Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (29 page)

Notwithstanding the efforts of the monks, it must be understood that the Church did not see its primary role as the preservation of profane knowledge. And even if it had devoted greater effort to transcribing from papyrus to parchment the great works of the Greeks and Romans, it is doubtful if they could have saved little more than it did. The immense expense of parchment would have been prohibitive; wealth that the monasteries would no doubt have felt better expended upon the care of the poor and sick.

The one major library of antiquity to survive in the West into the High Middle Ages was that of the Vatican; but the great majority of this was lost during the removal of the papal court to Avignon in the fourteenth century.

That was the situation in the West. It was also, incidentally, the situation in Byzantium, which, as we have seen, is now known to have experienced its own “Dark Age” after the middle of the seventh century. Here too we find impoverishment, the abandonment of cities, and the growth of a feudal system. Cyril Mango, as we have seen, remarked on the virtual abandonment of the Byzantine cities after the mid-seventh century, and the archaeology of these settlements usually reveals “a dramatic rupture in the seventh century, sometimes in the form of virtual abandonment.”
[11]
With the cities and with the papyrus supply from Egypt went the intellectual class, who after the seventh century were reduced to a “small clique.”
[12]
The evidence, as Mango sees it, is unmistakable: the “catastrophe” (as he names it) of the seventh century, “is the central event of Byzantine history.”

The final conquest of Byzantium by the Turks in 1453 saw the destruction of what libraries still existed, and we cannot doubt that the few texts which reached the West with refugees in the years that followed represented but a pitiable remnant of what once existed.

Thus we have seen that all of Christendom was devastated by the Muslim conquests. What then, we might ask, of the Islamic world itself; those regions of the Middle East and North Africa conquered and held by the Muslims in the seventh century and which were to become the core of the Muslim world as we now understand it?

As we saw, until the first quarter of the seventh century literacy was widespread in the Near East, and the works of the classical historians, as well as the philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians, were readily available and discussed in the academies and libraries located throughout the region. In Egypt, during the sixth century, renowned philosophers such as Olympiodorus (died 570) presided over the Alexandrian academy which possessed a well-stocked and funded library packed with probably thousands of volumes. The Alexandrian academy of this time was the most illustrious institute of learning in the known world; and it is beyond doubt that its library matched, if indeed it did not surpass, the original Library founded by Ptolemy II. The writings of Olympiodorus and his contemporaries demonstrate intimate familiarity with the great works of classical antiquity – very often quoting obscure philosophers and historians whose works have long since disappeared. Among the general population of the time literacy was the norm, and the appetite for reading was fed by a large class of professional writers who composed plays, poems and short stories – the latter taking the form of mini-novels. In Egypt, the works of Greek writers such as Herodotus and Diodorus were familiar and widely quoted. Both the latter, as well as native Egyptian writers such as Manetho, had composed extensive histories of Egypt of the time of the pharaohs. These works provided, for the citizens of Egypt and other parts of the Empire, a direct link with the pharaohnic past. Here the educated citizen encountered the name of the pharaoh (Kheops) who built the Great Pyramid, as well as that of his son (Khephren), who built the second pyramid at Giza, and that of his grandson Mykerinos, who raised the third and smallest structure. These Hellenized versions of the names were extremely accurate transcriptions of the actual Egyptian names (Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure). In the history of the country written by Manetho, the educated citizen of the Empire would have had a detailed description of Egypt’s past, complete with an in-depth account of the deeds of the pharaohs as well as descriptions of the various monuments and the kings who built them.

The change that came over Egypt and the other regions of the Middle East following the Arab Conquest can only be described as catastrophic. Almost all knowledge of these countries’ histories disappears, and does so almost overnight. Consider the account of the Giza Pyramids and their construction written by the Arab historian Al-Masudi (regarded as the “Arab Herodotus”), apparently in the tenth century:

Surid, Ben Shaluk, Ben Sermuni, Ben Termidun, Ben Tedresan, Ben Sal, one of the kings of Egypt before the flood, built two great pyramids; and, notwithstanding, they were subsequently named after a person called Shaddad Ben Ad ... they were not built by the Adites, who could not conquer Egypt, on account of their powers, which the Egyptians possessed by means of enchantment ... the reason for the building of the pyramids was the following dream, which happened to Surid three hundred years previous to the flood. It appeared to him that the earth was overthrown, and that the inhabitants were laid prostrate upon it, that the stars wandered confusedly from their courses, and clashed together with tremendous noise. The king though greatly affected by this vision, did not disclose it to any person, but was conscious that some great event was about to take place.
[13]

