Status Updates From A History of the Muslim Wor...

“As the language of the conquerors, Arabic was the language of power and prestige, and sooner or later it became the language of opportunity for anyone aspiring to political, military, bureaucratic, cultural, or commercial success. And yet at first it was only the language of a small minority in comparison to the masses speaking Persian, Aramaic, Coptic, and the like. [The later coming of the Arab nomads], in turn,

“Mu’awiya’s achievement was to reestablish the empire created by the conquests on a foundation sufficiently viable for it to last for two full centuries. As we have seen, the key geopolitical change was that the state was now ruled from a center outside Arabia, from one of the conquered territories [Syria] where fiscal and military power were concentrated. This shift accelerated a gradual evolution in the

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“We have indirect but telling evidence of the imaginative impact of Muhammad’s religion on the Arabs. After his death, and perhaps even before, one form taken by the short-lived rejection of Islam in Arabia was the appearance of no fewer than five false prophets—false, that is to say, in the eyes of our Muslim sources. There was one in the Yemen, one in Yamama, two—including a woman—among the nomads of

“It was the lowlands of Mesopotamia, irrigated by the Tigris and the Euphrates and inhabited by Aramaic-speaking peasants, that provided the [Persian] empire with its fiscal sinews—its tax power. Mesopotamia lived on borrowed rainfall brought to it by rivers rising in eastern Anatolia. As long as it lasted, this combination of highland manpower and lowland tax power provided a firm foundation for an empire based