Contrary to what was written about Muslims in the historic texts of the West, Islam spread more by mutually beneficial trade relations than by the oppressive specter of the sword. A closer look at historical sources bears out the fact that Muslims and Jews have lived, for the most part, peaceably within the very same communities and maintained trade relations with each other since the Prophet’s death five years after Ka‘b’s assassination. Jews as well as Christians were given special privileges in Muslim-dominated trading centers, for there was special status granted to the People of the Book. Nevertheless, special status is not the same as equal status. As noted earlier, almost from the start of Islam, Christians and Jews were mandated to pay an additional fee called al-jizya. While this gave them the privilege of living and working among Muslims, they could rightly contend that it was a tax differentially levied against them by a faith that claimed it would not tax or levy usurylike interest rates within their communities.
As such, it has been endlessly debated whether or not Khadijah’s concern for the poor and hospitality for other cultures trumped Muhammad’s apparent anger with Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf and the other satirical poets among the Banu al-Nadir Jews. Perhaps it was a mix of their sensibilities as a couple, even with all the inherent contradictions, that became embedded in early Islam’s spirituality, ethics, and economy. But it remains clear that Khadijah herself strongly encouraged the nurturing of cross-cultural relationships as well as the reduction of economic disparities across all the landscapes through which their trade routes extended, and regularly included those of other faiths.
In fact, some historians claim that until their deaths, both the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Khadijah, remained socially and politically motivated to deal with the glaring disparities in wealth and well-being around them. They had personally witnessed these inequalities when traveling between desert landscapes endowed with widely varying capacities for producing natural and agricultural resources, and what they saw prompted them to forge the economic principles and ethics of Islam to address this dilemma directly. In the seminal work done on the economic origins and spread of Islam by economic historian Stelios Michalopoulos and colleagues, we can see the pattern that emerged in the years following the death of the Prophet. Islam was adopted precisely among those cultures that were historically located in agriculturally poor regions, for it offered the local inhabitants a safety net.
Consistent with the hypothesis that Islamic principles provided an attractive social contract for populations residing along productively unequal regions, we find that Muslim adherence increases in the degree of geographic inequality. . . . Islam spread successfully among groups historically located in agriculturally poor regions featuring few pockets of fertile land. It was along these places that the Islamic institutional arrangement would be appealing to the indigenous populations.21
There was one particular aspect of Islam that especially fostered a more globalized mentality, first among the formerly disparate Arab tribes who had initially united behind the Prophet and then among all Muslims. It was the insistence that the Qur’an be recited only in Arabic and not subject to the kinds of tedious translations that might dilute the unifying power of the Prophet’s holy poetry. Perhaps the near-exclusive use of Arabic in reciting the sacred verses was the first wave of linguistic colonialism to splash up on the shores of every continent. It had been preceded and then later followed, of course, with more secular and insidious forms of linguistic monoculture, first with Greek, then with Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese, and more recently with English. Sequentially, each of these few languages has become the lingua franca at the expense of some sixty-eight hundred other languages that barely remain in currency on the planet.
Linguistic monoculture ultimately removes most impediments to rapid globalization, since the adoption of the conqueror’s language may disarm the cultural values, symbols, and rhetoric that otherwise allow an indigenous culture to resist imperialism. In other words, linguistic imperialism has often become a tool of ecological and culinary imperialism as globalization proceeds. (In keeping its slogan, “I’m lovin’ it,” in English in more than eighty-five nations, McDonald’s is linking linguistic imperialism to culinary imperialism.) Although many cultures that embraced Islam still spoke their native language in the recesses of their village or home, the use of Arabic as a holy language certainly fostered its acceptance as a globalized lingua franca.
Even before the Prophet died in 632, in the arms of A’isha, the most beloved among his later wives, his troops had begun preparations to introduce Islam to Syria, just as they already had done across much of the Arabian Peninsula.22 This task was accomplished in 635, as if to demonstrate to the world that the death of the Prophet would in no way impede Islam’s momentum. Islam had begun to spread like wildfire from one tribe, one country, and one continent to another. And yet, it would be a mistake to attribute the rapidity of Islamic expansion solely to the existing trade networks that Arab merchants like Khadijah and Abu Talib had already nurtured.
