Professor of Arabic Hugh Kennedy

Hugh N. Kennedy

1. The Conquest and the Age of the Amirs, 711-56 -- 2. The Umayyad Amirate, 756-852 -- 3. Muhammad, al-Mundhir and 'Abd Allah: the Slide into Anarchy, 852-912 -- 4. The Golden Age of the Umayyad Caliphate, 912-76 -- 5. The 'Amirids and the Collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba -- 6. The Taifa Kingdoms -- 7. The Empire of the Almoravids -- 8. The Second Taifas -- 9. The Early Almohad Caliphate -- 10. The Later Almohad Caliphate -- 11. The Nasrids of Granada -- Farewell to al-Andalus -- App. 1. Governors of al-Andalus and Taifa Kings -- App. 2. Family Trees of the Ruling Dynasties of al-Andalus.

A Political History of Al-Andalus

Muslim Spain and Portugal

John Keegan

Namads at war, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Mongols, The Arabs, Turks, the Vikings includes Maps, Chronology of events.

Nomads at War

Mongols, Huns and Vikings

A popular history of the Arab invasions that carved out an empire from Spain to China

How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live in

The Great Arab Conquests

Professor Hugh Kennedy makes no apology for the 'fair share of booze and sex' involved in The Court of the Caliphs. Every element of his story is drawn from the original Arabic texts: 'the writers of the ninth and tenth centuries knew their rulers had their fair share of human frailties and were quite happy to describe them. To produce a sanitized and whitewashed version of history does no service to our understanding of the caliphate.' In this fast-paced and colourful narrative, Professor Hugh Kennedy takes us back to Baghdad and Samarra and the glory days of the Caliphate. From a rebellion planned in a remote desert town to the founding of Baghdad in AD 762, the rule of the Abbasid dynasty was looked back on as the golden era of the Islamic Conquest. The muslim world was ruled by a single sovereign, who waged holy war against the Byzantines and protected the holy cites of Mecca and Medina. For what was to be the last time in history, a mighty empire was based on the ancient Mesopotamian heartland that had once supported the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The Caliphs formed the model for succeeding muslim regimes. From military conquests to patronizing poetry, building palaces, and the formal structure of the court - harems, viziers, eunuchs and the tales of the Arabian Nights - the Abbasid Caliphate and offered a historical ideal for later empires and their rulers to aspire to. Yet the true story of this fascinating empire has been forgotten outside the academic world. And it deserves to be rescued: it is an epic story in every sense, with larger-than-life rulers, exotic slave girls, inventive tortures, and enough court intrigue to frighten a Borgia.

The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty

The Court of the Caliphs

This book investigates the Muslim castles of greater Syria from c.700 to c.1700 from archaeological and historical perspectives.

From the Coming of Islam to the Ottoman Period

Muslim Military Architecture in Greater Syria

Georgina Herrmann

The survival of the mudbrick monuments of Merv against all the odds is little short of a miracle. Mudbrick and rammed earth are not building materials famed for their longevity, rather for their economy. However, some buildings of the Merv oasis in the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan have survived for more than seven centuries and some, unbelievably, for a millennium. Mud was the building material of choice, wonderfully flexible and a superb insulator, ideal for the extremes of the Central Asian climate, and one used by the architects of Merv with ingenuity and virtuosity to construct a wide variety of vaults and domes. The survivng monuments include palatial residences, small houses, summer pavilions and watch towers, as well as the earliest examples of tall conical icehouses. Perhaps the most remarkable are the extraordinary corrugated buildings, which, like the icehouses, dominate the flat landscape of the oasis. These are a distinctly Central Asian type of building with a surprising dearth of parallels elsewhere. Merv's key position during the eighth and ninth centuries may suggest that these remarkable buildings originated in the oasis, and they continued to be built through the Seljuk period. They present a unique record of an otherwise lost architechtural heritage and are of such importance that they form a major part of Merv's application to UNESCO for World Heritage Status. Merv was, of course, one of the great cosmopolitan capitals of the day, a centre of learning, industry and of long-distance trade: it was strategically located on the Great Silk Road'.

Traditional Buildings of the Karakum

Monuments of Merv

A Political History

The Early Abbasid Caliphate

Dr Kennedy gives a full and clear account of the Near East in the formative period of Islamic society. Beginning with the life of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, he goes on to examine the great Arab conquests and the golden age of Islam from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The book closes with the period of political fragmentation in the tenth and eleventh centuries when the early unity was lost, never to be recovered.

Hugh N. Kennedy

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