of Islam. A religious movement that began in a single Arabian city in the early seventh century had, by the early eighth, produced the largest polity the world had ever seen; by the ninth, it had built a civilization whose achievements in philosophy, science, medicine, and literature were unrivaled; and by the tenth, it was transmitting the heritage of Greek thought, Indian mathematics, and Persian statecraft to the Latin West at the very moment when the foundations of medieval Christendom were being laid. The rise of Islam was, in short, a transformative event in the history of the Early Middle Ages, and no account of the period that omits it can hope to be complete.

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