AN INTRODUCTION TO
ISLAMIC HISTORY
Since the I/7th century a growing proportion of human beings have been
followers of Islam. Over this period the message which Muslims believe
God sent to all people through the Prophet Muḥammad has both given
meaning to Muslim lives and helped to shape the world in which they
live. Now, one fifth of the world's people identify themselves as
Muslims and their increase is amongst the fastest of humankind. They
live in the main in a great swathe of territory stretching from the
Atlantic shore of north and west Africa, through west, central, and
south Asia to island southeast Asia. Theirs is the dominant culture in
over fifty nation states, while they also form significant minority
cultures most notably in India but also in western Europe, north
America, east Asia, and southern Africa. This is a global presence
which cannot be ignored.
The world's one billion Muslims share a past of glorious achievement.
For much of the period from the II/8th to the XII/18th century the
leading civilization on the planet in terms of spread and creativity
was that of Islam. It was formed in the I/7th century when Arab
tribesmen burst out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered the two
rival empires to the north, those of Byzantium and Sasanian Iran.
Afterwards, a great new cultural and economic nexus developed which was
able to draw on the knowledge and the commodities of lands from China
and India in the east to Spain and Africa in the west, as well as those
of the west Asian lands on which it was based. This new civilization
commanded a substantial slice of the globe's area of cities and settled
agriculture. In this region there was a shared language of religion and
the law. Men could travel and do business within a shared framework of
assumptions. In its high cultures they could express themselves in
symbols to which all could respond. The first notable centers were
found in the Arab worlds of Damascus, Baghdad, and Córdoba from
the II/8th to the IV/10th centuries; the second were found in the
Turko-Iranian worlds of Istanbul, Isfahan, Bukhara, Samarqand, and
Delhi from the IX/15th to the XI/17th centuries. There were great
achievements in scholarship and in science, in poetry and in prose, and
in the arts of the book, of building, and of spiritual insight, which
are precious legacies to all humankind. For about half of what is
termed the Christian era Muslims marched at the forefront of human
progress.
From the XIII/19th century this Islamic world system was overwhelmed by
forces from the West, driven by capitalism, powered by industrial
revolution, and civilized, after a fashion, by the Enlightenment. The
symbolic moment when the leader's standard overtly passed to the West
was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1213/ 1798. From this moment
Western armies and Western capital overran the lands of the Muslims. By
the 1340s/ 1920s only Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, central Arabia, and
the Yemen were free from Western control. The caliphate, the symbolic
leadership of the Muslim community which reached back to the Prophet,
had been abolished. For a moment it had been feared that the holy
places of Islam, Mecca and Medina, would fall into infidel hands.
Muslims, who for centuries had walked hand in hand with power, had good
reason to feel that history had deserted them.
The XIV/20th century has witnessed, from the emergence of modern Turkey
in the early 1340s/1920s to that of the Muslim republics of the former
Soviet Union in the 1410s/1990s, a steady decolonization of the Muslim
world. But for many this has seemed a pyrrhic victory. More often than
not they have found Western rule replaced by that of Muslims with
Western values, while Western capital and Western culture has come to
be even more corrosive of their customs and their standards than
before. This challenge has elicited from Muslims throughout the world
an assertion of an Islamic, and for some a totalitarian Islamic, future
for their people. Such views have not been shared by all Muslims but
have come to be shared by enough to represent a significant threat to
the secular leaders of their societies, and on occasion, as in the
revolution in Iran, to drive their upholders to power. These Muslims,
who are popularly known as 'fundamentalist' in the West but are more
appropriately known as 'Islamists', are seen to challenge some of the
most cherished principles of the contemporary West, whether it be the
position of women, human rights, or the role of revealed religion in
modern life. Such is the fervor of the challenge and such is the
violence with which some Islamists are prepared to press it forward,
that there has been talk in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet
Union of the red menace being replaced by a green one.
History can offer few answers to present problems, but it can place
them in perspective and enrich understanding. Islamic history demands
attention because of the numbers of humankind who claim that past for
their own, because of the achievement of that past in the saga of human
history, and because of the challenge which the inheritors of that past
place before the present.
