UsefulCharts’ Islamic History Timeline: When a Beautiful Chart Gets the History Wrong
A battle in France supposedly stopped Islam's advance into Europe. The fall of Baghdad supposedly ended centuries of Islamic intellectual achievement. A succession of caliphs appears to pass authority neatly from one dynasty to another.
These are not harmless shortcuts. They are examples of historical complexity being compressed until the explanation becomes misleading.
In Timeline of Islamic History, UsefulCharts presenter Matt Baker guides viewers through roughly 1,400 years of Muslim dynasties, conquests and political transformations. The underlying chart, developed by Syawish Rehman and Piotr Stanislawski, is ambitious. Its geographical range extends beyond the Middle East into Africa, India, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Much of the broad chronology is sound. The Rashidun conquests transformed the Middle East. The Abbasids established Baghdad as a major intellectual center. The Mongols destroyed the Abbasid government there in 1258. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453.
But those facts are not where the trouble begins.
The trouble begins when a historical milestone becomes a definitive explanation, when a disputed interpretation becomes a fact, and when military conquest becomes interchangeable with the spread of a religion.
Several of the video's most confident conclusions fail those tests.
1. The Battle of Tours Did Not Stop Islam's Expansion Into Europe
Baker describes the Frankish victory over an Umayyad army in 732 as a decisive event that halted Islamic expansion into Western Europe.
It is one of the video's most consequential claims—and one of its weakest.
The battle certainly happened. Charles Martel's Frankish forces defeated an army commanded by Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who was killed in the fighting.
What historians dispute is the familiar story that this victory saved Western Europe from an otherwise inevitable Muslim conquest.
James T. Palmer, a medieval historian at the University of St Andrews, examined precisely how the Battle of Tours acquired its reputation as a world-changing confrontation. His 2019 study found that the battle received comparatively modest treatment in early sources. Its later status as a decisive confrontation between Christianity and Islam was greatly amplified by nineteenth-century historical writing.
Oxford's military-history bibliography likewise notes that scholars have challenged the traditional interpretation, particularly because Muslim military operations in Frankish territory continued afterward.
The geography makes the problem impossible to ignore.
Muslim forces still controlled Narbonne, in what is now southern France, for decades after Tours.
The city had fallen under Muslim control around 719. It was not recovered by the Franks until the middle of the eighth century, traditionally dated to 759.
Jacqueline Caille's historical study of Muslim-occupied Narbonne documents this occupation, while later research identifies continuing campaigns in southern Gaul after 732.
Nor did the subsequent history of Muslim power in Europe stop at Spain.
In 827, Muslim forces began the conquest of Sicily. The campaign developed into a prolonged occupation that transformed the island's political, commercial and cultural history.
The early conquest is examined in Theresa Jäckh's study of the Chronicon Salernitanum, while a 2024 scholarly collection documents the lasting Islamic presence in Sicily.
Centuries later, the Ottomans established extensive Muslim rule in southeastern Europe.
None of this means Tours was insignificant. It was a Frankish military victory with important regional consequences.
But a military victory, the end of a particular campaign and the permanent termination of religious expansion are three different things.
Baker's formulation treats them as one.
That is particularly unfortunate because the inflated historical importance of Tours has itself become a subject of serious scholarship.
A timeline should help readers escape historical mythology, not preserve its most convenient version.
2. The Rashidun Caliphs Are Credited With Conquering Territory They Did Not Secure
The video's early account of Muslim expansion contains another revealing compression.
Baker attributes the conquest of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia to the four Rashidun caliphs.
The first four caliphs ruled between 632 and 661.
Tunisia's conquest was considerably more complicated.
Muslim forces conducted an expedition into Ifriqiya, the region encompassing much of modern Tunisia, in 647. They defeated Byzantine forces at Sufetula.
But a successful military expedition was not the same as permanently conquering and administering the territory.
Further campaigns followed.
In 670, the Umayyad commander Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan, which developed into a major military and political center.
Carthage, one of the region's most important Byzantine strongholds, fell to Muslim forces in 698.
The chronology is documented by the Museum With No Frontiers' Tunisian historical timeline and by research on the Islamic conquest of North Africa.
The difference matters.
If the Rashidun caliphs had already secured Tunisia, the subsequent decades of warfare, resistance and territorial consolidation would become difficult to explain.
The video's account gives the first generation of caliphs credit for a political outcome substantially achieved under later rulers.
The presentation also dates Muhammad's conquest of Mecca to 629. Standard historical chronology places that event in 630, as Frederick Kilgour records in Oxford University Press's The Evolution of the Book.
A one-year error does not destroy a historical presentation.