Something altogether new was occurring: the coalition of many localized or regionalized transit trade routes into a cohesive globalized network system managed from end to end by Muslims. In the case of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Andalusia, Sicily, Anatolia, the Balkans, and India, the sword was initially used to vanquish obstacles to the spread of Islam.23 But over much of the Old World, the engagement of other cultures in a peaceful spice trade eventually led to their conversion to Islam. Spice traders who were recent converts often served as the “first wave” of Muslims who captured sequential control of various segments of ancient, lucrative trade routes and brought them into the fold. Nearly everywhere they went, they established the now-legendary funduq, a trading center with bargaining floors, spice warehouses, and camel liveries that became the precursor of the modern stock exchange.
Although it could not have been too surprising, itinerant Muslims soon found that some of the pre-Islamic trade routes, particularly those in North Africa, had already been worked for centuries by Berber, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman merchants, as well as Jewish traders. The first wave of Jews apparently arrived in Egypt and Ethiopia in ancient times, but most of those who immigrated to the Maghreb came immediately after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The thirty thousand Jews taken as slaves to Qart Hadasht (Carthage) eventually freed themselves from their Roman captors and learned how to garner goods from across the Sahara as understudies to the Punic descendants of the Phoenicians. The majority of the newly arrived Jews to the Maghreb who became merchants seem to have stuck close to the more cosmopolitan ports of the coastlines, from Alexandria all the way to Mogador on the Atlantic. They generally functioned as brokers and bankers in the urban hubs and harbors.
Generalities, however, gloss over the most interesting anomalies in the globalization of Africa. There were indeed a number of more adventurous Jews who moved inland, marrying into the Berber tribes of the Sahara and converting them to Judaism.24 By the time the first Muslims arrived in the Sahara, they were greeted by all-Jewish clans among both the Berbers and their kin to the south, the Tuareg or Kel Tamasheq. One of these Jewish clans of Tuareg, the Iddao Ishaak, later became legendary for leveraging trade between the ports of North Africa and the deeper reaches of West Africa. Other Jewish clans, perhaps those that had drifted westward from Ethiopia across the Sahel to Mali in ancient times, eventually settled in western and southeastern Nigeria.
Today, their descendants are called Igbos, or Igbo Benei-Yisrael Jews. They trace themselves back to particular Hebrew patriarchs who either forcibly or voluntarily left their homeland for Africa prior to written records of such movements.
Not surprisingly, when Muslim armies and merchant fleets arrived in their midst, the Jewish traders were worried. They had heard rumors from the East of the successes the Arab tribes had achieved in converting others to Islam; they also learned that Muslim traders had captured and consolidated trade routes that the Jews had previously accessed
without much difficulty. And they were alarmed at how quickly the world they had known was being transformed into a world that chanted the Prophet’s words.
FIGURE 11. Sub-Saharan merchants such as these portrayed in Timbuktu in 1897 often formed collaborative communities to protect themselves from bandits or competing forces. (General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)
As Islamic adventurer and itinerant geographer Ibn Battuta later confirmed, these nomadic spice traders had expeditiously carried Islam westward, far beyond Mecca and Medina within a century after the Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.25 Islam was embraced by many in Alexandria by 641, although Jews and Christians persisted there. After arriving in Tripoli by 647, in Carthage by 698, and in Tangier by 709, the sheer power of Islam rippled inland.26 The Prophet’s words then echoed all the way across the Sahara, into the areas where Jewish traders had gained a foothold.
