Medieval Middle East

Main Points

• Rise of Religion A new religion brings culture to the barbarian Arabs.
• Economic Growth The Umayyad Arabs and their successors build a vibrant and rich civilization.
• Barbarian Invasions The collapse of Arab civilization and centuries of barbarian devastation.

The Medieval Era in the Middle East was almost completely different than any other region. In other regions, barbarian invasions destroyed established empires and allowed religion to flourish. Religion was a way to retain regional unity in the face of the political fragmentation. At the same time, religion was the best emotional answer to the soul searching occasioned by the collapse of seemingly invincible civilizations. In contrast, when the barbarians stormed the gates of the Middle East, they brought their religion with them. This is one of the key reasons why the Arabs can stake a claim to being the most successful civilization of the Medieval Era.

Rise of Religion

The Arabs created several dynasties on the backs of religious fervor, religious tolerance, and a love of learning and culture. In 610AD, the prophet Muhammad received his first vision, the first holy words from Allah, Muhammad's name for the creator of the universe and lord of all. He passed the next 20 years sharing these teachings and poetry to his followers who would eventually write the verses down as the holy Qur'an, the central scripture of Islam. The Muslims would equate Allah with the deity that Christians called God or Jehovah, and which Jews called Yaweh. As such the Muslims absorbed and reinterpreted the Christian and Jewish scriptures almost verbatim and found many metaphors and histories that merged with their own.

This was the reason which the Arabs gave for pursuing one of the most tolerant and "peaceful" conversions in the history of Eurasia. While the Muslims conquered a larger empire than any before them, there were no enforced conversions. Jews and Christians had practiced full scale genocide in a number of instances against their enemies - indeed against opposing sects of their own religions. The Muslims on the other hand, respected the Christians and Jews as brothers of the faith, calling them "People of the Book" because all three faiths acknowledged the revelations of the Bible.

Conversion efforts to the Arabs meant that Muslims encouraged some ministry among Christians and Jews and levied additional taxes to motivate them to accept the true faith. But Christians and Jews were treated with respect, extended roughly equal legal rights with Muslims and enjoyed the right to continue in their culture and their religion so long as they wished. There was certainly no similar treatment of other religions among the Jews or Christians either before or during the Arab dominance of Eurasia. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Muhammad's revelation moved him not only to poetry, but to action. So what was a young member of a small tribe in the tangled politics of the Arabian Peninsula to do? Muhammad chose to teach his new religious message in the holy city of the Arabs; Mecca. Among the fractious Arab tribes, Mecca was the hub of power and what passed for Arab culture. He was not welcome. His teachings praised service, charity for the poor, and other humane doctrines, which were deemed subversive by the ruling tribes of Mecca who practiced few if any of these admirable traits. In 622 AD, fearing for his life, Muhammad slipped from Mecca in the middle of the night and fled to the friendlier city of Medina. This act was named the Hijra, the flight, and became the year 1 in the Muslim calendar.

Within a few years, Muhammad had come to power peacefully and wrote a constitution for Medina. The Muslims proved they were the most sophisticated law givers and insightful politicians among the Arabs, though Muhammad's followers several times demonstrated that they were also among the most skilled warriors on the Arabian Peninsula. In 630 AD, Mohammad made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and he brought his powerful army with him. The ruling lords of Mecca were still diametrically opposed to him, but with Mohammad's army on their doorstep, they acquiesced and allowed him to make the pilgrimage, entering the city in triumph where he had fled in the night just 8 years before.

Muhammad conducted himself with the utmost decorum and though he smashed the idols to install Islam as the religion of the city, the Conquest of Mecca was otherwise entirely peaceful. Muhammad's conduct, peaceful observance of his moral principles, and the power of this new faith swept the Arabian Peninsula. Over the next few years Muhammad - and after his death, his successors - allied with the other tribes through diplomacy or by defeating them in battle. The divided Arabs who had wandered Arabia fighting amongst themselves were united for the first time under a series of dynamic leaders and possessing a revolutionary new culture and religion. And in 633 AD they burst out of Arabia on the most unprecedented series of conquests in world history.

