Arab-Muslim Conquests (A.D. 632-700) | Middle East And North Africa

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ARAB CONQUESTS (A.D. 632-700)

battle between Arabs and Persians

At the time of Muhammad's death, Islam was primarily a local phenomena. It was little noticed outside Arabia but within a 100 years after Muhammad’s death, it was the glue that held together an empire that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees in the west, and Himalayas in east, and was one of the greatest unifying force in the history of mankind.

By 634 Islam had spread throughout Arabia. Muslim armies confronted the Byzantine Empire and seized the province of Palestine, where Jerusalem was located. They also seized Syria, Persia (Iran), and much of Egypt. In 638 the second caliph, or successor to Muhammad, Umar, accepted the surrender of the city of Jerusalem from the Byzantines. The first wave of conquests by Muslim Arabs, completed at the beginning of the eighth century A.D., included the Fertile Crescent, Iran, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, the western fringes of India, and some parts of Central Asia.

Islam swept through the Middle East and North Africa in part by filing a void left by the anarchy and decadence of waning Byzantine rule. Byzantium at the time the Arabs conquered the Middle East in the 7th century was worn out from its battles with Avars and Persians and the plague and was not the empire it was two centuries earlier. The Persians had similar problems, and many of their subjects had grown weary of their rule.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Since its emergence in seventh-century Arabia, the religion of Islam spread rapidly, by swift military conquest and by conversion, throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Islam had already spread into northern Africa by the mid-seventh century A.D., only a few decades after the Prophet Muhammad moved with his followers from Mecca to Medina on the neighboring Arabian Peninsula (622 A.D./1 A.H.). The Arab conquest of Spain and the push of Arab armies as far as the Indus River culminated in an empire that stretched over three continents, a mere hundred years after the Prophet's death.By the seventeenth century, areas under Islamic religious and political control stretched from the southern Philippines across southern Asia and the Middle East through Turkey and into central Europe.[Source: Department of Arms and Armor, Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Websites on Islamic History: History of Islam: An encyclopedia of Islamic history historyofislam.com ; Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World oxfordislamicstudies.com ; Sacred Footsetps sacredfootsteps.com ; Islamic History Resources uga.edu/islam/history ; Internet Islamic History Sourcebook fordham.edu/halsall/islam/islamsbook ; Islamic History friesian.com/islam ; Muslim Heritage muslimheritage.com ; Chronological history of Islam barkati.net

Impact of the Arab Conquest

John L. Esposito wrote in the “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices”: Few observers of seventh-century Arabia would have predicted that, within a hundred years of Muhammad's death, a religious community established by a local businessman, orphaned and illiterate, would unite Arabia's warring tribes, overwhelm the eastern Byzantine and Sasanid empires, and create its own vast empire stretching from North Africa to India. Within a brief period of time, Muhammad had initiated a major historical transformation that began in Arabia but that would become a global religious and political movement. In subsequent years Muslim armies, traders, and mystics spread the faith and power of Islam globally. The religion of Islam became intertwined with empires and sultanates from North Africa to Southeast Asia. [Source: John L. Esposito “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices”, 2000s, Encyclopedia.com]

The so-called Arab invasions in the 7th century were among the least destructive in history. The Islamic conquest was not only speedy but permanent. Nearly all of the conquered territory remain Muslim today. You can't say that about the Roman, Persian or Mongol empires. Wherever the Muslims went they also carried with them Arab culture. The cultures of the assimilated territories, which included places occupied by Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, were influenced by the religion and culture of the Arab invaders.

The Arabic language and Arabic culture was spread with Islam. But even so a concept of ethnic nationalism, with a common language, never really developed, nor did the notion of territorial nations defined by formal borders. What existed were mainly Muslim-ruled cities and their hinterlands. The conquered people were subjugated politically but over time their culture, customs, administrative practices, arts and world view transformed their conquerors. The process continues today. In the early years it was common for non-Arabs to convert to Islam and at the same time become an Arab by forming a relationship with an Arab tribe. Later on converting to Islam and become an Arab became a separate process.

