EARLY ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION 

Introduction

Although there were important contacts between the civilized centers of the classical world, no single civilization had bound together large portions of the ancient world in either the Western or the Eastern Hemisphere.

But in the 7th century A.D., the followers of a new religion, Islam, which literally means "submission, the self-surrender of the believer to the will of the one, true God, Allah," charged out of the Arabian peninsula and began a sequence of conquest and conversion that would forge the first truly global civilization. Until then Arabia had been a nomadic backwater on the periphery of the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. Within decades, the Muslims (as the followers of the new faith and its prophet, Muhammad, were called) had conquered an empire extending from Spain in the west to central Asia in the east, an empire that combined the classical civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Persia.

In succeeding centuries, Islamic civilization would be spread by merchants, holy men, and warriors across the steppes of Asia (including most of what is today southern Russia) to western China, into the Indian subcontinent and across maritime Southeast Asia, and down the eastern coast of Africa and into the vast savanna zone to the west. Muslim conquerors would also capture Asia Minor and advance into the European heartland of Islam's great rival, Christendom.

During most of the millennium after the 7th century A.D., this great civilization, which cut a huge swath across the middle of the continents of Africa and Asia, provided key links and channels for exchange among the civilized centers of the classical era in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Muslim merchants, often in cooperation with Jewish, Armenian, Indian, and other regional commercial groups, became key middlemen in the trade between civilizations from the western Mediterranean to the South China Sea. Muslim traders and conquerors became the prime agents for the transfer of food crops, technology, and ideas among the many centers of civilization in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Muslim scholars studied, preserved, and improved on the learning of the ancient civilizations of the Old World, including most critically those of Greece, Persia, and Egypt. For several centuries, Muslim works in philosophy, literature, mathematics, and the sciences elevated Arabic (the language of the Quran, the holy book containing God's revelations to Muhammad)to the status of the international language of the educated and informed.

Thus, building on the achievements of earlier civilizations, Muslim peoples forged a splendid new civilization that excelled in most areas of human endeavor, from poetry and architecture to the sciences and urban development.

Islam not only joined existing centers of civilization, it provided the foundations on which a truly global civilization would eventually be built.Although unified by a common allegiance to the religious rituals and teachings proclaimed by Muhammad and to some extent by the Arabic language, the Islamic world was divided by political rivalries, vast cultural and linguistic diversity, and religious sectarianism.

The agrarian cores of earlier civilizations provided the base of support for Muslim empires and kingdoms that fought to expand their territorial control at each other's expense and warred for the right to claim that their rulers were the true leaders of the Islamic world.

It was unrealistic to expect that such a large area as that encompassed by Islamic civilization could be united under a single ruler, particularly given the primitive state of sea and overland communications. In any case, from the 7th to the 14th centuries, political rivalries prompted technological and organizational innovations that strengthened the Islamic world as a whole.

Diversity and the continuing influx of new ideas, objects, and peoples from areas newly brought into the Islamic fold enriched Muslim civilization and enhanced its accomplishments in the arts, invention, and the sciences.

Only with the rise of Europe, beginning in the 14th century, from a besieged and peripheral outlier on the western fringes of the Islamic empires to a mighty aggressor on a global scale, did the divisions within the Islamic world begin to undermine seriously the continued strength and prosperity of Muslim civilization. By playing rival Islamic rulers and sects against each other, the emerging Christian powers could further their designs for territorial expansion. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Muslim divisions and rivalries allowed the Europeans to gain footholds, however precarious, in Africa and the East Indies.

We trace the emergence of the Muslim religion and community of Muhammad's faithful followers in the middle decades of the 7th century A.D. It then presents the early conquests of the Arabs, united by the new religion, and examines the achievements of early Islamic civilization.

The lecture concludes with an account of a major shift in leadership that occurred within the Islamic community in the mid-8th century and the early history of the Abbasid Empire, which was a product of that shift.

These lectures note the reasons for Islamic expansion and the ways in which that expansion made it the first truly global civilization.

The Arabian peninsula was a very unlikely birthplace for the first globalcivilization. Much of the area is covered by some of the most inhospitable desert regions in the world. An early traveler wrote of the region:

All about us is an iron wilderness; a bare and black shining beach of heated volcanic stones . . . a vast bed and banks of rusty and basaltic bluish rocks . . . stubborn as heavy matter, as iron and sounding like bell metal; lying out eternally under the sand-driving desert wind. . . .

In the scrub zones on the edges of the empty quarters, or uninhabitable desert zones, a wide variety of bedouin, or nomadic cultures, had developed over the centuries on the basis of camel and goat herding. In the oases that dotted the dry landscape, towns and agriculture flourished on a limited scale.

Only in the far south, on the Yemen and Hadramaut coasts, had extensive sedentary agriculture, sizeable cities, and regional kingdoms developed in ancient times. Over much of the rest of the peninsula, the camel nomads, organized in tribes and clans, were dominant.