Economic Growth

In 636 AD, a great Muslim army stood toe to toe with the forces of the East Roman empire. Neither army saw an advantage and so for several months the armies simply encamped opposite each other across the Yarmuk River. The stalemate was broken by a massive sandstorm which swept up over the camps. Sensing the moment, the Muslims forded the river en masse and charged the Christian army which could only flee or try to fight with heavy winds driving sand into their eyes. The Muslims dispersed the Christian force and claimed Palestine and Syria; neither would permanently leave the Muslim sphere of influence again. Then in 642 AD, at the Battle of Nehavend, the Arabs broke the power of the weakened Sassanian Empire and seized their territory as well.

Muhammad had died in 632 AD, but his followers chose a series of successors (called Caliphs) to unify the movement as spiritual and political leaders. Culturally, the most important was probably Uthman who in the 650s, had the Qur'an compiled into an authoritative written form for the first time. On his death in 656 AD, he was succeeded by the only relative of Muhammad ever to rule, Ali. However, Ali's reign was one of the most fractious in Muslim history, and in 661 AD he was assassinated.

This led to a Muslim civil war which could have broken the power of Islam almost before it had begun. However, the Umayyad merchant clan of Mecca succeeded in destroying their opposition and founded the Umayyad dynasty. This civil war however, was not without consequences. The two factions never made peace, but both survived and have sparred off and on ever since. The Shia Ali, party of Ali, known as the Shiites, are a dissenting minority clan that believes only relatives of Muhammad had the authority to rule as Caliph. They were opposed to the majority Sunni who hold that any Caliph may rule so long as they obey the strictures of Islam. This fracture has never been repaired to this day and Sunnis and Shiites continue to disagree on many points of doctrine.

The Sunni Umayyads established their capital in Damascus and unified their new empire by sending military expeditions in all directions. The Umayyads seized Egypt and stormed across North Africa. They crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered most of Spain. Finally, a massive Muslim force raided as far as central Gaul before being resoundingly defeated by a Christian coalition at the Battle of Poitier in 732 AD. It was a signal that the Muslim tide was really beginning to turn. In 716 AD, the Muslims had marched before the very walls of Constantinople and laid seige to the city for two years. The Byzantines held out despite the determination and dedication of their foes, and in 718 AD they broke the seige of the city. It was the first major victory for the East Romans over the Umayyads. Spain and Constantinople would remain the rough borders between Christian and Muslim spheres of influence for the rest of the Medieval period.

Muslim navies however, would continue to expand until they largely dominated the Mediterranean. While the Romans were the only empire to conquer all the lands surrounding the sea, Muslim ships seized the Mediterranean just as completely using their triangular sailed ships. These were more maneuverable than square sailed Christian ships, and Muslims could sail into the wind, a feat the Christians couldn't duplicate and refused to adopt. As this balance of power was forming, the Umayyads settled down to ostentatious living, something which did not sit well with their devout subjects. In 750 AD, a coup overthrew the decreasingly dynamic empire and Abu al-Abbas founded the Abbasid Dynasty.

The Abbasids recognized the relative importance of their more sophisticated eastern provinces in comparison to the possibility of making advances into barbarian Europe. It was one of the most timely decisions in history as in 751 AD, Abbasid armies were in position to face a major new expansion of the Chinese Tang Dynasty into the Middle East. At the Battle of the Talas River the two armies collided and the Abbasids soundly routed the Chinese force in one of the great turning points in history. With the Tang armies sent back into China, the Abbasids were able to lay claim to the entire Middle East. This massive land empire from India to Spain was the largest empire ever assembled and it had only taken a hundred years to do it. No other people in history conquered so much, so quickly before settling into a peaceful, strong, stable empire. While the Abbasids would settle into their new empire without expanding it significantly, for almost 200 years they would maintain their empire in the face of all challengers. Between the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, the Arab Muslims thus hold the best argument for ruling the largest stable empire in world history.

Excepting only the Tang Dynasty which was now on the verge of collapse, the Arab Muslims were also the most cultured empire of the Medieval era. Like all great empires, the Abbasids developed a sophisticated economy fueled by international trade. The Abbasids moved their court from Damascus to Mesopotamia where they founded a beautiful and powerful new city as their capital, Baghdad. Muslim culture was devoted to art, poetry, architecture, gardens, and the greatest scientists and mathematicians of the age. It also created great libraries that preserved and extended Christian learning at a time when European abbeys were storing a few hundred books, and scraping off most of the old writing in order to reuse the parchment for new books about the lives of saints.

