Unfortunately very few people are well read in Near Eastern and Islamic history either inside or outside the Muslim world.vegetariantaxidermy wrote:Muslims had their own magnificent countries that the 'West' has systematically destroyed. Now the 'West' will just have to wait and see if 2 billion muslims will be as aggressive and relentless in enforcing their ideology as kristians have been since its inception.
I would suggest a somewhat different narrative which I will sketch below.
The rise of Islam can be viewed as a secessionist Roman civil war. A continuation of basically the same problems of the 3rd Century crisis. That is, the completion of the conquest of the Mediterranean basin in the time leading up to years 0 provided Rome with enormous wealth, which was eventually spent, (Roman coins flowed out, ending up in Ceylon, Britain, Scandinavia and so on) giving the conquered peoples of the East the opportunity to rebel. Romans, who were tenacious soldiers, conquered Gaul and Palmyra again, re-enriching themselves and allowing the empirical project to continue. The empire was however not self-sufficient, it was exploitative and this did not go unnoticed by the people of the South who paid tribute to the North. It's important to mention that the reason Romans and Greeks were able to conqueror the Near East is because the Asiatic character had become slavish after three-thousand years of subjection to empires: the Akkadians, the Neo-Assyrians, the Seleucids and so on and so on. The effect of imperialism tends always to be the same and the Romans of course also fell victim to the same malaise: slavery, peasantry and elites, mercenary armies, tax farming and the like, this all codified by Diocletian, and all of which degraded the morale of a people who had once been free and responsible for their own livelihood and political decisions.
Much as others who relied on fast moving armies such as the Egyptians with their chariots, the Persians and Macedonians with their horses, the Romans with their legionaries, next came the Arabs on horse and camel. In every case, the locals surrendered to the invaders in preference to the existing imperial force. In every case the invaders' threat was the same: surrender and join us or else die. Alexander, Khalid, Raymond and Godfy, Hulagu or Saladin all followed this same policy in the Near East with the same basic results, none was more merciful or more cruel. This is why Antioch fell to the Moslems first, and then to the Crusaders a few generations later, everyone tended to side with the invader, hoping for freedom, against the imperial occupier.
Islam was initially a movement for unification of the Arab tribes which had previously not been united. Other than looting, and piracy and raiding were the basis of Arab economy, there was no motive for the Arabs to invade the Levantine coast or Persia. Iraq, for instance, had been a Greco-Roman province for one-thousand years at the time of the Arab invasion. The Arabs, like the Macedonians, were a backwards people as compared to the Near East which was the apotheosis of human civilization and had been for almost four-thousand years. Just as Alexander realized this and adopted Persian habits, some Arabs also recognized this and wrote poems of "the gardens guarded by our spears". However, a power struggle emerged, the initial Arab conquest and colonization was challenged by the indigenous peoples, that is, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Persians and so on. They threw off Arab occupation and influence, this is Muawiyah and the early Umayyads. But the Arabs responded with war, immigration and colonization, and an halting of the rule of converts to Islam being equals, which had been the basis for the initial Pan-Arab movement. Race war exploded and the non-Arabs rebelled, armies from Central Asia marched west, defeated the Arabs and established the Abbasid caliphate. This period became known as the Islamic Golden Age however it had little to do with Islam, the House of Wisdom, the Mutazilites and so on were a resurgence of local people, particularly Persian wisdom and Greek philosophy. This fact is testified to by Arab historian Ibn Khaldun writing at the beginning of the 15th Century and can easily be confirmed by looking at the names and places of the major figures in Islamic science and medicine.
An important series of events then unfolds. The caliph Al Mamun was highly inspired by Greek philosophy and set up an inquisition to root out religiosity. Of course this rationalist inquisition was not well received, he and the following Abbasid caliphs were regarded as elitist heretics by the masses and they were rejected. Islam at this point turned against rationality in preference to dogmatism, the Abbassids crumbled as infighting between Sunni and Shia (Mediterraneans and Semites versus Indo-Aryans) degenerated into the Anarchy at Samarra period. Islam hence forth rejected philosophy and political investigation and only maths, medicine and astronomy continued to advance, since they did not threaten religious dogma.
Al Mamun and his successors had also begun another project which would have negative long term outcomes, that is, the establishment of White slave armies, the Mamluks and Janissaries who were the de facto, or legitimate rulers of Islamic civilization as at Cairo and Delhi, until the end of the Ottoman period. Even the caliph was a foreigner, after the early Abbasid period caliphs didn't marry but bore progeny from their harems of White slaves. This point, about 900 AD, is the beginning of the decline of Islamic civilization and has continued since. Inequality between gender, station, race, degree of manumission, religion, and special statuses lead to demoralization, and together with dogmatism which led to stultification and ignorance, that is the internal cause of the civilization's decline, not outside interference.
The Crusades were a defensive war fought by the Byzantines against the secessionists and invaders of the South or East. The Crusades were successful because of the collapse of unity of the Abbasids leaving Persia involved in a two front war (against Mongol and Mediterranean) and also the Mediterraneans (against Persian and Greco-Latin).
Apart from the brief early Abbasid period, the Golden Age, the remainder of Islamic civilization was essentially funded by pillage of Persia and Byzantium (much as Rome had been funded along the same method a thousand years earlier). The Turks, like the Arabs, were a relatively backwards invader who also lived off raiding and conquest. The Byzantines, who were demoralized for much the same reasons as Islamic civilization, that is, inequality and dogmatism, made easy prey for the Central Asian horsemen. But, like the Arabs before them, and unlike the Romans and Macedonians, the Turks failed to appreciate the civilizational superiority of the people who they were conquering. The final sack of Constantinople funded the Ottomans push into Europe, but a depressed and ignorant culture could only balloon for so long off the booty of pillage and eventually imploded. Contrary to popular belief, the ancient classics did not come to Europe from the Arabs and Muslims, excepting some mathematical and medical texts. At the fall of Constantinople Greek refugees arrived in mass in Italy with their wisdom and texts, igniting the Renaissance.
During the high period of the Roman Republic Hannibal did not dare to attack Rome directly despite three huge Roman defeats right in Italy, some centuries later during the alienated and dogmatic imperial period, they could not defend their capital even from barbarian raiders. Likewise, Islamic civilization did not succumb to outside invaders, it rotted from within as inequality degraded morale and dogmatism stifled intelligence and creativity.
