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died in 632, but within a few short decades the entire Middle East would be under the control of his followers. Under Mohammed’s successors, known as caliphs (from the Arabic word for ‘follower’), the new religion spread rapidly, reaching all of Arabia by 634. The Byzantines still didn’t get it: when Islam’s armies first engaged the Byzantines in the Levant, the latter believed that Islam was merely a newly arisen Christian sect and would be swiftly put down. How wrong they were. The wafer-thin Byzantine defences were swept away and their army proved no match for the fearless zeal of the Muslim armies. By 646, Syria, Palestine and Egypt were all in Muslim hands, while most of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan were wrested from the Sassanids by 656. By 682, Islam had reached the shores of the Atlantic in Morocco.

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The Golden Age of Persia, by Richard N Frye, is a fine historical work that traces myriad Persian contributions to civilisation from the rise of Islam to the 11th century.

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The unprecedented spread of Islam – as first conceived, it was a religious and social movement with no experience of political governance – was all the more remarkable because its custodians were deeply divided over the question of who should lead the Muslim community in Mohammed’s aftermath. With Mohammed having designated no successor, numerous candidates were openly at war with each other within just 12 years of the Prophet’s death, even as their armies conquered the world. These battles for the caliphate opened a rift in Islam that grew into today’s divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims (Click here). The resulting civil war ended with the rise to power of Mu’awiyah, the Muslim military governor of Syria and a distant relative of Mohammed.

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AL-ANDALUS – THE HIGH POINT OF ISLAMIC CIVILISATION

In the distinguished annals of Islamic history, there has never been anything quite like Al-Andalus, the Islamic civilisation that flourished in southern Spain for over seven centuries.

The first successful Muslim expedition into Europe was launched from North Africa into Spain in 711. By 732, Muslim armies had taken the Iberian Peninsula and advanced as far north as Poitiers in France, before being pushed back across the Pyrenees. Although thereafter in a perpetual state of war with the Christian soldiers of the Spanish Reconquista (Reconquest), the Muslims retreated to their strongholds in Andalusia, built the unrivalled splendour of Córdoba and Granada – which were home to happily coexisting Jews, Muslims and Christians – and set about writing one of the most enlightened chapters in world history.

At the end of the first millennium, the intellectuals of Muslim Spain translated the classical works of medicine, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy and architecture, thus eventually bringing them to the attention of Christian Europe, and in turn laying the groundwork for the Renaissance. Words such as zenith, nadir, azimuth, algebra, algorithm – all of which have Arabic roots – are evidence of the legacy of Arabic scientists.

Undoubtedly the greatest contribution that the Arabs made to Europe was in mathematics. Until the 11th century, Europe laboured under the strictures of Latin numerals. Europe was well aware of the wellspring of learning that existed in the Muslim realm, and what amounted to intellectuals’ study tours from Europe to Muslim Spain were common. It was after one such foray that the ‘Arabic’ numeral system – the system still in use today – was introduced to Europe. Most crucial among this system was ‘zero’, a concept that had thus far eluded Europe’s imagination. Without ‘zero’ the binary system – central to much modern technology – could never have been devised.

Some also contend that it was first in the Muslim world that monarchs encouraged the learned to gather together and study a range of disciplines in one space, and it is from here that the concept of the university was conceived and spread to the West.

It all came to an end in 1492 when the Spanish Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand