PAUL FREEDMAN: Now we're
going to talk about Islam.
And here we enter into a segment
that, in a sense, is
the most relevant, if relevance
is a criterion, sort
of is, to today's world.
Because these controversies
that play out today Shiism
versus Sunni, for example, the
nature of Islam, its appeal as
a religion on a world scale are
obviously established in
the period that we're
talking about.
They were established slowly.
One of the things that you'll
have noticed from the
assignment is that the author,
Berkey, emphasizes very much
that Islam is slow in formation,
that it's not fully
grown as this militant movement
with a set of rules
in 632, the year that
Mohammed dies.
And because of that, then, it's
not to be understood as
some militant,
conversion-oriented,
jihado-centric religion
from the start.
I said at one point when we were
summarizing the end of
the Roman Empire that there
were three heirs
to the Roman Empire.
One was the Church--
ironic because, of course, the
Church had grown up persecuted
by the Empire.
The other was the Byzantine
Empire, the
Eastern Roman Empire.
Remember that it called itself
simply "the Roman Empire." So
that's the most clear claim
being staked to succession to
the Roman Empire.
And that the third was Islam.
And a couple of you said, well
Islam, that's the most
surprising of all, actually.
And I didn't really elaborate
at that time.
And that's not the center
of what we're going
to be talking about.
Because time moves on.
We're in the seventh century,
the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the west is
established two and a half,
two centuries earlier.
But Islam, although developed
in Arabia, outside of the
Roman empire, and although very
strong in places like
Persia or the western part of
India, would in many respects
take up the inheritance of the
Roman and Byzantine Empires.
The conquests on the
Mediterranean, in the east,
and in the south; its
architectural and artistic
style; its administrative
structure; and not least, the
translation and elaborations
of Greek science, medicine,
and other academic forms,
including, for example, the
translation of Aristotle and
the influence of Aristotle
would be signs of,
evidence of the
significance of Islam within--
it's pointless to debate whether
it's the Western
tradition or what the Western
tradition means--
but within the classical legacy,
within what it means
to say that Rome as a polity
ceased to exist in the west
and yet the classical world
has continued to influence
society and ideas to this day.
So in talking about the history
of Islam, one is
inevitably going to
be emphasizing its
revolutionary nature.
And so I'm going to go against
the reading in some sense.
Or the reading is intended to
go against the conventional
way of presenting the early
history of Islam.
And that can be sometimes
annoying.
The writer is cautioning you
against views you never had.
Or the writer keeps on saying,
"Well, we should not think
that this"-- and I hadn't
thought that.
Just tell me what you think
happened in early Islam.
My apologies for that.
Writers are always writing
against other writers.
Scholars are always writing
against a prevailing
interpretation.
Berkey is a continuist, and
that is the scholarly
consensus now, arguing against
this notion of Islam bursting
forth like some kind of pent-up
explosion in Arabia.
But Arabia is off the map.
Islam as a movement, and
certainly the Arab conquests,
are unpredictable events.
They may be understandable later
in terms of developments
in the Near East, both religious
and cultural, but up
until the seventh century Arabia
was on the periphery of
the two great controlling
empires to its north, namely
Persia and Rome.
And we are taking Byzantium
as the heir of
Rome in this sense.
The problem with Arabia is
that it is really dry.
And before the discovery of oil,
or more precisely, before
the discovery that oil was
useful, important, and
valuable, it was a strikingly
impoverished land in terms of
natural resources.
"A terrible land," as Isaiah
the prophet says.
Isaiah 21:1; "the burden of
the desert of the sea.
As whirlwinds in the south pass
through it, so it cometh
from the desert, from
a terrible land."
Now, Isaiah actually grew up
in what most of us would
consider to be pretty
dry circumstances.
The eastern Mediterranean,
modern-day Israel, Lebanon,
Syria are hot and dry compared
to bounteous
climes like New Haven.
So the Eastern Mediterranean,
however, is a land of fertile
oases, river valleys like the
famed Tigris/ Euphrates/
Fertile Crescent area, coastal
cities with commerce, whereas
Arabia is essentially
a vast expanse of
barely habitable terrain.
It is isolated by the
sea on three sides.
