By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE the settled world had crystallized into four
cultural core areas: Mediterranean, Nile-to-Oxus, Indic, and
East Asian. The Nile-to-Oxus, the future core of
Islamdom, was the least cohesive and the most complicated.
Whereas each of the other regions developed a single
language of high culture—Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese,
respectively— the Nile-to-Oxus region was a linguistic
palimpsest of Irano-Semitic languages of several
sorts: Aramaic, Syriac (eastern or Iranian Aramaic), and Middle
Persian (the language of eastern Iran).
The
Nile-to-Oxus Region
In addition to its various linguistic
groups, the Nile-to-Oxus region also differed in climate and ecology. It lay at the centre of a
vast arid zone stretching across Afro-Eurasia from the Sahara to the Gobi. It
favoured those who could deal
with aridity—not only states that could control flooding (as in Egypt) or
maintain irrigation (as in Mesopotamia) but also pastoralists
and oasis dwellers. Although its agricultural potential was severely
limited, its commercial
possibilities were virtually unlimited. Located at the crossroads of the
trans-Asian trade and blessed with numerous natural transit points, the
region offered special
social and economic prominence to its merchants.
The period from 800 to 200 BCE has
been called the Axial Age
because of its pivotal importance for the history of religion and
culture. The world’s first religions of salvation developed in the
four core areas. From these traditions—for example, Judaism,
Mazdeism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—derived all later forms of high
religion, including
Christianity and Islam. Unlike the religions that surrounded their
formation, the Axial Age religions concentrated transcendent
power into one locus, be it symbolized theistically or
nontheistically. Their radically dualistic cosmology posited another
realm, totally unlike the earthly realm and capable of challenging and
replacing ordinary earthly
values. The individual was challenged to adopt the right relationship with
that “other” realm, so as to transcend mortality by earning a final resting
place, or to escape the
immortality guaranteed by rebirth by achieving annihilation of earthly
attachment.
In the Nile-to-Oxus region two major
traditions arose during the Axial
Age: the Abrahamic in the west and the Mazdean in the east. Because they
required exclusive allegiance through an individual confession of
faith in a just and judging
deity, they are called confessional religions. This deity was a
unique all-powerful creator who remained active in history, and each event in
the life of every individual was meaningful in terms of the
judgment of God at the end of
time. The universally applicable truth of these new religions was expressed in
sacred writings. The traditions reflected the mercantile environment in
which they were formed
in their special concern for fairness, honesty, covenant keeping,
moderation, law and order, accountability, and the rights of
ordinary human beings. These values were always potentially incompatible with the elitism and
absolutism of courtly circles. Most often, as in the
example of the Achaemenian Empire, the conflict was expressed in
rebellion against the crown or was adjudicated by viewing kingship as
the guarantor of divine justice.
Although modern Western
historiography has projected an East-West dichotomy onto ancient
times, Afro-Eurasian
continuities and interactions were well established by the Axial Age and
persisted throughout premodern times. The history of Islamdom cannot be understood
without reference to them. Through Alexander’s conquests in the 4th
century BCE in three of the four core areas, the Irano-Semitic cultures of the
Nileto-Oxus region were permanently overlaid with Hellenistic elements, and a
link was forged between the Indian subcontinent and Iran. By the
3rd century CE, crosscutting movements like Gnosticism and
Manichaeism integrated individuals from disparate cultures. Similarly
organized large,
land-based empires with official religions existed in all parts of the
settled world. The Christian Roman Empire was locked in conflict with its
counterpart to the east, the Zoroastrian-Mazdean Sasanian empire.
Another Christian empire in East
Africa, the Abyssinian, was involved alternately with each of the
others. In the context of these regional interrelationships,
inhabitants of Arabia made their fateful entrance into
international political, religious, and economic life.
