Episode 30: Islamic Expansion and Rule
The Big History of Civilizations (2016)
Dr Craig G Benjamin
Film Review
For me the most interesting part of this lecture is the thumbnail sketch Benjamin provides of the birth of Islam. After Mohammad experienced his visitation from the angel Gabriel in 610 AD, tension arising between his followers and the Bedouin Arabs who ran the city of Mecca forced the former to flee to Yethrab (later renamed Medina) in 622 AD. There Mohammad and his followers began providing social welfare services in addition to religious instruction. They also organized a Muslim military arm to protect his followers against his enemies from Mecca.
In 627 AD, Mohammad and his followers returned to Mecca where they forcibly ousted the city’s rulers and established a theocracy.* By the time of Mohammad’s death in 632 AD, his Muslim armies had conquered the entire Arabian peninsula. They then turned northward and conquered the Sassanian empire (modern day Persian and Afghanistan) and Mesopotamia. By 637 AD, they also controlled, Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine.
Between 705-713 AD they expanded into Pakistan, in 711 AD into North Africa and in 718 AD into the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal).
This vast Muslim empire (the largest to this point in history), known as Dar es Islam, was ruled by a caliphate** centered in Baghdad from 762 AD. Although all subjects of the caliphate were pressured to convert to Islam, the caliphate deliberately encouraged intellectual and educational pursuits of the extremely diverse populations they had conquered. The result was an economic golden age, with substantial population growth, a revival of ancient Mesopotamian irrigation systems, the introduction of crop rotation and new methods of fertilization.
As Islam spread into Pakistan and India, Indian discoveries in astronomy, agriculture and and mathematics gradually spread from India to Persia to Mesopotamia to Mediterranean cities. A number of crops originating in India (sugar, sorghum, spinach, eggplant, lemon, banana, watermelon, cotton, rice, wheat, artichokes, oranges, limes, coconuts, mangoes) gradually made their way to the Mediterranean in this way.
Adopting the compass and paper from the Chinese, the Muslim empire established thriving overland maritime trade networks and sophisticated banking systems.
The role of women under early Islam depended on the underlying culture (eg veiling of women predated Islam in Mesopotamia, leading Muslim leaders there to mandate it). In general, elite Muslim women were expected to stay at home and not participate in public life. In contrast lower class women were allowed a public role as farmers, construction workers, midwives, spinsters, dyers, seamstresses and embroiderers and money lenders.
Dar es Islam was destroyed by Mongol invaders in 1258.
*Theocracy is a form of government in which a deity of some type is recognized as the supreme ruling authority.
**A caliphate is a public institution governing a territory under Islamic rule. The Abassid Caliphate (750-1517) was the most prominent. It relied heavily on Persian bureaucrats and
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
Reblogged this on OPENED HERE >> https:/BOOKS.ESLARN-NET.DE.
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All very cool to know. I for one didn’t know Islām reached south Asia that long ago. However, there’s at least one fairly important omission which is becoming increasingly common nowadays:
Muhammad and the early ummah (Muslim community) did not go straight from Makkah to Yathrib. They went to al-Habash (Abyssinia, or what we now call Ethiopia) first as asylum seekers to seek protection from the Meccans.
Why? Because the Negus (Ethiopian king) was reputed to be very fair-minded and open to protecting his subjects, a reputation that even ancient Greeks and Egyptians held of Ethiopians (ie. Nubians) thousands of years before. Back in Muhammad’s time Arabia was a tribute-paying vassal state to al-Habash so his lot could reasonably expect to be granted asylum. That was how Islām was first introduced to the horn of Africa.
However, the early Muslims abused their protection by disrespecting the locals’ Christian beliefs even though Christians are ahl-ul-kitāb (people of the book, fellow recipients of a written revelation from Allah in Islamic belief). For that reason the Negus kicked them out, and from then on the Ethiopian royal family has never allowed a Muslim to rule their country.
That’s how the first ummah ended up moving to Yathrib, where they conquered and largely killed off the local population before renaming it al-Madīnat-un-Nabī (the prophet’s city), or Madīnah for short.
Why is this omission becoming so much more common in modern times? At least 2 reasons I can think of:
1- as Islām spreads around the world it wants to make everyone believe the lie that it equals peace & prosperity, and
2 – now that people of ‘white’ European ancestry are currently running the world, ‘Arabs’ want to ape them by hiding/ denying any historical connection to sub-Saharan Africans if it doesn’t involve enslaving them, especially if it does involve being enslaved by them – like when Arabia was a tribute-paying vassal state to al-Habash.
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Wow, very interesting background, 1tawnystranger. Thanks so much for taking the time to share this.
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