Part 1: Quranic and Historical Foundations2

Chapter 2: The Law of Contention in History

Four turning points open this chapter: Tariq ibn Ziyad crossing into a land whose kingdom was already eroding from within; Hulagu entering a Baghdad that had spent decades exhausting itself; the storming of the Bastille, and a revolution that went on to devour its own children; and a small Ottoman principality filling a vacuum left by the great powers until it took Constantinople. The thread that joins them is that numbers alone cannot read history, and that states often fall from the inside before anyone walks in. The chapter then follows the law across the centuries: Persians and Romans wearing each other down, projects consumed by their own internal strife, the Crusaders and the Mongols, colonialism dressed as modernity, and revolutions that always begin within.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 4

  The conquest of al-Andalus

  When collapse within comes before the entry from without

  711Chapter 2Power and states
• 5

  The Mongol invasion

  When the outside finishes what the inside exhausted

  1258Chapter 2Power and states
• 6

  The French Revolution

  When a nation explodes upon itself

  1789Chapter 2Popular uprisings
• 7

  The rise of the Ottomans

  When the small fills the vacuum left by the great

  1299–1453Chapter 2Power and states

The Cases