Lecture: 17: Civilization in the

Muslim Middle East

Faculty: Abul Hossain Ahmed
Bhuiyan, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
The Arabs
• Sometime about 610 in the Arabian town of
Mecca, a merchant’s son named Muhammad
began to preach to the people, summoning them
to repentance and reform. The explosive impact
of his preaching must be reckoned as one of the
most extraordinary events of world history.
Within a century after Muhammad’s death his
followers had conquered and partially converted
territories larger than the old Roman Empire.
• The Arabian Peninsula was in a state of intense political
and social ferment on the eve of Muhammad’s
appearance. The stronger political powers – the
Persians, Byzantines, and Abyssinians across the Red
Sea – tried repeatedly to subdue the Arabs but could not
dominate them in their desert home.
• Both Christianity and Judaism had won numerous
converts, but neither one was able to gain the adherence
of most Arabs. The religious leader who by the force of
his vision fused all these contending pagan, Christian,
and Jewish ideas into a single, commanding, and
authentically Arabian religion was Muhammad.
Muhammad
• He may have been illiterate and may have had no
direct knowledge of Jewish and Christian scriptures;
but he did acquire a wide knowledge of the history
and teaching of those two religions.
• The people of Mecca feared him because his
strictures against paganism seemed to threaten the
position of Mecca as a center of pilgrimages.
Rejected in his native city, Muhammad accepted an
invitation to expound his ideas in Yathrib, a trading
town 270 miles to the north. After the success of the
religion, the town’s name became Medina (city of
the prophet).
• Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Yathrib
is called hijra and occurred in 622, which later
became the year 1 of the Islamic calendar. He
was more successful at Medina than he had been
at Mecca in making converts. Muhammad
marched against the Meccans, defeating them at
Badr in 624 and taking Mecca in 630. He
destroyed all the pagan shrines, keeping only the
Kaaba (square building), which Muslim tradition
says that Abraham built.
• By his death in 632, Muhammad had given his religion a
firm foundation on Arabian soil.
• Instructed by the angel Gabriel, Muhammad passed on
to his followers the words or prophecies of ALLAH (from
al ilah, meaning “the God”). The collection of prophecies
is known as the KORAN; and Allah, in Islamic theology,
is its true author. The Koran was written down in its
present version in 651 and 652. The Koran imparts to the
sympathetic reader a powerful mood, one of
uncompromising monotheism, of repeated and
impassioned emphasis upon the unity, power, and
presence of Allah. The mood is sustained by constant
reiterations of set formulas praising Allah, his power,
knowledge, mercy, justice, and concern for his people.
Chronology of Islamic Rule
• Four Caliphs (successor of Muhammad)
- Abu Bakr (632 – 634; father-in-law of the Prophet)
- Umar (634 – 644; father-in-law of the Prophet, killed by
a Persian Christian slave)
- Uthman (644 – 656; Prophet’s son-in-law, official
version of the KORAN; killed by rebels)
- Ali (656 – 661; son-in-law of the Prophet, Killed in
mosque)
661 – 750 : Umayyad Dynasty
750 – 945: Abbasid Dynasty (Golden Age)
945 – 1258: Abbasid Decline and Mongol Invasion
1250 – 1517: Mamluk Sultanate
1517 – 1929: Ottoman Empire
Relationship to Christianity and
Judaism
• The message of Islam exerted a powerful appeal to
the Arabs. Compared with Christianity and Judaism,
Islam was a starkly simple belief, easily explained
and easily grasped. It was an effective fusion of
religious ideas from Arabic paganism, Christianity,
Judaism, and perhaps Zoroastrianism.
• Bible tells that Abraham fathered Ishmael by Hagar,
an Egyptian slave girl, and Muslims believed that
Ishmael was their ancestor and lies buried with
Hagar in the Kaaba at Mecca.
• Christianity contributed the concepts of Last
Judgment, personal salvation, heaven and hell,
charity to the poor and weak, and a universal
religion. Christianity, or perhaps Zoroastrianism,
suggested the figures of Satan and evil demons.
• Islam was therefore the fulfillment of religious ideas
already familiar to the Arabs. The Koran was written
in their native language, Arabic, and only in Arabic
could Allah be addressed.
• The Arabs saw themselves as replacing the Jews as
God’s chosen people, with a sacred right to his holy
places, including Jerusalem.
Conquests
• The Arabs, long familiar with camels, were
masters of desert warfare. Their enemies, relying
on horses, could not challenge them on desert
terrain. Using the desert, the Arabs moved
armies and supplies with facility across vast arid
stretches, struck the enemy at places and times
of their own choosing, and retreated to the safety
of the desert when the odds turned against them.
• The Arabs’ immediate neighbors, the Byzantines and
Persians, were mutually exhausted by their recurrent
wars. Both the Byzantine and Persian empires included
large Semitic populations that were linguistically and
culturally related to the Arabs and could, therefore,
comprehend the message of Islam.
