After zipping through the political history of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Spanish Umayyads, and Fatimids, Zaydan declares that it would take too long to go through all the other Islamic dynasties that have existed in the world. So he lists them in tabular form, giving their capitals, how many kings each had, the year each was founded, and the year each came to an end. The table takes up four pages. He then continues..
..........To sum up, from the earliest days of Islam until now, over a hundred Islamic dynasties have come into existence, with some 1200 leaders, among them caliphs, sultans, kings,emirs, atabegs, ikhshīds, khedives, sherifs, beys, deys, and more; by origin Arabs,Persians, Turks, Circassians, Kurds, Indians, Tatars, Mongols, Afghans, and others; and ruled from Medina, Kufa, Damascus, Baghdad, Egypt, Cairawan, Cordova, Istanbul,Sanaa, Oman, Delhi, and elsewhere... But in as much as the Abbasid dynasty is the most famous of them all, and the first to attain civilization (tamaddun), we shall base our description of tamaddun for the most part on the Abbasids..............
Here Zaydān does not quite say that the early Abbasid period was the golden age. But hisdecision to use it as the exemplar of Arab-Islamic civilization...