Islam

A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.

970

A scholar who may have arrived in Ghazni as a prisoner of the sultan who conquered his homeland went on to write the most even-handed medieval account of India that survives, sponsored by the same military campaigns that made study of it possible.

He walked away from the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world at the height of his career, and only then wrote the work that made him a renewer of the faith.

The words algebra and algorithm both trace to one Baghdad scholar, yet almost nothing about his personal life survives beyond a bibliographer's secondhand book list.

His reign survives through a genuine Arabic scholarly tradition centred on Timbuktu, chronicles written by men embedded in the same religious culture he actively promoted.

Khomeini spent fifteen years exiled from Iran for opposing the Shah, then returned to build a state with far more centralised religious authority than the monarchy he replaced ever claimed.

A caliph whose real diplomacy and administration are well documented is still known worldwide chiefly as the fictional ruler of a story collection assembled after his death.

Whether he marched to Kufa out of ambition, principle, or a deliberate wish for martyrdom is a question the evidence supports three ways and settles none.

Some of his most important writing was produced while fleeing suspicious rulers or hiding from arrest, in an unusually direct autobiography rare for a medieval scholar.

Every figure attached to Mansa Musa's fortune, eighty camels, thousands of slaves, a specific weight of gold dust, traces back to the same handful of Arabic chroniclers, which is why historians now treat his rank as history's richest man as unverifiable rather than false.

2001

The Soviet Union invaded to save a communist government from collapse, and the war that followed helped collapse the Soviet Union instead.

680

732

Muhammad's biography was written more than a century after his death, by which point, one historian notes, almost nothing of documentary use to a historian remained beyond confirming he had lived.

Medieval chroniclers could not even agree on what Pope Urban II promised the men who signed up for the First Crusade, and historians still argue how much religion had to do with any of it.

The river running black with ink is a literary trope recycled across several sieges, and death toll estimates for 1258 still range from two hundred thousand to two million.

800

The United States spent nearly twenty years and thousands of lives removing the Taliban from power in 2001, only to watch them retake the country within weeks of its own withdrawal.

A caliph-funded translation project in Baghdad is credited with sparking centuries of Islamic scholarship, but the historian who named it a 'House of Wisdom' may have mistranslated what the place actually was.

1250

661

The betrayed governor, the outraged father, the defiant king's speech: none appear in any source written near the actual conquest, only in accounts compiled centuries later.

A city whose scholars once taught twenty-five thousand students collapsed within years of a foreign invasion that executed or scattered the people who had built it.