Middle East - Anthony Ham [24]
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The History of the Middle East Database (www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/mideastindex.htm) has longish, informative essays on the great moments of Middle Eastern history and is especially good on the early Islamic period.
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EARLY ISLAM
Having won the battle for supremacy over the Muslim world, Mu’awiyah moved the capital from Medina to Damascus and established the first great Muslim dynasty – the Umayyads. Thanks to the unrelenting success of his armies, Mu’awiyah and his successors found themselves ruling an empire that held sway over almost a third of the world’s population.
The decision to make Damascus the capital meant that, for the first time in the Middle East’s turbulent history, the region was ruled from its Levantine heartland. Already a well-established and relatively sophisticated centre of regional power, Damascus would prove to be a perfect choice for the Umayyads – by moving the capital here, the Umayyads were symbolically declaring that they had aspirations far beyond the rather ascetic teachings of the Quran. The Umayyads gave the Islamic world some of its greatest architectural treasures, including the Dome of the Rock (Click here) in Jerusalem and the Umayyad Mosque (Click here) in Damascus – lavish monuments to the new faith, if a far cry from Islam’s simple desert origins.
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John Julius Norwich’s concise A Short History of Byzantium – a distillation of three volumes on the Byzantines – does a fantastic job of cramming 1123 eventful years of history into less than 500 pages.
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History, however, has not been kind to the Umayyads. Perhaps seduced by Damascus’s charms, they are remembered as a decadent lot, known for the high living, corruption, nepotism and tyranny that eventually proved to be their undoing. News of Umayyad excesses never sat well with the foot-soldiers of Islam and even confirmed their long-held suspicions about their adherence to Islamic tenets.
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There is no finer work in English on the history of the Arabs, from the Prophet Mohammed to modern times, than A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani – it’s definitive, encyclopaedic and highly readable.
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In 750, the Umayyads were toppled in a revolt fuelled, predictably, by accusations of impiety. Their successors, and the strong arm behind the revolt, were the Abbasids. The Abbasid caliphate created a new capital in Baghdad, and the early centuries of its rule constituted what’s often regarded as the golden age of Islamic culture in the Middle East. The most famous of the Abbasid caliphs was Haroun ar-Rashid (r 786–809) of The Thousand and One Nights fame (see the boxed text, Click here). Warrior-king Haroun ar-Rashid led one of the most successful early Muslim invasions of Byzantium, almost reaching Constantinople. But his name will forever be associated with Baghdad, which he transformed into a world centre of learning and sophistication.
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WHO ARE THE ARABS?
The question of who the Arabs are exactly is still widely debated. Fourteen centuries ago, only the nomadic tribes wandering between the Euphrates River and the central Arabian Peninsula were considered Arabs, distinguished by their language. However, with the rapid expansion of Islam, the language of the Quran spread to vast areas. Although the Arabs were relatively few in number in most of the countries they conquered, their culture quickly became established through language, religion and intermarriage. In addition to the original nomads, the settled inhabitants of these newly conquered provinces also became known as Arabs. In the 20th century, rising Arab nationalism legitimised the current blanket usage of the term to apply to all the