The Arabian Peninsula
The Arabian Peninsula consists of a
large central arid zone punctuated by oases, wells, and small seasonal streams and bounded in
the south by well-watered lands that are generally thin, sometimes mountainous
coastal strips. To the north of the peninsula are the irrigated
agricultural areas of Syria
and Iraq, the site of large-scale states from the 4th millennium
BCE. As early as the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE the southwest corner
of Arabia, the Yemen, was also
divided into settled kingdoms. Their language was a South Arabian Semitic
dialect, and their culture bore some affinity to Semitic societies in the Fertile
Crescent. By the beginning of the Common Era (the 1st century
AD in the Christian calendar), the major occupants of the habitable parts of
the arid centre were known as Arabs. They were Semitic-speaking tribes of settled,
semi-settled, and fully migratory peoples who drew their name
and apparently their identity from what the camel-herding Bedouin
pastoralists among them called themselves: ‘arab.
Until the beginning of the 3rd
century CE the greatest economic and political power in the peninsula rested
in the relatively
independent kingdoms of the Yemen. The Yemenis, with a knowledge of the
monsoon winds, had evolved an exceptionally long and profitable trade
route from East Africa
across the Red Sea and from India across the Indian Ocean up through the
peninsula into Iraq and Syria, where it joined older Phoenician routes across
the Mediterranean
and into the Iberian Peninsula. Their power depended on their ability to
protect islands discovered in the Indian Ocean and to control
the straits of Hormuz and Aden.
It also depended on the Bedouin caravanners who guided and
protected the caravans that carried the trade northward to Arab
entrepôts like Petra and Palmyra. Participation in this trade was in turn
an important source
of power for tribal Arabs, whose livelihood otherwise
depended on a combination of intergroup raiding, agriculture, and animal
husbandry.
By the 3rd century, however, external
developments began to
impinge. In the early 3rd century, Ardashir I founded the
Sasanian empire in Fars. Within 70 years the Sasanian state was at war with
Rome, a conflict that was to last up to Islamic times. The Roman Empire was reorganized
under Constantine the Great, with the adoption of a new faith,
Christianity, and a new capital, Constantinople. These changes
exacerbated the competition with the Sasanian empire and resulted
in the
spreading of Christianity into Egypt and Abyssinia and the encouraging
of missionizing in Arabia itself. In Arabia Christians
encountered Jews who had been settling there since the 1st
century, as well as Arabs who had converted to Judaism. By
the beginning of the 4th century the rulers of Abyssinia and
Ptolemaic Egypt were interfering in the Red Sea area and carrying their
aggression into the Yemen proper. In the first quarter of the
6th century the proselytizing efforts of a Jewish Yemeni ruler
resulted in a massacre of Christians in the major Christian centre of Najran.
This event invited
Abyssinian Christian reprisal and occupation, which put a
virtual end to indigenous control of the Yemen. In conflict with the
Byzantines, the Zoroastrian- Mazdean Sasanians invaded Yemen
toward the end of the 6th century, further expanding the religious and
cultural horizons of
Arabia, where membership in a religious community could not be
apolitical and could even have international ramifications. The
connection between communal affiliation and political orientations would
be expressed in the
early Muslim community and in fact has continued to function to the present
day.
The long-term result of Arabia’s
entry into international politics was paradoxical: it enhanced
the power of the tribal Arabs
at the expense of the “superpowers.” Living in an ecological environment
that favoured tribal independence and small-group loyalties, the Arabs had never
established lasting large-scale states, only transient tribal
confederations. By the 5th century, owever, the settled powers needed their
hinterlands enough to foster client states: the Byzantines oversaw
the Ghassanid kingdom; the Persians oversaw the Lakhmid; and the Yemenis (prior to the
Abyssinian invasion) had Kindah. These relationships increased Arab
awareness of other cultures and religions, and the awareness
seems to have stimulated internal Arab cultural activity,
especially the classical Arabic, or mudari , poetry, for which the pre-Islamic
Arabs are so famous.
In the north, Arabic speakers were drawn into the imperial administrations of
the Romans and Sasanians. Soon
certain settled and semi-settled Arabs spoke and wrote Aramaic or Persian as
well as Arabic, and some Persian or Aramaic speakers could speak and write Arabic. The
prosperity of the 5th and 6th centuries, as well as the intensifi
cation of imperial rivalries in the late 6th century, seems
to have brought the Arabs of the interior permanently into the wider network of
communication that fostered
the rise of the Muslim community at Mecca and Medina.
Islamic history / edited by Laura S.
Etheredge. Britannica Educational Publishing
(a
trademark of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.): New York.
0 comments:
Post a Comment