Islam

The history of Islam in its earliest phases is based on written sources that date from the 8th century or later. These sources look back at earliest Islam from a very specific religious and political point of view, and may well distort history in a serious way. Scholarship on the 6th and 7th centuries seems to be divided between those who support a view of early developments within Islam that is more or less close to Islamic orthodoxy, and those who argue for an Islam that only took shape during the period of conquests outside the Arabian peninsula and that only created an identity of its own toward the end of the 7th or the

Beginning of the 8th century. Here, we stick to a traditional account—but it should be noted that neither this, nor any other account, is supported by independent evidence.

The joining together of many Arabic tribes in a single community, the umma, is usually explained by pointing at the pressure put on the Arabian peninsula by Byzantium, Sassanid Persia, and Ethiopia. Ethiopia conquered the south of the peninsula in the 6th century. There had been a period when kingdoms to the north and south, such as Nabatea, Petra, Palmyra, and Yemen had brought about some political and economic integration of the Arabian peninsula, but now the area was fragmented. Under attack from Greeks, Sassanids, and Ethiopians, there was little that it could do, as it lacked a political center from where resistance could be organized. Also, its adversaries all had an exclusivist religion that strengthened their identities, the monotheism of Christians and Jews and the dualist Zoroastrianism of Persia. The religions of the Arabic tribes did not—and could not—fulfill the same function. The only common element was the town of Mecca, an important trade hub, but also housing a central sanctuary, the Ka’ba. But Mecca was also affected by the 6th-century troubles.

Here enters Mohammed (Muhammad), scion of a Meccan family. He was a man with an interest in religion, who from 610, when he was about 40 years of age, followed his calling as a prophet. For many years, God is supposed to have revealed His words to Mohammed, with the archangel Gabriel as an intermediary. This revelation was later written down in Al-Qur’an, the Qur’an (probably, “what is recited”). On the basis of these visions, Mohammed preached a monotheism that was close to the Jewish monotheistic tradition. His success was quite limited at first, and the animosity of many Meccans made Mohammed leave for Madina (Medina): the hijra (“the migration”) of 622—the year that became the base year of the Islamic calendar. In Madina, the umma of Mohammed and his followers separated from the Jews and Christians, and, at least so we are told, at that moment a new monotheistic religion came into being: Islam (“Surrender to God”).

Mohammed not only advocated monotheism, but also Arabic unity. Diplomacy and force did indeed bring this unity about, but Mohammed’s death in 632 threatened to undo everything, especially because of the question who would take over Mohammed’s leadership role. This was solved by the institution of the caliphate. A khalifa is a successor, or a stadtholder or vicaris. First, there was talk of a khalifa rasul Allah: a successor to the prophet of God, and later we also hear of a khalifa Allah: a stadtholder of God on Earth. Between 632 and 661 there ruled four orthodox caliphs, all from the direct circle of Mohammed. Between 661 and 750, the caliphs belonged to the dynasty of the Umayyads. It was in this period that the incredibly rapid expansion of Islam took place.

Immediately after the death of Mohammed, all Arabic tribes were once and for all incorporated into an Arabic unity. A combination of martial traditions, a longing for plunder and booty and the religious duty to fight a jihad, a holy war, against the infidels, brought Arabic armies to Damascus in 636, to Ctesiphon in 637, to Jerusalem in 638, Mosul in 641, and Alexandria and Tripolis in 643. Between 640 and 660, all of Iran and parts of Afghanistan were conquered; between 643 and 711, all of Northern Africa; and after 711, Spain. In 720, not even a century after the death of Mohammed, Islam ruled from the Indus to the Pyrenees. Only Byzantium withstood the Arabic onslaught: in 674-678 and in 717-718 the Arabs tried to take Constantinople, but to no avail.

It is remarkable how the Arabs managed to resist assimilation. Usually, when nomadic tribes from the periphery invade central powers, as happened in China and with the Roman Empire, the newcomers are rapidly absorbed. Not so the Arabs, who rather put their stamp on the territories they conquered. The explanation should lie in the fact that they had their own extremely powerful and exclusive set of norms and values based on their religion. In the Near East, the Arabs at first had a purely fiscal relationship with the local populations, which remained in majority non-Islamic for at least two centuries after they had been conquered.

The rapid expansion went together with internal troubles: already in the 7th century, the Islamic Arabs fought their first civil war. This ended with the murder in 661 of the fourth caliph ‘Ali, a most traumatic event that led to the permanent division between the adherents of ‘Ali and his descendants—the Shi’a—and those who recognized the Umayyad dynasty as the legitimate caliphs—the Sunna. The Umayyads tried to bring political stability, which did not return after 661, by attempting to centralize government, not so much around the person of the caliph but around a state. Part of this policy was to diminish the Arab character of the government, for instance, by replacing Arabs in the army by Syrians. The capital was transferred from Medina to Damascus. But Arabic remained the lingua franca. When the Byzantine and Sassanid bureaucracies, which the Arabs had taken over intact, were turned into an Umayyad bureaucracy, Greek and Persian were replaced by Arabic.

The years between 730 and 750 were a period of profound crisis: heavy setbacks were suffered on battlefields from the Amu Darya to France, from Northern Africa to Anatolia, and political and religious unrest were rife. The Umayyads were removed from power by a new dynasty, the ‘Abbasids, who continued the Umayyad policy of building an Islamic, not an Arabic, empire. The Arabic umma was now replaced once and for all by an Islamic umma. The symbol of this new Islamic Empire was the newly founded Baghdad, a cosmopolitan capital city that in the 9th century grew to become the largest city in the world outside China. The shift from Damascus to Baghdad turned Islam from being essentially Mediterranean into a successor to Sassanid Persia. But the glorious days of the ‘Abbasids were short-lived. In the 9th and 10th centuries, their Islamic Empire began to fall apart in smaller states. Sometimes this was merely the recognition of an existing state of affairs: thus, Spain had been autonomous since the mid-8th century. Political fragmentation meant economic regression. But although the Islamic imperium was never to return, still strong cultural ties continued to exist between the lands that once had been part of it, fostered by a shared religion.