WESTERN ATTITUDES
TOWARD ISLAM
Anyone setting out to explore Islamic history should first arm
themselves with some knowledge of the hostility towards Islam which has
infused Western culture over many centuries. Some Christians have felt
bound to oppose a faith which denied the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, which denied Christ's crucifixion, and which raised the
authority of its Qur'ān over that of the Bible. Some Christian rulers,
equally, have felt bound to oppose the armies of a faith which for
nearly one thousand years from the Arab thrust to Poitiers in 114/ 732
to the Ottoman advance on Vienna in 1095/1683 has threatened to
penetrate to the heart of Christendom. Indeed, the Crusades from the
V/11th to the VII/13th centuries, when Christian rulers took the fight
against Islam into the eastern Mediterranean lands, were one of the
great forces of European history.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that from the early Middle Ages to
the Enlightenment European attitudes to Islam were instinct with
hostility. Early European attitudes, which out of ignorance were
fashioned from hearsay and fantasy, dismissed Islam as a Christian
heresy and its Prophet as a sorcerer, whose success owed much to the
divine imprimatur he gave to sexual license. With the Crusades there
came the first translations of the Qur'ān into Latin and a more
knowledgeable approach. This was accompanied by a redoubled attack on
the status of Muḥammad as a prophet and assaults directed at those
aspects of his message which seemed to condone the use of violence, to
endorse sexual freedom in this world, and to promise sexual ecstasy in
the next. These basic lines of attack were continued through the
Renaissance and Reformation so that on the eve of the Enlightenment the
widely accepted picture of Muḥammad was of an impostor who had founded
a heresy and given it the name of religion.
The XII/18th and XIII/19th centuries saw a continuation of the old
attacks against Islam. They were carried by missionaries who, taking
advantage of the growing European ascendancy, now fanned out across
Muslim lands; much of the medieval polemic, for instance, was repeated
in a Life of Muḥammad published in 1268/1851 by the Bombay
Tract and Book Society. But their message was broadcast, too, by
Westerners with purely secular concerns. Such was the impact of the
writers Flaubert and de Nerval, or the painters Ingres and
Gérôme, who associated sex, sensuality, and the Muslim
world. Colonial administrators, their minds exercised by the tendency
of Muslims to wage holy wars against their presence, found the term
'fanatic' the natural adjective for them.
Mercifully, however, the range of Western attitudes to Islam was
beginning to broaden. Enlightenment scholars seeking a critique of
Christianity found rational qualities in Islam. It was seen, moreover,
as a civilizing force which had transmitted ancient learning to the
West, while its Prophet came to be viewed as a profound thinker and the
founder of rational religion. This new spirit was well represented by
Napoleon who, whatever his political motives, had no difficulty on
landing in Egypt in declaring: 'I respect God, his Prophet, and the
Qur'ān.' For many in Europe, however, Islam was more than just a weapon
in the war against Christianity, it was also an exotic playground full
of novel possibilities. A good number of these were supplied by
Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights in 1116/ 1704 with
its rich store of caliphs, genies, and fabulous happenings. Creative
minds roamed excitedly through this new world—Montesquieu in Persian
Letters, Mozart in The Abduction from the Seraglio, and
Goethe in West-Easterly Diwan. Others preferred to travel and
discover for themselves how Muslim societies might expand the potential
of their lives. Not the least amongst these were women, Mary Wortley
Montagu, Hester Stanhope, and a host of others, who found that Muslim
women's lives were in many ways preferable to the circumscribed lives
of women in the West.
Modern scholarship represents a further broadening of the range of
attitudes. Arguably the modern study of Islam reaches back to the
foundation of the first chairs of Arabic at the College de France in
946/1539, at the university of Leiden in 1022/1613 and at the
university of Cambridge in 1044/1634. Later came more accurate
translations of the Qur'ān such as that of Sale into English in
1147/1734 and the writing of the Muslim past such as Simon Ockley's History
of the Saracens (1120- 31/1708-18) not as polemic but as history.
