# Islam Timeline The chronological spine for [[Islam]] — the world's fastest-growing religion and, at roughly two billion adherents, the tradition that appears in this vault more often as an object of American political mobilization than as anything else. This page is the first of the per-tradition companions to the [[World Religions Timeline]], and it exists to supply what the vault has been missing: an **internal** chronology of Islam, so that the material filed under [[Islamophobia]], the [[War on Terror Timeline]], and the counter-jihad network has something to be measured against. It runs two tracks. Eras I–IX are the history of the tradition and the societies it shaped. A parallel section then runs the **American counter-jihad industry** from 1990 to 2026 as its own chronology, because that industry is a distinctly American political formation with its own founders, funders, and legislative program, and reading it interleaved with fourteen centuries of Islamic history flatters it. > [!warning] On sources and dates > The earliest biography of Muhammad — Ibn Ishaq's, surviving only through Ibn Hisham's edited recension — was written **120 to 140 years after his death**, and Ibn Hisham states outright that he abbreviated, annotated, and omitted material. There is almost no contemporary documentary evidence for the first century. Dates in Era I are therefore traditional dates from a later tradition, and this page marks them as such rather than pretending to a precision no one has. > > Four claims flagged in place because they are wrong and widespread: that the Ottomans received the caliphate in 1517; that the gate of *ijtihad* closed around 900 CE; that al-Ghazali killed Islamic science; and that the "House of Wisdom" was an institution. --- ## I. Revelation and the First Community (c. 570 – 661) - **c. 570** — Muhammad born at Mecca. The date is approximate and anchored to the legendary "Year of the Elephant"; the Meccan record is fragmentary. - **610 (traditional)** — First revelation on Mount Hira. Muhammad preaches strict monotheism, social obligation to the poor and orphaned, and a coming judgment, in a mercantile polytheistic city whose economy depended in part on pilgrimage to the Kaaba's idols. The early opposition was commercial as much as theological. - **622** — **The Hijra to Medina**, and the firmest date in the sequence: year 1 of the Islamic calendar. This is the pivot on which everything turns. At Mecca Muhammad led a persecuted minority; at Medina he governed — arbitrating disputes, levying, making treaties, commanding in war. **[[Islam]] therefore contains a fully articulated theory of religious governance from its first decade**, which is why the question of the Islamic state is native to the tradition rather than retrofitted, as Christian political theology had to be after Constantine. - **c. 622** — The **Constitution of Medina** constitutes the town's groups as a single *umma* transcending tribal kinship and extends protection to its Jewish tribes: "neither shall they be oppressed nor will any help be given against them." Most historians accept its authenticity — the archaic language, the inclusion of non-Muslims, and the unflattering treatment of Quraysh are all things a later forger would not have produced. - **8 June 632** — Muhammad dies at Medina, without an unambiguous designated successor and without institutional machinery for choosing one. Everything in Era I after this point is a consequence of that gap. - **632 – 661** — The **Rashidun caliphate**: Abu Bakr (632–634), Umar (634–644), Uthman (644–656), Ali (656–661). Arab armies take [[Syria]], Egypt, Mesopotamia and Sassanid Persia within a generation — one of the fastest imperial expansions on record, achieved against two empires exhausted by decades of war with each other. **Three of the four caliphs were assassinated.** - **c. 650** — The **Uthmanic recension** of the Quran. The 1970s revisionist case for late-7th-century canonization has largely collapsed against manuscript evidence: the Birmingham folios and the Sanaa palimpsest both radiocarbon-date to the 7th century, and Western scholarship has moved back toward broadly accepting the traditional account. - **656 – 661** — The **First Fitna**. Uthman is murdered in his house by rebel soldiers; Mu'awiya demands retribution, Ali prioritizes order; the Battle of the Camel (656) and Siffin (657) split the community between Kufa and Damascus. Ali is assassinated at prayer in 661 by Kharijites — the first sect to declare other Muslims apostate and kill them for it, and the doctrinal ancestor, at a considerable distance, of everything later filed under *takfir*. --- ## II. Empire, Law, and the Golden Age (661 – 1258) - **661 – 750** — The **Umayyad caliphate**, ruled from Damascus, at its peak running from Iberia to the Indus across more than eleven million square kilometres. Hereditary, Arab-supremacist in practice, and resented accordingly by Shia partisans and by *mawali* — non-Arab converts treated as second-class. - **711 – 1492** — **Al-Andalus.