The falacy of Islam “preserved” classical knowledge

“The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times. As Michael Harris points out in his History of Libraries in the Western World:

'The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.'

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge), such as al-Gahiz (d. 868), repeatedly asserted that Christianity had stopped the Rum (Romans—that is, the inhabitants of the Greek Roman Empire) from taking advantage of classical knowledge. This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence. Lamenting the end of the study of ancient philosophy and science upon the presumed closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy by Emperor Justinian I in 529 is part of this narrative. Yet this propaganda does not correspond to the facts, as Speros Vryonis and others have shown, and as evidenced by the preservation and use of ancient Greek knowledge by the Christians of the empire of the Greeks. The Christian Greeks themselves were aware of their own civilizational superiority as well as the medieval Muslim propaganda against it.

In the West several works of Aristotle were available to Roman Catholic medieval scholars in Latin translations from Greek dating back to Boethius in the sixth century and Marius Victorinus in the fourth century. By the end of the twelfth century, the Columbia History of Western Philosophy reminds us, “authors of the Latin West were quite “familiar with the logical works (Organon) of Aristotle.” As the historian Sylvain Gouguenheim has shown, with the translations made at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, medieval scholars hardly needed translations of Aristotle from Arabic into Latin. Moreover, we know that Saint Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle translated directly from the Greek texts into Latin by William of Moerbeke (1215–1286), a Dominican who was Latin bishop of Corinth—that is, a Roman Catholic bishop of a city in largely Christian Orthodox Greece. William produced more than twenty-five translations of Aristotle in addition to translations of Archimedes, Proclus, Ptolemy, Galen, and many other Greek thinkers. In fact, as will be shown, it was Christian scholars who were responsible for bringing Greek knowledge to Islam, and this knowledge came to Islam only because Muslim forces had conquered areas (the Middle East and North Africa) where a rich Greek Christian civilization had developed...

Christian Europe, including the Christian kingdoms in Spain, could not benefit more from its commerce with the superior civilization of the Christian Greek Roman Empire because, as Henri Pirenne pointed out long ago, Islamic warriors’ attacks had turned the then-Christian Mediterranean sea into a battlefield, and eventually into an Islamic lake, and had consequently short-circuited the direct cultural exchange between Europe and the empire of the Greeks. Therefore the Islamic empire was arguably the cause of the relative slowing down of European development in the early or “dark” Middle Ages...of course cultural and especially commercial exchange between West and East continued to occur, and now largely via the Islamic empire, but this happened not because of the civilizational properties of medieval Islam but because medieval Islam had interrupted the direct communication in the first place.

Therefore the torrent of Islamocentric academic publications; television documentaries from PBS, the History Channel, and the BBC; declarations by UNESCO; and the National Geographic traveling exhibits extolling the “transmission of Greek science and technology” by Islam to the backward West overlooks that, whatever the actual degree of this transmission, the transmission not only of Greek science and technology but also of Greek sculpture, painting, drama, narrative, and lyric, which could not and did not take place via Islam because of religious barriers, would equally have taken place without Islam, if Islam had not interrupted with its military conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the direct communication between the Christian West and the Christian East.

In fact, when Greek scholars began to arrive in Italy escaping from the final destruction of the Christian Greek Roman Empire by Islam in the fifteenth century...they brought Greek drama, narrative, lyric poetry, philosophy (significantly Plato), and art to the West. They decisively contributed to (and perhaps even started, as many scholars have argued) what would be the Italian Renaissance. This massive cultural transmission showed the sort of impact the Christian Greeks could have had on western Europe centuries earlier, perhaps as early as the seventh century, without the Islamic interruption.

Moreover, in Constantinople alone, we know from contemporary testimonies that the medieval Islamic conquest was responsible for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Greek manuscripts during the capture and sacking of this Christian Greek city by the Ottoman sultan (and caliph of all Muslims) Mehmet II in 1453. We will never know how much of Greek literature and art and scientific knowledge was lost with the destruction of the Christian Greek Roman Empire. To this damage caused to European civilization should be added the demographic disaster resulting from the millions of European men, women, and children captured or bought as slaves by Islam throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The historian Robert Davis has estimated that more than a million white slaves were traded in Islamic lands between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries alone.”

Excerpt From: Darío Fernández-Morera. “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.”

Chesterton on the Crusades

The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had det out to fight some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Tibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.

G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, AD 1920

Arab women before and after Islam: Opening the door of pre-Islamic Arabian history

Author: S. B. Zaki

Article published on May 9, 2016 on Arab Humanists

“Islamic civilization developed a construct of history that labeled the pre-Islamic period the Age of Ignorance and projected Islam as the sole source of all that was civilized – and used that construct so effectively in its rewriting of history that the peoples of Middle East lost all knowledge of the past civilizations of the region. Obviously, that construct was ideologically serviceable, successfully concealing, among other things, the fact that in some cultures of the Middle East women had been considerably better off before the rise of Islam than afterward” (Ahmed, 1992; p. 37).

In the quote provided above, Leila Ahmed, a Harvard Divinity School scholar of Islam, highlights the reasons for the filtered version of the history of women of pre-Islamic Arabia. If you try Googling ‘Status of Women in Islam’, unsurprisingly you will be offered millions of results. A more difficult task is to find out how women have been discussed in Islamic literature over the last 14 centuries (by men, to be precise). A pattern emerges. The words ‘Status of Women in Islam’ do not appear until the early 20th century.  Before that, Islamic scholars wrote on the ‘Duties of a Muslim Woman’ or ‘Roles of Muslim Women.’

These early scholars, writers and historians nonetheless, did often show through historical examples that Muslim women must not act like the women from ‘pre-Islamic time’ (pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance). For example, when a few years after Prophet Muhammad’s death, a young Muslim woman began sleeping with her male slave stating that “I thought that ownership by the right hand made lawful to me what it makes lawful to men”, Umar Ibn Khattab, who judged the ‘matter’, sternly rebuked her and announced that she had acted “in Ignorance” (i.e., like women did in pre-Islamic time) and deliberately misinterpreted the message of the Quran. In other words, Quran does not make lawful to women what it makes lawful to men; their rights are not the same. He then banned her from ever marrying a free man (Musannaf of `Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani in Ali, 2010). This incident was recorded and used by early scholars to show that pre-Islamic women were wrong in exercising their sexual independence and freedom and that the Islamic model of patriarchal marriage and sex was licit and superior.

Fast-forward about eleven centuries, many parts of the world that were once colonised by Muslims (which shaped the Muslim narratives about women in Islam in those centuries) were being colonised by Europeans who scorned Muslims for their backwardness and seclusion of women. This was a time when Muslim scholars had to urgently show to the world that Islam actually “raised the status of women.” There was a shift from a more authoritative and pompous scholarly tone discussing Muslim women like al Ghazali’s, that dictated to Muslim women how they should behave and obey their husbands, and the more accusatory tone of the later scholars who made excuses for Islam’s treatment of women by claiming that women of pre-Islamic time were “mere chattel” and Quran was revealed for a Muslim woman to “rescue her from the gloomy injustice of Pre-Islamic darkness.[1]”

These latter politically shaped narratives are the ones we are still reading and using. To show that Islam bettered the lives of Muslim women, a parallel history had to be created of women in pre-Islamic time where women: “were treated like slaves or property. Their personal consent concerning anything related to their well-being was considered unimportant and unnecessary to such an extent that they were never even treated as a party to a marriage contract. They had no independence, could not own property and were not allowed to inherit. In times of war, women were treated as part of the loot. Simply put, their plight was unspeakable…The practice of killing female children was rampant. The pagan Arabs used to bury alive their daughters with the fear that these girls will grow up and will get married to some men who will be called their sons-in-law.[2]”

These narratives did not only cover the “plight of women” in Arabia before Islam, but justified the invasions of lands by Muslims by extending it to “all nations of the World[3]” which necessitated that the new Islamic law be accepted as the most just system since the “advent of Islam brought profound changes to the Arabian society in general and to women in particular[4].”  In doing so, these Muslim histories do exactly what contemporary war politicians do – justify their mission by stating that “Islam liberated women[5].”