Towards the end of the XII/ 18th century large numbers of texts, both
literary and religious, began to be translated into European languages,
and in the XIII/19th century the range of study widened as scholars of
religion, biblical criticism, and comparative philology brought Islam
and the languages of the Islamic world within their purview. At the
beginning of the XIV/20th century there emerged the Islamic specialist,
like the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher, the Dutch scholar-administrator
Snouck Hurgronje, the British-American D.B. MacDonald, and the Russian
V.V. Barthold, who were concerned to expose their subject to the
highest standards of scholarship and interpretation. This tradition has
reached its highest peaks so far in the achievement of three
men—the Frenchman Louis Massignon, who greatly enlarged
understandings of the spiritual dimensions of Islam, the Englishman
Hamilton Gibb, who strove to provide a framework in which the
historical development of Islam could be understood, and the American
Marshall Hodgson, who aimed to place Islamic history in the broader
context of world history. All three, too, were believers, Massignon a
Roman Catholic, Gibb an Anglican Protestant, and Hodgson a Quaker, who
brought the insights of their personal commitment to their studies.
Those involved in this tradition of scholarship considered themselves
committed to the objective study of the Islamic world. In recent years,
however, and in particular since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism
in 1399/1978, these scholars have been accused of distorting truth,
that is, of practicing 'orientalism'. The charges are that they have
explained Islam in terms of some unchanging essence rather than subject
to processes of differentiation and change similar to those undergone
by the West, that they have created a body of received truths about
Islam which have authority in Western academic life but little relation
to Muslim realities, that they have in fact created a structure of
knowledge to explain superiority of the West over the Islamic world and
to justify its continuing domination. There is a grain of truth in
these charges, and more than a grain when we come to the popular
discourse of politicians and the press. But these charges are less
fairly applied to the XIV/20th century masters of Islamic studies. And
they are less fairly applied to most practitioners of the subject in
recent decades, who bring the insights of all disciplines from
anthropology to psychology to their research, who more often than not
work side by side with Muslims in their studies, and who reveal the
many different ways there have been and are of being Muslim.
Contemporary attitudes to Islam contain much of the old Christian
polemic in modern form, which despite the efforts of modern scholars of
the Muslim world, is firmly underpinned by the continuing vigor of the
old 'orientalist' understanding in popular discourse. Thus, the old
objection to Islam which focused on sex and sensuality has become a new
objection to the position of women. The worry about violence has become
a disapproval of the approach to human rights in Muslim states. The
fear of Muslim power has emerged again as the rise of the Islamists has
led to talk of a green menace. Islamists, indeed, in their desire to
subordinate all of human life to their understanding of revelation,
provoke the strongest responses from the secular West. They commit a
form of heresy in Western eyes by wishing to deny the achievements of
the Enlightenment and on occasion, as in the case of Salman Rushdie's Satanic
Verses, by trying to impose their standards on the West.
Ironically, Rushdie's unflattering picture of the Prophet, which has
its antecedents in the Christian polemic of the Middle Ages, is one
which most contemporary Christian clergy would deplore. In a secular
and materialistic world, the Church, particularly the Roman Catholic
branch, finds it has more in common with those who believe than with
those who do not. 'Upon the Muslims too', declared the Second Vatican
Council in the early 1380s/1960s, 'the Church looks with esteem. They
adore one God, living and enduring, merciful and all-powerful, maker of
heaven and earth and Speaker to men.' Since this Council the Vatican
has found increasing reason to make common cause with forces in the
Muslims world.
MUSLIM ATTITUDES
TOWARD THE WEST
Those setting out to explore Islamic history should also benefit from
knowledge of the range of Muslim attitudes to
the West, and how they have changed through time. In many ways they
represent the reverse of the coin of Western attitudes. In particular,
moreover, in the passing on the received 'truths' without reference to
reality, they contain elements of a Muslim 'occidentalism' to match
Western orientalism.
