Everything was quite unexceptional about the life of Muhammad until about the age of forty. Then one night, in 610, while sleeping in a cave outside of Mecca, he had a supernatural experience. He had a vision of the Archangel Gabriel summoning him to be God’s chosen emissary and to begin reciting the first part of His revelation. For much of the next decade, Muhammad preached to a small group of followers, asserting that he was the final prophet in a line of divinely inspired Jewish and Christian messengers from Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Islam meant simply a “submission” to God in all facets of life. As his following grew, the leading families of the Quraysh tried to suppress him. Muhammad’s position in Mecca became untenable when his uncle and tribal protector died in 619. Some of his adherents fled for Christian Ethiopia. In 622, Muhammad and a group of followers left Mecca for a settlement 200 miles north at the crowded, sweet water oasis of Yathrib, later renamed Medina, or “city of the prophet,” where he’d been invited to arbitrate disputes between local tribes.
From Medina, Muhammad’s power base grew rapidly. He expelled Medina’s Jewish tribes when they refused to acknowledge him as the true prophet. To supplement the limited agricultural resources of the oasis, he led his followers to raid camel caravans from Mecca in an expanding alliance with converted Bedouins, who shared profitably in the stolen booty. Before long, Muhammad was engaged in armed struggle with the Quraysh, possibly over control of trade routes. Several victories reinforced the religious fervor of the Muslim faithful that God was on their side, and gradually convinced Meccan leaders to negotiate the peaceful submission of Mecca to Islam by 630. As Mecca’s new leader, Muhammad abolished all blood and property privileges except custodianship of the cube-shaped Ka’bah shrine housing the black meteorite. Mecca replaced Jerusalem as the holy focal point of Muslim prayers.
Through control of the oases, marketplaces, and key caravan and trade routes, plus diplomacy backed by several military offensives, Muhammad rapidly united most of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam. Yet when Muhammad died in 632 many of the tribal chiefs considered their oaths to Islam no longer binding and rebelled against the financial tribute Medina exacted from them. The first caliph, or “successor” to Muhammad, Abu Bakr, responded by organizing a regular army to quell the rebellions. The momentum of these military successes launched a growing Islamic fighting force of fierce nomadic tribesmen who soon reached the frontiers of Arabia’s great neighboring empires, Byzantine Rome and Sassanian Persia.
Under the ambitious and strong-willed second caliph, Omar, Arab armies surged across these frontiers and unleashed one of world history’s astonishing military juggernauts. Long-standing borders were swept away with stunning speed and world history’s cultural map was permanently transformed by seeding Islam throughout the conquered territory. One of the earliest and greatest victories was the August 636 battle of the Yarmuk River, a tributary of the Jordan River at the modern border of Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Aided by a dust storm that concealed their approach and fired by the zeal of religion and the lavish booty of imperial conquest, a large Arab army decimated a huge Byzantine force that became trapped with its back to the river, which soon ran bloody with its dead. By 642 Islamic armies controlled all of Syria and Palestine as well as Egypt’s Nile Valley—thus severing Byzantine Constantinople from two of its richest provinces. Other Arab armies meanwhile thrust eastward, seizing Mesopotamia and the wealth of its twin rivers by 641. By 651 the entire Sassanian Persian Empire had succumbed with astonishing ease. The historic border between Rome and Near East empires, stable for some 700 years, was obliterated in just fifteen years.
Historians have offered various explanations for the spectacular and improbable success of the small, modestly equipped Islamic armies against the huge Persian and Byzantine empires. Although both maintained the façade of imperial power, the two old empires had become internally enfeebled by wars, disease, political struggles, barbarian invasions, and economic corrosion from their failure to maintain agricultural water management infrastructure. In Persia, internecine political quarrels had weakened the central administration, which also failed to maintain the river-fed irrigation systems on the Tigris and Euphrates that had supported the original rise of its power. The resulting fall in crop yields undermined the society’s cohesion. The Byzantine grip on Egypt had been weakened by a century of low Nile floods during which land under cultivation had shrunk by half. The consequent famine, and an overlapping plague, had diminished Egypt’s population by the time of the Arab invasions in 639 to merely 2.5 million—half its Pharaohic height. The highly organized, religiously inspired Arab armies also created their own advantages, notably by the use of camel transport which helped them attack effectively over wide areas. In a typical battle, camels provided the supply trains until preparations were ready for horses, mounted by sword-brandishing cavalry, to make the final charge.