Despite the presence of Jewish tribes, Berber and Tuareg caravans regularly recited the Qur’an as they navigated seven perilous routes across the sand seas to reach the Niger River basin. Centuries later, when Timbuktu became a trading hub for rock salt, African floating (deepwater) rice, and melegueta pepper, Islam expanded farther south-ward and westward into the watersheds of the Niger and Senegal rivers. The sedentary Songhai and Soninke embraced Islam and spread its customs and trading protocols throughout West Africa.27
Not every Berber, Tuareg, Songhai, or Soninke household fell under the spell of the Prophet Muhammad, however, and at times, Jewish-led resistance temporarily halted the spread of Islam. The most remarkable episode of resistance in North Africa was led by a woman warrior reputed to be of Jewish descent (a fact many scholars dispute) who was born in an era when Algeria was part of the Byzantine Empire. Although the name given to her at birth was Damya, Dahya, or some similar variant, she became known throughout the Maghreb by the Arabic name al-Kāhinat, “the soothsayer,” “seer,” or “priestess.” She was tall, wore her curly hair long, and was not afraid to wield a sword or prophesy doom for her enemies or for some of her own.28 After her father died in the early 680s, al-Kāhinat succeeded him as both a military strategist and a spiritual leader, rallying together the Jrāwa, Zenāta, and Lūwāta tribes of Berber Jews in the Aurès Mountains. She soon convinced the Tuareg and other Berbers to join together to resist Muslim expansion from Carthage westward into the rest of the Maghreb, or the Numidia of Ifriqiya, as Africa was then called. The Berbers feared that if control of Carthage was lost, they might be enslaved or taxed by the Arabs far worse than they had been by the Romans.
Carthage, the Roman capital of Numidia on the Gulf of Tunis, had grown into a trade center with perhaps as many as a half million people, its great port sending olive oil, grains, dried fruits, spices, pottery, and tax money back across the Mediterranean. While it was now a multicultural melting pot, its economic development had clearly been forged under Punic and Roman influences. A half century earlier, Muslim armies had swarmed into Alexandria, Barqa, and Tripoli to take these trade centers from their Egyptian, Punic, or Roman citizenry, but they knew that they had not yet tapped into the mother lode of the Maghreb.
So the Muslim caliph in Mecca dispatched Hasan ibn al Nu’man al-Ghassani, then an emir in Egypt, to take the Gulf of Tunis from the Romans and Berbers. Like many of his soldiers, Hasan was from a Yemeni tribe that had come out of the Syrian deserts to become part of the Umayyad elite that had made Damascus their capital. The caliph gave Hasan forty thousand troops and a fleet of ships to accomplish his task and, to strengthen his confidence, declared him general and sheikh amin, or “trusted elder.”
When his troops and ships arrived at the Gulf of Tunis in 685, most of its Byzantine and Roman Christian protectors had already chosen to flee, leaving only the Berber peasantry to deal with the invaders. Kusaila, the Christian Berber military leader who had fathered one of al-Kāhinat’s sons, was captured by the Arabs and forced to convert to Islam. It was the first time in nearly eight hundred years that the Romans lost their power base among the Berbers for extracting wealth from Africa.29 Hasan’s army and navy thoroughly looted the fine new harbor of Carthage of all of its riches. But when he did the same to the older harbor of Utica nearby, he learned that al-Kāhinat had been crowned the Queen of the Berbers and had defiantly gathered most of the Berber tribes together to block Hasan’s army from passing into any more of their lands.
