Brendan’s Reviews > A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity > Status Update

“The effect of rising foreign trade [in the 19th c] was not to increase demand for the manufactures of the Muslim world but rather to reduce it, sometimes drastically. Textiles produced by European factories were cheaper if not better, and they tended to crowd out those produced locally. The result was a process of deindustrialization in which these lands became suppliers of raw materials to industrial economies

“There was one feature of the demography of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that worked in favor of Zionist settlement: the relative depopulation of the plains, as opposed to the hills. This was a widespread feature of the Mediterranean coastlands at the time, the result of a long term process of environmental degradation whereby the deforestation and erosion of the hillsides led to the spread

The 18th century Saudi/Wahhabi state “effectively closed down the pilgrimage for most Muslims—whom of course they considered to be unbelievers. This was too much for the Ottomans…the Ottoman sultan delegated the task of destroying the Saudi state to the upstart ruler of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha. The invasion that followed ended Saudi rule in 1818, but it did not issue in a permanent conquest of the Najd. The

“As a fifteenth century Egyptian historian put it, ‘In the Yemen, under almost every stone there is a troublemaker, and a rebel in the shade of every tree.’”

“In political terms, the subcontinent was too large under premodern conditions to be brought together under the aegis of a single state. In fact the only state that has ever embraced the whole of India was the British Raj…Before that there had been occasional states of imperial dimensions based in the northern plains…but none of these states extended to the whole subcontinent. The normal condition of pre-Muslim

“To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at a map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf. Iran was thus less well placed to participate in the growth of trade on the Indian Ocean than the Ottoman Empire was to participate in that of the Mediterranean. The country was a victim of

“There are no significant Muslim populations among the non-Turkic peoples in or near the steppes, other than those of settled areas adjoining the Middle East…Whereas Islam swept the band of desert from the Persian gulf to the Atlantic, it did not do the same for the steppes. To the east, the Mongols in their homeland were not receptive to Islam. The 16th century saw their definitive adoption of Tibetan Buddhism

On the dependency of Mecca and Medina on foreign financial/material support:

“As late as the mid-11th century a traveler reported extensive ruins in Mecca and a population of a mere two and a half thousand. At this point one might have wondered whether the whole phenomenon of a world religion situating its major pilgrimage site deep in the Arabian desert was impractical to the point of being unsustainable. That it

Fascinating context on the adoption of Arabic script for the Persian language, which previously used the Aramaic script:

“There was a tendency in this part of the world to link choice of script with religious affiliation, no doubt reflecting a pattern whereby the acquisition of literacy took place within religious communities. Sogdian, for example, was written in three different scripts by Christians, Manichaeans,

“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,