In AD 636 an Arab army defeated the Roman-Byzantine garrison of Syria and Palestine, and permanently eliminated Roman power in those two provinces. Shortly thereafter other Arab expeditionary forces overran Mesopotamia and Egypt, by 651 Iran had also been annexed to the Mew Islamic empire created by these victories. The fervor of fresh religious revelation vouchsafed to the prophet Mohammed inspired these extraordinary victories. Even more remarkable was the fact that the religious conviction Mohammed aroused enabled crude Arab conquerors and their descendants to weld a new and distinctively Islamic civilization from the various and often discordant elements Middle Easterners had inherited from a past that reached all the way back to the first beginning of civilization.
In Mohammed's time, Arabia was divided between warlike tribes, some nomadic and some settled at agricultural oases or in trading towns. Judaism and Christianity had made some inroads into Arabia, but Mecca, the city of Mohammed's birth, remained pagan. As a young man, Mohammed probably traveled with caravans carrying goods to towns along the Palestinian border. Then at about the age of forty he began to fall into trances and hear voices, which he presently recognized as visitations from the angel Gabriel, instructing him in obedience to the will of Allah. Under the impulsion of these experiences, Mohammed began to preach the unity and omnipotence of Allah, the impending Allah's will. He summed up his message under the rubric ''Islam,'. that is, ''submission' to Allah. Prayers five times daily, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, abstention from wine and pork, and a month-long fast from sunup to sun-set every year were the principal obligations Mohammed imposed upon the faithful. Obedience to Allah, the Prophet revealed, would be rewarded by a place in Paradise, whereas idolaters and other wicked men were destined to suffer eternal fiery torment. Bodily resurrection on the Last Day was another point upon which Mohammed put much emphasis.
Initially, the Prophet assumed that Jews and Christians would recognize his preaching as the last and most perfect revelation of God's will. or Allah, Mohammed believed, was the same deity who had spoken to Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and all the other Hebrew prophets. Since Allah could not contradict himself, differences between Mohammed's own revelation and the tenets of the other religions were explained simply as a result of human error or corruptions of the authentic divine message. A few Meccans accepted Mohammed's warnings, but the great majority declined to give up their traditional worship, which Mohammed denounced as idolatry. Then, in AD 622 Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina, where he had been invited by one faction of that strife-torn oasis city in the hope that an outsider could settle their quarrels. From this time onward, Mohammed became a political leader and lawgiver. At Medina, Mohammed had his first direct encounter with Jews, who declined to accept his authority. Mohammed therefore drove them out, and took their land for his own followers. A little later, Mohammed conquered another Jewish oasis. This time he left the inhabitants in possession of the i land on condition that they render tribute in the form of a head tax. These first encounters were of great importance because they became binding precedents, defining the relation between Moslem rulers and their J wish (and later also Christian) subjects.
While at Medina, Mohammed attracted a steady flow of new recruits and converts' As a result, the community of the faithful was soon hard pressed to find a livelihood in the narrow' confines of the Medina oasis. An obvious solution was to raid caravans owned by the Meccans. The first raids were successful, others soon followed until resistance in Mecca crumbled' Mohammed returned in triumph and then went on to unite all of Arabia under the banner of Islam, partly by war, but mainly by diplomacy and negotiation.
Scarcely had this been accomplished when Mohammed died (AD 632) , leaving no son to succeed him. One of the Prophet's old friends and close companions, Abu Bakre was chOsen as caliph (i.e. successor) to lead the Moslem community. He immediately had to face a widespread withdrawal of allegiance by Ar b chieftains, who felt that their submission to Mohammed did not obligate them to the community of the faithful as a whole But when it came to fighting, the enthusiasm and conviction of the hard core of Mohammed's converts once again prevailed, and the Arabian chieftains were forced to unite once more behind the banner of the new faith. Abu Bakr died as soon as this crisis was pas t Leadership passed next to Omar who proved himself not only pious and devout, but also a very successful general and administrator.