** Conquest of Iberia in 711; an independent Cordoban emirate by 756; a rival caliphate declared by Abd al-Rahman III in 929; collapse into *taifa* kingdoms in 1031; Cordoba lost 1236, Seville 1248, Granada surrendered 2 January 1492. The *convivencia* framing — coined by Américo Castro in **1948** and contested from the moment he coined it — remains the most politically loaded concept in medieval Iberian history, invoked by one side as proof Islam is compatible with pluralism and by the other as proof it never was. - **25 January 750** — The **Battle of the Zab** ends Umayyad rule; the Abbasid revolution succeeds on a coalition of Persian, Shia and *mawali* grievance. - **2 August 762** — **Baghdad founded** by al-Mansur as *Madinat al-Salam*, the City of Peace. Within a century it is probably the largest city on earth. - **c. 786 – 1000** — The **Translation Movement** and what is conventionally called the [[Islamic Golden Age]]: al-Khwarizmi's algebra, Ibn al-Haytham's optics and controlled experiment, Ibn Sina's *Canon of Medicine*, al-Razi's clinical practice, Ibn Rushd's Aristotle. **The "House of Wisdom" as a university-like academy is very likely a 19th-century Orientalist construction** resting on a mistranslation of *khizanat al-hikma*, a storehouse or library; few Abbasid sources mention it and none of the major translations reference it. - **699 – 855** — The four surviving Sunni legal schools take shape around Abu Hanifa (699–767), Malik ibn Anas (711–795), al-Shafi'i (767–820, who systematized legal theory itself), and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855). See [[Sharia]]. The recurring Western claim that "**the gate of *ijtihad* closed**" around 900 CE was refuted by Wael Hallaq in 1984: the phrase does not appear in legal literature until the late 11th century, qualified *mujtahids* existed continuously, and no consensus on closure was ever reached. - **833 – c. 851** — The **Mihna**, the caliphal inquisition. Al-Ma'mun imposes the doctrine that the Quran was created and prosecutes scholars who refuse; Ahmad ibn Hanbal is stripped of his post, imprisoned and flogged unconscious, and is released after public outcry. Al-Mutawakkil abolishes the inquisition between 848 and 851. **The state lost.** The traditionists' victory over Mu'tazilite rationalism established that Sunni religious authority sits with independent scholars rather than with the ruler — a structural fact that distinguishes Sunni Islam from every church-state arrangement in the Christian world, and that later makes it much harder for any modern Muslim state to speak authoritatively for the religion. - **909 – 1171** — The Ismaili **Fatimid caliphate** in North Africa and Egypt; al-Azhar founded at Cairo in 970, and still the closest thing [[Sunni Islam]] has to a magisterium a thousand years later. - **945 – 1055** — The Buyid period lets Shia thought and ritual develop publicly. Sunni and Shia devotional practice remains substantially intertwined into the 13th and 14th centuries; see [[Shia Islam]]. - **1058 – 1111** — **Al-Ghazali.** *The Incoherence of the Philosophers* critiques twenty teachings of the *falasifa* and condemns exactly **three** as unbelief, arguing they were not demonstratively proven rather than that they were false. He accepted Aristotelian logic, absorbed Avicennan psychology into kalam, and legitimized [[Sufism]] for the mainstream. **The claim that he ended Islamic science does not survive the text** — major work continued for centuries, including the Maragha school whose planetary models appear in Copernicus. - **1095 – 1291** — The **Crusades**, from the Muslim side: a peripheral and initially confusing frontier war in a fragmented Levant, decisively reversed by Saladin at Hattin (1187), and remembered as far less central than it is in European memory — until 20th-century Islamists and Western politicians both found it useful. See [[Crusader Complex]]. - **1258** — **The Mongol sack of Baghdad**, 29 January – 10 February. Al-Musta'sim surrenders on 10 February and is executed on 20 February, rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses so that no royal blood touches the ground. Death tolls range from Hulegu's own 200,000 to Muslim sources' two million. **Modern historians dispute that 1258 ended the Golden Age** — libraries reopened within two years, and the intellectual centers shifted rather than vanished. --- ## III. The Long Middle Period and the Gunpowder Empires (1258 – 1798) - **1263 – 1328** — **Ibn Taymiyya**, writing in Mongol-devastated Damascus, having fled Harran as a child. Repeatedly prosecuted by his own contemporaries — 1298, 1306, 1309, 1318, 1326 — and dead in prison. His **Mardin fatwa** ruled that Muslim life and property remain inviolable whoever rules, that emigration is not obligatory where faith can be practiced, and that Mardin was a third category, neither *dar al-islam* nor *dar