Chapter 13: The triumph of Islam

It had taken 300 years from Jesus’s first outdoor sermon for Christianity to become the official religion of a great empire. The next religion to arise in the same corner of the world – Islam – achieved an identical result in half the time. Whereas Christianity had to wait for the conversion of an emperor, Islam acquired its empire at the point of a sword.

The founder of Islam was an Arab merchant named Muhammad, who was born in the town of Mecca, in Arabia, in around 570. Mecca was a prosperous oasis some 20 miles from the Red Sea coast, and a staging post on trading routes from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean lands. As the home of the Ka’hah sanctuary it was also a destination for long-distance pilgrimages. The Ka’bah was a black meteoritic stone that played an important part in Arab religion, which at that time had many gods. Once a year, people flocked to Mecca to visit this important shrine, to do business, negotiate marriages and generally have a good time.

Muhammad’s father and mother died before he was six, and he was brought up by his grandfather and later his uncle. When he was about 25, he was entrusted with the trading goods of Khadijah, a rich widow who was so impressed with his abilities that she accepted his proposal of marriage. This marriage enabled him to carry on business on his own account.

Muhammad was a serious-minded young man, and he got into the habit of spending nights in a cave outside the town, reflecting on the life he saw about him, and in particular on the greed and selfishness of the merchants of his native town. One night, when he was about 40, he had a vision of the Angel Gabriel, who told him that he (Muhammad) was the ‘Messenger of God’. Over the next 20 years, he experienced a succession of what he took to be divine revelations concerning the conduct of men towards God (Allah) and their fellow men.

Muhammad gathered a group of like-minded friends, and began to preach in public. His preaching was resented by the merchant class in his native town, especially when he began to acquire a following among the poorer classes. His message was subversive. It preached the worship of one God in a town that was a polytheistic religious center, to the likely detriment of the pilgrim trade. It also raised the ties that bound together fellow believers above the ties of family and clan that were the foundation of Arab culture. So long as he enjoyed the protection of his clan, his enemies were unable to touch him. But on the death of his uncle, the new head of the clan disowned him, leaving him exposed. In July 622, when he was about 52, he made his escape to Medina, a large oasis some 250 miles north of Mecca. This flight, which is known as the Hegira (Arabic hijra), is the date from which the Muslim era is reckoned.

In Medina, Muhammad joined up with a group of sympathizers with whom he had previously made contact. Having no power base in the town, they supported themselves by robbing passing camel trains. It was in these piratical escapades that Muhammad first revealed the organizational gifts that would form the basis of his later success. In his personal dealings, he seems to have been the essence of gentleness (as single-minded empire builders often are). But in his pursuit of religious and political power, he was as ruthless as he was gifted. He remained in Medina for seven years, during which time he honed his military skills, and built up his financial resources, by continued acts of piracy against passing caravans. All this time he was systematically strengthening his power base by individual conversions, and by the negotiation of military alliances. He was so successful that in January 630 he was able to march on Mecca at the head of a force of 10,000 troops, and take possession of the town with the loss of only two men. Having established his authority, he won over his former enemies by making the pilgrimage that was the basis of the town’s prosperity a sacred obligation for his followers.

He confirmed his position as the most powerful man in Arabia by a further series of alliances.

Muhammad died in Medina in 632, when he was about 62. He left behind a united Arabia. He also left behind the makings of a magnificent fighting machine, equipped with a weapon that was to prove irresistible after his death. This was the concept of jihad – ‘holy conflict’ – in which military struggle was a missionary endeavour, and death in battle was a direct route to eternal bliss. What he did not leave was a nominated successor, an oversight that would later cause a split in the religion he had created: the dispute between Sunni and Shia. The Sunni were those who believed that the prophet had chosen his comrade-in-arms Abu Bakr as his successor (caliph) before he died, and that Abu Bakr had designated his own successor, and so on. The Shia, or Shi-ites, believed that his choice had fallen on his cousin Ali, his daughter Fatima’s husband. They further believed that the legitimate succession had descended through a line of spiritual leaders (imams), each descended from Ali and Fatima, each of whom had designated his own successor. It was a dispute that would persist down the centuries, and still haunts Islam today.

