@ @ Civilization or Political: The Reality of the Present Tension between the Muslim World and the West
other living human experiences, but also inherit and incorporate elements from other civilizations. Islamic civilization is perhaps one of the best known examples. As our understanding of the early and classical period of Islam progresses, the complex nature of Islamic civilization is becoming more apparent. Within a hundred years of the advent of Islam, Islamic authority extended from central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula, incorporating a great number of ethnic and linguistic groups, cultural and civilizational heritages, and religious traditions. The Hijaz, the cradle of Islam, was part of an extended Near Eastern space in which ancient civilizations, religious traditions, and local cultures, mixed and interchanged. Arab tribes not only settled in Syria and Mesopotamia, where pre-Islamic Arab culture came to develop in the neighborhood of the Byzantine and Persian empires, but the Hijaz itself was turning into a major trade centre between Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Abyssinia and Yemen. Judaism and Christianity were living religions among the Arabs in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the Fertile Crescent. 3 With the Islamic conquering of the Near East, the Muslim Arabs arrived to areas and in the midst of peoples that they were familiar with, encountering legal and political culture they had long been integrated into. It was this internalized consciousness of the dominant cultures and modes of living in Byzantine Syria and Egypt, and Sasanid Iraq, which explains different aspects in the development of classical Islamic civilization. Beside the adoption of Sasanid agricultural taxation and economics, as well as certain measures of administration, 4 the encounter 3 For a brief discussion of the cultural situation in the pre-Islamic Near East, see Irfan Shahid, “Pre-Islamic Arabia,” in P. M. Holt, Ann Lambton and Bernard Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), vol. 1A, 3- 29; Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8-19. 4 Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43-45.
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