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Islam's Place in History 

in A Study of History

Arnold J. Toynbee

Courtesy: A Study of History, Vol. XII (Oxford University Press, 1961), pp.461-476.

 

XIV. ISLAM’S PLACE IN HISTORY

ISLAM's epiphany was dramatic by comparison with Christianity's and Buddhism's, Jesus's life and death passed unnoticed at the time, except among the obscure and tiny band of His Galilaean Jewish disciples. Our information about His ministry comes exclusively from the scriptures of the Christian Church. We should know next to nothing about it if our only sources were the Hellenic literature in Greek and Latin and the Jewish literature in Aramaic of the first century of the Christian Era. Siddhartha Gautama's ministry, likewise, is knoWn only from the Pali scriptures of the Hinayana, though, according to these records, Gautama, unlike Jesus, was something of a public figure in His own lifetime. He was a king's son; and, after He had renounced His worldly heritage, He still consorted with kings during His ministry. Yet Buddhism did not make a political impact on the World on a grand scale till about two hundred years, and Christianity not till about three hundred years, after the founder's day, when their respective political fortunes were made by the conversions of Ashoka and Constantine. On the other hand, Islam made a comparable impact during the founder's own lifetime, and its political fortunes were made by the founder himself.

Muhammad yielded, in the thirteenth year of his ministry, to the temptation which, according to the Gospels, was resisted by Jesus at the beginning of His. For twelve years Muhammad had been a sincere and intrepid but utterly unsuccessful prophet.1 He had won only a tiny band   of converts; most of these had had eventually to take asylum in Abyssinia; and Muhammad himself was in daily danger of meeting Jesus's fate. After his acceptance of the invitation from the people of Yathrib (subsequently known as Medina)2 to become the head of their state, Muhammad proved to be not only a prophet but also a political genius.

            I Philip Bagby has derided me (in Toynbee and History, p. 105) for stating this notorious fact in previous volumes of this book (e.g. iii. 467; v. 128 and 676), as if I had made a ludicrous gaffe. The statement is, of course, a commonplace, It will be found in every serious account of Muhammad's career. Muhammad was, in the end, a conspicuously successful man, but he succeeded, not as a prophet, but as a statesman. Islam, too, was, in the end, a conspicuously successful religion, but its spiritual fortune was made by the converted descendants of Christians and Zoroastrians who had become political subjects of the militant Islamic state. These equally notorious facts are also mentioned by me in the contexts cited in the present footnote, In order to understand the character and career of Muhammad and the history of the religion that he founded, we have to distinguish (i) between Muhammad's success as a statesman and his failure as a prophet, and (ii) between the immediate success of his Islamic state and the eventual success of Islam itself as a universal religion.

2 I.e. Madinat-an-Nabi, meaning ‘city of the Prophet.’

Before his death he had compelled the commercial oligarchy of his native city-state Mecca to capitulate to him, and had shown his statesmanship-and also the generosity of his character-in the moderateness of the terms with which he had contented himself.

In addition he had extended his rule from the city-state of Yathrib over a large part of the Arabian Peninsula besides Mecca, and his troops had made a probing raid on the Roman Empire's dominions in Transjordan. This piece of audacity had met with prompt chastisement, but it was premonitory of the sweeping conquests that were to be made by Muhammad's immediate political successors. Within less than twenty years of his death they had conquered the whole of the Sasanian Persian Empire and the best part of the Roman Empire: that is to say, Syria, in the broadest sense of the word, and also Egypt.

These dramatically rapid military and political successes of early Islam have given some Western students of history the impression that the epiphany of Islam made an unusually sharp break in the history of the Old-World Oikoumene and that it had no antecedents and no precedents. Christopher Dawson's dictum1 that history 'allows the whole world situation to be suddenly transformed by the action of a single individual like Muhammad or Alexander' has already been quoted in this volume.2 A. L. Kroeber has expressed the same view. 'Islam', he says,3 'had no infancy and no real growth, but sprang up, Minerva-like, full- blown with the life of one man.'

If this were the truth, Islam's lack of antecedents could not be due just to the suddenness of its epiphany. This was neither more nor less sudden than the epiphanies of other religions and philosophies which, like Islam, had single historical founders, but whose founders-unlike what is alleged of Muhammad-had a long tradition behind them, as, for instance, Jesus had in the history of Judaism and in the antecedent religion of Israel, and as Gautama had in the previous development of Indian philosophy. The alleged lack of antecedents in Muhammad's case would be inexplicable. The simple and adequate explanation is that this Western picture is an hallucination. In reality there were substantial antecedents to Islam's epiphany and a number of precedents for it, as will be argued in the present chapter. Meanwhile, it is worth pausing to examine how the prevalent Western impression to the contrary arose.

 

1In The Dynamics of World History, p.257.

2 On p. 16 See also P 16, footnote 6.

3A.L. Kroeber: The Nature of Culture, p.388.

