Hugh Kennedy, Robert Irwin, and Amira Bennison get together for a discussion of the Abbasid caliphate on Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time.”

Check out the BBC Radio 4 summary, curiously illustrated with something that looks more Ottoman than Abbasid, or just stream the audio.

Satellite photo of Samarra, taken on 27 February 2003 by the Ikonos satellite. Three by six kilometres, one meter resolution.

Here’s their suggested further reading:

• Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (Penguin, 2006)
• Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A companion (Penguin, 1994)
• Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World (Phoenix, 2004)
• Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs (London, 2001)
• Saleh Said Agha, The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads (Leiden, 2003)
• Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage (Cambridge, 1998)
• Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: the history and impact of paper in the Islamic World (London, 2001)
• T. El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate (Cambridge, 1999)
• Dmitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London, 1998)