If you were to buy just one coin to...

I cannot think of another Muslim ruler who commanded the same level of reverence and respect across a large swathe of land....East and West. He is like the Alexander or Julius Caesar of the Islamic world. You can't go wrong with one of his coins. BUT watch out.....I'll be bidding against you.

 

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That's helpful, but it doesn't differentiate them much from the recent modern U.S. Mint offerings.

 

I have a couple that I purchased but have done no research and don't even remember what they are. It's times like this that make me think of myself as a hoarder rather than a numismatist.

 

I like it. I bought a couple from a shop that didn't know what they had. Now I don't know what I have. I've tried looking through CNG but being totally ignorant of the letters and language, they all look the same to me. I think it's an AR dirham of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 862-866 AD. Of course I probably have it upside down.

 

Looks like Sallent has one too. Pretty cool.

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/sultanate-of-rum-dirham-of-kaykhusraw-ii.296271/

 

YES you do actually have both sides upside down. Also, first pic is the Reverse and second one is the Obverse.

 

Nice coin lordmarcovan. BTW if you find a nice Saladin (Salah-ud-Din) and don't want it for yourself, please do give me a shout .

 

Thanks. The dumb thing is that I had them correct and then thought maybe I had it wrong and changed them. At least I was correct about my being ignorant

 

I know that it doesn't fall under your stated price parameters, but I wouldn't mind owning a gold dinar from gold mined by land owned by Caliph himself. One such dinar (dated 723 AD) went at auction in 2011 for over $6mil, which I believe makes it the third highest price realized at auction behind the 1933 Double Eagle auctioned by Sotheby's in 2002 for $7.6mil and the 1794 Flowing Hair Silver Dollar that went for over $10mil in 2011 at Stack's Bowers.

 

The silver proof 5 egyptian pounds with Mecca on the obverse.

 

One coin for the Islamic world? Is that a joke?

One is not enough.

These represent most of the different phases of the Islamic occupation of Iberia.


Umayyad (first phase of occupation)


Caliphate of Cordoba (second phase of occupation)


Muwahhid Iberia (third phase of occupation and the start of permanent decline of Islamic rule in Iberia).

Iberia was not the entire Islamic world though. Here is the Abbasid Caliphate.


Abbasid Caliphate

And let's not forget Islamic rule in India


Delhi Sultanate

And going back to the middle East, there is the collapse of the classical world in Persia.


Tabaristan

And let's not forget the Crusades


Seljuq Turks

And even with all these, I'm probably half a dozen Islamics short of having a fair representative sample of medieval Islamic coinage.

 

During the Crusades, Islamic coins were so well made that the Crusaders made imitations of them, including the original Islamic inscriptions.


Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem gold bezant
20mm, 3.90gm, struck AD 1148-1187

These coins were copies of Moslem Fatimid coins, down to the Kufic legends promoting Islam as the true religion. Kufic was a form of Arabic writing used at the time. Most of the copies used the design of the Fatimid king al-Amir who ruled AD 1101-1130. The first coins were direct copies, as time went on the legends became less clear.

In AD 1250 Pope Innocent IV (AD 1243-1254) ordered the Crusaders to stop making coins with Islamic legends and they began putting Christian legends on their coins.