Robyn Lebron vindictive and sanguinary ruthlessness of his dealing with the highest officials of his government coupled with an obsession to suppress all signs of corruption and immorality in public life, his attempted annihilation of Christians and call for the systematic destruction of all Christian holy places in the Middle East culminating in the destruction of the most holy , which all combine to contrast his reign sharply with that of any of his predecessors and successors.7 From the eleventh century onward, alliances of European Christian kingdoms mobilized to launch a series of wars known as the ǡ bringing the Muslim world into conflict with Christendom Initially successful in their goal of taking the Holy Land and establishing the crusader states, crusader gains in the Holy Land were later reversed by subsequent Muslim generals who recaptured Jerusalem during the Second Crusade In the East, the Mongol Empire put an end to the Abbasid Dynasty at the Battle of Baghdad in 1258 as they overran in Muslim lands in a series of invasions Mongol rule extended across the breadth of almost all Muslim lands in Asia, and Islam was temporarily replaced by Buddhism as the official religion of the land Over the next century, many Mongols converted to Islam, and this religious and cultural absorption ushered in a new age of Mongol-Islamic synthesis that shaped the further spread of Islam in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent After the invasion of Persia and sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, Delhi, India, became the most important cultural center of the Muslim East Beginning in the thirteenth century, Sufism underwent a transformation, largely as a result of the efforts of al-Ghazzali to legitimize and reorganize the movement He developed the model of the Sufi order—a community of spiritual teachers and students Also of importance to Sufism was the creation of the , a collection of mystical poetry by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi The Masnavi had a profound influence on the development of Sufi religious thought; to many Sufis, it is second in importance only to the Qur’an.8 After World War I losses, the remnants of the empire were parceled out as European protectorates or spheres of influence Since then, ~ 96 ~