History of pre-Islamic Arabian women

More recently, several Muslim women have begun to research the lives of women in pre-Islamic Arabia. This is by no means an easy task since as when Muslims spread from Medina they categorically destroyed the old ways of life: temples, pagan poetry written on animal skins, idols of gods and goddesses etc, and Islamic history has practically no records written by women. What little we know are reports in Islamic texts, which are narrated to establish the new order, and a few archeological finds. The result is that we have pamphlets, web links and books that preach women that “Islam truly liberated women” while there is no justification for the existence of women like Khadija bint Khuwalid, Hind bint Utbah, Asma Bint Marwan, Lubna bint Hajar, Arwa umm Jamil amongst others, if the general condition of Arab women was not more than mere chattel.

Reading all the sources now available, one can see that, in the absence of a single law before Islam, lives of men and women in Arabia depended on which tribe they belonged to. Islam did lay down comprehensive law and while some women may have enjoyed more rights under Islamic law, it is certainly true that the rights of others were severely curtailed. The resultant picture that emerges is that of a deeply patriarchal form of religious law rather than one that could have been more balanced, just and equal.  Like Leila Ahmed writes us in her book (1991, p. 60):

“That women felt Islam to be a somewhat depressing religion is suggested by a remark of Muhammad’s great-granddaughter Sukaina, who, when asked why she was so merry and her sister Fatima so solemn, replied that it was because she had been named after her pre-Islamic great-grandmother, whereas her sister has been named after her Islamic grandmother.”

Furthermore, it can be argued that the ‘status’ of all women in Islam is not equal either. Islamic jurisprudence supports classism and Quran differentiates between free and enslaved women as will be seen below.

There are several ways in which Islam could have established gender equality based on the practice already available in pre-Islamic time.  That women in pre-Islamic time were used to being treated equally with men can be inferred from Hind bint Utbah’s feisty comment to Muhammad, “By God, you ask us something that you didn’t ask men. In any case, we shall grant it to you![6]” when the latter asked Hind to take his oath of allegiance which is different for women. Muslim scholars point out that some “distinguished women converted to Islam prior to their husbands, a demonstration of Islam’s recognition of their capacity for independent action[7].” However, what this demonstrates is the independence of pre-Islamic women who would have never been able to convert independently without their male kin if their independent status was not already established.

Marriage

Hoyland gives several examples to illustrate that while Islamic law establishes ‘descent through the male line’, pre-Islamic Arabia also recognized ‘matrilineal arrangements’ which allowed women to choose who they wished to marry and have children with (2003, p.129-131). Muslims claim that ‘Islam gave women the right to choose their husband’, but there are instances where Muslim girls were married off by their guardians/fathers, examples of which include: Aisha being married off to Muhammad as a child (presumably without her knowledge), al-Musayyab ibn Najaba giving his newborn daughter’s hand in marriage to his cousin’s son, Muhammad arranging his cousin, Zainab bint Jahsh’s (apparently against her will prompting the revelation of 33:36, see tafsir of al Jalalayn[8]) marriage to his adopted Zayd ibn Harithah. Thus we see that if male guardians generally married off women in pre-Islamic time, the practice did not stop with the coming of Islam.

We also see Islamic law making it necessary for a woman (whether virgin or previously married) to have a male guardian give her away in marriage, for example we learn that when Muhammad married Umm Salamah she was an ‘older widow’ but what we hardly read is that she was “married to the Prophet” by her son, Salamah (Ibn Hisham, 2010, p. 793).  On the other hand, the pre-Islamic forms of unions, some of which gave authority to women in a marriage, were replaced by patriarchal order by Islam (see Ahmed, 1986, p. 667) scraping off marriages that assisted women like: uxorilocal marriage (according to Ahmed, Muhammad’s own mother had contracted this form of marriage with Abdullah ibn Abdul Muttalib), pre-Islamic form of mutah marriage (which according to Robertson in Kinship And Marriage in Early Arabia may have been the type contracted between Khadija and Muhammad since he remained monogamous), and even polyandry practiced by women belonging to matrilineal tribes.  In the words of Fatima Mernissi (2011), polyandry, which was banned by Islam, was degrading to men not women:

“Group sex marriages, where the woman could entertain relations either with a group of less than ten men or consume a limitless number of partners, degraded men to animal-like anonymity. Fatherhood, which implied that the woman limited her sexual desire to consuming only her husband’s body was a rare privilege, since children belonged to the mother’s tribe in general.”

Anonymity of the father meant a man’s role was that of a mere sperm donor and a temporary sexual object. Since the woman gave birth to a child and raised them, she took central stage position. According to Robertson (1907), polyandry as practiced in the pre-Islamic world is generally represented by Muslim writers as fornication however, he says, “where the children are not bastards, and the mothers are not disgraced or punished for their unchastity, this term is plainly in- appropriate.”

Divorce

Another area where Islam changed power balance between men and women is divorce. While generally men held the right to divorce women in pre-Islamic time, there are also records that indicate that women dismissed their husbands with an equal right:

‘The women in the pre-Islamic time, or some of them, had the right to dismiss their husbands, and the form of dismissal was this. If they lived in a tent they turned it round, so that if the door faced east it now faced west, and when the man saw this he knew that he was dismissed and did not enter.’”(Isfahani in Hoyland, p. 130).

The above report dismisses the claim that it was Islam that gave women the right to divorce, which is also factually untrue since a Muslim woman cannot divorce her husband, but has to ask to be divorced by him. An option of equality would have been to make ‘divorce through arbitration’ the law for both men and women. Instead men have the full right to dismiss a wife independently even through oral pronouncement, while a woman has to ‘ask’ her husband for divorce through third party intercession (called Khul):

“Islam further restricted women’s divorce rights by leaving it only to the husband to decide on divorce. Although the practice of foregoing one’s mahr for a divorce continues to exist in Muslim countries up to now, it no longer guarantees the wife a divorce: the husband has the right to refuse a divorce even if the wife is prepared to forego her mahr. Only very limited circumstances (such as disappearance of a husband over four years, or extreme physical deformities leading to sexual impotence) entitle a wife to ask an Islamic judge for a divorce. The final decision is left to the judge, however.[9]”

This disparity has never been clearer than in modern time when Muslim men can divorce via text messages[10], while Muslim women have to wait for years to obtain a divorce[11] making it clear that changing the direction of the opening of a tent was unquestionably empowering for a pre-Islamic woman!