It has very few natural
harbors.
There are no lakes, no forest,
no grasslands, even, and no
rivers that run year-round.
The only intrinsically favorable
part of it is the
southwest corner,
modern Yemen.
This was in the ancient world,
or at least to the Roman
geographers, "Arabia Felix,"
Happy Arabia.
Nice Arabia.
And indeed, there were two
kingdoms that emerged here
around 1000 BC.
Harbors, oases, and these two
kingdoms controlled the spice
and incense trade from India and
from the Horn of Africa.
These are two extremely valuable
kinds of products for
religious, gastronomic, and
medicinal purposes.
And most of the spices
come from India.
And most of the incense comes
from modern Somalia, Ethiopia,
places along the Red Sea.
By the time of Mohammed,
however, southern Arabia's
best days had passed.
And Mohammed is, of course, from
central, and in the sense
of its orientation, really,
northern Arabia.
The worst desert in Arabia
is the south.
So just when you get out of
Yemen going northeast you come
to an area that still bears
the not really encouraging
name, the Empty Quarter.
This is really serious,
no-oases desert.
Further north, however, in
places like Mecca or Medina,
there is enough water for
settlement, though not enough
for agriculture.
A key event in the history of
Arabia is the domestication of
the camel, which can be situated
around 1000 BC.
Arabia, outside of the Yemenite
kingdoms, was mostly
nomadic, though there were
trading cities of which the
most famous are Mecca
and Medina.
These cities were rather
cosmopolitan.
They had Arabs and
other peoples.
They had Christians, some of
whom were Arabs, some of whom
were not, and Jews, many of
whom were also Arabs.
They controlled overland trade,
again, from further
east, bearing exotic products
like spices from India,
organizing caravans.
At times they would form
kingdoms, at times there would
be Arab kingdoms in the north,
but generally these are
feuding societies organized
along tribal lines.
Looked at from the Roman or
Persian empire, Arabia was a
little bit like the forests of
Germany: a hostile terrain--
from the Roman point of view,
Persian point of view--
inhabited by useful but
presumably barbarian and
presumably not very interesting
people.
This is the point of view
of the Bible as well.
They are primitive people
bearing interesting products,
inhabiting a land that's
not worth having.
Not worth invading, not
worth owning, not
worth dealing with.
The first mention of Arabs
seems to be 854 BC when,
according to a Syrian
inscription, a certain
Gindibu, the Arab, contributed
1,000 camels to forces
revolting against
the Assyrians.
The Arabs, henceforth, after
854 mentioned often in
Babylonian and Persian texts.
They're always frontiersmen or
people inhabiting a land
beyond a frontier.
Questions so far?
OK.
Not all Arabs are nomads, but
the Bedouin, Bedouin in this
sense meaning Arab nomad, is
sort of the Ur Arab, the
original Arab, the defining
archetype and the original
colloquial meaning
of the word Arab.
In a way the Bedouins are a
little like the Germanic
tribes, an analogy I'll mention
but I don't want to
push too hard.
They form extended kinship
units, that is to say they
know who their second cousins
are and care about them.
And these extended kinship
units form a
kind of tribal structure.
This notion of tribe remains
important to this day.
You'll have seen, in accounts
of post-Qaddafi Libya, for
example, the cliche and probably
accurate, is there is
no tradition of government.
Qaddafi didn't govern,
he just tyrannized.
And there are no civil
institutions.
It is divided by tribal
loyalties.
What does tribe mean in that?
I actually don't know
in terms of Libya.
It is a way of saying the people
do not have loyalty to
the state, but to some extended
kinship group, or
what's sometimes called "fictive
kinship group." I'm
not really related to you, but
we have either the same name
or we're from the same place or
we consider each other kin
and therefore have a
certain protective
sense about each other.
This is very useful if you
don't have a government.
We've already spoken about this
in terms of our question
of what held Merovingian
society together.
Your second cousin becomes
important to you if there's no
police force, if there's no
way of making sure that
someone is not going to kill
you just for fun or because
they got angry at you.
Under the circumstances we live
in, we don't care about
our second cousins.
We don't know who they are.
We don't expect anything
from them.
In a society in which family
is not just a sentimental
attachment, but it actually is
what is protecting your life,
kinship is very important.
