| Islamic Revolution The 'hijrah' - migration of Muhammed and his early followers from Mecca to Medinah dates from 622 AD That year is the base of the Islamic calendar. Within less than 20 years from that date, the whole of the Near East and a great part of North Africa was Islamic, liberated from western domination. Since then it has been Islamic. The advance of Islam was so rapid, with so little resistance to its expansion, that some explanation should be offered for its success. There were many causes, some basic and some contributory. Islam emerged out of the desert as a purely monotheistic religion. There were nearly two millennia between its appearance and that of Judaism, which still had some connection with nature. The continuation of the south-north progress of desiccation influenced Islam. It emerged directly out of the desert, without much previous connection with agriculture. At the time when Islam burst out of Arabia, the whole of the Middle East was monotheistic. With the Jews and the Zoroastrians there was no doubt about their monotheism; the local Christians had to struggle for the acceptance of their monotheism. The large majority of local Christians belonged to one of the Southern Christian churches, Nestorians or Monophysites. Their dogmas were far from the official Christian creed, which attempted to prove that three is equal to one. Indeed, the Monophysites violently opposed the official creed. The new religion was quintessentially monotheistic. There is one God; without any need for explanations and philosophical proof. In addition, the religion venerated its founder as a human being, however exalted. Its adherents also honored the prophets of other monotheistic religions, Moses, Zarathustra and Jesus, but as prophets and not as divine manifestations. There was nothing in the new religion to which a Nestorian or Monophysite Christian, or a Zoroastrian Persian would object. They might have argued about the position of their prophet in the list of prophets, but not about substance. With the Jews it was somewhat different. They were a cohesive national group and their religion was part and parcel of the national consciousness. However, even the Jews much preferred the rule of Islam to that of the hated Greeks. In addition to the pure monotheism that applied to all the people in the Middle East, the new religion incorporated all the customs, habits and beliefs of the region. In this respect it was no different from the religions of nature and that of Christianity, which also incorporated the classical religions into its Pantheon. So, the new religion had the prohibition of the pig and intoxicating drinks, and required circumcision. Not everybody joined the new religion, at least at the beginning. There was no compulsion. Indeed the new religion did not encourage people to join. The Arabs learned fast the principles of taxation, and preferred taxpaying protected minorities to tax-free believers. Taxation was not the only subject, which the Arabs had to learn. When they burst out of Arabia, they had no state organization behind them. They still lived in a state of Chiefdom, organized by tribes. They had a rudimentary organization governing their intra-tribal and intertribal affairs. At the time when they reached the Middle East, they came into contact with states with millennia-long state traditions behind them. The Greeks and Romans, when they reached the area had similar traditions behind them, which they intended to transfer to the East. The attempt caused constant clashes between two traditions. The result was continuous conflict, alienation and distrust. The new Islamic rulers were more amenable. They had no traditions of their own and were willing to learn. The result was that the Islamic conquest relied on the local elite to create a state organization. That the new administrative elite was Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian did not disturb them.1 This fact alone can explain the speedy and smooth acceptance of the new regime by the people. There were no centers of resistance. On the contrary, the local elite became the best advocate the Islamic regime could have. The lack of experience became, therefore, a positive factor ensuring the stability of the new regime. One of the factors that helped the Islamic revolution was the hatred between the Greek rulers and the native population. That hatred can be explained on theological grounds, by the differences in the Christology of the native population and the official creed, but it was probably one of the results of the basic differences and not the cause. When one sees the long and sorry tale of slaughter and counter-slaughter during the millennium of Western domination, it shouldn't be surprising that the chasm that separated the Greeks and the natives did not overlook religious principles too. The Arab armies campaigning in Syria, Persia and Egypt had helping hands everywhere. In the battle of the Yarmuk, which decided the fate of Syria, 12,000 Arab Christian soldiers went over to the enemy. In Egypt, the Coptic Bishop of Alexandria instructed his flock not to offer any resistance to the invaders. In Seleucia on the Tigris, the Katholikos complained that his congregation changed sides in their tens of thousands. 