One of the historical phenomena that have created this erroneous impression is the scale, speed, and revolutionariness of Islam's military and political impact on the World within the thirty years beginning with Muhammad's withdrawal from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622. Within those thirty years the Islamic state incorporated, as has just been noted, the whole of Arabia, the whole of the Sasanian Persian Empire, and the Roman Empire's dominions in Syria and Egypt. These immense political successes are apt to impress modern Western scholars in particular, because modern Western Society is particularly political-minded. The Islamic state conquered vast territories and populations almost at one blow; but, in the subsequent transformation of the conquered peoples' religious, artistic, and intellectual outlook, Islam was no swifter and no more revolutionary than Christianity and Buddhism had been. Subjects can be won more quickly and easily than converts. The conversion of the Islamic state's subjects to Islam was a gradual process.1 It took at least six centuries, and even then it was not complete. Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian minorities have survived in the Islamic World down to this day-partly thanks to the toleration that Muhammad himself enjoined upon Muslims, in the Qur'an2 in their dealings with non-Muslim 'People of the Book' Who had submitted to the rule of the Islamic state. Moreover, in so far as Islam won its way, it won it, like the other missionary religions, by unavowedly receiving into itself many of the elements in its converts' previous religions. In this case, as in those, the price of converting was compromise.

Another historical phenomenon that has given Western minds the impression that the advent of Islam brought with it a sharp break in historical continuity is the sudden accompanying elevation of the Arabic language to a dominating position. In the reign of the Caliph' Abd-al- Malik (imperabat A.D. 685-705) Arabic \vas substituted for Greek as the official language of administration in those dominions of the Islamic state that had formerly belonged to the Roman Empire. But the Arabic language's chief triumph was in the unofficial realm of literature.

I Accounts of it will be found in T. W. Arnold: The Preaching of Islam, 2nd ed.

(London 1913. Constable); A. S. Tritton: The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects (London 1930. Milford) ; L. E. Browne: The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia (Cambridge 1933, University Press). ,

2 e.g. Surah xxii. 17. quoted in v. 674, footnote 1.

The sources for the study of Islamic history, from Muhammad's lifetime onwards, are copious, and many of them are of first-rate value from the historian's professional point of view. Muhammad's career, unlike Jesus's, can be followed point by point-and, in some of its chapters, almost day by day-in the full light of history. nut these valuable historical records are all in Arabic; and this pulls up short the Western historian who has been following the history of South-West Asia and Egypt in Greek and Latin records over a span of nearly twelve hundred years, beginning with the antecedents of the establishment of the Achaemenian Persian Empire, as recorded in Greek by Herodotus, and coming down to the campaigns of the Roman Emperor Heraclius as recorded in the same language by George the Pisidian (Who would have been Herodotus the Carian's neighbour if they had been contemporaries). Then, at the advent of Islam before the end of Heraclius's reign, the Greek-reading Western historian suddenly finds that the language that has served as his key to the history of twelve centuries no longer suffices. This confirms his impression that, at this point, he is confronted with a break in the continuity of history.1

This is how it looks to a Western historian, educated in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, whose point of departure is the Pre-Alexandrine Hellenic World and who views the adjacent Achaemenian Empire and its Hellenic successor-states from the Hellenic angle. He does not realize that this Hellenic point of view gives an inadequate picture of South-West Asian and Egyptian history from first to last; and so, when he is confronted with the manifest indispensability of historical records in the Arabic language for the history of the core of the Oikoumene from the seventh century of the Christian Era onwards, he does not see the significance of this baffling experience.

I J. B. Bury's first edition of A History of the Later Roman Empire carried the story down almost to the end of the eighth century of the Christian Era. The second edition breaks off at A.D, 565, the date of the death of the Emperor Justinian, and a few years before the date of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. After the second edition had been published, Bury told the present writer that he now looked back on the first edition as an act of youthful rashness. He had ventured to deal with the history of the seventh and eighth centuries without having mastered the Arabic language. By the time when he was producing his second edition, he could not face either trying to master Arabic or trying, without having done this, to rewrite the history of those two centuries. So, this time, he had laid down his pen at the latest convenient stopping-place before the date of the beginning of Muhammad's career.

 

 

What it signifies is that other languages besides Greek are indispensable for a study of the history of the preceding twelve centuries as well. Even if the historian confines his attention to the political surface of history, he ought to check the veracity of Herodotus's Greek narrative by comparing it with the Achaemenian emperors' surviving official documents in the Medo-Persian, Elamite, Akkadian, Aramaic, and Egyptian languages and scripts. If he wants to probe down below the political surface to the economic level, he must study the voluminous cuneiform records of private business transactions in the Akkadian language, produced under the Achaemenian and Seleucid regimes, that have been unearthed in Babylonia. The irrigated alluvium of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin was the economic power-house of each of these empires in turn; and Akkadian, not Greek, is the key language for any study of the economic history of South-West Asia in this age-even for the time when, on the political plane, the Achaemenidae had been sup- planted by the Greek-speaking Seleucid dynasty. If the inquirer wants to probe down below the economic level to the religious, then he must read Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Avestan, and Pehlevi-and Pali and Sanskrit too, if he is going to invade India at Demetrius of Bactria's heels. In fact, for any inquirer into Egyptian and South-West Asian history who takes a comprehensive view of history, languages other than Greek are of capital importance throughout, and not merely since the advent of Islam and of the Arabic language in Islam's train. In this perspective the obvious indispensability of Arabic and inadequacy of Greek from the seventh century of the Christian Era onwards will be seen to be no sudden revolutionary new departure. The self-assertion of Arabic merely makes it impossible to continue to turn a blind eye to a situation that has been confronting the inquirer all the time.

