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Gods Crucible

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(al-Ard al- Kabirah), — location: 261 ^ref-4288

an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that, by defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war. The massacre at Roncevaux gave the “West” an iconic hero who embodied caste supremacy and unrestrained martial valor: — location: 268 ^ref-64640

The conveyor belt at Toledo transmitted most of what Paris, Cologne, Padua, and Rome knew of Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Galen, the “Hindu numbers,” and Arab astronomy. — location: 282 ^ref-34541

the rise, for centuries thereafter, of a reciprocally reassuring ignorance and of an addiction to war as the substitute for the complexities of coexistence. — location: 288 ^ref-59456

Arabs accomplished the greatest revolution in power, religion, culture, and wealth in history—all of which made Europe Europe. — location: 310 ^ref-10942

reports to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But none trumps the explanatory power of death by imperial misadventure with Iran. — location: 312 ^ref-41537

Marcus Licinius Crassus had inaugurated history’s longest war between two superpowers. — location: 368 ^ref-60703

“An experience of seven hundred years might convince the rival nations of the impossibility of maintaining conquests beyond the fatal limits of the Tigris and Euphrates.” — location: 371 ^ref-37194

Theodosius’s imperial decrees settled the primacy of Christianity in the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.15 In so doing, the emperors transformed the competition between the Roman and Iranian empires for glory, territory, slave labor, and riches into an ideological conflict for a monopoly on revealed truth. — location: 449 ^ref-31315

In the early decades of the sixth century, a revolution swept across the Iranian plateau. It was so radical in its leveling aspirations as to prefigure the egalitarian passions of the French Revolution and the economic terror of the Bolshevik Revolution. — location: 569 ^ref-53477

Mazdak envisaged his royal disciple’s reforms as only the starting point for a true societal transformation in which meat eating was abandoned and distinctions based on private property were gradually mitigated by common ownership. — location: 582 ^ref-12326

his peaceful vision of the good society morphed into the powerful ideology of Mazdakism, a radical gospel that seized the underclass imagination. — location: 585 ^ref-28245

It had fallen to Khosrow to do his father’s dirty work, hang Mazdak in about 528, and exterminate tens of thousands of Mazdakites in a class pogrom reminiscent of the Roman Republic’s defeat of Spartacus and his seventy thousand followers in the last of Rome’s three great slave revolts. — location: 593 ^ref-37256

Thousands of the enslaved were distributed among the noble estates; others were sent to the galleys, the quarries, or quicker deaths in the mines, for which Khosrow’s nobility and priesthood gratefully lauded him as Anushirvan. — location: 596 ^ref-45934

Zoroastrianism and its radical offshoots, the Indo-Persian literary canon, the formidable war machine and superb bureaucracy, the archetypal research university, and the Mazdakite socioeconomic experiment were the spores of much of Islamic science, culture, religious practice, and military organization. — location: 621 ^ref-29321

progress came “not through discussion” but in thoughts, words, and acts in “full conformity” — location: 625 ^ref-18741

To the Arabs, Mecca had been miraculously spared, some said, by a flock of attacking birds. In reality, Meccans owed their deliverance to the sudden arrival of a Sassanian naval expedition, dispatched by Khosrow I to checkmate Graeco-Roman power in the Gulf of Aden. — location: 699 ^ref-47019

Islam “developed as an answer to the problem resulting from Meccan commercial prosperity” — location: 742 ^ref-10797

Unprecedented prosperity made customary poverty seem cruel, unmerited misery—and — location: 744 ^ref-34302

In history’s big picture, then, Muhammad and his new creed were incarnations of the Mesopotamian Zeitgeist and the new economy of the Hijaz. — location: 759 ^ref-23896

While the patience of the Berbers was more and more tested, the rulers of al-Andalus pursued a policy of civil pluralism permitting a latitude in mores, beliefs, and institutions unmatched in the West since Augustan Rome—a policy whose success depended on cohesion within the political class of high-born Arabs, complemented by deference paid by Berbers and other Muslims of inferior pedigree. — location: 3465 ^ref-26752

By the 740s, as Frankish hegemony asserted itself on the other side of the Pyrenees, a small percentage of Andalusis began to embrace Islam. — location: 3473 ^ref-36998

For all the Qur’an’s welcoming of converts and tolerance of the sacred books of others, however, Arab pride of lineage invariably trumped the ummah’s vaunted solidarity. — location: 3475 ^ref-63952

In the autumn of 741, after a good many months of premonitory rumblings, al-Andalus was struck by the Berber earthquake that was to undermine the Umayyad Caliphate. — location: 3481 ^ref-4365

The Berber steamroller had halted for the winter. It regained momentum in the spring, flattening whatever obstacles it encountered on a triple course of slaughter set for Toledo, Cordoba, and Algeciras. — location: 3489 ^ref-56544

Caliph Hisham’s determination to end the special tax exemptions of Berbers and other groups in the Dar al-Islam, a well as to rationalize the fisc and increase extant rates, sparked a rolling barrage of tax revolts aggravated by deep ethnic resentments and religious fundamentalism that sundered the very foundations of the Muslim imperium. — location: 3493 ^ref-34929

Grievances against Arab rule in Ifriqiya and Morocco derived from much the same causes as those across the strait. In the Maghreb, as elsewhere, revenues from the hijaz declined as conversions increased. To compensate, Damascus tightened up collection of the kharaj (the land tax paid by Muslim and non-Muslim alike) — location: 3498 ^ref-38449

Kharijites paired radical egalitarianism with rectitude of conduct. If they transgressed the faith, caliphs—even those who claimed descent from the Prophet—had no more right to rule than a beggar in Mecca. — location: 3511 ^ref-43614

The egalitarian ideals of the Kharajites also receded from the concerns of the Sunni regime. While it became true that the citizenship discrimination practiced by the Umayyads greatly diminished, and the offices of state were opened to non-Arabs, the Abbasid Caliphate nevertheless was a family autocracy — location: 3627 ^ref-61446