Sublime

Shared faith, and common acknowledgement of the Sharia or Islamic law, helped make Ottoman rule acceptable in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and North Africa, while the sultan’s role as Islam’s champion against the Christian infidel gave him a strong claim on the loyalty of the faithful.

AT THE DAWN of the eighteenth century, around the time Europe was beginning to take notice of the vast natural resources waiting to be tapped across the Mediterranean, the sacred land that had given birth to Islam and reared it in its infancy fell under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, though the Caliph allowed the Sharif of Mecca—a de

K’ang-hsi had restored Peking’s authority in mainland East Asia. This great triumph, followed up by the Yung-cheng (r. 1723–35) and Ch’ien-lung (r. 1735–96) emperors, was the vital geopolitical precondition for the domestic achievements of Ch’ing rule and, in the longer term, for its tenacious resistance to European diplomatic and commercial demand

Shravasti: This was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kaushala.

In 1818, the Egyptian khedive, Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), at the behest of the Ottoman Caliph, sent a massive contingent of heavily armed soldiers into the peninsula. The Egyptian army easily overwhelmed the ill-equipped and poorly trained Wahhabis. Mecca and Medina were once again placed under the care of the Sharif and the Wahhabists forcefully se

Yang Zengxin, maintained autocratic control untrammeled by Beijing from 1911 until his death in 1928.

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.

Dīn al-Ayyubī had been rising in Egypt

In the nineteenth century a particularly rich inhumation cemetery was partially excavated just east of the village of Sarre in the Isle of Thanet, in east Kent. The Wantsum Channel, which separated Thanet from the mainland until the end of the Middle Ages was, in Bede’s day, traversable on foot in just two places.39 Sarre (from the Brythonic word s