But these two examples expose the same problem: events are assigned convenient positions within a simplified story, while the more complicated process by which political authority was actually established disappears.
For a product built around chronological precision, that is not a minor weakness.
3. The Fall of Baghdad Did Not End Islamic Scientific Achievement
The video's account of the Islamic Golden Age gives particular prominence to Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs and the House of Wisdom.
This emphasis is understandable.
Abbasid patronage supported important intellectual developments, and figures such as al-Khwarizmi helped transform mathematics, astronomy and geography.
But the presentation assigns the Golden Age a remarkably definite ending: 1258, when Mongol armies captured Baghdad.
The destruction was real. The political and cultural losses were enormous.
Yet the idea of Islamic intellectual progress coming to an abrupt historical stop is contradicted by what happened next.
In 1259, just one year after Baghdad's fall, work began on one of the medieval world's most important astronomical observatories.
It was established at Maragha, in northwestern Persia, under the patronage of the Mongol ruler Hülegü.
Its director was Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a leading Persian mathematician and astronomer.
The observatory assembled scholars from different parts of the Islamic world and developed important approaches to mathematical astronomy.
Research published in Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam Three documents its foundation, scientific work and later influence. The observatory's research contributed to developments in planetary theory, including mathematical ideas that became relevant to subsequent European astronomy.
Its intellectual influence extended to observatories in Tabriz, Samarkand, Istanbul and elsewhere.
That is a rather extraordinary development to place on the other side of a supposed intellectual finish line.
The Mongol conquest did not prevent all subsequent scientific innovation. In this case, a Mongol ruler directly sponsored it.
The historical distinction is straightforward.
The destruction of Baghdad ended a particular political and institutional order. It did not end Muslim scholarship.
Indeed, the Maragha example demonstrates why intellectual history cannot be reduced to the fortunes of a single imperial capital.
Scientific knowledge moved between cities, courts, languages and patrons.
Scholars survived political upheaval. New institutions replaced older ones. Research continued under governments very different from those that had originally supported it.
The conventional label Islamic Golden Age can be useful when describing a broad period of intellectual activity.
What becomes misleading is treating its chosen terminal date as though intellectual achievement itself ended there.
The destruction of one capital is a dramatic scene.
The survival of an intellectual tradition is a better historical explanation.
4. The Sunni–Shia Split Is Presented Without One of Its Defining Events
Baker correctly identifies the dispute over Muhammad's succession as the origin of the Sunni–Shia division.
He explains Ali's relationship to Muhammad, Ali's eventual election as caliph, the First Fitna, his assassination and Hasan's agreement with Muawiya.
These are important events.
But an extraordinary omission follows.
The presentation moves from the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty to the enduring Sunni–Shia division without explaining the Battle of Karbala in 680.
At Karbala, forces serving the Umayyad government confronted Husayn, Muhammad's grandson and Ali's son.
Husayn and many of his companions were killed.
This became one of the defining events of Shia religious memory.
Historian Meir Litvak's account in Encyclopaedia Iranica explains how Karbala developed into a central symbol of injustice, sacrifice and resistance within Shia Islam.
The omission matters because the Sunni–Shia division was not simply an argument over which politician should have inherited authority in 632.
It developed through subsequent disputes about religious legitimacy, the authority of Muhammad's descendants, the institution of the imamate and the interpretation of Islamic tradition.
Toby Matthiesen's 2023 Oxford University Press study, The Caliph and the Imam, examines how these differences developed and were reinforced by later empires and political institutions.
The video reduces much of this development to recognition or rejection of the first three caliphs.
That explanation supplies the starting point. It does not adequately explain the religious communities that subsequently emerged.
Worse, the presentation makes a more definite claim when discussing Islamic jurisprudence.
It identifies Ja'far al-Sadiq as the founder of the Ja'fari school and describes that tradition as followed by all Shia Muslims.
That is incorrect.
Twelver Shia Islam is associated with Ja'fari jurisprudence, but Shia Islam also includes Ismaili and Zaydi traditions with distinct legal histories.
A 2023 academic collection published by Edinburgh University Press examines these differences through historical legal texts from all three traditions.
This is not a dispute over terminology.
It concerns the internal diversity of a religious tradition followed by millions of people.
A video presenting the basic organization of Islamic history should not erase that diversity while explaining how it developed.
5. The Caliphate Did Not Pass Neatly From the Abbasids to the Ottomans
The political history of the caliphate becomes particularly complicated after 1258.
Baker explains that the Abbasid line continued in Cairo under Mamluk protection before the Ottomans eventually became the dominant Muslim power.
That broad outline is reasonable.
The difficulty lies in the presentation's treatment of the Ottomans as the eventual replacements for the old Abbasid caliphs, without explaining the disputed basis of that succession.
