African and Islamic Empires: A Beginner's Guide

If you never learned African or Islamic history at school, you are not alone, and you have not missed something too hard to catch up on. The history of African and Islamic empires is a set of stories about trade, faith, learning and power. Each story has people in it you will remember. This guide gives you the main empires, cities and thinkers in a sensible order, so you can hang every later story on a frame.

Here is the frame in one paragraph. From the seventh century, a faith spread out of Arabia and built a chain of states from Spain to Central Asia. Its scholars kept and extended the knowledge of Greece, Persia and India. At the same time, in West Africa, kingdoms grew rich by carrying gold north and salt south. On the East African coast, trading towns linked the continent to India and China. Inland, builders raised stone cities in the south. Late in the story, the Ottomans took over the old Roman capital and ruled three continents for six hundred years.

Take it one piece at a time.

From Mecca to Cordoba in a century

In the year 610, according to Muslim tradition, a merchant in Mecca named Muhammad began to receive the revelations that became the Quran. Mecca was a trading town, and its leading families were worried about a message that challenged both their gods and their power. In 622 Muhammad and his followers moved to Medina. This move, the Hijra, is the start of the Islamic calendar. By the time Muhammad died in 632, most of Arabia had accepted his leadership.

What happened next surprised everyone, including the people doing it. Within about a hundred years, armies from Arabia and their allies controlled land from Spain to the edge of India. The reasons are less mysterious than the speed makes them sound. The two great powers next door, the Byzantine and Persian empires, had just spent years fighting each other and were worn out. The Arab armies were light, fast and used to desert travel. And the terms offered to a conquered town were often easier than the taxes it already paid. People who kept their own religion paid a tax and were left alone, though the rules varied by place and ruler. The Persian empire fell completely. The Byzantines lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

We tell this story in detail in How Islam Spread So Fast from Mecca to Spain. Two things are worth knowing now. First, conquest was not the same as conversion. In many regions most people kept their old faith for generations, and Islam spread slowly through trade, marriage and the appeal of a clear, portable creed. Second, the empire split. The Umayyad family ruled from Damascus from 661. In 750 the Abbasids overthrew them. One Umayyad prince escaped to Spain and founded a separate state with its capital at Cordoba. So by the middle of the eighth century there were already two Islamic powers, one in the east and one in the west, and they did not agree on much.

Cordoba grew into one of the largest and best-lit cities in western Europe. It had libraries, public baths and a great mosque whose forest of striped arches is still there. Scholars of Muslim, Jewish and Christian background worked in the same city, and they translated texts between Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. That translation work later fed the European universities. Do not picture perfect harmony, though. Relations between communities changed with every ruler, and there were good periods and bad ones.

Baghdad's golden age of science and medicine

The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad in 762. He chose a spot on the Tigris river, at a crossing of trade routes, and he built it as a round city. Within a few generations it was one of the biggest cities in the world.

Baghdad is famous for one thing above all: it paid for knowledge. Rulers and rich families hired translators to turn Greek, Persian, Sanskrit and Syriac books into Arabic. Paper, which had reached the Islamic world from China, made books cheap enough to copy in large numbers. By tradition, the technique arrived through Chinese prisoners taken in a battle in Central Asia. Historians doubt the neat version of this story, but the basic point stands: paper came from the east and changed what a scholar could do.

The best-known institution is the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a library and translation centre. Be careful with the legends. We know that scholars worked there and in other libraries, but we do not know exactly how it was organised.

Some of the people you should know:

Al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on solving equations. The word "algebra" comes from the Arabic title of that book, and the word "algorithm" comes from a form of his name.
Ibn al-Haytham worked out how the eye sees by testing light in dark rooms. He insisted on experiments, which makes him an early voice for the scientific method.
Al-Razi was a physician who wrote careful case notes and could tell two similar diseases apart.
Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, wrote a huge medical encyclopedia that European students still studied centuries later.

