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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Islam timeline in the History of Worldviews.
Streams: All of Islam Sunni Islam Twelver Shia Islam Ibadi Islam Mu'tazila Hanbali Sufi Orders Ash'ari Modern Reformist Islam
Muhammad is born in Mecca in the Year of the Elephant, as tradition names it; the sira literature preserves the account of his birth and childhood, and the date rests on that tradition rather than on contemporary records.
In retreat on Mount Hira outside Mecca, Muhammad receives the first revelation, the opening verses of what becomes Surah al-Alaq; Khadija and her cousin Waraqa confirm the experience, and the preaching that follows begins Islam.
Muhammad and his followers emigrate from Mecca to Yathrib, renamed Medina, where he becomes the head of a community bound by the Constitution of Medina; the migration opens year one of the Islamic calendar.
A small Medinan force defeats a larger Meccan one at the wells of Badr during Ramadan; the victory, read in the Qur'an as divine aid, secures the young community and Muhammad's authority in Medina.
Muhammad returns to Mecca with a large army and takes the city nearly without bloodshed, declares a general amnesty, and clears the Kaaba of its idols; Mecca becomes the sanctuary center of Islam.
Muhammad dies in Medina after a short illness, months after the Farewell Sermon; he leaves no agreed successor named in a form all accept, and the question of who leads the community divides it from this day forward.
The community gathers at the Saqifa and chooses Abu Bakr, the Prophet's closest companion, as caliph; his short reign fights the Ridda wars against Arabian tribes that withhold allegiance, and begins the compilation of the Qur'an after the losses at Yamama.
Under Umar the armies of Islam take Syria, Egypt, and Persia from the Byzantine and Sasanian empires; Umar organizes the conquered lands with garrison cities, a register of stipends, and the Hijri calendar, and is assassinated in the Medina mosque.
The caliph Uthman commissions Zayd ibn Thabit and a committee to fix one written text of the Qur'an and orders variant codices burned; the recension becomes the standard text of the Qur'an in use to this day.
After Uthman's murder the community chooses Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law; his caliphate is consumed by civil war against Aisha's party and then Mu'awiya's, and Shia Islam holds him the first rightful Imam, wrongly kept from rule for twenty-five years.
Aisha, Talha, and Zubayr march on Basra against Ali and are defeated at the Battle of the Camel, named for Aisha's camel at the fight's center; the battle opens the first fitna, the community's first civil war.
Ali's battle with Mu'awiya at Siffin ends in arbitration; a party of Ali's own supporters secedes over the judgment, holding that judgment belongs to God alone, and from that secession the Khawarij emerge, among whose moderate heirs the Ibadi community traces its descent.
After Ali's assassination by a Kharijite, Mu'awiya takes the caliphate and moves its capital to Damascus; rule passes into a hereditary dynasty, the Umayyads, who govern the empire for ninety years.
Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, refuses allegiance to Yazid and is killed with his small company at Karbala on the tenth of Muharram; his martyrdom becomes the defining memory of Shia Islam, commemorated every Ashura.
The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik completes the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the oldest surviving monument of Islamic architecture; its mosaics carry Qur'anic inscriptions, including texts addressed to the People of the Book.
Wasil ibn Ata, who withdrew from Hasan al-Basri's circle over the status of the grave sinner, dies in Basra; his circle's doctrine of the intermediate position gives the Mu'tazila, the first school of Islamic theology, its name and its beginning.
Oman's Ibadis elect al-Julanda ibn Mas'ud as imam, the first Ibadi imamate in Oman; the elective imamate, held to belong to the most qualified believer rather than to one lineage, becomes the lasting pattern of Ibadi rule in Oman.
The Abbasids, claiming rule for the Prophet's family, overthrow the Umayyads from Khorasan and found a caliphate that lasts five centuries; Baghdad rises as its capital, and the revolution's promise to the Prophet's kin curdles for the Alids, whose claims it had used.
Abu Hanifa dies in Baghdad; the legal school formed by his disciples, the Hanafi school, becomes the most widely followed school of Sunni law, carried later by the Abbasid, Ottoman, and Mughal states.
Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam founds the Rustamid imamate at Tahert in the central Maghreb, an Ibadi state that endures for over a century and makes Tahert a center of Ibadi learning and trans-Saharan trade.
Malik ibn Anas dies in Medina; his al-Muwatta, among the earliest surviving books of Islamic law, grounds the Maliki school, which follows the practice of Medina and spreads across North and West Africa.
Al-Shafi'i dies in Fustat; his Risala founds the theory of Islamic law by ordering its sources (Qur'an, Sunna, consensus, analogy), and the Shafi'i school spreads through Egypt, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
The caliphs al-Ma'mun and his two successors impose the mihna, an inquisition requiring officials and scholars to affirm the createdness of the Qur'an, the Mu'tazila doctrine; Ahmad ibn Hanbal's refusal and flogging make him Sunni Islam's emblem of resistance, and al-Mutawakkil abandons the test.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal dies in Baghdad, and crowds fill the streets for his funeral; the Hanbali school formed from his teaching prizes the Qur'an and the hadith over speculative theology, and his Musnad gathers some twenty-seven thousand traditions.
The Sufi Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj is executed in Baghdad after a long trial, condemned for utterances including 'I am the Truth'; his martyrdom becomes Sufism's enduring meditation on union with God and the law's boundary.
Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari dies in Baghdad, having left the Mu'tazila to defend revealed doctrine with the tools of rational theology; the Ash'ari school he founds becomes, with the Maturidi school, the dominant theology of Sunni Islam.