Let us suppose that the Roman Empire had not recovered from the bout of anarchy and disruption into which it fell in A.D. 235. Let us suppose, in fact, that Zenobia, the queen of the North Arabian city- state of Palmyra, had been able to retain the territories that she had acquired, at lightning speed, at the Roman Empire's expense. Her dominions extended, at their widest, over the whole eastern third of the Roman Empire. They stretched north-westward to the Black Sea Straits and south-westward to the Syrtes. Let us suppose, further, that Zenobia had been a Christian, and that she had derived her Christianity from the Mesopotamian Christian kingdom of Osrhoene, and had there- fore acquired it in the Syriac language, not in the Greek. And, finally, let us suppose that she had been half a century ahead of Constantine in giving Christianity an official status in her dominions. None of these suppositions is extravagant. History could easily have taken this turn. And, if it had, then Christianity would have made the same impression on Western historians that Islam now makes. It would have seemed to them suddenly and unforeseenly to have changed the face of the World by depriving the Western historian of his linguistic key to an under- standing of the World's history. Zenobia's hypothetical Christianity would have enthroned the Syriac language in the Greek language's place, as Muhammad's historical Islam did enthrone Arabic in its place some four hundred years later. This would have created, in Western eyes, the same impression of a revolutionary break; and in this imaginary event, as in the historical event, the impression would have been illusory. All that would then have happened in the third century would have been merely what did happen in the seventh century. A 'pseudomorphosis', in Spengler's usage of the term,1 would have been convicted of being the camouflage that it always had been in reality. The presence of the ever- present non-Hellenic core of South-West Asian life, beneath the Hellenic veneer, would have been exposed some four hundred years earlier than the actual date at which the veneer was stripped off. But this exposure would not have made a revolutionary break in the continuity of history if it had occurred in the third century, any more than it made one in the seventh century. Islam's alleged lack of antecedents turns out to be nothing more substantial than a Western Hellenist's illusion.

If we look at Pre-Islamic history again, and look, this time, with non- Hellenic eyes, we shall find abundant antecedents and precedents for all the main phenomena that constitute, in combination, the epiphany of Islam.

The non-Arab world was first apprised of the new religion's epiphany by a militant outbreak of Semitic-speaking Nomads from the Arabian Peninsula; but the Arab Volkerwanderung in the seventh century of the Christian Era was not the first eruption of its kind, any more than it was the last.

1 See Chapter XVIII, Annex, pp. 670-4.

The Arabs themselves had erupted out of Arabia twice before: in the second century B.C., when the Seleucid Empire was losing its grip on the Fertile Crescent, and, before that, in the seventh century B.C., when the Assyrian Empire was beginning to labour under the weight of its self-imposed military burdens. The Aramaean-Chaldaean-Hebrew eruption in the thirteenth century B.C., when the New Empire of Egypt was in decline, is comparable to the Muslim Arab eruption in point of magnitude and vehemence. Round about the beginning of the second millennium B.C. the Amorites had erupted as far afield as their Aramaean successors penetrated. Five or six hundred years earlier the Akkadians had thrust their way out of the desert on to the alluvium, to the north- west of Sumer, and had pressed on, up the Tigris, into the country that they made into Assyria. The Canaanites must have erupted out of Arabia no later than the Akkadians, and their occupation of Syria may have been still earlier.

The vast Islamic empire expanded, within the span of a single generation, out of a tiny nucleus: a single city-state commanding a single oasis. But Muhammad's Yathrib had its predecessors in Zenobia's Palmyra and, on a smaller scale, in Petra and in Hatra. In each of these earlier cases, too, a city-state in an Arabian oasis had generated a notable political power. The Roman Emperor Trajan liquidated the miniature empire of Petra and annexed its territories; but he was defeated in his attempt to capture Hatra. The lines of the Roman invader's unsuccessful circumvallation surround the inviolate walls of Hatra to this day. Hatra had been under the protection of the trinity of goddesses who, in Muhammad's day, were the protectresses of Mecca. Their potency was so great that Muhammad almost succumbed to the temptation to stultify his mission by proclaiming them to be daughters of the One True God of the pure religion of Abraham.

Under the Umayyad regime, which centred itself on Syria and chose Damascus for its capital, the Islamic state was, first and foremost, a successor-state of the Roman Empire. In this role it had been anticipated, in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era, by the principality of the Banu Ghassan, who had guarded the Roman Empire's desert marches, and in the third century by the wide, though short-lived, empire that Zenobia had ruled from Palmyra. The Umayyads (with the single exception of 'Umar II) found Hellenism more to their taste than Islam-as witness the Hellenic decorations of Hisham's palace on the northern outskirts of Jericho. In this philhellenism they had been anticipated by earlier barbarian conquerors of previously Hellenized ground: for instance, the Parthians in Iran and 'Iraq and the Kushans in Bactria and India.

By conquering 'Iraq and Iran as well as Syria and Egypt, the Islamic state had made itself a successor-state of the Sasanian Empire as well as of the Roman Empire. The economic pull of 'Iraq on its Arab conquerors made itself felt when the Umayyad regime was replaced by the , Abbasid regime, and when the capital of the Islamic state was moved from Damascus to the new city of Baghdad. Under the' Abbasids the Islamic state took its place in the long series of empires based on 'Iraq's economic resources. The series stretched back through the Sasanian, Parthian, Seleucid, Achaemenian, and Neobabylonian empires to the Empire of Agade, which had given political unity to the Fertile Crescent in the third millennium B.C.

