Unit III

Unit Summary

A climatic map of Southwestern Asia shows that much of this area falls within a long belt of dry country that extends from the Sahara Desert to the arid lands of northern China. Across this dry zone, including Arabia, pastoral nomads herded camels and other animals, and oasis cities sheltered farmers, artisans, and merchants. North of the Arabian peninsula is the lush agricultural land of Mesopotamia and Persia. Here settled farmers had supported an advanced civilization going back to ancient Mesopotamia. A map of the eastern hemisphere also shows students that Southwestern Asia, Persia, Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were natural channels for land and sea trade in spices, textiles, and many other goods between the Indian Ocean world and the Mediterranean area. These geographical factors put Southwestern Asia and Arab, Persian, and Indian merchants and sailors at the center of the Afroeurasian trade networks, which began to grow dynamically after the seventh century.

Beginning with the Persian Sassanian Empire that had existed from about 550 BCE and was the heir to the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, it was the most important state in Southwestern Asia. It was also Rome and the Byzantine Empire’s great rival for power in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. In the sixth century, the Sassanians ruled an empire that began at the Euphrates River and covered modern Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of central Asia. Their ruler was called by the title “King of Kings.” The official religion of Persia was Zoroastrianism, but they practiced religious toleration. Many Jews and Christians lived in the Persian Empire. Every land trade route across central Eurasia passed through the Persian Empire, and the tax income from the trade made the Persians wealthy. Continued warfare against the Byzantine Empire weakened the Sassanian Persian Empire in the mid-seventh century and contributed to its fall to Muslim armies.

Along with Judaism and Christianity, Islam is an “Abrahamic” religion, that is, a faith built on the ancient monotheism of Abraham. Beginning in 610, Muhammad (570-632 CE), a resident of the small Arabian city of Mecca, preached a new vision of monotheistic faith. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad, an Arabic-speaking merchant, received revelations from God, which were written down in the Qur’an. This message declared that human beings must worship and live by the teachings of the one God and treat one another with equality and justice. Divine salvation will come to the righteous, but those who deny God, “Allah” in Arabic, will suffer damnation. God’s commandments require all men and women to live virtuously by submitting to Allah and following the Five Pillars. Like Christianity, there is an afterlife in Islam; faithful believers are promised paradise after death. Islamic teachings are set forth principally in the Qur’an and the Hadith, the sayings and actions of Muhammad. These were the foundation for the Shariah, the religious laws governing moral, social, and economic life. Islamic law, for example, rejected the older Arabian view of women as “family property,” declaring that all women and men are entitled to respect and moral self-governance, even though Muslim society, like all agrarian societies of that era, remained patriarchal, that is, dominated politically, socially, and culturally by men.

Muhammad also founded a political state in order to defend the young Muslim community. He led armies of desert tribes to take over all of the Arabian peninsula. After his death, the leaders of the Muslim community chose one of his followers to be their new leader, with the title “caliph.” The caliphs sent armies northward to conquer part of the Christian Byzantine Empire and all of the Persian Sasanian Empire. As the Muslim conquests multiplied, the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs ruled an empire called the Umayyad Caliphate. Muslim armies continued to conquer land until by 750 CE, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from Spain all the way to the valley of the Indus . Muslims often did not force Christians or Jews, “people of the book,” to convert, but people of other religions were more often forced to convert. Non-Muslims had to pay a special tax to the caliphate. Gradually more and more people in the caliphate converted to Islam, and Arabic, the language of both the conquerors and the Qur’an, achieved gradual dominance across much of Southwestern Asia (except in Persia) and North Africa. The Umayyad caliphate broke into several states after 750, but most of the Middle East remained unified under the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty (751-1258) with its capital in Baghdad.

The spread of the Muslim Empire is one way people of different cultures interact. That is, Arabs, who were nomadic tribesmen from Arabia, converted to a new religion, and inspired by that religion, fought wars against other cultures. One type of cultural interaction is war. After the conquest, people of other cultures had to live under Umayyad Muslim rule and pay special taxes if they belonged to another religion. This type of cultural interaction is called coexistence in communities. Another type is adoption and adaptation. Some of these conquered people adopted the new religion for various reasons, such as religious conversion, access to political power, and socio-economic advantages. As they converted, they changed their names, their social identity, and associated with Muslims in their area, rather than with their home group of Jews, Christians, or others. Over time, they adopted more of Arab culture as well. However, as they adopted the Muslim religion and Arab culture, they also adapted religious and cultural practices to accommodate local customs. For example, the custom of secluding elite women inside a special part of the house and only allowing them to go out when their hair and most of their bodies were covered predates the religion of Islam. It was actually a Persian and Mediterranean (and ancient Athenian) custom. Before Islam, Arabian women were not confined to the household. The Persians and Mediterranean people who converted to Islam adapted social practices to include their custom. This is just one example of the cultural adaptation process.

Under the Abbasids, Baghdad grew from an insignificant village to one of the leading cities of the world. The city’s culture was a mix of Arab, Persian, Indian, Turkish, and other South Asian and Central Asian cultures. The Abbasids encouraged the growth of learning and borrowing from Greek, Hellenistic, and Indian science and medicine. They built schools and libraries, translated and preserved Greek philosophic, scientific, and medical texts, and supported scientists who expanded that knowledge. In Baghdad and other Muslim-ruled cities, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars collaborated to study ancient Greek, Persian, and Indian writings, forging and widely disseminating a more advanced synthesis of philosophical, scientific, mathematical, geographic, artistic, medical, and literary knowledge.

After 900, the Abbasid Empire began to fragment into many smaller states. However, the common knowledge of Arabic, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and extensive trade and travel unified the Muslim world. Islam continued to spread, sometimes by conquest, but also by the missionary work of Sufis and traveling Muslim merchants. Sufi saints and teachers combined local and Islamic traditions, and inspired common people on the frontier areas of the Muslim world – east Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia – to convert.

The Islamic world was a network of cities that was tied together by common religion, pilgrimage, trade, and intellectual culture. Islamic institutions, such as the pilgrimage (or hajj), caravans, caravanserais, funduqs, souqs, and madrassas, and favorable policies of city and state governments provided major assistance to merchants and travelers. In a gallery walk of primary-source visuals of and text excerpts about these institutions, students gather and analyze evidence using an evidence analysis chart. The same routes also transmitted technologies and food plants. For example, paper-making technology reached the Southwestern Asia from China around the eighth century and spread from there to Europe in the following 300 years. Food plants, including sugar cane, oranges, melons, eggplants, and spinach, were diffused widely along the exchange routes. Less positive things also spread along trade routes, such as the bubonic plague. The Black Death of the 1300s killed millions in China and caused the population of Europe and the Muslim world to plummet temporarily by about a third.

Because of its geographical location, multicultural population and tolerant rulers, the Norman kingdom of Sicily was a major site of exchange among Muslims, Jews, Latin Roman Christians, and Greek Byzantine Christians in the twelfth century. At the same time, Latin Christian crusaders were battling with Syrian, Arab, Egyptian, and North African Muslim warriors over territory and religious differences. Whereas in the past historians placed emphasis on religious differences and the Crusades, historians now emphasize the common features of these Mediterranean cultures and the many ways in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews interacted. The central position of Islamic world in Afroeurasia became increasingly important as trade and exchange expanded. Muslim merchants, scholars and Sufis traveled between the great cities, such as Córdoba, Damascus and Cairo, which produced luxury goods such as steel swords and embroidered silk capes.

Muslim merchants eventually traded from China to the Mediterranean, and Jewish merchants also traded freely in the Muslim world. They established communities across Afroeurasia that were connected by family ties and trade connections.