The Central Islamic Lands | Class 11 History Notes

These notes cover The Central Islamic Lands, a Class 11 History chapter from the NCERT theme on world history. The chapter follows the birth of Islam in seventh century Arabia and the rise of a huge state, the caliphate, that at its height stretched from Spain to Central Asia. You will meet Prophet Muhammad and the umma, the four early caliphs, the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, the Crusades, and the trade and learning that made cities like Baghdad famous. For the full set, see all of our Class 11 History notes.

Faith, community and politics

Islam began in the years around 612 to 632 CE. Prophet Muhammad preached the worship of a single God, Allah, and called believers into a single community known as the umma.

Who was Prophet Muhammad?

Muhammad founded Islam and is linked with its holy book, the Quran. He lived his whole life in what is now Saudi Arabia, from his birth in Mecca around 570 CE to his death in Medina in 632 CE.

In the sixth century, Arab society was spread across the Arabian Peninsula, southern Syria and Mesopotamia. Its main features were:

• The Arabs were divided into tribes (qabila), each led by a chief chosen for his courage, wisdom and generosity (muruwwa).
• Each tribe worshipped its own god or goddess, often as an idol (sanam).
• Many Bedouin tribes moved between desert oases in search of food, mainly dates, and fodder for their camels, while some settled in towns to trade or farm.

The Quraysh tribe

The Quraysh tribe controlled Mecca's main shrine, the Kaba, a cube like structure that then held many idols.

• People from outside Mecca made an annual pilgrimage (hajj) to the shrine. Mecca also sat on a busy trade route between Yemen and Syria, which added to its importance.
• The shrine was a haram, a sanctuary that protected its visitors, so pilgrimage and trade helped nomadic and settled tribes exchange goods, beliefs and customs.
• Even so, most Arabs felt a stronger, more immediate attachment to their idols and shrines than to the idea of one Supreme God, Allah.

Muhammad as a messenger of God

• Around 612 CE, Muhammad announced that he was the messenger (rasul) of God.
• Worship was kept simple, with daily prayers (salat) and moral rules such as giving alms and not stealing.

The umma

Muhammad was to build an umma, a community of believers. The community would bear witness to the faith (shahada) before God and before other communities, and its members were called Muslims.

They were promised salvation on the Day of Judgement and a share in the community's resources. Wealthy Meccans were angry that their gods were rejected and saw the new faith as a threat to Mecca's status and trade.

In 622 CE, Muhammad was forced to move from Mecca to Medina. This journey, the hijra, marks the start of the Muslim calendar.

The creation of political order

In Medina, Muhammad built a political order that kept his followers safe and calmed the city's long running conflicts.

• His leadership brought the polytheists and the Jews of Medina into the umma.
• He strengthened his followers' faith with rituals such as fasting and with clear ethical rules.

The community was funded by farming, trade and an alms tax (zakat). Muslims also carried out ghazw raids on Meccan caravans and nearby oases, which angered both the Meccans and the Jews of Medina.

After several battles, Muhammad's fame as a religious and political leader spread widely, and joining the community now meant accepting Islam. Many tribes, mostly Bedouin, converted, and his alliances grew to cover most of Arabia.

Mecca and Medina

Medina became the political capital of the Islamic state, while Mecca stayed its religious centre. Muslims prayed facing the Kaba, which was cleared of idols. In a short time Muhammad had united much of Arabia under one faith, one community and one state. In its early years, Islam remained in effect a federation of Arab tribes and clans.

The expansion of the caliphate

What is a caliphate?

A caliphate is the political and religious state of the Muslim community, led by a caliph who acts as a successor to Prophet Muhammad.

A shift in political authority

When Muhammad died in 632 CE, he left no fixed rule for succession, so authority passed to the umma. This allowed new ideas but also caused deep divisions.

The most important change was the caliphate itself, in which the leader of the community (amir) became the deputy (khalifa) of the Prophet. The first four caliphs (632 to 661 CE) justified their rule through their close ties to Muhammad and their promise to continue his work.

