Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!
September 3, 1260.
The 25th of Ramadan.
A fasting army, outnumbered and outmatched by every military calculation known to the age, lines up in a narrow valley in Palestine, near a place called Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath.
In front of them stands a force that had up until now been unstoppable.
An army that had shattered China, swallowed Persia whole, dissolved the greatest Islamic caliphate in history into dust, and left a trail of ash from the central asian steppe to the gates of Cairo.
These were the Mongols, under the rule of Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan.
An army before whom kings fled, cities surrendered without a fight, and generals wept.
The Mamluks were told by their own emirs at the war council that this was suicide. That no one defeats the Mongols. That they should wait. Negotiate. Survive.
Their Sultan looked at them and said: whoever fears death, leave now.
Nobody left.
That moment, on a blazing morning in Ramadan, is where this story ends.
But to understand what it means, you have to understand how the world got there.
The Spark That Lit The Flame
It began, as so many catastrophes do, with a moment of colossal, almost inexplicable arrogance.
The year is 1218.
Genghis Khan, already master of Mongolia and much of China, sends a trade caravan westward toward the Khwarazmian Empire, a powerful Muslim state that ruled much of what is now Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The caravan was enormous, around 500 merchants and escorts, laden with silk, gold, silver, and furs. The message it carried was clear: I want trade, not war.
The governor of the border city of Otrar, Inalchuq, accused the merchants of being spies and had every last one of them executed. Then he sold their goods in the markets of Bukhara.
What happened next speaks to Genghis Khan’s character and, in some ways, his code. He did not immediately invade. Instead, he sent three ambassadors, one Muslim and two Mongols, directly to Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, the ruler of the empire, to demand that the governor be handed over and the caravan’s blood be answered for.
The Shah had the Muslim ambassador beheaded. He shaved the beards of the two Mongols, symbols of masculine honor in their culture, and sent them back to Genghis Khan with the severed head as his reply.
Among the Mongols, ambassadors were considered sacred and inviolable. There was no greater insult.
Genghis Khan climbed a mountain, bowed his head to the ground, and wept. Then he said:
“I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
He came. With everything he had.
The Punishment That Remade the World
What followed is almost too vast to comprehend.
Genghis did not simply march an army into Khwarezm. He descended upon it from multiple directions simultaneously, dividing his forces in a way his enemies had never seen, striking from angles they could not predict. City after legendary city fell. Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, Nishapur, one of the greatest cities on earth, home to 150,000 books in ten libraries, razed to nothing.
The Persian historian Juvayni, writing in the aftermath, described cities so thoroughly destroyed that it was impossible to tell where the walls had stood. Population estimates for the region before and after the invasion suggest that tens of millions perished, not only in the fighting but in the famines and diseases that followed. Some historians estimate that Central Asia lost up to three-quarters of its population in the span of a few decades.
The Shah Muhammad II, who had sent back that severed head so arrogantly, spent the last days of his life as a fugitive, hunted across his own crumbling empire until he died alone on a small island in the Caspian Sea, stripped of everything he had once ruled.
Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his empire did not stop. His sons and grandsons carried the fire westward, and when they turned toward the heart of the Muslim world, what they found was already half-broken.
The Night Baghdad Burned
February 13, 1258.
This date is seared into the memory of this ummah the way few others are.
Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, arrived at Baghdad with what was perhaps the largest Mongol army ever assembled, having been given a fifth of the entire empire’s fighting men for the task. His mission was explicit: end the Abbasid Caliphate.
Baghdad was not merely a city. It was the beating heart of Islamic civilization. Since the 8th century it had been the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, the symbolic center of the Muslim world, a city that at its peak housed over a million souls, home to the legendary Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, whose scholars had translated, preserved, and expanded the knowledge of the ancient world. While Europe was in the depths of its Dark Ages, Baghdad’s streets were lit, its hospitals were staffed, and its astronomers were mapping the stars.
Caliph Al-Musta’sim, the last of the Abbasid line, did none of the things a ruler should do when a force like this appears on the horizon. His advisors convinced him to scale down the army. He hoarded his treasury rather than use it to raise soldiers. He reportedly wept at threats but did not act on them.
Hulagu demanded surrender. The Caliph refused. The siege lasted twelve days. The city’s fortifications were breached within two of them.
What followed was a week of massacre and destruction that contemporaries struggled to put into words. Scholars and historians recorded that the Tigris ran black with the ink of burned books and red with blood. The streets were piled with the dead. The great libraries were destroyed. The House of Wisdom, centuries of accumulated human knowledge, was fed to the Mongol fires.
The Caliph himself, the last successor to a line stretching back five centuries, was executed. According to most accounts, because the Mongols considered it forbidden to spill royal blood on the earth, he was wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by horses.
Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله, who had already written about what he considered the unbearable calamity of the Crusades, wrote of the Mongols: “Even Antichrist will spare those who follow him, though he will destroy others; these Tatars spared no one.”
The caliphate was over. Five hundred years of institutional continuity, gone in a week.
And the Mongols were not finished.
