Methodology & sources

Each record stores a Common Era (Gregorian/Julian-proleptic by convention of the cited references) year and, where the sources record one, an attested Hijri year, typical for scholars' death dates, which the biographical tradition preserved in AH. Attested pairs are shown plainly: 1258 CE · 656 AH.

When no attested Hijri date exists, the site computes one from the tabular (civil) Islamic calendar and always labels it: ≈ 641 AH (calc.). Tabular conversion can differ from historically observed months by a day or two, and by ±1 year at year boundaries; it is an orientation aid, not a claim. Events before the Hijra (622 CE) receive no calculated AH value at all. The conversion code is unit-tested against attested pairs (Badr 2 AH/624, Baghdad's founding 145 AH/762, Constantinople 857 AH/1453, and others).

Precision is explicit in the data model: exact (attested to the day or month), year, circa, range, and disputed (with the alternative years listed). The interface renders these differently, “c.”, dashed outlines, hollow end-caps, ≈ marks, and notes in the detail panel, so approximation is always visible.

The line now reaches back past 570 CE to Ādam عليه السلام. This demanded a special honesty device, because Islamic tradition preserves the order of the prophets, not their dates. Below the Islamic era the line therefore passes through three clearly-marked bands. First, late antiquity and the era of ʿĪsā عليه السلام, where ordinary scholarly dating exists (ʿĪsā c. 4 BCE – c. 30 CE; the end marks the rafʿ, in Islamic belief he was not killed but raised up, Q 4:157–158). Second, a band of traditional dating: conventional associations only (Mūsā with 13th-century-BCE Egypt, Dāwūd and Sulaymān with the 10th century BCE, Ibrāhīm with the early second millennium), every one flagged "disputed," because none is historically established. Third, an ordinal band for Ādam, Idrīs, Nūḥ, Hūd, and Ṣāliḥ عليهم السلام: here the spacing is explicitly not to scale, no year is ever displayed, computed comparisons are disabled, and the interface says only what tradition says, who came before whom. Their positions in the data are layout slots, never dates.

Sources for this section are the Qurʾan (cited by sūra and āya on each record), Ibn Kathīr's Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, the first volume of al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh, and modern reference works. All prophets are treated with reverence, no depictions are used, and nothing about them is invented, including chronology.

Today sits at the top; scrolling down travels into the past. From today back to 3300 BCE the scale is one uniform ruler, so a century occupies the same height wherever it falls at a given zoom level, before Islam included. Below that sits a single fixed-height ordinal band for the earliest prophets, hatched and captioned wherever it appears: it is explicitly not to scale, and no year is ever displayed inside it.

Markers are sized by an editorial 1–5 estimate of historical influence, how widely a person, book, state, or event is referenced and how much it shaped what followed. It controls display prominence only: which markers appear first while zooming out and how large they draw. It is not a theological ranking, an endorsement, or a verdict; al-Nawawī renders larger than a contemporary scholar because of eight centuries of citation, not as a judgment between them.

Political borders are drawn from Historical Basemaps (A. Ourednik and contributors, GPL-3.0), an openly licensed scholarly compilation of world political geometry at year keyframes. The atlas loads the keyframe nearest the year you are viewing and says so on its face ("borders c. 1200"). Muslim-ruled states are colored (and, where they match a timeline record, clickable); other powers render in quiet grey. Cities, battle sites (flagged when the location is uncertain), trade routes, and figures' journeys are plotted from this site's own dataset. The land outline is Natural Earth (public domain).

Two honesty notes. First, pre-modern frontiers were zones, not lines: the source project itself describes its geometry as world-scale approximation, and we simplify it further for the inset scale, treat every line as "roughly here," never as a survey. Second, entity names and extents are the dataset's editorial choices at each snapshot; between keyframes (they run roughly a century apart before 1800) the map does not interpolate. The timeline records, not the map, carry this site's dated claims.

The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, the prophets, the Companions, and sacred matters are treated with respect; the site contains no depictions of prophets and uses abstract markers for all persons. Disputed political, theological, and sectarian topics are described in neutral, factual language, and controversy is noted rather than adjudicated (e.g., Karbala, Ibn ʿArabī's reception, modern movements). No historical state is presented as representing all Muslims. Arabic names are given in scholarly-lite transliteration with the Arabic script alongside; the search accepts plain spellings.

Modern coverage (20th–21st centuries) is intentionally sparse: the instrument's purpose is deep time, and recent history is better served elsewhere. The dataset aims for breadth across regions, West Africa, the Swahili coast, Central and Southeast Asia stand beside the central lands, while remaining a curated demonstration rather than a census.

Every sentence like “Imam al-Bukhārī died roughly 393 years before Ibn Taymiyya was born” is computed at runtime from the structured dates, never hand-written, so it stays consistent with the data and inherits its uncertainty (the word roughly appears whenever an approximate date is involved).

• Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd & 3rd editions (Brill), the default reference for biographical entries.
• al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, primary biographical dates for scholars.
• Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa-l-Nihāya; Ibn Rajab, al-Dhayl ʿalā Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila, Mamluk-era scholars.
• Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya; al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, the Prophetic era and early caliphate.
• W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca / Muhammad at Medina (Oxford UP).
• C.E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties (Edinburgh UP, 1996), dynastic dates.
• Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates; The Great Arab Conquests; Muslim Spain and Portugal; An Historical Atlas of Islam, 2nd ed. (Brill, 2002).
• Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago UP, 1974).
• Jonathan Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (Brill, 2007).
• Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998).
• George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh UP, 1981).
• George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT, 2007).
• Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh UP, 1999).
• Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World (Yale UP, 2017); The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge, 1999).
• Amira K. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh UP, 2016).
• Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge, 1965).
• Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650 (Palgrave, 2002); Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream (2005).
• Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge, 1980).
• John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993).
• Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973); Levtzion & Pouwels (eds.), The History of Islam in Africa (Ohio UP, 2000).
• John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 1999).
• M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Palgrave, 4th ed. 2008); Peter Riddell, Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World (Hurst, 2001).
• Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (California UP, 1986).
• Natural Earth (public domain) via the world-atlas package, coastline data for the atlas.
• A. Ourednik et al., Historical Basemaps (github.com/aourednik/historical-basemaps, GPL-3.0), political border keyframes used in the atlas, simplified for display.
• Ibn Kathīr, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, traditional narratives of the prophets عليهم السلام.
• Brannon Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran: An Introduction to the Quran and Muslim Exegesis (Continuum, 2002).

Per-record citations appear in each detail panel. Corrections are welcome, see the README for how records are structured and how to amend them.

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