80 DESTINY DISRUPTED
All this came at a price however, the usual price of stability, which en-
sures that whatever is the case one day is even more the case the next day.
The rich got richer. The poor increased in numbers. Cities with magnifi-
cent architecture sprang up, but so did vast slums sunk in squalid poverty.
Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.
Other problems bubbled up too. The rapid expansion of Islamic rule
brought many different ethnicities under the Muslim umbrella, and there
was some question about how to make the Muslim promise of brother-
hood and equality work for all of them.
Umayyad policies may have promoted Arabization and Islamification
but not both of them equally everywhere. In North Africa, Arabization
proceeded rapidly, perhaps because the patchwork of indigenous cultures
had long ago been fragmented by Phoenician colonization-the Romans
had deposited a Latin layer, the Vandals had come in with a Germanic
glaze, and finally Christianity had permeated the region. North Africa had
no single language or culture to bind it together; when the Arabs arrived
with their powerful conviction, no correspondingly unified and powerful
indigenous conviction was there to resist them. So the Arabs thoroughly
dissolved and absorbed whatever was there before.
Egypt and the Levant were somewhat easily digested too, because many
of these peoples shared a historical narrative with the Arabs, harking back
to common traditional ancestors such as Abraham, Noah, and Adam him-
self. Most of the inhabitants had already subscribed to the idea of
monotheism. Hebrew and Aramaic were Semitic languages, like Arabic.
Persia, however-ah, that was quite a different matter! The Persians
were an Indo-European people, not Semitic. They had an ancient civiliza-
tion of their own, a proud history, and a language that would not be sub-
dued. Many Persians accepted Islam, but they would not be Arabized.
Those who did convert to Islam presented the society with a challenging
religious contradiction. Islam claimed to make every Muslim equal to
every other. Join the Umma and you join an egalitarian brotherhood-
such was the promise of this new religion, this powerful movement. But
the Arab-dominated society forged by the Umayyads couldn't deliver on
the promise. Arabs were the rulers now; they were the aristocrats. Far from
making even a show of equal status for all, Umayyad society spawned for-
mal institutions to discriminate among various gradations of folk in soci-