Islamic History After the Companions — 661 CE to Today

Where the Timeline Stops, and Why This Page Begins

The site's Islamic history timeline walks the years 570 to 661: the life of the Prophet ﷺ, told in fuller detail in the Seerah, and then the reigns of the four rightly-guided caliphs among his Companions. This page picks the story up where that one sets it down. The year 661 is the natural seam: al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī, the Prophet's ﷺ grandson, laid down his claim to the caliphate to stop Muslims killing Muslims, and rule passed to Muʿāwiyah in Damascus. Everything after that year — Umayyads, Abbasids, al-Andalus, Crusades, Mongols, Ottomans, the sea-borne spread of Islam through the Malay world, and the century we are living in now — belongs here.

Read it with one question held steadily in mind, because it is the question that actually matters to a Muslim: how did the religion itself reach me? Dynasties are the scenery of this story. The plot is the preservation and transmission of the Book, the Sunnah, and the understanding of them — the chain that runs from the Companions, through the students of the Companions, through the compilers and the jurists, to the copy of the Qur'an in your hand and the hadith you read on this site. Allah took the first half of that preservation upon Himself:

And the Prophet ﷺ told the ummah in advance how to weigh the generations who would do the carrying, which gives this page its measuring-rod:

Those first three generations are the salaf, and closeness to what they held is how the people of knowledge have always graded a later century, a later movement, or a later book. See the way of the salaf for what that standard means in practice, and who ahl as-sunnah are for the creed it protects.

The Umayyads, 661–750: The Year of the Community

The civil war that began with the murder of ʿUthmān had cost the ummah dearly, and in 41 AH (661 CE) it was ended not by a victory but by a renunciation. Al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī, at the head of an army, chose peace with Muʿāwiyah instead of battle. The Muslims called that year ʿām al-jamāʿah, the Year of the Community. It was not a defeat, and it was not an accident: the Prophet ﷺ had pointed to this very grandson, from the pulpit, decades before it happened.

Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān was himself a Companion and one of the scribes who wrote down the revelation. With him the seat of government moved from Kūfah to Damascus, and the character of rule changed: when he arranged the pledge of allegiance for his son Yazīd, the caliphate became, in practice, hereditary. The scholars of ahl as-sunnah have never pretended this was a small matter, because the Prophet ﷺ himself had marked out the span of the caliphate patterned on prophethood and said what would follow it:

Thirty years from the death of the Prophet ﷺ reaches exactly to the abdication of al-Ḥasan. After that came kingship: rulers who were sometimes just and sometimes far from it, who were obeyed in what was lawful, advised where they erred, and not rebelled against for their sins. That last point is not a political preference but a transmitted instruction, and it shaped how the scholars of every century afterwards behaved toward the state:

Under the Umayyads the religion travelled further and faster than in any comparable stretch of time. Within ninety years the adhān was called from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Indus and beyond the Oxus; ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān made Arabic the language of administration and struck the first distinctly Islamic coinage; Muslim armies crossed into the Iberian peninsula in 711 and into Sindh in the same decade. Expansion of a state and acceptance of a religion are two different processes, and the second took centuries longer than the first in most of these lands — a point worth remembering whenever conquest and conversion are spoken of as if they were one thing.

The scholarly work of the era matters more to us than its borders. This was the age of the tābiʿūn, the students of the Companions: Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib and Nāfiʿ in Madinah, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī in Basra, Ibrāhīm an-Nakhaʿī in Kūfah, Ṭāwūs and Mujāhid among the students of Ibn ʿAbbās. When ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz became caliph in 717 — a ruler whose justice made later scholars speak of him as a fifth of the rightly-guided — he sent word to the governors and to scholars such as Ibn Shihāb az-Zuhrī that the hadith should be gathered and written down systematically, for he feared the death of the scholars and the loss of knowledge. That instruction is the hinge between an age of memorised transmission and the age of great written collections that follows. What guided the ummah through the disputes of the period was the instruction the Prophet ﷺ had left for exactly such times:

For what that last sentence means in worship and practice, see Bidʿah; for the caliphs whose way is named in it, see the four rightly-guided caliphs.

Karbala, 61 AH: How Ahl as-Sunnah Hold a Grief

When Muʿāwiyah died in 60 AH and the pledge was taken for his son Yazīd, the people of Kūfah wrote to al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī inviting him to come to them. He set out with his household. The Kūfans then abandoned him, and on the tenth of Muḥarram 61 AH (680 CE), at Karbala in Iraq, al-Ḥusayn was killed with most of the men of his family by the force sent against him. He was the grandson whom the Prophet ﷺ had carried on his shoulder and prayed for openly.