Baghdad did not last. The caliphs lost real power to their own generals, then to regional rulers. In 1258 a Mongol army took the city after a siege and destroyed much of it. But by then the learning had spread to Cairo, Cordoba, Samarkand and Delhi.

Ghana, Mali and Songhai: gold, salt and Timbuktu

Now go south, across the Sahara. For a long time, textbooks in Europe treated sub-Saharan Africa as a place with no history before the colonial period. That was never true. The evidence is in the written records of travellers and scholars, in the oral histories kept by trained singers called griots, and in the ground itself.

The basis of the wealth was an exchange. West Africa had gold, from rivers and mines in the forest regions to the south. The Sahara had salt, dug from deep pits in the desert, and the people of the grasslands needed it. Merchants with camel caravans carried salt south and gold north across the desert, and each side took a cut. Whoever controlled the meeting points controlled the money.

Ghana was the first great power of this trade. It is not the same place as the country of Ghana today, which took the name later. The old kingdom was further north and west. Its king sat at the centre of the gold trade, and he taxed the goods that came in and out. Our track on Mali and the Sahara Trade starts there, with gold weighed against salt.

Mali replaced Ghana. Its founder, Sundiata, defeated a rival king around 1235 and built a state that stretched for hundreds of miles. His story is told in an epic that griots have performed for centuries. It is part history and part legend, and we should not pretend to know which parts are which.

The ruler everyone remembers is Mansa Musa, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. He travelled with a huge caravan and gave away so much gold in Cairo that, according to Egyptian writers, the value of gold fell there for years. How much of this is exact and how much is exaggeration is something historians argue about, and we take it apart in Did Mansa Musa Crash the Price of Gold?. The more important result is that Mali appeared on the maps of the Mediterranean world after that, as a land of gold.

Mansa Musa also brought scholars and builders home. The city of Timbuktu grew into a centre of learning. Its Sankore mosque and the schools around it trained lawyers, grammarians and astronomers, and its scribes copied manuscripts that families have kept to this day. Timbuktu was not a city of mud huts and mystery. It was a place where people argued about books.

Songhai took over from Mali in the fifteenth century. Its ruler Sunni Ali built a strong army and a river fleet. Askia Muhammad, who followed him, organised the state, set up officials and made his own pilgrimage. At its height Songhai was the largest empire in West Africa. It fell in 1591, when a Moroccan army crossed the desert with guns and defeated its forces. Guns changed who could win in the Sahel, and trade routes were already shifting toward the Atlantic coast.

Aksum, Lalibela, Kilwa and Great Zimbabwe

The rest of Africa has its own stories, and it helps to hold four places in your head.

Aksum was a kingdom in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea. It traded across the Red Sea with Rome, Persia and India, and it struck its own coins. In the fourth century its king Ezana accepted Christianity. The Ethiopian church that grew from this is one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world.

Lalibela is a town in Ethiopia where, by tradition, a king of the thirteenth century had a group of churches cut straight down into the rock. They are not built up from the ground. Workers carved them out of solid stone, from the roof down. They are still used for worship.

Kilwa was one of the trading towns of the Swahili coast of East Africa. Swahili culture grew from African and Arab trade over centuries, and its language is African in structure with many words from Arabic. The towns sent ivory, gold and timber across the Indian Ocean, using the seasonal winds, and brought back cloth, beads and Chinese porcelain. Kilwa had its own coins and large coral-stone buildings.

Great Zimbabwe is a huge stone city in the south of the continent, built by the ancestors of the Shona people over several centuries. Its walls are made of cut granite blocks, fitted without mortar. When European settlers saw it, some insisted that Africans could not have built it, and invented stories about Phoenicians or lost kings. The evidence says otherwise, and Who Built Great Zimbabwe goes through it. The city was wealthy because it sat between the gold fields inland and the trading ports of the coast.

The lesson across all four places: Africa was connected to the world by sea and desert, and its states were not waiting to be discovered.