Hugh Kennedy wrote in “The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State”: The resulting growth of the Muslim state provided the ground in which the recently revealed faith could take root and flourish. The military conquest was inspired by religion, but it was also motivated by greed and politics. Men fought for their religion, the prospect of booty and because their friends and fellow tribesmen were also doing it. [Source: Hugh Kennedy, “The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State, 2001]

How Islam Spread So Quickly in the 7th Century

Battle of Siffin, during the first Muslim civil war in AD 657

According to the World Religions Reference Library: Historians have identified three reasons that they believe were important in the wide and rapid advancement of Islam in the seventh century. [Source: World Religions Reference Library, Encyclopedia.com]

1) Trade: Historians note that Islam spreads by following established trade routes around the world, from Africa to southeast Asia. They believe that Islam made trade easier by creating trust relationships based on a common set of religious beliefs. Traders outside the community of Islam had to create ties between people of different faiths and different backgrounds, which was much more difficult. Because Islam requires knowledge of Arabic, Muslim traders also shared a common language. Islam, this theory states, made trading much easier and gave Muslim traders an advantage over their non-Muslim counterparts.

2) Alienation from Other religions: People in general were unhappy with other religions, including Christianity and Judaism, the two other major monotheistic religions. Judaism at the time was an ethnic religion, and membership was open only to people who were born Jews. Christianity promised peace and love, but the equality promised by the early Church was hard to come by. In many cases Church leaders (priests and bishops) used their religion to maintain their own social positions. In contrast, Islam had no priesthood, and membership was open to anyone who would recite the Shahadah in front of witnesses.

Taxes and Tolerance: Although Muslim rulers imposed additional taxes on their non-Muslim subjects, in many cases those taxes were lighter than those gathered by local rulers. In addition, the Qurʾan calls on all Muslims to respect Christians and Jews (whom the Prophet called "the people of the Book"). Sometimes the relationship between members of different religions was so close that they shared places of worship. In Syria, for instance, Christians and Muslims shared the Church of St. John the Baptist (an old Christian church). Muslims used the church as a mosque on Saturdays, while Christians used it on Sundays.

Arab Conquest in the Middle East

After the prophets death in 632, the first Arab attacks were little more than Bedouin raids organized in Medina. Muslims were forbidden from attacking other Muslims. Instead they attacked infidels to the north in Byzantium and Persia—both weakened by years of fighting each other. Byzantines were Christians. Persi was under the control of the Zoroastrian Sassanids.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Although Muhammad died in 632, his followers, led by a series of four caliphs (Arabic: khalifa, "successor") known as the Rightly Guided, continued to spread the message of Islam. Under their command, the Arab armies carried the new faith and leadership from the Arabian Peninsula to the shores of the Mediterranean and to the eastern reaches of Iran. The Arabs conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from the Byzantine empire, while Iraq and Iran, the heart of the Sasanian empire, succumbed to their forces. Here in these lands, Islam fostered the development of a religious, political, and cultural commonwealth and the creation of a global empire.\^/

Under Caliph Omar (634-44) the Arabs made their greatest gains. Muslim armies invaded Iraq, Syria and Egypt and moved into Persia and North Africa. By the end of his ten year reign nearly all the Middle East was under Arab control. Omar was brilliant military leader. He called himself the “commander of the faithful” and was able establish himself as a de facto king over Bedouins who chaffed under monarchies. He was able harness Arab raiding urges, which bubbled under the surface among Muslims who were not allowed to fight each other, against non-Muslims to conquer much of the Middle East. There is also evidence that many of the warriors were motivated by the opportunity to seize land and booty not just religious zeal.

Arabs Conquer Persia

Within one year of Muhammad's death in 632, Arabia itself was secure enough to allow his secular successor, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, to begin the campaign against the Byzantine and Sassanid empires. Abu Bakr defeated the Byzantine army at Damascus in 635 and then began his conquest of Iran. According to an often told story in Iran, Muhammad sent a letter from Mecca to the Sassanid King, Khosrow Parviz, inviting him to embrace Islam. The king’s response was to arrogantly tear up the letter. [Source: Library of Congress, December 1987 *]

