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.