al-harb*. **A 1909 printing corrupted one word** — *yu'amal*, "should be treated," became *yuqatal*, "should be fought" — and modern jihadi movements built on the corrupted text. The 2010 Mardin conference recovered the manuscript reading. He is the most consequential misquotation in modern Islamic politics. - **1377** — **Ibn Khaldun** drafts the *Muqaddimah*, building a cyclical theory of dynastic rise and fall around *asabiyyah* — group solidarity — and inventing something recognizable as social science, complete with source criticism, four centuries before Europe. - **c. 1299 / 1301 – 1922** — The **[[Ottoman Empire]]**. The traditional 1299 founding under Osman I rests on nothing contemporary: "the earliest history of the Ottomans is a black hole," with no written source from Osman's reign and Ottoman chroniclers writing it down only in the 15th century. Constantinople falls **29 May 1453**. - **1501 – 1736** — The **Safavid empire**. Ismail I imposes Twelver [[Shia Islam]] on Iran by force, creating the sectarian map of the modern Middle East. **This is the hinge to hold onto: the hard Sunni–Shia boundary is roughly five centuries old and was made by a state, not fourteen centuries old and made at Karbala.** - **20 April 1526** — Babur's artillery wins the First Battle of Panipat, founding the **Mughal empire**: a Sunni dynasty governing a Hindu-majority population, an arrangement whose memory is now central ammunition in the [[Narendra Modi]]-era Hindutva politics the vault tracks. - **1744** — The **Diriyah pact**: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud trade religious legitimacy for military force in central Arabia. See [[Wahhabism]]. Three Saudi states and 280 years later, the bargain is still running. - **1774** — The **Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca**, the first document in which a European power recognizes an Ottoman claim to the [[Caliphate]]. The story that Selim I received the office from the last Cairo Abbasid in 1517 **first appears in 1790, 273 years after the fact**, and some historians consider it a fabrication. --- ## IV. Colonial Rupture and the Reform Response (1798 – 1924) - **1798** — Napoleon in Egypt. The conventional marker for the colonial encounter, and the beginning of a century in which nearly every Muslim-majority society came under European rule or control. - **1830 – 1920** — France takes Algeria (1830), Britain takes Egypt (1882), the Dutch consolidate the Indies, Russia takes Central Asia, and the Ottoman territories are partitioned after 1918. By 1920 the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims live under non-Muslim rule for the first time since the 7th century. - **30 May 1866** — **Darul Uloom Deoband** founded in colonial India, after the failure of armed resistance around the 1857 rebellion: strict *taqlid*, hostility to shrine devotion, and a madrasa network designed to preserve religious learning outside state control. Its most prominent modern political descendant is the [[Taliban]]. The rival **Barelvi** movement, defending popular Sufi devotion, is organized by Ahmad Raza Khan from 1904; his **Husam al-Haramayn (1906)** declares the Deobandi founders unbelievers, opening a fatwa war still running. - **1884 – 1935** — The reform current: **Jamal al-Din al-Afghani** (d. 1897) preaching pan-Islamic unity against imperialism, **Muhammad Abduh** (d. 1905), Grand Mufti of Egypt, arguing for reason over *taqlid*, and **Rashid Rida** (1865–1935), who founds *al-Manar* in 1898, abandons his early rationalism, and becomes a leading champion of [[Wahhabism]] in the 1920s. > [!note] The Salafiyya genealogy is contested > The tidy story — "modernist Salafiyya of al-Afghani and Abduh evolves into today's purist Salafism" — is challenged by Henri Lauzière (2010), who finds the primary sources do not show those figures coining *salafiyya* or using it as a self-identifier; the term was popularized by the **Salafiyya Bookstore in Cairo (1909)**. Treating the two as one lineage is a conceptual anachronism. - **3 January – 16 May 1916 / 2 November 1917 / 26 April 1920** — **Sykes–Picot**, initialed 3 January and ratified in May, dividing the non-Arabian Ottoman lands into British and French spheres; the **Balfour Declaration**; and the **San Remo agreement** assigning the mandates — notably before the League's mandate machinery existed, so San Remo predetermined what the League then formalized. The Bolsheviks published Sykes–Picot on **23 November 1917**, exposing the contradiction with British promises to the Arabs. A century of grievance politics dates from that publication as much as from the agreement. - **1 November 1922 / 3 March 1924** — The Ottoman sultanate abolished; then the **[[Caliphate]] itself**, by vote of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, with the Ottoman house exiled. **The hole this opened in Sunni political theology has never been filled**, and every Islamist movement since is in some sense an