This was what passed for “history” in Egypt after the Arab conquest – little more than a collection of Arab fables.
[14]
Egypt, effectively, had lost her history. Other Arab writers display the same ignorance. Take for example the comments of Ibn Jubayr, who worked as a secretary to the Moorish governor of Granada, and who visited Cairo in 1182. He commented on “the ancient pyramids, of miraculous construction and wonderful to look upon, [which looked] like huge pavilions rearing to the skies; two in particular shock the firmament …” He wondered whether they might be the tombs of early prophets mention in the Koran, or whether they were granaries of the biblical patriarch Joseph, but in the end came to the conclusion, “To be short, none but the Great and Glorious God can know their story.”
[15]

The loss of Egypt’s history, particularly the effacing all knowledge about the Great Pyramid, in such a short period of time, speaks of a major episode of cultural destruction. To find a parallel we would perhaps need to refer to the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century – and even these were arguably less damaging. The Mexicans and Peruvians could still tell visitors the histories and traditions of the great monuments of their lands long after the Conquest, and these traditions are preserved to this day. In view of this, the story of Caliph Umar’s destruction of the last library at Alexandria, often dismissed as apocryphal – especially in the more polite academic circles – needs to be fundamentally reconsidered.

The disconnection with the past experienced in Egypt was paralleled throughout all the territories that came under Islam. We find, for example, that in the tenth century the Persian poet Ferdowsi, although knowledgeable about the Sassanid period, is completely ignorant of the earlier and far more glorious epoch of the Achaemenids. His “history” of the Persian people, prior to the time of the Sassanids, is little more than a collection of orally-preserved Iranian myths and legends. We observe the same ignorance on the part of the great poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, who imagined that the palaces of the Achaemenid Great Kings Darius I and Xerxes were built by the genie-king Jamshid.

We should not imagine that this loss of connection with the past occurred gradually. Nor can the loss of Egypt’s and Persia’s histories be blamed on poverty or absence of cheap writing materials such as papyrus. The Caliphate established in the Middle East was neither impoverished nor lacking in resources. Egypt, after all, was the source of papyrus, and it was right at the heart of the Caliphate. And, we must stress again, in conquering the regions of the Middle East the Arabs came to possess the most populous, the most wealthy, and the most venerable centers of civilization in the known world. For the histories of Egypt and Syria and Babylonia and Persia written or preserved by the Greek and Hellenistic authors to have disappeared they must have been destroyed deliberately; or at the very least the libraries and academies wherein they were stored must have been deprived of all funding and allowed to fall into decay. More likely, however, they were actively destroyed. How else can we explain the loss of every copy of Herodotus, Diodorus and Manetho (and every other classical author who wrote of Egypt’s pharaohnic past) in such a short period of time? And the impression of active destruction is confirmed by what we see in other areas. We know, for example, that from the very beginning the Arabs displayed indifference and contempt for the culture and history of both Egypt and the other countries of the regions they conquered. Immediately upon the invasion of Egypt, the Caliph established a commission whose purpose was to discover and plunder the pharaohnic tombs. We know that Christian churches and monasteries – many of the latter possessing well-stocked libraries – suffered the same fate. The larger monuments of Roman and pharaohnic times were similarly plundered for their cut-stone, and Saladin, the Muslim hero lionized in so much politically-correct literature and art, began the process by the exploitation of the smaller Giza monuments. From these, he constructed the citadel at Cairo (between 1193 and 1198). His son and successor, Al-Aziz Uthman, went further, and made a determined effort to demolish the Great Pyramid itself.
[16]
He succeeded in stripping the outer casing of smooth limestone blocks from the structure (covered with historically invaluable inscriptions), but eventually cancelled the project owing to its cost.

What then of the much-vaunted Arab respect for learning and science that we hear so much of in modern academic literature? That the Arabs did permit some of the science and learning they encountered in the great cities of Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, and Persia to survive – for a while – is beyond doubt. Yet the learning they tolerated was entirely of a practical or utilitarian nature – and this is a fact admitted even by Islamophile writers.
[17]
Thus, for a while, they patronized physicists, mathematicians and physicians. Yet the very fact that knowledge has to plead its usefulness in order to be permitted to survive at all speaks volumes in itself. Is not this an infallible mark of barbarism? And we should note that even the utilitarian learning which the earliest Caliphs fostered was soon to be snuffed out under the weight of an Islamic theocracy (promulgated by Al-Ghazali in the eleventh century) which regarded the very concept of scientific laws as an affront to Allah and an infringement of his freedom to act.

