With the conquest of much of the eastern empire, the spread of Muslim domination is halted in 733 by the Franks. The peoples of the conquered lands learn to live under Muslim rule and many adopt Islam. After a century of conquering, however, the successors of the Muslim elite rest on their laurels and watch as their empire is fragmented, thwarting all hopes for a unified Islamic state.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 16: Under Muslim Rule
With the Muslim conquest, the lands under their control were altered, and certain advancements were made, the first of which were in the spheres of education and learning. Unlike the barbarian invasions in the western part of the empire, and much of Europe, where illiteracy thrived as knowledge was destroyed, the conquered Arab lands experienced an explosion of learning and literacy. From the eighth to the tenth centuries, this advancement continued, and Arabic became the default language throughout almost the entire caliphate. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, or at least to the Indian Ocean, Arabic was the primary form of study and communication in the conquered lands, replacing Latin, Greek, and other languages native to those lands.
“The attitude toward learning resulted in a burst of intellectual energy, as witnessed by a few of the Arabic words that became a part of the vocabulary in Europe, regardless of language.”
Writes John M. Riddle in A History of the Middle Ages.
“Some examples are alcohol, elixir, algebra, zero, nadir, zenith, almanac, and chemistry. From the Arabs, Europe learned of paper, the clock, and numerous medical innovations, including new drugs. Because of Arabic-to-Latin translations, medieval Europe came to know Greek science texts, often accompanied by commentaries from an Arabic writer.”
Those Greek texts were introduced to medieval Europe through Muslims because Muslim learning was based largely on Greek concepts, and they developed a love of Greek learning superior to their love of other cultures. Under Muslim conquest, strides were made in the fields of science, agriculture, engineering and technology, medicine, and mathematics as well. Indeed, with the coming of the Muslims, which followed the invasions of the various barbarian tribes, the post-Roman world was effectively split into three distinct power blocks: barbarian-controlled Europe, the Islamic Caliphate, and the remaining Roman holdover, Byzantium.
“One of the major themes in medieval history from the seventh to the twelfth centuries was the relationship and interaction among these three cultural, economic, linguistic, and religious groupings.”
Writes Norman F. Cantor in The Civilization of the Middle Ages.
“In various degrees each of these civilizations was an heir of the late Roman Empire. Byzantium exemplifies the most direct continuation of Roman law, administration, and thought. Western Europe also inherited many Roman traditions, and Islam absorbed some aspects of Roman imperial organization and the better part of the philosophy and science of Greece and Rome.”
In other words, these power blocks became the toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in Daniel 2, as would the papacy upon its emergence as a dominant player in western Europe.
A vast number of Christians in the east learned to live under Islamic rule. Islam still influences the eastern churches that survive today, and in a small way that influence extends to Spain, which the Arabs conquered and later lost. The success they enjoyed in the eastern and southern Mediterranean broke the grip the eastern Roman Empire held over that region, and whatever unity was enjoyed was interrupted and reshaped. The west was also forced to grapple with the Arab incursion, though they were able to halt its progress for the most part. In the west, the story was a bit different: the Franks were forced to tighten their military and political structure, which allowed them to dominate, and the papacy looked to them as a means of support when it too developed into an independent state.
At its height, the church established five patriarchates. During Justinian’s reign, the term came into official use and meant that there were five main religious heads or patriarchs established in five of the most important or influential regions in the realm, both east and west. These patriarchs were the heads of five churches located in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. With the coming of the Arabs …
“Three of the five ancient patriarchates—Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria—seemed to have vanished, though the patriarchs in those cities continued, with restrictions, to function”
Writes Kevin Madigan in Medieval Christianity.
“Only Rome (which would experience Muslim raids in the ninth century) and Constantinople (which would experience them much more often) remained. Conquered so rapidly, many of these lands would be fought over for much of the Middle Ages.”
Penetration of the Arabs into the west—well, north of the Pyrenees mountains located between France and Spain—was halted by the Franks in 733, almost exactly a century after the death of Muhammad in 632. It would prove to be the century of their greatest expansion.
