Introduction

"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.
-The Prophet Muhammad

When The Prophet Muhammad left Mecca for Medina, he had less than a hundred followers. Within a century after his death, the Muslims had conquered all the territory from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and the empire of Islam led the world in science, education, medicine, culture, commerce and war. This empire dominated the world for a thousand years. The two empires that followed after the seventeenth century were, in comparison, short-lived-the British Empire lasted for 200 years and its successor, the American Empire is in decline after only sixty years.
Between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, Muslim power shifted from the Arabs to the Persians, the Turks and the Moguls. The capital of the Islamic empire moved from the sands of Mecca and Medina to Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba and Istanbul, as new dynasties replaced the old-the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid-followed by Tamerlane, the world conqueror, and the three gunpowder empires-the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mogul. The golden centuries of the world of Islam flourished while the Dark Ages made life nasty, brutish and short in Europe.