Bridal Price

Islam also continued the practice of ‘bridal price’ (called Mahr or Sadaq) making Islamic marriage a ‘marriage of authority.’ Mahr or Sadaq is explained in Islam (as was understood before Islam as well) as the price a man pays a woman to have sex with her (amusingly called ‘thaman al bud’a’ – ‘the vulva’s price’, by Imam Shafi; see Ali, 2006, p. 4). However, before Islam, some women were able to contract marriages with men who were obligated to live in the woman’s house. The offspring produced in such a marriage would remain with the woman and her family and the husband did not receive inheritance from the wife upon her death. Some early biographers of Muhammad claim that Khadija paid four thousand dinars to Muhammad upon their marriage which makes scholars like Robertson and Leila Ahmed to speculate that the pre-Islamic type of marriage between the two obligated Muhammad to live in Khadija’s house and remain monogamous as long as she was alive (he also received nothing in inheritance upon her death). After Islam, men were no longer required to be monogamous and allowed up to four wives and as many concubines as they can afford. Women, on the other hand, were banned from practicing polyandry. Muslim scholars explain that Islam allows men four wives (ignoring the countless concubines!) making it the only religious system in the world to restrict limitless polygyny for the first time. This we know is not true.  Over five hundred years before Islam, Hinduism had already laid down the law according to which the upper caste, Brâhmanas were allowed to four wives (Baudhayana Prasna I, Adhyay 8, Kandikka 16[12]).

Thus, there were other religious systems before Islam that restricted polygyny and similar models must have been available for Muslims to adopt including an equally satisfying monogamous model that could have been established as the preferred model for both sexes by ending the practice of  ‘thaman al bud’a’ which reduces the significance of a woman to that of purchased goods. This is not pointed out in modern Islamic discourses, which have started to call Mahr/Sadaq a ‘sweet gift’ rather than “vulva’s price.” Mahr is interchangeably used with Sadaq in Islamic discourses although the former was paid, in pre-Islamic time, to the male guardian of the bride, while the latter was given to the bride. After Islam, although it remains as the payment that gives a man “the right to enjoy the women’s private parts” (Sahih Bukhari – Volume 7, Book 62, Number 81), Mahr or Sadaq is directly given to the bride and becomes her property.  However, because a man buys a woman’s vulva through Mahr (Quran, 4:24), she must remain monogamous and faithful to her husband; if she is not, he can take the Mahr back (Quran, 4:19). If he no longer wants her, he may divorce her and let her keep the Mahr since he has already ‘gone into’ what he paid for (Quran, 4:20-21).  If a woman wants a divorce, she returns the Mahr so she can be “released/freed” (“tasrīḥun” – Quran, 2:229).  This is a clear model of patriarchal marriage of authority where the woman’s vulva is purchased and she must request to be “released”, which Islam established as the standardized model bringing it from pre-Islamic time while abolishing all other models, some of which placed women at an equal footing or in a more favourable position.

Social roles pre-Islamic women played

Being wives and mothers was not the only roles women played in pre-Islamic time.  Women commissioned inscriptions, made offerings to their gods in their own right, acted as administrative officers, took up their deceased husbands’ overloardship, and constructed public buildings and tombs (Hoyland, p. 132; also see Al Fassi, 2001, p. 48-55) leading historians to claim that the last activity indicates a ‘considerable degree of financial independence (Ibid).’  Ahmed also explains that, “Jahilia women were priests, soothsayers, prophets, participants in warfare, and nurses on the battlefield. They were fearlessly outspoken, defiant critics of men; authors of satirical verse aimed at formidable male opponents; keepers, in some unclear capacity, of the keys of the holiest shrine in Mecca; rebels and leaders of rebellions that included men; and individuals who initiated and terminated marriages at will, protested the limits Islam imposed on that freedom, and mingled freely with the men of their society until Islam banned such interaction” (1992, p. 62).

Furthermore, Muslims claim that in pre-Islamic time during “times of war, women were treated as part of the loot. Simply put, their plight was unspeakable[13].”  But that very well continued into Islam:

Narrated Buraida: The prophet sent Ali to Khalid to bring the Khumus ([one fifth] of the booty) and I hated Ali, and Ali had taken a bath (after a sexual act with a slave girl from the Khumus). I said to Khalid, “Don’t you see this (i.e. Ali)?” When we reached the prophet I mentioned that to him. He said, “O Buraida! Do you hate Ali?” I said, “Yes” He said, “Do you hate him, for he deserves more than that from the Khumus.” (Sahih Bukhari 5:59:637). Also see Sahih Bukhari 7:62:137; Sahih Bukhari 5:59:512; Sahih Bukhari 5:59:459.)

Inheritance

Similarly, “Muslim writers on the subject of inheritance often state that Islam instituted inheritance and property rights for women, something that they were presumably deprived of in pre-Islamic Arabia. This is simply false and in contradiction to many statements in the Muslim hadith itself[14]” for we read about the wealth Khadija had inherited and owned. We even read about Sulafa and Hubba – two women who were entrusted with being the Keepers of the Key of Kaaba, something that never happened after Mecca was attacked and Muslims subsequently occupied Kaaba – women never became the successors who could become the Keepers of the Key. We now know (through the study of none other than a Meccan Muslim woman) that “women were able to inherit and also to bequeath inheritance to whom so ever they wish (sic). The fact that women were those who bestow rights to their close relatives demonstrates their legal power of ownership and inheritance” (Al Fassi, 2001, p. 55).

Veil

In modern Muslim circles, we also see assertions that veil is liberation from sexual attention, that it is a feminist choice that ‘dignifies a woman’ because before Islam women used to roam around naked. This is not entirely true. Classism existed in the pre-Islamic Arabian society. The upper class, free women would cover their bodies, even faces, because their “sexuality and reproductive capability belonged to one man” (Ahmed, 1992, p. 12) – this continued into Islam. Women belonging to the working class and those who were slaves did not cover themselves; in fact, slaves were not allowed to cover their bodies and were punished if they tried to behave like free women – this too continued into Islam:

Umar hit the slave women from the family of Anas ibn Malik, when he saw them covered and said, “Uncover your head, and do not resemble the free women.” – Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani (d. 211 AH/826 CE) in Al-Musannaf

Based on such incidents “jurists in the following centuries allowed Muslim slave women to pray without a head covering, and walk topless in public. The slave woman’s awrah — the legally delineated area that must be covered in order to avoid sin — became the same as the man, from the navel to the knees.[15]” Renowned historian, Ronald Segal’s book, ‘Islam’s Black Slaves’, gives specific details of how throughout Muslim history classism has existed with free women and slaves treated differently just like in pre-Islamic times (2001, p. 13-65).

Infanticide

Female infanticide in pre-Islamic times is another point Muslims use to claim that women were “rescued from the gloomy injustice of Pre-Islamic darkness.” It is certainly true that Quran categorically bans infanticide and ended the practice very quickly, at least in Arabia (Quran, 6:151: 17:31). However, the practice was never widespread anyway and Quran clearly bans the infanticide of boys and girls, not just girls. Tribes that practiced infanticide did not discriminate between sons and daughters. Some tribes killed their children as a way to appease their gods. Muhammad’s grandfather, Abdul Muttalib, had sworn to his highest god, Allah, that he would sacrifice a son if he had ten. He was then required to sacrifice Abdullah (Muhammad’s father) whose name was cast by divination arrows but was saved by a female soothsayer’s consultation (Ibn Ishaq, p.66-68). Poorer tribes would kill their children from fear of poverty.  There was one tribe, Tamim, in which some men would kill their daughters as they were always warring with other tribes and were afraid that their daughters would be captured and turned into concubines.  However, while Quran prohibits killing children and refers to the fear and sadness associated with the birth of a daughter (16:58-59), it never banned capture of women in wars and their subsequent enslavement and concubinage.  Strangely, renowned Muslim scholars like Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Sina justified capture of Africans as slaves commenting that “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery” since they have characteristics that “are quite similar to those of dumb animals” (Ibn Khaldun cited in Segal, 2001: 49).  Similarly, al Idrisi is cited as commenting on a desirability of Nubian concubines: “Their women are of surpassing beauty. They are circumcised and fragrant-smelling…Of all the black women, they are the best for pleasures of the bed” (Ibid, p.50). Thus, we see that while degradation of women as enslaved concubines could have been banned by Islam, which was a fear out of which the Tamim tribe would kill their daughters, it not only continued the practice but was justified by the early Muslim scholars.

