This lecture will discuss the way in which Prophet Muḥammad and his immediate successor Abū Bakr established Muslim control over the Arabian peninsula. For some years I have been working on a new English translation of al-Baladhuri’s classic account of the Muslim conquests of the Near East (written c. 865) and I shall use this account to show not only the process of conquest but the way in which a historian from the Abbasid period, two centuries later, presents and describes it
There will be a reception afterwards in the Vestry Hall which will provide the first chance for IASA members to meet in person since 2019.
Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London and the auhor of numerous books and articles about the first four centuries of Islam, including The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (4th ed. 2022) and The Calphate: the history of an idea (2016)
The lecture will be filmed and uploaded to our You Tube
channel.