The caliphate had two aims: to keep control over the tribes of the umma, and to raise resources for the state. After Muhammad's death many tribes broke away, and some even set up their own prophets.

• The first caliph, Abu Bakr, put down these revolts through a series of campaigns.
• The second caliph, Umar, shaped the policy of expansion.

The caliphs knew the umma could not survive on the small income from trade and taxes alone, so their commanders rallied the tribes to conquer the Byzantine Empire in the west and the Sasanian Empire in the east.

The Byzantine and Sasanian empires

Both empires held large parts of the lands around Arabia and had great resources. The Byzantine Empire supported Christianity, while the Sasanian Empire supported Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Iran. Religious conflict and revolts by the nobility had weakened both of them.

Because these two powers were in decline, the Arabs were able to take territory more easily through war and treaties. In a series of campaigns they brought Syria, Iraq, Iran and Egypt under their control. Their success came from good military strategy, strong religious belief and the weakness of their opponents.

The third caliph, Uthman, launched campaigns in Central Asia to tighten the caliphate's grip. Within about ten years of Muhammad's death, the Arab Islamic state controlled the huge region between the Nile and the Oxus.

• Each conquered province was placed under governors (amirs) and tribal chiefs (ashraf).
• Muslim taxes and a share of the raids funded the central treasury (bait al-mal).
• Soldiers were stationed in desert camp cities such as Kufa and Basra, close to the desert but under the caliph's command, and were paid monthly with a share of the booty (ata).

Non-Muslims could keep their property and religious practices by paying taxes such as kharaj and jizya. Jews and Christians were treated as dhimmis, protected subjects who were given a good deal of freedom to run their own community affairs.

The cost of expansion

Holding this vast territory together was hard. As the umma grew, arguments over resources and offices threatened its unity, and the ruling class was dominated by the Meccan Quraysh.

The third caliph, Uthman (644 to 656 CE), a Quraysh, filled his administration with his own men to gain more control. He was assassinated by an opposing alliance from Iraq, Egypt and Medina, and Ali became the fourth caliph.

The major Islamic sects

Shias and Sunnis

Divisions among Muslims deepened under Ali, the fourth caliph (656 to 661 CE), who fought two wars against those who spoke for the Meccan aristocracy. The supporters and the opponents of Ali later grew into the two main sects of Islam, the Shias and the Sunnis.

Ali set up his base at Kufa and defeated an army led by Muhammad's wife, Aisha, at the Battle of the Camel in 657 CE. He could not defeat the faction led by Muawiya, a kinsman of Uthman and the governor of Syria. His second battle, at Siffin in northern Mesopotamia, ended in a truce that split his followers. Some stayed loyal, while others left and became known as Kharijites.

Ali was later assassinated by a Kharijite in a mosque at Kufa. His followers then gave their loyalty to his son Hussain and his descendants. In 661 CE, Muawiya made himself caliph and founded the Umayyad dynasty, which lasted until 750 CE.

The Umayyads and the centralisation of power

The conquest of such large territories turned the caliphate into a strong, centralised, authoritarian state. The Umayyads took several steps to secure their power within the umma.

• Muawiya, the first Umayyad caliph, moved the capital to Damascus and adopted Byzantine court and administrative practices.
• He introduced hereditary succession to secure the throne for his son. These changes helped the Umayyads rule for about ninety years and the Abbasids for two centuries.
• The Umayyad state became an imperial power built on statecraft and the loyalty of Syrian troops, with Christian advisers and Zoroastrian scribes in its administration.

Islam still gave the state its legitimacy, and the Umayyads put down rebellions in its name. Under Abd al-Malik (685 to 705 CE) and his successors, both Arab and Islamic identity were stressed.

Coinage and the Dome of the Rock

Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration and coinage. The early gold dinar and silver dirham had copied Byzantine and Iranian coins, complete with crosses, fire altars and Greek or Pahlavi writing.

Abd al-Malik replaced these images with a purely written, or epigraphic, coinage in Kufic script, carrying Quranic verses and the profession of faith, the shahada. The reformed dinar carried the words, "There is no God but Allah and He has no partner." This reform was tied to a wider reorganisation of state finances and was so successful that coins were struck to this pattern and weight for centuries. His other great work was the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

The Abbasid revolution

How did the Abbasids replace the Umayyads?

