The Abbasid Caliphate: A History.

• Author: Yucesoy, Hayrettin

The Abbasid Caliphate: A History. By TAYEB EL-HIBRI. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. xxxii + 330, illus. $89.99 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $24 (ebook).

Like several of its peers in world history, the Abbasid empire left an indelible mark on Muslim political traditions, religious practices, intellectual pursuits, and cultural habits that grew much larger than its actual size and lasted well beyond its own time. Just to name one, Islam as we know it today settled into its initial form as a "religion" during the Abbasid period. In a more formal way, this empire functioned as a "structuring" archetype of imperial practices and ideas for many dynasties, from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula. No history of bureaucracy under Muslim dynasties can be satisfactorily written without a reference to the Abbasid bureaucratic practice and intellectual tradition. Even today, the Abbasid caliphate continues to shape our discussions about Islam, Islamic civilization, and Muslims in world history in explicit and subtle ways.

It is lamentable, therefore, in light of its duration, magnitude, significance, and impact, that the Abbasid caliphate remains woefully understudied in scholarship and neglected in public discourse. As far as lay readers and undergraduate students are concerned, there are only a handful of monographs on the market. For this reason alone, Tayeb EI-Hibri is to be congratulated for producing The Abbas id Caliphate: A History and for reminding us why we need to keep studying and writing about it from different angles. One of the leading historians of the Abbasids, he structures the book to follow the timeline of political history, surveying the Abbasid caliphate from its inception in the mid-eighth century to its demise at the hands of the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth. What makes the work even more attractive is that it ventures beyond the framework of a bare-bones political history and offers a broader view of the Abbasid caliphate as an institution through its various phases, in lucid language and well-crafted chapters.

The book comprises five chronologically organized chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. After the introduction, chapter two, "From Revolution to Foundations (750-775)," discusses the Abbasid empire-building efforts after the devastation caused by the fourth civil war. "The Golden Age of the Abbasid Caliphate (775-833)" is the subject of chapter three, in which the author addresses the...