Caliph's Splendor (eBook)

Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad

Benson Bobrick (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
304 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4165-6806-3 (ISBN)

Infos

The Caliph's Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture.

While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph's Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun's rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne.

When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun's court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature.

But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun's caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions, eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire.

Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.

Textauszug

chapter one

MINARET AND TOWER

On the twenty-first of March 630, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius entered Jerusalem by its Golden Gate at the head of his legions to set up the True Cross of Christ, which he had just recaptured from the Persians in one of his great Persian wars. Dressed in humble garb, he dismounted not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and went the rest of the way on foot. Thousands of weeping Christians, overcome with elation, parted before him and carpets scented with aromatic herbs were strewn across his path. 'An indescribable joy,' wrote one Byzantine court poet, 'seized the entire Universe.'¹ It was 'a triumphant event for all Christendom,' and is still marked today in the Church calendar as the 'Feast of the Elevation of the Cross.'² Yet even as it was taking place, in one of the strangest coincidences of history, word came that an imperial outpost beyond the Jordan River had just been assailed by a small Arab band. The emperor paid little heed. Within a few years, however, Palestine and many other provinces would be torn forever from Roman rule, the Persian Empire shattered, and a new faith and people would arise to control the world's stage. In 636, just six years after Heraclius shrugged off this first Arab attack, his own vast legions would be crushed by the forces of Omar, second caliph from the Prophet, on the banks of the Yarmuk River in Syria.

Ever since that day, the forces of the Near and Middle East have had 'a deep, silent disdain' for the thunderings of Christian power.³

THE RISE OF ISLAM IS OFTEN DEPICTED AS HAVING TAKEN place in a primitive community of desert Arabs, who tended their flocks when not raiding caravans or engaged in tribal feuds. After their conversion to Islam, these tribes banded together and, upon the death of their Prophet (so the story goes), folded up their tents and swarmed out of the desert to spread his new doctrine to the world. Almost overnight they began to demonstrate a marked degree of culture and became an invincible military machine.

That strange picture, still popular in the West, is at once both too pathetic and high-flown. Islam had its cradle in an area where advanced civilizations--Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Byzantine--had thrived since ancient times. Arabia lay on their outskirts, but in succession or combination all had irrigated its psychic soil. Cuneiform tablets record large Arab armies complete with infantry, cavalry, and chariots as early as 853 B.C. And the oral tradition of Arabic poetry is resplendent with heroic lays that tell of mighty battles, the dreams of love, and the oases of paradise. Empires rose and fell, and by the seventh century A.D., those large Arab armies and the kingdoms they served had long since dispersed. But the region remained in dynamic transition, where the vibrant streams of faith and culture converged.

The Prophet Muhammad sprang from its soil.

Born ca. A.D. 570 at Mecca in Arabia on the shores of the Red Sea, Muhammad was the son of a merchant and belonged to the elite Arab tribe of the Koraish. Orphaned early, he was raised by in-laws, married a wealthy merchant's widow (much older than himself), had four daughters and two sons, and embarked, in the footsteps of his father, on a business career.

Despite his worldly interests, he was a religious man, spent whole nights in contemplation on Mount Hira near Mecca, and there one day in 620, it is said, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and urged him to preach among the Arabs on behalf of the one true God....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.8.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-4165-6806-9 / 1416568069
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6806-3 / 9781416568063