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DATES: al-Hijira (622 CE) to the Ottoman Empire (c.1520-1919); mostly, about how this region developed culturally and politically.

The Arabian Peninsula is a world apart from the rest of Islamic civilization. The barriers that matter are the blazingly hot regions surrounding the heartland, the Nejd, and the cruel rocky plateaux that shields the Hijaz. Human settlement in the region was confined to oases and coastal hamlets. As a result, a huge amount of human energy was devoted to communications and trade. One method was via the Gulf and the Red Sea; here, the ease of navigation tended to encourage the development of excellent seafarers, such as the Kuwaitis and the Omanis. In the interior, trade was conducted through caravans running from port cities in Yemen or Oman, to Palestine and Iraq. This lead to several paradoxes of ancient Arabian life.

The first was the absolute sanctity of private property. Communities which did not develop this point of view were bypassed by the caravans, and quite usually reduced by military attacks. For most of the history of the peninsula, heresy was tolerable but disregard of private property rights was not.

The second was a keen recognition of the limitations of individual providentiality. In other words, humans could survive only with the freely-supplied assistance of others. The most providential, clever, and hard-working man could be ruined in an afternoon by a natural disaster or the loss of his flocks. Or, in a society where people made their living on highly specialized crafts that they were taught by their father, the loss of a market could ruin the most conscientious practicioner. When a single hegemonic power, such as the Roman Empire under Trajan, was able to control the Red Sea, then trade naturally bypassed the Hijaz; when the Axumite Empire invaded Yemen, it also disrupted commerce with through the Hijaz.

This paradox lies at the heart of Islam and afffects everything about it. Regardless of whether one is a believer in the divine provinance of the Qur'an or not, one can see how the emphasis in Muslim societies around the world came to reflect their respective, distinct needs (the notion of which Qur'anic injunctions are most urgent varies quite a lot from region to region). In Western societies, the notion that private property is sacred goes hand in hand with the notion that individual initiative is so fundamental that anything alternative is either wicked or foolish. Self-identified "libertarians" in the USA will insist that Social Security has sapped the human impulse to provide for the future; if there were no public services, humans would allegedly supply them on their own (and do a better job). Most socialist movements (outside of Islam) tend to point out the clash between private property rights and social justice; as long as private property rights are a fetish, then it will be impossible for the community to provide for the unfortunate, indigent, members.

In early Muslim societies, this clash was not an issue because Arabs and their early contacts understood private property as khalifa, i.e., the right to enjoy the benefits of a thing, and the stewardship of those benefits according to social norms (usufruct, in Latin). Hence, Sharia (Islamic law) assures private property rights and also imposes what most non-Muslims would regard as highly invasive personal restrictions.

Readers are urged to regard this as neither an endorsement nor a criticism of Islam or Sharia; it does contribute somewhat to explaining why Islam tended to spread to a certain climatological zone (in which water and land usage were extremely sensitive to every community member's conduct), and why Muslim communities outside of this climate region tend to vary according to whether they are surrounded by it (such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria) or whether they lie on the periphery (Turkey, Malaysia, Tanganyika).

For the Arabian Peninsula, the emergence of Islam as a world religion occurred with almost nuclear speed. It was facillitated by the proximity of two completely exhausted empires, that of the Sassanid Persians (which collapsed in a single battle, 636) and Byzantium (which barely attempted to defend its Egyptian and Syrian holdings). The Muslim Arabs instantly won the necessary and sufficient basis of legitimacy that their antecedents lost: they could defend the region and administer order, and the Sassaniya could not.

AFTER THE CONQUEST

The seat of power for the Islamic Empire left Medina almost immediately after Ali became caliph (656); it was relocated to the garrison city of Kufah, in Iraq. By the time Ali was assassinated by an estranged follower (661), power had shifted entirely to the garrisons in Iraq, North Africa, and Syria. The period of constant conquest and civil war had utter wrecked the republican character of the ummah, and the original core state of the Nejd was now a dumping ground for exiles.¹ The loser of the Sunni-Shi'a civil war, Hussein ibn Ali, was dead, and his descendants, the Shi'a imams, were frequently confined to exile in what is now Saudi Arabia. Arabia itself continued to depend on intermittant commerce for survival, plus the Hijazi religious community.

The first madhhab (school of Islamic jurisprudence) originated in Medina; the others were developed mainly in Iraq, although the founders spent time there. After the 9th century, the Hijaz suffered from political instability, such as the conquest of Mecca by the Ismaili Shi'a of al-Hufuf [930*]; it therefore sank into complete isolation, except for the trickle of hajji via whichever polity that happened to control the Hijaz. After 1000, this was the Ismaili regime in Egypt, the Fatimids; after 1512, it was the Ottoman Turks (except for an interval 1803-1818, when the Saudis conquered the Hijaz). The population of the Peninsula sank to historic lows and was encircled by European protectorates by the mid-19th century.

(Part 2)

SOURCES & RECOMMENDED READING: Prof. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1991;

Prof. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988;

ONLINE: Fred Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, VI, Princeton Univ Press, 1981

Fordham University Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Islam

Library of Congress Country Studies: Saudi Arabia Wikipedia Entry, Saudi Arabia; history of; insurgency in; Saudi Aramco; demographics;