Islam’s military expansion continued, albeit at a less prodigious pace, following a power struggle and civil war that ended with the assassination in 661 of the fourth caliph, Ali. This was a seismic event in Islamic history. Islam’s ruling caliphate moved from Medina to Damascus, under the hereditary control until AD 750 of the Quraysh’s powerful Umayya clan. Moreover, Ali had been Muhammad’s cousin and husband of his daughter, Fatima. His demise ignited the bloody schism between establishment Sunni and dissident Sh’ia, who believe that legitimate leaders of Islam should descend only from the prophet’s direct household.
Under the Umayyads, North Africa was slowly brought into the Islamic fold. Aided by its new Berber allies—and in ships loaned by the Christian Byzantine Empire—Islamic soldiers crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to easily overthrow in 711 the Catholic Visigothic kingdom in Spain. The western Mediterranean, dominated by Rome in its heyday, was transformed into a Muslim lake. Arab fleets also became a force to be reckoned with in the waters east of Sicily and Malta. On land, raiders skirmished with Europeans deep into northern France over the next quarter century. In the east, Muslim armies crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains and stormed the Indus Valley between 708 and 711. The Caucasus mountains and the rich Oxus valley became the northeast borders of Islam’s empire following a Muslim defeat at the hands of Turkish steppe tribe warriors—many of whom were later converted to Islam—and a Muslim victory over a T’ang Chinese army at the Talas River in 751, an event which effectively closed the overland Silk Roads and diverted its trade to the Indian Ocean. Islamic armies also marched south along the African coast. By ejecting the Abyssinian Christians from the narrow Strait of Aden (the modern Bab-el Mandab), they took control of its tolls and opened up the entire Indian Ocean to Arab shipping. Large Arabian dhows were soon sailing the Indian Ocean’s two-way, seasonal monsoons and currents as far as Malacca and China and back again, and displacing Hindu shipping throughout the Old World’s richest long-distance-trading ocean.
By AD 750 Islam’s empire effectively had attained its largest geographical reach. It was a far-flung and decentralized empire with several competing regional centers and political interests loosely unified by a common religion, a common Arabic language, and enormous wealth derived from an extensive land and sea trading market economy. By one estimate the caliphate’s revenue was no less than five times greater than the Byzantine Empire’s by 820.
It was Islamic civilization’s meager freshwater patrimony for farming that compelled it to pursue its livelihood through trade and commerce by exploiting its occupancy of the lands at the crossroads of the civilized Old World. Its agriculture was confined to three main types of cultivation and habitats. Along the sandy coastlines where annual rainfall exceeded seven inches the olive tree provided nourishment, cooking oil, and lighting fuel. Around the scorching desert oases with temperatures of at least 61º Fahrenheit flowered the remarkably useful date palm with its eatable fruit, fibrous leaves for weaving, and trunk for scarce wood. Only in the few irrigable river valleys, or on plains where more than 16 inches of rain fell each year, could the basi
c grains for Islam’s daily bread be cultivated. In between the expanses separating these agricultural pockets roamed small clans of nomadic, seasonal groundwater and grass-seeking desert pastoralists who bred camels and other animals that provided the milk, meat, clothing, and tent skin mainstays of their simple, subsistence lifestyles.
Freshwater scarcity thus profoundly shaped the nature, institutions, and history of Islamic society. Water imposed constraints on food production and set limits on the maximum size of Islam’s sustainable population. For instance, in its halcyon days, Islam could support only 30 to 50 million people; at the time, China’s population was triple that number and world population was ten times greater. As a result, Islam was a civilization that chronically lacked manpower and was forced to expand through religious conversion and conquest. Islam’s religious universalism and Arab leaders’ eventual acceptance of non-Arab converts were likewise shaped by this demographic shortfall. So was the unusual degree of tolerance with which conquered peoples, mercenaries, and even its large slave population were absorbed into its society.
