What Makes an Empire?
This political formation incorporates different peoples and territories while maintaining hierarchies among them.
Empire
This Arabic term identifies the community of Muslims, extending beyond a single tribe.
Umma
Mecca and Medina are located in this region of western Arabia.
Hijaz
The year Baghdad became the principal Abbasid imperial capital.
762
This dynasty replaced the Umayyads as rulers of the caliphate in 750.
Abbasids
This scholarly shift brought empires back to the center of historical analysis and questioned treating the nation-state as the natural unit of history.
Imperial turn
Muhammad belonged to this influential Meccan tribe.
Quraysh
The Fatimids first established their caliphate in this North African region, centered largely on present-day Tunisia.
Ifriqiyya
This Abbasid caliph founded Baghdad.
Al-Mansur
This ruler established Umayyad dynastic rule, with Damascus as its capital.
Muʿawiya
Burbank and Cooper use this phrase for governing through distinctions among populations rather than making everyone politically identical.
Politics of difference
This migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 became the starting point of the Islamic calendar.
Hijra
This region in the eastern Islamic world became a major base of the Abbasid revolutionary movement.
Khurasan
This caliph established a new Abbasid capital at Samarra in 836.
Al-Muʿtasim
Abu Bakr fought these wars against groups that rejected Medinan authority after Muhammad’s death
Ridda wars
This term describes the range of strategies empires draw upon to incorporate and govern different populations
Imperial repertoires
Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali are collectively known by this designation.
Rashidun / Rightly Guided Caliphs
The Ottoman principality emerged around 1300 in the northwestern part of this peninsula, also called Asia Minor.
Anatolia
Another name of Baghdad; the gates of Kufa, Basra, Khurasan, and Syria were the four principal entrances to this planned core of Baghdad.
The Round City / Madinat al-Salam
These non-Arab Muslim clients featured prominently in grievances against inequalities under Umayyad rule.
Mawali
Stoler uses this term to understand imperial rule as an ongoing process continually made and remade.
Imperial formations
Before it became known as Medina, the city to which Muhammad migrated had this name.
Yathrib
Known by this Arabic name, Muslim-ruled Iberia included the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba.
Al-Andalus
This Shiʿi dynasty took control of Baghdad in 945 while retaining the Abbasid caliph.
Buyids
This man became the first Abbasid caliph in 749–750.
Abu al-ʿAbbas al-Saffah