Muhammad’s disciples wrote down his revelations in his lifetime. Twenty years after his death, these were gathered together to form the basis of the holy book of the Muslim faith – the Qur’an.
Qur’an means ‘recitation’, and the act of reciting its verses, in the beautiful cadences of the Arabic in which it is written, has a significance, and a power, that is impossible to convey to anyone to whom its language is inaccessible.

The revolutionary message of the Qur’an was embodied in its basic proposition: ‘There is no God but God (Allah), and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ Islam means ‘surrender to God’, and it is a word that embraces both the religion prescribed in the Qur’an and the attitude of mind it enjoins. Like Jesus, Muhammad preached the necessity of right conduct in preparation for a day of judgement, after which the faithful would spend eternity in paradise, while the infidels – those who denied the faith – suffered unending torment. It was this promise that fuelled the stupendous success of Islam’s first century and a half.

There is no force in human affairs that can match the devotion of people who are happy to die for a cause, and who know in their hearts that their reward will be eternal bliss. It was the calm way in which Christians faced death in the arena that persuaded so many Romans that theirs was a faith worth having. The way in which the soldiers of Islam faced death in battle may seem on the surface to have been utterly different. But deep down, the joyous assurance was the same. Both attitudes to death had the power to change the world – and both did.

Muhammad’s God, like Jesus’s God, was the God of the Jew, and both religions honoured the Hebrew Prophets. But one crucial difference would always distinguish Islam from Christianity. In the eyes of the faithful, Muhammad was mortal. He was the messenger of God, not a god himself. The concept of the divinity of Jesus, which ultimately became the central tenet of Christianity, had no counterpart in Islam.

After Muhammad’s death, one of his companions, Abu Bakr, was recognized by some as the first caliph, or successor.
Under him, and his successor, Umar, the tribes were fashioned into a formidable fighting force, driven by religious zeal (and the prospect of plunder), and also by the pressure of over-population in the barren Arabian peninsular.
Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, was captured in 637, Jerusalem in 638. By 664, they had taken Kabul. By 711, they had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and were advancing into Spain.
With the expansion of the empire of Islam, the incentive for Jews and Christians to convert increased.
By 780 the territory of Islam stretched from Lisbon, taking in most of Spain, the whole of North Africa, through Mesopotamia and Persia, all the way to Samarkand in Central Asia.

It was near Samarkand, at the battle of Talas in 751, that the army of Islam acquired a group of prisoners with a secret that changed the course of European history. They were Chinese papermakers, and it was as a result of their capture that the knowledge of papermaking found its way to Europe. Arabic manuscripts written on paper survive from the 9^th century.

The security of a wide-ranging empire encouraged trade, which was made easier still by a common language (Arabic), a common law and a single currency. On the back of this trade, a brilliant civilization arose, unmatched outside China.
An important element of Islam was the obligation to pursue knowledge. This imperative, and the resources of the empire, created an environment in which science flourished.
In 830, al-Rashid’s son, al-Ma’mum, founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars worked on translations of works by Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy and others that had been recovered from the far corners of the empire.
It was this store of knowledge that would later kick-start Europe’s Scientific revolution, when Arabic texts were translated into Latin.
One of Islam’s great gifts to science was the system we call Arabic numerals.
The period from the 9^th to the 12^th century was the golden age of Islam. As a religion, its greatest days lay in the future. It would go on to make converts by the hundred million: in south-east Europe; in Africa; and across Asia, all the way to China and Indonesia. But as a secular power, its influence was beginning to fade by the 10^th century. It was still a force to be reckoned with, but, weakened by internal dissension and confronted by countries with substantial resources of their own, it was no longer irresistible.

The Story of Man Part 8

Chapter 13: The triumph of Islam

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