The Ash'ari theologian and Maliki judge al-Baqillani dies in Baghdad; his works systematize Ash'ari doctrine, including the proof of prophethood and the inimitability of the Qur'an, and carry the school across the Sunni world.
Qadi Abd al-Jabbar, chief judge of Rayy and the Mu'tazila's great systematizer, dies; his twenty-volume al-Mughni preserves Mu'tazila theology in its fullest form, much of it recovered from manuscripts in Yemeni libraries a thousand years later.
Ibn Sina dies at Hamadan; the Persian physician-philosopher's Canon of Medicine teaches medicine in Europe for centuries, and his Book of Healing sets the agenda of philosophy in Islam, framing the questions al-Ghazali answers and Ibn Rushd takes up again.
The Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk founds the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, the head of a network of madrasas endowed to teach Shafi'i law and Ash'ari theology; the madrasa becomes the institutional form of Sunni learning, and al-Ghazali holds its chair a generation later.
Pope Urban II's call at Clermont brings Latin Christian armies into Syria and Palestine; Jerusalem falls in 1099, and two centuries of crusader states follow, answered from the Muslim side by Nur al-Din and Saladin's recovery of Jerusalem in 1187.
Al-Ghazali dies at Tus, having left the Nizamiyya chair in spiritual crisis and returned to teaching through Sufism; his Revival of the Religious Sciences joins law, theology, and the Sufi path into the synthesis that shapes Sunni piety for a millennium.
The Mu'tazila commentator al-Zamakhshari dies; his al-Kashshaf, a rhetorical and grammatical commentary on the Qur'an, is read across the schools despite its Mu'tazila doctrine, and preserves that theology inside the mainstream commentary tradition.
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the Hanbali preacher of Baghdad whose sermons drew the city, dies; the Qadiriyya, among the earliest of the great Sufi orders to spread worldwide, carries his name and becomes Sufism's most widespread order.
Ibn Rushd dies in Marrakesh; the Cordoban judge and philosopher's commentaries on Aristotle, written to defend philosophy within Islam, find their largest audience in Latin translation, where 'the Commentator' shapes European thought for centuries.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi dies at Herat; the Ash'ari theologian and polymath's Great Commentary on the Qur'an and his philosophical summae carry Ash'ari theology into its mature, philosophy-engaged form.
Ibn Qudama dies in Damascus; the Hanbali jurist's al-Mughni, a comparative compendium of law across the schools, becomes the Hanbali school's standard work and a monument of Sunni legal scholarship.
Ibn Arabi dies in Damascus; the Andalusian Sufi's Meccan Revelations and Bezels of Wisdom set out the doctrine of the unity of being that dominates later Sufi metaphysics and draws centuries of commentary and controversy.
Hulagu's Mongols sack Baghdad and kill the last Abbasid caliph of the city; the catastrophe ends the five-hundred-year caliphate in Iraq, though a shadow Abbasid line continues in Mamluk Cairo.
Jalal al-Din Rumi dies at Konya; his Masnavi, a Persian Sufi poem of some twenty-six thousand verses, becomes the most read book of Sufism, and the Mevlevi order formed by his disciples carries his path across the Turkish world.
Ibn Taymiyya dies a prisoner in the Damascus citadel; the Hanbali scholar's fatwas against saint veneration and speculative theology, marginal in his own century, are taken up by reform movements centuries later and stand behind the Wahhabi alliance of 1744.
Mehmed II takes Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire; the city becomes the Ottoman capital, and the sultan takes up the caliph's mantle over a Sunni empire that will hold the holy cities and the Balkans for four centuries.
Ismail I, head of the Safavid Sufi order, takes Tabriz and proclaims Twelver Shi'ism the religion of his Persian empire; the Safavid state makes Iran the center of Shia Islam and fixes the Sunni-Shia frontier that endures in the region.
Babur, a Chagatai prince descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, defeats the Delhi Sultanate at Panipat and founds the Mughal Empire; under Akbar and his successors it rules most of India and joins Persian culture, Sunni law, and a Hindu majority in one state.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud join preacher and sword at Diriyah; the alliance's call to strip Islam of saint veneration and innovation, rooted in Hanbali teaching, founds the Saudi state and spreads its doctrine with Saudi power.
Napoleon's expedition lands in Egypt with soldiers, scholars, and a printing press; the ease of the conquest shocks the Muslim world, opens the modern encounter with Europe, and begins the age of reform, reaction, and revival that runs to the present.
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan founds the college at Aligarh to give India's Muslims modern education alongside their faith; the Aligarh movement becomes the seedbed of Muslim modernism in South Asia and, in time, of the Pakistan movement.
Muhammad Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt and the leading voice of Islamic modernism, dies in Alexandria; his call to reopen interpretation, reconcile Islam with reason and science, and reform education shapes reformist Islam for a century.
The Turkish Grand National Assembly abolishes the Ottoman caliphate and exiles Abdulmecid II, ending thirteen centuries of the caliphal institution; the question of leadership of the Muslim community, open since 632, stands open in a new form.
Hasan al-Banna founds the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Ismailia, Egypt; its call for an Islamic order built from society upward becomes the template of modern Islamist movements across the Sunni world.
The Shah falls and Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran; the Islamic Republic of Iran is proclaimed under the guardianship of the jurist, the first modern state built on Twelver Shia doctrine, and its example re-energizes movements, Sunni and Shia alike, across the region.
