Ashok V. Desai on a book about how Islam changed the world
‘A black meteoric stone there was the centre of a shrine. That stone is
today’s Kaaba’
Before the Industrial Revolution, the world was very sparsely settled.
Akbar’s empire is estimated to have had about 10 crore people â€" and
it was a world power because it was so populous. The entire world’s
population might have been 50 crore, against 671 crore today.
The small population gave people greater choice of lands to settle down
in; more people settled where life was easier â€" that is, where manual
labour gave higher returns. Such areas were flat river beds, where the
soil was easy to plough; they were warm, with temperatures between 20 and
40 degrees for long enough to grow a crop; and they were either
periodically drenched by floods, like the plain of the Nile, or had
enough rainfall for a crop â€" which could be as low as 10 inches in a
cold region and 30 inches in a hot region. Such areas of high
agricultural productivity supported a dense population.
Many people did not enjoy the life of unending toil that these fertile
areas offered. They preferred to live in the hills or forests nearby and
rob farmers in the valleys from time to time. Rather than be killed,
raped and robbed by foreign marauders, the valley people preferred to
have a regulated robber, otherwise known as king. His moderate robbery
was called taxes; with taxes he maintained a band of anti-robbers â€"
paid servants who fought foreign robbers and kept them at bay.
Farmers grew crops, and paid a share in taxes. But crops were difficult to
carry to the capital. They were carried or hauled by animals, which too
required food. So beyond a point it was uneconomic to collect taxes in
grains. As kingdoms grew, kings started exchanging the crop revenue for
something more portable; the more value it had per unit of weight, the
better. More and more things came to be exchanged for these portable
commodities; they thus became money.
There were as many currencies as kings. All could not get hold of metals
when necessary, so they created different currencies depending on what
metal they could get. Coins lasted for centuries. So soon there was
bedlam; there were hundreds of denominations and weights. That led to the
emergence of currency traders. As traders, they kept stocks of currency.
When someone was short of currency, they would lend it to him.
Once currencies became convertible and loanable, commodities could be
traded over vast areas. Thus Indian spices could be eaten by the English,
and Chinese silk be worn by Indians. The kings along the way would collect
taxes. All along the way came up traders, stockists, moneychangers,
transporters, tax collectors â€" and robbers. These categories were
fungible â€" often, robbers turned tax collectors, transporters or
traders, and vice versa.
That is the sort of world in which Arabs lived. Arabs existed before
Islam; they were tribes that inhabited the desert to the east of the
fertile crescent that extends along the Mediterranean coast from Egypt
through Palestine and Syria to Turkey. Outside Nemara, an ancient fort
near Damascus (the capital of today’s Syria), lies the grave of
Imrul-Qays, son of Amr, described as king of Arabs, who died in AD 328
â€" much before Muhammad was born. Two hundred years later, this area was
under Ghassanids, who were governors under the Romans. They held a fair
every spring at the shrine of St Sergius where Arabs from the mountains
and desert further east would come to pray and celebrate; at that time,
those Arabs were obviously Christians sometimes. They were nomads; they
kept camels, goats and sheep. They lived in tents. They rode horses. They
traded wool and hides for grain, wine and olive oil. And they carried arms
â€" swords and bows â€" to protect their herds from theft. So they were
also equipped for robbery â€" and probably collected a tribute from the
Byzantine settlements to their west in lieu of robbing them.
In the sixth century, gold was discovered in the mountains to the
southeast of Palestine. It created purchasing power, and a number of
trading centres developed. One of them was Mecca. A black meteoric stone
there was the centre of a shrine; the Christians believed the shrine was
founded by Abraham. It was managed by the tribe of Quraish, who grew rich
on trade between the east and west coasts of the Arabian peninsula. That
stone is today’s Kaaba.
Muhammad was born in a Quraish family around 570. He is reported to have
gone to Syria on a trading expedition, and discussed religion with
Christian monks there. Then, around 600, he began to preach that there
was only one god, and that god had sent a message to him through angel
Gabriel. He also taught that after death, men would be judged; the
virtuous would go to a heaven replete with material luxuries, and the
wicked to a burning hell.
The Meccans did not relish this message. In 622, however, Muhammad
received an invitation from Medina, 200 miles to the north. Medina was
scoured by feuds; Muhammad was called as a peacemaker. Thus he acquired a
fiefdom. The Quraish of Mecca were quite upset, and conflict soon began
between Medina and Mecca. After a number of battles, Muhammad took over
Mecca in 630. Two years later he died â€" before he could convert many
beyond Medina and Mecca.
Islam was a great religion to belong to: it was simple and democratic. But
it could not be an imperial religion, for it did not allow taxation of
Muslims. That is why the Bedouin tribal armies spread out and conquered
Syria, Egypt and Iraq under the first caliphs. They collected taxes from
newly conquered territories, but did not convert the people to Islam;
often they restored the defeated kings and made them pay tributes.
Stories of conversion at swordpoint are misplaced; conversions came
later, and were mostly voluntary because Muslims paid no taxes â€" and
could, by joining the army, share in booty from conquered regions and
become rich. India’s partial conversion took seven centuries; and even
at its end, many Hindu kings survived as tributaries. That is the
beginning of the story told by Hugh Kennedy in The Great Arab Conquests:
How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Da Capo Press).
There is more, but this is all there is space for.
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