Many Christians who were previously under Byzantine domination gladly welcomed the Arabs as liberators. In fact, in the lands of early Christendom, that being Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, Christianity had been brought to a low level that left it a shallow husk rife with doctrinal controversies and sectarianism. In these very lands, pagan practices and beliefs were packaged with Christian ones, along with blasphemous prayers to various saints, unwarranted reverence for Yeshua’s mother, Mary, and even the use of amulets and other relics and features of supposed magic. No wonder then, that when adherents to the new Muslim religion stormed into these regions proclaiming Muhammad as the last true prophet, many eagerly welcomed this shift and embraced Islam. The Muslims expressed a strict monotheistic belief that did not abide superstitious practices. For many, this seemed like a higher religious ideal when contrasted to the shallow Christianity that pervaded the land. But with the new Arab rulers came a new system of taxation. Chris Wickham, in his book Medieval Europe writes:
“From as early as the 640s, the caliphs seem to have decided that the Arab armies would not settle on the land, as Germanic groups had done earlier, but instead were to be settled in cities and paid directly from taxation.… The practice of supporting the army, the ruling class and the state by a sophisticated system of taxation never failed in the Arab world. This had the significant initial benefit of separating the Arabs from the local societies of non-Arabs and non-Muslims, who hugely outnumbered them, and in fact the Arabs were never absorbed by them.”
In this way, the Arab caliphate spread its policy and grew immensely rich through its fiscal and administrative systems. Altogether, the Arab caliphates were the richest and most powerful of all the rulers of the Mediterranean world for half a millennium. Not only did the Muslims control the lands which they conquered, but their religion was able to spread in many of those lands and be embraced by its Christian citizens, which was a blow to the church. One of the reasons for Islam’s appeal among Christians is similar to the appeal of monasticism to monks: a rigorous ethic and austere theology.
What is true too is that many Christians converted simply to avoid the consequences that would surely befall all those who refused to bow to the new conquerors. These and other factors caused the oldest Christian centers in the ancient world to switch faiths, and that included Christians tied to the churches of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa itself. Christianity, however, did not disappear altogether in these conquered lands. It would continue to exist in pockets within these Islamic territories, being practiced by a smattering of Christian groups, as it is to this day.
Islam means “submission,” with the idea that one is to submit oneself to the Most High. But this is not a concept original to the Arab religion. Muhammad, while employed as a merchant, traveled far and wide and came into contact with people of other faiths: Christians, Zoroastrians of the Persian belief, and especially Israelites. Israelite customs were a great influence to Islam, and the Israelite Scriptures, and even the Messianic Writings, first spoke of submission to Yah.
[7] Submit yourselves therefore to Elohim.
—James 4:7
[11] “But my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would not submit to me.”
—Psalm 81:11
The Qur’an, however, delineates from the Scriptures in several ways. The picture of the rewards in the hereafter are certainly divergent. Like the Scriptures …
“The Koran sets down a long series of regulations on the daily life of the Moslem.”
Writes Norman F. Cantor.
“The Moslem is to refrain from drinking and gambling, he is not to practice usury in business, and generally he is to deal with his fellow humans according to the highest precepts of justice and mercy….”
But …
“[W]hereas the Hebraic concept of heaven is extremely vague and the Christian concept of heaven is purely ethereal and spiritual, the Koranic picture of heaven is both specific in detail and highly attractive to human desires. In fact, the Moslem is promised a heaven in which he can partake of pleasures denied him in this world; he may drink; gamble; and enjoy the company of beautiful black-eyed maidens, who are mentioned several times in the Koran as rewards promised to the most worthy members of the faith.”
With promises of this nature, it is no wonder that many Arab males, much less men outside the culture, flocked to the religion in the high hopes of reversing their fortunes on the other side of this existence. Jihad meant certain eternal pleasures to Arab warriors, and even the rigid, austere nature of the religion held high appeal for Christians who now viewed their own superficial religion with disfavor.
Just two hundred years after Muhammad’s death the many churches along the eastern and southern Mediterranean—the Orthodox and heretical Greek persuasions—lost both their influence and large memberships and in fact became negligible. By 900 CE, the Latin churches of North Africa followed suit and very nearly disappeared. The many churches in southern Spain—renamed Andalusia by the Arabs—lost a vast number of Christians as well.
A tenth-century Spanish Christian writer recounts that the reason many young Spaniards embraced Islam was not due to their political aims but to the literature and culture of the Arabs, which was quite attractive at the time. What is truly interesting is that, what can be considered the very heartland of Islamic civilization today, those very lands on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, were once dominated by deep-rooted Christian philosophy and theology, thanks to giants like Philo, Eusebius, and Augustine of Hippo. Augustine’s own region in North Africa became supremely Islamic, being awash with Muslim culture and language. This utter rejection and stripping away of such Christian influences undid centuries of labor in a relatively short period of time. But this was not mere happenstance. From the moment the Muslims rose to power, they would continue to be a dominant religious, political, and economic force alongside other existing and future powers, per the dictates of Scripture prophecy. As Chris Wickham aptly puts it:
“[W]hat the Arab conquests created was a third major player in western Eurasia, one which was more powerful than the previously dominant one, the (eastern) Roman empire, and one with which everyone would have to deal in the future.”
