Before we proceed to the rise of Islam among the Arabs,
we should go
back to the spread of Christianity in the early Middle Ages. The
crucial event, was the adoption of the Christian faith as the state
religion of the Roman Empire. This made it much more attractive, and
not just inside the imperial boundaries. From the fourth century onward
conversion became epidemic in the lands beyond the Roman frontiers,
with peoples as diverse as the Irish, the Goths, and the Ethiopians
jumping on the bandwagon. Of course there were holdouts. As late as
1128 the Pomeranians, a Slavic people of the Baltic coast, were still
pagans. But significantly, a group among them was arguing "that it was
incredibly stupid to separate themselves like miscarried children from
the lap of Holy Mother Church, when all the provinces of the
surrounding nations and the whole Roman world had submitted to the yoke
of the Christian faith." Why, then, should the Arabs have seen things
differently?
One thing that was different about Arabia was the poverty
of its desert
environment. Poverty militates against complexity. Pre- Islamic Arabian
society was tribal, with a form of social organization based on
extended kinship. It did not possess a wealthy aristocracy clearly
differentiated from the masses, and still less did it have powerful
rulers. This made the mechanics of conversion significantly harder.
In the societies on the edges of the Mediterranean
world, the king was
normally the key actor in the process of conversion. Thus when Saint
Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Kent in 597 to convert the English,
he had neither the need nor the opportunity to involve himself in the
micropolitics of the local clans. Instead, he found himself preaching
to Ethelbert, the Kentish king. Ethelbert was no novice, having been on
the throne since 560. He doubtless recognized a tricky combination of
danger and opportunity, and wisely decided to play for time; but he
established ground rules for Augustine's mission that opened the door
to the rapid conversion of his people. It would have been hard to find
a ruler with this kind of authority in Arabia.
Ethelbert had good reason to facilitate the adoption
of Christianity in
his kingdom. From the point of view of the pagan English, continental
Christianity was civilization, and civilization has much to offer to a
king—literate bureaucracy, for example. But adopting Christianity could
not be cost- free, as Ethelbert knew very well. When he played for time
in his initial audience with Augustine, he said this: "The words and
promises you bring are fair indeed, but since they are new and
uncertain I cannot assent to them, abandoning what I, with the whole
English people, have observed for so long." There may be good reasons
to break faith with the religion of one's ancestors and adopt a foreign
one; indeed, it may even be incredibly stupid not to do so. But the
process is necessarily jarring, and wounding to ethnic pride. This was
Ethelbert's dilemma, and the Christian mission in Kent was by no means
insensitive to it. The pope, after long deliberation, recognized that
the stubborn English could not be expected to make an immediate break
with everything in their pagan past, and endorsed a compromise whereby
they could retain their temples intact once the pagan idols had been
removed from them. So the English gave up their idols, but for a time
at least they held on to their temples.
The absence of a powerful king to take the lead in
Arabia made it that
much harder for them to accept the ethnic costs of conversion.