Yet in the rocky regions adjacent to the Red Sea, several trading towns had developed that would play pivotal roles in the emergence of Islam.Though the urban roots of Islam have often been stressed by writers on Muslim civilization, the bedouin world in which the religion arose shaped the career of its prophet, his teachings, and the spread of the new beliefs in major ways.

In fact, key towns, such as Mecca and Medina, were largely extensions of the tribal culture of the camel nomads.

Their populations werelinked by kinship to bedouin peoples. Mecca, for example, had been founded by bedouins and at the time of Muhammad was ruled by former bedouin clans.

The safety of the trade routes on which the towns depended for their livelihood was in the hands of nomadic tribes who lived along the vulnerable caravan routes to the north and south. In addition, the town dwellers' social organization, which focused on clan and family, as well as their culture, including language and religion, were much like those of the nomads.

In the beginning the Muslims were both open and cautious. They borrowed and integrated elements of other cultures into their own. The new religion of Islam, which we will get to in a moment, adopted elements of Christian, Jewish, and pagan religious beliefs and practices. The Muslims tolerated religious minorities within territories they had conquered so long as these minorities recognized Islamic political rule, paid taxes, and did not proselytize among Muslims. Still, the Muslims were careful to protect the purity of their religion, language, and law from any foreign influence. With the passage of time, and with increased conflict with both eastern and western Christians, this protective instinct grew stronger. In the end, Islamic culture did not penetrate the west in the same way that Germanic culture did, but would remain strange as well as threatening to the West.

Fundamental to Islam was its religion -- this, of course, is true for the medieval west as well. However, we know more about early Christianity then we do about early Islam. And the reason is clear. Christianity was produced by a literate culture. Islamic religion, however, was formed largely in an illiterate, nomadic culture.

The home of Islam is the Arabian Peninsula. The Peninsula is predominantly desert and the tribes who inhabited this area were nomadic, that is, they traveled from place to place. Politically, Islam was not a unified territory nor was there any centralized government.

The great unifying agent in Islamic civilization was clearly that of Muhammad (c.570-632). He was born at Mecca and raised by family of modest means. His father had died in the year of his birth and his mother died when he was 6 years old. At the time of Muhammad's birth, Mecca was one of the most prosperous caravan cities. However, Mecca was still tied to the traditional social and religious life of the Arabian world. In other words, it was governed by the tribal societies of the desert. Membership in the tribe was determined by blood descent. In such an order, the interests of the individual were always subordinate to those of the group or tribe. Each tribe worshipped its own gods in the form of objects from nature (moon, sky, dog, cat, ram) but all Arabs worshipped one object in common: the Kaaba, a large black stone enshrined at Mecca. It was the Kaaba that made Mecca significant as a place of worship and pilgrimage.

As a youth, Muhammad worked as a merchant's assistant, traveling the major trade routes of the Peninsula. When he was 25, he married the widow of a wealthy merchant and became a man of means. He also became a kind of social activist, critical of Meccan materialism, paganism, and the unjust treatment of the poor and needy.

Muhammad worked hard at his career but like so many "saviors" and prophets, Muhammad was plagued by doubts. His doubt increased to such an extent that he left Meccan society and lived a life of isolation in the desert. In 610, and at the age of 40, he received his first revelation and began to preach. He believed his revelations came directly from God, a God who spoke to him through the angel Gabriel, who recited God's word to him at irregular intervals. These revelations grew into the Qur'an which his followers compiled between 650 and 651. The basic message Muhammad received was a summons to all Arabs to submit to God's will. Islam means "submission to the will of God." 

There was little that was new in Muhammad's message. It had been uttered by a long line of Jewish prophets going back to Noah but now ending with Muhammad, the last of God's chosen prophets. The Qur'an also recognized Jesus Christ as a prophet but did not view him as God's co-eternal and co-equal son. Like Judaism, Islam was a monotheistic and theocratic religion, not a Trinitarian one like Christianity.

The basic beliefs of Muhammad's religion were (1) that God is good and omnipotent, (2) that God will judge all men on the last day and assign them their place in either Heaven or Hell, (3) that men should thank God for making the world as it is, (4) that God expects men to be generous with their wealth, and (5) that Muhammad was a prophet sent by God to teach men and warn them of the last judgment.

It ought to be clear that many of these beliefs are similar to those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, Muhammad's religion was not a mere copy. Instead, Muhammad's religion grew as a result of the social and economic conditions of Mecca itself. One other difference ought to be noted. Christianity was produced in an urban environment while the faith of Muhammad was fashioned from his life in the desert.

For Muhammad, there were also five obligations which were essential to his faith: (1) the profession of faith – there is no God but Allah and Muhammad was the last prophet, (2) prayers had to be uttered five times daily, (3) the giving of alms, or charity, (4) fasting, and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca. These laws are recorded in the Qur'an, a book which contains all of the revelations of Muhammad.

Muhammad believed that God had chosen him to be the last prophet. Abraham and Moses were prophets. So too was Jesus Christ. But Muhammad believed that Jesus was not the son of God. The Jews and Christians, according to Muhammad, had strayed from the true faith, a faith which Muhammad believed he had had revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. It was his task to convert them and bring them back to the true word.