[I wrote this quite a while ago -- the day after I received the email, I think -- but I didn't get around to editing and posting it until now.]

As is his wont, Darcy has sent me a whole lot of small emails, rather than one big one. Most of them will go into the pile and wait their turn, but this one invaded my idle brain and wouldn't leave, so it gets to jump the queue.

Me:

Ha. Do you realize what you're asking? That's the central question of Islamic history. Or rather it's one of a handful of interlocking questions which all answer each other while none answers the big question: Why did Islamic civilization decline and fall? You may as well ask why the Roman Empire declined and fell. Historians write entire books on the question without really answering it. I'm certainly not going to settle it in one blog post. If I did have a good answer, I'd write a book and make my big splash as a historian.

Let me show you what I mean by interlocking questions: You ask specifically why the Islamic world lost its great lead in science and technology. Off the top of my head I can think of two simple answers. One, Islamic culture changed in a way so that it no longer was supportive of open scientific inquiry. This happened some time around 1200, depending on what region. (Ibn-Rushd, aka Averroës, died in 1198). That fact is very easy to demonstrate, if not to explain. Another simple answer is that the entire Islamic world had a drastic setback, politically and economically. This happened some time around 1250, again depending on the region. (Hülagü Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258.) With civilization and the economy collapsed, the Islamic world didn't accomplish much of anything, so of course science and technology suffered.

But of course these answers beg their own questions. If culture changed in a way that was no longer supportive of progress, why did culture change? If civilization collapsed economically and militarily, why did it collapse? Some historians say one was the cause of the other. Once the culture of progressive scientific inquiry was lost, the whole empire lost its vigor and decline ensued, some say. But you can just as easily turn that around and say that science and technology are a luxury product of prosperity, so when the prosperity was turned off, attitudes hardened as people focused on simple survival.

You can even turn this around on your original question: Neither cultural change nor economic decline was the cause of Islam losing its lead in science and technology; rather, both were the effect of that loss. You can pretty much pick whichever you like as the original cause and tie all the others to it as effects. Answer just one question, and you have a working theory for the whole bundle. This gives us several basic strategies for attacking the problem.

One very simple answer goes like this. Throughout Islam's era of prosperity, there were always forces of intellectual and cultural reaction. That is, while the mainstream culture was supportive of scientific inquiry, there was always a minority saying, "God tells us everything we need to know; all this progress is just impiety." Eventually (after about 500 years), these forces won out. There's no complicated historical process, one might argue, simply an ideological tug-of-war between one side and the other. If only the progressive side had prevailed instead, then the Islamic world would have remained strong and led the globe in every sort of progress. But the other side won instead.

That's really not very satisfying. Another simple approach which I find a bit more convincing is that Islam simply got beat up on by others. The Islamic nation reached its peak of political power some time around 1100 AD. Then it got hit hard on all sides. The Christian resistance stepped up the fight in Spain while the Crusaders opened a new front in the Eastern Mediterranean. India, never thoroughly assimilated, went up in rebellion. Then, while Islam's hands were already full, the Mongols launched a devastating attack right at the heart of the empire and tore it inside out. The Islamic nation, strong as it was, simply couldn't stand such a pummeling. That it wasn't obliterated completely is a testimony to its hardiness. Even so, it suffered all sorts of internal wounds from which it has never really recovered, including the loss of the progressive culture which had been a product of its prosperity.

Another popular theory starts with the cultural question and blames the "barbarians". The idea is that political power within the Islamic world had since its beginnings been held by a civilized and enlightened class, but in the period leading up to the decline, power was gradually usurped by outsiders who lacked the same traditions and values. This is most often presented as the story of the Seljuqs, an uncivilized tribe of Turks from the north who converted to Islam and came to the heart of the empire. There they ascended as a military slave class and eventually took over. A similar story can be told for Almoravids in Spain and other less sophisticated outsider groups at various times and places. This theory often ties in with a belief that intellectual culture has a natural lifespan in which it becomes decadent and effete and thus becomes prey to a hardier but cruder rival culture. It's no coincidence that this sounds so like a similar theory for the decline of Roman civilization. The historians who advance the idea in one place generally embrace it in the other as well.

