56 A Short History of the Middle East
Maniluk sultan at last worthy of his first predecessors. Instead they
successfully assaulted Persia.1 In 1514 the Turkish troops armed
with muskets and supported by 300 cannon were too much for the
Persian cavalry without firearms. It was now the turn of the JViarn-
luks, who were suspected of complicity with the Persian shah.
They also had no guns as yet, and their cavalry were routed near
Aleppo in 1516. They hastened to acquire some few pieces of ord-
nance to meet the advancing Ottoman army, but the outcome of a
second battle outside Cairo next year was the same. The JVtamluk
sultanate was no more. The pitiful Abbasid puppet-caliph, last of a
line which had been set up in Cairo by the first of the great Main-
luks in 1260 following the Mongol sacking of Baghdad, and
under whose nominal authority the Mamluks had continued to
rule, was carried off from Cairo to Constantinople. By this token
the centre of gravity once more passed from Egypt to the city on
die Bosporus; and Cairo sank to the level of a provincial capital.
APPENDIX: THE PRINCIPAL DOCTRINES OF ISLAM.
The essential core of Muslim belief is the Oneness of God. The
Muslim Creed begins with the words la ilah ill9Allah9 'There is no
god but God'. From this follow his various attributes of omni-
potence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc.
The Creeds ends, wa-Mohammed rasul Allah, 'and Mohammed is
the apostle of God*. No divinity is thereby claimed for the Prophet.
He is wholly human, the last and greatest of an ascending series of
prophets, borrowed from the Jewish Old Testament. The series
comprises the Patriarchs culminating in Moses, and the kings
David and Solomon, but not the prophets of the periods immedi-
ately before and after the Exile. Higher than all, and next in rank
to Mohammed himself comes Jesus, 'from the breath (spirit) of
God5 as the Qur'an describes him. He and His Mother are honoured
by Muslims; but Jesus again is regarded as wholly human, and the
Christian doctrines of His Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resur-
rection are held to be misguided.
The doctrine of the Trinity is especially obnoxious to Muslims,
who consider it to conflict with the essential Unity of God; yet
1A new dynasty, the Safavid, winning the support of the populace of the
Persian cities by its adoption of moderate Shi'i doctrines as the religion of
dynasty and state, had newly unified Persia c. 1500 after centuries of disunion
and anarchy. Their dynasty lasted until 1722.