ABSTRACT
The Middle East region, comprising the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia and the Levant, contains within it the three earliest centres of Islamic civilisation: the Hejaz, dominated by Mecca and Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad preached and where the first Islamic community developed under his aegis and that of the first three caliphs; greater Syria, centred on Damascus, the capital of the Umayyad dynasty from 661 to 750, and containing Jerusalem, Islam’s first qibla and its third holy city; and Iraq, where the new capital of Baghdad became the centre of a vast empire under the Abbasids, where the consensus that grew into Islamic orthodoxy was first hammered out, and where the chief elements of classical Islamic civilisation were developed.
