Sirah Atlas, the interactive map of Islamic history
What you see on the map
Sirah Atlas places the history of Islam on a map and on a timeline, so that you not only read what happened but also see where and when. The map is built from epochs: the Seerah of the Prophet ﷺ from Mecca to Medina, the Rightly Guided Caliphs from Abu Bakr ﵁ to ʿAli ﵁, and Islam in West Africa from Ghana to the Sokoto Caliphate. Each epoch consists of periods and events, and behind every event stands an article. Alongside these you will find phase-by-phase battle stories, from Badr to Siffin, biographies of the people who bore this history, and thematic routes such as the Islamic Sciences and the Heroes of Islam. The timeline in the atlas ties all of this together, so that you can move year by year through fourteen centuries.
Who it is for
Sirah Atlas is made for anyone who wants to understand the history of Islam as a connected whole, and not as a series of separate stories. Readers who already know the Seerah discover how the events relate to one another in place and time. Students use the articles and the source references as a starting point for their own research. Teachers show a battle phase by phase on the screen, or set a period as a reading assignment with its accompanying quiz. Families read one event each evening in Ramadan, and so follow, night after night, the road from the first revelation to the Farewell Sermon. The language is accessible, the honorifics stand where they belong, and the content is written with reverence for those who appear in it.
How the content is made
Every article goes back to sources that are named. For the Seerah these include Ibn Ishaq ﵀, Ibn Hisham ﵀ and the hadith collection of al-Bukhari ﵀, for the Rightly Guided Caliphs the Tarikh al-Khulafa of as-Suyuti ﵀, and for West Africa the Tarikh as-Sudan of as-Saʿdi ﵀, the travel accounts of Ibn Battuta ﵀ and the work of modern historians such as John Hunwick and Michael Gomez. Beneath the articles on the caliphs and on West Africa stands a block of sources with page references, so that a reader can check where a claim comes from. The Dutch text is the source text: it is first reviewed editorially for language, facts and honorifics, and then translated into English, German, French, Turkish, Russian and Indonesian. Seven languages, one source, and every correction made in the Dutch carries through into all the translations.