The New World of Islam

by Lothrop Stoddard

The rise of Islam is perhaps the most amazing event in human history. Springing from a land and a people alike previously negligible, Islam spread within a century over half the earth, shattering great empires, overthrowing long-established religions, remoulding the souls of races, and building up a whole new world—the world of Islam.

The closer we examine this development the more extraordinary does it appear. The other great religions won their way slowly, by painful struggle, and finally triumphed with the aid of powerful monarchs converted to the new faith. Christianity had its Constantine, Buddhism its Asoka, and Zoroastrianism its Cyrus, each lending to his chosen cult the mighty force of secular authority. Not so Islam. Arising in a desert land sparsely inhabited by a nomad race previously undistinguished in human annals, Islam sallied forth on its great adventure with the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds. Yet Islam triumphed with seemingly miraculous ease, and a couple of generations saw the Fiery Crescent borne victorious from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and from the deserts of Central Asia to the deserts of Central Africa.

This amazing success was due to a number of contributing factors, chief among them being the character of the Arab race, the nature of Mohammed's teaching, and the general state of the contemporary Eastern world. Undistinguished though the Arabs had hitherto been, they were a people of remarkable potentialities, which were at that moment patently seeking self-realization. For several generations before Mohammed, Arabia had been astir with exuberant vitality. The Arabs had outgrown their ancestral paganism and were instinctively yearning for better things. Athwart this seething ferment of mind and spirit Islam rang like a trumpet-call. Mohammed, an Arab of the Arabs, was the very incarnation of the soul of his race. Preaching a simple, austere monotheism, free from priestcraft or elaborate doctrinal trappings, he tapped the well-springs of religious zeal always present in the Semitic heart. Forgetting the chronic rivalries and blood-feuds which had consumed their energies in internecine strife, and welded into a glowing unity by the fire of their new-found faith, the Arabs poured forth from their deserts to conquer the earth for Allah, the One True God.

Thus Islam, like the resistless breath of the sirocco, the desert wind, swept out of Arabia and encountered—a spiritual vacuum. Those neighbouring Byzantine and Persian Empires, so imposing to the casual eye, were mere dried husks, devoid of real vitality. Their religions were a mockery and a sham. Persia's ancestral cult of Zoroaster had degenerated into "Magism"—a pompous priestcraft, tyrannical and persecuting, hated and secretly despised. As for Eastern Christianity, bedizened with the gewgaws of paganism and bedevilled by the maddening theological speculations of the decadent Greek mind, it had become a repellent caricature of the teachings of Christ. Both Magism and Byzantine Christendom were riven by great heresies which engendered savage persecutions and furious hates. Furthermore, both the Byzantine and Persian Empires were harsh despotisms which crushed their subjects to the dust and killed out all love of country or loyalty to the state. Lastly, the two empires had just fought a terrible war from which they had emerged mutually bled white and utterly exhausted.

Such was the world compelled to face the lava-flood of Islam. The result was inevitable. Once the disciplined strength of the East Roman legions and the Persian cuirassiers had broken before the fiery onslaught of the fanatic sons of the desert, it was all over. There was no patriotic resistance. The down-trodden populations passively accepted new masters, while the numerous heretics actually welcomed the overthrow of persecuting co-religionists whom they hated far worse than their alien conquerors. In a short time most of the subject peoples accepted the new faith, so refreshingly simple compared with their own degenerate cults. The Arabs, in their turn, knew how to consolidate their rule. They were no bloodthirsty savages, bent solely on loot and destruction. On the contrary, they were an innately gifted race, eager to learn and appreciative of the cultural gifts which older civilizations had to bestow. Intermarrying freely and professing a common belief, conquerors and conquered rapidly fused, and from this fusion arose a new civilization—the Saracenic civilization, in which the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, and Persia were revitalized by Arab vigour and synthesized by the Arab genius and the Islamic spirit. For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. a.d. 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques, and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem East offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages.

