Islamic Polity – Social Formations – History DU Notes

Presentation on Islamic Polity

ABU BAKR

Abu bakr was born in Mecca, in October 573 AD to Uthman Abu Quahafa & Salma Umm-ul-khair. He was also called Abdullah-ibn-Abi-Quhafa and Al-Siddiq aswell. He was born in the same tribe, that of Muhammad, Quraysh.

He spent his childhood developing fondness for camels and played with camel foals and goats like any other Arab child. This in turn earned him the name Abu Bakr meaning father of foal of the camel.

He was born in a rich merchant family. While growing up he went to business trips with his father in caravans to various cities. On growing up he joined his family business of cloth merchant. He had a flourishing business and soon became the chief of the tribe. He usually went to business trip to Yemen and other Arabian countries.

Once when he returned from his trip from Yemen, he got to know that Muhammad had proclaimed his prophet hood and this led to Abu Bakr accept Islam. But one of his wife did not accept Islam to whom he divorced and a son , who he disowned whom he would face on the opposite side of battle of Uhud.

After accepting Islam he had a tough time in propagating Muhammad’s faith to people in Mecca leading to various persecutions and at one time somewhere around 613 AD he was even beaten to unconscious. This incident led Abu Bakr to migrate to Abyssinia for some time. Whwn he returned back to Mecca he engaged his daughter to Muhammad to strengthen ties between them.

In 622 AD, along with Muhammad Abu bakr and the whole of ummah migrated to Yathrib or modern day Medina due to growing resentment in the Meccan people. This marks the beginning of the the muslim calendar called Hijrah. In Yathrib itself the final marriage ceremony of Muhammad an Aisha took place. Here as well Abu Bakr started his cloth trade and it really flourished.

Now, moving onto military expedition of Abu Bakr.

He took part in the Battle of Badr in 624 AD, but only guarded Muhammad’s tent rather than fighting in the war. He fought in the Battle of Uhud in 625 AD where his son Abdul-Rahman-ibn-Abu Bakr was on the opposite side. Though Muslims lost the battle. He again fought in the Battle of Trench where muslims won the battle due to the strategy they used. The treaty of Hudaybiyyah (between Mecca and Medina) saw Abu Bakr as one of the witness. During the expedition of Tabuk, he donated all his wealth when Muhammad welcomed donations from all the Muslims.

In 631 AD he was sent by Muhammad to lead 300 Muslims to perform Hajj for the first time in Islam history, and was called Amir-ul-Hajj.

The unexpected death of Muhammad in 632 AD threw the whole Muslim community or Ummah into confusion as before dying he did not name any successor for ummah. After the death of Muhammad many said that every tribe should have their own leader or Imam But Abu Bakr and Ummar wanted a united community. According to standard Sunni accounts Muhammad’s friend and father-in-law prevented the Medina Muslims to break away from the ummah and then was named the first caliph of the Rashidun period.

Abu Bakr or Khalifat Rasulallah

According to P.K Hitti during his reign Abu Bakr lived in patriarchal simplicity. In first six months he travelled back and forth daily from Sunh(his trading center) where he lived in a modest house with wife Habibah.

His reign was short but crucial one. During his time He was preoccupied with Riddah wars (temptation period) apostasy, when various tribes tried to break away from ummah though their reason was completely economic and political. Abu Bakr managed these uprisings with wit and clemency and thus completed the unification of Arabia. During this time he also defeated the self-proclaimed prophet Musaylimah at the battle of Yamana.

He then announced jihad against Palestine, Byzantine and Sassanid empire as he thought two kingdoms at the border of Arabia might be dangerous. He began his conquest by attacking Iraq first as it was the richest town of the Sassanid empire. It was started from The battle of chains, battle of Rivers, battle of walaja, battle of Ullais and finally took over at the siege of Hirar.

On 23 August 634, Abu Bakr fell sick and did not recover due to his old age. There are two accounts about the sickness of Abu Bakr. One account states that 8 August 634 was a cold day and when Abu Bakr took a bath, he caught a chill. Another account indicates that, about a year before, along with some other companions, Harith bin Kaladah and Attab bin Usaid, he had eaten some poisoned food which did not affect him for a year.

Abu Bakr developed high fever and was confined to bed. His illness was prolonged and when his condition worsened he felt that his end was near. Realizing his death was near, he sent for Ali and requested him to perform his ghusl since Ali had also done it for Muhammad.

