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De Lacy O'Leary

A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate

Published by Good Press, 2021

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4066338085207

Table of Contents

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THE SHIʿITES OR SCHISMATICS OF ISLAM

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Islam appears first on the page of history as a purely Arab religion: indeed it is perfectly clear that the Prophet Mohammed, whilst intending it to be the one and only religion of the whole Arab race, did not contemplate its extension to foreign communities. “Throughout the land there shall be no second creed” was the Prophet’s message from his death-bed, and this was the guiding principle in the policy of the early Khalifs. The Prophet died in A.H. 11, and within the next ten years the Arabs, united under the leadership of his successors, extended their rule over Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. To a large extent it was merely an accident that this rapid expansion of Arab rule was associated with the rise of Islam. The expanding movement had already commenced before the Prophet’s ministry, and was due to purely secular causes to the age long tendency of the Arabs,—as of every race at a similar stage of economic and social development,—to over-spread and plunder the cultured territories in their vicinity. The Arabs were nomadic dwellers in a comparatively unproductive area, and had been gradually pressed back into that area by the development of settled communities of cultivators in the better irrigated land upon its borders. These settled communities evolved an intensive agriculture, and thus achieved great wealth and an advanced state of civilization which was a perpetual temptation to the ruder nomads who, able to move over great distances with considerable rapidity, were always inclined to make plundering incursions into the territories of the prosperous agricultural and city states near at hand. The only restraint on these incursions was the military power of the settled communities which always had as its first task the raising of a barrier against the wild men of the desert: whenever the dyke gave way, the flood poured out. In the seventh century A.D. the restraining powers were the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Persia, and both of these, almost simultaneously, showed a sudden military collapse from which, in the natural course of events they would, no doubt, have recovered after a short interval; but the Arabs poured in at this moment of weakness, just as the Teutonic and other groups of central Europe had broken through the barriers of the western half of the Roman Empire; and at that moment, in the course of their incursion, they received a new coherence by the rise of the religion of Islam and, by the racial unity thus artificially produced, became more formidable.

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