SYRIA – 7 The Arrival of the Mongols
A short addendum to the last installment of this series. I lay in bed and actually READ the appropriate sections of Album’s Checklist of Islamic Coins, instead of just looking up coins in it. When I write about coins I tend to look at them from a “non-collector” perspective, and ignore the very rare and extremely rare stuff that very or extremely rarely passes through my inventory. I’ve never encountered coins like Arab-Sasanian silver drachms announcing that they were made in Damascus. They areephemeral issuers, rebels. There is a whole other world of stuff on the other side of rare.
Back to the timeline. We were up to the Fatimids. The two big branches of Islam are Sunni and Shia. The Sunnis think that the first four caliphs were legitimate, then the Umayyads, then the Abbasids, then the Ottomans. The Shia think three of the four first caliphs were illegitimate and that only the fourth, Ali, was for real. From Ali, the Shia split into two major opinions, with a larger number of splinter opinions. One thinks that a line of 12 “Imams” carried the truth of Islam into the future. The current official religion of Iran is “twelver.” The