A familiar historical narrative maintains that the last Abbasid caliph in Cairo formally transferred the caliphate to Ottoman Sultan Selim I following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517.
For generations, this purported transfer has appeared in simplified accounts of Islamic history.
But historians have questioned whether it happened.
Toshiko Saito's scholarly examination of the Ottoman sultan-caliph system found no contemporary evidence establishing the traditional transfer narrative.
Hakan T. Karateke's research likewise examines the absence of contemporary records describing the alleged transfer ceremony.
The historical picture is more complicated than a single undocumented transaction. Ottoman rulers employed caliphal titles in different contexts, and the political importance of those claims evolved over time.
Baker does not explicitly describe a formal transfer ceremony.
That distinction is important.
The problem is instead what the presentation leaves unexplained.
Its sequence makes the emergence of Ottoman caliphal authority appear to be a straightforward continuation of an existing institution.
In reality, the relationship between conquest, religious legitimacy, political power and the title of caliph was contested.
The Ottoman conquest of Egypt is beyond dispute.
A clean legal inheritance of the Abbasid caliphate is not.
Those are different historical claims.
And when a timeline treats political succession as a continuous line, the distinction becomes essential.
6. Oman's Supposed Continuous Independence Requires a Missing Explanation
The presentation describes Oman as the oldest continuously independent state in the Muslim world.
That is a striking claim.
It also raises an immediate historical problem.
Portuguese forces captured important Omani coastal settlements in the early sixteenth century.
Muscat remained under Portuguese control until 1650.
Research by Ana Lopes and Jorge Correia, published through the University of Porto's academic research network and indexed by Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, documents the Portuguese fortifications and territorial presence in Muscat between 1507 and 1650.
Oman's inland political institutions were not simply abolished by Portuguese control of the coast.
That distinction could support an argument for substantial continuity in Omani political independence.
But it does not justify an unqualified superlative.
Was the claim about uninterrupted indigenous government? About the inland imamate? About independence from neighboring Muslim empires? Or about sovereignty over the territory of the modern state?
These are different standards.
The presentation supplies none of them.
Instead, a complicated history of divided authority, foreign occupation and indigenous resistance is reduced to a claim of exceptional continuity.
For a historical timeline concerned with political independence, those missing distinctions are central.
7. The Largest Problem: Conquering a Territory Is Not the Same as Converting Its Population
The most persistent weakness in the presentation is not any single wrong date.
It is the movement between three different subjects as though they were interchangeable: Muslim political rule, Islamic religious expansion and the development of Muslim societies.
The early caliphates conquered enormous territories.
That does not mean the populations of those territories immediately became Muslim.
The distinction is especially important in North Africa.
Arab military campaigns established political authority through successive conquests. The religious transformation of local populations occurred through a much longer and more uneven process.
A country's incorporation into an Islamic empire and its eventual development into a Muslim-majority society are therefore separate historical events.
Richard Bulliet's chapter on conversion in The New Cambridge History of Islam explains why conversion cannot be measured simply by following political boundaries. Historians must distinguish changes in personal belief, collective identity, social circumstances and the demographic growth of Muslim communities.
Consider what this means for a historical map.
If an army conquers a province in one year, a colored line can accurately indicate the change of government.
But the color does not reveal what religion the farmers practiced, what language merchants spoke, which communities retained their institutions or how many generations passed before religious identification changed substantially.
The political frontier can move in a season.
The society behind it may change over centuries.
To his credit, Baker explicitly recognizes maritime trade as important to Islam's expansion in Southeast Asia.
That acknowledgment makes the shortcomings elsewhere more noticeable.
The presentation understands that Islam could spread through commerce without direct conquest.
Yet much of its central chronology still treats the territorial growth of Muslim dynasties as the principal measure of Islamic expansion.
This approach privileges rulers and armies over the people whose religious histories it claims to explain.
It also makes the fall of dynasties appear more final than it was.
A caliphate could collapse while Muslim institutions, scholarship, communities and commercial networks continued developing.
A Christian kingdom could conquer a Muslim-governed territory without immediately eliminating its Muslim population or cultural influence.
Political power mattered enormously.
But it was never the whole story.
The Verdict: A Timeline Cannot Substitute Confidence for Historical Judgment
UsefulCharts has produced an ambitious visual account of Muslim political history.
Its effort to include Africa, Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia is worthwhile. The broad succession of major dynasties is generally recognizable, and the chronological format offers an accessible starting point for unfamiliar readers.
Those strengths make the weaknesses more consequential.
The Battle of Tours did not confine Muslim rule in Europe to Spain.