The unification of all Arabia prefaced the amazing series of Arab conquests that brought the whole of the ancient Middle East (except for Asia Minor) as well as the desert region of the lower Indus valley (by AD 715) , North Africa, and even Spain (AD 711-715) under Moslem control. No military change accounts for these victories. Arab armies were neither very numerous nor particularly well equipped, but the conviction that God was with them, the belief that death in battle assured a blissful life in Paradise, and Omar's effective leadership sufficed to give the Arabs superiority over their enemies.
After 715 AD, however, easy victories stopped. The city of B Byzantium withstood a hard and prolonged siege. This major defeat was matched by failure in a series of frontier skirmishes in central Asia, where a Turkish force pushed the Moslems out of eastern Iran by 715. A little later, the Franks defeated a Moslem raiding party at the battle of Tours in central Gaul (732 AD). These defeats, together with the inevitable waning of the first flush of religious excitement and conviction, created acute problems within the Moslem community. During the first generation or two, the Arab warriors had remained more or less insulated from their subjects. Omar set up special garrison cities where the Arabs settled down under Their tribal leaders. Each warrior received a pay derived from the taxes collected from the population at large by traditional Roman and Persian bureaucratic methods. This system worked pretty ell at first, and remained effective even when the leadership of the Islamic community passed into ar less capable hands than those which had guided its first years.
The first est in 644 AD, when Omar was assassin ed. A chieftain of the Ommyad family then succeeded to the caliphate and the office remained in that family until 750 AD. The Ommyads made Damascus their capital' The power of the Ommyad caliphs depended upon maintaining a delicate between three very different roles. The caliph had first of all to balance rival Arab chieftains and tribes off against one another. He had also to manage the bureaucracy inherited from his oman and Persian predecessors and use it to tax the population at large. Then, in the third place, the caliphs somehow had to serve as religious head of the community.
Of these three roles the one the Ommayads failed to fill adequately was the last. Serious and devout men, seeking to know the will of Allah and to do it faithfully, found no satisfaction in the spectacle offered by Ommayad administration. As long as military success continued uninterruptedly, such discontents were politically ineffective. But after AD 715, when the Moslems suffered their first serious defeats, the pious opposition, which demanded a worthy, God-chosen caliph, became a serious matter.
As administrators of the population at large, the Ommayads also ran into increasing difficulty. Numerous Christians and Zoroastrians and followers of other religions found the theological simplicity, legal precision, and practical success of Islam perfectly convincing. On principle, such converts were welcome to join the community of the faithful. But when conversion meant relief from taxation--as at first was the case--the religious success meant acute fiscal embarrassment.
Moreover, the Moslem community was still organized by tribes, and the tribes could not or would not welcome masses of strangers into their ranks. Arabs looked scornfully upon the new converts and treated them as less than fully equal members of the community of Islam, despite the plain injunctions of Mohammed's revelation.
All these strains came to a head in 744 AD, when a disputed succession precipitated civil war. Fighting ended with the overthrow of the Ommayad regime and of the privileged position of the Arab garrison forces as well. The Abbasid victors set up their capital at Baghdad in Mesopotamia. The backbone of their military support came from Persian converts. It is not, therefore surprising that Abbasid policy from the start smacked strongly of Sassanian precedent. Arab tribal groups, which had been so important before, disintegrated because tribal garrisons no longer received pay through their chiefs, as in Ommayad times. In Arabia proper, where the old style of nomad life continued, tribal ties remained unchanged. But in the settled parts of the empire the Arabs blended into the general population usually as landowners or in other privileged positions, and soon forgot their tribal identity and discipline. Instead, bureaucracy of the familiar imperial model took over all ordinary administration, while Iranian and Turkish or other mercenaries more and more constituted the core of the caliph.s armed forces. These reversions to very ancient imperial precedents met the demands of the non-Arab converts to islam, who were now, like everybody else, the subjects of a distant, unapproachable caliph.