The Islamic state, in the first chapter of its history, was up in arms against the political ascendancy of Hellenism in South-West Asia and Egypt-an ascendancy that had been upheld there by Roman power since the last century B.C. On the cultural plane, on the other hand, Islam eventually equipped itself for playing its part as a universal religion by drawing on Hellenic intellectual resources.1 Thus its attitude towards Hellenism was the ambivalent one of attraction towards it on the cultural plane coexisting with hostility towards it on the political plane. But this ambivalence towards Hellenism was not peculiar to Islam. It was the attitude of both Monophysite and Nestorian christianity at the time when Islam first took the field; and, before that, it had been the attitude of Catholic Christianity until the concordat with the Roman Imperial Government had degraded this into being the 'Imperialist' (Melchite) Church in the eyes of the Roman Empire's disaffected Syrian and Egyptian Christian subjects. Before the days of Constantine and Theodosius, the Catholic Christian Church had been anti-Hellenic and philhellene simultaneously. It had won its converts from Hellenism by presenting itself to them in an Hellenic dress. Islam was following these Christian precedents when, after completing the expulsion of Hellenism from South-West Asia and Egypt on the political plane, it proceeded to provide itself with a theology by having recourse to Hellenic philosophy.

      I See p. 450, with footnote 2, above, and also pp. 471 and 671, footnote 1

The various aspects of the epiphany and early subsequent history of Islam thus turn out to have antecedents and precedents, like other historical phenomena. More than that, they can be satisfactorily explained. We can see why Muhammad, in his particular generation, was moved to engage in his religious mission. We can see why he was compelled to become a politician as well as a prophet. We can see why the Islamic state, in the first chapter of its history, was able to make its swift and sweeping military conquests. Finally, we can see how, after the establishment of the Islamic world-state, Islam developed into a universal religion of the same order as Christianity and on a par with it.

Muhammad's prophetic mission can be explained as a consequence of the cumulative effect of a gradual but progressive penetration of Arabia by the influences of civilization.1 This process may have begun before the close of the second millennium B.C., when the domestication of the camel made all but the greatest of the Arabian deserts traversable by Man. Before the end of the last millennium B.C. the Yaman had, as we have seen,2 been drawn into the field of the Syriac Civilization. In the sixth century B.C. the Neobabylonian Emperor Nabunaid had established an outpost of the Sumero-Akkadian Civilization in the North- West Arabian oasis of Tayma. By Muhammad's time, Judaism and Christianity were radiating their influence into the Arabian Peninsula vigorously from the north-west, the south-west, and the north-east. There were well-established Jewish communities at Khaybar and Yathrib, and Christian communities in the Yaman. In the Arabia of Muhammad's day there was a widespread feeling that it was high time for the Arabs to become 'People of the Book', such as the Jews and the Christians were. Muhammad had equally sincere, though less articulate, predecessors in the hanifs, and he had a contemporary and a potential rival in the Prophet Maslamah. If the Hijazi prophet Muhammad had failed, the Najdi prophet Maslamah might have done the equivalent of Muhammad's work; and, if Maslamah, too, had failed, some other prophet would have arisen, in some other part of Arabia, to step into Maslamah's and Muhammad's shoes. So far from springing up 'Minerva-like,

 1 This point has been noticed in iii. 277.

2On pp. 393-4.

 

 

full-blown, with the life of one man',1 Islam, like Christianity, had a long pre-natal history. A normal birth offers an apter simile for the epiphany of Islam than the legendary birth of the goddess Athene. A normal birth is a sudden and dramatic event, but it does not come out of the blue and is therefore not inexplicable.

In the second part of his public career, beginning with his withdrawal from Mecca to Medina, Muhammad successfully played the military and political part for which the Jews, after their loss of their political independence, had cast their expected Messiah.

The Jewish Messiah's designated task was, humanly speaking, a forlorn hope. He was to overthrow a world-empire to which the Jews were subject, and was to establish a Jewish world-empire in its place. It was recognized that the Messiah could succeed only in virtue of his being supported by Yahweh's almighty power. Left to his own human re- sources he would be foredoomed; and, in fact, as long as the Roman Empire -lasted, every Jewish political leader who tried to play the conventional Messiah's part brought a crushing disaster on himself and on his community. The Roman power was invincible and ubiquitous. The mere accusation of aspiring to be the Messiah was enough to procure a death-sentence-as Jesus's Jewish enemies knew when they brought this charge against Him in Pilate's court. As the story is told in the Gospels, the charge against Jesus was groundless. Either He had not claimed to be the Messiah in any sense, or He had made the claim in a non-political and non-militant sense that changed the conventional concept of the Messiah's role out of all recognition. Nevertheless, Jesus was put to death by the Roman authorities. They were taking no chances. In fact, under the regime of the Roman world-state, a prophet was doomed if he was even falsely accused of intending to go into politics and to take up arms. His only hope lay in a policy of strict nonviolence, and even this might not save him.

The regime under which Muhammad entered on his prophetic mission was entirely different. He was a citizen of a turbulent city-state. In the Mecca of his day non-violence certainly would not save the life of a prophet who was preaching a doctrine that was objectionable to the local ruling oligarchy.

I Kroeber, quoted on p. 462.

 

 

But, unlike the Roman Empire, the Meccan city-state was not ubiquitous. Its jurisdiction was limited to a single oasis. It was practicable to withdraw beyond the reach of the Quraysh's not very long arm; and thus, when Muhammad was offered the political headship of the independent city-state of Medina, he had found his effective retort to the Meccan oligarchy's hostility. Since Muhammad at Medina turned out to be a political genius, his retort, before long, became not merely effective but crushing. His political career need not be considered further in this present context, as it has been discussed at some length in a previous volume.1 It is sufficient here to note that there is nothing in- explicable in it.

