A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Staying Power
It is one thing to note the speed of Muslim conquest—a tribute to military and
strategic skills. But it is another to note the remarkable staying power of Islam
across such broad regions, cultures, and peoples for the rest of history. There’s
no way we can explain this away by attributing it merely to Muslim military
power over the centuries. Why did Syria, for example, not revert back to
Christianity, or some other earlier form of faith, after later Arab power
weakened? Why did Iran not revert back to its ancient Zoroastrianism as soon as
the Abbasid Islamic Empire weakened and collapsed before the Mongols? If
Islam had sat uncomfortably upon these diverse populations, might we not have
expected that at some point over the next fourteen hundred years they would
have risen against Islamic authority to reclaim an earlier faith and culture?
When Mongol armies in the thirteenth century shattered Islamic power across
most of the East, how was Islamic civilization able to arise again from the ashes?
The resilience of Islam as a community, culture, religion, and political order
seems impressive, even at its lowest points. The cohesion of Muslim societies
through all kinds of events on down into the modern period—including
European colonialism, world wars, and a Cold War—continue to suggest a kind
of civilizational glue that cushions it against external challenge, even as Muslim
civilization came to lag behind the Western power and technology in the modern
period. Islam has thus served to help hold the region together, united in a
common high civilization of Islamic culture. But the attitudes toward the West,
Rome, even Constantinople, had deep roots that preceded Islam and continued
on into Islam.
The directness of the message of Islam seems to have spoken to the
populations that came to accept it. Its theological clarity and simplicity,
compared to the intellectually complex—even arcane—theologies of
Christianity, hammered out in endless church politico-religious councils, seemed
to work in its favor. The religious appeal of Islam and its rapid spread may have
been why many Christian powers feared Islam and demonized it early on. And
while all rulers are quite capable of harshness of governance, the Islamic
formula for rule seemed to have worked better than those of its opponents in
most cases, judging by its longevity of governance. The sword can prevail early
on, but other more positive skills of governance are required thereafter. Witness
the fall of multiple mighty empires.
With its new political and religious dominance of the Middle East, Islam
seemed to fit in relatively comfortably with previous systems of religious

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thought and belief, a fusion of older and newer ideas. It is hard to argue that
Islam represented some kind of new and aggressive force that suddenly changed
the character of Middle Eastern geopolitics or established some kind of new
precedent of anti-Western impulses. Traditional cultures, attitudes, and
geopolitics persisted, but now under an Islamic patina. If Islam had never
existed, would the old patterns of Semitic pushback against Greek and Roman
Byzantine culture not have continued?

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CHAPTER FIVE