by Kevin Reilly
Christianity offered salvation from a world that seemed to be ending; Islamic salvation seemed to beckon to a world just beginning. Islam sprang from a world on the move, the southern part of Eurasia that was untouched by the widespread population dislocations of the Eurasian grasslands. Between 200 and 700, a period of global population decline, the population of the Arabian Peninsula actually doubled.19 This vitality was probably a reflection of a rising economy, resulting in part from the redirection of trade along the “water silk road” of the Indian Ocean. Arab trade prospered from new technologies of transportation by water and land. Arab traders used Malay triangular sails to navigate the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean. The Chinese compass allowed them to sail the open seas. Camels, the ships of the desert, had been domesticated for more than 1,000 years, but they too became more useful with the invention of a camel saddle that held a considerable array of baggage or riders with swords.
The Prophet: Trade and Religion
Muhammad (570–632) was born into a merchant family. Orphaned at an early age, he learned the trade of a camel driver and merchant under the tutelage of a wealthy widow whom he later married. On caravan trips across Arabia, he came into contact with Jews and Christians and was drawn to the simplicity of their faith in a single God of both local and global significance. The God of Abraham was the deity of ancient nomadic pastoralists who brought their herds and people along the same routes that connected Mesopotamia and Egypt. He was also the creator of the world and of all mankind. Some Arabs recognized this and professed adherence to the faith of Moses or Jesus, but most Arabs worshipped other tribal fathers, forces of nature, and spirits called jinns (or genies). Muhammad was appalled by such local tribal religions and the continuous wars they engendered.
The revelation of the Quran transformed tribal conflict into a powerful force for Arab unity and expansion. Muhammad himself galvanized many of the Arabs of his native Mecca into an army of God opposed to idol worship, social inequality, political injustice, and corruption. His success threatened the ruling elite of Mecca, particularly the powerful leaders of the Quraish tribe who benefited from the many religious shrines of the city.
In 622, Muhammad and his followers escaped assassination by fleeing north to the city that became Medina. The flight, hijra, and the creation of the first Muslim community, umma, marked 622 as the first year of the Muslim calendar. In Medina, Islam evolved as a distinct religion, separate from Judaism and Christianity: a more robust monotheism than Christianity but attuned to Arab traditions. The “five pillars” of Islam that developed in Medina—profession of faith, prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage—were unique to Islam only in the form they took. The profession of faith was not only “there is no god but God” but also “and Muhammad is his Messenger.” Prayer was performed five times a day—initially facing Jerusalem but, as Muhammad in Medina separated Islam from Judaism, toward Mecca. Fasting (during the month of Ramadan) and pilgrimage (to Mecca) also gave these practices an Arab stamp. By centering Islam (literally “submission” to God) at Mecca, Muhammad also built on traditional Arab pilgrimages to the black stone called the Kaba and took advantage of the useful influence of the Quraish tribe, which controlled the holy site and the city.
Islam beyond Arabia
Islamic Expansion to 750 . Religious fervor fired the initial campaigns that brought Islam to all of the Arabs of Arabia. But what happened next had as much to do with Arab armies as with religious belief. There are few historical parallels for such rapid expansion. Perhaps only the Macedonian armies of Alexander the Great (and later the Mongols) carried out a similar range of conquests in such a short period of time. Between the time of the death of Muhammad in 632 and 750, a period of little more than 100 years, the Arab armies conquered most of the territory of two of the world’s great empires—the east Roman Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire—and the peoples from Morocco and Spain in the west to the margins of India and China in the east.
It would be a mistake, however, to see the rapid expansion of Islam beyond Arabia as a religious jihad or crusade. This is because the conquest of Byzantine and Persian empires had more to do with luck and military success than the preaching of a new religion. Further, Muslims saw little need and had little reason to convert non-Arabs. They viewed Islam as Arab monotheism, akin to the monotheism of Christians and Jews. The Greek Christians of the Byzantine Empire, even the Zoroastrians of the Persian Empire, were to the Muslims fellow monotheists and “people of the Book.” Like other ancient empires, Muslims also determined a system of taxation for subject peoples—at a slightly higher level for non-Muslims than Muslims. Like taxation, the enslavement of conquered peoples was also a common option of ancient empires. Muslims, however, thought it inappropriate to enslave fellow Muslims, and that too provided a reason to conquer and administer rather than convert.
Arab armies dealt a significant defeat to the Byzantine Empire in 636. In 637, the Persian Sassanian Empire capitulated to Arab forces. Byzantine and Persian armies had been weakened by continual conflicts between themselves, and they faced in the Arab armies a potent and determined adversary. The fall of old empires did not have to mean a radical change in the daily lives of ordinary people, however. In Syria, Palestine, and Persia, Arab governors often used the same administrators and tax collectors who had served the Byzantine and Persian empires. Most people lived their lives as they had before. The conquering Arabs were, compared to Alexander’s Macedonians, particularly insular. Arab armies stationed themselves in forts separated from the cities they had conquered. Initially, they mixed very little with the local population, using each fort as a stepping-stone to further expansion. As late as 750, only 10 percent of the non-Arab population of the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) was Muslim, a level that testifies to the lack of religious coercion by the Arab conquerors or the disinterest of the new subjects in what they may have perceived as Arab religion.