This was a key ingredient for the Arab's success. They combined the best of two Eras, the Ancient power of learning with the Medieval power of religion; virtually every other Medieval culture - including the heirs of Arab civilization - witnessed religion's erosion of learning. Religion's emphasis on faith without understanding sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly sapped the commitment of society to secular education. In contrast, Muhammad had spoken of Allah's command not only to expand the faith but to expand knowledge, and the Abbasids encouraged some of the most dynamic and brilliant scholars in all of history. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worked and shared their knowledge, but the Muslims had an unusually shrewd practical streak. Where the Greeks loved to take a premise and start working out its implications philosophically, Arabs preferred to take lots of little facts and build them up into one idea. Thus, many of the great precursors of the scientific movement got their start among the Arabs who worked best not in the realms of Greek abstraction but in experimentation and testing. This is how Arab scholars developed detailed astronomical tables derived from practical observations which were used across Eurasia due to their accuracy.

The greatest medical text of the Medieval era was compiled by Ibn Sina of Bukhara - known to Christians as Avicenna, the Arabic Aristotle - Ibn Sina wrote cogently on virtually every topic imaginable and was the greatest scholar of the Medieval era. He was also one of the first Arab scholars to understand the importance of Indian numerals, and was the scholar most responsible for achieving their adoption throughout the Muslim world. The decimal system was so powerful, that Europeans would eventually grasp it and adopt it, calling them Arabic numerals thinking the Arabs had developed them independently.

Also of profound importance was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarazmi (of Kwarazm); al-Kwarazmi created an entirely new field of mathematics never imagined in Greek geometry. Rather than sketching geometric proofs visually, he wrote down equations of letters and numbers to indicate relationships, ratios, values, and other mathematical concepts or elements. He then developed the discipline of al-muqabala "comparing" which demonstrated that quantities (even if unknown or undetermined) could be subtracted from each side of an equation as long as they could be shown to be equal. He developed this into the more powerful discipline of al-jabr "restoring" in which an unknown quantity could be subtracted or removed from one side of an equation if it's opposite was added to the other side. The name al-jabr would become westernized in Europe to algebra, and al-Kwarazmi's equations would eventually replace geometry as a superior tool in most mathematical disciplines.

Barbarian Invasions

The Abbasid Caliphs became more and more concerned with living lives of gratuitous luxury, in direct contradiction to the dictates of their religion and to the distaste of their subjects. As the job of government became secondary to the job of pleasure, the caliphate weakened just as the Romans, Sassanians, and Chinese before them. And unfortunately, the days of the barbarians were not yet gone. In 945 AD, the Buwayhid tribes conquered Baghdad, effectively ending the power of the Caliphate. In 1038 AD, a superficial unity was restored by the invasion of the Seljuk Turks who swept through the Middle East in the most successful series of campaigns since the Arabs themselves. The Turks would dominate the Middle East for almost a thousand years but never equaled the sophistication of the Arabs much less their own contemporaries. To add insult to injury, in 1095 AD, the Franj (the Franks of Europe) launched the First Crusade against the Muslims. Despite having little in the way of resources, their more advanced political institutions allowed them to parlay an unlikely series of conquests into 200 years of European rule in Syria and Palestine.

Far worse was to come however. In 1220 AD, the eastern states of the Seljuk Turks collided with the most powerful barbarian tribe ever to sweep out of Central Asia, the Mongols. The Mongols proved unstoppable and a flying column of Mongol armies devastated city after city on a march around the Caspian Sea. This raiding party took many prisoners and looted a number of the most beautiful cities in the Muslim world. When issues of the Mongol succession had been resolved, the Mongols returned in 1258 AD invading the Middle East, executing the last Caliph, and building the Ilkhanate in the heartlands of Mesopotamia.

The Mongols never advanced further than this, but it was absolutely devastating. The entire Middle East was under their thumb, and all of Islam's most beautiful cities lay crushed under a brutal police state if they were lucky. Cities that revolted were wiped off the face of the Earth, with only pyramids of skulls to indicate that people had ever lived there. Many Muslim writers of the day believed that the last days had come, and expected with hope and terror the coming end of the world. However, in 1260 AD, Islam was saved by a dynasty of slave sultans. The mamluks ("owned") of Egypt believed that the Mongols were a visitation from Allah upon the impure. Trusting in their faith, but acting with their rigid military discipline, the mamluks sent a small force to lure the Mongols into an ambush and crushed them at the Battle of Ain Jalut. It was the first major defeat in the history of the Mongol hordes, and Ain Jalut represents the end of Mongol expansion in the Middle East.

