Fourteen years after Razia ascended the throne of Delhi (1236), another remarkable lady, Shajarat al Durr, became the queen of Egypt (1250). Like Razia, Shajarat al Durr was a Mamluke and a Turk. Specifically, Shajarat belonged to the family of Bahri Mamlukes, the Turkish tribe who had settled in the islands that dot the Nile. Those were turbulent times for the world of Islam. There existed at...

For a brief moment, towards the end of the 12th century, the Muslim world was politically united under one caliph ruling from Baghdad. This political unity, rare in Islamic history, projected itself on the military plane. In West Asia, the Crusaders were ejected from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Salahuddin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. Four years later, in 1191, Muhammed Ghori of Ghazna...

The historian and geographer, Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Hussain Ibn Ali Al Masudi (895-957 CE) was a scion of an age when Islamic scholarship had overcome the challenge of Greek rationalism, and having thrown off the yoke of deductive absurdity, found its own expression in the inductive empiricism of the Qur’an. The history of this challenge and the aftermath of ensuing battles has defined the...