Welcome


Background
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This podcast started as a log of my journey through multiple classical Arab histories. Listeners are invited to join me as I construct a narrative out of the long and often contradictory accounts left to us by the earliest Arab historians. We’ll use their material (and at times supplement it with more recent scholarship) to try and understand the political evolution of the Arabs from warring nomadic tribes at the edges of civilization, to the proud rulers of the greatest empire of their time, and then back again. Our vantage point into this world will be their leaders, the “successors to God’s prophet Mohammad”: the caliphs.




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