96. Karen Armstrongthe Turks called their new state in Anatolia "Rum" or Rome.
Despite the decline of the caliphate, Muslims had now ex-
panded into two areas that had never before been part of the
Dar al-Islam - eastern Europe and a portion of north-west
India-and which would become highly creative regions in
the near future.
Caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) tried to restore the caliphate in
Baghdad and its environs. Seeing the power of the religious re-
vival, he tried to draw upon Islam. Originally, the Shariah had
been developed in protest against caliphal rule, but now al-
Nasir studied to become an alim in all four of the Sunni law
schools. He was also initiated into one of the futuwwab clubs,
with the aim of making himself the Grand Master of all the
futuwwabs in Baghdad. Afier al-Nasir's death, his successors
continued these policies. But it was too late. The Islamic world
was shortly engulfed in a catastrophe which would finally bring
the Abbasid caliphate to a violent and tragic end.
THE MONGOLS (1220-1500)
In the Far East, the Mongol chiefiain Genghis Khan was
building a world empire, and a clash with Islamdom was in-
evitable. Unlike the Seljuks, he was able to control and disci-
pline his nomadic hordes, and made them into a fighting
machine with a destructive power that the world had never
seen before. Any ruler who failed to submit immediately to
the Mongol chiefiains could expect to see his major cities en-
tirely laid waste and their populations massacred. The Mon-
gols' ferocity was a deliberate technique but it also expressed
the nomads' pent-up resentment of urban culture. When
Muhammad, shah of the Khwarazmian Turks (1200-1220),
attempted to build a Muslim caliphate of his own in Iran and
the Oxus region, the Mongol general Hulegu regarded it as
an act of insolent hubris. From 1219 to 1229 the Mongol