2027 School Calendar Art Competition

The Constitution of Madinah (the Charter of Madinah) was enacted shortly after the migration (Hijrah) to Madinah in 622 CE. It is widely considered the earliest and most historically undisputed of the Prophet's covenants. It established a multi-faith confederation, declaring that the Jewish tribes of Madinah formed a single political community (ummah) alongside the Muslims. It guaranteed freedom of religion and mandated the mutual defence of the city against outside enemies — a remarkable early model of a society in which different faiths shared rights and responsibilities.

The Charter belongs to a wider collection of treaties, edicts and letters issued by the Prophet ﷺ to non-Muslim communities — Christians, Jews, Samaritans and Zoroastrians — granting protection, autonomy and rights. Modern scholarly work, such as the research compiled in the Covenants Initiative, frequently highlights several primary covenants:

The most prominent covenants

The Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai (Ashtiname). Granted around 623–624 CE to the monks of St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, this document is famous for being dictated by the Prophet ﷺ, scribed by Ali ibn Abi Talib, and stamped with an imprint of the Prophet's hand. It states that Muslims must defend peaceful Christians "until the End of the World."

The Covenant with the Christians of Najran. Najran was a major Christian hub in southern Arabia. The Prophet ﷺ issued a comprehensive covenant ensuring that their religious leaders, crosses, property and lands would remain protected under the protection of God and His Messenger.

The Covenant with the Christians of Persia and of the World. Further treaties extended protections to Christian populations within Persian territories, and a broader proclamation directed toward all Christian communities reinforced that religious freedom and civic protection were meant to be global and lasting, rather than local exceptions.

The Covenants with Jewish and other communities. Specific treaties were struck with the Jews of Maqna, Yemenite Jewish tribes, Samaritans and Zoroastrians (Magi), ensuring localised peace and self-governance across the expanding frontiers of Arabia.

Linked theme: see also Theme 14 — Hijrah to Abyssinia, the first time early Muslims were granted refuge and protection, by a Christian king.

One of the least appreciated continuities in intellectual history is the relationship between Islamic mathematics, medieval Gothic architecture and modern artificial intelligence. Although separated by nearly a millennium, these belong to the same trajectory: the increasing formalisation of order through symbolic reasoning.

Preserving and transforming Greek mathematics

When much of Western Europe had lost access to advanced Greek scientific works following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, scholars of the Islamic world preserved, translated, expanded and transformed this inheritance. During the eighth through eleventh centuries, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and cities like Cairo, Cordoba and Samarkand became hubs of innovation. Greek works were not merely translated — they were critically extended, and Muslim mathematicians introduced entirely new methods Europe had never possessed.

Al-Khwarizmi and the birth of algebra

The single most influential mathematician in this story is Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His famous work, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, contains the Arabic word al-jabr (restoration or completion), which gives us "algebra." Latin translators rendered his name as "Algoritmi," which became "algorithm." Thus two foundational concepts of modern computing — algebra and algorithm — both derive directly from al-Khwarizmi.

Why algebra was revolutionary

Greek mathematics was largely geometric; one solved problems through diagrams. Islamic algebra introduced something radically different: problems could be represented abstractly using symbols and operations rather than figures. Instead of asking "What does this shape look like?" one could ask "What relationships hold regardless of shape?" This allowed symbolic manipulation, general equations, procedural reasoning and repeatable computational methods — ideas that eventually underpin computer science itself.

From Baghdad to the Gothic cathedral

Beginning in the eleventh century, Arabic manuscripts were translated into Latin in Toledo and Palermo; Europe adopted Hindu-Arabic numerals, decimal notation and zero. The twelfth-century School of Chartres revived the Platonic insight that "mathematics is the language of creation," profoundly shaping Gothic architecture. The Gothic cathedral is geometry made inhabitable: master builders used proportional systems, Euclidean geometry and structural calculation, so the whole cathedral becomes a visible theorem. This parallels Islamic geometric art, which expresses "unity through multiplicity" through repeated polygons, stars and tessellations.

From algebra to algorithms to AI

Algebra introduced symbolic procedures; algorithms are precisely defined procedures; and modern computing rests on this idea. Machine learning represents data as mathematical objects, neural networks are enormous systems of equations, and training AI means solving optimisation problems. Without algebra, there would be no modern AI.