Abu Bakr felt that he should nominate his successor so that the issue should not be a cause of dissension among the Muslims after his death, though there was already controversy over Ali not having been appointed.He appointed Umar as his successor after discussing with some companions. Some of them favored the nomination and others disliked it, due to the tough nature of Umar.

Well we all have read about how Abu Bakr was a good friend of Muhammad and how he was accountable and compassionate towards him. So here is a totally different take on Abu bakr. This is an extract from M Watt’s article.

“When Muhammad Mustafa, the Messenger of God, died, Abu Bakr (and Umar) did not attend his funeral. They went first to the outhouse of Saqifa, and then to the Great Mosque, to get and to count their votes. In the meantime, Muhammad had been buried.

When Abu Bakr took charge of the government, he did not allow the Muslims to observe a period of mourning at the death of their Prophet. There was neither a state funeral for Muhammad Mustafa, the Last and the Greatest Messenger of God on Earth; nor was there any official or even non-official mourning over his demise. It appeared as if his death and his burial were matters of least importance in the psyche of his own companions.

By Ayush Ranjan

Umar-Ibn Al Khattab

After the prophet’s death in 632 A.D.,there were four caliphs who followed suit, they were referred to as the Rashidun or the “Rightly guided ones”. Abu-Bakr was the first caliph and following his death in 634 A.D., Umar- Ibn-Al-khatab was anointed as his successor and his caliphate stretched from 634-644 A.D.

Umar’s name according to moslem tradition means the greatest in early Islam after that of Muhammad. Umar like the prophet ,was a man who lived a very simple and frugal life,his lifestyle has often deemed to be extremely ostentatious.Now there were certain goals which he concertedly pursued

a)maintenance of the purity of the faith

b)the upholding of justice

c)ascendancy of Islam and the Arabians

instances delving into the aforementioned aspects ,be it his insistence on establishing mosques in all ‘amsars’ or garrison towns, or him stressing on family values and the active promotion of the ascetic values of the prophet. While his condemnation of drunkenness is well known as he put his own sun to death after he displayed the aforementioned behavior. It were such values alongside his sense of piety,justice and patriarchal simplicity that lead to him being idolized by moslem writers and were seen as virtues the caliph out to posses.

Now in regard to his role in the public sphere. the Ghazu Raids were kicked off during Abu-Bakr’s tenure as caliph, gained significant momentum under umar’s tenure.One needs to understand the reason behind the Ghazu raids was not to fulfill some divine nadir with umar being the sole ruler of the world, instead it was borne out of paucity of resources due to peace agenda of Islam which established peace in the peninsula, prevented war amongst the tribes.

By means of these raids,not only was the paucity of resources being dealt with but it also helped in bringing order to the lawless nature of the Arab tribes and preserving the unity of the ummah by concentrating the energies towards the Ghazu raids against the non-Muslims. Umar subsequently took on the title of Amir-Al-Mumnim( means commander of the faithful), thereby gaining legitimacy as the military chief of the Arab tribal’s while leading them to pastures a new.

Victory was later achieved against the Persians at the battle of Qadisiyyah(637 A.D.)

resulting in the fall at the capital of Ctesiphon. While resistance on part of the Byzantine Empire prevented them from making further inroads into Anatolia.Subsequent achievements include victory at the Battle of Yarmuk (636A.D.) in North Palestine,Jerusalem(638 A.D.),controlling the whole of Syria,Palestine and Egypt by 641 A.D. The expanse of the empire stretched from Pyrenees to the Himalayas, this is significant because what had once been a random assortment of tribal groups had now become a concrete political entity which had inflicted major defeats on two world empires.

While the military prowess of the Arab tribal was instrumental in inflicting the aforementioned defeats but there were certain internal troubles plaguing the two empires which played there part in their defeats, namely

in case of the Persian empire, the already depleted resources due to wars with the byzantine empire, a factional strife and flooding which destroyed the country’s agriculture as well as the fact that the Sassinids, showed greater allegiance to the Arabs than their alien masters . While in case of the Byzantine empire the main internal conflict arose out of the masses being alienated by the Greek Orthodox Establishment.

Thus the membership of the Ummah, was a transcendental experience and their new found success was also endorsed in the Quran , which states that an orderly, correctly guided society, must prosper because it was in tune with god’s views.