Conclusion

Two arguments are being made in this essay: 1] the condition of women in pre-Islamic Arabia depended on which tribe they belonged to – not all women were mistreated, in fact some were far more empowered before Islam than afterward…these reports all exist in Muslim sources; 2] Islam did not choose the more women-empowering pre-existing cultural mores to lay down laws regarding women. It appears that the Islamic laws related to women, while striving for some form of compassion for women, are consistently formed in ways to benefit men, and the focus of many of these laws has been to satisfy the almost obsessive interest of Islam in paternity. Muslim gender equality activists argue that early male scholars deliberately misinterpreted the Quran, but their entire premise is based on the belief that Islam universally improved the situation of women who lived in the gloomy, unjust, pre-Islamic darkness. Without this naïve supposition (that we have seen is a false belief), their entire argument crumbles to dust.  Some Muslims have already begun to realise this:

“I have become only further convinced that if Muslim women are to come fully to terms with cases in which the Qur’anic text lends itself to meanings that are detrimental to them, we must begin to confront those meanings more honestly, without resorting to apologetic explanations for them, or engaging in interpretive manipulations to force egalitarian meanings from the text. Furthermore, I have also come to believe firmly that we must begin to radically reimagine the nature of the Qur’an’s revelation and divinity.” – Hidayatullah (2014, p. viii).

As more and more historians reconsider the condition of pre-Islamic women, it will become exceedingly difficult for Muslim scholars to defend the supposed gender egalitarianism in Islam without radically reimagining the nature of the Qur’an’s revelation and divinity.

References

1. Ahmed, L. ( 1986). Women and the Advent of Islam. Signs, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 665-691. University of Chicago Press
2. Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam. New Haven and London: Yale University press
3. Al-Fassi, H.A. (2007). Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) Archaeopress, Oxford
4. Ali, K. (2010). Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
5. Ibn Ishaq. (2010). Sirat Rasul Allah – The Life of Muhammad. Translated by A. Guillaume. Karachi: Oxford University Press
6. Hidayatullah, A. A. (2014). Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. New York: Oxford University Press
7. Hoyland, R. G. (2001) Arabia and the Arabs – from the bronze age to the coming of Islam.  London and New York: Routledge
8. Mernissi, F. (2011). Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society. London: Saqi
9. Robertson, S. W. (1907). Kinship And Marriage In Early Arabia. London: Adam and Charles Black
10. Segal, R. (2002). Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Obligation to destroy idols: Islamic Jihad against Human History and Human Art

 This comes from Islam Question and Answer Fatwa 20894

In a nutshell: It is an obligation for Muslims to destroy "idols" even if they are part of the legacy of human civilization!

Question:
Is it obligatory to destroy statues in Islam, even if they are part of the legacy of human civilization? Why is it that when the Sahaabah conquered other lands and saw statues there they did not destroy them?.

Answer:

Praise be to Allaah.  

The evidence of sharee’ah indicates that it is obligatory to destroy idols, for example:

1 – Muslim (969) narrated that Abu’l-Hayaaj al-Asadi said: ‘Ali ibn Abi Taalib said to me: “Shall I not send you with the same instructions as the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sent me? ‘Do not leave any image without defacing it or any built-up grave without leveling it.’”

2 – Muslim (832) narrated from ‘Urwah ibn ‘Abasah that he said to the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “With what were you sent?” He said, “I was sent to uphold the ties of kinship, to break the idols, and so that Allaah would be worshipped alone with no partner or associate.”

The obligation to destroy them is even stronger if they are worshipped instead of Allaah.

3 – al-Bukhaari (3020) and Muslim (2476) narrated that Jareer ibn ‘Abd-Allaah al-Bajali said: The Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said to me: “O Jareer, will you not relieve me of Dhu’l-Khalsah?”  That was a house (in Yemen) belonging to the (tribe of) Khath’am, which was called Ka’bat al-Yamaaniyyah. I set out with one hundred and fifty horsemen. I used not to sit firm on horses and I mentioned that to the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). He struck me on my chest with his hand and said, 'O Allaah! Make him firm and make him one who guides others and is guided on the right path.' " So Jareer went and burned it with fire, then Jareer sent a man called Abu Artaat to the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). He said, “I did not come to you until we had left it like a scabby camel.” Then the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) blessed the horses of (the tribe of) Ahmas and their men five times.

Al-Haafiz Ibn Hajar said:

This hadeeth indicates that it is prescribed to remove things that may tempt or confuse the people, whether they are buildings, people, animals or inanimate objects.

4 – The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sent Khaalid ibn al-Waleed (may Allaah be pleased with him) on a campaign to destroy al-‘Uzza.

5 – and he sent Sa’d ibn Zayd al-Ashhali (may Allaah be pleased with him) on a campaign to destroy Manaat.

6 – And he sent ‘Amr ibn al-‘Aas (may Allaah be pleased with him) on a campaign to destroy Suwaa’. All of that happened after the Conquest of Makkah.

Al-Bidaayah wa’l-Nihaayah, 4/712. 776. 5/83; al-Seerah al-Nabawiyyah by Dr. ‘Ali al-Salaabi, 2/1186.

Al-Nawawi said in Sharh Muslim when discussing the issue of image-making:
They were unanimously agreed that whatever casts a shadow is not allowed and must be changed.
Images that cast a shadow are three-dimensional images like these statues.

With regard to what is said about the Sahaabah (may Allaah be pleased with them) not destroying idols in the conquered lands, this is merely conjecture. The companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) would not have left idols and statues alone, especially since they were worshipped at that time.

If it is asked, how come the Sahaabah left alone the ancient idols of the Pharaohs and Phoenicians? The answer is that these idols fall into one of three categories:

1 – These idols may have been in remote places that the Sahaabah did not reach; when the Sahaabah conquered Egypt, for example, that does not mean that they reached every part of the land.

2 – These idols may not have been visible, rather they may have been inside Pharaonic buildings etc. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) told us to hasten when passing through the abodes of the wrongdoers and those who had been punished, and he forbade entering such places. In al-Saheehayn it is says: “Do not enter upon those who have been punished unless you are weeping, lest there befall you something like that which befall them.” He (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said that when he passed by ashaab al-hijr [the dwellers of the rocky tract – see al-Hijr 15:80], in the land of Thamood, the people of Saalih (peace be upon him).

According to another report narrated in  al-Saheehayn, “If you are not weeping, then do not enter upon them, lest there befall you something like that which befall them.” 

What we think is that if the companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) saw a temple or building belonging of these people, they did not enter it or even look at what was inside it. 

This will dispel any confusion about why the Sahaabah did not see the Pyramids or what is inside them. There is also the possibility that their doors and entrances were covered with sand at that time.

3 – Many of these idols that are visible nowadays were covered and hidden, and have only been discovered recently, or they have been brought from remote places that the companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) did not reach.

Al-Zarkali was asked about the Pyramids and the Sphinx etc: Did the Sahaabah who entered Egypt see them?

He said: They were mostly covered with sand, especially the Sphinx.