In this way then the vast body of classical literature disappeared from the lands of the Caliphate. Thus the Arabs undermined classical civilization and its literary heritage in Europe through an economic blockade, whilst in the Middle East they destroyed it deliberately and methodically.

[1]
Thompson and Johnson, op cit., p. 172

[2]
Briffault, op cit., p. 188

[3]
See A. Butler,
The Arab Conquest of Egypt
(London, 1902), who speaks of some continuity in the academic institutions of the country after the Muslim invasion.

[4]
See for example Toby E. Huff’s
The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), where the basic incompatibility of Islam with scientific and philosophical thinking is explained in detail.

[5]
Charles Simmonds (1919).
Alcohol: With Chapters on Methyl Alcohol, Fusel Oil, and Spirituous Beverages
(Macmillan, 1919), pp. 6ff.

[6]
See eg. Carl B. Boyer,
A History of Mathematics
, Second Edition (Wiley, 1991), p. 228

[7]
Thompson and Johnson, op cit., p. 175

[8]
Ibid., p. 176

[9]
Ibid., p. 178

[10]
Charles Montalembert, op cit., p. 146

[11]
Mango, op cit., p. 8

[12]
Ibid., p. 9

[13]
Cited from L. Cottrell,
The Mountains of Pharaoh
(London, 1956)

[14]
The tale may, however, have been partly influenced by oral traditions among the Copts, for the connection of pyramid-building with catastrophic events among the stars is found in ancient Egyptian tradition itself.

[15]
Andrew Beattie,
Cairo: A Cultural History
(Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 50

[16]
Andrew Beattie, op cit.

[17]
Robert Briffault, for example, admits that, “Of the poets and historians of Greece, beyond satisfying their curiosity by a few samples, they [the Arabs] took little account.” Briffault, op cit., p. 192

T
he entire Mediterranean world was utterly transformed in the seventh century. Everywhere, from Palestine in the East to Spain in the West, the Roman style of life disappeared. Cities were destroyed or abandoned and life rapidly became more rural. The Roman system of agriculture, which had sustained the great cities of the classical age, broke down. The dykes, irrigation ditches and terraces which had for centuries produced vast food surpluses to feed Rome and the other metropolises of the Empire, fell into disrepair. Topsoil was washed away and a layer of silt, now known as the Younger Fill, began to cover many of the towns and villages. As the scattered farming settlements and cities of the Empire were deserted, new settlements, especially in southern Europe, began to appear on defended hill-tops.

If the above transformation occurred in 600 AD or slightly earlier, as Hodges, Whitehouse, and a host of other contemporary academics maintain, then it must be regarded as one of history’s greatest enigmas. Nothing that we know of the late sixth century could account for it. That the plague of Justinian’s time (542) was not to blame is proved beyond question by the thriving and populous cities of the Middle East, which excavators found were destroyed violently from 614 onwards. If however the great transformation occurred in the two or three decades following 614, then it makes perfect sense. These years saw the commencement of the ruinous Persian war which damaged many of the cities of Anatolia and Syria, and which was soon followed by the appearance on the world stage of the Arabs. And it was the Arab wars of conquest, far more than the Persian war, which explains the permanence and completeness of the devastation. The damage done during the Persian conflict would have been swiftly repaired – as it had always been before – had not the latter been immediately followed by the arrival on the scene of the Arabs. The religious concept of jihad (permanent religious war) made any kind of peace between the Arabs and the outside world impossible. Since it was the duty of every able-bodied Muslim to wage jihad, it became the custom of Arab rulers to engage in raids on infidel territory on an annual (or twice-annual) basis. All regions on the borders of the Dar al-Islam were liable to be ridden over; and this is precisely what we see occurring in Anatolia and large areas of Spain, such as La Mancha. At a later stage Islamic armies created a similar wasteland in Hungary, where the once-heavily populated Hungarian Plain, the Pushta, became a dreary prairie.