Freshwater scarcity also forced Islam’s population to be highly concentrated around each region’s few good water sources. Overcrowded towns of exceptional size and a few cities of dazzling, world-class accomplishments, such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, were characteristic of Islamic society. Typically, a grand mosque surrounded by commercial markets lay at each town center, which was encircled by a web of twisty, narrow, and unsanitary streets built on slopes from which the rare rains would wash away the refuse.
At the height of its glory, three disparate, rival regional power centers arose—Spain-Magrib, Egypt-Levant, and Mesopotamia-Persia—reflecting and magnifying the religious and tribal divisions within Islam. In such decentralized circumstances, economic organization by command was impossible. Instead, it was the invisible hand of market forces that governed the signature transit and trade that held together Islam’s economy and helped stimulate the breakthroughs underpinning its civilization’s rise. “Not being well endowed by nature,” observes historian Fernand Braudel, “Islam would have counted for little without the roads across its desert: they held it together and gave it life. Trade-routes were its wealth, its raison d’être, its civilization. For centuries, they gave it a dominant position.”
Water scarcity presented the primary obstacle standing between Islam and its historic rise to greatness through trade. First and foremost, it needed a way to cross the long expanse of its own hot, waterless interior deserts. Its first triumphant innovation, which at a stroke transformed the barren desert barrier into an insulated, exclusive Islamic trade highway, came by its disciplined organization of the hardy camel, with its prodigious water-storing capacity, into long trade caravans and military supply transports. A caravan of 5,000 to 6,000 camels could carry as much cargo as a very large European merchant sailing ship or a fleet of barges on China’s Grand Canal. Islam’s quasi-monopoly over this powerful pack animal provided it with the mobility to cross and exit its desert homelands—and to make its mark on world history.
The one-humped Saharan dromedary was specially adapted for the hot deserts. It could go without drinking water for a week or more, while plodding some 35 miles per day across the desert sands with a 200-pound load on its back. Water was stored in its bloodstream—its fatty hump, which grew flaccid during long journeys without nourishment, functioned as a food reserve—and it maximized water retention by recapturing some exhaled water through its nose. Once at a water source the camel speedily rehydrated by consuming up to 25 gallons in only ten minutes. It even could tolerate briney water. It possessed an uncanny memory for the location of water holes. Moreover, it could eat the thorny plants and dry grasses that grew on arid lands and were indigestible by most other animals. During a trip, camels could lose one-quarter their body weight, twice the amount fatal to most other mammals. The camel’s extraordinary physical attributes made it possible for caravans to make the two-month, trans-Sahara trip from Morocco to Walata at the frontiers of the Mali Empire in Africa, which included one notorious stage of ten waterless days.
Like seas, deserts have played a distinctive role in history as expansive, empty spaces between distant civilizations. Initially, both imposed formidable geographic barriers of separation. But when traversed by some transport innovation, they were rapidly transformed into history’s great highways of invasion, expansion, and cultural exchange that often abruptly realigned regional and world orders. Camels took Arab merchants and soldiers everywhere. Ultimately they reached Islam’s other great water challenge—the frontier of its seashores. Islam’s second water breakthrough was to extend its overland desert trade franchise to mercantile mastery of the Old World’s great sea waterways, the Indian Ocean and much of the Mediterranean Sea. Its large dhows, their hulls made of planks tied together with date palm or coconut tree fibers and propelled by triangular lateen sails, which were highly maneuverable against headwinds, and steered with nimble stern rudders, became the caravans of the seas that carried Sinbad the Sailor on the adventures described in the classic literary cycle The Thousand and One Nights.
The long-distance trade route from the Moluccas or Spice Islands of Indonesia across the Indian Ocean to India and the West became in Muslim times the single greatest highway to world power and empire. At a time before Europeans had unlocked the secret arts of sailing across the open oceans and discovered the riches of the New World, and when the Silk Roads were closed, Arab dhows carried the lion’s share of the world’s most desirable goods and spread Islamic civilization throughout the richest coastal ports of call in the world.
