VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 215The boundary between the First Millennium and the Middle Ages is espe-
cially uncertain in Asia—as indeed is the applicability of medievalism at all,
either here or elsewhere in the Islamic world. In arguing for a periodization
ending around the year 1000, I have mentioned certain individuals whose
work resumes the period and symbolizes that “end,” but also stands for new
developments pending or already under way. Ibn Sīnā fuses Aristotle and
Muslim theolog y into a distinctive synthesis which, thanks also to Ghazālī’s
openness to the Sufi dimension, echoed for centuries to come. Bīrūnī draws
his readers’ attention to the utterly alien civilization of India, in acculturating
to which Muslim invaders were to be challenged as nowhere else. Ferdowsi’s
historical epic sets the tone of Iranian national consciousness for a millen-
nium to come, and still counting. All three of these men from Iran’s eastern
peripheries belonged to one of those fertile worlds where cultural zones over-
lap, in their case the Iranian and Islamic Commonwealths. Arabic remained
the language of culture. Ibn Sīnā and Bīrūnī wrote Arabic, and Bīrūnī criti-
cized scholars who used Persian. But the Arab lands between Tigris and Nile,
although then as now more visible to the European eye, had lost both cul-
tural and political impetus.^67 The East, by contrast, was confident, resilient
and, above all, absorbent. Where the Arabs failed to assimilate the Crusaders
(who took Christian brides, and paraded them in public instead of locking
them up at home), the Iranian world made Sunni Muslims out of the Seljuks,
and eventually the Mongols too. The Seljuks went on to create a vast empire
in Iran and the Fertile Crescent but also Anatolia, where they drew cultural
inspiration from East Rome and even the Crusaders as well as Iran and the
Arab world, and were then absorbed by the Ottomans. The Mongols went
down in Arabic and European history as a scourge, but they opened up Asian
trade and brought a new efflorescence to the arts and scholarship of Iran.
Their Ilkhanid and then Timurid states prepared the way for the Safavids;
Iranized Mongols founded the Mughal dynasty in India. By the 1520s, all
three of the great empires were in place which, as I observed at the outset of
chapter 1, framed a self- confident Muslim world from the Danube to the
Ganges into the eighteenth century and the age of European colonial
conquest.^68
In the 1780s Gibbon placed this Asiatic world at the culmination of what
he must by then have realized was his thoroughly misnamed though (in part
for its title) commercially successful Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
67 For a recent, especially negative view of their eleventh- century state, see Ellenblum, Collapse of
the Eastern Mediterranean [4:48] 168–70, 258–60.
68 The varied and creative postformative period of Islamic history, starting with the Seljuks, is a
necessary counterbalance to the First Millennium perspective, given that attention to ninth/tenth-
century Baghdad, or any other early “Golden Age” (e.g., Meccan- Medinan origins), tends to facilitate the
Eurocentric agenda that dismisses the rest of Islamic history as “decline” ripe for colonialist rectification:
cf. Bauer, Ambiguität [1:5] 53, 58–59, 161, 296–97.