However, by the tenth century the Saracenic civilization began to display unmistakable symptoms of decline. This decline was at first gradual. Down to the terrible disasters of the thirteenth century it still displayed vigour and remained ahead of the Christian West. Still, by the year a.d. 1000 its golden age was over. For this there were several reasons. In the first place, that inveterate spirit of faction which has always been the bane of the Arab race soon reappeared once more. Rival clans strove for the headship of Islam, and their quarrels degenerated into bloody civil wars. In this fratricidal strife the fervour of the first days cooled, and saintly men like Abu Bekr and Omar, Islam's first standard-bearers, gave place to worldly minded leaders who regarded their position of "Khalifa"[1] as a means to despotic power and self-glorification. The seat of government was moved to Damascus in Syria, and afterward to Bagdad in Mesopotamia. The reason for this was obvious. In Mecca despotism was impossible. The fierce, free-born Arabs of the desert would tolerate no master, and their innate democracy had been sanctioned by the Prophet, who had explicitly declared that all Believers were brothers. The Meccan caliphate was a theocratic democracy. Abu Bekr and Omar were elected by the people, and held themselves responsible to public opinion, subject to the divine law as revealed by Mohammed in the Koran.

But in Damascus, and still more in Bagdad, things were different. There the pure-blooded Arabs were only a handful among swarms of Syrian and Persian converts and "Neo-Arab" mixed-bloods. These people were filled with traditions of despotism and were quite ready to yield the caliphs obsequious obedience. The caliphs, in their turn, leaned more and more upon these complaisant subjects, drawing from their ranks courtiers, officials, and ultimately soldiers. Shocked and angered, the proud Arabs gradually returned to the desert, while the government fell into the well-worn ruts of traditional Oriental despotism. When the caliphate was moved to Bagdad after the founding of the Abbaside dynasty (a.d. 750), Persian influence became preponderant. The famous Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid, the hero of the Arabian Nights, was a typical Persian monarch, a true successor of Xerxes and Chosroes, and as different from Abu Bekr or Omar as it is possible to conceive. And, in Bagdad, as elsewhere, despotic power was fatal to its possessors. Under its blight the "successors" of Mohammed became capricious tyrants or degenerate harem puppets, whose nerveless hands were wholly incapable of guiding the great Moslem Empire.

The empire, in fact, gradually went to pieces. Shaken by the civil wars, bereft of strong leaders, and deprived of the invigorating amalgam of the unspoiled desert Arabs, political unity could not endure. Everywhere there occurred revivals of suppressed racial or particularist tendencies. The very rapidity of Islam's expansion turned against it, now that the well-springs of that expansion were dried up. Islam had made millions of converts, of many sects and races, but it had digested them very imperfectly. Mohammed had really converted the Arabs, because he merely voiced ideas which were obscurely germinating in Arab minds and appealed to impulses innate in the Arab blood. When, however, Islam was accepted by non-Arab peoples, they instinctively interpreted the Prophet's message according to their particular racial tendencies and cultural backgrounds, the result being that primitive Islam was distorted or perverted. The most extreme example of this was in Persia, where the austere monotheism of Mohammed was transmuted into the elaborate mystical cult known as Shiism, which presently cut the Persians off from full communion with the orthodox Moslem world. The same transmutive tendency appears, in lesser degree, in the saint-worship of the North African Berbers and in the pantheism of the Hindu Moslems—both developments which Mohammed would have unquestionably execrated.

These doctrinal fissures in Islam were paralleled by the disruption of political unity. The first formal split occurred after the accession of the Abbasides. A member of the deposed Ommeyyad family fled to Spain, where he set up a rival caliphate at Cordova, recognized as lawful not only by the Spanish Moslems, but by the Berbers of North Africa. Later on another caliphate was set up in Egypt—the Fatimite caliphate, resting its title on descent from Mohammed's daughter Fatima. As for the Abbaside caliphs of Bagdad, they gradually declined in power, until they became mere puppets in the hands of a new racial element, the Turks.

Before describing that shift of power from Neo-Arab to Turkish hands which was so momentous for the history of the Islamic world, let us first consider the decline in cultural and intellectual vigour that set in concurrently with the disruption of political and religious unity during the later stages of the Neo-Arab period.