Bedouins as well as
Germans, then.
The problem with kinship is that
while it's a very solid
attachment, it's also
an irritant.
And here we're not talking about
arguments over whose
Christmas is better or who gets
the Venetian glass vase
after Mom and Dad's death, we're
talking about terrible
arguments, feuds that are
within a kinship group.
So you have feuds within the
kin groups or tribes, and
feuds between tribes,
accentuated in this
case often by water.
Water, a scarce resource,
obviously, and one that people
fight about a lot in terms
of territorial feuds.
So the Bedouins tend to have
more feuds than the Germans.
There's no Bedouin equivalent
of wergild.
Remember, the wergild is the
price that you have to pay to
make someone have peace with
you, even if you've killed
their relatives.
It's the worth of a person.
It's compensation.
And then other people can
be assessed on the
basis of some tariff.
So women may be 2/3 of a man,
a pregnant woman may be one
and a half times a man,
and so forth.
We saw this in the
Burgundian Code.
Key to the Burgundian Code is
this notion of compensation,
that money related to the
nature of the loss.
One finger, two fingers, right
hand, left hand, is
compensation.
Bedouin don't have that idea of
compensation, of tariffs,
of wergild.
In both the Bedouin and the
German societies, the ruler
has a limited amount of power.
These are, I wouldn't want to
say democratic societies in
terms of some theory of
representation, but they're
not societies in which one
person's will is obeyed
unquestionably.
They are consultative.
They are more like gangs
in that sense.
There's a leader, but his
control is conditional on the
loyalty of his most powerful
subordinates.
And his most powerful
subordinates are quite capable
of overthrowing him.
The Bedouin sheik is a
little different from
the Germanic king.
And by Germanic king I mean not
the kings that we've seen
in the settled post-Roman,
Merovingian empire, but the
kings as described by Tacitus
with possible greater or
lesser accuracy.
In the Germanic tradition,
the king is a war leader.
In the Bedouin tradition, the
sheik is an arbiter, a settler
of disputes.
Both societies exalted custom,
and both had an exacting
standard of masculinity.
The Germans practiced
agriculture and herded animals.
The Bedouins don't have
agriculture, and they
supplement their herding
of animals by raids
on wealthier society.
These raids, called "razzia,"
are important because the
Islamic conquests that we're
going to be talking about on
Wednesday may be said
to begin as raids.
They begin as raids, and then
they discover that there's
almost nobody there.
That the Byzantine army and the
Persian army are crippled
by fighting against
each other.
So what begins by raids
becomes conquests.
So we come to Mohammed.
At first glance it would seem
that Mohammed is a religious
leader whose career takes place
in what a French scholar
of religion called "the full
light of history." 620s AD may
not seem like the full light of
history, but Mohammed as a
historical figure at least seems
to emerge more clearly
than Abraham or Moses
or Jesus.
But, as you have read,
Mohammed's biography is
hopelessly entwined
with legend.
What we know about Mohammed is
what later Islamic and Arab
commentators wanted to have
happened to Mohammed.
There are several sources for
the life of Mohammed, and for
thus the early years of Islam.
There are formal biographies,
called sira, S-I-R-A. The
problem with these is they
were written long after
Mohammed's death-- a hundred
years, at least.
There are collections of oral
tradition, called hadith,
H-A-D-I-T-H, to which,
similarly, there
are sayings, proverbs.
These are also questionable,
because although they were put
together within fifty years of
Mohammed's death, they're very
heavily influenced by the first
civil war of the 650s,
which we will be talking about
the day after tomorrow.
And then there's the Koran,
which is supposed to represent
the words of Mohammed as
composed by divine
inspiration.
The Koran itself is a text that
scholars outside of the
Islamic tradition have
questioned in terms of when it
was put together, how
much by Mohammed,
how soon after Mohammed.
The problem with all these
sources is not that they are
unreliable in the sense of
fabrication, but that they
tend to shape events in light
of what the writers already
know happens and in light of
what they think should happen.
So that, as an example, we'll
be talking about this in a
moment, but you're all aware
that in 622 Mohammed moves
suddenly from Mecca to Medina.