But these changes did nothing to meet the demands of the pious Moslems who wee bent upon realizing God's will on earth in all its specificity. The solution Abbasid statesmen found for this difficulty was of fundamental importance for all subsequent Islamic society. Instead of trying to combine religious authority with military and political leadership as previously, the Abbasids tacitly agreed to transfer jurisdiction in all matters of religious importance to experts in the lore of Islam--men known collectively as ulema.
The ulema had developed spontaneously. Pious men, confronting a problem of conduct, wished to know what God.s will in the matter might be. The way to find out was to seek for precedents in the words or deeds of the Prophet. But ordinary men were not familiar with these deeds and words, and had to ask experts who were. As the first generation of the Prophet's companions died, this called for systematic study. Naturally enough, Medina was the first seat where the details of Mohammed: career were studied. Here his inspired utterances were collected and put carefully in order just a few years after the Prophet:s death. The resulting scripture, the Koran, has ever since constituted the ultimate repository of religious authority for Moslems.
Many matters for which the Koran offered no direct guidance had somehow to be coped with also. For answers to such questions, experts in the lore of Islam resorted at first to reports about Mohammed's uninspired words and deeds emanating--really or fictitiously--from companions of the Prophet. When this failed, the conduct of men closely associated with Mohammed might be helpful. When even these ''traditions'' could not be brought to bear on a case, the Ulema admitted the use of analogy to decide a difficult point. If analogy failed to offer convincing guidance they fell back ultimately upon the consensus of the faithful, arguing that Allah would not permit the entire community to err, however faulty individual judgments might be. Using these methods, the learned men of Islam rapidly built up an elaborate system of law, which they believed expressed the will of Allah. The sacred law was, of course, unchangeable since Allah did not change. It was also rather detailed and specific, since the whole effort was aimed at making unambiguously clear what Allah wished men to do in particular situations. As a result, the sacred law of Islam later proved a heavy burden for Moslem society to carry, since it could neither be repudiated nor altered.
Under the Abbasids, however, the sacred law still glistened like newly minted gold. Allah's will for men seemed surely there revealed, and it behooved the faithful to bend every effort to conform to its clear and definite prescriptions. This was not hard to do since learned men, respected for their exact knowledge of the Koran, the Traditions, and the detail of the Sacred Law, sat in the market place of every considerable town, ready to pass judgment on matters of conscience brought before them. Much of the business of government affecting private persons and individual lives was thus transferred to the jurisdiction of these religious experts. Pious Moslems could therefore feel that in everything that really mattered, the best and wisest men were in control.
By comparison with this, who happened to be running the central government, collecting taxes, guarding the frontiers, and enjoying the luxuries of palace life did not matter so very much. The early ideal of the totally holy community, led by a worthy successor to the Prophet and dedicated solely to obedience to Allah, was thus somewhat reluctantly surrendered by the majority of Moslems. But not by all.
Some stubborn idealists clung to the original vision and thereby became heretics. Many of them came to hold that only descendants of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, were worthy of heading the community of the faithful. When Ali's direct line died out in the twelfth generation, some argued that the true successor to the Prophet had withdrawn from an irremediably wicked world but would return in the future and turn his terrible avenging wrath against those who had betrayed the truth and been false to Allah's commands. Extreme sects split into numerous subgroupings. Some of them nursed a fiercely revolutionary intolerance for Abbasid, or indeed for any constituted authority that fell short of their utterly unyielding ideal. Such groups are termed Shi'a. The majority, who were willing to live within the framework accorded by Abbasid policy, are known as Sunni Moslems.
The Sunni-Shi'a split has continued to run throughOut Islam right down to the present day. Equally, the restrictions the Abbasid compromise placed upon the jurisdiction of secular government affected the policy of all Islamic states ever since. An important corollary of the autonomous adminstration of the Sacred Law was that Moslem political authorities expected the leaders of other religious communities to guide and legislate for their flocks in all personal and religious matters just as the ulema guided the lives of Moslems. Far-ranging autonomy for Christians and Jews was thereby assured.