Further on , upon the establishment of the empire, the Islamic law divide the world into the Dar-al-islam(the house of Islam) which was in  perpetual conflict with Dar- al-harb i.e is the house of war. The muslims had now realised that they had reached the end of their expansion and started living in peace with non-muslim world. As understood by the treatment to the Dhimmis who were protected subjects who followed other religions/religious sects like Judaism, Christianity or Zoroastrianism.

But this period of triumph came to an end in November 644 A.D., when Umar died at the zenith of his life by the poisoned dagger of a christian Persian slave, who had a personal grievance against him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karen Armstrong Islam: a short history

P.K Hiiti  the arbs :a short history

W.M. Watt Islamic philosophy and theology

By Dhruv Sekhar

UTHMAN IBN AFFAN-THE THIRD CALIPH OF ISLAM

In 644, after the tragic setback in the expanding Muslim empire, the death of Omar, Uthman was chosen to be the third khalifa. Uthman was years old. Al Ghani (The generous), Zun Noorain (Possessor of two lights) were his titles. Uthman was born in 11 November 577CE in Taif, Arabia. He belonged to the powerful and the wealthy Umayyad clan. Uthman was old when he became the khalifa. He wasn’t as forceful like the previous caliphs. Uthman was mellow, kind-hearted, very generous, and shy. He spent the days praying to Allah and never missed out a chance to help the poor and the needy. Due to his bashful nature, the prophet once said “Angels feel shy when they see Uthman”. Uthman offered his allegiance to Abu bakar for Ridda wars and also to Umar. During the time of Umar, when a famine broke out a large caravan of food was sent by Uthman. He did many great things during his rule but his most outstanding achievement was the compilation of the Quran. Around 653 he organized the Quran, put it together and made the version understandable even by the non- Arabs. He sent standard copies of the holy Quran to the capital of each province. Conquests under him continued northward, eastward in Iran and westward from Egypt. They seized Cyprus from the Byzantines ejecting them from the western Mediterranean and reached Tripoli. In the east, they took much of Armenia, penetrated the Caucasus, and established Muslim rule as far as the River Oxus in Iran, Herat in Afghanistan and Sind in Indian subcontinent. He bought a lot of administration reforms and softened the economic policies. Under him the empire was divided into twelve provinces. The people became economically more prosperous and politically enjoyed a larger degree of freedom. He looked upon the welfare of the people and also developed a custom to free the slaves, help widows, take care of the orphans and give unlimited charity every Friday. He constructed large buildings, barracks, cantonments were enlarged and stables were extended. New markets under him burst out, and water supplies were given special attention. His patience and endurance were among his characteristics that made him a great leader however, new realities emerged. Uthman practiced nepotism. He appointed only fellow members of the Umayyad clan to administrative positions. During the first 6 years of his rule Muslim community prospered but later on the tremendous energy of the Ummah slowed down. Uthman was born into a rich family and enjoyed a luxurious life since childhood. He had the habit of lavish spending and hence he couldn’t make any proper financial plans. The people also started to take advantages of the liberties he gave, thus these all started to create headache for the state. Towards the end of his rule many Muslims died for the cause of Islam due to military engagements. Uthman faced a lot of trials. He was accused of abandoning the traditional ways of prophet and his successors. He was also criticized of tempering with the sacred text. When he made his own palace lavishly with his own money since he was from an aristocratic background, he was pointed fingers of using the state’s money. Discontentment grew militarily, politically, and in the rest of empire. They stopped food and water supply to his house and rebelled against him brutally. Bloodsheds continued in the empire. Uthman was encouraged to fight against the rebels. Uthman was very meek and humble he simply said “No, I do not want to spill the blood of Muslims, to save my neck”. Uthman was assassinated in 20 June 656; a group of non-Arabs from Egypt sneaked into his house and killed him. The rebels did not even allow the dead body to be carried off to the graveyard. Uthman was assassinated on the 18 Dhul Haj. After the assassination of Uthman a civil war erupted leading to the division of Ummah. Finally the long awaited dream, Ali became the new fourth khalifa.

By Bonomi K Murumi

Ali Ibn Abi Talib (born 600 A.D Mecca- died January 661 AD in Kuffah, Iraq)

Ali was the nephew of the Prophet and by virtue of his marriage to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, he was also his son-in-law. Ali was one of the youngest converts of Islam and was also a constant companion to the Prophet. Ali from very early on had strong claims to lead the Islamic ummah of Muhammad. Firstly he was the closest kin of the Prophet and many of the early ansars believed that Ali displayed the same benevolent and charismatic qualities that the Prophet had possessed during his lifetime. Ali, undeniably was an important figure in the now ever expansive Islamic ummah, but after the Prophet’s death as historian Patricia Crone states, “a clique of followers on the advice of Umar elected Abu Bakr as the First Caliph”. Thus began the life of the Rashiduns or the Rightly Guided Caliphs, of which Ali was to be the fourth in line.