Their armies met face to face in what is now Oum el-Bouaghi Province in Algeria, a valley some distance inland from the Mediterranean. Just as the battle began, Kusaila, the supposed convert to Islam, betrayed the Arabs with misinformation that cost them their strategic advantage. Surprising Hasan with their resolve, al-Kāhinat’s Berber troops so forcefully routed the Umayyad army that Hasan fled to Libya, where he stayed in hiding for the next five years. When al-Kāhinat captured and adopted a young Arab of high rank named Khaled ibn Yazid, she learned from him that the Muslims wished to secure all of the harbors on the Gulf of Tunis, from which they planned to control Mediterranean trade and eventually attack Rome.30
This prompted al-Kāhinat to go beyond resistance to the Arab army and its efforts to convert Berbers to Islam. She decided to leave nothing in the Maghreb that would entice them to return. In a speech she reportedly gave to Berber nomads and herders, the seer with long black hair and wild eyes made assertions that, over the centuries, have been paraphrased in this manner: “The Arabs only want Ifrīqīya for its cities and gold and silver while we only want agriculture and flocks. The only solution is the destruction [kharb] of the whole of Ifrīqīya so that the Arabs lose interest in it and they never return again!”31
She then went on the warpath, torching every caravansary and oasis outpost between Tripoli and Tangier, especially devastating those that had aided and abetted Hasan’s movements. Between her own siege and the earlier attacks by Hasan, Carthage itself was left in such ruin that its harbor was abandoned for another two centuries. While these actions made most nomadic Berber tribes jubilant, the sedentary oasis dwellers and merchants were not pleased by the way the Jewish priestess had scorched the earth around them. They silently pledged their support to Hasan, should he ever return. Meanwhile, al-Kāhinat and her troops went back to their stronghold in the wilds of the Aurès Mountains, where they could effectively block the only routes from the plains of Tunisia westward into Algeria and Morocco.
Around 698, Hasan did return, bringing not only his own troops but also some twelve thousand Berbers who could no longer accept al-Kāhinat’s despotism and destructive urge. Just before their armies met near Gabis, the seer apparently had a dream in which she foresaw her own fate. The next morning she requested that Khaled ibn Yazid, the Arab youth whom she had taken into her own family, take her sons back with him to the Arab army in the hope that they would not be killed in battle. The Muslim army overwhelmed her troops and sent her back into the wilds of her Aurès refuge. Hasan pursued her and ultimately defeated the Berber resistance north of Tobna, at a site now called Bir al-Kāhinat. Although some claim that the enigmatic warrior-priestess died fighting with a sword in her hand, other accounts suggest that she drank poison to keep from being raped or killed by the Arab soldiers.
With al-Kāhinat’s death, which most sources put in 702, the last of the three Muslim invasions of North Africa had succeeded in securing a strategic position on the Gulf of Tunis, directly across the Mediterranean from Sicily and Italy. Her sons as well as most of her Berber followers converted to Islam from Judaism and Christianity. The jihad continued on with little difficulty for the next nine hundred miles, with Muslims taking control of the entire Mediterranean shoreline all the way to the Jabal al-Tariq, known today as the Rock of Gibraltar, which overlooks the strait of the same name. In 708, Muslim forces found no resistance when they entered the twin cities of Tangier and Ceuta, the closest African ports to the Iberian Peninsula. From there, they would later
stage their entry into western Europe.32
By that time, Islam had already been embraced in much of East Africa as well. That was because some of the Prophet’s original followers had fled Mecca to escape the wrath of the Quraysh clans against those who aligned themselves with the Prophet and Khadijah. They had quickly established trading hubs in Abyssinia, where Yemeni and Omani Arabs had been negotiating for myrrh, coffee, and other goods for centuries. After the conversion of the black African leader King Negus, Islam spread through the Sudan all the way to Ghana. The rapid coalescence of various legs of the East African spice trade into a single network was as remarkable as what soon happened in the Maghreb. The Lamu Archipelago near Kenya later became a colony for Omani and Yemeni spice traders, who took Islam along on their dhows. Zanzibar became another of their colonies, where in time the production of spices taken from Asia provided the Arabs with an alternative source when conflicts prevented their passage eastward. Still later, Madagascar was assimilated into their trade networks.
From that point, it would be Muslim caliphs, emirs, brokers, and merchants, not Jewish or Christian traders or bankers, who would decide who could trade along their routes, some of which now ran twenty-two hundred to three thousand miles long. Despite their avoidance of usury and oppressive taxation, the Muslims made sure that considerable wealth moved back toward Mecca, Damascus, and other places along their chain of command. Jews and Christians could place their aromatics and other wares onto caravans running through countries under Islamic control, but they could hardly afford to work independently of the Muslim trade networks.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 16