A second important implication of the Moslem legal code was that a man had to accept Islam in its entirely or reject it utterly. No half-way house was possible. Either Mohammed was Allah's latest and most perfect prophet, and the Sacred Law in every jot and tittle was the true expression of Allah's will for men, or else these claims were false. No middle ground could be found in logic, and very little was discovered in fact . Islam, in short, shared the doctrinal intolerance of its Judaic and Christian forerunners to the full.
The religious aspiration that found expression in Islam very soon set a powerful stamp upon the daily lives of millions of men in the Middle East and north Africa. Cultivation of the Arabic language as the necessary vehicle for all religious discourse became part of piety. As a result, a rather rapid linguistic shift went hand in hand with the propagation of Islam, as Arabic displaced Greek and/or Aramaic as the everyday speech of the Middle Eastern peoples. Persians, ho ever, retained its currency in Iran, although for a while it ceased to be used for literary purposes.
Poetic records of tribal and individual prowess were an important part of the culture of pre-Islamic Arabia. Mohammed had looked with disfavor upon these rivals to the poetry of his own inspired utterances. Nonetheless, Arab warriors continued to cultivate a taste for poetry and rhythmic prose in spite of the Prophet. The warrior's ideal expressed in such poetry was reinforced by the ease and leisure the first Arab generations experienced, when they began to live upon the taxes collected from their new subjects. As a result, a courtly style of gentlemanly life developed among Arab fighting men which stood in conscious opposition to the ideals of the pious Moslems. Wine drinking, for example, was part of the gentlemanly code of behavior despite Mohammed's prohibition. More generally, a warm appreciation of the sensory joys of the world, refinement of manners, and delicacy of sentiment in matters of pride, hate, and love, fitted awkwardly with the pious drive for complete obedience to Allah. Only in high political circles, preeminently in the court of the caliph himself, could this secular, leisured, and essentially aristocratic style of life flourish freely.
A second element inherited from the past also stood stubbornly in the way of energetically pious champions of Islam. The speculative habit of mind, so persistently cultivated among the Greeks, could not be entirely suppressed. In matters of religion, to be sure, the ulema resolutely and on the whole successfully resisted temptation by refusing to entertain questions of speculative theology. They held it to be a selfevident truth that everything a man needed to know was provided by the Koran and Traditions.
Nevertheless, there were two professional services the Moslems--or at least the rich among them--were not prepared to do without: the prediction of the future by astrologers and the curing of illness by doctors. Astrology and medicine were, of course, deeply imbued with Greek thought. In taking these professions over, the Moslems, therefore, inevitably imported into their own learning a generous share of the Greek inheritance. And once Moslem minds began to reason about things, it was hard to call a halt. Before long, curiosity spread to other matters not directly related to either medicine or astrology. Some of the Abbasid caliphs even became patrons of learning and organized systematic translation of Greek and Indian works of science and philosophy. In this way much of Greek knowledge and some Indian learning (e.g. the decimal-place notation system) passed into Arabic and fired the curiosity of a handful of courtiers and professional men.
The ease and precision of arithmetical calculation, which the decimal system allowed, stimulated Arab mathematicians to generalize arithmetical processes and relationships into what we know by its Arabic name as algebra. This carried mathematical understanding of numbers in quite new directions, and away from the geometrical shape of Greek mathematical thought.
A second fruitful direction in which scientific curiosity turned was toward alchemY. Many of the ideas and some of the skills alchemists acquired seem to have originated among Taoists in China. But the Arabs took up the search for the philosopher's stone with enthusiasm and tried long and hard to transmute base metals into gold. In the process, devices for distillation, heating, dissolving, and in other ways altering the physical state of matter were invented or improved; and a number of chemical compounds were synthesized successfully, despite radically erroneous ideas about how chemical reactions occur.
Another science in which Arab work surpassed anything known to the Greeks was mathematical optics--a result of the skill the Moslems acquired in grinding lenses of glass to fit a mathematical curve. But such improvements did not shake the general authority of such authors as Galen in medicine and Ptolemy in astronomy. Except in mathematics, Arab science remained always faithful to the Greek in fundamentals and departed from their authority only in detail.