When the Islamic World Stood at the Edge
Damascus fell in March 1260 without a fight. Aleppo had been sacked before it. Gaza. Nablus. The Mongol forces, under Hulagu’s general Kitbuqa, pressed southward with nothing in their path.
Hulagu himself sent messengers to Cairo, to the ruler of Egypt, the last major Muslim power left standing. The letter was designed to break the will of whoever read it:
“We are the army of God in His land… Surrender yourselves to us before the lid is lifted, at which point you will have cause to regret. Your fortresses will not stop us, the armies that fight us will not benefit, and your supplications against us will not be heard. So receive tidings of humiliation and degradation.”
In response to letters like this, rulers across the region had surrendered. An-Nasir Yusuf, the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, had fled rather than fight. Most of the Muslim world appeared to be in collective paralysis.
But the man who read this letter was not like the others.
His name was Sayfuddin Qutuz.
The Slave Sultan
To understand Qutuz, you have to know where he came from.
He was born a Khwarazmian prince of Turkic origin, a child of the very world Genghis Khan had annihilated. When the Mongols destroyed the Khwarazmian Empire around 1231, the young boy was captured, separated from everything he had ever known, and sold as a slave. He was taken to Damascus, then to Egypt, where he was purchased by the Mamluk sultan of Cairo.
The Mamluks were a unique institution, slave soldiers trained from boyhood in both Islamic sciences and the art of war. They were purchased as children, raised as warriors, educated as scholars, and often freed to serve as the most elite military caste in the Muslim world. Many of them rose to extraordinary positions of power. Some became sultans.
Qutuz was one of those who rose. Over decades of service, he became the most powerful figure behind the Egyptian throne. When the Mongol threat made clear that the fifteen-year-old boy-sultan on the throne could not lead a defense, Qutuz stepped forward and took it. Not out of ambition alone, but because he understood something that those around him did not.
He had been a boy when the Mongols destroyed his world. He had lost his home, his family, his dignity, his freedom, to this same force now bearing down on Egypt. He knew who they were. He knew what they did.
And he had spent decades waiting.
When his emirs told him at the war council that no one had ever defeated the Mongols, Qutuz stood up and said: “O amirs of the Muslims, you all know the Mongols have destroyed the lands of Islam, killed the men, enslaved the women and children. If you are unwilling to fight them, who will stand against them? You are the remnant of Islam.”
Then he said: “I will go alone and fight them if you will not. And if I die, I die. But I will not surrender this ummah to humiliation.”
The emirs followed him.
When Hulagu’s messengers arrived in Cairo with the demand for surrender, Qutuz did something no ruler in the Mongol advance had done. He had them killed, and their heads displayed on the Bab Zuweila gate of the city.
He had just told the most powerful military machine in the world to come and get it.
The Valley of Goliath
The two forces met on September 3, 1260, in a narrow valley in southeastern Galilee, near a spring in Palestine.
Ain Jalut. The Spring of Goliath.
The name was not coincidental. This was the same valley where, centuries before, a young shepherd boy named Dawud عليه السلام had stepped forward alone to face a warrior giant that an entire army had refused to fight. Now, on the 25th of Ramadan, another Muslim force fasting in the heat of the Palestinian summer was about to reenact something of the same defiance.
Hulagu had returned east with the bulk of his forces after the death of the Great Khan, leaving his general Kitbuqa in command of a reduced but still formidable force of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 battle-hardened Mongol veterans who had never tasted defeat.
Qutuz’s strategy was built on knowledge. His general Baybars, who commanded the vanguard, knew this terrain intimately. He had been a fugitive here once, and now he would turn the land itself into a weapon.
The Mamluks concealed the bulk of their forces in the highland hills surrounding the valley and sent Baybars forward with a smaller force to draw the Mongols in. Baybars did what only the best commanders can do under fire: he engaged the Mongols, skirmished, provoked, and then retreated, step by step, pulling Kitbuqa and his cavalry deeper into the valley, deeper into the trap.
At the height of the battle, the Mamluk left wing broke under the Mongol pressure. The line was collapsing.
At that moment, Sultan Qutuz tore off his helmet so every soldier could see his face, charged forward, and cried out three times:
“Wa Islamah! Wa Islamah! Wa Islamah!”
O, Islam. O, Islam. O, Islam.
The cry was not a battle cry. It was a prayer. It was the cry of a man who had nothing left to offer except everything. The cry of someone who understood that what stood or fell in that valley was not just an army, but something far larger.
The soldiers heard it. And something shifted.
The line held. Then it pushed. The hidden forces in the hills poured down. The Mongols were surrounded on three sides. Kitbuqa himself was killed in the fighting. The Mongol force was broken, and what remained was pursued all the way to Baysan, and there, broken again.
For the first time in the memory of a generation, the Mongol advance had not only been stopped. It had been reversed.
What the Ummah Lost Immediately After
Qutuz never made it back to Cairo.
On the way home, at the height of the greatest victory the Muslim world had seen in a generation, a plot was hatched among his own commanders. Baybars and his allies approached the Sultan during a break in the march. Baybars asked to speak with Qutuz privately. When they were close, Baybars struck him down.
