A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Cultural and Intellectual Factors
In its time, Islam was perhaps the most significant early proto-globalization
movement. Expanding over a far greater area than the Roman Empire, it came to
link vast regions of the known world through a common Islamic culture, where
Arabic and Persian served as the lingua francas. Yet it was the waning of this
universalist spirit that led to localization and atrophy of what was once an open
and searching intellectual society. And even then, a struggle had always existed
between a narrower, more legalistic interpretation of the faith and a broader,
more civilizational one.
The death of Islamic intellectual vigor and curiosity—an exhaustion of
civilizational élan without dramatic new intellectual input—led to the decline of
creative thinking in Islamic theology, philosophy, science, and technology. Ritual
and narrow legalism came to triumph over thought and inquiry in what passed
for the study of Islam. Thinking ossified, inhibiting even the kind of historical
scrutiny of Islam’s own texts and sources of authority that was possible in earlier
centuries. This atrophy of Muslim intellectual vigor was well demonstrated in
the collapse of Muslim science and, possibly more damaging, in a general
passivity toward later scientific and technological development in the West—
until that same technology landed on the Muslim doorstep and overwhelmed it.
Even in the face of the West’s challenge, most Muslim reformers looked at the
West primarily as a warehouse of technological hardware, without grasping the
need for the all-important cultural and intellectual software that made it all
function.
Important external geopolitical factors played a major role in the decline of
the Muslim world as well. The savage Mongol conquests erupting out of the
Mongolian steppes in the thirteenth century obliterated the cream of the great
Muslim urban centers—dozens of cities, along with their libraries, populations,
and wealth—a blow from which they never fully recovered. Then the emergence
of a Shi’ite state in Iran in the sixteenth century physically divided the Sunni
Muslim world, complicating the once-ready communication and trade among
Sunni Muslims across Eurasia. In a massive paradigm shift, with the rise of the
new European nation-states and their maritime capabilities, trade between the
Mediterranean and the Orient shifted away from land routes to the sea. Muslim
kingdoms had long maintained a monopoly on overland trade, making it difficult
for the West to participate directly in trans-Asian commerce. The appearance of
the Black Death from Asia in the eastern Mediterranean in the early fourteenth
century further dampened Western enthusiasm for the land route. Thus began a

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search for sea access to the East that would eliminate the hazards and difficulties
of overland travel.
The development of new sea routes to the Orient was based on new maritime
technologies. Western use of these technologies rode on the accomplishments of
earlier centuries of Arab and Muslim seafaring skills, their broad exploration of
the Indian Ocean, detailed map-making, use of the compass, and boat
construction suitable for the open seas. These advanced maritime skills led to the
momentous “discovery” of the New World. Europe’s growing focus on the
development of maritime trade across the Atlantic opened a new chapter in
global history that immensely enriched Europe, spurred further European
exploration of East Asia, and largely marginalized the role of Muslim seafarers
who had once dominated Asian trade.
Important environmental changes powerfully affected the rise and fall of
civilizations as well. Jared Diamond has suggested that the Fertile Crescent, long
a cradle of civilization, essentially began to fail as deforestation, desiccation, and
subsequent diminution of its natural and animal resources gradually caused the
region to decline. For long periods after the fall of Rome, Western Europe had
still contributed little to the overall development of world civilization until the
late Middle Ages. Meanwhile, Europe’s moderate climate, fertile land, and
prolific flora and fauna, coupled with new civilizational energy, drove the
eventual emergence of a new and powerful West European civilization, built on
the successes and accomplishments of past Eastern societies whose
environments had become far less productive.
Jeffrey Sachs, at the Harvard University Center for International
Development, also points out the impact of climatic and ecological shifts: while
Europe possessed a temperate climate, the Middle East was marked by growing
aridity: “By 1900, at the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Europe had coal,
hydropower, lumber, and iron ore. The Islamic countries had few stocks of these
nineteenth-century necessities for industrialization. The oil fields were
discovered and exploited only after the Europeans had seized colonial control.”
The urban record tells the story. In 800 CE, the Middle East and Western Europe
both had roughly equal populations of around thirty million each. But the Middle
East had thirteen cities with populations of over fifty thousand, while Europe
had only one—Rome. By 1600, the balance had shifted dramatically.
European maritime exploration of the East and the New World laid the
foundations for a long-term European presence along the seacoasts to Asia,
where they first created entrepôts, then colonial outposts, and eventually colonial
control and empires. Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, and England succeeded
each other in establishing these outposts. While much of the eastern

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Mediterranean remained a Muslim lake, the Western imperial reach was opening
an age of imperialism that would last many centuries. Europeans negotiated and
fought with each other over rival claims, but, in the end, these imperial
acquisitions took on de jure character—at least among themselves, even if not
for their imperial subjects.
By the end of World War I, nearly the entire Muslim world had fallen under
European imperial control—the inner desert fastnesses of Saudi Arabia and
much of Afghanistan being the sole exceptions. And most European powers
played in the overseas imperial game: Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, Britain,
Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Although their imperial styles would differ
considerably, all were resented and all were resisted by their colonized subjects.
It would be misleading, of course, to suggest that colonialism and
imperialism are strictly Western phenomena, or constitute uniquely Western sins.
After all, empires have long been part of the normal political order over most of
the world, at various times. But several important features distinguish Western
colonialism: first, it entailed sea voyages by Europeans over considerable
distances to establish its imperial points of control abroad, which were inhabited
by people ethnically and culturally utterly distinct. Europeans usually imported
Christian missionaries into the areas they took over as part of the softening-up
process. This mode of imperialism contrasts sharply with almost all non-
European empires, which were land empires, hence contiguous empires, formed
through gradual, incremental expansion. Expanding imperial land powers were
well familiar with their newly acquired contiguous imperial regions and had
often interacted with them in territorial give-and-take for centuries—sometimes
as parts of cultural continuums.
Contiguous empires often extended only de facto political control. European
imperialism tried to legalize these new forms of control through de jure
imposition of legal, organic relationships between the imperial holdings and the
metropole, and expected general European acknowledgment of the same; in
some cases, such as Algeria and the Congo, France and Belgium formally
annexed them. This imposed de jure control constituted a greater affront to local
national sovereignty, as it seemingly received “legal” acknowledgment of the
Western international order. While differing greatly in character, of course
neither contiguous nor maritime imperial expansion is inherently any more
virtuous.
Ultimately, the most destabilizing and thorny kind of imperialism entailed the
actual settling of lands by foreigners—settler colonialism—who came in to live,
take over land, and establish governmental rule over the native population, the
net losers. These are the hardest kind of colonial situations to undo without real

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violence. Thus, we have witnessed huge tensions and bloodshed in such cases as
South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Portuguese Angola, Algeria, and
with Palestinian lands settled by European Jews in Israel.

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