For a thousand years the Muslims were little interested in Europe. They
neither wished to learn its languages nor to travel its lands. They had
only the haziest idea of its geography and its peoples. They were sure
that Europe contained a lesser civilization that had nothing to offer
them. As far as Muslims noticed Europeans at all their attitudes
contained the following strands: the Europeans, as Christians, were
people of the book (ahl-i kitab), people to whom God has
revealed knowledge, but also people who had misunderstood his message;
they were kafirs, from the Arabic meaning to disbelieve or
deny, therefore infidels, and they would be referred to as such both in
speech and in official documents, often accompanied by a curse; they
were dirty; 'they do not cleanse or bathe themselves more than twice a
year, and then in cold water', commented one Muslim of the medieval
Franks, 'and then they do not wash their garments from the time they
put them on until they fall to pieces'; and they permitted their women
amazing liberties: 'the women do not cover themselves decently',
declared the companion of the Ottoman prince Jem on his visit to Nice
in 887/1482, 'but on the contrary they are proud to kiss and embrace.
If they grow tired of their games and need to rest, they sit on the
knees of strange men.' From the X/16th century some interest in the
West developed, especially at the level of, say, the Ottoman, Safawid,
or Mughal courts. The technology of warfare was of particular interest
but so too were European arts, architecture, and even religion. This
said, at the level of mosque and bazar, Muslims remained indifferent.
From the XIII/19th century Muslims were increasingly forced to take
notice of the West. Some of the old attitudes continued and were joined
by new ones. The presence of Christian missionaries who were supported
by European power in Muslim lands meant that it was no longer enough to
dismiss Christians as infidels; in northern India Muslims went on the
attack debating their faith with missionaries and developing the modern
Muslim critique of Christianity based on the implausibility of the
doctrine of the Trinity and the corruption of the scriptures. At the
same time, ruling elites found themselves forced to admire the military
strength and material achievements of the West. 'So it went on until
all had passed', declared the secretary to the Moroccan envoy to France
in 1263/1846 after watching a review of French troops, 'leaving our
hearts consumed with fire for what we had seen of their overwhelming
power and mastery ... In comparison with the weakness of Islam ... how
confident they are, how impressive their state of readiness, how
competent they are in matters of state, how firm their laws, how
capable in war.' It was but a short move from admiration to resentment
at the bullying way in which this strength was used. Each advance of
Western power into the Islamic world from the Napoleonic invasion of
Egypt in 1213/ 1798 to the Allied occupation of Istanbul after the
First World War etched bitterness yet more deeply into Muslim psyches.
In the XIV/20th century the complexity of attitudes increased.
Christianity moved to being more an ally than a threat; the infidel is
less the Christian than those who do not believe at all. Inter-faith
discussion is now common, and it is possible, for instance, for
Christian and Iranian Shia theologians to come together, as they did in
Birmingham (England) in 1413/1992, and to discover substantial common
ground. Admiration of the West has become large-scale; secular Muslim
leaders have copied its ways in order to make state and society strong
enough to stand on their own feet. At its extreme this could mean a
forced adoption of Western ways. Thus Atatürk, the founder of
modern Turkey, told his National Assembly in 1346/1927: Gentlemen, 'it
was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation
as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of
progress and civilization, to accept in its place the hat, the headgear
used by the whole civilized world, and in this way to demonstrate that
the Turkish nation, in its mentality, as in other respects, in no way
diverges from civilized social life.'
As might be expected, some Muslims have doubted whether western forms
of progress were appropriate for Muslims. 'The Westerners', declared
the Indian poet Iqbal, who was a direct contemporary of Atatürk,
'have lost the vision of heaven, they go hunting for the pure spirit in
the belly.' Both communist and capitalist roads were false ones: 'The
soul of both is impatient and intolerant, both of them know not God,
and deceive mankind. One lives by production, the other by taxation and
man is a glass caught between these two stones.'
