Great Arab Empires

The Umayyads, ruling from Damascus from 661, built the first great Islamic state — an empire stretching from the Atlantic to Central Asia, administered in Arabic, and expressed architecturally in the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus.

The Abbasids replaced them in 750 and moved the centre eastward to a new round city on the Tigris: Baghdad. Their five centuries were the period of the greatest scholarly and commercial reach, tied into trade networks that ran to China, India and East Africa.

In North Africa and Egypt, the Fatimids founded Cairo and al-Azhar; the Almoravids and Almohads unified the Maghreb and Al-Andalus from Marrakesh; the Ayyubids under Salah al-Din reunited Egypt and Syria; and the Mamluks, a military elite of remarkable durability, held off both Mongols and Crusaders and left Cairo its most spectacular architecture.

Further south and west, the Kanem-Bornu, Mali and Songhai states connected the Sahara to the Sahel, and Timbuktu became a manuscript city. From 1517 the Ottomans absorbed most of the Arab lands, and their provincial arrangements shaped the borders that the modern states inherited.