The Same Faces You See on Your Way Up Are the Same Faces You See on Your Way Down – How Allah Raises the Humble and Humbles the Mighty

Allah, the Exalted, says:

قُلِ اللَّهُمَّ مَالِكَ الْمُلْكِ تُؤْتِي الْمُلْكَ مَن تَشَاءُ وَتَنزِعُ الْمُلْكَ مِمَّن تَشَاءُ وَتُعِزُّ مَن تَشَاءُ وَتُذِلُّ مَن تَشَاءُ ۖ بِيَدِكَ الْخَيْرُ ۖ إِنَّكَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ ۞

“Say: ‘O Allah, Owner of Sovereignty, You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will. You honour whom You will and You humble whom You will. In Your hand is all good. Indeed, You are over all things competent.'” (Sūrat Āl ʿImrān 3:26)

This worldly life is one from which Allah ﷻ gives to the believer and the disbeliever, the righteous and the wicked alike. Allah ﷻ causes the days to alternate among the people: one day in favour of one group, and another day in favour of another. This is because the life of this world is temporary and destined to come to an end. As for the Hereafter, it is exclusively for those who believed.

Islamic history offers repeated, striking illustrations of Allah ﷻ raising the humble to positions of great authority, and casting down the mighty from thrones that once seemed unshakeable.

From Slave to Sultan: Al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars and the Rise of the Mamlūks

Perhaps no episode illustrates this principle more starkly than the rise of the Mamlūk Sultanate in Egypt. The Mamlūks were originally slave-soldiers, boys purchased from the steppes of Central Asia and the Caucasus, converted to Islam, and trained rigorously in horsemanship and warfare to serve the Ayyūbid sultans. They were, by definition, without lineage, without inherited wealth, and without any claim to rulership whatsoever.

Among them was al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Rukn al-Dīn Baybars al-Bunduqdārī (d. 676 AH/1277 CE), born among the Qipchaq Turks of the Crimean steppe. As a young man, he was captured and sold into slavery, passing through several owners, at one point reportedly rejected by a buyer on account of a defect in his eye, before eventually entering the Ayyūbid military system in Egypt as a Mamlūk. He rose swiftly through the ranks on account of his exceptional skill, distinguishing himself at the Battle of al-Manṣūrah in 647 AH/1250 CE, where the Mamlūk forces decisively defeated the Crusader army of King Louis IX of France and captured the king himself. Within that same year, the Mamlūk commanders seized power in Egypt following the death of the last effective Ayyūbid sultan.

Baybars himself ascended to the sultanate in 658 AH/1260 CE, the very year in which he commanded the Mamlūk forces to their historic victory over the Mongols at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, halting, for the first time, the seemingly unstoppable westward advance of the Mongol Empire, an advance that had already destroyed the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate in Baghdad only two years earlier. As sultan, Baybars went on to reorganise the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate in exile in Cairo, reclaim numerous Crusader strongholds along the Levantine coast, and establish an administrative and military system that would sustain Mamlūk rule over Egypt and Syria for over two and a half centuries. A man who began his life sold in a slave market, rejected on account of a bodily blemish, became the very sultan who saved the Islamic world from Mongol conquest and re-established the caliphate itself under his own protection.

Mālik Ambar: From Ethiopian Slave Markets to Kingmaker of the Deccan

A remarkably similar story unfolded centuries later and thousands of miles to the east, in the Deccan plateau of India. Mālik Ambar (d. 1035 AH/1626 CE) was born in the Ethiopian highlands, likely among the Oromo people, and was captured and sold into the slave trade as a boy, passing through several owners across the Red Sea slave routes before eventually being sold in Baghdad and brought to India, where he entered the service of the Niẓām Shāhī sultanate of Ahmadnagar.

Unlike many enslaved boys of his era, Mālik Ambar received an education alongside his military training, and he rose through a combination of battlefield skill, administrative talent, and political acumen to eventually be freed from slavery and to command his own force of soldiers. Following the collapse of centralised Niẓām Shāhī authority under pressure from the expanding Mughal Empire, Mālik Ambar emerged as the effective regent and military commander of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, ruling in all but name for roughly two decades, from around 1600 to 1626 CE.