Growing discontentment- A Precursor to the Fitnah

Uthman the third caliph followed the policies of his predecessor but he was not very skillful and lacked the administrative acumen of Umar. Moreover, Uthman though an early convert, was of the Banu-Umayah clan most of them who like their leader Abu Sufyan opposed Muhammad till the last minute. This added to the fact that Uthman showed nepotism towards his kinsmen of the Umayyad clan which did not particularly go down well with some sections of the early ansar families of Medina. This contentment led to the assassination of Uthman by some Arab soldiers stationed in the Fustat garrison town. After negotiations had gone sour, they broke into Uthman’s simple house in Medina, killing him and declared Ali as the caliph.

Ali was in a tight predicament after accepting the position of caliph in 656 AD. The Umayyads under Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, Muawiyyah (kin to Uthman) and two of Aisha’s kinsmen Talah and al-Zubayr demanded vengeance for the killing of Uthman. Ali’s own partisans or the Shiites were in sympathies with the assassins as they felt Uthman deserved this fate as he ruled unjustly and had been a Zaliman. Ali was a good devout man torn up in circumstances not knowing what to do and not wanting to disown his partisans, he took refuge in Kufah, which he made his capital.

Fitnah- 656 to 661 AD

Fitnah is the period of trials and temptations as Quranic interpretations state that God was testing the strength, fidelity and unity of the ummah. Taking matters from a historic perspective, the fitnah was a backlash as the open gashes of Uthman’s corpse cried for vengeance. The rebels led by Aisha had marched from Medina to Basrah. After taking refuge in Kufah, Ali decided that the rebellion must be crushed and the rebels defeated. The outcome was the Battle of the Camel in which Aisha was defeated. Though no harm was done to her, Talah and Al-Zubayr were killed. Historian Karen Armstrong argues that by not allowing his soldiers to annex the rich agricultural land Sawad near Kufah, the seeds of dissent were sown in Ali’s camp. The entire faction of the rebellion was not suppressed as Syria under the Umayyad governorship of Muawiyyah out rightly rejected Ali’s claim to the Caliphate. After a series of futile skirmishes, an arbitration was reached between Ali and Muawiyyah at Siffin on the upper Euphrates in 657 AD. Muawiyyah’s supporters put copies of the Quran on the tip of their lances and called for neutral Muslims to arbitrate in accordance to Allah’s will. The arbitration went against Ali and put under pressure from some section of his camp, he accepted the verdict. Feeling thus empowered, Muawiyyah seized the opportunity and had Ali deposed and proclaimed himself as the caliph in Baghdad. A section of Ali’s orthodox supporters withdrew from the party as they believed that by accepting defeat Ali had betrayed the spirit of the Quran. According to them, Ali too had become a Zaliman like Uthman. These secessionists came to be known as Kharajites and they were a rather fundamentalist group. Though majority of the Kharajites were suppressed by Ali, pockets of them remained and came to be the undoing bane of Ali. His harsh treatment of the Kharajites further jeopardized his political position and this proved beneficial for Muawiyyah. Finally this rupturing of the Shiite fold took its toll as in January 661 AD when Ali was murdered by a Kharajite and thus the second greatest man in Islamic history ceased to be.

By Chopel Mooney Bhutia

By Candace Andrews

The Late Umayyad rule and their decline

My presentation will cover the period of the caliphs from 685 AD up to the eventual decline of the Umayyad clan in the middle of the 8^th century. The themes that I’ll focus on will be the rule of Caliph Abd-al-Malik (685-705), al-Walid (705-715), Umar II (717-720) and Hisham (724-743), their administrative policies and contributions to Islamic culture. Finally, I’ll brief u on the possible reasons for the decline of the Umayyad regime as put forward by Karen Armstrong and Ira Lapidus.