Weakened decades of fighting the Romans and Byzantines, the Sassanids in Iran and Iraq fell easily to the Arabs between A.D. 637 and 642. In 637 Arabs under Saad ibn Abi Waqqas defeated the Persians under Yazdegird III in the Battle of Qadisiyyah near Baghdad and seized the Sassanid stronghold of Ctesiphon (renamed Madain)—an island between the Tigres and Euphrates—gaining control of Mesopotamia. In n 641-42 the Arabs defeated the Sassanid army at Nahavand. After that, Iran lay open to the invaders. At that time Persia was wealthy and full of luxuries. The Arabs exchanged gold (yellow money), which they were unfamiliar with for silver (white money), which was their traditional form of currency. One Arab soldier kidnaped the daughter of a rich Persian nobleman and sold her back to her father for 1,000 dirhams. When he was told he could have demanded many times that amount he replied he had never heard of a number lager than 10,000.

The Sassanids were defeated with relative ease because they were weak from fighting the Byzantines and internal divisions and the country’s agriculture had been destroyed by flooding. Many Sassanid soldiers who were Arabs switched sides. The Islamic conquest was aided by the material and social bankruptcy of the Sassanids; the native populations had little to lose by cooperating with the conquering power. Moreover, the Muslims offered relative religious tolerance and fair treatment to populations that accepted Islamic rule without resistance. It was not until around 650, however, that resistance in Iran was quelled. Conversion to Islam, which offered certain advantages, was fairly rapid among the urban population but slower among the peasantry and the dihqans. The majority of Iranians did not become Muslim until the ninth century.*

Persia Under Arab Rule

Muhammad (in green lower left) headed to the Battle of Uhud

Arabs—mostly the Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphs— controlled Persia for nearly 600 years and replaced the indigenous Zoroastrian faith with Islam. However, the eastern pat of the Muslim world, namely Iran, did not absorb Arab culture as readily as in the west. The Arabic language and culture didn’t penetrate into Iran as it did in other places. Persians continued to speak Persian and maintain links with their pre-Islamic culture while people in the west replaced local languages with Arabic and disavowed their old ways. There was friction between the Arab rulers and their Persian subjects.

Although the conquerors, especially the Umayyads (the Muslim rulers who succeeded Muhammad from 661-750), tended to stress the primacy of Arabs among Muslims, the Iranians were gradually integrated into the new community. The Muslim conquerors adopted the Sassanid coinage system and many Sassanid administrative practices, including the office of vizier, or minister, and the divan, a bureau or register for controlling state revenue and expenditure that became a characteristic of administration throughout Muslim lands. Later caliphs adopted Iranian court ceremonial practices and the trappings of Sassanid monarchy. Men of Iranian origin served as administrators after the conquest, and Iranians contributed significantly to all branches of Islamic learning, including philology, literature, history, geography, jurisprudence, philosophy, medicine, and the sciences.*

The Arabs were in control, however. The new state religion, Islam, imposed its own system of beliefs, laws, and social mores. In regions that submitted peacefully to Muslim rule, landowners kept their land. But crown land, land abandoned by fleeing owners, and land taken by conquest passed into the hands of the new state. This included the rich lands of the Sawad, a rich, alluvial plain in central and southern Iraq. Arabic became the official language of the court in 696, although Persian continued to be widely used as the spoken language. The shuubiyya literary controversy of the ninth through the eleventh centuries, in which Arabs and Iranians each lauded their own and denigrated the other's cultural traits, suggests the survival of a certain sense of distinct Iranian identity. In the ninth century, the emergence of more purely Iranian ruling dynasties witnessed the revival of the Persian language, enriched by Arabic loanwords and using the Arabic script, and of Persian literature.*

When Arabs conquered Persia, Sassanid bureaucrats retained their positions. Arab leaders were entranced by Persian culture. Many employed Persian artists and poets in their court. Some learned to speak Persian. Persian literature art and science continued to thrive under Arab rule and helped enrich Arab culture. In 10th century, a new style of high literature appeared written in Persian with Arabic script and enhanced y Arabic words. The Persian provinces produced some of Islam's greatest scholars and poets: Hafiz, Saadi and Imar Khayyam.