Nor is there any mystery about the causes of the early Islamic state's swift and sweeping military successes. The key is to be found in the division of the territories once conquered from the Achaemenidae by Alexander between two rival empires: one of them based on 'Iraq and the other centred on the Mediterranean. This political constellation had been in existence for 700 years by the time when Muhammad's second political successor, the Caliph 'Umar I (imperabat A.D. 634-44) over- threw the Sasanian Persian Empire and wrested from the Roman Empire its dominions south-east of Taurus. The two empires had brought these disasters upon themselves by allowing the chronic border-warfare between them to boil up, from a limited competition for the possession of frontier fortresses and provinces, into a life-and-death struggle in which the very existence of both powers was at stake. Most of Muhammad's lifetime (vivebat circa A.D. 570-632) was occupied, in the heart of the Oikoumene immediately to the north of Arabia, by two long- drawn-out and devastating Romano-Persian wars (gerebantur A.D. 572- 91 and 603-28) that ended, as far as the two belligerents' mutual relations were concerned, in nothing more constructive than a re-establishment of the status quo ante. The effective consequent change was in the balance of power between the two empires and the Arab barbarians beyond their southern frontiers. Both empires emerged from this double great war exhausted. By contrast, the Arabs emerged notably enriched and instructed. They had earned money by serving as mercenaries on both sides; they had invested much of it in buying up-to-date military equipment; and, most important of all, they had learnt by

I iii, 466--72.

 

practice how to use this equipment and how to conduct military operations with large forces on the grand scale. This speeded up and completed a process that had been going on for some centuries past. For religion was not the only element of 'civilization' that had been seeping into Arabia. Military equipment and skill had been seeping in as well, even before the long history of Romano-Persian warfare had mounted to its fatal climax. The most potent new weapon that the Arabs had acquired in the Pre-Islamic Age was the horse,1 and horsemanship had made the Arabs militarily formidable-as it was to make the Plains Indians of North America when they had acquired the horse from the Spaniards.2

Thus, by the time of Muhammad's hijrah to Medina, the Arabs already possessed all the requisites for becoming world-conquerors except one, and that was political unity. When Muhammad had given them this it was inevitable that they should erupt and that their eruption should sweep away everything in its path. Few Arabs ever became devotees of Islam for its own sake, and most Arabs strongly objected, at first, to having the political rule of the Islamic state imposed on them. Why should they submit to being ruled by the people of Yathrib in league with a handful of Meccan refugees? The news of Muhammad's death in A.D. 632. was the signal, in Arabia, for a widespread war of secession (riddah); and this might have been difficult for Muhammad's political successors to suppress by force of arms alone. The dissident Arabs were reconciled to the rule of the Islamic state by the realization that, under this unified command, they had it in their power to conquer the Oikoumene and plunder it. The misery of the war-stricken Persian and Roman empires, which was so keenly felt by their subjects, represented incredible wealth when appraised by the standards of their starveling Arab conquerors.

In making the Arabs' potential military ascendancy tell by giving them political unity, Muhammad did for them what Philip of Macedon had done for the Hellenes. These had established their military ascendancy over the Achaemenian Persian power as far back as the years 480- 479 B.C., when they had so signally defeated Xerxes' attempt to conquer Continental European Greece. The successful march of Cyrus the Younger's 10,000

1See L. Caetani: Studi di Storia Orientale, vol. 1 (Milan 1911, Hoepli), r. 346, cited already in viii. 17. footnote 5.

2 See viii. 637-9.

Hellenic mercenaries from Babylonia to the Black Sea coast of Anatolia in 401-400 B.C., in defiance of the Achaemenian Empire's military power, and the Lacedaemonians' successful campaigns in Western Anatolia in 399--393 B.C., had indicated what might be achieved by a Panhellenic military effort. Indeed, the Spartan King Agesilaus might have anticipated Alexander by sixty years if, in 395 B.C., Athens and Thebes had not joined hands to take the Lacedaemonians in the rear. The Hellenes had to wait until Philip of Macedon had imposed political unity on them in order to reap the harvest of the military ascendancy over the Achaemenian Empire that they had established 45 years before Philip's successor Alexander-the Hellenic 'Umar- crossed the Hellespont.

Kroeber's dictuml that 'Islam had no infancy and no real growth' is also irreconcilable with the historical facts. The truth surely is that Islam had an infancy which was unpromising, and was redeemed from this by a growth which was remarkable.

It is true that Islam, as preached by its founder Muhammad, was essentially a 'higher religion'. Muhammad summoned his fellow country-men the people of Mecca to abandon the worship of their local pantheon, domiciled in the Ka'bah, and to submit themselves to a god who was proclaimed by his Meccan prophet to be the One True God of all men and of the whole Universe. It was this that got Muhammad into trouble with the ruling oligarchy of the Meccan city-state. At the same time, Muhammad's horizon was bounded by the limits of his own nation, as Jesus's horizon was, according to the passages in the Gospel according to St. Matthew2 in which He is reported to have instructed His emissaries not to visit the gentiles or the Samaritans, but to go rather to 'the lost sheep of the house of Israel'. The Arabs' aspiration to become 'People of the Book', like the Jews and the Christians, was a nationalistic one; and it took a form that is characteristic of barbarians camped on the fringe of a civilization.3 The Arabs were sufficiently impressed by the culture of the Roman Empire to hanker after a religion of the kind professed by the Empire's inhabitants; yet at the same time they were sufficiently independent-minded to be unwilling simply to adopt their impressive

I Quoted on p. 462.

