Islam liberated men and women from the shackles of slavery and made them masters of the world. The history of the Mamlukes illustrates this observation. In the 9th and 10th centuries, there was a brisk slave trade down the Volga River, near the Caspian Sea. The Vikings raided Europe with unrelenting ferocity in search of booty and slaves. Eastern Europe, fossilized as it was between...

The Turks forced their way onto the world stage with thunderous momentum. Their galactic advance is marked by three critical events that provide historic benchmarks: the hiring of a Turkish guard by the Abbasid Caliph al Mu’tasim (833); the disappearance of the Samanid State based in Bukhara (999); and finally, the Battle of Manzikert (August 1072). After Caliph al Mu’tasim, the...

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...