Archives Islamic History

Archives

Each episode, we break down a key era, event, or figure from Islamic history. From the rise of the first caliphate to the Golden Age of Baghdad to the fall of great empires, we cover it all. Whether you're learning for the first time or filling in the gaps, this is the podcast for you.

  1. 20h ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 4): Convert or Leave

    This is the final episode of a four-part series on Al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia. It covers the century after Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, tracing how a negotiated treaty protecting Muslim religion, property, and law unraveled into forced conversion, clandestine religious practice, and the mass expulsion of 1609 to 1614. The episode follows Cardinal Cisneros's forced-conversion campaign in Granada, the 1502 pragmatic that gave Castile's Muslims an impossible choice between conversion and an exile designed to be unreachable, and the Moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity who lived under Inquisition surveillance for generations. It examines the 1504 Oran Fatwa, a real ruling by the jurist Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah al-Maghrawi al-Wahrani that permitted religious dissimulation for survival, and the Aljamiado manuscripts, Spanish texts written secretly in Arabic script, including a Qur'an hidden behind a wall in Cútar and found in 2003. It closes with the 1609 Edict of Expulsion and what remained afterward in the Spanish language, place names, and architecture. This episode connects directly to the earlier days of the series, including the dhimma protection system covered on day four and the convivencia debate over coexistence and control, revisiting both from the other side of the power now doing the deciding. Research draws on the Capitulations of Granada, the Oran Fatwa, the 1502 and 1609 royal decrees, the Aljamiado manuscript corpus, the chronicler Damian Fonseca, and modern sources including Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History, al-Islam.org, and the Islamic Institute of Toronto's coverage of the Morisco expulsion. Content Warning: this episode discusses forced religious conversion, religious persecution, the Spanish Inquisition, and the mass expulsion and displacement of a civilian population, including references to violence, kidnapping, and death during the expulsion. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  2. 1d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 4): Convert or Leave

    When Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492, the terms were negotiated, not imposed. The Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the kingdom's Muslims their religion, their property, their own law, and their language. This episode is the fourth and final installment in the Al Andalus series, and it covers the century that almost never makes the popular retelling: the slow, deliberate unraveling of that guarantee. The story moves from Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros's forced conversions in 1499, through Castile's 1502 decree ordering Granada's Muslims to convert or leave, to the same ultimatum reaching Aragon in 1526. It follows the Moriscos, the converted families who lived afterward as legal Christians while historians and the Spanish Inquisition alike still argue over how many secretly kept practicing Islam. It covers the aljamiado manuscripts, Spanish devotional texts written in Arabic script so families could keep reading scripture the law had banned, and the Fez jurists who were formally asked, and formally answered, how a believer could survive under total compulsion. Philip II's 1567 decree banning the Arabic language, Morisco dress, and public bathhouses triggers the Alpujarras revolt, put down by Don John of Austria. The episode ends where the century does: the expulsion decrees of 1609 to 1614 under Philip III, which removed an estimated 275,000 to 300,000 people, most of them to North Africa. The episode closes on a deliberate contrast with the rest of the series: the dhimma protections covered on Day Four, and the Toledo translation movement that carried Andalusi scholarship into Europe on Day Six. It asks what a legal guarantee is actually worth once the government that signed it decides otherwise, and it traces the roughly four thousand Spanish words of Arabic origin, and the Arabic place names still on the map, that outlasted the decrees anyway. Sources include the Capitulations of Granada, Ahmad al-Maqqari's Nafh al-Tib, the Maliki fatwa tradition associated with al-Wansharisi and the jurists of Fez, Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History, and L.P. Harvey's Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 for chronology. Content Warning: this episode discusses forced religious conversion, state persecution of a religious minority, the suppression of an armed revolt, and a mass forced expulsion. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  3. 2d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 3): Thirty Kingdoms

    Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain. After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of Cordoba collapsed into civil war and then into roughly thirty small, competing kingdoms called taifas. These courts were militarily weak but culturally extraordinary, producing some of the finest Andalusi poetry, medicine, and astronomy of the age while paying tribute to survive. When Alfonso the Sixth of Leon-Castile took Toledo in 1085, the taifa rulers, al-Mu'tamid among them, invited the Almoravids across the strait to save them. The episode follows that decision through the Battle of Sagrajas, the Almoravid annexation of the very kingdoms that had summoned them, al-Mu'tamid's exile and death at Aghmat, and a second, near-identical pattern a generation later when the Almohads displaced the Almoravids in turn. The episode also follows Ibn Rushd, known in Latin Europe as Averroes, born in Cordoba and rising to become qadi and court physician under the same Almohad dynasty that would later exile him, and traces how Toledo, the city whose loss triggered this whole chain of events, became within a generation the place where his commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and taught in European universities for centuries. The episode closes at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the fall of Cordoba, Valencia, and Seville to Castile and Aragon in the decades that followed, setting up the final kingdom of Granada. Sources include Ibn Bassam's al-Dhakhira, Ibn Idhari's al-Bayan al-Mughrib, the captivity poetry of al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, the elegies of Ibn al-Labbana, Ibn 'Alqama's account of Valencia under El Cid, Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History, and Richard Fletcher's The Quest for El Cid. Content Warning: this episode includes descriptions of war, siege, captivity, and a family's descent into poverty in exile. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  4. 3d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 3): Thirty Kingdoms

    This episode covers the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and the century and a half that followed, when al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain and Portugal, fractured into roughly thirty rival kingdoms known as the taifas, and then watched two North African dynasties, the Almoravids and the Almohads, arrive as rescuers and stay as rulers. It opens with al-Mansur ibn Abi Aamir's 997 raid on Santiago de Compostela and traces the fitna civil war, the 1031 abolition of the caliphate, the wealthy and militarily fragile taifa courts of rulers like the poet-king al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad of Seville, the mercenary career of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (El Cid), the 1086 Battle of al-Zallaqa, and the Almoravid annexation that followed it. It then follows the same pattern repeat under the Almohads, and spends real time on the philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, whose commentaries on Aristotle were burned in Cordoba and Marrakesh even as they were being translated into Latin a few hundred miles away in Toledo. It's a story about what happens when a divided society's only remaining option is to invite in a stronger outside power, and about how ideas can outlast the governments that produced them and the governments that tried to destroy them. Drawing on Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi's chronicle al-Bayan al-Mughrib, the court poetry of Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli, and modern scholarship including Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Ibn Rushd. Content Warning: this episode includes descriptions of medieval warfare, the sacking of a city, and the public burning of books. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  5. 4d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 2): Madinat al-Zahra

    In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, ruler of Cordoba, took the title of caliph, rejecting the lesser title his family had held for five generations and setting himself against two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim world, in Baghdad and in North Africa. This episode follows what he built to back that claim up: Madinat al-Zahra, a purpose-built palace city on three stepped terraces outside Cordoba, complete with a mint, a reception hall built specifically to overawe foreign envoys, and, under his son al-Hakam II, one of the largest libraries the medieval world had seen, run day to day by a woman named Lubna who had been born enslaved. The episode then turns to a different population in the same cities: the Christians and Jews who lived under Muslim rule in al-Andalus as ahl al-dhimma, "the protected people," a legal status that guaranteed their lives, property, and worship while also taxing them, subordinating their legal testimony, and restricting their public standing. It traces the 850s martyrs of Cordoba, a small group of Mozarab Christians who deliberately broke the one law that held the whole arrangement together, and Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish physician and diplomat who rose to the top of the same caliph's court while still living under that same unequal law. Together, the two threads ask the same question from opposite directions: what does it mean when the same legal and physical architecture, at the same moment in history, produces both genuine protection and genuine inequality, without either canceling out the other. Drawing on Ibn Hayyan's al-Muqtabis, al-Maqqari's Nafh al-Tib, Eulogius of Cordoba's own account of the martyrs he chronicled and ultimately joined, and modern research from Lost Islamic History and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, this episode is part two of a four-part series on Muslim Iberia. Content Warning: This episode describes the execution of religious dissenters in 9th-century Cordoba, including public accounts of martyrdom. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  6. 5d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 2): Madinat al-Zahra