2 Matt. x. 5-6; xv. 21-28. In Mark vii. 24-30. Jesus is reported to have taken the same line-and this in harsh and wounding language-in His negative first reaction to a Caananite woman's appeal to Him.

3This point has been made by R. Coulbom in Toynbee and History, p. 165. Cp. the present book, v. 230.

neighbours' religion as it stood without giving it an Arab national colouring.

In the eyes of Arabs of Muhammad's generation, Christianity was the national religion of the Romans and Judaism the national religion of the Jews; and the picture of the One True God that Muhammad presented to his countrymen was, like the Jewish picture of Him, equivocal. Besides being the God of the Universe, He was to be the national god of the Arabs. Islam was to be a revival of the pure religion of Abraham, and this time 'the Chosen People' of Abraham's lineage were to be the Arab offspring of his son Ishmael instead of the Jewish offspring of his son Isaac.

In having this tincture of barbarian nationalism, Islam resembled the Arian form of Christianity which, three centuries earlier, had been adopted by the East German barbarians on the eve of their own invasion of the Roman Empire from the opposite quarter. This element of nationalism in Islam was, of course, greatly reinforced when Muhammad extended the territory of his Medinese state not only over Mecca but over the whole of Arabia. As has been noted already, the Arabs were in- different to their prophet's religious ideas and ideals, but they appreciated the military power which he had conferred on them by uniting them politically in a Pan-Arabian Islamic Commonwealth, and Islam was carried out of Arabia into the former dominions of the Roman and Sasanian empires as the national religion of the conquering Arab armies.

The conquerors did not much want non-Arab converts. The conquered peoples seemed to them more valuable as surtax-payers than as co-religionists. It was their Zoroastrian and Christian non-Arab subjects who took the Arabs' kingdom by storm. They forced their way into the fold of Islam, deposed the Arabs from their political ascendancy in the Islamic state, and gave Islam itself an organization and a theology1 which removed, once for all, the ambiguity that, till then, had kept it havering between the two incompatible ideals of nationalism and universality. Thus the non-Arab converts to Muhammad's religion eventually saved for Islam a situation that the founder himself had compromised. But for these converts, it seems probable that Islam would have gone the way that Arian Christianity went. Like the Burgundians, the Visigoths, and the Lombards, the Arabs would have abandoned their barbarian national religion, sooner or

1 See p. 450, with footnotes.

later, for the universal religion of their Christian subjects, if these subjects had not, meanwhile, insisted on making of Islam a new higher religion for all men on the pattern of the' Christianity that the Christian converts to Islam had formerly professed.

This eventual harvesting of Islam's potentialities as a universal religion was an immense cultural, as well as religious, achievement. It was comparable to what had previously been done for Christianity; and it was done by the same people and by the same means. The people whose good offices enabled Islam, as well as Christianity, to grow to its full spiritual and cultural stature were the South-West Asian heirs of the combined Syriac and Hellenic heritages. As we have seen in the preceding chapter,1 both the Syriac and the Hellenic Civilization's continuity had been broken-the Syriac Civilization's by the impact of Hellenism, and the Hellenic Civilization's by the impact of a Syriac-Hellenic religion, Christianity. The former participants in the two civilizations had lost their consciousness of their distinctive cultures, but they had not lost their cultural fertility. On the contrary, the Syriac and Hellenic cultures, in losing their distinctive identities, had blended into a culture- compost which had an unrivalled nutritive power. The feat of nursing not only one but two higher religions into a maturity at which each of them makes a universal appeal is an achievement that it would be hard to match.

The prevalent depreciation of Islam in the West is a relic of anti-Islamic Christian prejudice. This stubbornly survives even in modern Western minds that feel an obligation, in their intellectual work, to correct the Christian bias in their cultural heritage, and that imagine themselves, in their unfavourable appraisal of Islam, to be acting up to their own high standard of detachment and to be condemning Islam objectively, on its own demerits. Kroeber, for example, has given an interpretation of Islam as an historical phenomenon in the light of an hypothesis of his about the history of the course of civilization in the Old World. Kroeber likens Old-World civilization to a fire that started in the Fertile Crescent and that then spread, as fires are apt to spread, in a progressively widening circle from its point of origin. The flame keeps alight round the circle's ever-advancing circumference, long after it has died away and left nothing but cold grey ashes on the spot which was its original hearth. This hypothesis has some

          1 On pp. 446-54.

notable merits. The greatest of these is that it fits a number of the historical facts. An almost equal merit is that it rises 'superior to the one-sided conventional Western prejudice that takes account solely of the westward spread of civilization from Sumer and Egypt through the Mediterranean into Europe, and thence eventually into the Americas, and ignores its contemporaneous spread into India and Eastern Asia. The progress of a movement on its outer edge after it has died down at its original point of departure is a phenomenon that can be observed in a number of situations in non-human nature and also in human affairs. The outward- moving circle of flame has one parallel in the circular wave set in motion by throwing a stone into a pond. The wave continues to travel outwards after the spot where the stone hit the water has become still again. A city, likewise, sometimes continues to grow round its edges after its original core, which was once the heart of its life, has fallen into squalor or even into desolation. And the Oikoumene is, in a sense, one great city: the City of Zeus in which the City of Cecrops is reproduced on the grand scale.1 This, however, is only a poetic simile; and Kroeber himself has warned me2 that a simile is not the same thing as a demonstration,