Shibh Jazeerat al-‘Arab, 4/1188

Then even if we assume that there was a statue that was visible and not hidden, then we still have to prove that the Sahaabah saw it and were able to destroy it.

The fact of the matter is that the Sahaabah (may Allaah be pleased with them) would not have been able to destroy some of these statues. It took twenty days to destroy some of these statues even with tools, equipment, and explosives etc that were not available to the Sahaabah at all.

This is indicated by what Ibn Khuldoon said in al-Muqaddimah (p. 383), that the caliph al-Rasheed was unable to destroy the estrade of Chosroes. He started to do that, and he gathered men and tools, and burned it with fire, and poured vinegar on it, but he was unable to do it. And the caliph al-Ma’moon wanted to destroy the Pyramids in Egypt and he gathered workers but he could not do it.

With regard to the excuse that these statues are part of the legacy of mankind, no attention should be paid to such words. Al-Laat, al-‘Uzaa, Hubal, Manaat and other idols were also a legacy for those who worshipped them among Quraysh and the Arabs.

This is a legacy, but it is a haraam legacy which should be uprooted. When the command comes from Allaah and His Messenger, then the believer must hasten to obey, and the command of Allaah and His Messenger cannot be rejected on the grounds of this flimsy excuse. Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning):

“The only saying of the faithful believers, when they are called to Allaah (His Words, the Qur’aan) and His Messenger, to judge between them, is that they say: “We hear and we obey.” And such are the successful (who will live forever in Paradise)”

[al-Noor 24:51]

We ask Allaah to help the Muslims to do that which He loves and which pleased Him.

And Allaah knows best.

Islam caused the Dark Ages

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: An Introduction to the History of a Controversy

by Emmet Scott

New English Review Press, 2012

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy is published by New English Review Press. It may be ordered through Amazon here. This is an excellent book!

Introduction

The book that follows is not a history in the normal sense, but, as the subtitle explains, the history of a controversy. The controversy in question is the one which has raged for many years around the question: What ended Roman civilization and brought about the Dark Ages?

Theories about the fall of the Roman Empire as a political institution have of course been thick on the ground for centuries; but the present study is not so much concerned with this event as with the fall of the civilization associated with the Roman Empire. That civilization – more properly called “classical civilization” – survived the fall of the Empire and was not, in any case, a creation of the Romans at all, but of the Greeks, which the Romans imbibed wholesale, and which they proceeded, with their conquests, to spread throughout the western Mediterranean and northern Europe. This Graeco-Roman civilization may be described as largely urban, literate, and learned, and characterized by what could be called a rationalist spirit. It was a society which, in theory at least, respected reason and the pursuit of knowledge, and which was not given to religious extremism or fanaticism. We know that this civilization did not come to an end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It survived in Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, and it survived too even in the West, a region administered, from 476 onwards, by “barbarian” kings and princes. The rulers of the Franks, Visigoths and Ostrogoths – and even of the Vandals – tried hard to preserve the culture and institutions they found in place when they crossed the Imperial frontiers. Yet, in spite of all this, Graeco-Roman civilization did indeed die in the West, and it died too in the East. In both regions it was replaced, eventually, by a society and civilization that we now call “medieval,” a society whose most outstanding characteristics were in many ways the precise opposite of the classical; a society that was overwhelmingly rural, generally illiterate, had a largely barter economy, and tended to be inward-looking rather than open and syncretic. (The latter of course is a clichéd and formulaic view of medieval civilization, but it does contain important elements of the truth).

It is the purpose of the present study to examine the causes of this, or, more precisely, to examine a highly controversial thesis about it which appeared in the early years of the twentieth century. This was the thesis of Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian whose specialism was the early medieval period. Pirenne maintained that the real destroyers of classical civilization were the Muslims. It was the Arab Invasions, he said, which broke the unity of the Mediterranean world and turned the Middle Sea – previously one of the world’s most important trading highways – into a battleground. It was only after the appearance of Islam, claimed Pirenne, that the cities of the West, which depended upon the Mediterranean trade for their survival, began to die. With them went the entire infrastructure of classical culture. Pirenne found that from the mid-seventh century onwards a host of luxury products, which had hitherto been common in Gaul, Italy and Spain, disappeared, and that with them went the prosperity upon which classical culture depended. Towns shrank and society became more rural.

Essentially, what Pirenne was saying was that Islam caused the Dark Age in Europe. This was, even in the 1920s, when the thesis was first published, an extremely controversial idea, and went quite against the grain of contemporary opinion: for the tendency over the previous century had increasingly been to see Islam as the harbinger of medieval Europe’s civilization; as the great preserver of classical knowledge and learning; as an enlightened and tolerant influence which reached Europe in the seventh century and which commenced then to raise the continent out of the darkness into which it had sunk. This had been the default mode of thought amongst perhaps the majority of academics for almost half a century before the appearance of Pirenne’s thesis, a view of history deeply rooted in contemporary European thinking. And then along came Pirenne to claim the precise opposite!

As might be imagined, such a remarkable counter-thesis generated heated debate; a debate that endures to this day. And to this day, the two camps are divided rather precisely as they were in the time of Pirenne, who died in 1935. There are those who, with varying degrees of passion, maintain that Islam essentially saved the remnants of classical culture and learning, which they transmitted to a benighted Europe; and there are those (a much smaller group) who, with Pirenne, maintain that Islam was the destroyer of that very culture and learning; and that if Europe was benighted after the seventh century, it was benighted precisely because of the actions of the Muslims. How strange is this situation! How is it that one topic can give rise to such radically differing perspectives? We are, we might say, once more in what was known during the Middle Ages as “the world’s debate.” In those days, during the Crusades, the “debate” was waged by force of arms. The academic and in some respects ideological battle being fought today is waged in newspapers, books, journals, television, radio and the internet; though another “theatre” of the debate is arguably being waged precisely as it was in the time of the Crusades: by force of arms.

Why then is this debate still with us; and why does it elicit such radically opposing responses? What is it about Islam and its history that gives rise to such intense controversy? The answer to these questions shall, I hope, be presented in the pages to follow. And if it is not an answer that everyone can accept, then at least the evidence shall be presented in a way that is accessible to all and that may enable the reader to make up his/her own mind.

* * *

As this is the history of a debate, it is appropriate to begin with a look at how it developed over the centuries; for the story does not begin with Pirenne.

Until the eighteenth century scholars had generally assumed that classical civilization came to an end with the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in 476. However, as the eighteenth century progressed and the study of history became a proper scholarly discipline rather than a simple chronicling of events, educated Europeans became aware of the fact that the “barbarian” tribes who conquered the Western Empire in the fifth century never intended to destroy Roman society or culture; and as our knowledge of late antiquity improved, the obvious question became progressively more urgent: What then brought classical civilization to an end? If it was not, after all, the “barbarians,” who were responsible, who or what was, and when?

Concomitant with research into Roman history, Enlightenment scholars began a detailed examination of early medieval Europe. As they did so, they began to notice how great was the debt owed by medieval Europe to the Islamic world. They read letters, official documents and chronicles, which seemed to point to Islamic Spain and the Islamic Middle East as the source of all real knowledge and learning at the time. They read accounts of how European scholars slipped across the borders of the Islamic world, often in disguise, to learn their secrets. They noticed how European thinkers of the time, from Abelard to Roger Bacon, couched their debates in the language of Islamic scholars such as Averroes and Avicenna. They noticed that very many of the scientific and scholarly terminologies found in the languages of Europe, were of Arab origin. We used the “Arabic” numeral system, which gave us the concept of zero – a direct borrowing from the Arabic zirr, whilst our word “algebra” was directly taken from the Arabic al-jabr. They found indeed that numerous technical and scientific terms, such as alcohol, alkali, etc, and many others, were of Arab origin.