Whilst the concept of jihad ensured a permanent war on Islam’s borders, the provisions of sharia law meant that even in the regions controlled by the Muslims, such as Syria and North Africa, native husbandmen and traders were afforded no protection from the predatory attentions of bedouin bandits and herders, who let their flocks graze on the irrigated lands of the former, thus degrading and destroying them. The result was that within a very short time, the whole economy and lifestyle of the classical world disappeared. Once-fertile and irrigated territories were reduced to semi-desert, and the great cities which dotted these regions, from northern Syria to the Atlantic coast of North Africa, were reduced to ghost towns. The urban life which these cities had supported, with their academies, libraries, and theatres, disappeared; and with them went the great bulk of the artistic and intellectual heritage of Greece and Rome.

In Mediterranean Europe, in the meantime, Arab raiders, fired by the belief that it was legitimate and even righteous to live off the wealth and resources of the infidel, launched raid after raid against the towns and villages on the coasts, plundering both lay and ecclesiastical settlements and destroying crops in the fields. Early medieval documents are full of descriptions of these atrocities. In the same way, sea traffic was targeted by the jihadis, who confiscated cargoes and enslaved crews and passengers. Within a short time, all trade between Christian Europe and the newly Islamicized East came to an end. The supply of all the Levantine luxuries, which had hitherto provided a modicum of civilized life in the towns and villages of the West, dried up, and Europe was thrown back on its own resources. The centre of gravity in Gaul moved decisively to the North, and a distinctly medieval culture rapidly took shape.

* * *

The above describes how classical civilization was terminated. Yet there still remains a problem; and that is one of chronology. We have found that the real break-off point between classical civilization and the medieval world is 614, the year of the commencement of the Persian War. It was then, or in the years immediately after, that the great cities of Asia Minor and Syria were destroyed or abandoned, never to rise again. That there was no attempt to repair them after the end of the Persian War (627) indicates that there was insufficient time to do so before the coming of the Arabs (in 638). Yet in a decade we might expect some signs of revival or rebuilding. That there were almost none could suggest that the arrival of the Arabs and Islam on the world stage was slightly closer to the time of the Persian War than is allowed.

It is generally believed that Muslim armies did not emerge from Arabia until after Muhammad’s death in 638. Yet there is evidence to suggest otherwise. A letter exists purportedly from Muhammad to the Persian king Chosroes II, inviting him to embrace Islam. Whether this communication is genuine or not (actually, it is without question a forgery), it does illustrate an important truth: The Persians had a long history of religious antagonism towards Christianity and towards Byzantium, and as such would have been natural allies of the Arabs against the latter. Indeed, the war between Chosroes II and Heraclius had all the characteristics of a religious conflict – a veritable jihad, no less. The Persians took Jerusalem in 614 and carried out a terrible massacre of the Christian population; after which they looted the churches and seized some of Christendom’s most sacred relics – including the Holy Cross upon which Christ was crucified. The story told by the Byzantines of how Heraclius, against all the odds, turned the tide of war and won back the sacred relics, strikes one as fictitious. And indeed, it is just with the reign of Heraclius that the dim and little-known period we now call the Dark Ages commences.

German writer Heribert Illig (of whom more shall be said presently) has put forward the interesting suggestion that the Persians encountered Islam in Syria and, seeing the latter as a valuable ally against Byzantium, joined forces with the Arabs. It is not inconceivable that some of the Persian ruling class may have converted to Islam and gradually imposed the new faith upon the populace. This would explain why the Arabs were able to conquer – with such apparent ease – the mighty and invincible Persian Empire, an Empire that had withstood the best efforts of Rome to subdue it for seven centuries.
[1]
And it would further explain why early Islam is so thoroughly Persian in character. The earliest Islamic coins, for example, are simply Sassanid Persian, usually with the addition of an Arab phrase such as
besm Allah
– “in the name of God,” and with the name of Chosroes II or his successor Yazdegerd III. But in all other particulars they are indistinguishable from Sassanid currency. According to the
Encyclopdaedia Iranica
,

“These coins usually have a portrait of a Sasanian emperor with an honorific inscription and various ornaments. To the right of the portrait is a ruler’s or governor’s name written in Pahlavi script. On the reverse there is a Zoroastrian fire altar with attendants on either side. At the far left is the year of issue expressed in words, and at the right is the place of minting. In all these features, the Arab-Sasanian coinages are similar to Sasanian silver drahms. The major difference between the two series is the presence of some additional Arabic inscription on most coins issued under Muslim authority, but some coins with no Arabic can still be attributed to the Islamic period. The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations, since they were surely designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues, illustrating the continuity of administration and economic life in the early years of Muslim rule in Iran.”
[2]