Arab-Muslim Conquests in North Africa

Egypt was invaded in 639. It fell two years later in 641 after a bloody, seven-month siege of a fortress called Babylon at present-day Cairo was taken by the Arab leader Amr ibn al-As. Eighteen months later Alexandria, the Byzantines’ main naval base, was taken. Alexandria was second only to Constantinople itself in importance. The spoils taken by the Arabs included "4,000 villas with 4,000 baths and 40,000 taxpaying Jews and 400 places of entertainment for the royalty."

Under Caliph Uthman, between 644 and 650, Muslims conquered Cyprus and Tripoli in North Africa and were able to control the eastern Mediterranean and claimed Armenia and part of the Caucasus.

Arab armies and Islam swept into North Africa under the Omayyad caliphs (661-750). At that time North Africa was very sparsely populated. Within a relatively short period of time North Africa and Spain were added to the Arab-Muslim empire. In 682, a general named Ubqa ibn Nafi moved westwards from the Nile, leading his cavalry across northern Africa and claiming what is now Libya, Tunisia Algeria and Morocco. After galloping his horse into the Atlantic near Agadir, Morocco, he exclaimed: "Lord God, bear witness were I not stopped by the sea I would conquer more lands for Thy sake!"

Arrival of Islam in Central Asia

Between 644 and 650, under Caliph Uthman, Muslims established Muslim rule in Iran, Afghanistan and the Sind area of Pakistan. The Arabs first invaded Mawarannahr—an Iranian Songdian province in present-day Uzbekistan—in the middle of the seventh century through sporadic raids during their conquest of Persia. Available sources on the Arab conquest suggest that the Soghdians and other Iranian peoples of Central Asia were unable to defend their land against the Arabs because of internal divisions and the lack of strong indigenous leadership. The Arabs, on the other hand, were led by a brilliant general, Qutaybah ibn Muslim, and they also were highly motivated by the desire to spread their new faith (the official beginning of which was in A.D. 622). Because of these factors, the population of Mawarannahr was easily conquered. [Source: Library of Congress, March 1996 *]

The Muslim armies moved quickly through Iran but were halted in present-day Uzbekistan by the Turks of Transoxiana in A.D. 642. A stalemate ensured. The Arabs got around it in A.D. 700, and seized control of Central Asia with the capture of Bukhara in 709, Samarkand in 712 and Kashgar in 714. The caliph's governor of Persia, Qutayba ibn Muslim, crossed the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the deserts of Turkestan. His fierce cavalry quickly captured Bukhara and Samarkand.

Islam was introduced by Arab invaders in the 7th and 8th centuries but also spread by Sufi teachers, who wanders in deserts, steppes and mountains. The new religion spread gradually in the region. The native cultures, which in some respects already were being displaced by Persian influences before the Arabs arrived, were displaced farther in the ensuing centuries. Nevertheless, the destiny of Central Asia as an Islamic region was firmly established by the Arab victory over the Chinese armies in 750 in a battle at the Talas River.

Muslim Rule in Central Asia

The conquest of Central Asia by Islamic Arabs, which was completed in the eighth century A.D., brought to the region a new religion and culture that continue to be dominant. Before the arrival of Islam many of the people in Central Asia were animists, Buddhists and Zoroastrians. Muslims introduced an alphabet and high-level scholarship. Chinese captured in Samarkand taught the Arabs the art of papermaking, which later made its way across the Muslim world to Europe. [Source: Library of Congress, March 1996 *]

Under Arab rule, Central Asia retained much of its Iranian character, remaining an important center of culture and trade for centuries after the Arab conquest. However, until the tenth century the language of government, literature, and commerce was Arabic. Mawarannahr continued to be an important political player in regional affairs, as it had been under various Persian dynasties. In fact, the Abbasid Caliphate, which ruled the Arab world for five centuries beginning in 750, was established thanks in great part to assistance from Central Asian supporters in their struggle against the then-ruling Umayyad Caliphate. *

During the height of the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth and the ninth centuries, Central Asia and Mawarannahr experienced a truly golden age. Bukhoro became one of the leading centers of learning, culture, and art in the Muslim world, its magnificence rivaling contemporaneous cultural centers such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Some of the greatest historians, scientists, and geographers in the history of Islamic culture were natives of the region. *