Ahl as-sunnah do not minimise this crime, and the generation that witnessed it did not. Ibn ʿUmar's answer to a questioner from the very region whose people had invited al-Ḥusayn and then failed him is preserved in the Ṣaḥīḥ:

How the grief is held is where the paths of the ummah divide, so the restraints deserve stating plainly, each of them drawn from the texts rather than from feeling:

Love for the Prophet's ﷺ household is part of the religion, not a rival to it. Loving al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, and honouring their descendants, is what the narrations above call for. Nobody who curses or belittles the Prophet's ﷺ family is following the Sunnah.

The tongue is restrained regarding that generation. The Companions who differed and even fought one another before Karbala are the generation the Prophet ﷺ called the best of people (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3651, quoted above), and ahl as-sunnah speak of their disputes with the fewest words possible, leaving what was in hearts to Allah. Yazīd was not a Companion; the scholars neither defend the wrong done under his authority nor make the cursing of named individuals into an act of worship.

No ritual is built on the day. Wailing, striking the body, and annual ceremonies of mourning were not the practice of ʿAlī's own descendants among the salaf, and the Sunnah for ʿĀshūrāʾ is what the Prophet ﷺ left it: a recommended fast, described on the voluntary fasting page. Nor is the day marked with celebration, which some later opponents of ʿAlī's house invented and which is worse still. On how the ummah's groups parted over these events and what distinguishes the middle path from both extremes, see Sects.

The Abbasids, 750–1258: The Age of Compilation

In 750 the Abbasid family overthrew the Umayyads and, twelve years later, founded Baghdad, which grew into the largest city on earth. An Umayyad prince escaped the massacre of his house and reached Spain, where he founded a separate emirate — so from this point the Muslim world has more than one centre, and the political unity of the first century is never restored. What is remarkable is that the loss of political unity did not fracture the religion, because by now the religion was being anchored in something more durable than a court: written, sifted, chained transmission.

The scholars of this age worked with a warning in their ears. They were watching the generation of living memory die out, and they knew what its passing would mean if the knowledge were not secured:

So they wrote, and they travelled to write. The scholar's journey — riḥlah fī ṭalab al-ʿilm — became a recognised institution: a student would cross from Bukhara to Egypt to hear one narration from the man who had heard it from the man who had heard it. They did that on the strength of a promise they took literally:

The harvest of this era has no parallel before or since. The four schools of fiqh took shape in it; the six books of hadith were compiled inside a single century; tafsīr, Arabic grammar, and the sciences of the Qur'an were organised into disciplines. Alongside them, and largely because of them, came the work in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and optics that the site treats separately in Science in Islam — the fruit of a civilisation whose scholars did not regard the study of Allah's creation as a distraction from Allah's Book.

It was also an age of trial. When the caliph al-Maʾmūn and his successors imposed the doctrine that the Qur'an is created and tested the scholars upon it, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal was imprisoned and flogged rather than say what he did not believe, and the position he held under the lash is the position of ahl as-sunnah to this day: the Qur'an is the speech of Allah, not created. That episode, and why the creed it defended matters, is set out on the Qur'an is the uncreated speech of Allah. The lives of the imams named here are gathered on the great scholars page.

How the Qur'an Was Carried

The preservation of the Qur'an did not begin in the Abbasid age; it was finished, in its decisive step, in the age of the Companions, and every later century only copied what they had settled. In the caliphate of Abū Bakr, after many memorisers were killed at the battle of Yamāmah, the written record was gathered into one collected copy. In the caliphate of ʿUthmān, when Muslims from different regions began to differ over recitation, that copy was used to produce authoritative master copies which were sent to the great cities:

Everything that follows in this page's thirteen centuries is, for the Qur'an, a story of copying rather than of composing. The consonantal skeleton fixed in ʿUthmān's copies — the rasm — is the same skeleton printed in the muṣḥaf today, and the surviving early manuscripts in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris and Birmingham are read without difficulty by anyone who knows the modern text. The refinements that later centuries added were aids to reading it correctly, not changes to it: the dotting and vowelling of the script under the Umayyads, the formal recording of the canonical recitations, and the science of tajwīd that regulates how the letters are pronounced. The site's tajwīd pages describe that discipline as it is taught now.

