The Germanic tribes, of course, had not been the only threat to Roman civilization. There had been the Huns, drawn by the empire’s wealth and luxuries, and there had been nomadic tribes from the Arabian peninsula, who for centuries past had raided the Roman provinces of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. But unlike the barbarians from the north, the Arabic world had itself become civilized. Great caravan routes already stretched across their lands, important links in a far-flung commercial network between the Far East, the Byzantine Empire, and Persia. Along these caravan routes cities had begun to rise, so large and prosperous that they rivaled Rome, sending out caravans of their own, growing still richer on their middle-man profits. And it was in Mecca, a bustling Arabic commercial center near the Red Sea, that around the year 570 was born a child who would enter history as the Prophet Mohammed.
The exact date of Mohammed’s birth is not known, nor is the name his mother gave him. The name by which he is universally known, Mohammed – highly praised – sounds more like an honorary title. Tradition also has it that he was an orphan before the age of six, and that thereafter he was raised by a Bedouin family. With little formal education, Mohammed eventually became a caravan trader for a wealthy widow, whom he later married despite the fact that she was fifteen years older than he. From this marriage also came the only child to survive him – Fatima, revered as the mother of all those descended from the Prophet.
Mohammed’s travels as a caravan trader later became embellished with so many legends that it is nearly impossible to separate the myths from the truth; apparently, however, during that time he did come into frequent contacts with Christians and Jews, and he no doubt picked up bits and pieces of these religions’ histories. At any rate, by the time he reached his thirties, Mohammed had become a high-strung young man, who was frequently seen wandering off in search of solitude and contemplation of life and the many religious principles he had encountered. Apparently, he had also been impressed by the fact that the Christians and the Jews with whom he had come into contact had a ‘book’ and were prosperous and advanced, while his own people, the heathen Arabians, had no book and were still relatively backward. This deficiency was rectified, however, when, during one of his meditations in a cave near Mecca, Mohammed suddenly heard a strange voice and experienced a mystical vision in which the Archangel Gabriel revealed to him the word and will of God. Mohammed had found his calling as the Prophet of the one true faith.
From that day on, Mohammed spent all his time in preaching and writing about his new-found faith, though at first he was unable to win over many believers outside his own family. The wealthy merchants of Mecca certainly had no use for this odd fanatic; they were not about to see their main temple, the Kaaba, discredited by the strange preachings of this peculiar advocate of a new faith. The Kaaba housed a sacred meteoritic stone, and had already become a profitable center of pagan pilgrimages; ironically, it was this same Kaaba that later became the very center of Mohammed’s faith. For now, however, the businessmen of Mecca proved so hostile that the prophet and his few followers felt threatened enough to flee the city. In 622, they resettled to Yathrib, some 200 miles north along the caravan route, and it was on that moment that was born the powerful new religion known as Islam. Yathrib was soon renamed Medina, al-Madinah, the city of the Prophet, and the retreat to Medina became known as Hegira, a significant date in Islam, for it marks the beginning of the Moslem calendar.
In his new home, Mohammed seems to have had few problems in winning converts to his new faith. Within a few years he had not only become Medina’s religious leader, but a political power as well, already laying the foundation of Islam by combining the religious and civil authorities into one sacred unit. Soon Medina’s forces intercepted caravans from Mecca, and in 630 even attacked and conquered that city itself. The birthplace of Mohammed now became the very center of Islam; the area around the Kaaba was declared sacred territory, forbidden to non-Moslems for all times. By that time, Mohammed had already become a near-legendary figure in Arabia; tribe after tribe now flocked to his support, and when the Prophet died in 632, the Arabian world had become a well-organized nation, fanatically inspired by the flame of Islam.
Islam, the Arabic word for surrender, teaches its followers to submit to the word of Allah, the single, almighty God of the Universe. Mohammed never regarded himself as divine, but rather as the last of a long line of prophets, which included Moses, Abraham and Christ. The Koran, the comprehensive work of Mohammed’s writings, is the bedrock of Islam – the word of Allah as dictated to the Prophet by the Archangel Gabriel from an original book located in Heaven. Written in the Prophet’s native Arabic, every true Moslem must read the Koran in its original version; as a result, wherever Islam spread, the Arabic language necessarily spread with it. But the very fact that Mohammed, an uneducated man, could produce such powerful writings was always presented by his followers as proof of his divine inspiration; Mohammed himself never performed any miracles, and he never claimed any.
The Koran sets down a long list of regulations covering the daily life of a Moslem. The Moslem must not drink nor gamble; he is not to practice usury in business, and he is to deal with his fellow man in just and merciful ways. A Moslem is expected to be generous and charitable to the poor; he is to pray several times a day, always facing in the direction of Mecca; and at least once in his life, if at all possible, he is expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet and the center of Islam. But above all, a true Moslem is required to give his life, if necessary, to further and protect the one true faith. Any Moslem who suffers such martyrdom is assured of eternal life. Holy War – Jihad – thus became one of the cornerstones of Islam, and in the years following Mohammed’s death, the Arabs responded to this exhortation with explosive force.
Islam could, in fact, not have chosen a better moment. The remnants of the Western Empire were barely able to survive. The Persian Empire had just been all but destroyed by the Byzantines, who, in the process, had exhausted nearly all their own military power and resources. The populations of Egypt and Syria were already in revolt to the strict policies of the Eastern Emperor, who had further added to his problems by setting out on large-scale persecutions of his Jewish subjects in such cities as Alexandria and Antioch. Much of the former Roman world was therefore wide open to outside influences, with neither East nor West able to offer much resistance. Islamic Jihad, at any rate, met with little opposition.
The forces of Islam fell over the Roman world, ablaze with religious zeal. There was no masterplan of conquest, but as victory piled on victory, the Arabic hordes grew ever bolder. Moving into Syria, they wiped out a large Byzantine army in 636, captured Damascus and Jerusalem, and soon occupied the entire land. In 637 they overwhelmingly defeated a Persian army, and within another decade had subdued all of Persia and stood on the borders of India. Other Arabic armies had meanwhile entered Egypt, conquered Alexandria, and then moved rapidly across the Libyan desert into North Africa, where they easily expelled the Byzantine government. For nearly fifty years thereafter, Islamic forces battered away at the fortress of Constantinople, but the great walls of the city held, protecting southeastern Europe for another 700 years. But of all its great and wealthy provinces, Byzantium had been able to hold only Asia Minor – the territory that is today’s Turkey – and not for two centuries more did the exhausted empire recover enough to undertake any reconquests.
In the West, too, the Islamic armies achieved spectacular successes. In 698 they took Carthage; in 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain and easily crushed the splintered and neglected Visigoth chiefdoms there. While the Christian lords barely managed to escape into the mountains, the Moslems crossed the Pyrenees and threatened the kingdom of the Franks. But there, in the year 732, exactly one hundred years after the Prophet’s death, the advance of Islam in the West came to a sudden halt. On a battlefield between Tours and Poitiers, a semi-barbarous, long-haired, wolf-skin robed army of Franks, commanded by the Carolingian Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel, stopped the threat of Islam as only Constantinople had been able to do.
But the Mediterranean world had now been drastically transformed. The vast territory conquered during this century of Islamic Jihad remained under Arab rule for decades and centuries to come. The Caliph, the successor to the Prophet, established his capital at Damascus and ruled over this extensive empire with an autocratic hand. And if many of the subject people eventually revolted against this strict rule, and if Arab civilization splintered into numerous separate states, the West would not soon recover any of its former kingdoms. Not until the very end of the 15th century, in fact, at the very eve of the discovery of the New World, would the last Islamic rulers be expelled from European territory.