• The death of Yazid I and his infant son, Muawiyyah II led to the eruption of the 2^nd fitnah ( civil war) which was seen by rebel and opposition groups as an opportunity to attack Umayyad rule. Ibn-al-Zubayr, who was one of the sons of a rebel who fought against Ali in the first fitnah, proclaimed himself as caliph after achieving widespread recognition.
• The extremist group, Kharajites started revolts in Iraq and Iran, while the Shii Muslims opposed Zubayr’s ascension to the throne asserting that the rightful caliph must be a descendant of Ali.
• But it was the Syrian forces, led by Manwan, who was an Umayyad cousin of Muawiyyah I, and his son Abd-al-Malik, who challenged the legitimacy of ibn-al-Zubayr. In 690, they defeated and killed Zubayr himself. Abd-al-Malik was made the Caliph.

The Later Caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty – their policies, contributions and failures

• He was able to revive Umayyad rule, though he assumes the figure of an absolute monarch running a centralized administration.
• He maintained the unity of the ummah against the local Arab chieftains and was able to silence the Kharajites and Shii Muslims due to his successful reinstating of peace.
• Arabic replaced Persian as the official language for the first time. He arranged for the translation of the tax registers, reports and copies from Greek and Persian into Arabic.
• Islamic coinage was introduced for the first time, decorated with Quranic verses, in place of Byzantine money. The new system did away with Christian and Zoroastrian symbolism and introduced gold and silver coins with Arabic script to symbolize the sovereignty of the state.
• In Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691, which is the first major Islamic monument, which asserted the supremacy of Islam in this holy city which had a large Christian majority. Thereafter, the Dome becomes a characteristic feature of Muslim architecture.
• In foreign policy, Abd-al-Malik and his successor Al-Walid resumed Arab conquest on a massive scale and brought North Africa, Spain, Transoxania and Sind into the Muslim empire.
• In domestic policy, Abd-al-Malik de-militarized the Arabs in the garrison towns of Iraq. Henceforth, Syrian forces replaced Iraqi soldiers in all the eastern campaigns.
• Under Umar II, the Caliphate proposed a major revision of the rules and principles of taxation for the sake of greater uniformity and Caliph Hisham implemented these policies in Khurasan, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The crisis of the Umayyad dynasty

• By the end of the reign of Umar II, the empire started disintegrating. Umar had to pay for a disastrous attempt to conquer Constantinople, which had not only failed but led to a heavy loss of manpower and weaponry.
• Umar was the first to encourage the dhimmis (non-Muslim community) to convert to Islam, and they were eager to join the faith, but since they no longer had to pay the poll tax (jizyah), which was a tax levied on non-Muslims, the new policy resulted in a drastic loss of revenue according to Karen Armstrong. Also, seeing the flexibility of Umar’s rule, the converts claimed exemption from land tax too as a form of equality with Arabs. But Umar emphasized that land taxes applied to both Arab landlords and converts. However, Lapidus was of the view that though the poll tax was abolished, Arab settlers and converts were expected to pay the sadaqat (Muslim alms tax), which partially compensated for the loss of poll-tax revenues. Karen Armstrong felt Umar’s Islamic policies were not good for the economy of the ailing empire.
• Hisham was a strong and effective caliph, who was able to put the empire back on a sound economic basis, but he achieved this by making the state more rigidly centralized and his own rule more autocratic. Though the empire benefited politically, the problem of autocracy was unacceptable to the devout especially the new schools of Islamic thought like the Qadarites, Mutazilites and the Murjites. The Shiis became increasingly active pressing for the legitimacy of Ali’s lineage while the more radical Shii (ghulat) blamed all the present problems of the ummah on the first 3 caliphs, Abu-Bakr, Umar and Uthman. Thus, the religious felt alienated from Umayyad rule which was becoming imperialistic and less focused on the underlying principles of the Quran. This is the view of Patricia Crone.
• The converts to Islam objected to their second-class status. There were tribal divisions among the Arab Muslims, some of whom wanted to settle down and integrate with the subject people and others who wanted to continue the old expansionist wars. But the Islamic sentiment had become so widespread that the various revolts and uprisings nearly all adopted a religious ideology. Armstrong felt this was certainly true of the revolt that finally toppled the Umayyad dynasty, with the Abbasid faction capitalizing on the widespread desire to see a member of Muhammad’s family on the throne, which was the same intention of the Shii Muslims.
• After the second civil war, the Yemenis came to represent those demilitarized Arabs who were transformed into city-dwellers engaged in trade or as village landowners and cultivators. The Yemenis accepted the assimilation of Arab and non-Arab populations. They desired peace rather than continuous wars of expansion, wanted financial equality for Arabs and converts and the decentralization of Caliphal power. They tended to stress Islamic ideals rather than purely Arab identifications. By contrast, the Qays represented those Arabs who were actively engaged in the army and who depended on their income from conquests, government administration and tax revenues. They pushed for centralized political power, military expansion and preservation of Arab privileges at the expense of non-Arab migrants and non-Muslims. The struggle among these competing interests came to a head during the reign of Umar II. He knew that the only solution was to pacify converts while retaining Arab supremacy. Rather he held that the empire could no longer be exclusively Arab but had to accommodate all Muslims. Thus, he encouraged conversion and their acceptance as equal to Arabs, which didn’t go down well with the Qays.
• At the death of the Caliph Hisham in 743, the Umayyad regime collapsed and the Shii, Abbasids, Kharajites, tribal factions and disgruntled governors all attempted to establish their supremacy through a series of revolts and outbreaks. The reason for this outbreak lay in the military exhaustion of the Syrian state. The late Umayyad caliphs had increasingly used the military power of Syria to control other Arabs. Thus, the Umayyad dynasty now found itself without the military basis for effective central government.