The Abbasids took over the caliphate in 750 CE and ruled most of the Islamic empire, except some western parts, until 1258 CE. They were the third caliphate, after the early caliphs and the Umayyads.

• The Abbasids blackened the name of the Umayyads and promised to restore Islam to its original form. Their revolution changed not only the ruling family but also the shape of politics and Islamic culture.
• The Umayyads had promised tax concessions and privileges that were never delivered, so Iranian Muslims (mawali), angered by Arab pride, were eager to join any movement against them.
• Their army, led by an Iranian named Abu Muslim, defeated the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan, at the Zab River.

The revolt began in Khurasan in eastern Iran, where the mixed Arab and Iranian population could be rallied and where Iraqi Arab soldiers resented Syrian dominance. The Abbasids, descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas, won support by promising a saviour (Mahdi) from the Prophet's family (Ahl al-Bayt).

In the Abbasid era, Iranian culture grew in importance. Baghdad, built near the ruins of Ctesiphon, became the new capital. The army and bureaucracy were reorganised to include people from Iraq and Khurasan. The Abbasids raised the religious standing of the caliphate and favoured Islamic scholars, while keeping the state firmly centralised. They kept the grand imperial architecture and court rituals of the Umayyads.

The break up of the caliphate and the rise of sultanates

Abbasid power weakened in the ninth century as the caliphs lost control of distant provinces and as pro-Arab and pro-Iranian groups in the army and bureaucracy fought each other.

During the civil war of 810 CE between Amin and Mamun, the sons of Harun al-Rashid, a new power bloc of Turkish slave officers (mamluks) emerged, and Shiism competed with Sunni orthodoxy for power. Independent dynasties appeared, such as the Tahirids and Samanids in Khurasan and Transoxiana and the Tulunids in Egypt and Syria.

By now Abbasid power was largely limited to Iraq and Iran. In 945 CE, the Buyids, a Shiite clan from the Caspian region of Iran, captured Baghdad. Their rulers took grand titles such as shahanshah, meaning king of kings, but kept the Abbasid caliph on as a symbol for their Sunni subjects.

• Keeping the caliph was a wise move, because a rival Shiite power, the Fatimids, wanted control of the whole Islamic world.
• The Fatimids claimed to be the only rightful rulers of Islam through their descent from the Prophet's daughter, Fatima.
• In 969 CE they conquered Egypt and set up the Fatimid caliphate, replacing the old capital of Fustat with a new city, Qahira, which we know today as Cairo.

What held Islamic society together was not one government or one language, but shared economic and cultural patterns. The rise of Persian as a language of high culture, and a lively world of learning, kept a sense of unity even as politics split apart. Scholars, artists and merchants travelled freely, carrying ideas and customs with them.

The Muslim share of the population, under ten per cent in the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, now grew quickly as conversion became easier and more meaningful. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Turks added a third major group alongside the Arabs and the Iranians. Originally nomads from Turkistan, they slowly converted to Islam and rose to high positions as slaves and soldiers in the Abbasid, Samanid and Buyid states because of their loyalty and skill in war.

The Ghaznavid and Seljuq sultanates

Mahmud of Ghazni built on the foundations laid by Alptigin in 961 CE and ran his state from about 998 to 1030 CE. He had a well trained army of Turks and Indians, drew his strength from Khurasan and Afghanistan, and gained legitimacy from the Abbasid caliphs, who gave him the title of Sultan. To check Shiite power, the caliph backed the Sunni Ghaznavids.

The Seljuq Turks, who were Sunni Muslims, grew powerful under the brothers Tughril and Chaghri Beg. They conquered Khurasan in 1037 CE, made Nishapur their first capital, and in 1055 CE defeated the Buyids to restore Sunni rule in Baghdad. The caliph al-Qaim gave Tughril Beg the title of Sultan, which separated religious authority, held by the caliph, from political and military power, held by the sultan.

