Islam
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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..... |