By Carl Jaison

ABASSID (750 -1258)

By the end of the reign of Umar II, which is in 720 AD, Things were looking grim for the Umayyad Dynasty. The policy followed in the empire was that the ‘Dhimmis’ or Non Muslims had to pay heavy taxes, therefore these people started converting to Islam to gain exemption from the taxes and this led to a massive loss in revenue.

The converts to Islam or MAWALIS or Clients also felt alienated and objected to their 2^nd class status and there were various revolts and uprisings, which finally toppled the Umayyad dynasty.

The Abbasid faction capitalized on the widespread desire to see a member of Muhammad’s family on the throne and emphasized the descent of their leader from Muhammad’s Uncle – Abbas. They defeated the last Umayyad ruler- Mansur II in 749 AD in Iraq. They projected themselves as SHIIS, but they betrayed people and shed this religious camouflage and showed that they wanted to make the caliphate an absolute monarchy.

Abu Al Abbas, the First Caliph, was aware of the discontentment that brought the Umayyad down and even though they were Arabs themselves, their victory ended the old practice of giving Arabs superior status in the empire. They had a more egalitarian approach and any man could work in the administration.

Al Mansur from 754- 775 was one of the greatest Abbasid rulers who founded a new capital i.e.Baghdad, Which became the centre of political, economic and cultural activities. He developed an evolved structure of bureaucracy and administration.

The Third Abbasid Caliph – Al Mahdi declared the holy war on BYZANTINES, which was continued by his son, Harun Al Rashid (786-809) .Hence the Abbasids intensified control over the territory of the erstwhile Byzantine Empire. By Harun ul Rashid’s time, the transformation to an absolute monarchy was complete. There was symbolism like courtiers kissing the ground when they came into his presence and an executioner standing behind him to show that he was the final arbitror ofjustice and had the power to decide between life and death for people.

Al Mamun (814) started his reign with a civil war; A Shii rebellion and Kharjaite revolt in Khurasan. The later Caliphs oscillated in their support for one group to another in a time when the Sunni Muslims were consolidating as a group.

An important change was introduced by Al – Muqtadir (902- 932 BC) who adopted the policy of giving provinces to governors or military officials instead of paying them in cash. It resulted in an increasing political authority, in the hands of governors who in several cases began to rule as de-facto rulers. This increasing decentralization severely weakened the authority of the Abbasid Caliphs. After being in a puppet state, the dynasty was totally routed by the Mongols in 1258.

By Chetan Chawla

Sir, Avantika will be sending her write-up separately as I couldn’t download her file which is of an unsupported format.

BIBLOGRAPHY

*The Formation of Islam : Jonathan P. Berkey

*Islam: A short History : Karen Armstrong

*History Of Arabs : P.K. Hitti

*Muhammad, Prophet & Statesman : W.M Watt

*Islam: The Untold Story: Tom Holland

*W.M Watt’s Article

* Patricia Crone- Meccan trade and the rise of islam

Slaves on horses: The origin of Islamic Polity

*I. Lapidus- The Origin of Islamic Societies

*Marshall Hodgson- The Adventure of Islam, Vol 1, 1974

Team members

1. Ayush Ranjan
2. Dhruv Sekhar
3. Bonomi K Murumi
4. Chopel Mooney Bhutia
5. Candace Andrews
6. Carl Jaison
7. Chetan Chawla
8. Avantika Vishwanathan