answer to it. - **1928** — Hasan al-Banna founds the **[[Muslim Brotherhood]]** in Egypt — four years after the abolition, which is not a coincidence. --- ## V. Nation-States, Arab Nationalism, and Its Failure (1924 – 1979) - **14 August 1947 / 12 March 1949** — **Pakistan**, founded on the two-nation theory as the first modern state created explicitly as a Muslim homeland; partition displaces perhaps ten million people each way with deaths estimated from the hundreds of thousands to two million. The **Objectives Resolution** of 1949 declares sovereignty to belong to Allah and delegated to the state — preamble to three constitutions, and made a substantive part of the constitution by the Eighth Amendment in 1985. - **1948 – 1967** — The era of secular Arab nationalism. Nasser's Egypt, Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq, and a broadly socialist, anti-colonial, explicitly non-religious politics as the dominant idiom of the Arab world. See [[Gamal Abdel Nasser]]. - **26 October – 7 December 1954** — A Brotherhood member fires eight shots at Nasser in Alexandria and misses. The Brotherhood is dissolved on 29 October, over 4,000 members imprisoned, six leaders executed on 7 December. - **1964 / 29 August 1966** — **Sayyid Qutb** publishes *Milestones*, arguing that Muslim societies have themselves reverted to *jahiliyya* and that God's exclusive sovereignty (*hakimiyya*) makes man-made law usurpation. He is hanged on 29 August 1966. **His execution multiplied his influence** — the two ideas above are the doctrinal foundation of every later jihadi movement in this timeline. See [[Jihad]]. - **5 June 1967** — The **Six-Day War**, and the single most important date in modern Islamic political history. Israel's rapid victory destroyed the credibility of Arab nationalism and its regimes; the religious explanation — that Arabs had strayed from Islam — gained ground, and disillusioned nationalists moved en masse into Islamist movements. Fawaz Gerges found that **every single jihadist he interviewed named 1967 as the watershed**; Zawahiri cited it as proof "the secular political system was bankrupt." [[Islamism]] did not defeat Arab nationalism in argument. It inherited the wreckage. - **19 October 1973 – 18 March 1974** — The **OAPEC oil embargo** takes crude from $3 to nearly $12 a barrel. Riyadh property prices doubled weekly through 1974. The petrodollar era begins, and with it the funding base for everything in the next section. --- ## VI. The Revolutionary Turn (1979 – 2001) **1979 is the hinge year of modern Islamic politics, and three of its events were causally independent.** - **16 January / 1 February / 11 February 1979** — The Shah leaves Iran; [[Ruhollah Khomeini]] returns after fifteen years of exile; the monarchy falls when the armed forces declare neutrality. A March referendum approves an Islamic Republic; the December constitution installs Khomeini as Supreme Leader under *velayat-e faqih* — a doctrine that fills the gap left by the twelfth Imam's occultation with a jurist's guardianship. See [[Iranian Revolution]] and [[Theocracy]]. **The only functioning constitutional theocracy built by a mass uprising in the modern world.** - **20 November – 4 December 1979** — The **Grand Mosque seizure** at Mecca. Juhayman al-Otaybi's 500–600 militants proclaim a Mahdi; 127 Saudi troops, 117 militants and 26 pilgrims are killed; 68 are beheaded on 9 January 1980. King Khalid's response is not liberalization but **capitulation to the clerical right**: expanded religious-police authority, images of women banned from press and then television, cinemas and music shops closed, gender segregation and religious education expanded, and a vastly enlarged program of religious export abroad. See [[Wahhabism]]. - **3 July 1979 – 15 February 1989** — **Operation Cyclone** and the Afghan jihad. CIA funding starts at $695,000 in mid-1979, reaches $20–30 million a year by 1980, and peaks at **$630 million in 1987**; [[Saudi Arabia]] matches American dollars; Pakistan's [[ISI]] controls all distribution and trains 16,000–18,000 fighters a year by 1986. Total aid: $6–12 billion. Soviet withdrawal completes 15 February 1989. **The United States spent a decade funding, arming and celebrating people it called mujahideen — those who wage jihad. The word did not change meaning in 1989; the alignment did.** - **1982 / 1985** — Iran's IRGC builds **[[Hezbollah]]** as a proxy in Lebanon; it announces itself publicly in 1985. - **18 April / 23 October 1983** — The Beirut embassy bombing kills 63; the barracks bombings kill 241 American personnel and 58 French. The United States withdraws from Lebanon, a lesson both sides drew conclusions from. - **August 1988** — **[[Al-Qaeda]]** founded at Peshawar by [[Osama bin Laden]] and Abdullah Azzam as a *qaeda* — a base, a vanguard — for jihad after the Soviet withdrawal. - **14 February 1989** — Khomeini's fatwa against **Salman Rushdie** over *The Satanic Verses*. Rushdie's Japanese translator was murdered in 1991, his Italian translator stabbed, a Norwegian publisher shot, and 37 people died in a 1993 Turkish hotel fire targeting a translator. Rushdie spent roughly thirteen years under protection. The affair globalized the blasphemy question and gave Western debate its enduring template. - **December 1991 – c. 2002** — **Algeria.