He maybe can be said
to flee Mecca.
This is called the Hegira, or
Hijra in the Berkey book.
H-E-G-I-R-A or H-I-J-R-A,
depending on just how faithful
you think you're being
to the Arab original.
The Hegira is a key event
in Islamic history.
It is the point from which
Islamic dating is done.
That is to say the
Islamic calendar
starts with the Hegira.
So this year is the year of
the Hegira such and such.
I can't do 2011 minus 622
immediately, but that's the
Islamic year.
According to the traditional
historical record, the Meccans
tried to assassinate Mohammed,
and he escaped,
narrowly, this attempt.
There's no real evidence of this
degree of hostility on
the part of people in Mecca.
There's no evidence of an
assassination attempt, or at
least independent evidence.
And the assassination attempt
seems to be something that is
important for the story, for
the way that the story is
presented later, to dramatize
something that may not have
been at the time as dramatic
as it seemed.
It may have been that the
Meccans simply didn't listen
to Mohammed and then
he accepted an
invitation to Medina.
It may be that they were trying
to sort of shut his
movement down.
But that they resorted to
assassination does not seem to
be very likely.
OK, so having given you all of
these fatiguing caveats about
what we do and do not know,
let's say Mohammed was born
between 570 and 580.
He was born into a reasonably
prominent but not really very
affluent family of Mecca.
He may have been a merchant.
It is usually assumed he was,
and this is partly because the
Koran has a lot of mercantile
similes.
In order to elucidate various
points, comparison is made
with trade, but there's
no real evidence.
We don't really know what
he did for a living.
We know that he married well.
His first wife, Khadija,
K-H-A-D-I-J-A, was from a
wealthy family, a higher class
family than Mohammed's own.
And we also know that Mohammed
got his start as a religious
thinker, as a prophet, at the
age of forty, an encouragement
to those of us who are
slow to get our
careers off the ground.
The discouraging part is that
his career only lasts a
relatively brief time.
He dies ten years after the
Hegira, but he does accomplish
an awful lot.
What was his religious
experience?
What was the revelation
vouchsafed to him that he
preached to the citizens
of Mecca beginning
around 615 to 620?
It is certainly a message of
monotheism against what was
considered to be a prevailing
paganism, or polytheism on the
part of the merchants and
tribesmen of Arabia.
But as we've said, Arabia
had lots of Jews and
Christians as well.
And it's a little tricky to tell
how much Mohammed would
have known about Judaism
and Christianity.
But it looks as if he did.
And indeed, it looks as if his
preaching begins as a kind of
biblical monotheism
for the Arabs.
It is a message to the Arabs
congruent with the message of
Judaism and Christianity, the
message of Judaism and
Christianity being understood as
a statement of the unity of
God and a progressive
interpretation of God's
message by a series of prophets,
a series of prophets
beginning with Abraham,
including Moses, Isaiah,
Jesus, according to Islam,
and Mohammed.
Mohammed is then in the
line of prophets.
The degree to which this means
that Islam takes on its own
identity is hard to say.
And the tendency of scholars
outside of the Islamic
tradition, that is people like
Berkey, is to say it takes
quite a while.
Takes quite a while for there
to be the confidence that
Islam is a religion that is
different from Judaism and
Christianity, while it is clear
from the start that the
people who are embracing it
are different, even though
there are Arab and Jewish
Christians, and we'll see what
that means in a moment.
Mohammed's first converts are
his family circle and a group
of key friends.
And they're all important
historically.
His wife, his cousin Ali, who
would marry his daughter
Fatima, a merchant named Abu
Bakr, a powerful member of one
of the leading clans or family
groups of Mecca, Uthman,
sometimes spelled--
I think in the Berkey book
spelled with a U, so we'll use
the U.
Uthman, right, Ali, I've
mentioned, Abu Bakr.
Uthman is a member of
the Umayyad family.
And Omar.
These are sort of considered
to be the inner circle of
very, very early converts.
As I said, according to
tradition the ruling circles
of Mecca became fearful as
what had been a fringe
movement started to gain
more converts.
The people who ruled Mecca
feared that their control was
slipping from their grasp, and
they feared that this new
movement was popular
with a lower class.