As the Abbasid Caliphate began to weaken and local Islamic Iranian states emerged as the rulers of Iran and Central Asia, the Persian language began to regain its preeminent role in the region as the language of literature and government. The rulers of the eastern section of Iran and of Mawarannahr were Persians. Under the Samanids and the Buyids, the rich culture of Mawarannahr continued to flourish. *

Legacy of the Islamic Conquests on the Middle East

Wherever the Muslims went they also carried with them Arab culture. The cultures of the assimilated territories, which included places occupied by Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, were influenced by the religion and culture of the Arab invaders. The Arabic language and Arabic culture was spread with Islam. But even so a concept of ethnic nationalism, with a common language, never really developed, nor did the notion of territorial nations defined by formal borders. What existed were mainly Muslim-ruled cities and their hinterlands. The conquered people were subjugated politically but over time their culture, customs, administrative practices, arts and world view transformed their conquerors. The process continues today. In the early years it was common for non-Arabs to convert to Islam and at the same time become an Arab by forming a relationship with an Arab tribe. Later on converting to Islam and become an Arab became a separate process.

Fred Donner of the University of Chicago wrote: “The Islamic conquests had a profound impact on the Near East and on the general course of world history. Among other things, they carried the new faith of Islam to distant regions and created the political and social conditions that allowed it to strike deep roots there; they thus represent the practical starting point in the evolution of the great civilization of medieval Islam, as well as the beginning of the end of the late antique world. For a time, they also resulted in a dramatic change in the political patterns prevailing in the Near East; for this state that took Arabia as the very basis of its power, and used it to dominate the old cultural and political centers of the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and Egypt, was a development unheralded in the region's history, one that stood the usual geo-political realities on their heads. [Source: Fred Donner, “The Early Islamic Conquests,” Princeton University Press, 1981, beginning with pg. 251. Donner is a scholar of Islam and Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago =]

Mecca

“Not all of the political changes that came with the rise of Islam proved to be of equal durability, of course. It is perhaps ironic, however, that of the two basic political developments that marked the rise of Islam — the integration of Arabian society including the nomads into a unified state, and the emergence of a ruling elite that dominated that state — the latter should prove more durable than the former; that is, the Islamic ruling elite (or a descendant of it) showed itself able to survive long after its original Arabian-lslamic state had disintegrated. Not even the elite weathered the first decades after the conquests completely unchanged, however. Soon after the opening of the conquests, the elite began to undergo a transformation that pitted one branch against another, so that it became increasingly narrowly defined as successive groups were eased out of positions of real influence. At the outset, as we have seen, the elite included tribesmen of Medina (the ansar), the Meccan Quraysh, and the Thaqif of al-Ta'if. But even Muhammad himself had been hard put at times to control the rivalries among these groups, and after his death these rivalries became sharper and eventually broke out in open conflict. The selection of Abu Bakr to be Muhammad's successor as head of state, for example, was made possible only by assuaging the fears of the ansar: that they might be overpowered by the Quraysh. Despite such assurances, however, the Quraysh seem in any case to have risen quickly to a position of practical dominance over other elements in the elite during the conquest period. The ans-r, in Abu Bakr's day, were already worried enough to demand of him, "Who is in charge of this affair? Do the ansar have a share in it?'' A bit later, during the caliphate of'Umar, the governor of southern Iraq, 'Utba b. Ghazwan (a man of B. Qays but a longtime resident of Mecca and ally of Quraysh) complained that the Qurashi commander in central Iraq, Sa'd b. Abl Waqqas, ordcred him about. 'Umar replied to his demand for an independent command by saying, "It is not for you, 'Utba, to be instated with authority over a man of Quraysh who is a companion of the Prophet and a man of honor." 'Utba reminded 'Umar that he, too, was a companion of Muhammad and, as an ally of Quraysh, entitled to be treated as one of them, but 'Umar refused to alter his stand. Similarly, thc general Abu 'Ubayda b. al-Jarrah is said to have opened an address to the Syrians whom he governed by stating, "Oh people, I am a man of Quraysh (appointed) over Syria" — not a Muslim over Syria, we may note, but a man of Quraysh. His use of this phrase may have been related to the way in which conquered areas in Syria appear to have becn "reserved" especially for the Quraysh, whereas the ansar and Thaqlf were sent more frequently to Iraq. But it is also probably reflective of the general rise of the Quraysh to real dominance within the ruling elite. =