It is true, as we have noticed,3 that, within the span of half a millennium ending in the fourth century of the Christian Era, four civilizations -three of them at home in the heart of the Oikoumene and the fourth, the Hellenic Civilization, also long since established there-dissolved, in the sense that the former participants in them lost their consciousness of continuity with their cultural heritage. It is also true that Islam subsequently established itself in this region in succession to Christianity. Kroeber is, of course, right in saying4 that' Islam arose in the very region of the first hearth of all higher civilization: ...in the Near Eastern area of the Neolithic Revolution, of the first farming and towns and kings and letters.' But he is surely wrong in going on to say5 that 'it arose at a time when constructive cultural impulses had long since moved out from that hearth'. The loss of consciousness of cultural continuity is not the same thing as a loss of power of cultural

1Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, Book IV, chap. 23.

             2 In The Nature of Culture, p. 376, quoted in this volume on p. 38, footnote 2.

3 On pp. 447-8.

4 In op. cit., p. 381.

 5 Ibid.

 

 

creativity. The fusion of the diverse elements of the Syriac and Hellenic civilizations had already provided a fertile compost from which Christianity had sprung; and its fertility now proved great enough to produce a second crop, of com- parable value, in the shape of Islam. Have there ever anywhere been 'constructive cultural impulses' that have produced finer fruits than this pair of higher religions with a message for all men?

Islam, in succession to Christianity, came to maturity in the heart of the Oikoumene in an age in which this heart was still beating as vigorously as ever. If Kroeber had been willing to recognize Islam as being the peer of Christianity that it is, he would not have seen it, through jaundiced eyes, as a 'reduced, retractile, civilization, an anti-Hellenic, anti-Sasanian, anti-Christian civilization. ...without art, without much intellectual curiosity or profundity, without many of the aspirations customary in civilizations'.1 He would not then have been led to explain Islam's imaginary inferiority by making the unwarranted assumption that the region in which Islam came to maturity was by that time a cultural waste land. Whether or not we accept his simile of the outward spread of a fire, leaving a burnt-out centre, as a valid key to the geographical history of civilization in the Old World, it is certain that the fire had not been extinguished in its original hearth either before the conquest of South- West Asia and Egypt by the primitive Muslim Arabs or during the sub- sequent formative centuries when Islam was being brought to maturity there by local non-Arab converts from among the conquered Christian and Zoroastrian population. Even during the previous age of political division, 'Iraq had been the power-house of the Sasanian Empire, and Syria and Egypt of the Roman Empire. The potency of all three countries was notably enhanced when the Arab conquest reunited them politically for the first time since the break-up of the Achaemenian Empire, nearlya thousand years back. Under the Umayyad and' Abbasid regimes, South- West Asia and Egypt were still the heart of the Oikoumene, as they had been during the previous three or four thousand years.

This historic region did eventually fall into adversity and suffer an eclipse from which it is re-emerging in our time. But this did not happen till after Islam had come to maturity there; and Islam was not the cause of it.

1 Op. cit., PP. 381-2.

The potency of this region was derived, and is derived once again today, from two assets: its local productivity and its geographical location at the centre of the Oikoumene's network of communications. In the past its staple production was agricultural: the crops raised on its irrigated fields. Today its staple production is mineral: the oil got from below its surface. The region is estimated to contain the major part of the World's oil reserves, as, in the past, it produced the major part of the World's annual cereal harvest. As for this region's geographical role as the central node of the World's communications, the permanent features of the World's geography are so favourable to South-West Asia and Egypt that this region is now recovering its natural position as the mid-point of the Oikoumene less than four hundred years after the date at which the Oikoumene was thrown out of its normal geographical balance by two almost simultaneous revolutionary Western achievements: the discovery of a New World west of the Atlantic and the discovery of the uninterrupted sea-route from the Atlantic coast of Western Europe to Southern and Eastern Asia round the Cape of Good Hope. Since 1869 this roundabout route has been short-circuited by the cutting of the Suez Canal. This has reopened the direct passage for ships between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean which existed in the Achaemenian Age after the Emperor Darius I's engineers had cut his canal from Suez to the head of the Nile Delta. The Suez Canal offers the shortest sea-route between the two main concentrations of population in the twentieth-century world: one in Southern and Eastern Asia and the other in Europe and North America; and in our day it has been supplemented by a bundle of air-routes which bunch together where they traverse the land-bridge between Eurasia and Africa.

