Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. In this video we're going to be looking at state building in Dar al-Islam, which when being translated means everywhere Islam is. What we're going to see is that the religion of Islam created a nice little petri dish out of which empires in different parts of the world grew up. In the mid-8th century a new Islamic Caliphate came to power in North Africa and the Middle East known as the Abbasid Caliphate. It was big, it was powerful, it was united by the Arabic language and Islamic traditions, but the political reality of the Islamic State, not to be confused with the Islamic State, was fractured and breaking down.
But the religion itself was still vital and spreading all across Afro-Eurasia. But even as the power and influence of the Abbasid Caliphate began to wane, political Islam was flourishing in other parts of the world. So let's look at two different test cases about how political Islam encountered other cultures and how they responded.
First India, or in AP speak, South Asia. So right around the 13th century some newly converted Muslims who also happened to be Turkish invaded India. Now it's important to know that these folks were Turks because they became the third major people group to be a carrier of Islam after the Arabs and the Persians. Well, long story short, they ended up establishing a Muslim political state in India called the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. Now remember, we're thinking about how cultures responded to Muslim influence, and in India, They had kind of a rough time. You may remember that Indians for a long time had been Hindu.
And Hinduism as a cultural phenomenon had structured Indian society for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And therefore the Islam of these Turkish invaders didn't gain much of a foothold. And this is pretty remarkable since Muslims were the ones who were in power in most of northern India. So let me stop here and do a quick comparison between Hinduism and Islam to help you understand why when most Indians saw Islam. They said nah.
Islam is monotheistic, which means that they worship one god, and furthermore, that only one god exists. Hinduism on the other hand was fantastically polytheistic, which means they believed in the existence of many gods. A key tenet of Islam is the absolute prohibition against representing Allah in any form.
Hindus generated endless statues of their gods. Muhammad taught the social equality of all Muslims. Hinduism separated society into a rigid caste system. whose hierarchical levels were impenetrable by those of different castes.
So you can see that converting the mass of Indian society to Islam was about as likely as an Eastern Orthodox bishop using unleavened bread for the Eucharist. History joke, who's with me? Whatever, I'll high five myself, it was a good joke.
Anyway the point is, even though Muslims were in power, they found it exceedingly difficult to convert the Indian culture en masse. But there were some notable exceptions. There was a group of Muslim missionaries known as the Sufis. These folks embraced a form of Islam that emphasized more emotional and ecstatic experience, and as such, it became a more popular form of Islam. Furthermore, Sufi holy men were willing to accommodate Hindu gods in religious festivals.
And there was a small population of Hindus who found all of this very attractive and were therefore converted. And most of the Indians who were converted were either disillusioned Buddhists or those who belonged to the lowest caste and as a result had a very difficult life. For them, Islam's promise of egalitarianism, or equality, was all that they needed to become believers in Allah.
Okay, so that's how India responded to the military and religious invasion of the Muslims. Let's go over to West Africa for our second test case. In West Africa, Islam spread not by military conquest, but by the commercial enterprises of traveling merchants.
And so as these merchants began to explain the tenets of Islam, people in West Africa converted on a voluntary and peaceful basis. Primarily conversions occurred in the great urban centers of West Africa like Ghana and Mali and Songhe. And under these circumstances Islam spread like mad.
And also in this region Islam spread to the highest levels of government. In fact, the ruler of Mali, a guy by the name of Mansa Musa, went on the Hajj, which is to say the pilgrimage to Mecca, and when he did, a great retinue accompanied him carrying magnificent displays of his wealth. So the point of all this is that between India and West Africa there were very different responses to the spread of Islam. Now those are only two examples, and we could go through many others.
But instead I'm going to take a hard right and talk about the economic, cultural, and technological innovations that the Muslims brought with them into every culture they found themselves. First, economics. Muslims, influenced by the teaching of Muhammad, thought highly of merchants and commercial activity.
And as such, Muslims were some of the most dominant players in the Afro-Eurasian trade network. And in doing all of this buying and selling, they came up with a few economic innovations that are worth mentioning. For example, they came up with new forms of banking, and the granting of credit, and the writing up of business contracts.
And soon these innovations became commonplace among all the networks of exchange. And technology. Muslims made improvements on rockets, which of course they got from the Chinese. You see, the Chinese figured out that you could use gunpowder not only in pyrotechnic displays and fireworks, but you could also blow people up with it.
The Muslims took it one step further and figured out how to launch rockets at ships with much greater accuracy. And here's the big lesson of world history. There's always more ways to blow people up.
Additionally, the Muslims also advanced the Chinese technology of papermaking. And the result of these innovations is that bureaucrats in kingdoms across the world could tighten their grip over their people's lives because of the more the more you can write down, the more you can hold people accountable for. Third, let's look at culture. Muslims were fastidious about translating the great works of Greek philosophy and natural science into Arabic.
They translated medical texts, scientific texts, philosophical texts. And therefore the Muslim not only preserved these ideas, but went on to innovate and expand upon them. In fact, in 830 the Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun established what he called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which became an academic center for learning and research and translation for the next few centuries.
So that's what you need to know about state building in Islam. Nailed it. Alright, thank you for watching.
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