The real reason for the early prominence of Mecca in pre-Islamic Arabia may lie in the Kaaba stone and the several nearby shrines to the other desert gods. Each year, the faithful made the pilgrimage, known as the hajj (which was only much later adopted by Islam), to venerate and circumambulate the Kaaba stone and black stone. The hajj in no small part contributed to Mecca’s wealth and power.
By the late fifth century AD, the Quraish tribe, led by a sheikh named Qussay, moved in from the north, took over Mecca, and then fended off invasions by both the Byzantines and Abyssinnians. Qussay next convinced the Quraish and the surrounding tribes that it was more profitable to trade and to protect the caravans than to raid them. Taxing traders and selling them safe conduct, it turned out, paid better than plundering a shrunken, fearful traffic.26 The Quraish continued to settle in Mecca in increasing numbers, grew wealthy, and gradually drifted away from their intensely communal, nomadic heritage. Their lives henceforth revolved around trade, not the precarious existence of oases and desert tents.
Beginning around AD 500, Abyssinia converted to Christianity and became a regional power closely associated with its co-religionists in Byzantium. The last ruler of an independent Arabia Felix, the handsome Yusuf Asai (also known as Dhu Nuwas and “the man with the hanging locks”), converted to Judaism in the early sixth century and proceeded to slaughter and enslave thousands of Christians in his kingdom. In AD 525, in response to the anti-Christian atrocities of Yusuf Asai, the Abyssinians attacked across Bab el Mandeb and overwhelmed his army. The despondent king was said to have ridden into the sea on horseback.27
The defeat of the Yemenite Jewish monarch and the resultant domination of Arabia Felix by Abyssinian Christians set in motion a chain of events whose effects reverberate to the present day. In AD 570, an Abyssinian proconsul in Arabia Felix named Abraha rebelled against his king and established a rival empire on the peninsula. A staunch Christian, with an army backed by African elephants transported from across Bab el Mandeb, Abraha was goaded by the Byzantine emperor Justinian into attacking Mecca, by that time the last pagan holdout in Arabia. The unfortunate elephants, however, although fearsome weapons on most of the ancient world’s battlefields, were not well-suited to the searing sands of Arabia and succumbed, either to disease or to the harsh climate, just outside the gates of the city. The Meccans had never seen such creatures and, being unfamiliar with the basics of animal ecology and microbiology, credited divine intervention. The year AD 571 became known in Arabia as the “Year of the Elephant.”28 That same year saw the birth of the Prophet Muhammad into a lesser branch of the Quraish, and his arrival was imbued forever after by Muslims with the mythic elephantine event. He became, of course, a trader.
Had Abraha and his pachyderm allies succeeded at Mecca, Muhammad, had he been born at all, might have wound up a Christian monk. The historical Muhammad is at best an indistinct figure; the first written accounts of his life did not appear for more than a century following his death, and even these were distorted by the ideological needs of his early chroniclers. Certain basic facts, however, seem beyond dispute. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an uncle, Abu Talib, a prosperous trader. Although Muhammad probably spent his formative years observing and participating in his uncle’s business, there is no direct record of his early professional endeavors. What is more certain is that at around age twenty-five, he found himself in the employ of an older widow, Khadija, who also ran a prosperous trading enterprise. We do not know precisely what goods her caravans carried, but dates, raisins, and leather from nearby Taif; frankincense from Yemen; and textiles from Egypt and beyond would certainly have been among them.
As a woman, she did not travel with these cargoes, and so Muhammad rapidly gained experience as her agent in Syria. Impressed with the young man’s competence and charmed by his personality, she proposed marriage, and he accepted; Muhammad was now a man with standing and resources.
In his travels, Muhammad encountered Jews and Christians—the “people of the Book”—and felt the power of their seductive belief systems. The fact that both Judaism and Christianity were associated with hated foreign powers limited their appeal and drove Muhammad and his Arab countrymen to seek their own path. The Arabs’ sense of longing was amplified by their revulsion at the materialistic ways of Mecca’s newly wealthy Quraish commercial aristocracy, perceived as having turned their back on the ancient tribal codes of behavior.29 In the words of Islam’s great Western historian, Maxime Rodinson:
The traditional virtues of the sons of the desert were no longer the sure road to success. Greed, and an eye to the main chance, were much more useful. The rich became proud and overbearing, glorying in their success as a personal thing—no longer a matter for the whole tribe. The ties of blood grew weaker.30
By the late sixth century, then, many Arabs were moved by twin needs: to create a single unifying identity in opposition to the two foreign-derived monotheistic religions, and to develop a political force to counter the wealth and corruption of the Quraish. In this turbulent socioeconomic atmosphere, al-Llah, who emerged alone from the gods of the desert, forcibly dictated through the angel Gabriel’s voice the first verses of the Koran to an agonized Muhammad on Mount Hira, just outside Mecca, in 610. The dry tinder of religious fervor was now lit, and almost immediately flared up into the conflagration of conversion and conquest that would engulf much of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Muslims have long recognized that Khadija’s support was critical to the Prophet’s ultimate mission: a common Arab saying has it that “Islam did not rise except through Ali’s sword and Khadija’s wealth.” (Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, eventually became the Prophet’s fourth successor; his murder would split the Muslim world into a Shiite minority and a Sunni majority, who believe and disbelieve, respectively, that the leadership should pass directly through Muhammad’s lineage by way of Ali.)
