A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

parts of Iraq as well, ultimately reaching the borders of India. This was very
much a foreign cultural invasion from the point of view of Asia and left a
significant legacy of interaction, culturally often rich but politically hostile.
Persia had already been at war off and on with Greece for many centuries. For
Asia, Greece was the West, the rival and enemy.
The successor to Alexander’s empire, the Seleucids, maintained Greek
military and frontier posts at the frontiers of a Semitic-and Persian-speaking
world as Greek influence was pushed back. Syria and Anatolia represented the
key front lines where these diverse cultures met and contested over many

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hundreds of years. The Roman Empire eventually superseded Alexander’s
Hellenistic empires. By the fourth century CE, it had spread to Constantinople
and beyond, the region which at first was known as the eastern wing of the
Roman Empire. So by the time of the foundation of the Eastern Roman Empire,
there is already a significant legacy of some six centuries of East-West political
contestation and warfare between Greek/Roman power and Persian or Semitic
empires.
But conflict in the region was hardly limited to Greek versus Persian or
Semitic cultures. Antagonisms between Rome and Constantinople themselves—
within the Roman Empire—go back at least to the second century CE, when
rivalries emerged among the five early Christian patriarchs: Rome,
Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. As one by one the latter
three patriarchs fell under Islamic rule in the seventh century—maintaining their
religious positions, but losing their local secular authority—the struggle came
down to a binary struggle for influence and power between Rome and
Constantinople. And over time, as differences in theology and rites deepened
between the two, Rome continued to insist on its own preeminence while
Constantinople felt itself every bit a coequal. Rome’s subsequent establishment
of a papacy in place of the Rome patriarchate was a further effort to extend its
credentials over the “lesser” ranks of patriarchs in the major Christian centers to
the East. This issue of preeminence persists even today.
Differences over power were reflected also in growing cultural differences.
When we speak of Constantinople, we are essentially speaking of a region of
long-standing Greek culture. Constantinople was the center of the Greek-
speaking world. This cultural difference helped fuel subsequent clashes between
Greek and Latin Christianity—Middle Eastern and Western. The Greek roots of
Constantinople actually go back a long way; its port was first known to the
Greeks as Byzantion in sixth century BCE. Some nine hundred years later, in
330 CE, the city was “refounded” by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who
named it after himself; he saw it as a more secure second capital of the vast
Roman Empire at a time when Rome itself was already reeling under constant
barbarian siege. Two distinct wings of the Roman Empire—an Eastern and a
Western—now emerge.
Even the very concept of a meaningful “Western Roman Empire” was
becoming increasingly a fiction in this period as civil wars, rival emperors, and
constant barbarian assaults continued to rend Rome. With the final collapse of
the Roman emperor in Rome, in the face of Germanic invasions in 476 CE, the
Western wing of the Roman Empire had come to an end. The Eastern wing in
Constantinople now inherited the full mantle of the Roman Empire, complete

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with all its vast territories in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Eastern Mediterranean,
and North Africa.
The emergence of Constantinople as the new seat of the Roman Empire
carried fateful cultural consequences. In contrast to the absolute dominance of
Latin in the Western Empire, Greek was the lingua franca of all the Eastern
Mediterranean, marking the city and the region with a distinct Greek cultural
character. One of Constantinople’s trump cards was that the New Testament
itself had been written in Greek, not Latin. Latin would hang on as the official
administrative language of the Eastern Empire for only a few more centuries.
The educated class in Constantinople no doubt prided itself on maintaining a
knowledge of Latin language and culture and for continuing to bear the standard
of Roman civilization. But the languages themselves began to determine their
broader cultures: the remnants of a “Latin” Empire in the West, and a powerful
“Greek” Empire in the East. In later centuries, these terms took on overtones of
mutual contempt: to be called a “Latin” in Constantinople, or a “Greek” in
Rome, passed as nothing less than derogatory. Furthermore, no emperor would
ever again rule over both Rome and Constantinople. Rome shrank to a fraction
of the size of the Eastern capital; the pope was left there in splendid isolation as
little more than a symbol, a virtual prisoner of the forces around him, for the
next several hundred years.
In the absence of any remaining Western Empire, what then was the nature of
this “Roman” capital in Constantinople now to be? Over time, Constantinople
developed a sense of special mission—the perpetuation and preservation of the
Roman Empire in the East. Constantinople was now the last bastion of Christian
civilization and spirituality against the new barbarian conquerors in both the
West—against Goths, Franks, Celts, Alans, Huns—and in the East—against
pagan Slavs, Zoroastrian Persians, and later Muslim Arabs and Turks. The
Eastern Roman Empire was developing its own cultural identity in increasing
distinction now from Rome and the West as centers of power.

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