Ultimately, this theory is a variation on the theory of military defeat, I think, because when you probe a little deeper, you have to ask why the Seljuqs/Almoravids/etc were allowed to take over, and the answer is that they were needed for military defense against threats from outside -- notably, the Mongol invaders. Thus, the narrow-minded, anti-progressive, anti-rational culture of the Seljuqs, Mamluks, etc, can be seen as an internal disease brought on by outside pressure.

As with so many large questions of history, the approach a historian prefers often says more about the answerer than the question, so maybe it says something about me that I like the approach which looks at economics. Throughout its long early heyday, the economic basis of the Islamic empire was trade. The Prophet himself was a merchant before he became the vehicle of God's revelation. Fundamental principles of Islam such as the hajj (pilgrimage) and zakat (tithe), whether deliberately or not, are well designed to promote progress in a mercantile civilization. Geographically, the Islamic nation's greatest resource was its location. It was not entirely lacking in natural resources, of course, but on the whole it did not abound in its mineral and agricultural products nor in the ability to support large dense populations. It was, however, supremely well positioned to be a hub through which these goods were delivered to and from others.

Of course any prosperous nation of even medium size is going to have a complete and balanced economy within itself, but with respect to its relationship to the global economy there will be an aspect in which it provides a surplus. For the Islamic nation this was trade. But this dominance was not permanent. Islam took several large hits to its commanding position in world trade, each associated with a great decline in Islamic society. The opening of the Silk Road was a boon to both Europe and China, but it came at the expense of the Islamic empire in the Middle East, and one can persuasively argue that this is the key to the decline of Abbasid Baghdad. On the maritime front, Islam at its zenith came very close to enclosing the Mediterranean, but a combination of creeping borders along the coasts and changing naval technology gradually eroded Islam's advantage there. The knockout blow came with the opening of the oceanic routes, which devastated not just the little feeder nations like Venice but the whole Middle East, whose fabled wealth was based on trade between East and West.

This fundamental nature of the Islamic economy is a key to many aspects of Islamic culture. Unlike its regional rivals (northern and western Europe, the central Asian steppes, India, China), the Islamic Middle East was a large net importer of human beings. It had this in common with the cities of the time relative to the countrysides -- and, in recent history, with coastal California relative to the rest of the United States. Like modern California, the Islamic Middle East was, in spite of its pockets of agriculture, a predominantly urban society. Like its fellow mercantile states and net importers of immigrants, and for the same reasons, the society of classical Islam was very tolerant and welcoming, certainly with respect to race and nationality, and to a large extent with respect to culture as well. (Indeed, ethnic identification of individuals in early Islamic history is a difficult problem precisely because ethnicity wasn't considered remarkable and thus is rarely discussed in surviving texts.)

That's not quite to say that Islamic culture was not aggressive, or even imperialistic. It's just that, like the English language and like the fictional Borg collective, its means of conquest was not to confront rivals and defeat them but rather to voraciously absorb them into its extremely adaptable whole. Historically, Islam is an inclusive religion. Its ideal of ideological conquest of the world is like the children's game Red Rover. Islam is determined to be the winning side, but at the end of the game every player is equally a winner. If it has to do that by digesting large foreign objects, it can do so.

One might well argue that the great stall of Islam's initially rapid expansion is directly tied to it losing its ability to absorb that which is outside of itself. Today we like to talk of Islam's conquest by the sword, but in reality it was not like that at all. In its infancy, the Islamic community hadn't nearly the manpower nor the resources to do any such thing. The early expansion came from swallowing societies whole. Naturally this led to periods of indigestion, and the great civil wars of the early period are essentially the struggles to chew and digest its very large mouthfuls of Syria and Mesopotamia. At the end of the struggle, there's room to wonder whether the resulting synthesis is more devouree than devourer.