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
The concept of jihad, which propelled the Arab conquests more than anything, must be understood from an eighth-century perspective. The kind of activity we see today among radical Muslims, which is credited to jihad, differs somewhat from its medieval counterpart. Professor Philip Daileader elaborates on the origin and development of the seventh- and eighth-century concept:
“The word jihad appears in the Qur’an about four times, and that’s it, and it doesn’t even always refer to military effort then. It does not, in other words, play a prominent role in the Qur’an. The idea of the jihad is worked out after Muhammad’s death, and it is worked out in a specific historical context. It is worked out at a time when it looks as though the Arabs are going to conquer the whole of the known world. According to the theory of jihad, developed by these scholars in the seventh and eighth centuries, there should be only one state in the world: an Islamic state in which Islamic rule is observed. And the reason for this is that the world should mirror, as closely as possible, the perfect unity of the one Allah.”
Having converted the polytheistic Arab worship to the monotheistic Muslim religion, the idea in the minds of these framers was that, since there was only one Creator being—who, as it turns out, favored their people over all others—there should be only one Islamic state in the world. The problem was that, during the time these Arab scholars were developing their theory, there was actually not a single, unified Islamic state.
“Instead it is divided into two parts.”
Says Professor Daileader.
“One, those territories where Islamic rulers are in control and where Islamic law is observed—and scholars refer to this as the House of Islam or the Dar al-Islam. The other area refers to the parts of the world where non-Muslims are ruling, following various types of law, and this part of the world is known as the Dar al-harb, or the House of War. According to the theory of jihad, developed in the seventh and eighth centuries, the House of Islam had to absorb the House of War and take it over so that there would be a single Islamic state and Islamic law would be observed throughout the world, and the purpose of jihad is to accomplish this. Jihad is the religious duty falling upon every Muslim. Muslim rulers under this doctrine of jihad are forbidden to have peaceful relations with their neighbors extending for more than ten years—at most you could sign a truce of ten years—but ultimately your goal must be to conquer these territories. And those who die fighting on behalf of this ideal are to be considered martyrs.”
This is where the reward of those beautiful black-eyed maidens comes into play, which many Christians of the era saw as nothing more than a carnal expression of an idolatrous religion. A clear case of the pot calling the kettle black and all that. At any rate, the concept of jihad in the eighth century, rather than being a means to a religious end, was instead a means to a political one. Victory over unbelievers was the main goal of a single Islamic state. While pagans were supposed to be eradicated or converted to the Muslim faith upon threat of death, Israelites and Christians (because their prior revelations were acknowledged by Muhammad) were eventually allowed to exist under Muslim rule with their own beliefs and practices intact, but they were expressly forbidden to attempt to convert Muslims to their religions.
In this way, the Islamic world could and would remain multi-religious indefinitely. Even the most forward-thinking Muslims of that day did not conceive of a worldwide Muslim faith where everyone would be converted to Islam. Today, some fear that Muslim domination will be ignited once more, and that Islam will spread throughout the whole world via the advance of Arab forces bent on terrorism in the guise of jihad, but prophecy assures that this will never happen. The Muslims have since been checked, as have all powerful nations and movements. There will be no one-world government but Yah’s. We go into greater detail concerning this subject in our mini-doc Bring on the New World Order! Be sure to view that video in addition to listening to this podcast episode.
Why the eighth-century concept of jihad became more political than religious is based on the special tax that was imposed on Israelites and Christians residing in conquered lands. That tax was called the jizyah, and it ran counter to any hopes of Israelite or Christian conversions to Islam, because the Islamic rulers forbade such conversions in order to allow for the steady flow of tax revenue from the two lucrative sources.
Now, given all this …
“Although the jihad was very important in the first century of Islam’s existence, it burned itself out by the early eighth century.”
Says Philip Daileader.
“As the boundaries of the House of Islam extended so far in so many different directions it was impossible to maintain the sort of dynamism that had existed shortly after Muhammad’s death. And by the early eighth century, Muslim rulers were establishing regular diplomatic contacts with their non-Muslim neighbors, and they would remain at peace with those neighbors for periods of more than ten years, and they would abandon any pretense that they were ever going to try to incorporate the House of War into the House of Islam. The theory of jihad became a dead letter after the early eighth century, but it’s still on the books, and it can be called upon in the future—revived—whenever the Islamic world feels itself to be threatened. One such period would be the Crusades, when the theory of jihad is revived by Islamic leaders who try and rally Muslims against westerners who have arrived in Syria and Palestine.”