This is not a simple chain of cause and effect — Gothic architecture did not "cause" AI. Each stage preserved, transformed and extended ways of thinking that accumulated over centuries. For the builders of cathedrals, mathematics was contemplative before it was technical, directing the mind toward God; in AI today it is largely used for prediction and control. A question for your generation: can mathematics once again serve both innovation and the pursuit of truth, beauty and the common good?

The numbers that changed the world

The system of numerals we use today was developed in India, with a decimal place-value system in which the position of a digit shows its value — and, crucially, a symbol for nothing: zero. Muslim mathematicians adopted and spread this system: al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on calculating with Hindu numerals, and the Arabic word for zero, sifr, gives us both "cipher" and "zero." These numerals reached Europe through Latin translations and the work of mathematicians such as Fibonacci, gradually replacing the clumsy Roman numerals. Without place-value notation and zero, modern mathematics, science and computing would scarcely be imaginable.

Al-Biruni: understanding India in its own words

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (c. 973 – c. 1050) was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world — a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, historian, linguist and geographer. His curiosity led him into the rich traditions of India, where he spent many years learning Sanskrit and engaging directly with Indian texts. Rather than relying on hearsay, he insisted on understanding Indian thought from its original sources. His monumental study of India, the Kitab fi Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind, remains one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of comparative scholarship, covering Indian mathematics, astronomy, religion and philosophy.

One of his most remarkable achievements was his Arabic interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali — not a word-for-word translation but a philosophical exposition that made subtle ideas intelligible to Muslim readers. What attracted him most was Yoga's profound psychology of the human soul: its disciplined science of self-knowledge, concerned with understanding the mind, overcoming distraction and cultivating concentration. He noted genuine similarities with aspects of Islamic spirituality, particularly Sufism — purification of the soul, disciplined remembrance (dhikr), and contemplation — while remaining careful never to blur the real differences between the two traditions.

Al-Biruni's greatest legacy lies in his method. He repeatedly insisted that one must first understand another people according to their own principles before offering criticism, warning against caricature and prejudice and arguing for the study of original languages, direct engagement with primary texts and respectful dialogue. Extraordinary for the eleventh century, this remains a timeless model of adab (good conduct) in the pursuit of knowledge: humility, patience, precision and justice toward other traditions, without compromising one's own.

A web of routes, a meeting of worlds

For more than a thousand years, the overland Silk Road connected China, Central Asia, Persia, Arabia and the Mediterranean. It carried silk, spices, gems, porcelain and horses — but its most valuable cargo was knowledge. Religions, languages, technologies and scientific ideas all travelled with the caravans. Muslim merchants and scholars became key intermediaries of this exchange, and great Central Asian cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara and Merv grew into glittering centres of trade and learning, dotted with caravanserais where travellers of every culture rested together.

One famous example of exchange is paper. The technique of paper-making, developed in China, spread westward into the Islamic world from around the eighth century, transforming Samarkand and then Baghdad into centres of book production long before paper reached Europe. Cheap, plentiful paper helped fuel the explosion of writing, science and literature in the Islamic Golden Age.

A Muslim among the Vikings: Ibn Fadlan

Almost 1,000 years ago an Arab faqih (jurist), Ibn Fadlan, set out from Baghdad on a journey of some 4,000 km along the northern trade routes, up the Volga River into the lands of the Bulgars and the Rus — the Vikings — in what is today western Russia. Curious about their behaviour and customs, he wrote down his impressions in a journal. His account of the cultural customs of the Vikings is one of the most accurate, objective and detailed ever written, and it later inspired Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead and the film based on it. One particularly moving moment is the scene in which Ibn Fadlan tries to teach the Vikings how to write "La ilaha illa Allah" — a reminder that curiosity and patience can build a bridge between two completely different worlds.

According to Chinese tradition recorded in the Old Book of Tang, Muslim envoys first reached China in 651 CE, less than twenty years after the Prophet's passing, when a delegation said to be led by Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas — a companion of the Prophet ﷺ — met Emperor Gaozong of Tang. The Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou, traditionally linked to this early contact, is regarded as one of the oldest mosques in the world.

The first major Muslim communities in China were Arab and Persian merchants who settled in the great southern port cities of Guangzhou, Quanzhou and Hangzhou, arriving by both the overland Silk Road and the sea routes of the Indian Ocean. In Quanzhou stand the ruins of the Qingjing (Ashab) Mosque, among the oldest stone mosques in China. The Great Mosque of Xi'an, first founded in 742 CE when Xi'an (then Chang'an) was the largest city in the world, was rebuilt in its present form in 1384 during the Ming dynasty — a serene complex of courtyards and pavilions that looks like a Chinese temple yet serves as a place of Islamic prayer.