Two features of the transmission are worth naming, because they are the reason the text could not drift. The first is that the Qur'an is carried in chests as well as on paper: in every generation, in every land, there have been ḥuffāẓ who hold the whole of it by heart, and any deviation in a copy is audible immediately to a room full of them. The second is that recitation is licensed face to face. A student recites the entire Qur'an to a teacher who has recited it to his teacher, and receives an ijāzah naming the chain back to the Prophet ﷺ. Those chains are still granted today, mouth to mouth, exactly as in the second century. The work of doing this — and of teaching it to others — carries the highest commendation the Prophet ﷺ gave to any occupation:

Print changed the scale but not the substance: the Ottoman and later Egyptian editions, and the Madinah muṣḥaf now distributed worldwide, all reproduce the same rasm, checked by committees of memorisers before a single copy is bound. Read the text itself, with translation, in the site's Al-Quran section.

How the Sunnah Was Sifted: Isnād and the Six Books

The Sunnah faced a danger the Qur'an did not: forgery. Political factions, storytellers, and sectarians all had reasons to put words into the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ, and the ummah understood from the beginning what such an act meant:

The response was the isnād: no report is accepted without the chain of men who transmitted it, name by name, back to the Prophet ﷺ. Around that requirement grew a whole science — ʿilm ar-rijāl, the criticism of narrators — in which the memory, honesty, doctrine and dates of tens of thousands of transmitters were investigated and recorded in biographical dictionaries, so that it could be known whether two men in a chain had ever actually met. No other body of ancient literature in the world was subjected to anything comparable. The discipline is described on the site's hadith sciences page.

Out of that work came the collections a Muslim still reads today, all of them compiled between roughly 840 and 915 CE:

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (al-Bukhārī, d. 870), who sifted a vast body of narrations for the ones meeting his conditions; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, d. 875), his contemporary and student, whose arrangement of chains is unmatched; and the four Sunan — Abū Dāwūd (d. 889), at-Tirmidhī (d. 892), an-Nasāʾī (d. 915) and Ibn Mājah (d. 887) — which gather the narrations bearing on rulings and note, hadith by hadith, what the scholars said about their strength. These six are the corpus this website reads from; you can open them in the hadith reader, and every hadith quoted on this page carries the grading recorded in that repository.

Two things follow from this for the reader. First, the existence of a grading system means that not everything attributed to the Prophet ﷺ is his; a weak or fabricated report is not evidence, however widely it is repeated, which is why the site keeps a page of narrations that are not authentic. Second, this science is why a claim made in 2026 can still be traced to a chain of named men. The scholars who built it were doing the most honoured work there is, and they did it on the strength of a single promise:

For how to begin that path yourself, see Seeking Knowledge.

How Fiqh Became Schools

Fiqh is the understanding drawn from the Book and the Sunnah, and understanding requires method: which text is general and which is specific, which narration reached the scholar and which did not, how the practice of the people of Madinah weighs, what to do when two authentic reports appear to conflict. In the first two centuries such method was carried in the persons of individual scholars. By the third it had been written down, and the four schools that survived to the present took their shape: Abū Ḥanīfah in Kūfah (d. 767), Mālik ibn Anas in Madinah (d. 795), ash-Shāfiʿī (d. 820), who wrote the first systematic work on the principles of jurisprudence, and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal in Baghdad (d. 855), whose Musnad holds tens of thousands of narrations.

These four schools agree on the foundations and differ over details of derivation. Their differences are not competing religions; they are competing readings of the same evidence, and each imam said plainly that his view is to be abandoned when an authentic hadith opposes it. That instruction is the reason a Muslim today can benefit from the schools without treating any of them as a fifth source of revelation. The site's page on the madhhabs sets out how to relate to them, and the way of the salaf explains the standard by which their positions are weighed.

The later centuries added commentary, refinement, and — where scholars grew content to repeat rather than to examine — a habit of imitation that the reformers of every age pushed back against. Ibn Taymiyyah in the eighth Islamic century, Ibn al-Qayyim after him, and Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in the twelfth all called for the same thing: judging the inherited practice of the community by the Book and the Sunnah as the first three generations understood them, and clearing away what had attached itself to worship. That call is what this website means when it speaks of returning to the salaf. See Aqeedah for the creed at stake and Bidʿah for the practices it addresses.

Al-Andalus, 711–1492: The Far West and Its Lesson

Muslim rule entered the Iberian peninsula in 711 and lasted, in steadily shrinking territory, for nearly eight centuries. Under the Umayyad emirate and then caliphate of Cordoba it produced a society whose libraries, paved and lit streets, hospitals, and agricultural engineering had no rival in western Europe at the time. The Mālikī school took deep root there, and the peninsula produced scholars whose books are still in use: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr in hadith and fiqh, Ibn Ḥazm in ẓāhirī jurisprudence and comparative religion, al-Qurṭubī in tafsīr, and later ash-Shāṭibī, whose analysis of the objectives of the Sharīʿah remains a standard reference. Through Toledo and Sicily, a great deal of this learning passed into Latin Europe.

