A Raid That Was Never About Expansion: How Islamic Civil Wars Shaped the Aksumite Raid on Jeddah (702 CE)
TL;DR:
The Aksumite raid on Jeddah in 702 CE has long been misread as an act of African imperial ambition. It wasn't. It was a reactive strike—a geopolitical intervention born from the ashes of Islamic civil war.
To understand why an Ethiopian fleet sailed across the Red Sea to sack an Arabian port, we must abandon the simplistic narrative of "Christian v…