In this position, Mālik Ambar became the single most formidable obstacle to Mughal expansion into the Deccan, repeatedly outmanoeuvring vastly larger Mughal armies through his mastery of guerrilla warfare tactics, employing swift cavalry raids and scorched-earth strategies against a much larger imperial power. He is also remembered for considerable administrative achievements: reforming land revenue systems in the Deccan, founding the city of Khadki (later renamed Aurangabad), and constructing extensive irrigation and water infrastructure that served the region for generations afterward. A boy sold in the slave markets of the Red Sea trade thus became the regent who held back the full might of the Mughal Empire, one of the largest and wealthiest empires on Earth at that time, for over twenty years.

The Fall of Baghdad: When the Greatest City Was Humbled

Just two years before ʿAyn Jālūt, in 656 AH/1258 CE, Baghdad, the seat of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate for over five centuries, and for long stretches the intellectual and political centre of the entire Islamic world, fell to the Mongol forces of Hülegü Khan. The city that had once housed the Bayt al-Ḥikmah, that had produced generations of scholars, jurists, and scientists, and whose caliphs had once commanded the allegiance of lands stretching from the borders of China to the Atlantic, was sacked, its libraries emptied into the Tigris until, as later chroniclers described, the river ran black with ink, and its last caliph, al-Mustaʿṣim, was put to death.

The very city that symbolised the height of Islamic civilisation and political power was brought low within a matter of weeks. Yet within a mere two years, Allah ﷻ had already begun turning the days once more: the same Mongol advance that had seemed unstoppable was shattered at ʿAyn Jālūt by former slaves.

The Barmakids: From the Height of Power to the Depths of Ruin

Few episodes in Islamic history illustrate the sudden reversal of fortune more vividly than the fall of the Barmakid family under Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193 AH/809 CE). Yaḥyā ibn Khālid al-Barmakī rose to become the most powerful vizier of the ʿAbbāsid state, and his son, Jaʿfar ibn Yaḥyā, rose higher still, sharing with the caliph himself his wealth, his pleasures, and his authority over the realms.

Al-Dhahabī (d. 748 AH/1348 CE) records that Jaʿfar’s wealth was such that he would scatter gold dinars, each weighing one hundred mithqāls, onto the rooftops of his own household as though they were nothing at all. His sons were born into a life of kings.

Then, in a single day, the entire fortune turned: Jaʿfar was executed, and his father and brothers were imprisoned until their deaths. Al-Dhahabī remarks: “How ignorant is the one who is deceived by this world!” Al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213 AH/828 CE) reported hearing Yaḥyā ibn Khālid himself say, in words that could stand as a summary of the very verse under discussion: “The world turns in cycles, and wealth is a loan. In those before us we have an example, and in us there is a lesson for those who come after us.”

It is said that one of Yaḥyā’s own sons asked him, while they lay together in chains: “Father, after ruling, and after wealth, have we come to this?” Yaḥyā replied: “Son, it was the supplication of an oppressed person that we neglected, though Allah ﷻ did not neglect it.”

The Fall of Granada: The Final Days of Islamic Spain

This same principle finds one of its most sorrowful illustrations in the fall of Granada in 897 AH/1492 CE, when the last remaining stronghold of Muslim rule in al-Andalus fell into the hands of Christian forces, bringing to an end nearly eight centuries of Islamic presence on the Iberian Peninsula.

This collapse was not sudden, nor was it merely the result of military defeat. It followed years of internal division, political rivalry, and attachment to worldly power that had steadily weakened the unity of the Muslims there, precisely the kind of fitnah the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had forewarned against when he said: “It is not poverty that I fear for you, but I fear that the world will be opened to you, and you will compete for it as those before you competed for it, and it will destroy you as it destroyed them.”

Among the most painful scenes recorded from this episode is the departure of Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṣaghīr, the last Muslim ruler of Granada. Defeated and heartbroken, he left the city with a small group of followers to surrender it to the conquerors. As he turned back for one final glance at Granada, the city of his forefathers, he wept openly. His own mother is reported to have addressed him with words that would echo through history: “Weep like a woman over a kingdom you failed to defend like a man.”

