The falcon of Quraysh

The life of 'Abd ar-Rahman I or the birth of the Umayyads of Cordoba

Author: Agha Ibrahim Akram - Editions: Ribât

Editor's note on the cover

It sometimes happens that Allah places a giant among men; 'Abd ar-Rahman ibn Mu'âwiya, the first of the Umayyads of Cordoba, was undoubtedly one of them. His destiny was even so fabulous that his greatest rival, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, gave him the eloquent nickname of “Falcon of Quraysh”. Can we think of a more formidable epic, in fact, than that of a fallen and lonely prince, a penniless fugitive marked by the massacre of his family and years of wandering through deserts and mountains, who manages to find himself establish in barely three decades as the omnipotent, victorious and conquering ruler of one of the richest and most coveted nations of humanity?

Few would have survived the countless trials and betrayals that stood in his long road beaten by the winds of adversity; he challenged the bravest, trapped the most cunning and defeated the most powerful to honor his appointment with Destiny and place his mark in History, the great one. In a peninsula threatened on all sides and cut to pieces by tribal and personal ambitions, the holy passion which animated him and his tireless zeal allowed him to re-establish both the unity of Muslim Spain and the glory of his clan – and to bequeath a kingdom to his descendants. An unrivaled state builder and inexhaustible war leader but also a poet keen on art, 'Abd ar-Rahman I thus laid the foundations of a dynasty which was to reign for nearly three centuries and offer the world one of its cultures the most radiant...

For the first time translated into French, the work of the great military historian Agha Ibrahim Akram, a distinguished specialist in the first conquests of the Muslim era, allows us to discover the extraordinary odyssey of this sovereign-pioneer from the age of gold of Islamic civilization.