Arms and armour include a wide variety of weaponry and protective gear, both traditional and adapted from the lands with which the Muslims came into contact across the centuries. The Muslim community founded by the prophet Muḥammad was fiercely expansionist. Within a century, the Islamic world stretched from Spain to the borders of China, resulting in the inevitable dilution of the Arab component in the Muslim armies and the adoption of the mamlūk system from the end of the second/eighth century. The absorption of the conquered peoples within dār