Alone among the world’s religions, Islam was founded by a trader. (Muhammad’s immediate successor, the cloth merchant Abu Bakr, was also a trader.) This extraordinary fact suffuses the soul of this faith and guides the historical events that ricocheted over the land routes of Asia and the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean through the next nine centuries. Its traces are visible in today’s world, from the modern colonies of Muslim Indians in East Africa to the Lebanese merchants still active in West Africa to the “Syrians” who populated the third-world outposts of Graham Greene’s novels.
The most sacred texts of Islam resonate with the importance of commerce, as in this famous passage from the Koran: “O you who believe! Do not devour your property among yourselves falsely, except that it be trading by your mutual consent.”31 The most important passages on trade and commerce, however, are found in the hadith, the collected stories of Muhammad’s life, which offer advice on the conduct of trade from the general: “There is no harm for you [to trade] in the Hajj season,” to the specific:
The buyer and the seller have the option to cancel or to confirm the deal, as long as they have not parted or till they part, and if they spoke the truth and told each other the defects of the things, then blessings would be in their deal, and if they hid something and told lies, the blessing of the deal would be lost.32
One narrator, Jabir bin Abdullah, tells of a personal encounter with Muhammad, who offers to buy his troublesome camel, and for which one gold piece is paid. In a demonstration of charity, Muhammad later returns the camel and allows Jabir to keep the gold, informing posterity that at that point in his life, the Prophet might have been taken out of the trade, the trade had not yet been taken out of the Prophet.33
Within a very few decades, the new creed would sweep from Mecca to Medina and back, next across the Middle East, and then west to Spain and east to India. In a commercial sense, early Islam can be thought of as a rapidly inflating bubble of commerce; outside lay unbelievers, and inside lay a swiftly growing theological and institutional unity. A detailed recounting of Islam’s astonishing initial spread is beyon
d the scope of this book, but it’s worth noting that its lightning speed was due in no small part to the conflict between the new creed, which forbade stealing from fellow believers, but not from infidels, and the economic imperative of the ghazu (raid). The Prophet may have been born a trader, but he died a raider. Soon after he was expelled from Mecca in 622, he began attacking that city’s infidel caravans. The new religion dictated that all the property of conquered nonbelievers was forfeit, with one-fifth earmarked for Allah and the umma—the people—and the rest divided between the victorious troops and their leaders.34 If a people converted peacefully, their property was spared. Thus, as more distant tribes converted, it became necessary to raid ever farther afield to obtain sustenance from resistant nonbelieving tribes. After the Prophet’s death in 632, this process accelerated as some peoples were conquered while others, driven both by the political, spiritual, and military power of the new creed and by a desire to retain their assets, saw the light and converted. Both mechanisms—conquest and peaceful conversion—rapidly drove the boundaries of Islam farther and farther from their starting point deep in the peninsula.
The Arab armies were stopped six years later at the gates of Constantinople by a string of unusual circumstances, that included the recent ascent of Emperor Leo the Isaurian, a master strategist, and unusually cold winter weather that proved deadly to troops bred in the Arabian climate and to an army supplied by camel. In the words of the Islamic scholar J. J. Saunders, “Had [Constantinople] fallen, the Balkan Peninsula would have been overrun, the Arabs would have sailed up the Danube into the heart of Europe, and Christianity might have lingered, an obscure cult, in the forests of Germany.”35
The Arabs’ first order of business was to feed the newly converted and hungry masses of the peninsula. Since time immemorial, Egypt had been the granary of the Mediterranean, and the Muslim conquest opened wide this supply to the demanding markets of Arabia. The caliph first sent grain by caravan down the incense route, but the new Islamic empire soon began clearing the old sea-level canal between the Nile and Red Sea to create a cheap maritime route between Arabia and its Egyptian food source. As in modern times, strategic considerations dictated the fate of this ancient version of the Suez Canal. Initially, the leaders considered extending it directly to the Mediterranean. This would have made its route nearly identical to that of the present-day canal, but Caliph Omar (the Prophet’s second successor, after Abu Bakr) decided against the project, fearing that the Byzantines would use a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea to interfere with the hajj. What can feed can also starve: the grain now flowing down the Red Sea had previously sailed north to Constantinople. The loss of this vital food store in no small part contributed to the decline of Byzantium. A century later, Caliph Abu Jaffar shut down the canal for the last time in order to cut off provisions to Arabian rebels.