Thus by the early nineteenth century scholarly opinion about Islam began to change dramatically. True, even then Muslim pirates were a problem in the Mediterranean, and Muslim societies – most notably the Ottoman Empire – were rather impoverished and often brutal. But these negatives were increasingly viewed as an accident of history, not as something logically deriving from Islam. After all, if slavery was then a problem in the Muslim world, had it not been a problem too in the Christian world? And if the Muslims killed apostates and heretics, did not the Christians do the same until the seventeenth century?

The trend towards a negative view of European civilization accompanied by a positive view of Islamic civilization continued throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed the “talking up” of Islam went rather precisely in tandem with the “talking down” of Christianity. This was particularly the case amongst a certain class of politicized intellectuals, who, as the nineteenth century progressed, adopted an increasingly hostile approach to all things European; and the trend only accelerated with the First World War. Following the cataclysmic events of those years, fewer and fewer of Europe’s and America’s intellectual class subscribed to the view that European civilization was in any way superior to others. On the contrary, an age of disillusionment dawned. As this view gathered strength, so the criticism of medieval Europe, and medieval Christendom, became more virulent. More and more the medieval world was seen as a “dark age,” and any learning that we now possess surely did not originate in it.

Christian writers at the time – there still were many – tried of course to counter this movement; but they were outnumbered and in a sense outgunned. The tide of thought was flowing decidedly against them.

Even as this occurred, the study of late antiquity and the early medieval world in Europe moved on. Archaeology, as well as the discovery and translation into modern languages of more and more texts of the fifth to tenth centuries began to transform our understanding of the period. As we saw, it had been known, since the time of Gibbon at least, that the “Barbarians” had not intended to destroy Roman civilization. The archaeological evidence proved that they did not. On the contrary, it became increasingly clear that classical, or Graeco-Roman, civilization had survived the Barbarian Invasions of the fifth century, and that there had even been, in the sixth century at least, something of a revival of that civilization, at least in places like Gaul and Spain. Yet the world of Rome and her civilization did indeed come to an end, and that event, it was increasingly clear, occurred sometime in the seventh century. After that time, the western world was distinctly medieval in all respects. But why, it was asked, should this have occurred? If the barbarian rulers of the West could manage and cultivate prosperous and largely urban societies for two centuries, especially in places like North Africa and Spain, why did they finally “lose the plot” in the seventh century?

By the early years of the twentieth century this had become a pressing problem, and it was addressed by two outstanding historians of the time: Alfons Dopsch and Henri Pirenne. Both Dopsch and Pirenne devoted considerable effort to an examination of Italian and Gaulish societies during the fifth and sixth centuries, and both became prominent in their rejection of the notion of a barbarian-created Dark Age during that period. Yet Dopsch came to believe that he could detect a general “decline” of Roman culture in the years between 400 and 600, and he eventually threw his weight behind the idea that the Germanic peoples who ruled the West proved in the long run incapable of administering an efficient urban civilization. With time, thought Dopsch, the “barbarian” and uncivilized nature of these peoples prevailed, and, notwithstanding their initial efforts to save Roman culture and institutions, in the end they presided over the collapse of these very things.

Henri Pirenne studied the same epoch and used more or less the same materials as Dopsch. The conclusions he came to, however, were very different. Like Dopsch, he saw that there was no “Dark Age” in the first two centuries after the sack of Rome by Alaric (410), and that Roman culture and institutions survived. He saw too that the demise of this culture could be dated to the first half of the seventh century. Unlike Dopsch, however, he could find no evidence of a gradual decline. For Pirenne, the end of the late classical civilization seemed to come suddenly. What, he thought, could have caused it?

Early in the 1920s, he came to a novel and controversial conclusion: Roman society and the culture we associate with it had been destroyed the Arab conquests. Saracen pirates and raiders¸ he claimed, had blockaded the Mediterranean from the 640s onwards, terminating all trade between the Levant and western Europe. The cities of Italy, Gaul and Spain, which depended upon this trade for their prosperity, began to die; and the Germanic kings who controlled these regions, deprived of the taxable wealth generated by the same trade, lost much of their authority and power. Local strongmen asserted control of the provinces. These were the medieval barons. The Middle Ages had begun.

What Pirenne was now saying went completely against the grain of contemporary academic thought about Islam, which had come to see the Arabian faith as a civilizing, rather than a destructive, force. The debate which he ignited then has never really died or been resolved and, on the contrary, has only taken on a new and urgent resonance in the modern world. As we shall see, Pirenne’s thesis was accorded, for a while, somewhat grudging acceptance in some areas of academia, though even then he was viewed as the person to argue against. By the 1980s, however, a general consensus had arisen, at least in the English-speaking world, that Pirenne had been effectively debunked; and from that time on more and more books and academic studies of the period failed to mention him or his theory.

The anti-Pirenne consensus was largely, as we shall see, galvanized by archaeological work carried out in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. There it was found that, whilst classical culture survived during the fifth and sixth centuries, there had nevertheless been a marked decline in all aspects of civilized life from the fifth century onwards. The Italian excavations were to form the basis of the argument presented by the most influential of Pirenne’s critics, Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, who in 1982 published what was advertised as a definitive refutation of Pirenne. The book, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, proved to mark a watershed in the debate. Using mainly the Italian material, but also some data from North Africa, Hodges and Whitehouse argued the Graeco-Roman civilization was in terminal decline in the years prior to 600. So decrepit were the economies of Italy, Spain, and North Africa after the 550s, they declared, that classical culture did not need to be killed off by the Arabs: it was already effectively

dead by the time they arrived.

But there were serious flaws in Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s thinking, as we shall see. For one thing, the data they presented was extremely limited in its scope, and essentially failed to look beyond central Italy. Claims that the economy and civic life of North Africa had also collapsed before 600 can be shown to be without foundation. In Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 we do what Hodges and Whitehouse failed to do and look beyond Italy to Gaul, central Europe, Britain and Spain, where we find apparently thriving and vital late classical cultures during the fifth and (more especially) sixth and early seventh centuries. This in spite of the fact that none of these societies – with the possible exception of Spain – can be described as major centers of classical culture, either in late antiquity or earlier. Indeed, the archaeology of western Europe in general, with the exception of Italy, shows a pronounced expansion of population, culture, and trade during the latter half of the sixth century and the first half of the seventh – precisely those years during which Hodges and Whitehouse claimed Europe and classical civilization was dying a slow and tortuous death. Everywhere we find evidence of expansion of cultivation, of population increase, of the growth of towns and the revival of building in stone, of the adoption and development of new technologies, and of new regions, such as Ireland, northern Britain (Scotland) and eastern and northern Germany, being brought within the orbit of Latin civilization for the first time.

