ABSTRACT
At the opening of the thirteenth century the prospects of Sunnite Islam were relatively favourable. The Fatimid schism, which had disrupted the Muslim world for close on three hundred years, was healed, and revolutionary Isma‘ilism survived only in isolated pockets in Persian and Syrian castles, a nuisance rather than a menace. Orthodoxy had been deepened and defined; law and theology as interpreted by the four canonical schools, were taught in the madrasas, and the ‘university’ of al-Azhar in Cairo, purged by Saladin of its Shi‘ite taint, was to become the principal centre of Muslim higher learning. The Franks, if not totally expelled, clung precariously only to a few strong points on the Syrian shores. The Byzantine Empire, against which the Muslims had battled for so many centuries, was shattered to fragments by the Latin Crusaders themselves, and Asia Minor was made safe for Islam. A vigorous military State, that of the Ayyubids, dominated the Arab lands. In Persia, the Seljuk Empire finally disintegrated on the death of Sultan Sanjar in 1157, but its power was in great part inherited by a new State founded by its former vassals, the Shahs of Khwarazm. Apart from Transoxiana, which had fallen to the Kara-Khitay in 1141, no portion of Dar al-Islam was lost to heathen nomads. In the West, though most of Spain was irretrievably gone, and North Africa still bore the scars of the ravages of the Banu-Hilal, the situation had stabilized itself with the coming of the Berber Muwahhids (Almohads—‘Unitarians’), ardent devotees of the unity of God against what they considered to be anthropomorphic corruptions, who starting from Morocco about 1120, erected within forty years an empire embracing the whole of the Maghrib, which enjoyed for two generations a peace and well-being it had not known since Roman times. Islam was spreading along the caravan routes southwards across the Sahara; it was slowly creeping down the coast of east Africa as far as Sofala, and up the Nile into hitherto Christian Nubia.
