Tamerlane. Meanwhile, political power was fragmented and dispersed to
local groups such as the Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks in North Africa,
the Ottoman Turks, Persian Safavids or the Timurids of Mogul India. Although
many of these local powers prospered, the vast Caliphate ruled by the
Umayyads or Abbasids, would fade into history. The Ottoman Turks claimed
the mantle of the Caliphs, ending the Arabic domination of Islam. By the
fifteenth century, between political fragmentation and growing competition
with a rapidly rising Europe, Islamic economic growth began to sputter and
decline. Ibn Khaldun (1969) noted endless cycles of conflict between the rich
urbanites and rural tribes that would thwart economic growth. Finally, by
the sixteenth century, European merchants with their vast ocean-going fleets,
undercut the caravan trade that had been the lifeblood of Islamic wealth.
Thus, we might note that in 1453, Mehmet II’s Ottoman army conquered
Constantinople. But by 1492, with the Reconquista,the Muslims were forced
out of Spain. In any event, in 1492, the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain
and the Spanish discovery of the New World, might mark the point in which
an ascendant Christian Europe would overtake a waning Islamic Caliphate.^24
A century and a half later came the Turkish defeat at the gates of Vienna, by
Sobieski in 1683, the defeat of the Ottoman army by Prince Eugene in 1697
and again in 1716. Further, the colonialization of Muslim countries that began
in 1798 meant Muslim societies would be ruled by European powers. The
colonization of Islamic societies by the great imperial power wrested local
control of the lands from North Africa to the Indus and beyond. The destruc-
tion of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in 1827, foretold the end of the Ottoman
Empire almost a century later.
In more recent times, further evidence of military, technological and eco-
nomic weakness was seen in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948
that led to a number of subsequent military defeats of massive Arab armies
by the far smaller IDF (1948, ’56, ’67 and ’73). The consequences of economic
weakness and political fragmentation have endured till this very day and
have kept most Muslim countries from prospering in the contemporary world.
306 • Lauren Langman
(^24) Of course the Ottoman Caliphate, a truncated remnant of a much larger empire
endured for 700 years until 1918.