This leads me to a key point which is often missed. The classical Islamic world was fundamentally a Western civilization. Because of our pattern of thinking of Islam as a rival to Christianity, both today and historically, we tend to overlook the fact that this is a sibling rivalry. Islamic culture was not created out of whole cloth born in the Arabian peninsula. The Islamic religion was an elixir which revived two giant but decadent societies. We generally think of these as the Byzantine and Persian empires, but what are they really? The Persian empire is essentially Alexander's realm, and Byzantium is essentially the southeastern half of the Roman Empire. In other words, they are Greece and Rome. When we talk about Western civilization, we talk about Greco-Roman society and we talk about Judeo-Christian culture. These are the parents of the Islamic world.

A recurring theme in European history is that it is heir to Roman Empire. When we talk about the decline of Rome, we say that Africa was lost, Egypt was lost, Syria was lost, and ultimately even Asia Minor, Greece and half of Italy were lost. But Rome was not quite extinguished: The flame was kept alive in some distant outpost -- usually France, but in some tellings even as remote as Ireland! -- and the new Rome was rekindled from that. Well, OK, that's one way of looking at it. Another view is that Egypt and Syria were not lost at all. They simply converted to the new religion, very much like the Roman world had done once before with Christianity. Then gradually they gathered up most of the rest of the Mediterranean world with only a few scraps of coast out in the West remaining in darkness.

This is not necessarily just a relativistic question of alternative perspectives. We of European cultural heritage like to imagine the Roman Empire as a European nation, with its center of gravity in the West. It was not. What were the great cities of the late empire? Rome? Hardly. Constantinople was not at the eastern end of the empire, as we like to pretend; it was at the northwestern fringe. The great cultural centers of the late empire -- Alexandria, Antioch -- were in the East. These great centers were not sacked and destroyed, they were annexed.

Recent historians have made a compelling case, using a combination of written and archeological evidence, that the monetary economy in Syria never collapsed as it did in the West (including Asia Minor) and thus has remained in continuous use from pre-Roman times to the present day. (See Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025.) I know that sounds esoteric to a non-historian and probably even to some historians, but if you believe (as I do) that the preservation of economic systems and the political structures that go with them is the essence of human progress, the implications are huge. It certainly buttresses the idea that the true heir of Rome is the Damascene empire of the Umayyads, not the Byzantine rump in Constantinople, nor the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne.

Absence of this realization is the big gap in Henri Pirenne's famous thesis (from his essay "Mohammed and Charlemagne" -- I'm pretty sure I read it online, but I can't find it now). Pirenne meticulously piles up evidence showing that the key to Western civilization's prosperity is control of the Mediterranean. In particular, he demonstrates the importance of the unified control of that sea and how it loses its value when it becomes fragmented. From this, Pirenne concludes that what destroyed the Roman empire was Islam, in that it broke Rome's hold on the Mediterranean Sea. Pirenne's chauvinistic Francocentric blindness is almost comical as he methodically catalogs the pieces of the Mediterranean world "lost" to Islamic conquest. At the darkest hour -- in the 10th century when Islam briefly held southern Italy and the traitorous Christian nations of Venice and Byzantium chose to attach their economies to the heathen -- only valiant France remains.

Fernand Braudel, also a fan of Mediterreanean importance, looks at Pirenne's thesis and draws the obvious conclusion that Roman/Mediterranean civilization was not destroyed by Muhammad so much as inherited by him. He then takes the curious next step. When faced with the question of why Islamic civilization declined -- the question seems destined to be forever linked with the Roman question -- he turns Pirenne's thesis on its head: Accepting all of Pirenne's particulars, Braudel suggests that the Mediterranean was key to the Islamic world's prosperity and it was the loss of it which triggered its collapse. This is essentially a one-region variation on the economic theory where Islam's decline is due to its loss of the trade monopoly.

Speaking of Braudel, if my response here leaves you unsatisfied -- and it should, since I've only danced circles around the question without ever answering it -- I can think of no better recommendation for further reading than "The Greatness and Decline of Islam," the sixth chapter of Braudel's A History of Civilizations. Come to think of it, Braudel doesn't really answer the question either, but he does provide an excellent and easy-to-read survey of the problem.