“The Meccans thus seem to have nudged the ansar out of real power during the period of the early conquests, until the two groups split openly during the First Civil War, when the ansar tried to restore their faded fortunes by backing the faction around 'Ali b. Abi Talib against two other factions representing rival groups within the Quraysh. The ansar lost the struggle, however, and after the First Civil War were for practical purposes no longer a part of the ruling elite. Certainly the caliphate seems to have become the unique preserve of the Quraysh by this time. As for the Thaqlf, they seem to havc avoided a direct clash with the Quraysh, but then they never appear to have posed quite the same challenge to the Quraysh's domination of the elite as had the ansar. Even at the start they seem to have been part of thc elite mainly by virtue of their long and intimate affiliations with the Quraysh, and after the First Civil War they, too, slowly slipped into oblivion, retaining a vestige of their former importance, perhaps, in their accustomed tenure of certain governorships, notably in Iraq. =

“By the post-conquest period, then, the struggle for dominance within the elite had become exclusively a question of which branch of the Quraysh was to rule. This issue was raised already in the First Civil War in the form of a struggle between the B. Umayya, led by Mu'awiya b. Abl Sufyan, the B. Hashim, led by 'Abi b. Abi Talib, and other branches of the Quraysh, led by Talha b. 'Ubaydallah and al-Zubayr b. al-'Awwam. The Second Civil War (A.H. 60-73/A.D. 680-692) saw a similar struggle between the Alids, branches of the B. Umayya, and an alliance of other Quraysh led by al-Zubayr's sons. The issue was raised yet again in the Abbasid coup of A.H. 132/A.D. 750, when the B. al'Abbas (a lineage of B. Hashim) ousted the B. Umayya from power and had most of them murdered, and yet again in the numerous rebellions of various Alid pretenders against the Abbasids — that is, in a protracted struggle between two rival factions within the B. Hashim. The ruling elite had thus been successively narrowed to limit leadership of the state first to the Quraysh, and then to a few select lineages of the Quraysh. It is interesting to note that in later years the debate over who had the right to lead the Islamic community eventually emerged in a curiously Arabian formulation, even though the protagonists were by now only in the most attenuated sense Arabians. The arguments used by those groups that were the main rivals for power within the elite (notably the Alids and Abbasids) came increasingly to rest on considerations of genealogy, whereas those of groups outside the elite that wished to gain access to it (notably the pious and the Khawarij) relied increasingly on the importance of virtuous, properly Islamic behavior as justifications for holding power. This dichotomy contains a curious echo of the notions of nasab (nobility of desccnt) and hasab (nobility of action) current among the pre-lslamic Arabian aristocracy as the principles validating their claims to authority and noble status. =

“The decades immediately following the conquests, marked as they were by two civil wars, constituted a period of real political turmoil in the Islamic state. But these quarrels among members of the ruling elite and the turbulence they generated were not caused by the failure of the original process of consolidation by which the elite had integrated Arabia's tribesmen into the state. Indeed, the striking thing about the First and Second Civil Wars is the degree to which the tribesmen remained bound to the state throughout them, even though the leadership of the state was divided against itself. The tribesmen waited out these squabbles in the ruling elite, or plunged in on the side of one or another group in the elite, but it never seems to have occurred to most of them that they should or could raise the standard of revolt in their own name. With very few exceptions, they appear to have accepted their status as subjects or employees of the state and its elite without demur; those tribesmen who tried to evade state control by forming little bands of escapees from the garrison towns, and by raising havoc in the Iraqi and Iranian countryside as Khawarij, were a mere handful of Arabia's population. The victory of the Islamic state over the bodies and minds of Arabia could hardly have been more complete. =

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Islamic History Sourcebook: sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Arab News, Jeddah; “Islam, a Short History” by Karen Armstrong; “A History of the Arab Peoples” by Albert Hourani (Faber and Faber, 1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New Yorker, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Library of Congress and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024