Abbasid Caliphate

The great Seljuk Empire, use all of those terms loosely at this point, is still capitaled in Baghdad.

There is an Abbasid caliph who doesn't really have any temporal authority at this point, or very little.

And they're sort of duking it out between, you know, the Caliph and the Seljuk Sultan who's supposed to be in charge here and who's taking orders from whom.

So that's a whole, you know, another problem is for a different story, I guess.

There's also, an emerging sense of jihad in some of these writings, at least we think so.

Of course, like, jihad as holy war is not an alien concept to Muslims at this period, but By this point, the fervor of the early conquest had sort of, you know, died out and things had settled into something of a routine.

The main conflicts that had been going on really were in the Levant between the Fatimids and the Seljuks or the Fatimids and the Abbasids, whoever was protecting the Abbasids, quote-unquote protecting them at any given time.

So a lot of the, like, starch had gone out of this idea of, you know, we have to be fighting the non-believers and that sort of thing.

the Romans are the ones that named the Providence Syria Palestina in the second century success they ruled the area and the reason they did that is because remember the Philistines were the enemy of the Jews when they finally occupied the land after Moses and Jacob went in and they started to take over everything and they occupied the land and one of their enemies the i think it was the ancient cretes they were called a sea people were in western part of the land out of the mediterranean sea and they were the philistines and you could read through the new test or the old testament of the battles they had with the philistines and so knowing that the romans named it that kind of slapping the jews in the face It's also been under Islamic rule.

The Muslim armies conquered the region in the 630s and leading centuries of government under, remember the caliphates we talked about, the Rashidun, the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatiman, and the Mameluke dynasties.

and then those were interrupted by the crusader kingdom of jerusalem we're not going to go into the details but those are some of the things i talked about last week now the ottoman control was from 1516 until world war one palestine remember the romans named it was part of the ottoman empire and it was divided into different uh administrative districts populated mostly mostly by sunni muslims alongside christian and jewish communities they were all together in that area remember they're sunni and shiite there's a division there and if you want to know some about that division go back to last week's podcast Now, the fall of the empire during World War I, British forces captured the region after defeating the Ottomans.

And they backed a wartime promise that was made to the Arab leaders and the 1917 Belford Declaration, which favored a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

And by the way, there is a distorted image of the Umayyads.

And the Baghdad of the Abbasids, for example.

Both centers were destroyed.

If we talk about the origin of the Arabs, it goes back to, in ancient times, to Yemen.

Al-Qanun.

Al-Jahiz from Abbasid period is famous for his work, Kitab al-Hawain.

Hayawan, I think.

That's the Book of Animals.