    In 929, Abd al-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, took the title his ancestors had refused for a hundred and seventy three years: caliph. Seven years later he began building Madinat al-Zahra, a palace city outside Cordoba with a reported four thousand marble columns and fifteen thousand doors, designed to make foreign ambassadors feel the size of his claim before a word of diplomacy was spoken. This episode covers the peak of Umayyad Cordoba: the caliphal proclamation and its rivalry with the Fatimid caliphate in North Africa, the construction of Madinat al-Zahra, and Caliph al-Hakam II's royal library, said by later chroniclers to hold four hundred thousand volumes. It then turns to the legal status of Christians and Jews under Islamic rule as ahl al-dhimma, the protected people, tracing both the real protections and the real subordination written into that law, from the Cordoba martyrs' movement of the 850s to Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish physician who ran the caliphate's foreign policy. The episode draws on Ibn Hayyan's Muqtabis, al-Maqqari's Nafh al-Tib, and the chroniclers Ibn Sa'id and Ibn Bashkuwal for the library's disputed volume count, alongside Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History and Muslim Heritage for modern context. For the Cordoba martyrs' story, the episode relies on the only detailed contemporary account, written by Eulogius of Cordoba, a Christian chronicler who was executed for the same offense he documented. Content Warning: this episode describes the public executions of religious dissenters in ninth century Cordoba, including a beheading and post-execution display of a body, in factual historical terms. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  7. 6d ago

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 1): The Crossing of 711

    In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber general serving the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic, opening a peninsula already fractured by a royal succession crisis. Within seven years, most of Iberia was under Muslim rule, won through a mix of battlefield conquest and negotiated treaties like the one signed with the Visigothic nobleman Theodemir in 713. This episode covers the two founding chapters of Al-Andalus: the invasion of 711 and, forty-five years later, the arrival of Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya, a young Umayyad prince who escaped the Abbasid revolution's massacre of his family in Damascus in 750 and spent roughly five years as a fugitive across North Africa. In 755 he crossed into Iberia with almost nothing, defeated the ruling governor Yusuf al-Fihri the following year, and founded the independent emirate of Cordoba, a state his descendants would rule for close to three hundred years. The episode also separates legend from record along the way: the story that Tariq burned his own ships, and the outsized claim that a 732 skirmish near Tours "saved Europe," are both addressed and set aside as later embellishments. And it examines the quieter, stranger choice that gives the episode its name: Abd al-Rahman refused to declare himself caliph, keeping the lesser title of emir even as Cordoba's Friday sermon quietly stopped naming the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, a marker of independence far more understated than any coronation. Sources include the classical Arabic chronicles of Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Ibn al-Qutiyya, Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi, al-Maqqari, and al-Tabari, along with Ibn Khaldun's later analysis of dynastic rise and fall, and modern synthesis from Lost Islamic History, Yaqeen Institute, and al-Islam.org. Content Warning: this episode includes descriptions of the killing of a fleeing family member, the massacre of a deposed ruling family, and the display of severed heads as proof of a battlefield victory. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

  8. Aug 12

    Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 1): The Crossing of 711

    In the year 711, a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the narrow strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated Roderic, the last Visigothic king, in a battle whose exact location history still cannot confirm. Within seven years, most of the peninsula had changed hands, not only by conquest but by negotiation, as the Treaty of Theodemir shows: a Visigothic lord who kept his lands, his people, and his church in exchange for an annual tribute of wheat, honey, and vinegar. This episode covers the two founding moments of Muslim Iberia, known to history as al-Andalus. The first is the crossing itself, and the legend of the burned ships that the earliest Arabic sources never mention. The second, forty-five years later, is quieter and just as consequential: Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya, a twenty-year-old survivor of the Abbasid massacre of his own family, fled across North Africa for five years, crossed into Iberia in 755, defeated the governor Yusuf al-Fihri near Cordoba, and became emir. And then he did something almost nobody expected. He never claimed the title of caliph. His independence from Baghdad was declared not with a crown or a new coin, but with a single name quietly dropped from the Friday sermon. That single act of restraint, more than any battle, is what let the Umayyad line he founded rule from Cordoba for nearly three hundred years, and it sets up the more dramatic claim to the caliphate that Cordoba would finally make over a century later. This episode draws on Ibn Abd al-Hakam's ninth-century account of the conquest, Ibn Idhari's chronicle of the Cordoban emirs, al-Maqqari's later compilation of Andalusi tradition, and modern scholarship from Lost Islamic History and the Yaqeen Institute, alongside Maria Rosa Menocal's work on the palm-tree ode attributed to Abd al-Rahman himself. Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes. 📲 Download the Archives app here 🌐 Learn more here 📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here  If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.

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About

Each episode, we break down a key era, event, or figure from Islamic history. From the rise of the first caliphate to the Golden Age of Baghdad to the fall of great empires, we cover it all. Whether you're learning for the first time or filling in the gaps, this is the podcast for you.

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  • Creator
    Archives
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    77
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Archives Islamic History
  • Show Website
    Archives Islamic History

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