08 The rise of Islam

At the beginning of the 6th century AD a new religion was born in the deserts of Arabia. This was Islam, a word meaning “submission to God.” Its prophet, Mohammed, told his followers that the word of God had been directly revealed to him by the angel Gabriel.

Such was the appeal and charisma of Mohammed that he united the tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam, and over the next 150 years the Arabs spread their power and their new religion from Spain in the west to the fringes of central Asia and India in the east.

Mohammed did not claim that Islam was a new religion. It was rather, he said, the perfection of the old monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, which traced their roots back to Abraham. The revelations began in 610, and were eventually written down in the Qur’an. Mohammed’s preaching against the idolatry of the polytheistic inhabitants of Mecca led to his expulsion to Medina in 622. He took his followers with him in a migration called the Hijra, which marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. Eight years later he returned to Mecca in force and conquered the city. By the time he died in 632, Mohammed was ruler of the whole of the Arabian peninsula.

Islamic science

For many centuries after the fall of Rome, while much of classical learning was lost to the Christian West, Islamic scholars and polymaths such as Ibn Sinna (Avicenna, 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës, 1126–98) kept alive the intellectual flame of ancient Greece. This learning began to be recovered from the 12th century, when Gerard of Cremona translated many Arabic versions of Greek texts into Latin. It was via this process that the works of Aristotle and many others came to be known in Christendom, having an enormous impact on theology, natural philosophy and medicine.

But Arabs, Persians and others within the medieval Islamic world also came up with numerous original contributions. The Arabic system of numerals, including the key symbol for zero (derived from India), made possible far more complex mathematics than the Greeks or Romans had managed with their cumbersome number systems. The very word “algebra” derives from the Arabic word al-jabr, first used in a mathematical context in 820 by the Persian mathematician Al-Khwāzmī in his treatise on solving polynomial equations. Similarly, the word “alcohol” derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, and it was Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber, c.721–c.815) who first identified alcohol as the flammable vapor released by boiling wine. He also understood the workings of acids and alkalis (he named the latter), and is credited as the first to develop alchemy into an experimental science—chemistry.

There were great technological achievements too. In 850 the Banu Musa brothers of Baghdad published their Book of Ingenious Devices, which contains descriptions of numerous mechanical contrivances such as automatons and automatic musical instruments. A few years later, in the emirate of Córdoba in southern Spain, the Moorish inventor Abbas Ibn Firnas made himself a pair of wings and appears to have glided through the air for some distance before coming back to earth with a bump.

Out of Arabia Before his death Mohammed had urged his followers to mount a jihad (holy war) against all non-believers. His successors as rulers of the Muslim community took the title of caliph (literally “successor”), and over the next three decades they led the Arabs in a series of remarkable campaigns, seizing Egypt and Syria from the Byzantine empire and Mesopotamia and Iran from the Sassanian Persians. The Arabs went on to lay siege to Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, not just once, but twice (674–8 and 717–18).

The policy of the conquerors to the conquered was to offer the rights and privileges of Muslims to all converts; those who did not wish to convert, whether Christian or Jew, were tolerated as long as they did not resist, although they were subjected to higher taxation. This pluralist approach was in contrast to the religious intolerance of the Greek Orthodox Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians, and ensured that many welcomed the new conquerors.

The Muslim armies spread across North Africa, and in 711 an army of Moors (Muslim Berbers) crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and proceeded to conquer most of the Iberian Peninsula. Sardinia and Sicily also fell, and in 846 the Arabs sacked Rome itself. The same year that the Berbers crossed to Spain, an Arab army advanced from eastern Iran and conquered a large stretch of the Indus valley. Over the following centuries, Islam spread to the Turkish peoples of central Asia, and thence across much of India. Arab traders also brought Islam to sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia and Indonesia.

“Persia was extinguished and Byzantium was crushed, as also were Indian cities; they were everywhere invincible.”

Tu Yu, 8th-century Chinese official, describes the extent of the conquests of the Arabs, recording that they even sent an embassy to the Chinese imperial court to present tribute

It was not long before conflict arose within the Islamic world. Ali, the fourth caliph and Mohammed’s son-in-law, was murdered in 661, and his followers, the Shi’at ’Ali (“party of Ali”) formed the minority Shia sect, while the majority, the Sunnis, adhered to thesunna (“tradition”). The first dynasty of caliphs, the Umayyads, had their base in Damascus, but were replaced in 750 by the Abbasid dynasty, who moved the capital to Baghdad. The Abbasid court came to a peak of magnificence in the late 8th century under the fifth Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who exchanged gifts with Charlemagne and who features in the Thousand and One Nights. But thereafter the power of the Abbasids across the Arab empire declined. In 929 the emir of Córdoba in southern Spain proclaimedhimself caliph, and for a century he and his successors presided over a golden age, marked by great prosperity and cultural flowering, with the erection of magnificent mosques, gardens and palaces and great advances in science, philosophy, history and geography. A further weakening of Abbasid power came in 969, when the Fatimids, a Shiite dynasty claiming descent from Ali and Fatima (Mohammed’s daughter), declared themselves caliphs in Egypt and North Africa.

“There was in the centre of the room a large basin filled with quicksilver; on each side of it eight doors fixed on arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with gold and precious stones of various kinds, resting upon pillars of variegated marble and transparent crystal.”

Al-Maqqari, the 11th-century writer, describes a Moorish palace in the emirate of Córdoba in southern Spain

In addition to these internal divisions, there were also external pressures. In the 11th century the Seljuk Turks, Muslim converts from central Asia, swept down through the Middle East, while at the end of the century Christian armies from western Europe mounted the first of a succession of crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. At the same time, the Christian kingdoms in the north of the Iberian Peninsula began a long campaign of reconquest of Muslim Spain. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Mongols and the Ottoman Turks began their onslaughts—the latter creating an empire in the Middle East that was to last until the 20th century.

the condensed idea

A rapid expansion of a new religious and political phenomenon