The Muslim armies moved with astonishing
speed. Within fifteen years of the death
of Muhammad they had conquered Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq
and Iran. Sixty years later they were in
Pakistan and Spain – a scale of achievement that rivalled that of Alexander the
Great.
The earliest Muslim building to survive is the Dome
of the Rock in Jerusalem. It was built
in imitation of a Christian Basilica on the site of the Jewish Temple. It rises high above the Wailing Wall, or
Western Wall, which for over 1,900 years are all that remained visible of the
Temple. One of the chief reasons for the
great friction between Jews, Christians and Muslims has been that so many of
their holy places are in the same city of Jerusalem. The last Jewish Temple was demolished by the
Romans in the year 70 AD. The Jews believed
that the bare patch of rock on which Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son
Isaac was the spot chosen by David as the site for the first Temple so it
became the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies.
The Muslims also venerated Abraham and they hold that Muhammad ascended
to Heaven from that same piece of rock to receive special revelations before
returning to Mecca in the morning. When
they captured Jerusalem in 638 AD they built the Dome of the Rock on that very
spot. Jerusalem is the Holy City of
Jews, Christians and Muslims.
A few years after the Dome of the Rock, the Caliphs
built the great mosque at Damascus, on the site of the church built in honour
of St. John the Baptist. Before that it
had been the site of a temple to a Roman god and before that to a Babylonian
god. When the Crusaders reached Syria
they were horrified to find Christians in Damascus living peacefully under the
Muslims. For centuries after the
beginning of Islam the same would have been the case in much of Spain and its
Muslim capital, Cordoba.
The world’s oldest, surviving university is in the
Al Az’har mosque in Cairo. Western
Europe is rightly proud of its early universities but the university mosque in
Cairo had been founded in 970 AD – two centuries before Oxford and is still a
centre of learning today – after over one thousand years.
The leadership of the Islamic world was in the
hands of the caliphs – the successors of Muhammad – who did not himself choose
his successor. So there has been a
disputed leadership ever since. In 750
AD the ruling dynasty moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad where Islam
reached its height during the eighth century onwards under the Sunni
caliph. But the Islamic empire from
Spain to India fragmented from the ninth century onward. Local rulers – Sultans or Kings or local
caliphs – displaced the single caliphs.
The Mongols ended the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258. The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in
1453 and the great empire of Byzantium came to an end. A thousand years after the great Cathedral of
Holy Wisdom had been built by the Emperor Justinian it became a mosque. The Ottoman Turks, with their Caliph became
the major Muslim power outside India.
The Ottoman Empire came to an end with the end of the First World War
and so did the Caliphate.
There is now no centre of authority in the Islam
world. In 1918 the Arab countries came
under the rule of Britain and France through a United Nations mandated
territories scheme. Except for Saudi
Arabia, which was independent under its monarchy, virtually the whole of the
Muslim world found itself occupied by the West.
It was a traumatic experience for a once proud and glorious
civilisation. The effects of World War
One are very much still with us as many Muslim communities have a deep seated
distrust of the West.