• The Arabs were able to make and hold their conquests
through a unique combination of fanaticism and
toleration. Warriors were inspired by the Prophet’s
promise of vast rewards to those who died in the Holy
War against the nonbelievers and by the very real
prospect of considerable booty if victorious.
• The Prophet, however, also enjoined a policy of
partial toleration toward Christians and Jews, who
were both known as the “people of the Book”. They
continued to live under their own laws, but they paid
a special tax for the privilege. Many Persian, Greek,
and Semitic people converted voluntarily because
they found the religion close to their own beliefs.
• Arabs did not have the numbers and the skills to
govern all the territories they conquered; they
opened the ranks of government to men from the
newly conquered peoples. This move added stability
to Arabic rule.
• Islam expanded most rapidly in the period
following Muhammad’s death in 632 and
coinciding with the rule of the first four caliphs,
as Muhammad’s successors were called. Arabian
forces seized the Byzantine provinces of
Palestine and Syria, overran Persia, and
conquered Egypt by the 640s. By 661 the
Arabian Empire was firmly established as a
world power.
Schism
• As the territory under Islamic control grew to
enormous size, powerful movements threatened and
finally shattered Islamic unity. Islam had been an
open and fluid religion at the death of Muhammad,
but scholars and teachers gradually elaborated a
theology that a majority of the believers accepted as
orthodox.
• The scholars based the new orthodoxy not only on
the Koran but also on the Sunnas, or traditions,
which were writings that purported to describe how
the first companions of Muhammad or how
Muhammad himself dealt with various problems.
• Some Muslims, however, rejected the new
orthodoxy of the Sunnites, as they came to
be called. Those who opposed the Sunnites
were called the Shiites (“party or fraction” of
Ali).
• The growing social and religious
dissatisfaction finally broke the unity: a
descendant of one Abbas, the uncle of
Muhammad revolted against the Umayyads,
captured Damascus, and ruthlessly
massacred the caliph’s family in 750 and
formed Abbaside dynasty.
• One member of the Umayyads,
Abdurrahman, escaped to Spain and set up
an independent caliphate at Cordoba in
755. Other independent regimes soon
arose: Morocco in 788, Tunisia in 800,
Eastern Persia in 820, and Egypt in 868.
All became virtually independent under
their local dynasties.
• The power of the Islamic Empire reached
its highest point under the Abbasid
dynasty, which endured until 1258. But the
community of Islam was never again to be
united.
Economy
• Islam embraced numerous economic systems: the
Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula, the Berbers in
North Africa, and the Turkish people of Eurasia
continued to have a pastoral economy; Egypt,
Persia, Sicily, and Spain lived from settled
agriculture; the inhabitants of cities, especially those
along the caravan routs that tide the Middle East to
India and central Asia, relied on commerce. Islamic
law favored commerce and Islam well-regarded the
merchant.
• Products from almost all parts of the known world
could be purchased at the markets, or bazaars, in all
the major cities.
Technology, Law and Governance and
Women
• The Arabs made progress in technology, often
borrowing from China, India, and Byzantium
and improving on what they found. The Arabs
also improved on siege weapons and fortress
building.
• Because Islam recognized no distinction
between religious place and state, the caliph was
the supreme religious and civil head of the
Muslim world. But he was not free to change the
law at will, since Allah had already provided all
the laws his people needed; therefore, the caliph
was primarily a military chief and a judge.
• In the early days of Islam, women played a major
role in conversion. Muhammad’s wife, Khadija, was
his first convert. His second wife, daughter of one of
the wealthy Meccans, was an early convert who
shared the exile in Medina before Muhammad
married her. The wives of two of the first caliphs
were also early converts.
• The Koran directed the preservation and
enhancement of the family. It encouraged people to
marry and enjoined men to support their wives. It
allowed male Muslims to have as many as four legal
wives, but only if they could support them and treat
them all fairly.
• Women could inherit from their male kin, but their
portion was less than a male heir would receive: “A
male child shall have the equivalent to two female
children”.
Islamic Culture
• During the eighth and ninth centuries scholars
translated into Arabic many Greek authors:
Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, and
Galen. Scholars were especially interested in
astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine,
and optics, and in these areas their writings
exerted a great influence on the Western world.
 This thirteenth- century
Arab commentary on the
Geometry of Euclid
illustrates the proof of the
Pythagorean theorem.
The Mosque of Cordoba, 784-990
The Mosque of Cordoba, 784-990
Alhambra Palace
Decline
• The earliest indication of decline was the
growing military weakness of the various Islamic
states in the face of new invasions in the middle
of the eleventh century. In the West Christian
fleets broke the Islamic domination of the
western Mediterranean islands.
• The Byzantine offensive gave rise to the First
Crusade, which wrested Jerusalem from Islamic
control in 1099.
• The Arabic economic base was changing. By the
thirteenth century, maritime and commercial
supremacy on the Mediterranean Sea passed to
Italians and other Westerners.
• The Arab (Islamic) civilization continued to support
some great cultural centers and to inspire some
great artists and thinkers; but after the eleventh
century it began to lose the qualities of openness,
flexibility, and intellectual daring that had so
distinguished it in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Discussion