Over the centuries, Muslim merchants often married into local Han families, helping to form the genetically and culturally diverse Hui people, who remain one of China's largest Muslim communities today. One outstanding figure was Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din of Bukhara, a descendant of the Prophet ﷺ who rose to become governor of Yunnan, where he is remembered for major reforms in taxation, agriculture, irrigation, education and infrastructure. Centuries later, the great Ming admiral Zheng He — who appears in Theme 9 — came from exactly this world: a Chinese Muslim family of Central Asian descent.

Linked themes: see Theme 4 — Silk Road Exchange and Theme 9 — Muslim Navigators of the Indian Ocean.

From the eighth to the fifteenth century, al-Andalus stood among the greatest centres of learning in the world. Córdoba, Toledo, Seville and Granada became homes to philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, poets and architects. Thinkers such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Tufayl, al-Zahrawi and al-Khwarizmi engaged critically with Greek philosophy and science while making original contributions in medicine, mathematics, optics, astronomy and metaphysics. Jewish scholars such as Moses Maimonides flourished here too, and the famous translation movement centred in Toledo rendered hundreds of Arabic works into Latin, making al-Andalus one of the principal bridges between the classical and medieval worlds.

Dante and the Mediterranean of ideas

This inheritance forms the backdrop to Dante's Divine Comedy. Its intellectual architecture emerged within a Mediterranean world deeply influenced by Islamic philosophy: Dante's cosmology rests upon an Aristotelian universe whose interpretation reached Western Europe largely through Arabic commentators, particularly Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, whose work shaped Thomas Aquinas and, through him, Dante. Scholars have also long noted parallels between Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and earlier Islamic accounts of the Prophet's Night Journey and Ascension (Mi'raj) — a comparison made famous by the Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios. Dante did not simply borrow; he transformed ideas circulating across cultures into a uniquely Christian vision.

Cervantes and a civilisation remembered

If Dante represents the confidence of medieval Christendom, Cervantes represents a civilisation looking back on its complex past. Born only decades after the fall of Granada in 1492, he lived in a Spain shaped by the forced conversion of Muslims and the eventual expulsion of the Moriscos. After fighting at the Battle of Lepanto, he spent five years as a captive in Algiers, becoming familiar with Arabic language and culture. One of the most remarkable devices in Don Quixote is Cervantes' claim that the novel is merely a translation of an Arabic manuscript by the fictional Muslim historian Cide Hamete Benengeli — a subtle reminder that the story of Spain cannot be told without an Arabic voice. Together, al-Andalus, Dante and Cervantes reveal that civilisations rarely arise from isolated cultures, but emerge through long processes of encounter, translation and creative transformation.

Linked theme: the Toledo translators also carried Islamic medicine into Europe — see Theme 12 — Islamic Medicine and the Ancient World.

In the fourteenth century, Timbuktu was one of the most important cities in the world — a hub of trade, learning and culture where scholars, poets and theologians gathered to exchange ideas. Its wealth came from the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt, but its lasting fame came from books. Nearby Djenné was also a celebrated centre of Islamic scholarship, and its great mud-brick mosque remains one of the most striking buildings in Africa.

Around 1324, the Mali emperor Mansa Musa made a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca and returned with scholars, architects and books from across the Islamic world. He commissioned mosques and learning institutions that transformed Timbuktu from a trading post into an intellectual powerhouse. The Sankoré Mosque, established in his reign, grew into a fully staffed mosque-university, said to hold the largest collection of books in Africa since the ancient Library of Alexandria. Students came from across Africa and beyond to study under the Maliki school of Islamic law.

The teachings gathered in Timbuktu — astronomy, mathematics, medicine, law, history, poetry and Qur'anic science — survive in several hundred thousand manuscripts, with some estimates as high as 700,000. Passed down within families for generations, many have been rescued, catalogued and digitised in modern times. They are a powerful answer to the old myth that Africa had no written history: West Africa built a vast, sophisticated world of learning, connected by Islam to the wider scholarly networks of the age.

From the fourteenth century onward, the Ottoman Empire was Europe's great neighbour and rival, and the two worlds were in constant contact. Goods, art, science, plants (such as the tulip), food and fashions passed back and forth; ambassadors travelled between courts; and European scholars, artists and merchants were endlessly curious about Ottoman power, learning and craftsmanship. Even moments of conflict, such as the famous siege of Vienna in 1683, became moments of cultural exchange — it was in its aftermath that Viennese coffeehouses flourished and the cappuccino was born (see Theme 13).