The man who had held the ummah together at its darkest moment was killed by his own general before he could reach home.
It is one of the bitter ironies of Islamic history. A man who gave everything for the ummah, denied even the dignity of dying in battle.
But his name and his cry, Wa Islamah, outlived him by centuries. And something he could not have anticipated followed in the decades after.
When The Conquerors Are Conquered
Here is the thing about the Mongols that no one who watched their advance could have predicted.
They destroyed everything… but then Islam absorbed them.
Hulagu Khan, who had sacked Baghdad and extinguished the caliphate, had a grandson named Ghazan. In 1295, Ghazan Khan became the Ilkhan of Persia. The great-great-grandson of the man who had ordered the destruction of the Islamic world took the throne and declared:
There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger.
He adopted the name Mahmud. He minted coins bearing the shahada. He built mosques and funded scholars. Under his rule and the rules of his successors, the Ilkhanate, the very Mongol state Hulagu had founded over the ruins of Baghdad, became a Muslim state.
And the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that had swept across Russia and Eastern Europe, had already converted to Islam a generation earlier, through the efforts of unnamed Muslim merchants who had shared their faith with a prince named Berke Khan while he was hunting near Bukhara. He became Muslim in 1254, even as his cousins were destroying Baghdad. He eventually went to war against his own cousin Hulagu over the massacre of Muslims.
Islam spread not by armies in those lands, but by the same means it always spread best: by ordinary men and women whose faith was visible, genuine, and impossible to ignore.
The Mongols who came as the scourge of God, left as the servants of God’s deen.
Lessons From Ain Jalut
There are lessons layered into this story like sediment, and we could spend a Ramadan unpacking all of them. But let these be the ones that stay with you.
The first: What looks like total destruction is often total transformation in disguise.
The fall of the Abbasid Caliphate was, in purely worldly terms, one of the greatest catastrophes in Islamic history. Nothing was left. The institution that had provided 500 years of continuity to the Muslim world was gone. And yet, Islam did not die. It could not die. Because Islam was never in the Caliph’s palace. It was in the hearts of believers, in the scholars who gathered the scattered manuscripts, in the soldiers who stood at Ain Jalut, in the merchants who sat with Berke Khan near Bukhara and talked about their Lord.
Allah ﷻ reminds us in His Book: “Perhaps you dislike something which is good for you.” [Quran, 2:216]
The destruction of what seemed like an irreplaceable institution created the conditions for something new. Egypt became the new center of the Muslim world. The Mamluks became its guardians. And the Mongols, those unstoppable Mongols, became Muslims.
The second: Even the tyrants of history serve a purpose in the plan of Allah ﷻ.
Genghis Khan called himself the punishment of God. And in a painful, terrible way, he may not have been entirely wrong. The Muslim world he invaded was not the world of the Companions. It was fractured, corrupt, obsessed with internal power struggles. The Abbasid caliph was reportedly pleased when he heard his rival, Khwarizm Shah, was being crushed by the Mongols, because of their personal feud. He was sitting comfortable with his treasury while the walls of the ummah crumbled. Ibn al-Athir himself noted that the scholars of the time believed the invasions were a divine reckoning for the sins of the Muslim world.
We do not say this to excuse the Mongols, nor to diminish the suffering of the innocent. We say it because the Quran itself uses Fir’awn as a lesson, and Namrud as a parable, and makes the destruction of ancient civilizations a reminder for those who think power makes them permanent.
Those who were sent as punishment eventually became part of the family.
The third: Qutuz teaches us that the moment calls for the person, and sometimes the person has to call for the moment.
His emirs did not want to fight. The political calculation of survival was clear: submit, negotiate, survive. Qutuz refused the political calculation and chose the moral one. He stood up in that council and said, in essence: if not us, then who?
That is the question every generation of Muslims eventually has to ask. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
And it is worth noting: he did this while fasting. The battle was fought on the 25th of Ramadan. These men had been awake for fajr, had made du’a in the pre-dawn darkness, were running on dates and water and the promise of Allah ﷻ. And they broke the back of the greatest military force the world had ever seen.
Ramadan is not a time of retreat. It is not a month of soft voices and closed curtains. It is the month of Badr. The month of Ain Jalut. The month when this ummah has, again and again, found something it did not know it had.
And the fourth: the most powerful da’wah is not the army. It is the ordinary believer.
Berke Khan became Muslim because of merchants. Tughluq Timur Khan became Muslim because of a man named Jamal who called the adhan near the royal compound at fajr. Ordinary believers, unnamed in the history books, changed the fate of empires. Their reward is with Allah ﷻ. Their names may not be in any chronicle, but they are in something better.
You do not need a throne or an army. You need sincerity.
The Mongols swept through the world like a fire that no one could extinguish.
But fire does not destroy what is truly alive. It only reveals what was hollow.
And what was hollow, burned. And what was real, remained.
Islam remained.
The spring at Ain Jalut still flows.
