CHAPTER SEVENTHE THREE EMPIRES AND THE ISLAMIC PHOENIX
(1400 A.C.–1800 A.C.)Introduction
The Phoenix is said to be a bird of an Arabian Desert, which lived
for several centuries, burned itself to death, and then was reborn
from its ashes—a legend the analogy of which is not very dissimilar
to that of the legacy of Islam. The two centuries from the mid-
thirteen to the mid-fifteen centuries seem to tell the tale.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Baghdad, the capital of the
caliphate, was destroyed by the Mongols (1220–1500), and the Euph-
rates, as historians tell us, were swamped with corps and skulls. Even
the lives of the Abbasìd caliph and his delegates who hurried to
receive the Mongol Chieftain Hulagu in a welcoming surrender were
not to be spared. Until they were finally checked by the Egyptian
Mamlùk Baybars in the decisive battle of Ain Jalut, north Palestine,
in 1260, they turned the Islamic land into ashes. Ain Jalut was not a
strategic battle that had to be won to balance the score, but it was
a battle for survival; survival of Muslims and survival of Islam itself.
The Mamlùks of Egypt were the last remaining stronghold facing
the Mongols in their unstoppable destructive march to the west and
had the Mongols had the upper hand over the Mamlùks the road
to the Islamic sacred shrines in Makkah and al-Medìnah would have
been wide open for further destruction. Seeing the Islamic ritual
shrines at risk of destruction must have prompted the populace to
rally behind the Mamlùks, who were Sunni Muslims, and to turn the
confrontation into a Holly War, jihàd. In the hearts of Muslims, it
was not a battle for land or even the caliphate; it was a battle for
God. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, the fate of the Muslim
world was to take an unexpected turn.
By the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth
centuries the Islamic ashes in the aftermath of the Mongol’s destruc-
tion burst into flames and those who turned the Islamic world into