Next, Muslim forces wrested control of the eastern Mediterranean from the Byzantines at the battle of Dhat al-Sawari—the Battle of the Masts—in 655. At this early date, the Arabs had yet to assemble a working navy and so manned their vessels with experienced Christian Coptic seamen who, ironically, despising their Greek overlords, abetted one of Islam’s greatest victories. At a stroke, the sea routes between the West and India, and China as well, were severed, and would remain so until Vasco da Gama became the first European to break through into the Indian Ocean eight and a half centuries later.36
After their victory at the Battle of the Masts, Muslim navies gradually extended their control over the Mediterranean. In 711 a freed Berber slave, Tariq ibn Ziyad, successfully commanded a daring raid at a rocky promontory in southern Spain, then under the rule of the Goths. The Umayyad invaders celebrated this famous victory, which preceded the Muslim conquest of all Spain by just three years, by naming the rock Jabil Tariq: the mountain of Tariq, or, as it later became pronounced, Gibraltar.
Of the strategic islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Cyprus fell nearly in the first flush of Arab conquest in 649. Crete fell in 827, Malta in 870, and, after more than a century of conflict, the sea’s greatest prize, Sicily, in 965. As the new millennium dawned, it must have seemed to the forces of Christendom that what the Romans once called mare nostrum—our sea—now swarmed with Muslim ships. So wide was the domain of Muslim conquest and trade in Europe that large numbers of Islamic coins dating to the ninth and tenth centuries have been found as far away as central Europe, Scandinavia (particularly on the island of Gotland, off eastern Sweden), England, and Iceland.37
The early Umayyad and Abbasid empires ruled, respectively, before and after 750. They controlled an area greater than that ruled by the Romans and as the sheer extent of their conquests dried up the supply of potential booty, commerce increasingly drove their military priorities. Poor and backward western Europe did not interest them as much as central Asia, with its rich silk route. The Umayyads did not return to Gaul after their defeat at the French city of Poitiers in 732, nor did they react vigorously to the reconquista of Spain and Portugal, which began in 718 and culminated in the expulsion of the last Moors (and of the Jews) in 1492.
Muslim armies, by contrast, attacked the far reaches of central Asia again and again, not succeeding until they defeated the Tang Chinese at Talas (in present day Kazakhstan) in 751 and delivered that part of the world, with its profitable caravan routes, into Muslim hands, where it remains to this day. Dramatic conquests often lead to startling serendipities: the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.
The early Muslim conquests essentially recreated the Pax Romana, but on an even grander scale. The Umayyad and Abbasid empires were in effect large free-trade areas in which old borders and barriers had been swept away, especially along the Euphrates River, since remotest antiquity the traditional frontier between the East and West. No longer were the three great routes to Asia—the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Silk Road—competing alternatives; rather, they were an integrated global logistic system available to all parties who recognized the suzerainty of the caliphate.
For nearly the next millennium, Muslim seafaring ran well ahead of Muslim conquest and conversion. Astoundingly, by the mid-eighth century, barely a hundred years after the death of the Prophet, thousands of Muslim (likely Persian) traders had arrived not only in Chinese coastal ports, but in Chinese inland cities as well.38 By contrast, the first large Chinese oceangoing junks did not venture into the Indian Ocean until about AD 1000, and the legendary eunuch admiral Zheng He would not sail his massive fleet to Sri Lanka and Zanzibar for another four hundred years after that.
Arabic was the lingua franca of the new empire, and Muslim navies patrolled ports and sea-lanes from Gibraltar to Sri Lanka. By the ninth century, Islamic rulers in central Asia had established contact with Volga Khazars, and through them, the Scandinavians; in the East, Muslim contact with China grew brisk via both the Silk Road and maritime routes, and North African traders sent caravans south across the Sahara. Within a few centuries of the Prophet’s death, his followers had knitted almost the entirety of the known world into a vast emporium in which African gold, ivory, and ostrich feathers could be exchanged for Scandinavian furs, Baltic amber, Chinese silks, Indian pepper, and Persian metal crafts.39 Further, the Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was found not in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but rather in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordova.
The Pax Islamica was not an unmixed blessing; the border between Occident and Orient shifted west into the Mediterranean, through which free passage was lost to Muslim and Christians alike. In the words of the historian George Hourani, “Instead of a highway, the Mediterranean became a frontier, a sea of war—
a change which ruined Alexandria.”40 Although the Muslim commercial web possessed many advanced features, including bills of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank.41
But this was beside the point. For several centuries after the fall of Rome, the fragments of the old empire suffered in obscurity as backwaters of world commerce, largely ignorant of the commercial and technological revolutions taking place in the Middle East, India, and especially China. Even so, Mediterranean shipping did benefit from the introduction of the Arab triangular lateen sail, which enabled vessels to tack into the wind, a feat not possible with the square rigging of Western antiquity.
This Pax Islamica went completely unchallenged until the eleventh century, when a resurgent Christendom recovered substantial territory in Spain, Sicily, and Malta. Emboldened by these gains, in 1095 Pope Urban II convened the Council of Clermont and called forth the First Crusade, which temporarily regained the Holy Land.
In the twelfth century Saladin followed his conquest of the Fatimids with the ejection of the crusaders from Jerusalem (although he was more than happy to trade with his Christian enemies) and consolidated Muslim power in the Middle East. With Saladin’s victories came Islam’s high point. Thereafter came a devastating series of misfortunes: the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, the plague in the fourteenth, and Vasco da Gama’s penetrations of the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth.
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