The religious aims of the Islamic rulers took a back seat to their political and economic aims, and that continues to be the case today. It is all about power and wealth. Instead of working toward the establishment of one Islamic state where Islam would hold sway over all, the rulers were content to collect their various taxes and enjoy diplomatic relations with their neighbors. The irony of this is that, right up to the middle of the eighth century, there continued to be one central authority over the vast territories and peoples the Arabs had conquered. That authority stemmed from the caliph, whose capital was in Damascus. But a shift began to take place. Some of the non-Arabic peoples in those conquered lands, having converted to Islam, no longer wanted to be subject to the lower-class status of non-Muslims. They wanted to share control of the vast government of the Islamic empire, and they desired equality with the respected Arab warriors who made the conquests possible.
“Finally, in the middle of the eighth century the subject peoples revolted against the caliph of the Omayyad dynasty, who ruled from Damascus …”
Writes Norman F. Cantor.
“… and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, who were mainly Persian in background seized the title of caliph and set up a new capital in Baghdad.”
We touched on this in our last podcast. Norman F. Cantor goes on to say.
“The supplanting of the Omayyad by the Abbasid dynasty was a signal for revolt and political decentralization throughout the Islamic world, and by the end of the ninth century, instead of one great Arabic empire, the Islamic world was divided into several states. The rulers of these states continued to respect the caliph as the successor of the Prophet, but the political power in the Islamic world had now fallen into the hands of various despotic princes. Among these princes was the ruler in Spain, where the Omayyad dynasty alone had managed to prevail. The Mediterranean world was now united by the Arabic religion and language, and it formed a great international economic system, but the Arabic civilization was no longer a political entity. From the eighth century the term Arabic identifies a great civilization on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean to which many peoples—Greek, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Berber, as well as Arab—contributed.”
So the idea of a single Islamic state gave way to several states that were governed by various princes and populated by peoples of varying ethnicities and beliefs. What is more, Islam was further fragmented, not merely politically and geographically, but religiously as well. Of this, Norman F. Cantor writes:
“The caliph’s position as the religious leader of Islam became a purely nominal one. By the end of the ninth century three distinct traditions and groups had emerged within the Moslem religious community, which by and large still prevail.”
The first of those three traditions is the orthodox position, which attempted a strict adherence to the Qur’an and its perceived revelation. In addition to this, the orthodox position also adopted the sayings, or Hadith, of Muhammad, which contain the accounts of his daily practice, known as the Sunna (meaning “tradition”), hence the orthodox branch and dominant majority of Islam: the Sunnis. The Qur’an and Hadith are the basis for Islamic Law, or shariah. It was the task of the caliph to uphold this orthodoxy among the people, but that duty fell to a group of teachers of Islam who could be compared to the rabbis who upheld the tradition of the Talmud. Their emulation of these rabbis is a clear sign of the leaven of the Pharisees continuing its prophetic spread.
As to the second of the three groups that emerged within the Muslim community, Professor F. X. Noble of the University of Notre Dame says:
“In Islamic tradition, the first four caliphs—Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali (from 634 – 661)—are called the Rashidun, ‘the rightly guided Caliphs.’ But it’s interesting that the last three were murdered. Moreover, when Ali was murdered, the seeds were sown for the eventual ‘party of Ali,’ the Shi’a. Now, it’s quite a while before the Shiite-Sunni division in the Islamic world becomes a factor of real consequence. It’s the murder of Ali in 661, which plants the seed out of which that contention would eventually grow.”
The tradition of the Shia, followed especially in Iran, reject the first three caliphs and consider the fourth, Ali, to be the first true successor of Muhammed. The third religious group that emerged in Islam, Sufism, is akin to ancient Kabbalah among the Israelites, or the Occult in Christianity. Sufism is the esoteric dimension of Islam through which its followers seek a mystical union with the Creator. These, therefore, are the three major branches of Islam that have come down to our day. Together, they are a far cry from the united, single-state vision representing the loftiest Islamic ideal. When religions, groups, movements, and governments cannot find unity within themselves, there is no hope that they will be able to unite the world beyond them.
Yah alone will bring true unity at the end of this age.
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: alcohol, elixir, algebra, zero, nadir, zenith, almanac, chemistry, Andalusia, jihad, Allah, Dar al-harb, Dar al-Islam, house of war, house of Islam, jizyah, Hadith, shariah, Sunna, Sunni, Shia, Shiite, Sufi, Kabbalah, Rashidun, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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