Great Leaders

The Rashidun caliphs set the pattern for the earliest Islamic state. Umar ibn al-Khattab in particular built the administrative machinery — the register of stipends, the provincial governorships, the Hijri calendar — that allowed a rapidly expanding territory to be governed at all.

Later rulers are remembered as much for what they built as for what they conquered. Abd al-Rahman I escaped the fall of the Umayyads and founded a new state in Córdoba; Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun presided over Baghdad at its intellectual height; Salah al-Din combined military success with a reputation for restraint that his opponents recorded as readily as his own chroniclers.

Baybars turned the Mamluk state into the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean. Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed into Iberia at the rock that still carries his name. Zenobia of Palmyra took on Rome, and the Kahina led Amazigh resistance in the Aurès.

The modern era added state builders of a different kind — figures such as King Abdulaziz Al Saud, who unified the Arabian Peninsula's central territories, and Sultan Qaboos, who reopened Oman to the world — each of whom is measured now by the institutions they left behind.