10.7 Post-Caliphate Islam
After the caliphate fell apart in the ninth century, the lands of Islam were never again ruled by a single state. The nearest approach to a restoration of the original unity of the Islamic world came with the Ottoman Empire. This state had its beginnings in Anatolia, a territory brought into the Muslim world by Turks from Central Asia who conquered it in the eleventh century. The Ottoman state emerged in the late thirteenth century and lasted until the early twentieth. At its height, in the sixteenth century, it included the Balkans, Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, parts of Arabia, Egypt, and North Africa as far as the borders of Morocco; at the same time, the activities of the Ottoman state extended as far afield as Mombasa and the Volga, Andalusia and Aceh.
But even in this period there were at least two other Muslim states that could be described as empires. One was the Safawid state in Iran, where the sixteenth century saw the establishment of Shiism, a form of Islam that is heterodox in relation to the mainstream Sunni confession. The other was the Moghul empire, which represented the zenith of a further extension of Muslim rule over India that had begun in the eleventh century.
The inroads of Islam in India were primarily the result of conquest. But in several other areas the spread of Islam had more to do with the activities of Muslim merchants and the cultural choices of indigenous peoples. There were two such regions in Africa: the West African interior south of the Sahara, and the East African coast. There was a comparable spread of Islam in parts of northern Asia. As early as the tenth century the Bulgars who lived around the bend in the Volga (cousins of the ones who gave their name to Bulgaria) were making well- meaning attempts to adopt Islam; a Muslim ambassador dispatched to them by the caliph did his best to wean them off an un-Islamic taste for nude mixed bathing in the Volga. In later centuries Islam spread among the tribes of the steppes to the east of the Volga, and farther south it became established in Chinese Turkestan. Meanwhile, the late medieval period saw a substantial penetration of Islam into parts of mainland and island South East Asia. By the middle of the sixteenth century there was a significant Islamic presence on the island of Mindanao, in the south of what we now call the Philippines; no doubt Islam would eventually have spread over the entire Philippine archipelago, had not the Spanish conquered it in 1565 and named it after their king.
Islamic civilization had thus become the prevalent culture from Morocco to Mindanao, from the Atlantic to the Pacific (see map 10). As such it was well on the way to dominating the Old World as a whole. There were, of course, extensive regions in which Islam was not established. They included most of southern Africa, particularly in the west, where there had been no coastal spread of Islam to match the ribbon development in the east; all of western Europe, one of the few regions in which Islam lost ground in the Middle Ages; vast tracts of northern Eurasia, including the Slavic continuation of the eastern Roman tradition in Russia; China and most of its neighbors, despite the emergence of a Chinese Muslim minority; large parts of Southeast Asia, such as Buddhist Thailand and Hindu Bali; and India, in the sense that the bulk of the population remained Hindu. All this added up to a lot of territory, but on the map of the Old World as a whole it appeared as disjointed fragments with nothing in common beyond the fact that they were not Muslim. Against this background it would have been easy to imagine a history in which Islam continued to spread for a few centuries in the Old World before making its way to the New World and the Antipodes.