The warrior's code: chivalry and futuwwa

The code of chivalry was held in high esteem across the medieval world, especially among the warrior class. The Japanese samurai had bushido, medieval Europeans had knightly chivalry, and Muslims had futuwwa. The warrior's code is focused on the love of God and service to others on the path of one's own betterment — courage and skill joined to humility, generosity and loyalty.

Saladin (Salah al-Din), who led the Muslim armies during the Crusades, became legendary in Europe itself as the very image of the noble, merciful knight — proof that ideals of honour crossed religious lines. Films such as Kingdom of Heaven portray his chivalry; The Last Samurai and the Jedi of Star Wars echo the same spirit; and many recent Turkish historical dramas explore the Ottoman version of these ideals. In an age that often thirsts for such values, this theme invites students to imagine what true courage and honour look like.

The science that made ocean travel possible

From the eighth century onwards, Muslim merchants built an extensive trade network across the Indian Ocean, linking ports such as Basra, Muscat, Aden, Hormuz, Calicut, Malacca and the cities of the Swahili coast. Unlike Mediterranean sailors, who often stayed within sight of land, Indian Ocean navigators regularly crossed vast stretches of open sea. Their success depended on mastering the seasonal monsoon winds, currents and stars. Muslim astronomers perfected the astrolabe (which finds latitude by measuring the height of stars), produced detailed astronomical tables, and adopted the magnetic compass from China. Geographers such as al-Idrisi (1100–1165) drew maps of remarkable sophistication.

Zheng He, admiral of the Ming

One of the greatest representatives of this maritime world was Zheng He, the celebrated Ming admiral born in 1371 into a Muslim family of Central Asian ancestry (his birth name, Ma He, used "Ma" as the Chinese form of "Muhammad"). Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven extraordinary expeditions of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of people, visiting Aden, Hormuz, Jeddah, Mogadishu and Calicut; Chinese records describe Muslim members of his crews performing the Hajj. His missions strengthened diplomacy, trade and prestige, treating the sea as a bridge between cultures rather than a frontier for conquest.

Columbus and the Islamic inheritance

Nearly sixty years later, Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492 with just three small ships. The navigational knowledge that made his journey possible had been profoundly shaped by Islamic science: Arabic works on astronomy, mathematics and navigation were translated into Latin and became standard in European universities, and European sailors used the astrolabe and astronomical tables of Muslim scholars. When Vasco da Gama reached East Africa, he relied on a skilled Muslim navigator to guide his fleet across the Arabian Sea.

Ibn Battuta, the greatest traveller of his age

At just 21, Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69) left his home in Tangier, Morocco, for the pilgrimage to Mecca — and did not return for around 29 years. He came from a family of judges and belonged to the Maliki school of law. Travelling roughly 120,000 km across the equivalent of 44 modern countries, he survived bandits, shipwrecks and tyrants, visiting West Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, the Maldives, Southeast Asia and China. Near the end of his life the Sultan of Morocco asked him to record his adventures, and so his famous Rihla ("The Journey") was born — a window into the cosmopolitan, interconnected world of the Indian Ocean.

Linked theme: Ibn Battuta's visit to Sumatra appears again in Theme 10 — Islam in Southeast Asia.

Islam reached the Malay world mainly through the peaceful channels of commerce. Muslim merchants from India and West Asia, sailing the same monsoon routes as the navigators in Theme 9, carried their faith to the trading ports of the region. The first clear Islamic kingdom was the Sultanate of Samudra Pasai in northern Sumatra, founded around 1267 when its ruler converted and took the name Sultan Malik al-Salih. Positioned beside the vital Strait of Malacca, it grew wealthy and influential. When Ibn Battuta visited in 1345, he found a thriving Muslim court following the Shafi'i school of law — the same school that predominates in Indonesia today.

By the fifteenth century, the even better-placed port of Malacca had become the region's most important trading city, and when its ruler embraced Islam, conversion accelerated across the archipelago, with the faith providing a unifying bond among rulers and merchants.