** The FIS wins 188 seats in the first round; the army cancels the election the following month; the ensuing civil war kills roughly 100,000 civilians. The most consequential demonstration of the proposition that Islamists will be permitted to win elections only until they do. - **1992 – 1995** — **Bosnia.** Roughly 100,000 killed, 80 percent of them Bosniak Muslims; **Srebrenica, July 1995**, the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. A European Muslim population destroyed while Europe watched — a fact that shaped a generation of Muslim political consciousness and that is almost entirely absent from the American counter-jihad narrative. - **1994 / 1996** — The **[[Taliban]]** emerges from Kandahar-area religious schools under Mullah Omar and takes Kabul. - **February 1998 / 7 August 1998 / 12 October 2000** — Bin Laden's World Islamic Front declaration extends the target set to American civilians; the East Africa embassy bombings kill 224; the USS *Cole* attack kills 17. --- ## VII. The American War (2001 – 2011) - **11 September 2001** — The [[September 11 Attacks]] kill 2,996. Fifteen of nineteen hijackers are Saudi nationals; none are Iraqi, Iranian or Afghan. - **October 2001 – December 2001** — The US invasion collapses the [[Taliban]] government. See [[Afghanistan War]]. - **26 October 2001 / September 2002 / 2003** — The [[USA PATRIOT Act]]; **NSEERS** registration, covering 25 countries all Muslim-majority but North Korea; [[Guantanamo]]. NSEERS processed over 138,000 registrants and placed at least 13,153 people in deportation proceedings. It produced **zero terrorism convictions**, and was formally dismantled on 23 December 2016, in Obama's final weeks, explicitly to deny the incoming administration a ready-made registry. - **20 March 2003 – 18 December 2011** — The **[[Iraq War]]**. Baghdad falls 9 April 2003; [[Paul Bremer]]'s May 2003 disbanding of the Iraqi security forces puts hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed men on the street; the February 2006 Samarra shrine bombing detonates sectarian civil war. Roughly 4,500 American dead, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, some $800 billion. The [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]] breaks in 2004. - **October 2004 – October 2006** — Zarqawi's group pledges to [[Al-Qaeda]], becoming al-Qaeda in Iraq; Zarqawi is killed in June 2006; the Islamic State of Iraq forms that October. **The [[Islamic State]] is a direct product of the invasion**, and the causal chain — invade, dissolve the army, detain a generation at Camp Bucca, produce a sectarian insurgency — is about as clean as historical causation gets. - **2003 – 15 April 2014** — The NYPD **Demographics Unit** maps New York's Muslim population by 28 "ancestries of interest," with undercover officers in businesses, mosques, student groups and sports teams. It was disbanded in April 2014. In more than ten years, by the NYPD's own acknowledgment, it **generated not a single terrorism lead**. - **2 May 2011** — Bin Laden killed at Abbottabad. --- ## VIII. Fragmentation (2011 – 2020) - **17 December 2010 – 2012** — The **[[Arab Spring]]**. Bouazizi's self-immolation; Ben Ali flees 14 January 2011; Mubarak resigns 11 February; Gaddafi is killed 20 October; Saleh steps down February 2012. Outcomes diverge violently: elections in Tunisia and Egypt, state collapse in [[Libya]], Syria and Yemen. - **June 2012 / 3 July 2013 / 14 August 2013** — **Mohamed Morsi** wins Egypt's presidency with 51.73 percent, the country's first democratically elected leader; he is removed by a military coup under [[Abdel Fattah el-Sisi]]; the Rabaa dispersal kills at least 904 in a single day, which Human Rights Watch called crimes against humanity. Read alongside Algeria 1992, this is the second decisive demonstration of the same rule, and it is the argument every jihadi recruiter makes about the futility of the ballot. - **29 June 2014 – March 2019** — **[[Islamic State]]** declares a worldwide [[Caliphate]] and names al-Baghdadi "Caliph Ibrahim"; he preaches at Mosul's al-Nuri mosque on 4 July. At its summer 2014 peak it holds roughly 40 percent of Iraq. Mosul is retaken in July 2017, Raqqa in October 2017, and the last pocket at Baghuz in March 2019. Al-Baghdadi dies in a US raid on 27 October 2019. **The overwhelming majority of its victims were Muslims**, including the systematic destruction of [[Sufism]]'s shrines and the November 2017 al-Rawda mosque massacre in Sinai that killed more than 300 worshippers. - **2014 – 31 August 2022** — **Xinjiang.