The leading clan of Mecca
were the Quraish.
These are the people who are
most powerful in Mecca and
begin as the enemies of Mohammed
and are responsible
for driving him out, if indeed
he was driven out.
In 622 the city of Medina,
another merchant center,
invited Mohammed to come as a
kind of arbiter or ruler who
was above factions and who
could then settle their
internecine disputes.
This is not an uncommon
pattern.
You'll see it in late
medieval and
Renaissance Italy, in fact.
The podesta in Italian cities
is an outsider who is
empowered with very extensive
police powers to quell feuds.
In Romeo and Juliet, for
example, there's a podesta,
but he's not able to
solve the feud.
But that's the kind of scene
that we can imagine as the
western equivalent of Medina.
Muhammad is invited as a wise
man, as an arbiter, as a
reconciler to the city
of Medina, an
offer that he accepts.
And it is in Medina that we
really start to see emerge
what can be called an
Islamic identity.
I tend to think a little bit
earlier than Berkey, because
here Islam starts to
differentiate itself from
Judaism and Christianity.
And indeed, the period at Medina
culminates with the
expulsion of Jewish groups who
refuse to accept Mohammed.
What he does at Medina also is
to preach that the religious
loyalty is more important than
loyalty to the tribal group.
The religious loyalty therefore
is not simply a
accompaniment to your already
existing identity; it is the
most important aspect
of your identity.
It's at Medina that Mecca
replaces Jerusalem as the
point of orientation
for prayer.
It's at Medina that Mohammed
stopped celebrating Yom Kippur
and institutes a month-long
fast during the daylight
hours, Ramadan.
At Medina, Friday becomes
the Sabbath,
not Saturday or Sunday.
And the Jews are expelled
from Medina.
And by Jews I don't mean some
kind of foreign community of
non-Arabs who happen to be
living in Medina, but rather
Jews, some of whom came
from elsewhere, many
of whom were Arabs.
And it's also here that Mohammed
perfects this notion
as against the Christians and
Jews who have scorned him that
he is the Seal of the Prophets,
the last of the prophets.
From Abraham to Jesus,
now to Mohammad.
This is the last prophecy.
God's message has not been
packaged into one deal, one
file too large for one
email attachment.
And it's come in a bunch of
them, and this is it.
Here are all the cute cat
pictures and all of the--
whole file, which you now can
download in segments.
But it's over.
This is it.
The Jews and Christians are
wrong to think that either it
ended with Elijah or that the
be all and end all of all
prophecy was Jesus.
No.
No.
This is the truth.
But keep in mind that Islam did,
and at least is supposed
to, respect Judaism and
Christianity as not merely
precursors, but as part
of the same tradition.
"People of the Book" is the term
often used in Islam to
describe Judaism and
Christianity.
They share the same, if not
scripture exactly, but the
same kind of historical
religious orientation.
The criticism that Islam can
make against Christianity is
that it tends to be
polytheistic.
And as you know, Islam expands
great care to make sure that
the human form does
not appear in art.
And in some forms of Islamic
art that not
even animals appear.
Depiction of the human
figure is proscribed.
Great care is made in
differentiating Mohammed from
what Muslims see as the
exaggerated stature of Jesus.
Mohammed is a prophet.
He is a messenger of Allah,
not to be identified with
Allah himself.
There is no depiction
of Mohammed.
People do not have pictures
of him in their houses.
There are no statues to him.
Mohammed's greatest challenge
was to overcome these tribal
loyalties in favor of the umma,
U-M-M-A, the community
of the faithful.
He allowed property and marriage
to be decided still
by tribal tradition, but
prohibited feuds and required
that disputes be arbitrated
in religious courts.
This is important.
Because Mohammed, like the
rabbis of the Diaspora in
Judaism, is both a religious
leader and a judge.
He is a community leader
and a spiritual leader.
And indeed, these two things are
not really distinguished.
I emphasize this because it's
really different from
Christianity.
In Christianity, there's a
church and there's a legal,
secular state.
Sometimes, and of course the
Middle Ages to some extent
defined by this, the Church
will have what look like
secular powers.
We've talked about this with
regard to the bishops and
Gregory of Tours.
At times the papacy, later,
would claim all sorts of
political powers.
