What Muhammad had done was remarkable, but it hardly
affected anyone
outside Arabia. That changed soon after his death. Under his
successors, the caliphs, the Arabs began to attack the Fertile
Crescent, the region adjoining Arabia on the north. They had always
been in the habit of conducting small- scale raids there, but the new
state enabled them to coordinate their efforts in an unprecedented way.
In the course of the 630s and 640s, these attacks developed into a
series of conquests that included the entire Persian Empire and most of
the southern provinces of the surviving eastern half of the Roman
Empire. The Muslims subsequently extended their rule all the way along
the coast of North Africa, and in the early eighth century they went on
to conquer most of Spain; meanwhile, in the east they advanced into
Central Asia and northwestern India.
No previous empire in history had extended over such
a distance, and
well into the ninth century most of these territories were held
together under the rule of a single state, the caliphate. The history
of this state was turbulent, with numerous rebellions, several periods
of intense civil war, and a major change of dynasty in the mid- eighth
century; moreover, the political values that emerged in Islam were by
no means as state friendly as those of China's Confucians (recollect
the ninth- century Muslim who wept at the thought of his father seeing
him serving the caliph as a judge). But the duration of this
effectively united caliphate was far longer than that of the Mongol
empire, and the Muslims had something to which the Mongols would offer
no parallel: a novel monotheist religion.
The outcome was that a new civilization took shape
around Islam, and by
the time the caliphate broke up, this civilization was firmly
established over lands that had previously displayed quite different
cultural allegiances. There was large-scale conversion of non-Arabs to
Islam; except in the southern fringes of Europe, the non-Muslim
population was gradually reduced to scattered minorities that no longer
threatened Islamic dominance.
In the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and, eventually, most
of North Africa,
the mass of the population also became Arabic- speaking, and their pre-
Islamic languages fell into disuse. At the same time a new elite
culture was established, centered on the Islamic religion and the
Arabic language; Arabic became the classical language of a civilization
in the manner of classical Chinese or Latin, and everything that an
educated elite might want to read became available in Arabic. In one
sense Islamic civilization was not new: most of the raw materials of
which it was made derived from the cultures the Arabs had conquered--
which is why it was possible to bring a new civilization into existence
with unique rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent as a result of the
career of a single man. But the reshaping of the diverse materials
yielded a civilization quite distinct from any of its predecessors, and
one that replaced them over large areas.