World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 9: The Islamic Empire

Mon, Nov 4, 2013

19. Tue, Nov 5, 2013

We trace our cultural lineage back to the Greeks and the Hebrews more than anything else — the Greeks for science, systems of government, and in many ways the fundamental method of understanding the world by looking at what's there; the Hebrews for the code of Biblical morality. But another culture took both those elements and built a civilization that has progressed in quite different ways: the Muslim Empire.

The influence of Islam on the world has been much spoken of in the past ten years. We all know why. The story of Islam is far more complicated than what is often heard in common discourse, however, which makes a full and careful study of Islam's origins and early days utterly critical.

To begin with, Islam proved extremely successful in its first centuries. Until the Mongols, no empire grew more rapidly. And Islam as a religion proved enormously popular even beyond the caliph's reach; Muslim prayers could (and can) be heard from the Straits of Gibraltar to Zanzibar to Borneo. Frankly, in terms of expansion and conversion, it was far more successful in its first few hundred years than Christianity was in its first centuries.

Moreover, early Islamic civilization truly was superior to Christian Europe of that time in terms of unity, military power, art, science, medicine, and equality. Islam, like Christianity, schismed early into Sunni and Shiite, and divided politically into three caliphates, but compared to the struggles between Christian branches and kingdoms in those days, Islam was quite unified and consistent. Meanwhile Muslim scholars and scientists took up the writings of the Greeks and Romans that many Christians had set aside as illegitimately pagan, preserving and building on much of Classical scholarship. In terms of peace and prosperity, the Muslim Caliphate in AD 900 was probably a much better place to live than, say, France at the same time. The Cordoban Caliphate in Spain built a society with almost no distinction or strife between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In fact Muslims described their realm as Dar es Salaam, the House of Peace, and called the rest of the world the House of War. This would be particularly true if you were a woman.

Clearly things have changed. But understanding Islam of the caliphates is vital for understanding the strife of the 21st century, since in general Muslims remember those times rather better than we do.

• In Christianity, the "religious language" has often been in flux — the New Testament was mostly written in Greek, then translated into Latin, then into the vernacular (everyday languages such as English and Italian). But Islam has always maintained Arabic as the language of religious practice, going so far as to assert that if the Koran is translated, it ceases to be the Koran. How might this have served the Islamic Empire as a unifying force?
• What about Islam made it more receptive toward the Greek and Roman classics, and more rigorous in scholarship in general, than Europe of the Middle Ages? Compare the main academic focus of the Byzantine Empire with the academics of the caliphates. Is there anything inherent in Islam that made it more open to outside ideas?
• What factors contributed to Islam's stunning military success of AD 632-750? Does anything remind you of other empires we've read about so far?

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