37 / 128
Hussein was slain along with his family and 200 of his followers.
Iraqi cities such as An Najaf and Karbala remain important shrines
for Shiite Muslims today. After the defeat of the Shiites, the Sunni
caliphs maintained their control over Islam.
For the next seven centuries, two Sunni dynasties ruled the
Muslims—the Umayyads from 661 to 750 and the Abbasids from
750 to 1258. The caliphs ruled the spreading Islamic empire first
from Medina, and then from Damascus, Syria. In 762 the adminis-
trative center was moved to a new city on the Tigris River, called
Madinat as-Salam (“the City of Peace”), although many people still
knew it by the name of a small town that had been on that site
before—Baghdad.
During the eighth century, Muslim culture blossomed in
Baghdad. Literature, science, art, and mathematics flourished, and
Baghdad became one of the world’s leading cities. The caliphs
encouraged the growth of knowledge by opening schools that
attracted scholars from all over. The writings of ancient Greece and
Rome were translated into Arabic and preserved in libraries and
universities in Baghdad and other cities. Many of these important
writings had been lost in the West when barbarians destroyed the
Roman Empire; they would be rediscovered by European scholars
centuries later. The 8th through the 12th centuries are often con-
sidered to be the golden age of the Arab Islamic civilization.
The area of modern-day Iraq continued to be at the center of the
Islamic civilization until the 13th century. During the early years
of that century, the Mongols had spread their control east from
Asia into Persia under the great leader Genghis Khan. In 1258
Mongol armies sacked Baghdad. The city was destroyed, and most
of the inhabitants were slaughtered—in fact, the Mongol leader
Hülegü Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, made a pyramid from
the skulls of poets, scholars, and religious leaders in Baghdad.
During the next few centuries, control of Mesopotamia alternated
I
RAQ
’
S
H
ISTORY TO
1990 37