The end of al-Andalus is the part the scholars have always underlined, because its cause was internal before it was external. The caliphate of Cordoba collapsed in civil war in 1031 and broke into small ṭāʾifah kingdoms which taxed their people heavily, hired Christian troops against each other, and paid tribute to the north to be left alone. Territory was then absorbed piece by piece over four centuries until Granada surrendered in 1492; within a generation Muslims in Spain faced forced conversion, and within a century Islam had been extinguished there. The Qur'an had named the remedy long before the disease:

And ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, addressing the armies in Syria, had passed on the same instruction from the Prophet ﷺ in the language of a commander:

The Crusades and the Mongols, 1095–1260

Two waves of catastrophe struck the central Muslim lands within two centuries, and the response to each is instructive.

In 1099 the First Crusade took Jerusalem and killed a large part of its population, and al-Masjid al-Aqṣā — one of the three mosques to which the Prophet ﷺ permitted travel for worship — passed out of Muslim hands for eighty-eight years.

The recovery took most of a century, and it began with religious revival rather than with armies. Nūr ad-Dīn Zangī united Syria and filled it with schools of hadith and fiqh; his officer Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn al-Ayyūbī ended the Fatimid state in Egypt, restored the Sunni creed there, and joined Egypt and Syria into a single front. At Ḥaṭṭīn in July 1187 the Crusader field army was destroyed, and that October Jerusalem was taken by terms: no massacre, ransoms fixed and frequently waived or paid by Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn himself, the churches left standing. The contrast with 1099 was recorded by the Crusaders' own chroniclers. The last Crusader strongholds on the coast fell by 1291. On the rulings that govern warfare in Islam, and the limits that made such conduct a religious obligation rather than a courtesy, see Jihad.

The Mongol invasions were worse. Between 1219 and 1258 cities that had produced scholars for five hundred years — Bukhara, Samarqand, Merv, Nishapur, Rayy — were sacked and in some cases depopulated. In February 1258 Hülegü's army took Baghdad, killed the last Abbasid caliph there, and destroyed its libraries. Two years later a Mamluk army out of Egypt stopped the advance at ʿAyn Jālūt in Palestine, the first serious check the Mongols had met. For a believer reading this, the Qur'an supplies the frame that keeps such a century from producing despair:

Two things then happened that no one in 1258 could have predicted. Within half a century the Mongol rulers of the western khanates had themselves entered Islam, and their descendants built mosques and endowed madrasahs. And the books survived. Because the Ṣaḥīḥs, the Sunan, the tafsīrs and the fiqh manuals existed in thousands of copies from Cordoba to Delhi, and in the memories of thousands of scholars, the burning of Baghdad's libraries could not erase them. The generation immediately after the sack produced Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, adh-Dhahabī and Ibn Kathīr in Damascus, and an-Nawawī had just completed the collection now studied everywhere as the Forty Hadith of an-Nawawī. An empire can be beheaded in a week; a religion carried in this manner cannot.

The Ottomans, c. 1300–1922

From a small principality in north-western Anatolia grew the longest-lived state in Muslim history. Its most celebrated moment came in 1453, when Meḥmed II took Constantinople and ended the Byzantine empire — an event Muslims had anticipated for eight centuries on the strength of a narration in the Ṣaḥīḥ:

In 1517 Selīm I brought Egypt, Syria and the Ḥijāz under Ottoman authority, and from then until the First World War the sultans bore responsibility for the Two Sacred Mosques: organising and protecting the hajj caravans from Damascus and Cairo, maintaining the water supply, and endowing the servants of the sanctuaries. Ottoman courts administered the Ḥanafī school while the other madhhabs continued in their regions; the endowment (waqf) system funded mosques, schools, hospitals and public kitchens on a scale not matched again until the modern state; and the calligraphy of the muṣḥaf reached its historical summit in the workshops of Istanbul. On the sanctuaries themselves, see Makkah and Madinah.

