EIGHT
Islamic Civilization
Now that we have covered almost seven centuries of political history, it is
time to look at the civilization as a whole. But what should we call it?
Scholars are divided between using Islamic and Arabic. Some say the civi¬
lization was Islamic because the religion of Islam brought together the
various peoples—mainly Arabs, Persians, and Turks—who took part in it.
The religion also affected its politics, commerce, lifestyle, ideas, and forms
of artistic expression. But at least up to about 1000 C.E., Muslims were a
minority within the lands of Islam. Inasmuch as they were relatively un¬
lettered at first, many of the scholars and scientists active within the civi¬
lization were Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, or recent Muslim converts
whose ideas still bore the stamp of their former religions. The civilization
evolving in the Middle East drew on many religious and philosophical
traditions.
The alternative term, Arabic civilization, highlights Arabic's role in the
development of the culture. Not only because of its prestige as the lan¬
guage of the Quran and of the conquering elite, but also because of its
capacity for absorbing new ideas, Arabic became the almost universal lan¬
guage of arts, sciences, and letters between 750 and 1250. But do not as¬
sume that all the artists, scholars, and writers were Arabs. The builders
of the civilization came from every ethnic group within the umma. Al¬
though many were Arabized Berbers, Egyptians, Syrians, and Iraqis
whose present-day descendants would call themselves Arabs, only a few
were wholly descended from tribal Arabs. Because Islamic is a more com¬
prehensive term than Arabic, we have chosen "Islamic Civilization" for
this chapter's title.