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After the death of Muhammad, his followers believed that there should be a temporal leader who enforced the teachings of the Quran and Hadith among the community of believers. Abu Baker, Umar, and Uthman were the first three caliphs during the early decades of Islam. In very short order, Islamic armies emerged from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and took the Levant from the Byzantine Empire in 636 and then defeated the Sassanid Persians in 637 at al-Qadisiyah, which opened Iraq and Persia to Islamic expansion. The next major country to fall was Egypt in 642 and the rest of North Africa soon followed. Despite the initial military successes of Islam, there were many rival factions within the religion, which ultimately resulted in Uthman’s assassination in 656. The assassination of Uthman proved to be the spark that ignited the First Civil War (656-661), plunging the Islamic world into a bloody sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shia branches of the new religion. <ref> Donner, Fred M. “Muhammad and the Caliphate.” In <i>The Oxford History of Islam.</i> Edited by John L. Esposito. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pgs. 15-16</ref>
When the dust of the First Civil War finally settled, The Umayyad Dynasty controlled virtually all of the Islamic world, which at that time stretched from Spain to Persia. For nearly 100 years the Umayyads provided leadership for the Islamic world, but as the ranks of Islam grew, so too did the number of different ethnicities that followed the religion. By the middle of the eight century, non-Arabs began to resent the almost total control that the Arabs wielded in the Umayyad Dynasty, which included most of the important administrative positions. In 750 the Umayyad Dynasty was overthrown and replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate, which was based in the city of Baghdad, far from Arabia or even the Umayyad capital city of Damascus. <ref> Donner, p. 20</ref> The Abbasids ushered in a period of Islamic history that is often referred to by modern scholars as the “Golden Age of Islam,” where art, science, and literature, often written in Persian, were promoted by the caliphs. The second great Islamic caliphate truly had a more Persian influence and although theologically in line with the Sunni branch of Islam, it was much more tolerant of Shia Islam. <ref> Donner, pgs. 31-32</ref> By the late eleventh century, though, the Abbasid caliphate was effectively challenged by other Islamic dynasties, such as the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt and the Seljuk Turks. To make matters worse for the Abbasids, the beginning of the Crusades in the late eleventh century brought large European armies into the Middle East, which further challenged Islamic authority. The final blow to the Abbasid caliphate came when the Mongols invaded the region and executed the last Abbasid caliph in 1258. The Mongols followed that act up by sacking Damascus in 1260, sending most of the Islamic world into a protracted state of turmoil. <ref> Denley, Peter. “The Mediterranean in the Age of the Renaissance, 1200-1500.” In <i>The Oxford History of Medieval Europe.</i> Edited by George Holmes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pgsp. 245</ref> It would be nearly 100 years before another Islamic dynasty could accurately claim the title of caliphate.
===Early Ottoman History===
