632 CE to today
History of Islam
Fourteen centuries
632 – 2026
Six eras, and what each one left behind that the world still uses.
The Rashidun caliphs
632 – 661 CE
The thirty years after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, under Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman and ‘Ali. The community expanded out of Arabia into Byzantine and Sasanian territory, and Kufa, Basra and Fustat were founded as garrison towns. Three of the four caliphs were assassinated, and the period ended in civil war.
What began here
The Qur’an was gathered into a single written codex under ‘Uthman and copies were sent to the main cities — the text every mushaf today descends from.
The Umayyads
661 – 750 CE
The capital moved to Damascus, and rule became dynastic. The territory reached the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Indus, and crossed into the Iberian peninsula in 711. The dynasty was overthrown in 750, though a branch of it survived in al-Andalus.
What began here
Arabic became the language of administration across the whole territory, and the first purely Islamic coinage was struck under ‘Abd al-Malik, who also built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem — completed in 691, and the oldest Islamic monument still standing.
The Abbasids
750 – 1258 CE
The capital moved east to Baghdad, founded in 762 as a round city. Greek, Persian and Indian works were translated into Arabic on a large scale, and the sciences built on them rather than only preserving them. Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.
What began here
Algebra and the word algorithm both come from one man here: al-Khwarizmi (c. 780 – 850), whose book on al-jabr names the subject and whose own name, Latinised, names the procedure. Public hospitals with separate wards and examined physicians date from this period, as does the first university still running anywhere — al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri.
Al-Andalus, 711 – 1492
On the other side of the Mediterranean, Cordoba grew into one of the largest cities in Europe, with a library of a scale nothing north of it could match. Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics, written in Egypt around 1011 – 1021, reached Latin Europe through this route; it argues that a claim about the natural world must be tested by experiment, and it is why he is often called the first true scientist.
The age of the three empires
1299 – 1922 CE
Three large states ruled most of the Muslim world at once: the Ottomans from 1299, based in Constantinople after 1453; the Safavids in Persia from 1501; and the Mughals in India from 1526. The Ottoman state was the longest-lived of the three, lasting until 1922.
What began here
Ottoman calligraphy schools formalised the classical scripts and passed them on by licence from master to student, a chain of training still followed today. The architecture of the period is Sinan’s: some four hundred buildings, of which the Süleymaniye and the Selimiye mosques are the best known. The Taj Mahal, finished around 1653, belongs to the Mughal end of the same age.
The colonial era and the awakening
c. 1800 – 1924 CE
Over the nineteenth century most Muslim-majority lands came under European rule or control — the French in North Africa, the British in India, Egypt and the Gulf, the Dutch in the East Indies. Reform and revival movements ran alongside this throughout the period, arguing over what to take from Europe and what to refuse. The Ottoman caliphate was abolished in 1924.
What began here
Printing in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Urdu became ordinary rather than exceptional, and with it came newspapers, journals and cheap printed copies of the Qur’an — the first time in a thousand years that the way texts travelled changed at all.
The modern era
1924 CE – today
Independence came to most Muslim-majority countries between the 1940s and the 1960s. Migration built substantial Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas and Australia, where there had been few before. There are now roughly two billion Muslims, about a quarter of the world’s people, and most of them live in Asia rather than the Arab world.
What began here
The mushaf became something anyone can carry: recordings of every reciter, translations into hundreds of languages, and the whole text searchable — which is what an app like this one is built on.
Dates are Common Era. An era is a convenience for reading, not a clean break — the ones here overlap, and none of them ended everywhere at once.