The Ottomans: from Osman's dream to the Turkish Republic

The last great Islamic empire started small. Around 1300, a leader named Osman ruled a little border state in western Anatolia. His descendants, the Ottomans, grew by taking land from the weakening Byzantine empire and from rival Turkish states. They also built an effective army and administration, including a corps of infantry called the Janissaries.

The turning point was 1453. Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, after a siege in which giant cannon broke walls that had held for a thousand years. The story is in How the Ottomans Took Constantinople. The city became Istanbul and the Ottoman capital.

In the sixteenth century, under Sultan Suleiman, the empire reached across the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. It controlled the Red Sea, the Black Sea and much of the Mediterranean. It was multi-ethnic and multi-faith, and it let Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities run their own religious courts for many matters. The system was imperfect, and the position of each group changed over time, but it lasted a very long time.

Then the long slide started. Trade shifted to the Atlantic, taxes fell short, the army was costly and the empire lost wars against Russia and Austria. In the nineteenth century, European diplomats began to call it the "sick man of Europe". Why the Ottoman Empire Was Called the Sick Man explains who said that and whether it was fair. The empire sided with Germany in the First World War and lost. The last sultan was removed soon after the war, and the next year Mustafa Kemal Ataturk declared the Turkish Republic.

Common mistakes about Africa and the Islamic world

A few traps catch almost every beginner.

Treating Africa as one place. It is a continent with thousands of languages and many kinds of state. Mali, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe have little in common except that they were African. Always ask which part and which century.
Using "Arab" and "Muslim" as the same word. Most Muslims are not Arabs, and there have always been Arab Christians and Jews. The Ottomans were Turkish. Songhai was African. The Persian-speaking world was a centre of Islamic culture.
Thinking the Middle Ages were dark everywhere. In Europe the early part of that period was poor in some ways. In Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba and Timbuktu, it was a time of books and experiments.
Believing one source. Many African histories come from oral tradition and from outsiders such as travellers. A good reader asks who wrote it and what they wanted.
Reading the past backwards. The borders and politics of the present do not map neatly on to the empires of the past.

Quick reference

Place	Roughly when	What to remember
Aksum	first to seventh centuries	Red Sea trader, early Christian kingdom
Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates	661 to 1258	Damascus, then Baghdad; translation and science
Ghana	before 1000	Gold and salt, kingdom of the Sahel
Mali	1200s and 1300s	Sundiata, Mansa Musa, Timbuktu
Songhai	1400s and 1500s	Largest West African empire; fell to guns
Kilwa and the Swahili coast	1100s to 1500s	Indian Ocean trade
Great Zimbabwe	1100s to 1400s	Stone city of the Shona
Ottoman Empire	c. 1300 to the end of the First World War	Constantinople in 1453; three continents

Questions people ask

Where should a beginner start with African and Islamic history?

Start with one story that you find interesting and then widen out. Many people begin with Mansa Musa or the fall of Constantinople, because both have a clear question and a clear answer. Then read the story that came before and the one that came after. This guide is meant to give you the order.

Was Timbuktu a real city of learning?

Yes. It was a trading town and a centre of Islamic scholarship, with schools around the Sankore mosque and a large trade in manuscripts. The popular image of Timbuktu as a mythical, faraway place came from European writers who had never seen it.

Did Islam spread only by the sword?

No. Armies did conquer large areas in the first century. But conversion was a slow process that happened over generations, and in much of West Africa and along the Indian Ocean coast, Islam spread through merchants and teachers.

Why do some people say Great Zimbabwe was not built by Africans?

That claim came from colonial writers who could not accept that African builders had made something so large. Archaeology shows it was built by the ancestors of the Shona. The claim persists because old books are still in circulation.

Learn this in five minutes

The Mali and the Sahara Trade track covers Ghana, Sundiata, Mansa Musa, the libraries of Timbuktu and the rise and fall of Songhai in five lessons of five minutes each. Each lesson gives you one story and one takeaway, so you can move through the whole region on your commute.