In the hands of the Islamist movement of the second half of the
XIV/20th century this attitude has become an aggressive rejection of
Western models of progress. 'Come, friends,' exhorted Alī Shariati,
ideologue of the Iranian revolution, 'let us abandon Europe; let us
cease this nauseating, apish imitation of Europe. Let us leave behind
this Europe that always speaks of humanity, but destroys human beings
wherever it finds them.' Side by side with this rejection, there has
been continuing anguish at what is seen to be Western bullying of
Muslim peoples. Ayatollah Khomeini's howl of rage, when in 1384/1964
the Iranian parliament granted US citizens extra-territorial rights in
exchange for a $200 million loan, spoke for all Muslims who had felt
powerless in the face of a bullying West from the bombardment of
Alexandria in 1300/1882 to the Gulf War in 1412/1991: 'they have
reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American
dog'.
INTERACTION AND
INTERDEPENDENCE
One of the misfortunes of the long history of stereotyping and conflict
between Islam and the West is that it has fostered ignorance. Muslims
and Westerners know too little of how much they have in common and how
much they owe to each other.
There are shared religious roots. Muslims, like Jews and Christians,
believe in one God, in prophecy, and revelation. Twenty-one of the
twenty-eight prophets mentioned in the Qur'ān appear in the Christian
Bible. Muslims are as familiar with the stories of Jacob, Joseph, and
Job as any Christian. The Qur'ān specifically recognizes the scriptures
of Abraham, the Torah of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the Gospel of
Jesus as books revealed by God. The same angel, Gabriel, who came to
Mary to announce her mission came to Muḥammad to tell him to recite the
Qur'ān. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all look back to Abraham as the
first prophet to receive revelation. Muslims trace their lineage back
to him, through Ishmael the child of his servant wife Hagar, while
Christians and Jews do so through the son of his legal wife Sarah.
Muslims revere Jesus as a Prophet and they honor Mary as his virgin
mother; they accept moral responsibility for their actions and
anticipate a day of judgment with its attendant outcomes of heaven and
hell. Major differences are that Muslims do not accept the divinity of
Jesus and regard the Qur'ān as perfecting a tradition of prophecy which
Jews and Christians had allowed to become distorted through human
intervention.
There are also shared intellectual roots. It is too little known that
the great heritage of Hellenistic learning has been as much cherished
in the Islamic world as in the West. The works of Aristotle, Plato, and
their subsequent elaborators—Stoics, Pythagoreans,
Neo-Platonists—were eagerly devoured by Muslims and had a major
impact on theological, mystical, and political thought. The influence
of Plato is evident in Islamic political thought down to the XIV/20th
century, while to this very day Aristotle is referred to in some
traditional Muslim schools as the 'first teacher'. The Greek
achievement in mathematics, astronomy, and optics was greatly extended
by Muslims; the names Euclid, Archimedes, or Ptolemy speak as
resonantly to them of scientific achievement as they do for any
Westerner. In the same way Muslims developed the medical system of
Galen which is practiced even now in South Asia and referred to as Unani
Tibb or Greek Medicine.
Because the Muslims absorbed and cherished this great heritage from
classical civilization, they were able to transmit its benefits along
with much that they themselves had created to the West. Indeed,
medieval Europe was profoundly influenced by the Arab-Islamic world,
although to precisely what extent is a matter of debate. The channels
of influence were in small part the Byzantine empire, in greater part
Islamic Sicily, and in large part Islamic Spain. The trade networks of
the Mediterranean and the international connections that developed out
of Europe's crusading enterprise also played a role. The major period
of influence was from the V/11th to the VII/13th century. This was the
time when notable centers for the translation of Arabic texts were set
up in Sicily, Barcelona, Toledo, and Seville. By this means the
Hellenistic achievement and its various Muslim elaborations in
mathematics, astronomy, optics, astrology, alchemy, natural history,
geography, medicine, philosophy, theology, and mysticism entered the
Western world. Two Muslim names stand before all others for their
influence on medieval Christian thought: Avicenna (Ibn Sina), whose
Neo-Platonism was devoured by Christian mystics, while technical
equipment was borrowed by scholars ranging from Aquinas to Duns Scotus;
and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), whose commentary on Aristotle was a source of
controversy and scholarship down to the end of the X/16th century.
