A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Islam Meets Eastern Christianity
Arab armies, energized by the new social, political, and religious ideas of Islam
in the mid-seventh century, quickly advanced north out of Arabia. We witness
here a classic encounter of the old and the new. It was the great Byzantine
province of Syria that was the scene of the first military encounters between
Christianity and Islam. And as we look at the sweep of Arab armies north into
Byzantine territory in the Levant, some striking features emerge. First is the
hostility so much of the mainly Semitic Fertile Crescent felt toward Western
attempts to rule them—and for these regions, the “West” meant not just Rome,
but Greek Constantinople as well. We are talking about lands whose histories
and cultures are essentially eastern and Semitic—long a part of the contested turf
between various Persian empires and Greece. There is little love lost for Greeks
or Byzantium here. So we encounter deeply rooted anti-Westernism—meaning
resistance to invasion and control from Greece or Rome—even before Islam
arrives on the scene.
Second, we see again and again how religion provided the rallying cry for
this resistance against Rome or Byzantium. These cities regularly embraced
“heresies” as symptomatic of their opposition. It wasn’t simply that they were
Monophysite and hence opposed Constantinople. It was partly that they opposed
Constantinople and hence were inclined to embrace theologies hostile to central
rule. Thus, Muslim conquest of these great Levantine cities of the Byzantine
Empire was facilitated by long-standing anti-Byzantine feeling within them.
Finally, these conquests by Muslim forces in one sense seem to have
transformed the religious world, but in reality at the time they tended more to
change control of the state. The actual mechanics of how Arab administration
spread provide fascinating insight into how little religion lay at the center of
these struggles. Instead, they suggest how much Islam was primarily the latest
banner under which old geopolitical struggles of the Middle East were
perpetuated; the great prize was enjoying the fruits of rule.

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It would be absurd, of course, to entirely exclude the role of Islam itself from
the dynamics of struggle among Middle Eastern cities, provinces, and rulers.
After all, Islam very much represented a fresh spirit on the scene. But the Middle
East region, in effect, was ripe for some kind of new galvanizing force that could
empower fractious local rulers and cities to rise up against the existing
centralized power of Constantinople. Ideology, wherever it exists, is almost
invariably pressed into the service of local geopolitics. In short, we witness the
role of anti-Byzantine impulses facilitating the Islamic conquest in many of the
Semitic regions.

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