Games and Tips.

“The adoption of the mamluk* institutions by the Abbasids was followed almost immediately by [the] . . . disintegration of the state. . . . The disintegration of the Abbasid state was an intensely painful process in which it seemed at times as if the very venture of Islam was coming to an end, like that of Alexander the Great before it. . . . Indeed, that Islam was soon to disappear was the very premise upon which the [Shi‘ite] revolutionaries held out their promise of a moral and material recovery: nothing less . . . could now save the marriage between religion and power to which the Islamic [state] owed its existence.”

*an Arabic term designating an enslaved person, in this case, a slave soldier of Turkic origin

Patricia Crone, Danish-American historian of Islamic history, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity, 1980

The disintegration of the Abbasid Caliphate most directly led to which of the following political developments in the Islamic world in the thirteenth century?

A The Russian conquest of Central Asia

B The rise of Turkic states

C The conversion of most of the Islamic world to Shi‘a Islam

D The collapse of trade along the Silk Road networks