** Over a million Turkic Muslims detained from 2014. The OHCHR report of 31 August 2022 found the detentions "may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity," documenting torture, sexual violence, coercive labor and forced birth control; birth rates in Hotan and Kashgar fell over 60 percent from 2015 to 2018 against 9.69 percent nationally. The US made a genocide determination in January 2021. **The largest state campaign against Muslims in the modern era is being conducted by [[China]]**, and it occupies a fraction of the space in American political discourse that ISIS did. - **25 August 2017** — The **Rohingya** expulsion from Myanmar. Over 700,000 flee initially, now more than a million; UNHCR called it "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing" within weeks; the US made a genocide determination in March 2022. - **25 October 2017 / 2 October 2018** — **[[Mohammed bin Salman]]** promises at Riyadh's Future Investment Initiative to return Saudi Arabia to "moderate Islam" and "eradicate promoters of extremist thoughts" — a real repudiation of the 1979 settlement, executed by the same authoritarian means that enforced it. A year later Jamal Khashoggi is murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member squad; the declassified ODNI assessment of 26 February 2021 concludes MBS was responsible. - **27 January 2017 – 26 June 2018** — The **travel bans**. EO 13769 suspends entry from seven Muslim-majority countries; EO 13780 drops Iraq; Proclamation 9645 (24 September 2017) makes the restrictions indefinite and adds North Korea and Venezuela — the two non-Muslim-majority additions that let the policy survive review. The Supreme Court upholds it 5–4 in *[[Trump v. Hawaii]]* on 26 June 2018. - **13 August – 10 December 2020** — The **[[Abraham Accords]]**: UAE, Bahrain, [[Sudan]] and Morocco normalize with [[Israel]], brokered in part by [[Jared Kushner]]. The first Arab-Israeli normalization since 1979 and the first not conditioned on Palestinian statehood, built on an explicitly anti-[[Iran]] axis. [[Kazakhstan]] joined in November 2025; the framework has been largely suspended since October 2023. --- ## IX. The Present (2021 – August 2026) - **29 February 2020 / 15 August 2021** — The **Doha Agreement**, negotiated with the [[Taliban]] and excluding the elected Afghan government from a discussion of its own survival; the Taliban enter Kabul eighteen months later and Ghani flees. US withdrawal completes 30 August 2021. - **31 July / 21 August 2024** — The Taliban's **Vice and Virtue law**: women's faces and voices treated as *awrah* in public, male guardians required for travel, no eye contact between unrelated men and women, no media images of living beings, and Hanafi jurisprudence applied exclusively — including to Afghanistan's Shia Hazara. - **8 December 2024 – 13 March 2025** — **Assad falls**; Damascus is taken by an HTS-led offensive and Assad flees to Russia. [[Ahmed al-Sharaa]] becomes transitional president on 29 January 2025 and signs a **Constitutional Declaration** on 13 March making Islamic jurisprudence "a main source" of legislation over a five-year transition. See [[Sharia]]. - **6 – 17 March 2025 / 14 – 19 July 2025** — The two atrocities that define post-Assad Syria. Reuters documented **1,479 Alawites killed** across 40 sites on the coast in March, with government-aligned forces implicated by a UN Human Rights Council investigation in August 2025. In July, **more than 1,700 killed at Suwayda**, including 1,190 [[Druze]] men, with nearly 200,000 displaced; the UN Commission of Inquiry reported on 27 March 2026 that the killings may amount to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. **A revolutionary Islamist government's first test was minority protection, and it failed it within ninety days.** - **13 – 24 June 2025** — The **twelve-day war**. Israel strikes Iranian nuclear sites and assassinates personnel from 13 June; the US hits Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on 22 June; Iran fires roughly 550 ballistic missiles and over a thousand drones. Ceasefire 24 June. Iranian dead: 1,060–1,190. - **28 February 2026 – present** — The **2026 Iran war**. US and Israeli strikes on 28 February; Iran counter-strikes Israel, US bases and Arab states; Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and the US imposes a counter-blockade on 13 April; [[Hezbollah]] enters the war. A conditional ceasefire was declared 8 April 2026 with Pakistan mediating, and negotiations remain unresolved. **[[Ali Khamenei]] was killed in the opening strikes on 28 February**, confirmed 1 March; the Assembly of Experts, unable to convene safely, voted online and by hand-carried ballot and announced **Mojtaba Khamenei** as Supreme Leader on **9 March 2026**. A revolutionary clerical republic produced a dynasty in forty-seven years. See [[Iran War 2026 Timeline]]. - **31 October 2025** — Trump announces **Nigeria's redesignation** as a Country of Particular Concern — "Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter" — paired