HISTORY CRAFTER - THE REAL AND SIMULATED HISTORY

  A PICTURE OF ABU BAKR AL SIDDIQ FROM AL-TABARI   Who was Al-Tabari?   Al-Tabari was an influential scholar and he was the muslim who compiled a huge work on early Islamic history. He was born in Tabaristan, modern Iran around 839 CE and died in Bagdad, Iraq, in 923 CE. To him, we owe a tafsir too, namely an exegesis of the Quranic verses. Every historian nowadays quote him when it comes to the Islamic early history; his work is really immense and precise and from his account we can have an internal point of view on what happened in the first centuries of the Caliphate. For this reason, I’ll use many volumes, and in particular: - the 5 th  volume, on Sasanids, Byzantines, and Lakmids - the 10 th  volume, on the conquest of Arabia, the Riddah wars, 632-633 CE - the 11 th  volume, on the challenge to the empires (633-635 CE)   As I don’t know Arabic, I’ll use the english translation.   A LETTER OF ABU BAKR AL SIDDIQ TO THE APOSTATES   In the previous post, I gave account of the elect

The Caliphate in history: Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, a trustworthy Muslim and Leader   In this and the next posts, we will begin to discover how events unfolded in real history; at first glance, we can present a rough timeline with the main events from 630, when Makkah was conquered by Islamic forces, and 661, the end of the rule of Ali, the 4 th  Caliph.   In the picture below, you can see the historical timeline:     As you can see, there have been 4 Caliphs in 34 years, and this period coincided with the first expansion of Islam and the Caliphate. As a matter of fact, Islam has been tied to the Caliphate from the very beginning; furthermore, it is a feature that will mark Islam forever, until our time. It seems impossible, in fact, to conceive Islam without, at least, the aspiration to the Caliphate. In other words, there is and there never will be a purely spiritual Islam, or a purely secular Islam, as the two ‘institutions’, the State and the True Religion are one and the same thing and