But conceptually in
Christianity, because
Christianity was an illegal
religious brotherhood within
the Roman Empire for over two
centuries, church and state
are different.
In Islam, one can't really talk
about church or clergy.
There are religious leaders who
have political authority,
but their authority is what we
would call that of a judge and
that of a religious leader
at the same time.
The political order
and the religious
community are the same.
That's why when we talk about
the Arab conquest or the
Islamic conquest, we're talking
about something in
which the new territories are
taken over by a state that's
not a theocracy in the sense
of the church's ruling the
state, but something in which
the church and state are not
to be distinguished.
We'll talk about this more when
we come to the conquests.
Within two years of the
Hegira, 622, so by 624
Mohammed was planning to take
over Mecca, to re-enter in
triumph the city that he had
fled, if not under cover of
darkness at least under
murky circumstances.
A victory in battle in 624 gave
Mohammed the confidence
to expel Jews and Christians
from Medina and to take on
this title of Seal
of the Prophets.
And by 627 Medina gained the
upper hand, and in 630 Mecca
fell to Mohammed
and his forces.
And all of the tribes of Mecca
and of the surrounding areas
submitted to Mohammed.
They recognized him as
a political as well
as religious leader.
Again, the two things not easily
to be distinguished.
And then Mohammed died.
In 632 he died, and what is
remarkable is that the
momentum he established was able
to survive his demise.
Because most of the tribes
probably thought that their
loyalty was to him as a prophet
and a person, and not
to some sort of institution that
would survive his death.
And indeed, his death would
usher in a period of
incredibly rapid expansion.
Within a few years of Mohammed's
death, Damascus,
the great city of the eastern
Mediterranean, Byzantine
Damascus, would fall to the
Arabs, the first of many such
conquests that we will be
marching through on Wednesday.
But this question of religious
loyalty would be exacerbated
by splits within Islam, which
we'll also be describing.
The tenets of Islam, just to
close by way of our last
remarks for the day Islam means
"surrender." And to
surrender oneself to the power
of Allah is the beginning of
wisdom, beginning of faith.
Acknowledgement of Allah is
acknowledgement a strict
monotheism, acknowledgement of
Mohammed as the messenger
prophet of Allah, and
as the last prophet.
The so-called "five pillars of
Islam" are duties incumbent on
the believer.
And these are the confession
of faith that I just
mentioned, daily prayers, five
times a day, the giving of
alms, the observance of Ramadan,
and the performance
of the pilgrimage to Mecca
if that's possible.
What's not there is
interesting, too.
What's not intrinsic to Islam
is a strong sense of sin.
The Arabs do not like the
Confessions of Saint
Augustine, are not interested
in this particular form of
spiritual investigation.
The believer can pray
directly to Allah.
There is really no Islamic
clergy in the sense of
presiding over sacraments
or channels of grace.
The mosque is a gathering
place.
it is not a place that has some
kind of powerful holy
objects in it, in the sense
that a church in this era
would have relics or Eucharistic
hosts and other
very powerful, sacred things.
Islam is a religion of conduct
and law, not of mortification
and purgation.
It emphasizes upright behavior:
no drinking, no
gambling, certain dietary
restrictions.
Not the renunciation of the
world-- it does not say, "Sell
everything you have and give
it to the poor." It says,
"Give alms."
It is a moderate religion,
actually.
It is a "do-able" religion.
These obligations may be
somewhat inconvenient at
times, Ramadan for example, but
there is nothing in here
to the degree that the New
Testament, for example,
prescribes behavior that
most people are
not going to follow.
Or that traditional
Judaism, possible
but certainly onerous.
Lots of obligations.
The other difference, more
important, with Judaism is
that Islam would be very
quickly universal.
In other words, it would
encourage conversion, although
not, as we will see, with
great enthusiasm.
It is completely erroneous to
think that these armies that
burst forth from Arabia after
the death of Mohammed were
intent of getting everybody
to follow Mohammed.
They were intent on conquest,
all right.
But we'll see that their goals
were a little more complicated
than that of orienting everybody
towards this new
faith, whatever we're
going to call it.
And we'll see more about that
the day after tomorrow.
Thanks.