with a threat of unilateral military action over the persecution of Christians. The underlying violence in Nigeria's middle belt is real, and predominantly a farmer-herder and banditry conflict that kills Muslims and Christians alike; the framing as a one-directional religious war is the part doing political work at home. - **July 2025 – February 2026** — Russia becomes the first state to formally recognize the Taliban Emirate; the ICC issues arrest warrants for Akhundzada and Chief Justice Haqqani for crimes against humanity on gender grounds; and the October 2025 Pakistan-Afghanistan ceasefire collapses, with Pakistan's defence minister declaring "open war" on the movement its own intelligence service built. - **Where the numbers stand.** Pew's June 2025 landscape study (2020 data) puts Muslims at **1.98 billion, 25.6 percent of world population** — the fastest-growing major tradition, up **347 million in a decade, more than every other religion combined**, and up 1.8 points as a share while Christianity fell 1.8. Roughly one in four people alive is Muslim, the great majority of them Sunni, and the largest Muslim populations are in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — none of them Arab, and none of them the places American discourse means when it says "the Muslim world." --- ## Parallel Track: The American Counter-Jihad Industry (1990 – 2026) This is a separate chronology because it is a separate subject. What follows is not the history of Islam; it is the history of a small, well-funded American political network that made a career of describing Islam. It is given its own column so that its scale is legible: a handful of organizations, a few dozen principals, and roughly $42.6 million from seven foundations across the decade after 9/11. - **1990** — **Middle East Forum** founded by Daniel Pipes. Its **Campus Watch** project (2002) profiled Middle East studies professors and was withdrawn after roughly a hundred academics asked to be added to the list. [[Orientalism]] is the frame it operationalizes. - **1988 / 2010** — **[[Center for Security Policy]]** founded by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan deputy assistant secretary of defense. Its 170-page report *Shariah: The Threat to America* (2010) called Islamic law "the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time" and recommended ending government outreach to Muslim communities and warning imams about sedition charges. - **1995** — **Investigative Project on Terrorism**, Steven Emerson. - **2003** — **Jihad Watch**, Robert Spencer, published by [[David Horowitz]]'s Freedom Center. 2008 IRS filings show Spencer earning $132,537 from the Center. - **2006 / 2007 / 2010 / 2012** — The **Clarion Project** (films including *Obsession* and *The Third Jihad*); **ACT for America**, founded by Brigitte Gabriel, which by one 2015 count claimed some 300,000 members and 890 chapters; **Stop Islamization of America / AFDI**, co-founded by Spencer and Pamela Geller and designated a hate group by both the ADL and SPLC; and the **Gatestone Institute**, chaired by [[John Bolton]] from 2013 to March 2018 for at least $310,000 before he became National Security Advisor. - **22 – 26 October 2007** — **Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week**, run by [[David Horowitz]]'s Terrorism Awareness Project across a claimed 147 campuses. - **3 December 2001 – 27 May 2009** — The **Holy Land Foundation** prosecution. OFAC designated HLF in December 2001; the criminal indictment was unsealed 26 July 2004; the first trial ended in a **mistrial in October 2007**; a November 2008 retrial convicted HLF and five men, with 65-year sentences imposed in May 2009. The prosecution's **unindicted co-conspirator list** — naming CAIR, ISNA and other mainstream American Muslim organizations — became the evidentiary backbone for a decade of "Brotherhood front" claims. It was later held to have violated those parties' Fifth Amendment due-process rights by publicizing them without charges or any forum to respond. **Named without trial, then cited forever as though named at trial.** - **December 2009 – 2010** — **Park51**, the "Ground Zero mosque." The New York Times reported the plan in December 2009 to essentially no reaction. National controversy ignited in **May 2010**, driven by Geller and Spencer, who coined the framing. Manhattan Community Board 1 voted 29–1 in support; the Landmarks Commission voted 9–0 against landmark status. A small temporary center opened in 2011; the site is now a 43-story condominium. **The controversy was manufactured, and the manufacturing is documented.** - **2 November 2010 – 15 August 2013** — **Oklahoma SQ 755** passes with 70 percent, carrying every county, and is permanently struck as an Establishment Clause violation in 2013. See [[Anti-Sharia Movement]]. - **2010 – 2026** — **American Laws for American Courts**, drafted by David Yerushalmi, general counsel to the [[Center for Security Policy]]. **201 anti-sharia bills introduced across 43 states**; fourteen states in 2017 alone. Yerushalmi on the record: *"If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose. The purpose was heuristic."