Stars, Hospitals and Sultans: A Timeline of the Islamic World, 610–1430

From Mecca to Samarkand

1Islam began in the Arabian city of Mecca in the early 600s. Muslims believe that, starting about 610, God revealed messages to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, and that these messages form the Quran. In 622 Muhammad and his followers moved to Medina, a journey called the hijra, which marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. By the time Muhammad died in 632, much of Arabia had joined the Muslim community.

2Under the caliphs who led Muslims after Muhammad, Arab armies took Syria, Egypt and Persia within about twenty years, and by 711 Muslim forces had reached Spain and the Indus River valley. In many conquered lands, people became Muslims slowly, over generations. Later, Islam often spread without armies. Merchants, teachers and scholars carried it along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and across the Sahara. In 1258 Mongol armies destroyed Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, yet in 1295 Ghazan, the Mongol ruler of Persia, became a Muslim himself. On Sumatra, an island on the Indian Ocean trade routes, a gravestone dated 1297 marks the grave of Sultan Malik al-Salih of Pasai, one of the earliest known Muslim rulers in Southeast Asia.

3Islamic practice gave scholars reasons to study the sky. Muslims pray at set times each day while facing the Kaaba in Mecca, and the month of Ramadan begins with the sighting of the new moon. To find the direction of Mecca from distant cities, mathematicians worked out new methods in trigonometry. Rulers also paid for observatories. In 1259 the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi began work at Maragha, in Persia, and in the 1420s Ulugh Beg, the ruler of Samarkand, built an observatory where astronomers measured the positions of more than 1,000 stars.

4Cities also built hospitals, called bimaristans. Many of them treated patients for free, kept records and trained new doctors. The hospital that Sultan Qalawun opened in Cairo in 1284 was meant to serve rich and poor, men and women, and it had separate wards for different illnesses. Schools grew around mosques. In 859 Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, founded a mosque in Fez that grew into al-Qarawiyyin, often called one of the oldest universities still working today. Merchants and pilgrims on the hajj to Mecca carried books, goods and ideas between these cities, and Arabic gave scholars from Spain to Central Asia a shared language.