10.6 The Caliphate
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.