376. Baghdad: The Forging of Islam (Part 1)

The Rest Is History

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 18.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A story of great myth and of huge historical significance, the foundation of Baghdad is a fundamental episode in the development of Islam. The Umayyad Caliphate, the first great Islamic empire, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of China; no dynasty had ever presided over a greater array of conquests. But amongst growing sectarian and internal divisions, discontent on the fringes of the caliphate, and the emergence of influential religious scholars, the Umayyads are challenged by a new power, which pretends to restore Muhammad’s bloodline to rule over Islam. In the first part of our series on the history of Baghdad, Tom and Dominic tell the story of the founders of the city, the Abbasids, and delve into the roots of the revolution that saw them overthrow the Umayyad Caliphate… *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to the rest is history.
0:02.2	For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership
0:07.3	of our much-love chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is, the rest is History. is History.
0:15.0	This episode is
0:18.0	by Diet Coke.
0:20.0	Time for a Diet Coke Break.
0:25.0	Enjoy what you like.
0:27.0	Just how you like it.
0:30.0	This is my taste. What's yours? Celebrate your unique taste with Diet Coke. Dawn in the city by the river. As the streets come to life you haul yourself up from the gutter.
1:02.0	Your name is Basim Ibenissac, and once, when your father
1:08.0	was working on the great mosque of Samara, you might have been somebody. But he was cast into exile and died a poor man.
1:16.2	And you have grown up here in the streets of the old capital, a beggar and nobody, a thief in
1:22.2	the shadows of the ninth century.
1:25.0	Already the streets around you are bustling with people,
1:28.0	the uncounted souls who live here in the round city.
1:31.0	Merchants and traders, hawkers and horkkers and hustlers, slave girls and
1:34.9	soldiers from every corner of the earth from the shores of Africa, the deserts of
1:39.9	Arabia, the frozen wastes of the north, the far steps of the east.
1:45.2	This is the city founded by the Caliph almanseur, home to a million people.
1:50.9	This is the city of peace, greatest richest most colourful most popular city on earth.
1:57.0	This is Baghdad.
2:00.0	So this is the setting for the video game Assassin's Creed Mirage which is out Tom as you will know at the end of this week and we talked in our library of Alexandria episode about this franchise.
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