In the populous interior of Java, Islam spread largely through the work of the Wali Songo, the Nine Saints — preachers and mystics of mixed Javanese, Arab and Chinese ancestry who understood local culture intimately. Sunan Kalijaga used wayang kulit (shadow-puppet theatre) to teach Islamic stories; Sunan Bonang composed Javanese songs with Islamic meaning; and Sunan Giri founded pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) that became centres of learning and community. Islam spread here through trade, the conversion of local rulers, Sufi spirituality and gentle cultural accommodation rather than military conquest — a gradual, creative blending of faith and local tradition.

From at least the early 1700s (some scholars argue earlier) until 1907, hundreds of fishermen sailed each year from the city of Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi in what is now Indonesia, to the Arnhem Land coast of the Northern Territory. They came on the monsoon winds in wooden sailing boats called praus to harvest trepang (sea cucumber), a delicacy they dried and traded onward to China.

The Makassans and the Yolngu people built a relationship of trade and exchange. The Makassans offered cloth, tobacco, rice, knives and — most importantly — metal, in return for the right to fish the coastal waters and for local labour; the Yolngu traded turtle-shell, pearls and timber, and some travelled back to Makassar and worked alongside the visitors. Metal axes and blades transformed everyday Yolngu life, making it easier to cut food, build large dugout canoes and carve wooden sculptures.

The cultural exchange ran deep. A Makassar-based pidgin became a shared trading language along the north coast, and words from it survive in Yolngu languages today — such as rupiah (money) and balanda (a term for white people, from "Hollander"). The praus, the visitors and their voyages are remembered in Yolngu rock art, bark paintings, songs and ceremonies. This long friendship ended only when the new Australian Government, after Federation in 1901, banned the Makassan fishermen; the last prau sailed home in 1907. It remains a proud reminder that Australia's first sustained contact with the outside world came peacefully, across the sea, with a Muslim people.

Ibn Sina's Canon: a bridge between civilisations

Knowledge grows through translation. In ninth-century Baghdad's House of Wisdom, scholars translated most of the ancient knowledge available to them and developed it further; centuries later, in twelfth-century Toledo, Europeans translated that inheritance into Latin. The supreme example is the Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) by Ibn Sina (known in Europe as Avicenna). Composed in the early eleventh century, it synthesised the medical traditions of Greece (Hippocrates and Galen), Persia, India and earlier Muslim physicians such as al-Razi into a single, brilliantly organised work presenting medicine as a rational science grounded in observation, logic and ethics.

During the twelfth century, the translator Gerard of Cremona travelled to Toledo and rendered around seventy Arabic works into Latin, including the Canon (c. 1175). By the thirteenth century it had become a principal teaching text at universities such as Bologna, Montpellier, Paris, Padua, Oxford and Leuven, where it held a position comparable to Aristotle in philosophy. Ibn Sina stressed careful patient observation, hygiene, nutrition and pharmacology — and insisted that physicians cultivate compassion, humility and integrity. The Canon remained influential for an astonishing length of time, continuing in some curricula into the eighteenth century and, in the Unani tradition of India and Iran, well into the nineteenth.

Ibn al-Haytham: light, the eye, and the birth of perspective

In a solitary laboratory in early eleventh-century Cairo, Ibn al-Haytham puzzled over a question he had inherited from the Greeks: how does the eye see? Dissatisfied with existing theories, he designed careful experiments, most famously with the camera obscura — a darkened chamber with a small hole that projects an image. With it he proved that vision occurs because rays of light enter the eye, forming an inverted image. His insistence on testing ideas through experiment makes him one of the great pioneers of the scientific method.

Centuries later, his work — by then translated into Latin — was widely read by scientists and artists in Renaissance Italy. Inadvertently, an Arab optical theory explaining human vision became the basis for one of the greatest developments in Western art: perspective. Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci were among the artists who used and developed it — as in Leonardo's The Last Supper, whose perspective lines all converge on a single point. Classroom idea: try Brunelleschi's camera obscura experiment in class — a lively way to see how science and art meet.

Linked theme: the Toledo translators are also part of Theme 6 — Al-Andalus.

There are many stories about the origins of coffee. The most famous tells of a ninth-century Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi, who noticed his goats were unusually energetic after eating the berries of certain wild bushes. The scholar al-Jaziri (c. 1558) wrote an early history of coffee, explaining that Sufi fuqara in Yemen used the drink to help them stay awake during evening prayers and meditations.

"They drank it every Monday and Friday eve, putting it in a large vessel made of red clay. Their leader ladled it out with a small dipper and gave it to them to drink, passing it to the right, while they recited one of their usual formulas, 'There is no god but God, the Master, the Clear Reality.'"