The Rashidun caliphs did not permanently secure Tunisia.
The Mongol destruction of Baghdad did not terminate Islamic scientific innovation.
Shia jurisprudence cannot be reduced to one legal school.
Ottoman caliphal legitimacy cannot be explained adequately through an uncomplicated succession of dynastic titles.
And Oman's political independence cannot be understood without accounting for foreign occupation of its principal coastal centers.
These are not objections manufactured from obscure academic disagreements.
Several are demonstrable errors. Others concern historically consequential omissions or interpretations presented with more certainty than the evidence permits.
The distinction matters because a timeline communicates authority differently from an ordinary historical essay.
Its dates, borders and connecting lines create an impression of settled knowledge.
The viewer sees an organized progression and naturally assumes that the underlying decisions have been carefully established.
But visual precision does not guarantee historical precision.
A map can locate a conquest correctly while misrepresenting what the conquest achieved.
A timeline can place two rulers in the correct order while concealing a contested claim to legitimacy.
And a dramatic date can mark the destruction of an empire while leaving the impression that an entire civilization's intellectual history ended with it.
The central failure of Timeline of Islamic History is not that it simplifies 1,400 years of history. Simplification is unavoidable. It is that some of its simplifications change the meaning of the history being taught.
That is where an educational chart stops merely leaving things out and starts giving its audience the wrong picture.
The purpose of history is not to make every complicated event fit neatly into a line.
It is to explain what actually happened—even when the truth refuses to fit.
References
1. Timeline of Islamic History — UsefulCharts, presented by Matt Baker.
YouTube; publication date not independently established. The original presentation establishes the claims examined in this critique, including its treatment of Tours, the Rashidun conquests, Islamic scholarship, religious jurisprudence and political succession. Watch the original video
2. James T. Palmer, The Making of a World Historical Moment: The Battle of Tours (732/3) in the Nineteenth Century.
postmedieval, 2019. Examines how the Battle of Tours acquired its exaggerated reputation as a decisive confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Read the research
3. Battle of Tours (732?) — Oxford Bibliographies in Military History.
Oxford University Press, 2024. Documents scholarly disagreement over the battle's historical significance and notes subsequent Muslim military activity in Frankish territory. Read the reference
4. Jacqueline Caille, Narbonne sous l'occupation musulmane (première moitié du VIIIe siècle): problèmes de topographie.
Annales du Midi, 1975. Establishes the Muslim occupation of Narbonne during the eighth century and discusses the chronology of its eventual reconquest. Read the historical study
5. Theresa Jäckh, 827: The Chronicon Salernitanum on the Muslim Conquest of Sicily.
Transmediterranean History, 2019. Examines the beginning of the Muslim conquest of Sicily and compares Latin, Arabic and Greek historical accounts. Read the study
6. Timeline: Tunisia, 600–700 AD.
Museum With No Frontiers, undated. Records the campaigns of 647, 665 and 670 and the conquest of Carthage in 698, demonstrating why the Rashidun conquest narrative is incomplete. View the historical timeline
7. Carol Bier, Marāgha.
Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, Brill, 2021. Documents the establishment and scientific achievements of the Maragha observatory after Baghdad's destruction, directly challenging the idea of an intellectual collapse in 1258. Read the encyclopedia entry
8. Meir Litvak, Karbala.
Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2010; updated 2012. Establishes the historical circumstances of Husayn's death in 680 and explains Karbala's central importance to Shia religious memory. Read the historical account
9. Toby Matthiesen, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism.
Oxford University Press, 2023. Examines the development and institutionalization of Sunni and Shia identities beyond the original succession dispute. Read the book overview
10. Robert Gleave and Kumail Rajani, editors, Shiʿite Legal Theory: Sources and Commentaries.
Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Documents the distinct Twelver, Ismaili and Zaydi legal traditions that contradict the claim that all Shia follow one school of jurisprudence. Read the academic collection
11. Toshiko Saito, An Interpretation of the So-Called Sultan-Caliph System in the Ottoman Empire.
Bulletin of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan, 1970. Examines the traditional account of the Abbasid-to-Ottoman transfer of caliphal authority and the absence of contemporary evidence for that narrative. Read the research
12. Ana Lopes and Jorge Correia, Das fortificações portuguesas em Mascate: análise morfológica e territorial.
Academic research published through CITCEM, University of Porto; date not specified in the accessible record. Documents Portuguese fortifications and control of Muscat between 1507 and 1650, providing essential context for claims of uninterrupted Omani independence. Read the research
13. Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam.
The New Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Explains why the spread of Islamic religious identity cannot be inferred directly from the changing boundaries of Muslim-ruled states. Read the chapter overview