Gradually, however, the conquered learned to appreciate the ways of the new conquerors and accept the legitimacy of the government of the caliphate. Muslims became more interested in converting their subjects to Islam, and non-Muslims found advantage in doing so. To make a contract with the new governor, perhaps to supply the troops or collect taxes, a Muslim name would be a definite advantage. Conversions began slowly but quickened in pace. The choice of a Muslim name was a clear indicator of conversion to the new faith. The historian Richard Bulliet gathered the data of name changes in Persia and discovered that Muslims grew from 10 percent to 90 percent of the Persian population between 750 and 900.20 Bulliet points out that this conversion rate followed a typical “S,” or bell, curve where something rises slowly, gathers momentum, surges, peaks, and levels off. He remarks that the same curve would chart the popularity of a new technological innovation, such as high-definition television today. But not every innovation or new idea succeeds, and few sweep away all predecessors so stunningly. So we need to ask “why?”—or, more modestly, “how?”
Islamic Expansion after 750 . The spread of Islam from 10 percent to 90 percent of the Persian population between 750 and 900 owed much to the power and prestige of the Abbasid caliphate that replaced the Um-mayad after 750. With the Abbasids, Islam shifted its geographic center only slightly farther east, from Damascus to Baghdad. But the builders of the new city on the Tigris brought in tribes from the Iranian plateau and central Asian nomads to join with Arabs in the new faith. Under the Abbasid caliphate, Islam realized a universalism that was only potential in Arab monotheism. In opposition to the Arab favoritism of the Ummayad caliphate, the Abbasid caliphate encouraged a larger range of ethnic groups and tribes to become Muslims. In their new capital at Baghdad, the Abbasids created a cosmopolitan government and culture.
Like the other monotheistic religions, Islam included everyone from theocrats, who believed the government should institute God’s will, to those who believed that spiritual matters were none of the government’s business. Because of the example of Muhammad’s governm
ent in Medina, perhaps more Muslims than Christians were theocrats, but Islam was a less hierarchical religion than Christianity became. In Islam, there was no equivalent of the pope or College of Cardinals. Nor were there bishops or church councils to determine orthodoxy or impose discipline. There were ulama (learned scholars) and judges, and well-respected religious leaders could issue pronouncements that their followers found binding. But a fatwa, or religious edict, rarely had the force of political law. Politically, Islam was a decentralized religion. While some of the early Abbasid caliphs thought of themselves as religious leaders, Islam spread more widely, paradoxically, under those caliphs who were more political than religious.
Ultimately, Islam’s appeal was more political and cultural. It was the sophisticated urban civilization of Islam that attracted cultural converts: to the Arabic language, schools of filosophia, high moral standards, and the rich culture of Islam.
The First World Civilization
Islam created the first civilization to encompass multiple states, governments, and peoples. By 750, the religion of Islam, the Quran, and the Arabic language shaped the beliefs and behavior of Berbers in North Africa and the descendants of Egyptians, Syrians, Mesopotamians, Persians, central Asians, and Indians. In the next 750 years, Islam spread to the Turks, Africans, and East Asians. A single culture united peoples across Eurasia from Spain to Indonesia. Even Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists who lived in the Dar al-Islam benefited from learning the language of the new global culture.
Abbasid Baghdad . The Abbasid caliphates of Harun al-Rashid (786–809) and of his son al-Mamun (813–833) were the first world cosmopolitan age. A world civilization may have been implicit in the message of Islam, but as long as that message was identified with a single ethnic group, the Arabs, its universality was muted. Al-Rashid and al-Mamun changed the balance of Islam so that it was no longer an Arab religion ruled by sons of Arabia. Al-Rashid brought ministers (viziers) and advisers to Baghdad from throughout central Asia. The first and best known of these, from the Persian Barmakid family, were descended from Buddhist priests who converted to Islam.
The Persians and other non-Arabs of the Abbasid court turned an Arab empire into a Muslim one. Ironically, the new synthesis of Arab and Persian culture also brought the traditional trappings of Persian hierarchy and royal pomp to the palace. Some Abbasid caliphs were like divine kings. Al-Rashid turned Baghdad into a world of opulence and dramatic indulgence: extravagant gifts one moment, a brutal punishment the next. He was the prototype for the later Thousand and One Nights, the tale of Queen Scheherazade’s nightly storytelling to curtail her evil husband’s plan to execute her.
Al-Mamun, who had to defeat his brother in a civil war for the caliphate, brought a cultural renaissance to Baghdad. He created a complex called the “House of Wisdom,” which included an enormous library, one of the oldest and largest universities of the world, and a center for translations from Greek, Latin, and other non-Arab and non-Persian literature. Al-Mamun’s efforts saved many classical Greek works, including those of Plato and Aristotle, from oblivion.