Thanks to the Indian Ocean’s unique, seasonally reversing wind system, Arab seamen could set out with a full load of goods between April and June by following the southwesterly monsoons, arrive within two months, do their trading, and fill up their cargo holds with profitable Oriental luxuries in time to catch the reliable fair winds from the northwest that would carry them home when cooling meteorological conditions reversed the monsoon’s direction in winter. Arab vessels also plied the Mediterranean Sea from Spain to Alexandria and the Levant. Compared to the Indian Ocean, however, the Mediterranean’s seaports offered far less alluring wealth while its unidirectional west-to-east winds made sailing more difficult.
By integrating its command over the resources of two disparate water environments—the waterless desert and the salty sea—Islam’s influence soared. Camels and dhows defined its seamless land and sea caravan network that could transport goods and people between the four corners of the Old World. Disassembled dhows were transported by camel across the Sahara Desert for assembly and launch, camels and all, across the Red Sea. Once on the Arabian Peninsula, the ships were again disassembled and portaged for the long, landward rest of the journey along the wadis and oases to the ports of the Arabian Sea that led to the Indian Ocean. The preference for this laborious overland route was that for centuries the rocks and coral reefs, unpredictable winds, irregular currents, and pirate-infested waters of the deep, salty Red Sea were more perilous to navigate than the great deserts along its coasts. Many of the seaways and coastlines leading to the Indian Ocean’s fabulously rich sea-lanes also were inhospitable and dangerous for seafaring. Arabia’s absence of navigable rivers and its scant number of good harbors with sufficient freshwater made supplying ships extremely difficult; the lack of wood resources in the arid landscape was a second, water-related impediment. Adding to the navigational problems for seamen, the Arabian coast was notoriously stormy.
Islamic merchants nevertheless overcame these water obstacles. In Mesopotamia goods went by river to Baghdad, then overland west to Syria and Egypt, north to Constantinople and Trebizond on the Black Sea, and east through northeastern Iran and thence to central Asia and China. Gold and slaves from Sudan, Oriental silk, peppers, spices and pearls, and much of everything else transited through Islamic lands by Arab traders. After about 1000, European vessels from the Republic of Venice and other rising small s
ea states increasingly handled the final transshipments from Alexandria and other Arab ports throughout the Mediterranean in commercial alliances that often transcended religious rivalries.
Islam’s expansive economic power made it a great military force that encroached upon and threatened neighboring civilizations. The native sub-Saharan civilizations of the Niger River fell under domination by Muslim states following the conquest of Ghana in 1076. Much of East Africa, with the notable exception of the Abyssinian highlands of modern Ethiopia, also succumbed. In India, Hindu civilization was in retreat from Islamic conquests over hundreds of years through the seventeenth century. Europe, too, barely survived the onslaught of Islam’s initial military juggernaut from 632 to 718, and remained at peril for several centuries in the heated clash of civilizations that continued in earnest across the Mediterranean throughout the sixteenth century.
Christianity, and all that later flowered into Western civilization, came closest to possible extinction in the year from AD August 717 to August 718. During those 12 months, a huge Muslim naval and army force of over 2,000 ships and 200,000 men laid siege to Constantinople, seat of the Byzantine Empire, inheritor of Rome’s civilization, and Christendom’s greatest city. Had the imperial city, located on the strategic triangular promontory overlooking the junction of the Bosporus Strait and the Sea of Marmara that controlled the narrow 225-mile waterway linking the Mediterranean and Black Sea trade routes and divided Europe from Asia, fallen under Islam’s flag, the entire Mediterranean Sea likely would have become a Muslim lake. Europe’s interior, via the river Danube and toward the Rhine, would have been wide open for an easy Muslim march of conquest. Europe, and the entire Western world, today might be Muslim. In the event, the siege of Constantinople would be an epic turning point in the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. It was also a dramatic illustration of the geostrategic advantage of a strong water defense.
Steven Solomon Page 15
