When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty

This is one of the best history books that I have read. The best thing about it is that it reads like a novel. When you start reading it you cant stop because you really want to know what happens next, and most of the time I already knew what was going to happen!

So much of the study of history is concerned with dates. I can remember in college with cram sheets of when things happened. Mr. Kennedy doesn't write much of dates. He writes of people, people living more than a thousand years ago when our own western history was in a period we call the dark ages when learning was forgotten and the Roman Catholic church ruled all. This was the time when the Shia and the Sunni were falling apart and beginning the conflict that rages to this day (In the morning paper a group of terrorists in Iraq stopped a bus or two, let the Sunni people go and murdered the Shia.) This was the time that Osama bin Laden seeks to re-establish. An old glory such as Mussolini felt about Roman times. For a couple of centuries a family ruled most of the Islamic world from Baghdad. For those of us more familiar with the antics of the kings of England there is a striking resemblance, palace intrigue, key supporters changing sides, murder, imprisonment, struggles over succession. This book brings to life an aspect of history that few of us have heard before but which is increasing in importance in our time.

This purely popular tale of the Baghdad Abbasid Caliphate is a wonderful book, full of splendor and tales of the times of the Caliphs, the Harem, early Islam, the founding of modern Baghdad, luxury, corruption, bad governance, murder, passion, rape, affluence gone wild, gluttony, exorbitance, decadence and political failure. The Abbasids were the first dynasty following the first four `righteous' caliphs(Bakr, Omar, Uthman, Ali) who followed the death of Mohammed. The movement of the capital of Islam to Baghdad symbolized the secular transference of temporal power from its religious foundations into a colonial capital of imperial Islam, after-all the region around Baghdad, modern day Iraq, then Mesopotamia, was a country full of Jews, Zoroastrians, Pagans, Assyrian Christians, Nestorians, Jacobites, Gnosts and others. Muslims were a minority in this land. Baghdad was a new city created to rule a colonial empire that was recently created. The empire that the Abbasids ruled was wealthy beyond belief, corrupt, licentious, full of slander, moral turpitude and court scandals. This excellent tale of this period doesn't really shed light on the modern `conflict' as claimed but it is an excellent fascinating tale, unfortunately it doesn't follow the narrative of Baghdad through to its destruction by the Mongols, but only to the replacement of the Abbasids by the Fatamids who rode to power on the backs of Turkic immigrant warriors from the east, see the book `black banners from the east' for a narrative of the rise of the Fatamids. If this sheds light on anything to do with Islam and modern times it shows that fundamentalist Islam's accusations of Western power, wealth and immorality, are mirrored in the actions of early Islam, which resembled the modern day west far more than modern day Islam, an irony. Islam in the 8th century was far from the fundamentalist form we see today, however there is nothing admirable in its use of Harems and slavery. Seth J. Frantzman

The rise and fall of Baghdad considers the earliest days of the city's origins, charting the rise and fall of the city during the Abbasid dynasty, when Baghdad was the seat of cultural and political power in the region. Any who would profess to understand modern Islam and Baghdad must understand the city's heyday during the 8th and 9th centuries: and this is the place to do it. When Baghdad Ruled The Muslim World: The Rise And Fall Of Islam's Greatest Dynasty offers important keys to understanding Islam's foundations.

The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 CE, and a universal caliphate was begun, the greatest political power ever in the Islamic world. The Abbasid Caliphate held sway afterwards for almost two hundred years. It included the reign of Harun al-Rashid, who became famous within the legends of the Arabian Nights. In _When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty_ (Da Capo Press), Hugh Kennedy has described his share of eunuchs, harems, slave girls, viziers (both sycophantic and traitorous), and lavish palaces, so although those knowing the legends will find few djinns or flying carpets, there is plenty of Arabic exoticism. There is also, as Kennedy says, a "fair share of, to put it bluntly, booze and sex." Kennedy, who has superb academic credentials in Arabic Studies, almost apologizes to pious Muslims, who may find this an irreverent account of glorious years of their history, and to his colleagues, who may think the book frivolous. He has deliberately concentrated on "dramatic events, striking personalities, and the trivia of everyday life." He says that he can do so because "... the writers of the ninth and tenth centuries knew that their rulers had their fair share of human frailties and they were quite happy to describe them." Besides booze and sex, there is plenty of blood here, shed in sometimes imaginative and cruel ways. The account of conflicts largely concerns the transfer of power from one caliph to another. Although some caliphs were more patrons of the arts than others, the period was rich in historic writing (from which Kennedy has directly drawn) and in poetry. Poems might be sung on intimate evenings between the caliph and his musicians, but there was no means of musical notation, so while we have the poems, we can never know what the music sounded like. Similarly, we have lost the architecture of the time. There are no ancient temples like those at Karnak: "The remains of Ur and Babylon are little more than piles of mud, comprehensible only to the specialists." The problem is that the region around Baghdad was terrific for agricultural production (and resultant wealth) but there was no good building stone. Nonetheless, the palaces were gargantuan, sprawling structures, encompassing gardens, courtyards, baths, mosques, and more. The women were not all slaves, and being taken into the harem was a blessing for many, a career choice for girls with few other options. There were moralists at the time that complained about the activities of the harem, and its expense, and they have blamed it for the eventual fall of the caliphate. Kennedy shows, however, that the harem was a politically stabilizing influence, with mistresses helping viziers who had fallen from grace; there was financial stabilizing, too, from the richness of the harem as a source of stock valuables which could be cashed in, useful in a society where borrowing was impossible. The number of major and minor players within t