978-1-4222-3442-6

I RAQ ’ S H ISTORY TO 1990 37

Hussein was slain along with his family and 200 of his followers. Iraqi cities such as An Najaf and Karbala remain important shrines for Shiite Muslims today. After the defeat of the Shiites, the Sunni caliphs maintained their control over Islam. For the next seven centuries, two Sunni dynasties ruled the Muslims—the Umayyads from 661 to 750 and the Abbasids from 750 to 1258. The caliphs ruled the spreading Islamic empire first from Medina, and then from Damascus, Syria. In 762 the adminis- trative center was moved to a new city on the Tigris River, called Madinat as-Salam (“the City of Peace”), although many people still knew it by the name of a small town that had been on that site before—Baghdad. During the eighth century, Muslim culture blossomed in Baghdad. Literature, science, art, and mathematics flourished, and Baghdad became one of the world’s leading cities. The caliphs encouraged the growth of knowledge by opening schools that attracted scholars from all over. The writings of ancient Greece and Rome were translated into Arabic and preserved in libraries and universities in Baghdad and other cities. Many of these important writings had been lost in the West when barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire; they would be rediscovered by European scholars centuries later. The 8th through the 12th centuries are often con- sidered to be the golden age of the Arab Islamic civilization. The area of modern-day Iraq continued to be at the center of the Islamic civilization until the 13th century. During the early years of that century, the Mongols had spread their control east from Asia into Persia under the great leader Genghis Khan. In 1258 Mongol armies sacked Baghdad. The city was destroyed, and most of the inhabitants were slaughtered—in fact, the Mongol leader Hülegü Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, made a pyramid from the skulls of poets, scholars, and religious leaders in Baghdad. During the next few centuries, control of Mesopotamia alternated