Thus the heart of the Oikoumene has now surmounted the crisis by which it was overtaken when the fifteenth-century Western maritime adventurers made their momentous geographical discoveries. Thanks to the striking of oil, South-West Asia is now well on the way towards recovering from the previous blow that it had suffered in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era when the Mongols had committed genocide against its population and had also cut the roots of its agricultural productivity by giving the coup de grace to the 4,000-years-old water-control system in 'Iraq.1 The degree of

            1 See iv, 42-43.

 

 

the devastation that was inflicted by the Mongols on South-West Asia east of Euphrates can be measured by the contrast between present-day agricultural Egypt, which has continued, without a break, to be a going concern since the unification of its water-control system round about 3000 B.C., and present-day agricultural 'Iraq, which even today is only just beginning to recover from the blow dealt to it by the Mongols 700 years ago. The wholesale destruction of human life was still more disastrous than the wrecking of Man's engineering works. Visit Khurasan, the north-easternmost province of the present kingdom of Persia, and take your stand in the vast empty space within the four-square walls of the Pre- Mongol city of Tus or the Pre-Mongol city of Nishapur. You will realize that, even after the passage of 700 years, South-West Asia is still prostrate under the blow that it received from the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The thirteenth-century Mongol devastation of South-West Asia, followed by the fifteenth-century West European diversion of the World's sea-routes away from the Levant and the Red Sea, explain, between them, the decline and eclipse of South-West Asia and Egypt in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This makes the recovery of this region in the nineteenth century and there- after all the more remarkable and impressive. In the present context the significance of this temporary eclipse and subsequent recovery is that both events have been subsequent to the epiphany and maturation of Islam. And this matter of chronological fact would appear to refute, decisively, Kroeber's imaginative thesis that Islam is Dead Sea fruit grown on waste land.

What is the relation of Islam, as a religion, to the Islamic Civilization that is so prominent a feature in the cultural map of the present-day world? Rushton Coulborn makes the point1 that 'Islamic Civilization, when it arises, is obviously something new. Its rise was mediated by Islam as a religion.' This dictum is, in my judgment, unexceptionable. I myself have certainly never written anything to the contrary, and would not ever oppose it so long as it is taken as implying no more than it says. I have the impression, however, that Coulborn is intending to imply that the Islamic Civilization came into existence simultaneously with Islam itself, and that in this point

I In Toynbee and History, p. 163.

 

 

its relation is different from that of the Christian civilizations to Christianity. If, in interpreting him in this sense, I have correctly caught his meaning, then he and I disagree. As I see it, the relation of the Islamic Civilization to Islam is the same as that of the Christian civilizations to Christianity. In both cases, as I see them, the religion made its appearance in the World and proceeded to grow to maturity within a social and cultural framework that was older and was also at least partly alien. It was only after this older alien civilization or civilizations had weathered away that the new religion incidentally mothered a new civilization which is legitimately called by its name because it bears its unmistakable stamp.

This construction of the course of events would not, I think, be disputed by any student of the relation between Christianity and the Christian civilizations. It would be recognized that Christianity appeared and matured within the framework of the Hellenic Civilization, and that the Christian civilizations did not begin to come to the surface before the period, running approximately from the latter part of the fourth to the latter part of the seventh century of the Christian Era, when the Hellenic Civilization was dissolving. Christianity in its formative age was the religion of a minority living as strangers and sojourners in a world that was not their own. Islam in its formative age was, as I see it, in the same situation. It came to maturity within the framework of alien civilizations-in this case, not the Hellenic Civilization but the Nestorian Christian, the Monophysite Christian, and the Zoroastrian Iranian. It is true that the Christian minority in the Roman Empire lived in the catacombs, whereas the Muslim minority in the Islamic world-state lived in the camps and the palaces. But this Muslim minority was in the same position as the Christian minority in the essential point that it was living in a world that it had not created and in which it was not at home.

After the epiphany of Islam, as after the epiphany of Christianity, centuries had to pass before the new religion could mother a new civilization; for the necessary pre-condition for that was that the minority should have become the majority. In the circum-Mediterranean world this happened in the course of the three centuries ending in the seventh century of the Christian Era; in South-West Asia and Egypt it happened in the course of the three centuries ending in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era. Before that, the Muslims-including the Arabs' converted non-Arab subjects as well as the Arabs themselves-had been only a minority in the dominions of the Islamic world-state. The Islamic state's Zoroastrian subjects in Iran and in the Oxus-Jaxartes basin had gone over to Islam more quickly, in larger numbers, than its Christian subjects west of Zagros. But the mass-conversions to Islam did not begin to take place in any of the Islamic world-state's dominions till the Islamic state was harried by barbarian invasions. It was the Crusades and the subsequent irruption of the Mongols that moved the mass of the population of South-West Asia and Egypt to rally to Islam as a spiritual force that might perhaps hold society together in a cataclysm in which 'Earth's foundations fled'.

I therefore continue, on reconsideration, to maintain that the Islamic Civilization--or civilizations-arose after the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, when the last remnant of the' Abbasid world-state had been extinguished by the Mongol war-lord Hiilagii. In order to locate the place of Islam in history, we have to distinguish clearly between three different things: the Islamic religion that was founded and compromised by the Prophet Muhammad and was then salvaged by his political successors' converted non-Arab subjects; the Islamic state that was founded by the statesman Muhammad and that swiftly grew, like the proverbial grain of mustard-seed, into a tree that overshadowed the Earth;1 and the Islamic Civilization (or civilizations) that has been a cultural by-product of Islam in the same sense in which the Christian civilizations have been cultural by-products of Christianity. If we do not keep these three different things clearly distinct in our minds, we are likely to go astray in our interpretation of Islam and of its political and cultural by-products.

1 The personal union of absolute political with absolute religious authority in the person of Muhammad died with him. His political successors did not inherit his prerogatives in the field of religion. Decisions about Islamic practice and doctrine on the basis of the Qur'an and the traditions are reached by a consensus (ijma) of the learned ('ulama) in the sacred law. Their role and standing correspond to those of the rabbis in Judaism.    

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