Importantly, the date is written in Persian Pahlavi script, and it would appear that those who minted the coins, native Persians, did not understand Arabic. We hear that under the Arabs the mints were “evidently allowed to go on as before,” and that there are “a small number of coins indistinguishable from the drahms of the last emperor, Yazdegerd III, dated during his reign but after the Arab capture of the cities of issue. It was only when Yazdegerd died (A.D. 651) that some mark of Arab authority was added to the coinage.”
[3]
Even more puzzling is the fact that the most common coins during the first decades of Islamic rule were those of Chosroes II, and many of these too bear the Arabic inscription
besm Allah
. Now, it is just conceivable that invading Arabs might have issued slightly amended coins of the last Sassanid monarch, Yazdegerd III, but why continue to issue money in the name of a previous Sassanid king, one who, supposedly, had died ten years earlier? This surely stretches credulity.

Fig. 25. Early Islamic coin, with head of Sassanid monarch and, on reverse, Zoroastrian Fire Temple. Mid-seventh century.

Did then Chosroes II convert to Islam as part of Persia’s ongoing Holy War against Christian Byzantium? Conventional history tells us that Yazdegerd III was the last of the pre-Islamic rulers of Iran, and that, in his time Caliph Umar conquered the country. Yet the poet Ferdowsi, who seems to have possessed a detailed knowledge of the period, mentions no Arab conquest at all. The Arabs are mentioned, but not as enemies of Yazdegerd III. The latter, who is portrayed as a villain, is killed by a miller, not by the Arabs (who are also portrayed as villains). Indeed, the events described by Ferdowsi have all the hallmarks of a Persian civil war. Is it possible that during the time of Yazdegerd III an internecine war erupted between an “Arabizing” group of extreme Islamists and a more traditional Persian faction? Later Islamic propagandists could have portrayed this conflict as an Arab “conquest” of Persia.

As we saw earlier, excavation has revealed few signs of violent overthrow at the termination of the Sassanid epoch, and all the indications are of a relatively peaceful transition from Sassanid rule to Islamic in the middle of the seventh century. Pottery and other artwork of the period continue to be thoroughly Persian in character.

If the Persians converted to Islam around 620, then the Arab conquests of Syria, Anatolia, Egypt and North Africa, which have always presented such a problem for historians (how could a few nomads on camels conquer such powerful and heavily-populated provinces?) would thus be at least partly explained as the work not of the Arabs but of Islamicized Persians.
[4]
Is this possible? Well, historical criticism has increasingly come to recognize the narrative of Arab expansion as, in some respects at least, an enormous fabrication. Thus for example German orientalist Günter Lüling opined that the earliest “Islam possessed an almost exclusively Abbasid [ie Persian] historiography, which Omayyad historical literature deliberately and extraordinarily successfully suppressed. … The entire old-Arabian historiography was, for the period until circa 400 AH/1000 AD, completely reworked on dogmatic lines.”
[5]
That the Arabs of the later Middle Ages were actively involved in falsifying history is proved by the existence of a number of forged documents purporting to treat of events of the early seventh century. In this category is the “letter from Muhammad” to Chosroes II, mentioned above. And if the invasion and conquest of Persia by the Arabs is a fiction, then the purpose of this letter is obvious: According to Islamic law, offensive action against the Infidel could take place only after the latter had been invited to accept Islam and had rejected the offer. The Muhammad letter would then have been part of the general invention of an Arab invasion of Iran, providing the event with its justification.
[6]

If the arrival of Islam on the world stage were thus dated from the 620s, rather than the 640s, then we would be presented with an entirely new view of the past; and much that was previously incomprehensible would begin to make sense. The failure of the cities of Asia Minor to recover after the destruction by the Persians from 616 onwards would no longer be a mystery, whilst the precipitate decline of Carthage at the same time would be explained. And such a chronological realignment would have implications for Europe. Most importantly, it would mean that the termination of Mediterranean and eastern influences occurred precisely in the 620s, and that it was from this decade that there commenced the historically obscure period we now call the Dark Ages. Trying to pin down the precise point at which the latter epoch commenced is of course a notoriously difficult task and, as we have seen repeatedly in the present study, significantly differing interpretations can be derived from the same bits of evidence. Hodges and Whitehouse, we saw, were rather keen to place the break-off point at 600 or shortly beforehand, whilst the latest archaeological data seemed to place it a couple of decades later. Thus we know that African Red Slip Ware and Carthaginian amphorae were still being imported into Britain and Ireland as late as the 620s, but not after that.