So much for Europe. Yet, in order to get to the bottom of this question, we need to look further afield. For Pirenne, as for most of his critics, the debate about the “Dark Ages” was entirely a debate about what happened in Europe, particularly western Europe, and most especially in Gaul and Italy. But the West, with the exception of Italy herself and perhaps Spain, had never been much more than a backwater even at the height of the Roman Empire. The reality of the situation is described succinctly by Patrick J. Geary:

“During the more than five centuries of Roman presence in the West, the regions of Britain, Gaul, and Germany were marginal to Roman interests. The Empire was essentially Mediterranean and remained so throughout its existence; thus Italy, Spain, and North Africa were the Western areas most vital to it. However, the Empire’s cultural, economic, and population centers were the great cities of the East: Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, and later Constantinople. The West boasted only one true city … Rome. In the first centuries of the Empire, Rome could afford the luxury of maintaining the Romanitas [Roman territories] of the West. Still, these regions, which supplying the legions of the limes, or borders, with men and arms and supporting the local senators with the otium, or leisured existence, necessary to lead a civilized life of letters, contributed little to either the cultural or economic life of the Empire.” (Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany, pp. 8-9)

From this, it is clear that if we wish to chart the decline and fall of classical civilization we must not confine our gaze to the West, but must pay close attention to what happened in the East: It was here, and not in the West, that was located the core area of that civilization. Pirenne failed to notice this, perhaps because of the habitually Eurocentric mindset of academic culture in his time. Yet examine the East we must, and this is the task we set ourselves from Chapter 10 onwards.

As we shall see, whatever might be said about the disappearance of classical civilization in the West, in the East there is no question at all that it was terminated in the mid-seventh century, and that it was terminated by the Arabs. On this point Hodges and Whitehouse were strangely ambiguous: on the one hand, they recognized that the Arabs wrought immense destruction in the Levant, and they even admitted to the appearance in North Africa of a “Dark Age” following the Arab conquests; yet on the other hand they strove to suggest that classical civilization in the East was wrecked more by the Persians than by the Arabs, and that, in Asia Minor at least, classical civilization was already terminally damaged by the time the Arabs arrived.

Our own survey of the evidence leads us to a somewhat different conclusion: namely that classical civilization was indeed weakened by Byzantium’s destructive war with Persia, which commenced in 612; but that it was still sufficiently powerful and vibrant to recover from that conflict, had not the Arabs arrived immediately afterwards to devastate the region permanently. These are the facts as uncovered by archaeology, yet, as we shall see, they prompt another urgent question: What then was it about the Arabs, or, more accurately, about Islam, that could bring about such universal and complete destruction?

At this point we must pause to take note of the remarkable fact that very few of the historians who have commented upon Pirenne’s thesis have paid much attention to the nature of Islam or its beliefs. They have, virtually without exception, assumed that Islam is or was a faith no different from any other. Indeed, almost all of modern academia treat the religious systems of mankind as an amorphous whole, and see no difference between them. If they do pick out one for special criticism it is invariably Christianity that they target. There are, or have been, interesting exceptions to the rule, such as Joseph Campbell, who spoke of “the sleep of Islam” which overtook the Middle East in the seventh century; but in general twentieth century scholarship has been remarkably positive about the Arabian faith. Yet even a cursory examination of the tenets of Islam is enough to convince us that it is not a faith like any other; and that it is, on the contrary, a religio-political ideology whose fundamental principle is aggressive expansionism. In Chapter 13 we find that, through the doctrine of perpetual “holy war,” or jihad, plus the notion of entitlement central to sharia law, Islam had a thoroughly and unprecedentedly destabilizing influence upon the Mediterranean world. It was the perpetual raiding of Muslim pirates and slave-traders that brought about the abandonment throughout southern Europe of the scattered settlements of classical times and the retreat to defended hilltop fortifications – the first medieval castles. The same raiding led to the abandonment of the old agricultural systems, with their irrigation dikes and ditches, and caused the formation throughout the Mediterranean coastlands of a layer of silt just about the last of the late classical settlements.

We find then that Islam did indeed cause the end of classical civilization, in its heartland at least, the Middle East. Yet that statement does not exhaust the complexity of this question. For the three centuries which saw the rise of Islam and the Dark Ages in Europe, the seventh to the tenth – the three least known of our entire history – have other mysteries to unravel. And these are mysteries that archaeology has done little to resolve. Indeed, it may even have further deepened them.

Whoever studies early medieval history cannot fail to note the fact that, apart from the economic impact which Pirenne claimed to detect in the seventh century, the real cultural and ideological impact of Islam upon Europe only begins in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Documents from that period onwards leave us in no doubt that the world of “the Saracens” was regarded by Europeans as one of fabulous wealth; a region to which they cast envious eyes not only on account of its riches but because of its learning and knowledge. From the late-tenth century onwards educated Europeans made continuous efforts to tap into the learning of the Arabs. And here of course we arrive at the very nexus of the radical disagreement over Islam which has bedeviled the study of early medieval history for two centuries. Here precisely is the reason why, on the one hand, some academics may describe Islam as tolerant and learned, whilst others, with equal conviction, can describe it as violent and intolerant. Whatever damage Islam may have caused Europe in the seventh century, argue the Islamophiles, it was more than compensated for by the knowledge and wisdom bequeathed to Europe in the tenth century by the same faith. For whilst Europe may have lingered for three centuries in a Dark Age limbo of poverty and ignorance, Islam enjoyed three centuries of unparalleled splendor and prosperity, a veritable Golden Age.

That, at least, has been the narrative until now. Yet over the past half century the discoveries of archaeology have undermined this picture, and have revealed facts which may well eventually compel a radical rethink.

Whilst some historians of medieval Europe, relying on the traditional written sources, have consistently argued for the removal of the term “Dark Age” from our historical nomenclature, the archaeological evidence has served only to demonstrate how thoroughly appropriate the term is. For try as they might, excavators have signally failed to discover any civilization worthy of the name in Europe between the late seventh and early tenth centuries. Indeed, the progress of research has repeatedly demonstrated that even the pitifully few monuments and artifacts hitherto assigned the “dark” centuries have, on further investigation, usually been shown not to belong to that epoch at all; but invariably either to the period immediately following the Dark Age, or to the period immediately preceding it.

Surely, archaeologists have said, ample proof that Europe was indeed a dark and barbarous – and largely unpopulated – land during those long years.

But the mystery has deepened further: for we now know that Europe is not the only region devoid of archaeology between the seventh and tenth centuries. The same gap is observed throughout the Islamic world. Here then is a real shock to the collective system! Whilst depopulation and non-culture might just have been expected in Europe, it was certainly not expected in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. These regions, after all, formed the very heart of the Caliphate, the very core of population, commerce, and cultured life during the three centuries of what has been called Islam’s Golden Age. At this time excavators had expected to find luxurious mosques, palaces, baths, etc, standing in the midst of truly enormous metropolises. The fabulous Harun al-Rashid in the ninth century, after all, is supposed to have reigned over a city of Baghdad that was home to in excess of a million people. Cordoba, capital of the Spanish Emirate at the same time, is said to have housed half a million souls. Yet of this splendid civilization hardly a brick or inscription has been found! It is true that from the very beginning of the Islamic epoch there is occasionally (although infrequently) found some archaeology. This usually dates to the mid-seventh century. Then, after this, there are three full centuries with virtually nothing. About the middle of the tenth century archaeology resumes, and there is talk of a “revival” of cities in the Muslim world, just as in Europe at the same time. Indeed, the mid-tenth century reveals a flowering and in many ways splendid Islamic civilization, clearly more wealthy and at a higher stage of development than anything in contemporary Europe. Yet this civilization seems to spring out of nowhere: It is without any archaeological antecedents.

These discoveries have served to underline the dichotomy at the heart of all discussion on Islam, and have in fact added another strand to it: On the one hand, as we saw, in the mid-seventh century, there is proof of massive destruction carried out by the Arabs throughout the Near East. So great was the destruction that many of the cities and towns which were thriving under the Byzantines and remained prosperous until the first quarter of the seventh century were then abandoned and deserted, never to be reoccupied. Their gaunt ruins lie everywhere throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Yet on the other hand, immediately after this destruction, the Islamic regions were always believed to have enjoyed a “Golden Age” which lasted into the tenth and eleventh centuries. That, at least, was the narrative and the argument until recently.