He Who Wins, Shall Lose...

The mamluks became the saviors of Islam overnight. While they never succeeded in expanding their realm beyond the borders of Egypt, their brand of fundamentalism would have a deep impact on desperate Muslims throughout the Middle East. With the Middle East ravaged first by the Turks, then by the Mongols, the prosperity and economic health of the Middle East plummeted. It would have been a grave challenge to any empire to rebuild in the face of this devastation. However, with Islamic fundamentalism questioning the very notion of rebuilding and worldly concern, those who tried to build were doing so in a society with the economic brakes on. It was a less than ideal situation for recovery.

Moreover, with the Egyptian mamluks unable to claim the Middle East, the region remained a checkerboard of local warlords, known as ghazi, Mongol vassals, and the ailing Ilkhanate. Lacking all but the most basic Formative Era traditions, Mongol culture was not ready to face off with the Medieval powers over the long haul. Into the vacuum, expanded an unlikely empire born from a small Turkish ghazi named Osman who only gained independence in 1299 AD. The Ottoman Turks, despite their tiny beginnings in the frontiers of Anatolia were the primary beneficiaries of Mongol collapse. They invaded Europe, the first Turks to do so. They conquered Constantinople in 1453 AD, renamed the city Istanbul and used it as their capitol for the next 500 years. In the early 1500s, the Ottomans would conquer Hungary and lay seige to Vienna, but their conquests, fueled by European artillery, primarily engulfed the Muslims states of North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. By 1519 AD, the Ottomans ruled the largest empire seen in the Middle East since the Arabs themselves.

While outwardly aggressive and dynamic, the Ottomans were not that far removed from being a Formative Era culture themselves. Before the conquest of Constantinople, they had even destroyed cities and depopulated regions which threatened them. Indeed, before 1453 AD, the Ottomans were little better than the Mongols. Therefore, they had virtually no prior experience on which to grow. If the Middle East was a challenge for any empire, ravaged by barbarians, and restrained by religious fundamentalism, the Ottomans were clearly not the culture who would overcome those disadvantages. It is therefore no surprise that the Ottoman Empire of the 1500s shared much in common with the Europe of 1000 AD and fell into the typical Medieval pattern of slow growth. Europe, however, would race through the Renaissance and into the Industrial in 250 years, leaving the Ottomans isolated and exposed.

Just as Medieval Christians had thumbed their nose at "pagan technology", the Ottomans found little value in anything except European military advances. However, while the Ottoman sultan failed to use European advances and nationalism to his advantage, local and regional nationalist movements used these ideas to form smaller but fundamentally stronger political entities. Some broke away and achieved their independence, like Greece in 1832 and Egypt in 1833. Throughout the empire the lack of an "Ottoman" political identity allowed local movements to wrest ever greater local autonomy from the Ottomans.

When the sultan signed a losing peace at the end of World War I, it was the signal that these proto-states had been waiting for. Led by the Turkish nationalists, the "Young Turks" overthrew the Ottoman Sultanate and created the modern nation of Turkey. Each portion of the Ottoman domains followed suit, splitting up the mighty Ottoman Empire into nationalist states and bringing an end to the Medieval Era in the Middle East.

The people of the Middle East were simply not ready for this massive transformation. Europe had evolved through 250 years of Renaissance history to get to the Industrial Era and even then some nations, most spectacularly France, still had difficulty making the transition to Industrial forms of government and culture. The Middle East almost literally woke up one morning and found itself in the Industrial Era.

Worse, these fledgling states had to contend with Mechanized Era Europeans looking to carve out their own pieces of the Middle Eastern pie. While Turkey's military prowess and difficult terrain allowed it to escape the same fate, most of the new nations of the Middle East had to face greater or lesser European interference. Even as the colonial powers of Europe were losing control of their African colonies, they took advantage of the political immaturity of the Ottoman successor states. Naturally, this would only add to the difficulty of the transition into the Industrial Era.