The House of Buya

What if one of the great chapters in the history of Iran and Islam has been almost forgotten?

Three brothers came down from the mountains of northern Iran with little more than their swords, their ambition and a name: Buya.

Within a generation, ʿAli, Hasan and Ahmad ibn Buya had conquered much of Iran and Iraq. In 945, Ahmad entered Baghdad, the heart of the Abbasid caliphate and one of the greatest cities in the world. The caliph remained on his throne, but power had changed hands.

What followed was one of the most remarkable periods in Islamic history.

For more than a century, the Buyids stood at the centre of a world where Persians, Arabs and Turks, Sunnis and Shiʿis, Muslims and non Muslims competed, collaborated and lived alongside one another. Iranian political power had returned to the heart of the Islamic world. Shiʿi traditions emerged into public life with new confidence. Baghdad and the great cities of Iran became home to an extraordinary flourishing of philosophy, medicine, science, literature and learning.

The House of Buya produced conquerors and kings, rival brothers and brilliant rulers. They fought for cities, divided an empire among themselves, humbled caliphs and became patrons of one of the great intellectual cultures of the medieval world.

And then they were almost forgotten.

The House of Buya brings their world back to life, from the mountains of Daylam to the palaces of Baghdad, and tells the extraordinary story of three brothers whose rise changed the history of Iran and the Islamic world.

Told with the pace and intimacy of a story, while grounded in historical scholarship, it follows the Buyids as men as well as rulers, through ambition, family, faith, power and survival.

But the disappearance of their empire was not quite the end of their story.

Centuries later, the name Buya survived in one family's memory. Beginning with an inherited tradition of descent from the dynasty, Danyal C. Buya follows that thread into the past, asking what history can prove, what families remember, and what can survive across a thousand years.

An empire was forgotten. A name survived. This is the story of both.