I really can't recommend that book enough. It is possibly the best history book ever written, or at least the best written in modern times. It's greatness does not come from any grand unified theory or brilliant new discovery. Braudel does that elsewhere. The genius of this book is that it is a masterpiece of reduction and simplification. Other history texts, even good ones, focus too narrowly on only a few regions or eras, get lost in a forest of non-essential details, or both. A general reader who simply wants to understand the basic history of the world is frustrated. Having labored through a mass of historical information, he or she comes out the other side little the wiser about what one really wants to know: Who are the nations of the world and what is their story that made them what they are today? A History of Civilizations sets out to answer exactly that question in the friendliest and most direct way possible. It succeeds brilliantly.

Braudel wrote this book as a textbook for the French equivalent of high school. Sort of. In the 1960s, as a distinguished historian well-established in his career, Braudel was involved in the academic debates about what was wrong with France's education system. Like America's today, France's history curriculum was a banal hodgepodge of useless information and saccharine national mythology. A group of historians decided to write new textbooks as they ought to be written, and Braudel provided the text on world history. After a complicated path with various editions and titles, it eventually became the History of Civilizations. Alas, bureaucratic idiocy won out, and this generous gift from France's greatest historian was rejected. If I were ever to teach a course in history, at the high school or collegiate level, it would surely be my textbook, no matter what the rest of the school system recommends.

But I digress. Here's my final answer to the question of Islamic decline. It's a point I like to make with regard to the Ottoman Empire specifically -- not original to me, of course (I think I got it from M.E. Yapp) -- but it applies equally to Islamic civilization as a whole. When considering the Ottoman Empire, we tend to take the view of diagnosing it as the "Sick Man of Europe". The question is always: It used to be so strong, so why is it now so decrepit? Perhaps that's the wrong way to look at it. The Ottoman Empire was a large, thriving, prosperous nation for more than 400 years, and over that particular span no other state survived with equal success. Why do we presume it would remain so healthy forever, when few other nations have a record nearly so long? Six centuries of existence including four centuries of dominance is a pretty impressive record.

The same argument can be made of classical Islam. If we count from the initial conquest to the fall of Baghdad, the early caliphate survived for about 600 years, and for nearly all of that period it was the greatest nation on earth. Attach that end to end with the Ottoman state, and you're looking at an entire millennium of prosperity. The real question is not why the Islamic world declined, but why it prospered as long as it did.

1:42:00 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

As some of you know, I have relocated in the real world. I'm still in Seattle, but on the other side of Green Lake now. Most of last week was devoted to moving and various moving-related activities like cleaning up the old place and setting up in the new place. I still have boxes and books and other things haphazardly piled around the apartment, but I at least have enough to be functional, so now I'm just catching up on rest. Wednesday night I slept for 14 hours (6 pm to 8 am, roughly), which I hadn't done in several years. Those of you who have reason to know my address will get the usual email notice as soon as I get around to it. Besides my mother, no one actually mails me anything, so it hasn't been a top priority.

I missed the entire Republican convention. Aside from being busy and uninterested, I had no television. I've been without for more than a week now; I unplugged it at the old place on Friday night (um, the last Friday in August, I mean), and I have no reception and no cable here. I'm not sure when I'll get around to hooking up the cable. Hopefully it'll be before the third game of the A's-Red Sox series. I haven't actually checked the TV listings, but I know that Tim Hudson is scheduled to face Pedro Martinez, so if that's not ESPN's featured Wednesday night game they're just nuts.

I read some of the convention speeches online, and even more of the convention commentary by various pundits and bloggers. Of these, the one I liked best was Andrew Sullivan, oddly enough since I usually don't care for him much. Most of the talk has been about Zell Miller, including an email I just got from Darcy, who was alarmed to find that my newly discovered sister-blog Sciolist is among those defending Miller. That may end up in the letter column some day, if only as an excuse to track down David Hood and get his take on the whole thing.

Of the one thing that interested me most, I saw only a brief mention. Did Arnold Schwarzenegger really try to represent Austria as if it was a country behind the Iron Curtain? I can accept politicians misrepresenting each other's voting records and calling each other traitors and so forth, but misrepresenting basic geography is a pet peeve.

12:44:22 PM  [permalink]  comment []