Tughril's nephew, Alp Arslan, extended the Seljuq empire into Anatolia, modern Turkey. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, European Christians and the Muslim states clashed there. By the early thirteenth century a new and far more destructive threat was gathering, the Mongols. You can follow that story in our notes on Nomadic Empires.

The Crusades

What were the Crusades?

The Crusades were a series of religious wars fought during the mediaeval period, supported and sometimes led by the Latin Church. The most famous took place in the Holy Land between 1095 and 1291 CE, with the aim of taking Jerusalem and the lands around it from Muslim rule.

In mediaeval Islamic societies, Christians and Jews were treated as "People of the Book" (Ahl al-Kitab) because they had their own scripture, and Christians could travel in Muslim lands as traders and pilgrims. Palestine was then a Byzantine province.

Several changes in Western Europe helped set off the conflict. As feudal states grew more stable and their economies leaned on farming, the Church's Peace of God movement tried to protect people from war and turned the energy of warriors outward against those it called the "enemies of God".

In 1095 CE the Pope and the Byzantine emperor called for a war to free the Holy Land. Between 1095 and 1291 CE, Christians from Western Europe fought Muslim cities in the eastern Mediterranean, a region they called the Levant. The Crusaders captured Antioch in Syria in 1098 to 1099 CE and killed many Muslims and Jews. Muslims called these invaders Franks (ifranji or firangi). Four crusader states were set up in Syria and Palestine.

After the Turks captured Edessa in 1144 CE, a second crusade was called but failed. In 1187 CE, Salah al-Din, known in Europe as Saladin, defeated the Crusaders and built an Egyptian and Syrian empire, and soon afterwards he retook Jerusalem. According to the sources, Salah al-Din treated Christians well. He gave them the Holy Sepulchre, turned many churches into mosques and made Jerusalem a Muslim city once more.

The Christians gained little from the third crusade, apart from a few coastal towns in Palestine and the right of Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem. In 1291 CE the Mamluks of Egypt drove the Crusaders out of Palestine, and Europe's military interest in the region faded after that. The Crusades left a double mark. Muslim power recovered, while Italian trading cities such as Pisa, Genoa and Venice greatly expanded their trade across the Mediterranean.

Economy: agriculture, cities and trade

Agriculture

Farming was widespread in the conquered lands. Land was held by big and small peasants, and in some cases by the state. In regions such as Iraq and Iran, large estates were worked by peasants, and estate owners collected taxes on behalf of the state.

• After the conquests, the state took over abandoned land and handed it to the elites or to the caliph's family.
• Overall control of the land stayed with the state.
• Conquered land was subject to a tax paid by its owners.

The tax system

The Arabs charged a land tax called kharaj, which ranged from half to a fifth of the harvest, while land owned or farmed by Muslims paid only about a tenth. To pay less, many non-Muslims chose to convert to Islam.

The caliphs kept taxation uniform, and the state allowed some officials to draw their salaries from iqtas, or shares of farm revenue. Political stability went hand in hand with farming success. Dams, canals and wells, often worked by water wheels (noria), made good harvests possible in the Nile valley, and new crops such as cotton, oranges, bananas, watermelons, spinach and brinjals were grown and traded.

Cities

As farming grew, cities multiplied and Islamic civilisation flourished. Many new towns began as camps for Arab soldiers (jund), such as Kufa and Basra in Iraq and Fustat and Cairo in Egypt. Within fifty years of becoming the Abbasid capital around 800 CE, Baghdad grew to roughly a million people, and older cities such as Damascus, Isfahan and Samarqand were rebuilt.

A typical city had a congregational mosque (masjid al-jami) large enough to be seen from far off, and a central market (suq) with rows of shops, merchants' lodgings and money changers. Officials, scholars and merchants (tujjar) lived near the centre. Ordinary people and soldiers lived in an outer ring with its own mosque, church or synagogue, market and public bath (hammam). On the edges lay the homes of the poor, markets for fresh produce, caravan parks, and the trades thought unclean, such as tanning and butchering, with inns and cemeteries outside the walls.

