The Formation of Islam Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800

Virtually all accounts of the rise of an Islamic state and then empire in the seventh century stress its extraordinary character, the suddenness of the appearance on the scene of the Muslim Arabs and the wholly unexpected nature of their success – what Marshall Hodgson referred to as “a breach in cultural continuity unparalleled among the great civilizations.” Explanatory models for the Muslim success – at least those which do not focus upon the Arabs themselves, on the demographic, economic, or religious factors propelling them forward – tend to look for causes in the chaotic developments in the Near East in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In this, of course, there lies the danger of an easy retrospective teleology, of the assumption that the Near Eastern civilizations experienced on the eve of the Muslim conquests a crisis which weakened them fatally, and so rendered those conquests (or something like them) virtually inevitable. The cautious historian should eschew such a dramatic viewpoint, tempting as it may be. On the other hand, conditions in the Near East in the early seventh century were indeed highly charged and unstable. From a broader perspective, they demonstrate, not the inevitability of the Muslim conquests, but the degree to which those events marked a stage in a longer-term process by which the Arabs were drawn into the cultural orbit of the Fertile Crescent and surrounding territories and, in their Muslim guise, contributed to its evolution.