Max Rodenbeck: How Muslims redrew the map of ancient civilization
[Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.]
Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.
The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture, politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. It created, for the first and only time, an empire based entirely upon a single faith, bound by its laws and devoted to its propagation. It uprooted long-embedded native religions, like Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in Central Asia and Hinduism in much of the Indus Valley. It transformed Arabic from a desert dialect into a world language that, for centuries, supplanted Latin and Greek as the main repository of human knowledge.
And yet strangely, the question of how the Muslim Arabs achieved all this, in such a short time, remains puzzling. Not that no one has tried to explain it. The Arabs themselves built a rich literary tradition around the seemingly miraculous success of Islam. But these martial histories of the futuhat, or “openings,” won by the new faith tended to focus on the moral superiority, zeal and courage of the victors rather than on more mundane factors that might have aided them. Much attention was paid to such details as the genealogy of Arab generals and the precise division of booty, at the expense of accurate chronology and geography.
Modern historians have generally discounted the Arab histories, emphasizing instead how the calamitous upheavals of late antiquity sapped capacities to resist the Muslim invasions. Because of the difficult nature of textual sources, which include rare materials in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Persian and even Chinese as well as Arabic, and because of the relative paucity of archaeological research into early Islam, recent scholarship has also tended to be area- and theme-specific. Not for a generation has anyone attempted a broad political history of Islam’s first century.
Few writers are better equipped for such a task than Hugh Kennedy. A professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, he has written scores of articles and numerous books on the early period of Islam, including popular histories as well as scholarly studies. ...
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Few events in history have had so swift, profound and far-reaching an impact as the arrival of Islam. Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, in A.D. 632, his desert followers had conquered all the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. They had erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that of Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France.
The triumph was not just military. The explosive expansion of Islam severed at a stroke the 1,000-year-old links of commerce, culture, politics and religion that had bound the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean. It created, for the first and only time, an empire based entirely upon a single faith, bound by its laws and devoted to its propagation. It uprooted long-embedded native religions, like Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in Central Asia and Hinduism in much of the Indus Valley. It transformed Arabic from a desert dialect into a world language that, for centuries, supplanted Latin and Greek as the main repository of human knowledge.
And yet strangely, the question of how the Muslim Arabs achieved all this, in such a short time, remains puzzling. Not that no one has tried to explain it. The Arabs themselves built a rich literary tradition around the seemingly miraculous success of Islam. But these martial histories of the futuhat, or “openings,” won by the new faith tended to focus on the moral superiority, zeal and courage of the victors rather than on more mundane factors that might have aided them. Much attention was paid to such details as the genealogy of Arab generals and the precise division of booty, at the expense of accurate chronology and geography.
Modern historians have generally discounted the Arab histories, emphasizing instead how the calamitous upheavals of late antiquity sapped capacities to resist the Muslim invasions. Because of the difficult nature of textual sources, which include rare materials in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Persian and even Chinese as well as Arabic, and because of the relative paucity of archaeological research into early Islam, recent scholarship has also tended to be area- and theme-specific. Not for a generation has anyone attempted a broad political history of Islam’s first century.
Few writers are better equipped for such a task than Hugh Kennedy. A professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, he has written scores of articles and numerous books on the early period of Islam, including popular histories as well as scholarly studies. ...