Sources — The Abbasid Caliphate

General works

Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016. The standard narrative for the whole period. Start here.
Kennedy, Hugh. When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2005. The early Abbasid court, written for a general reader and very readable.
Kennedy, Hugh. The Early Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History. London: Croom Helm, 1981.
Robinson, Chase F., ed. The New Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Idiosyncratic, difficult and still the most ambitious account of Islamic civilisation in English.
Lassner, Jacob. The Shaping of Abbasid Rule. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Chapters I–III

Sharon, Moshe. Black Banners from the East. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983. On the Khorasan revolution that brought the dynasty to power.
Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.
Le Strange, Guy. Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900. Old, and still the fullest reconstruction of the round city from the written sources.
El-Hibri, Tayeb. Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. On how much of the Harun al-Rashid story is literature rather than record.
Bosworth, C. E., trans. The History of al-Tabari, Vol. XXX: The Abbasid Caliphate in Equilibrium. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.

Chapters IV–VI

Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London: Routledge, 1998. The book that replaced every previous account of the translation movement. Essential.
Saliba, George. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Rashed, Roshdi, ed. Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science. 3 vols. London: Routledge, 1996.
Pormann, Peter E., and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Bloom, Jonathan M. Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. On the technology that made the rest of it possible.
Van Bladel, Kevin. The Arabic Hermes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Chapters VII–VIII

Northedge, Alastair. The Historical Topography of Samarra. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2005. The excavation report, and the reason we know what Samarra was.
Gordon, Matthew S. The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Kennedy, Hugh. The Armies of the Caliphs. London: Routledge, 2001.
Popovic, Alexandre. The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1999. The standard account of the Zanj rebellion.
Kraemer, Joel L. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1986. On the Buyid century, when the caliphs had stopped ruling and the culture flourished anyway.

Chapters IX–X

Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Biran, Michal. Chinggis Khan. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007.
Hillenbrand, Carole. Islam: A New Historical Introduction. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
Berkey, Jonathan P. The Formation of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society. 5 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1988. Drawn from the Cairo Geniza. The best evidence anywhere for how ordinary people in this world actually lived.

Arabic sources in translation

al-Tabari. The History of al-Tabari. 40 vols. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985–2007. The great annalistic history, complete in English. Volumes XXVII–XXXVIII cover the Abbasids.
al-Mas'udi. The Meadows of Gold: The Abbasids. Trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone. London: Kegan Paul, 1989.
Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah. Trans. Franz Rosenthal, abr. N. J. Dawood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Fourteenth-century, and the first systematic theory of why states rise and fall.
Ibn Fadlan. Mission to the Volga. Trans. James E. Montgomery. New York: NYU Press, 2017. An Abbasid envoy's account of the Rus in 922, including a ship burial.
al-Jahiz. Nine Essays of al-Jahiz. Trans. William M. Hutchins. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
The Arabian Nights. Trans. Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 2008. Literature rather than history, and the source of most of what people think they know.

Reference and further reading

Kennedy, Hugh, ed. An Historical Atlas of Islam. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2002. The maps this volume's geography is checked against.
Ettinghausen, Richard, Oleg Grabar and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina. Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Hillenbrand, Robert. Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.
Hallaq, Wael B. The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. On the schools of law, and on why the gate of interpretation never actually closed.
Cook, Michael. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. On the gap between the religion as codified and the civilisation as lived.