In the first of a five-part series at 3 Quarks Daily, Namit Arora traces the rise of Islam:
By early seventh century, both Byzantines and Persians were reeling from war weariness, internal religious conflict, and plague epidemics. The Syrians and Egyptians disliked the orthodox strictures of Byzantium and disagreed over theological matters. Eastern Christianity had inherited the urge for disputation and logical analysis from the ancient Greeks whereas a great deal of western Christian theology was based on the spirit of Roman law. The former butted heads over nuances that didn’t occupy the latter, or the Jews—or the ancient Greeks for that matter, who hardly bothered with formal theology. A major crisis concerned the nature of Jesus: did the son of God possess both divine and human natures? Splinter churches arose in the east, modifying many doctrines of official orthodoxy while also giving expression to cultural and linguistic resentments of the non-Greek speaking populace.
By this time, the Persian empire of the Sassanids too, with its capital at Ctesiphon in Iraq, had grown weak and its old feudal structure was broken. A new type of military feudalism, dominated by generals, was emerging and pointed towards a disintegration of the empire. ‘Its characteristic feature was an aristocratic society … status derived wholly from membership of the closed upper classes … [with their] elaborate rituals and ceremonies … the old Persian feudal nobility had become militarily inefficient.’ The privileged classes were immune from taxation. On the religious front, Manicheanism and its offshoots—deeply ascetic in character—had challenged the ways of the priestly and royal classes.
Around this time, an unschooled loner, 40, from the tribe of Quraysh in the trading town of Mecca took to roaming the nearby hills, engaged in a solitary spiritual quest. He was close to a group of people called Hanifs, who, while abandoning paganism, were not prepared to accept any of the competing religious doctrines on offer. Early Islamic chronicles betray a sense of foreshadowing. ‘Arabia was a world waiting for a guide and a man was searching for a vocation.’
Read the rest of Part 1 here. Part 2 on the golden age of Islam will appear on October 12.