2 Arnold J. Toynbee compared the conquest of the Middle East with that of Sicily by Garibaldi in 1860.3 The people of the Middle East received the invading Arabs as the Sicilians received Garibaldi's Redshirts. Last but not least, there were two fortuitous historical accidents that greatly helped the Muslim invaders. The first was the last war between Byzantium and the Persians, which was a few years before the battle of the Yarmuk. In that war the Persians overran the Middle East and Egypt, killing all the Greeks they could find. In Jerusalem alone they killed 90,000 people. Eventually, the Byzantines returned, expelled the Persians and met a new enemy head-on. Both the Byzantines and the Persians were exhausted by the long war; they had no strength left to resist the Arab invaders. In the case of Byzantium, there was another factor that worked against it. Greek colonists in the Middle East always formed a local militia when needed. In the last challenge to Greek rule, there were no Greek local militias available. They were killed in the last Persian war. Not only were the Byzantines exhausted, but their native troops deserted or turned against them. They were also without their local Greek auxiliaries.4 The second fortuitous accident, from the point of view of the Arab invaders, was that Europe was probably at the lowest point of its existence. The Western Roman Empire disappeared about two centuries before the Islamic Revolution. Europe was a crazy patchwork of small barbarian entities, barely deserving the names of states. In the millennium-long Western domination of the Middle East, western military units always played a central role in all the wars and rebellions. In this war they were conspicuously missing. In about 20 years the Arabs conquered the Middle East. In another 40 - 50 years they extended their rule to the Pyrenees in the west and to the Indus in the east. They were also present on the islands of the Mediterranean and probing the Central Asian steppes beyond the Caspian Sea. This was the time that remained in the memory of Europe as one of great danger, deflected by the valor of Charles Martel at Poitiers. With all due respect to the memory of Charles Martel, the Arab raiders who came from Spain, might have intended to pilfer the area, but it is doubtful that they intended to stay. The raiders who were North African Berbers could not remain in northern Europe because of simple dietary reasons. Muslims were not allowed to eat pig in any form. So, the locally available foodstuff limited their advance. They could advance until the line of the olive in Spain and in Provence, or until the line of the clarified butter, the 'ghee' in India. Northern Europe received its fat from pigs, so it was out of bounds to Muslims. There is no doubt that the Arab conquest was fast, decisive and extraordinary in its extent. However, to give it its due, it should be called liberation and not conquest. If we take the map of the Islamic world in the middle of the 8th Century AD and superimpose on it the Carthaginian Empire, including its Spanish possessions, and the Persian Empire of Darius, then it nearly fills the picture. Even so, the reconquest of Asia Minor, the Balkans and the territories north of the Black Sea, had to be left to the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks.5 If we want to define the results of the Islamic Revolution in historical, not in geographical terms, then it reversed the decision of the three Punic Wars and the conquests of Alexander the Great. The victories of Sulla and Pompey over Mithridates will be reversed by the Turks. The Islamic Revolution was a tremendous success from the point of view of the Middle East. It brought complete liberation from Western domination. The direct originators of that revolution were the Arabs. Their success as a people was less than complete, and problematic at best. It is true that they are accepted and honored as the creators of the unifying religion of the Middle East. Their language replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of the region. But all this did not bring about Arab political domination. After Muhammed's death there were four Arab Caliphs, of whom three were assassinated. After the murder of the fourth Caliph in 656 AD, 24 years after the death of the founder, the Caliphate moved north to Syria, and from there to Baghdad, which was already in the territory of the Persian Empire.It is true that both the Ummayads and the Abbasides were originally important Mecca clans, but the actual power in their Caliphates was in the hands of Syrians and Persians. Looking at it objectively, it might be said that the same inexperience in state organization, which helped the Arabs to get the Syrians, Egyptians, Persians to help organize the Empire, without causing clashes, worked against them once the Empire was organized. As a people they were now relegated to the backwater of the region until modern times, when their oil reserves rescued them from their situation. Notes: |