Arab historians agree that coffee drinking began in Yemen around the mid-fifteenth century, after traders brought beans back from Ethiopia to cultivate and brew. It spread to coffeehouses in Mecca, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and later Istanbul. The drink was not always welcomed — some scholars feared it was an intoxicant and banned it — until it was found to have no such effect and was permitted, notably through a 1524 ruling under the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I.

Coffee reached Italy in 1570 via Venetian merchants. The first European coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1645, then Oxford and Paris in 1646 and London in 1658; by 1700 London alone had some 500 coffeehouses. In 1683, after the Ottoman siege of Vienna, the Viennese added milk and cream to strong Turkish coffee, creating a lighter drink the colour of a Capuchin monk's robe — and named it cappuccino in his honour.

These coffeehouses spread at a critical moment in European history — the century in which the ideas of the Enlightenment were being discussed. The writings of the Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl were among them: his book Hayy ibn Yaqzan was translated into Latin in 1671 by Edward Pococke (teacher of John Locke) and into English in 1708, influencing thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Newton and Kant. In England, coffeehouses were called "penny universities" because, for the price of a cup, anyone could exchange political ideas, scientific discoveries and conversation. Because they welcomed all social classes, many became linked with ideas of equality — so much so that Charles II tried to ban them, only to back down after public outcry. Several great London institutions began here: the London Stock Exchange grew from Jonathan's Coffee House (1698); Sotheby's and Christie's from coffeehouse auctions; and Lloyd's of London from Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse on Lombard Street.

In the fifth year of the Prophet's mission, around 615 CE, the early Muslims of Mecca were suffering harsh persecution from the Quraysh. On the Prophet's advice, a group sought safety across the sea in Abyssinia — the Christian Kingdom of Aksum, in what is today Ethiopia and Eritrea. A first party of some eleven men and four women, including the Prophet's daughter Ruqayyah and her husband Uthman ibn Affan, made the crossing; in time the number of refugees grew to perhaps eighty to a hundred. This is remembered as the first Hijrah — the first migration in Islam.

The ruler of Aksum was known by the title Negus (in Arabic, Najashi); the king of the time is named in the histories as Ashama ibn Abjar. When envoys from the Quraysh arrived and demanded that the refugees be handed back, the Negus first wished to hear from the Muslims themselves. Their spokesman, Jafar ibn Abi Talib, explained their faith and then recited verses from Surat Maryam — the chapter of the Qur'an that honours Mary and the birth of Jesus. It is said that the Negus and the bishops of his court wept until their beards were wet, recognising the shared reverence between the two faiths.

The Negus refused to surrender the Muslims and granted them his protection, despite the political pressure. The episode is treasured as a model of refuge, justice and interfaith respect — a just ruler protecting the persecuted, and two religious communities finding common ground. It also looks forward to the spirit of the later Constitution of Madinah and the Prophet's covenants (Theme 1), in which protection and coexistence became founding principles.

Linked theme: see also Theme 1 — Constitution of Madinah.

The Makassan voyages of Theme 11 were Australia's first sustained contact with a Muslim people, but the story continued in a new way in the nineteenth century. From around the 1860s to the 1930s, an estimated 3,000 men came to Australia from Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Punjab and Sindh — remembered together as the Afghan cameleers. Their camels were perfectly suited to the harsh, dry interior, and the cameleers became vital to opening up the outback: they carried wool, supplies and equipment, helped build the Overland Telegraph Line (completed in 1872) and the inland railways, and supported exploration. The famous "Ghan" passenger train is named in their honour.

Wherever they settled, the cameleers built places of worship. The mosque at Marree in outback South Australia, raised by the camel breeder Abdul Kadir, is remembered as Australia's first outback mosque — a simple structure of earth and timber with a place for the call to prayer and for ritual washing using water from an artesian bore. The Adelaide Mosque, built in 1888–89 and led by Hadji Mullah Merban, is the oldest surviving mosque in an Australian city. In all, Afghan settlers built around thirty-six mosques across the outback. Many of these sites are now lovingly preserved and celebrated by the descendants of the cameleers.

Later came Malay pearl divers in the north, and, after the Second World War, waves of migration from many lands that have made today's Australian Muslim community wonderfully diverse — with roots in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Balkans and beyond. Schools such as the Australian International Islamic College, with its campuses at Durack, Logan, Gold Coast and City, are part of this continuing story. This theme is a chance for students to connect great history to their own families, suburbs and city — and to imagine the chapter they themselves will add.