Enter the Turks
120-487 AH
737-1095 CEW
HAT GAVE RISE to all the anxiety? The answer lies in the political
story unfolding alongside the intellectual movements I have de-
scribed. From the Prophet's day through the first two centuries or so of
Abbasid rule, people in the Muslim world had good reason to think they
were living at the very center of world civilization. European culture barely
existed. India had fragmented into many small kingdoms. Buddhism had
receded into China, and although it's true that there in "Cathay" the Tang
and Sung dynasties presided over a glorious renaissance almost exactly co-
extensive with the Muslim one flowering in the middle world, China was
too far away to have much resonance in places like Mesopotamia or Egypt.
If the Muslim realm was the heart of the world, then the underlying
driving force of world history was the quest to perfect and universalize the
Muslim community. All the major issues of the time-the struggle be-
tween Shi'ism and orthodoxy, philosophy and theology, Persians and
Arabs-could be understood within this framework. For a long while, op-
timistic observers could look at world events and believe that things were
generally moving forward. The implications of the holy miracle that blos-
somed in Mecca and Medina were still flowering. Islam had permeated
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