The jurist al-Wansharīsī (d. 914 AH/1508 CE), writing in the aftermath of this fall, described with anguish the fate that awaited Muslim families who remained under the new Christian rule, warning of the temptation threatening the honour and religion of Muslim women and daughters left without the protection of Islamic governance, citing as a stark example what had befallen the daughter-in-law of al-Muʿtamid ibn ʿAbbād, the former ruler of Seville, generations before Granada’s own fall. “May Allah protect us from such affliction,” he wrote, “and from the gloating of enemies.”

The Umayyads of al-Andalus: A Dynasty Reborn From Ruin

When the ʿAbbāsids overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus in 132 AH/750 CE, they sought to exterminate the entire Umayyad line, hunting down and killing its princes across the former caliphate. Yet a single young prince, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muʿāwiyah, escaped the massacre, fleeing for years across North Africa as a fugitive with a price upon his head, before finally crossing into al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) in 138 AH/755 CE.

There, this sole survivor of a slaughtered dynasty, arriving with almost nothing, established a new Umayyad Emirate that would flourish for centuries, eventually declaring itself a caliphate in its own right under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III in 316 AH/929 CE. Cordoba, under this restored line, became one of the great cities of the medieval world, a centre of learning, architecture, and civilisation, all sprung from a single fugitive prince who had fled with nothing but his life.

The Ottoman Rise From a Minor Frontier Principality

The Ottoman dynasty began not as a great power but as one minor Turkish frontier principality (beylik) among many, established around 699 AH/1299 CE by Osman I in a small corner of north-western Anatolia, on the very edges of the Byzantine frontier. Numerous other, larger Turkish principalities existed at the time with far greater claims to prominence.

Yet this small border principality would, over the following centuries, grow into an empire that conquered Constantinople itself in 857 AH/1453 CE, ending the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire, and would eventually stretch across three continents, holding the caliphate for centuries. The empire that began as a minor frontier outpost became, for a time, one of the most powerful states on Earth, before it too, in the twentieth century, was dissolved entirely.

The Reflection for the Believer

Across each of these episodes, whether the sudden empowerment of slaves, the fall of the greatest city of its age, the survival and restoration of an annihilated dynasty, or the growth of a minor frontier post into a world empire, the same principle reasserts itself: no throne is so secure that it cannot fall, and no condition of lowliness is so fixed that Allah ﷻ cannot raise it to greatness.

This is not merely a historical curiosity but a matter of tawḥīd: it is a reminder that power, dominion, and authority belong to Allah ﷻ alone, who lends them to whomever He wills, for whatever duration He decrees, before reclaiming them again. Allah, the Exalted, says:

إِن يَمْسَسْكُمْ قَرْحٌ فَقَدْ مَسَّ الْقَوْمَ قَرْحٌ مِّثْلُهُ ۚ وَتِلْكَ الْأَيَّامُ نُدَاوِلُهَا بَيْنَ النَّاسِ ۞

“If a wound should touch you, there has already touched the enemy a wound similar to it. And such days We alternate among the people.” (Sūrat Āl ʿImrān 3:140)

The believer, then, neither despairs at hardship nor grows arrogant in power, knowing that both are but days that Allah ﷻ alternates among His creation, for reasons known fully only to Him.

Reference

Al-Qurʾān al-Karīm, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (3:26, 3:140). Ibn Kathīr, Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUmar (d. 774 AH/1373 CE), Al-Bidāyah wa al-Nihāyah, on the events of the years 132, 138, 647, 648, 656, and 658 AH. Al-Maqrīzī, Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī (d. 845 AH/1442 CE), Kitāb al-Sulūk li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, on the establishment of the Mamlūk Sultanate, the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, and the reign of al-Ẓāhir Baybars. Ibn Shaddād, ʿIzz al-Dīn (d. 684 AH/1285 CE), Al-Rawḍ al-Ẓāhir fī Sīrat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir,  Al-Dhahabī, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 748 AH/1348 CE), Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, vol. 2, p. 797. Al-Wansharīsī, Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā (d. 914 AH/1508 CE), Asnā al-Matājir wa Bayān Aḥkām man Ghalaba ʿalā Waṭanihi al-Naṣārā wa-lam Yuhājir wa-mā Yatarattab ʿalayhi min al-ʿUqūbāt wa-l-Zawājir, p. 64.