Ja'far ibn Abi Talib: The Man Who Recited the Qur'an in the Palace of Najashi
Around the year 615 CE, a small group of refugees stood in the court of a Christian king in Abyssinia. Behind them, a delegation from Mecca…
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The First Fitna: Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Fracture of the Early Muslim Community (656–661 CE)
Within twenty-five years of the Prophet Muhammad's death, the community he left behind was at war with itself. Between 656 and 661 CE, Musl…
How Paper Remade the Abbasid World
There is a story that gets repeated in almost every account of how paper reached the Islamic world. In the summer of 751 CE, an Abbasid arm…
Zenobia of Palmyra: The Desert Queen Who Took on Rome
In the summer of 270 CE, a Palmyrene army marched into Alexandria and took Egypt — the granary of the Roman world — from an empire that had…
Hazrat Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib (RA): The Life of the Lion of Allah
Among the companions of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, few figures occupy the imagination quite like Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib. He was an uncle by…
Who Was Ammar ibn Yasir (RA)? The Life of Islam's Enduring Witness
Few lives span the arc of early Islam as completely as that of Ammar ibn Yasir. He was among the first handful of people to accept the mess…