Map – Abbasids (749 – 877 CE)

TIME PERIOD: 749 – 877 CE

“Syria was replaced as center of the Muslim caliphate by Iraq. The power of Abu’l-‘Abbas (749-54) and his successors, known from their ancestor as ‘Abbasids, lay less in the eastern Mediterranean countries, or in Hijaz which was an extension of them, than in the former Sasanian territories: southern Iraq and the oases and plateaux of Iran, Khurasan and the land stretching beyond it into central Asia.”

Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, p. 32, Warner Books Edition, 1991

“With the transfer of the political centre to Iraq they [the Abbasids] succeeded in completing the slower, but major, process of shifting the international trade routes connecting the Middle East and the Far East from Syria to the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Almost overnight Palestine became a marginal land and began to deteriorate.”

Moshe Sharon, “The History of Palestine from the Arab Conquest until the Crusades (633-1099),” A History of Israel and the Holy Land, p. 224, The Continuum Publishing Group Inc., 2001

“The first sign of internal decay in the Abbasid regime was the rise of the Turkish bodyguard under the immediate successors of al-Ma’mun (d. 833)…Except for short intervals thereafter the Abbasid power was steadily on the decline…As it was disintegrating petty dynasties, mostly of Arab origin, were parcelling out its domains in the west…First among those with which Syria [including Palestine] was concerned was the Tulunid dynasty.”

Philip K. Hitti, History of Syria, p. 557, Macmillan & Co. LTD. 1951

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