* - **26 August 2011** — **"Fear, Inc."** (Center for American Progress) documents **$42.6 million from seven foundations, 2001–2009**, including Donors Capital Fund, the Scaife foundations and the [[Bradley Foundation]]. See [[Dark Money Timeline]]. - **27 January 2017 – 26 June 2018** — The travel bans and *[[Trump v. Hawaii]]*. - **1 May 2025 / 9 February 2026** — Executive Order 14291 creates the Religious Liberty Commission. On 9 February 2026 a multifaith coalition — Interfaith Alliance, Muslims For Progressive Values, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Hindus For Human Rights — sues, alleging the commission is composed "exclusively of Christians, except for one Orthodox Jewish Rabbi," with no Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or nonreligious member, in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. **A body constituted to defend religious liberty, sued for religious exclusion.** - **10 March 2026** — CAIR's 2026 civil rights report records **8,683 complaints in 2025**, the highest single-year total since it began reporting on 1996 data. --- ## What the timeline shows **1. The pivotal date is 1967, not 622 or 1979.** Islamism did not defeat Arab nationalism in an argument. It inherited the wreckage of the Six-Day War, and every jihadist Fawaz Gerges interviewed named that year as the watershed. Movements that look like ancient religious returns are usually filling a vacuum left by a *secular* failure — which means the analytically useful question about any Islamist movement is what collapsed before it, not what scripture says. **2. Almost every "ancient" division in this timeline is modern.** The hard Sunni–Shia boundary dates to the Safavids after **1501**, not Karbala in 680. The Deobandi–Barelvi fatwa war dates to **1906**. Purist Salafism's genealogy back to al-Afghani is a **conceptual anachronism**. Political Islam's founding texts were written between 1928 and 1966. The oldest thing in modern Islamist politics is younger than the Republican Party. **3. The most important variable is alignment, not theology.** The United States funded *mujahideen* at $630 million a year and then made "jihadist" its word for enemy. It treats [[Wahhabism]] as the taproot of terrorism and [[Saudi Arabia]] as an indispensable partner. It designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern over Islamist violence in the same period it ignored the mass internment of Muslims in [[China]]. None of this is hypocrisy exactly; it is what happens when a religious frame is used to describe what are actually alliance decisions. **4. The scholarly authority structure is the underrated fact.** The Mihna's failure in the 9th century established that Sunni religious authority sits with independent scholars rather than the ruler. That is why no state can speak for Sunni Islam, why the [[Caliphate]]'s 1924 abolition left a hole nobody could fill, and why anyone with a following can claim to speak for the tradition — [[Al-Qaeda]] and [[Islamic State]] included. The absence of a magisterium is not a defect the tradition failed to correct; it is a deliberate outcome of a 9th-century political struggle, and it explains the shape of the 21st-century one. **5. The victims are the story.** The overwhelming majority of people killed by Salafi-jihadi organizations have been Muslims. The largest campaign of anti-Muslim state violence in the modern era is [[China]]'s. The largest campaign of religious destruction against a Muslim tradition was conducted by other Muslims against [[Sufism]]. An analytic frame that reads this timeline as a conflict between Islam and the West cannot account for any of that — which is the strongest available evidence that the frame is not an analysis but an argument. --- ## See also - [[Islam]] — the parent tradition; [[Sunni Islam]] · [[Shia Islam]] · [[Sufism]] · [[Wahhabism]] for the branches - [[World Religions Timeline]] — the comparative spine this page is the first companion to; [[Judaism Timeline]] is the second - [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]] — the payoff MOC; Islam appears there as object of mobilization, not coalition participant - [[Islamophobia]] — the ideological apparatus documented in the parallel track above - [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] — the legislative program - [[War on Terror Timeline]] — the US policy record, 2001 onward - [[Forever Wars]] and [[Andrew Bacevich]] — the standing critique of what the response cost - [[Caliphate]] · [[Sharia]] · [[Jihad]] · [[Islamic Golden Age]] · [[Orientalism]] — the concept layer - [[Al-Qaeda]] · [[Taliban]] · [[Islamic State]] · [[Muslim Brotherhood]] · [[Hezbollah]] · [[Hamas]] — the organizations - [[Timelines Hub]] — every chronological reference in the vault