We should note that the archaeological appearance of the first rich Islamic culture in the tenth and eleventh centuries coincides with written history which always indicated that the cultural impact of Islam only reached Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

What can all this mean? Is this a conundrum that can be solved, or is it utterly beyond the ingenuity of men to get to the bottom of?

As we shall see in the final chapter of the present study, so great has this problem become that it has prompted some very radical, even outlandish, solutions. One of these, favored by not a few historians and climatologists, is that some form of natural disaster struck Europe and perhaps the entire earth during the seventh century. Several writers, referring mainly to medieval chronicles, speak of a mini-Ice Age or perhaps a period of global warming. Others look to the skies and see cometary or asteroid causes. These writers agree that there was a Dark Age, but that it was caused by nature, rather than man. Another school of thought, most influential in Europe, denies the existence of a Dark Age at all and claims that the three hundred years between the early seventh and early tenth centuries never existed, and were merely a fictional creation of scribes working for the Emperor Otto III at the end of the tenth century. The most important proponents of this theory are German writers Heribert Illig and Gunnar Heinsohn. It would be impossible to do justice to either of these theories or to examine all their implications in a volume, never mind a chapter. We shall look briefly at some towards the end of the present study. Suffice to say that whilst Illig’s thesis may be seen as solving several hitherto intractable conundrums (eg why does “Romanesque” art of the tenth and eleventh centuries look so much like Merovingian art of the seventh), it has been almost universally rejected by mainstream academia, and remains a decidedly “fringe” idea.

Leaving such questions aside, the present study concludes by noting that scholarship has now arrived at a several conclusions which are really beyond dispute, and which tend to offer definitive support for Pirenne.

First and foremost, the evidence suggests that classical or Graeco-Roman civilization was alive and well into the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This was particularly the case in the Middle East and North Africa, which were the ancient heartlands of Mediterranean culture, and in which were located by far the greatest centers of population, wealth, and industry. Evidence shows that until the first quarter of the seventh century these regions were flourishing as never before. But classical civilization was also alive and well in Europe, a region which (aside from central and southern Italy), had always been peripheral to Graeco-Roman civilization. And outside of central Italy we find none of the signs of decay that Pirenne’s critics claimed to have detected. On the contrary, Gaul and in particular Spain supported a thriving and vigorous late classical culture; and this was a culture that was growing, rather than declining. Indeed, by the latter years of the sixth century classical civilization had begun to spread into regions never reached by the Roman Legions, and Latin, as well as Greek, was now studied along the banks of the Elbe in eastern Germany, and in the Hebrides, off northern Scotland.

Secondly, the evidence shows that this culture went into rapid and terminal decline in the 620s and 630s. The great cities of Asia Minor and Syria everywhere at this time show signs of violent destruction; after which they were never rebuilt. Whatever archaeology appears on top of them is invariably impoverished and small-scale; usually little more than a diminutive fortress. Contemporary with the destruction of the classical cities, we find a universal decay in the countryside: Top-soil is washed away and a layer of subsoil, known as the Younger Fill, covers settlements in river-valleys and blocks harbors. This stratum appears throughout the Mediterranean world, from Syria to Spain, and is the geographical signature of the end of Graeco-Roman civilization. With the appearance of this layer, classical patterns of settlement and land-management are abandoned. This is the pattern too in southern Europe, where we now find a retreat of settlement to defended hill-top sites – the first medieval castles. Both these developments can be explained by the appearance of Muslim raiders and pirates throughout the Mediterranean coastlands from the 630s onwards; and if that is not the accepted solution, then no answer is forthcoming.

Thirdly, from the mid-seventh century onwards there is an almost total disappearance of archaeology in Europe and throughout the Middle East and North Africa for a period of three centuries. This disappearance, it seems, has nothing to do with what has always been called the “Dark Age” of Europe, because it appears also in the Islamic lands. By the mid- to late-tenth century cities and towns revive both in the Islamic and Christian lands, and (though the great cities of classical times are gone forever), the material culture of the new settlements looks strikingly reminiscent in many ways of the material culture of the seventh century.

That, in brief, is what the archaeology says. At the end of the present volume we take a brief look at events subsequent to the rise and spread of Islam. There we find that not only did the Arabs terminate classical civilization in the Levant and North Africa, and therefore cut Europe off from the humanizing and civilizing impulses which had previously emanated from those regions, but they now began, in the tenth century, to exert their own influence upon the West. And that influence was anything but benevolent. It is of course widely accepted that Islam had a profound cultural impact upon early medieval Europe. Indeed, the all-pervasiveness of that impact has been traditionally seen as underlining the cultural superiority of Islam at that time. Yet, as we shall see, in addition to some commentaries upon Aristotle, and a few scientific and technological concepts (which were not “Arab” inventions at all) Islam was to communicate to Europe a whole host of ideas and attitudes that were far from being enlightened. Most obviously, the concept of “holy war”, which Europe adopted (admittedly somewhat reluctantly) in the eleventh century, was entirely an Islamic innovation; as was the tendency towards theocracy (enshrined in the all-powerful medieval Papacy) and the suppression, by force, of heterodox ideas.

* * *

It goes without saying that a work such as this cannot claim to be exhaustive, or the last word. Many of the topics covered could profitably have been examined in greater depth; yet so diverse is the range of evidence and so wide the territories and epochs it covers, that a detailed examination of everything is a complete impossibility. I have been compelled to look at written and archaeological evidence for the fifth to tenth centuries from the western extremities of Europe to the borders of Persia. And, as might be expected, the literature dealing with these diverse eras and areas is immense, and growing more so by the day. So much has been written on the economic and political histories of the Byzantine, Frankish, Visigothic and Early Islamic states in the English language over the past twenty years that a complete bibliography might fill an entire volume of its own. But a bulging bibliography does not necessarily indicate a convincing argument or even a coherent line of thought. As such, I have endeavored simply to select some of the most representative material, and to examine the arguments and evidence found therein in detail. And since this is an examination of the Pirenne thesis I have concentrated, on the whole, on those authors who have dealt with his work, or whose own work has a direct impact upon his.

So the scope of the present work is limited. On the whole, I have tended to concentrate upon the evidence of archaeology. If we have learned anything about this epoch, it is that written sources cannot be taken at face value. They must be supported by archaeology. And the archaeology of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages has, so far, produced far more puzzles than answers.

So, much work remains to be done. Having said that however, I am convinced that the evidence now accumulated points decisively to a vindication of Pirenne, if not in exactly the manner he imagined. Islam did indeed terminate classical civilization in its main centers, in the Middle East and North Africa. Its impact upon Europe however was more nuanced, and did not perhaps amount to the economic catastrophe Pirenne believed. Temperate Europe was already economically self-sufficient before the arrival of the Arabs; and their presence in the Mediterranean did little more than block the importation to the West of certain eastern luxuries which were enjoyed by the elites of Gaul, Spain and Italy. Much more serious however was the termination of the papyrus supply, an event which led, inter alia, to the loss of the great bulk of the heritage of classical literature and to the general loss of literacy amongst the population of Europe. This led, very quickly indeed, to the “medieval” mentality with which we are all too familiar.

Emmet Scott is a historian specializing in the ancient history of the Near East. Over the past ten years he has turned his attention to Late Antiquity and the declining phase of classical civilization, which he sees as one of the most crucial episodes in the history of western civilization.