The spread of Islam in this period ran far beyond any one dynasty — through the Sahel and the Swahili coast, across Central Asia, into Bengal and the Indian subcontinent under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, and through the Malay archipelago as described in the next section. The reach of the community had been described to the Prophet ﷺ before any of it happened:

The Ottoman decline through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — battlefield defeats, foreign debt, provinces lost one after another — repeats the lesson of al-Andalus rather than adding a new one: outward strength follows inward condition, and no dynasty holds a promise of permanence. The Prophet ﷺ had described the mechanism of such a decline in terms that have nothing to do with numbers:

How Islam Reached Southeast Asia

No army brought Islam to the Malay world. It arrived in the holds of trading ships, along the monsoon routes that linked the Red Sea and the Gulf to Gujarat, the Straits of Melaka, and the ports of southern China — routes that had carried Arab, Persian and Indian merchants since before Islam and now carried Muslims. Traders settled in the port towns, married locally, dealt honestly, and prayed where their neighbours could see them. Rulers watched, asked questions, and one by one accepted Islam; their courts and then their peoples followed.

The milestones are visible in the record. A Muslim sultanate existed at Samudera-Pasai in northern Sumatra by the late thirteenth century, and Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, visiting in the 1340s, found a functioning Muslim court with scholars in attendance. Melaka became Muslim in the early fifteenth century and, as the dominant trading power of the Straits, carried Islam and the Malay language through the peninsula and into the archipelago. Aceh, Brunei, Ternate, Demak and the north-coast states of Java followed, and by the seventeenth century Islam was the religion of most of maritime Southeast Asia. Today the region holds more Muslims than the entire Arab world, and not one conquest stands behind that.

That is worth pausing on, because it is the most far-reaching daʿwah in the history of the ummah and it was carried by ordinary believers doing ordinary work well, under an instruction addressed to every single Muslim:

The traders' credibility was their capital in both senses. A merchant community known for honest weights and plain dealing was a standing argument for the religion, and the Prophet ﷺ had made the standard unmistakable when he found a seller hiding wet grain beneath dry:

Learning followed trade. The same sea-lanes carried students from the archipelago to Makkah and Madinah, where they studied for years and returned as teachers: figures such as ʿAbd ar-Raʾūf as-Singkilī of Aceh in the seventeenth century, Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjarī of Banjar in the eighteenth, and Nawawī al-Bantanī of Java in the nineteenth, whose works are still read in the region's schools. Jawi — the Arabic script adapted to write Malay — became the vehicle of Qur'anic learning across the region, and the pondok and pesantren schools built a literate religious culture that survived colonial rule intact. The manner of that whole enterprise is the manner the Qur'an prescribes:

What that example asks of Muslims in every land now is set out on the Daʿwah page.

1924 and the Age We Live In

On 3 March 1924 the Turkish republic abolished the Ottoman caliphate. For the first time since the pledge given to Abū Bakr, the ummah had no caliph even in name. Most Muslim lands were by then under European colonial administration; over the following two generations they emerged as the sovereign states of today, more than fifty of them, with the world's largest Muslim populations in South and Southeast Asia rather than in the Arab world. The rupture was real and its effects are still being worked through. But it is exactly the kind of turn the Prophet ﷺ foretold when he said that the caliphate patterned on prophethood would last thirty years and that dominion afterwards is given to whom Allah wills (Sunan Abi Dawud 4646, quoted above). What was promised permanence in this religion was never the state. It was the religion.

The Qur'an ties political condition to inward condition, and the tie runs in that order, not the reverse:

Alongside the loss, this century has seen the instruments of preservation multiply beyond anything earlier generations could have imagined. The Qur'an is printed to a single standard from Madinah to Jakarta and memorised in full by more people than in any previous century. The six books, the great commentaries and the fiqh literature are printed, indexed and searchable, and the recitation chains are still granted teacher to student. Translation has put the meanings of the Book into every major language. The corpus that al-Bukhārī assembled in Abbasid Baghdad is the same corpus this site reads from, chain-checked and graded, on its hadith pages. The technology is new; the content is what the third century sealed.

Two narrations set the horizon for a Muslim who has read this far. The first is a promise that the truth is never left without carriers, whatever the century looks like:

The second is the pattern by which the religion has in fact been restored after every decline in this page — not by a dynasty, but by knowledge being renewed:

And the measure by which any such renewal is judged — in the eighth century or the fifteenth — was given by the Prophet ﷺ in one sentence when he was asked which of the ummah's many parties would be saved:

That is where thirteen centuries leave us, and it is a workable conclusion rather than a mournful one. States rose in this story by holding to the religion and decayed by loosening their grip on it, and none of them was guaranteed. The religion itself was guaranteed, and it was kept — through the Book Allah promised to guard, and through the unbroken chains of the men and women who memorised, verified, taught and lived it in every one of those centuries. Our part in the chapter now being written is the same as theirs was: learn it accurately, act on it honestly, and pass it on, even if a single sentence.

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