Book summary
Islam and the World
Sh. Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi
19518 chapters
Nadwi's diagnosis of the modern world and the case for Islam's continuing relevance to humanity — a foundational twentieth-century work.
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Library
Ajnadayn Library
Welcome to the world's first digital library dedicated exclusively to Islamic history.
Summaries
Foundational works, summarised
Chapter-by-chapter summaries of essential texts in Islamic history and thought.
Book summary
Lost Islamic History
Firas AlKhateeb
201412 chaptersA sweeping single-volume retelling of 1,400 years of Islamic history, recovering the threads that conventional histories leave out.
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Book summary
Saviours of Islamic Spirit
Sh. Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi
19716 chaptersBiographical sketches of the great revivers — from Hasan al-Basri to Shah Waliullah — and the renewal they brought to the ummah.
Summary coming soon
Essays
Long-form essays & articles
Moments from the Muslim past, told well — full articles and educational write-ups from our teaching team.
ReflectionWhat 'Lost' Means in 'Lost Islamic History'
The records are not lost. They sit in libraries from Istanbul to Hyderabad, often catalogued, sometimes edited, frequently untranslated. What was lost is the place this material once held in the general account of the past.
Ustadh Maheer Hasan · 5 min readRead article →
ProfileSalahuddin and the Question of Power
How a Kurdish soldier from Tikrit became sultan of Egypt and Syria, dismantled the Fatimid caliphate from inside, and built a state his own family proved unable to keep.
Ustadh Maheer Hasan · 6 min readRead article →
EssayThe House of Wisdom
The Bayt al-Hikma was not a golden-age fairy tale. It was a state-funded translation bureau in ninth-century Baghdad, built for a specific purpose, sustained for a specific reason, and dismantled when those reasons changed.
Ustadh Maheer Hasan · 5 min readRead article →
ProfileSultan Mehmed II
For over a thousand years, twenty-three armies had besieged Constantinople and none had succeeded. In 1453 a young Ottoman sultan gambled his entire empire on taking the city — and changed the course of history.
Ustadh Maheer Hasan · 4 min readRead article →
EssayThe Battle of Manzikert
August 1071. A Seljuk army defeats the Byzantine emperor at Manzikert, opens Anatolia to Turkish settlement, and quietly sets the stage for a thousand years of Muslim civilisation in the heart of the old Roman world.
Ustadh Maheer Hasan · 4 min readRead article →