The material culture of the Islamic world was also influential. The
impact of Muslim achievements in textiles, carpets, metalwork,
glass-making, miniature painting, and bookbinding can be seen across
the medieval and early modern European world. Silk and paper came to
the West by Muslim hands. So, too, did the cultivation of sugar,
cotton, and citrus fruit. Moreover, a host of Arabic words associated
with trade have entered European languages, from magazine or the French
magazin (Arabic makhazin, a storehouse) to traffic
(Arabic tafriq, distribution).
Amongst the greatest areas of influence is Spain whose development in
everything from place names to Catholic mysticism was shaped by 700
years of Muslim presence. But it should also be noted that recent
scholarship has come to find the roots of medieval scholasticism and
the development of universities in Muslim influence. It has even gone
so far as to find the origins of Renaissance humanism in that of
classical Islam. 'I have read, reverend fathers,' Pico della Mirandola
begins his oration The Dignity of Man in the late IX/15th
century, 'that when Abdala the Saracen was asked what he regarded as
most to be wondered at on the world stage ... he answered that there
was nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.'
Over the past two centuries, on the other hand, the Islamic world has
come to be penetrated and shaped by the West, and much more so than
ever the West was affected by influences from its neighbor. Western
power has, more often than not, dictated the boundaries of Muslim
countries and fashioned the modern states under which their people
live. Western power, too, has integrated Muslim economies into the new
Western-dominated world economy. In the process it has created whole
new worlds of production and exchange which totally overshadow those of
handicraft production, the bazar, the communal solidarities they have
bred, and the Islamic institutions which have rested upon them for more
than a millennium. Muslims have come to exist in new urban landscapes
fashioned after those of the West with broad streets, glass-fronted
shops, the roar of motor transport and a suburban hinterland of flats,
villas, and slums. Their lives have come to be furnished by a material
culture taken from the West—biros and bicycles, tables and
chairs, while for men the Western uniform of shirt and trousers has
been widely adopted. Their minds and understandings have come to be
filled with knowledge derived from the West. The new school systems of
the modern nation states were concerned to transmit knowledge which it
was hoped carried with it the secrets of Western strength. At elite
levels Muslims often came to be educated not in their own languages but
in English, French, or Russian. Many, and not just at the level of the
elite, came to be divorced from their heritage of learning and to seek
to understand it primarily through Western sources. Even those who have
led cultural resistance to the West have drawn on its wisdom to make
their case.
Muḥammad Iqbal's thought owed much to that of Nietzsche, Bergson, and
Renan, that of Ali Shariati to Sartre, Fanon, and Massignon. One of the
reasons why the Iranian theologians who went to Birmingham in 1413/1992
found substantial common ground with their Christian collocutors was
that they were steeped in Western intellectual traditions. Not only did
they know the classical Hellenic philosophers but also the work of
Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger as well as that of Christian
theologians such as Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann.
The Islamic and the Western worlds are not only profoundly interrelated
but also increasingly interdependent. More than twenty million Muslims
live in the West and are not unnaturally concerned that their societies
should respect their culture and values. On the other hand the West has
substantial economic and strategic interests in the Islamic world, as
demonstrated by its warlike response to Saddam Husayn's invasion of
Kuwait. Nor should this interdependence be restricted to the West.
China has a Muslim community as populous as that in the West and no
less keen for its views to be respected. Japan by the early 1410s/1990s
had come to regard the Middle East as important enough to have about
100 trained Arabists in its foreign service. In this increasingly
interdependent world, moreover, the rapid globalization of the media
and communications is forging yet further connections. We can all, as
never before, peer into each other's worlds. Such a capacity makes it
crucial that we have the understanding to see through the veils of
prejudice and cultural difference to grasp the common thread of
humanity we all share.
Francis Robinson
From The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World
©1996 Cambridge University Press, reprinted with the permission of
Cambridge University Press