Abbasid Baghdad also became a center of scientific and mathematical research. Arabs adopted Indian numerical notation and the Indian zero-based decimal system, which were far more flexible than Roman numerals or older Mesopotamian 12- and 60-based systems. The House of Wisdom contained an astronomical observatory, introduced the compass from China, and developed the astrolabe or sextant. Astronomers calculated the length of the solar year, the distance around the earth, and the rhythm of lunar tides. The translation center preserved the science of Greece: the astronomical writings of Ptolemy, Euclid’s Geometry, the early medical works of Hippocrates, and the medical texts of Galen, including the first study of asthma. Scholars wrote medical encyclopedias and volumes on diseases like smallpox and measles, practiced dissection, and wrote on the optics of the eye. Indian, Persian, and Greek pharmacological knowledge led to the creation of the world’s first pharmacies. Baghdad had 800 registered pharmacists. The great mathematician al-Khwarizmi introduced the study of algebra. The three Banu Musa brothers built on Greek geometry and mathematics. Geographers compiled an encyclopedia of places visited by Islamic merchants from East Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.
A Cultural Empire . Islam was the first global civilization not because of its political empire. The Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad lasted beyond the ninth century in name only. Its top-heavy, Persian imperial court ill fitted early Muslim ideas of the equality of believers. Alternate “caliphs” challenged the authority of the Abbasids, including members of the Umayyad family who established their capital at Cordoba. Other dynasties were created by Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs from Fez in Morocco to Delhi in India. The early vision of a single Muslim caliphate ceased to exist in fact. But its failure enabled the success of a cultural empire—a single civilization that embraced many people and many governments.
The cultural empire was based on a shared language and a single book. The Quran was the one authority that all Muslims shared. But the importance of the book created a culture of literacy and libraries. In addition to the Quran, Muslims gathered the hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet reported by those who knew him. They wrote volumes on each chapter of the Quran, interpretations, analyses, and explanations. But they also continued to translate, transcribe, and build on the works of the Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, and Indians. Like the Chinese, Muslims turned calligraphy and bookmaking into art forms. By the ninth century, they had borrowed Chinese papermaking techniques, substituting linen (for mulberry bark) to make a longer-lasting cloth paper.
Writing had always been the glue that bound civilizations. Libraries not only created literate elites and cultures but also shared memories and uniform speech. Before the existence of paper, libraries the size of Baghdad’s under al-Mamun were rare if they existed at all. The greatest library of the classical world was the library of Alexandria, which had probably contained between 40,000 and 70,000 scrolls (where each scroll contains a few chapters).21 A large library in Ephesus that was burned by the Goths in 262 contained 12,000 scrolls. The library of Charlemagne, who also led a cultural renaissance in the early ninth century, numbered 256 volumes.22 It is said that the library in Cordoba under the caliph Al-Hakem II (971–976) contained 400,000 volumes. Such numbers are hard to verify, but it is certain that the Muslim world retained and built on the literary and scientific heritage of the classical world. It is also certain that such a literary empire united Muslims and their non-Muslim residents across the largest span of land and seas and the largest number of peoples in the history of the world until that time. In the centuries that followed 1000, that Dar al-Islam expanded even farther into Africa and Southeast Asia and in the centuries after 1500 into a new world as well.
Conclusion
The period from 200 to 1000 used to be called the Dark Ages. From the perspective of European history, especially western European history, this made a certain degree of sense. We have noted the disruptions of nomadic tribes in both western Europe and China from 200 to 600 and the accompanying population declines and loss of cities and traditional cultures. But from the perspective of southern Eurasia, this period was one of growth and expansion, both material and cultural.
The first 1,000 years of the Common Era was also a millennium of mixing. New religious and commercial relationships stretched across the borders of identity that had been forged in the previous age of classical civilizations. In many ways, the first millennium was the first global age, the first age of globalization, the first age when people became more alike rather than more different.
We have concentrated our attention on Eurasia, where these developments were most marked. Not until after 1500 did the entire world begin to become one. It remains for us to see how other parts of the world moved closer together in these and later years. Nevertheless, this world where everything is more than 1,000 years old might strike us as very familiar.
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gested Readings
Bentley, Jerry H. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A leading world historian surveys Eurasian cultural interactions, especially religious conversions.
Foltz, Richard C. Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. A brief overview of Silk Road religions and their relationship to trade and diplomacy.
Fox, Robin Lane. Pagans and Christians. New York: Harper, 1988. Rich study of pagan religions and the spread of Christianity in the second and third centuries.
Johnson, Donald, and Jean Elliot Johnson. Universal Religions in World History: The Spread of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam to 1500. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Broad survey of these religions.
Macmullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. This is one of a number of studies of the subject by the leading scholar in the field.
Shaffer, Lynda. “Southernization.” Journal of World History 5 (Spring 1994): 1-21. Available also in Kevin Reilly, Worlds of History, vol. 1 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
Xinru, Liu, and Lynda Shaffer. Connections across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange along the Silk Roads. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. A leading scholar of Chinese and Indian trade and the author of the “Southernization” essay in the previous entry discuss the cultures of the Silk Roads.