Trade

City growth and political unity widened the circles of trade. The Muslim empire sat between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and for about five centuries Arab and Iranian traders controlled sea trade from China to Europe.

The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were major routes. Spices, textiles, porcelain and other goods were shipped from India and China to ports such as Aden and Siraf, then carried by camel caravans to Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo. Jewish merchants handled much of the trade from Alexandria to Europe, and some traded directly with India, as we know from letters kept in the Geniza collection. To the east, Iranian caravans left Baghdad for China through Bukhara and Samarqand, bringing back Central Asian and Chinese goods, including paper.

Money grew more important as the tax system and markets expanded. Coins of gold, silver and copper (fulus) were minted and often passed around in sealed bags. Gold came from Africa and silver from Central Asia, while precious metals and coins also flowed in from Europe. Rising demand for money pushed people to release their hoarded wealth into circulation, and credit worked alongside coins to keep trade moving.

The Muslim world's contribution

One of the greatest gifts of the Muslim world to mediaeval economic life was a better system of payment and business. Merchants and bankers used letters of credit (sakk, the origin of the word cheque) and bills of exchange (suftaja) to move money between places and people. These commercial papers meant traders did not have to carry cash, which made their journeys safer. To avoid usury, or the charging of interest, which was forbidden, people used clever methods, such as hiding the interest inside a currency exchange fee. Sailing, trade, money changers and everyday life all appear in the famous story collection, the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla).

Learning and culture

As the Muslim community met more peoples, it thought harder about questions of God and the world, and about how a Muslim should behave in public and in private.

For religious scholars, the ulama, the Quran and the example of the Prophet (sunna) were the main sources of knowledge. Some scholars built up a body of law, the sharia or straight path, to guide people's relationship with God and with one another.

Alongside the law grew Sufism, a more mystical path. Sufis used poetry about love and longing to reach a sense of closeness with God. Rabia of Basra expressed an intense love for God (ishq) in her verse, and the Iranian Sufi Bayazid Bistami taught complete absorption in God. Other scholars, such as the Mutazila, used Greek logic to defend Islamic beliefs, and the works of Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy were translated for Arabic readers.

Mediaeval Islamic society prized fine language and imagination, and skill with words was raised to an art called adab. Abbasid poets wrote the ode (qasida) to praise their patrons, and Persian poets reshaped Arabic poetry. An old Indian text, the Panchatantra, was translated into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna and travelled widely. History writing was also well developed, exploring the stories of dynasties, cities and regions.

Why it still matters

The story in this chapter is not sealed off in the past. The hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to the Kaba in Mecca that began in Prophet Muhammad's own lifetime, is still one of the largest gatherings of people anywhere on Earth. In 2025, Saudi Arabia's General Authority for Statistics counted 1,673,230 pilgrims performing the hajj, and more than 1.5 million of them came from outside the country. When you read here about pilgrims circling the Kaba in the seventh century, you are reading about a ritual that well over a million people still complete every single year.

The chapter's ideas about money and trade are just as alive today. When you write a cheque, you are using a word that comes from the Arabic sakk, the letter of credit that merchants in the central Islamic lands used so they did not have to carry heavy bags of coins. The word monsoon comes from the Arabic mawasim, the sailing seasons those same traders followed across the Indian Ocean. And the learning gathered in Abbasid Baghdad, where Greek, Persian and Indian books were translated into Arabic, later flowed on into Europe, which is why historians treat these centuries as a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. You can place this chapter beside our other notes on the period, such as An Empire Across Three Continents, and explore the wider world through the Learnacy Hub.

For more chapter by chapter revision, browse all of our study notes.

Sources

1. Saudi General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), Hajj 1446 AH (2025) statistics, total pilgrims 1,673,230: stats.gov.sa/en/w/news/49
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Bayt al-Hikmah (the House of Wisdom in Baghdad): britannica.com/place/Bayt-al-Hikmah
3. TED-Ed, The rise and fall of the medieval Islamic Empire, by Petra Sijpesteijn and Birte Kristiansen: ed.ted.com lesson