8 - The Arab conquest and the rise of Islam in North Africa

Summary

PROBLEMS OF SOURCES

The Arab conquests, which created a great new empire and led to the establishment of Islam as one of the great religions of the world, are one of the traditional landmarks of history. For European historians they are a part of that perennial problem, the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Conventionally it was the conquests themselves in the seventh century AD which were decisive; or, with greater refinement, it has been suggested that the landmark should be placed in the eighth, when the caliphate was transferred from Damascus to Baghdad. The most celebrated opinion of the last fifty years is that of Pirenne, who argued that the Arab conquest of the eastern and southern Mediterranean cut off western Europe from the long-distance trade on which its economy had depended, and drove it back into rudimentary self-sufficiency. The criticism to which this theory has been subjected, however, illustrates the elementary point that the introduction of a new language into the sources, whatever it may be said to represent, has created a separate discipline to rank with the study of medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek among the successors to the Classics. At the same time the primarily European concern of Pirenne's hypothesis indicates the major interest of historians and the disparity of these disciplines in terms of the attention each has hitherto received. In this way the problems of Mediterranean history have been complicated rather than clarified; there has been neither a global treatment nor an adequate specialization. It is therefore ironic that the Arab conquests and the appearance of Islam in Africa should have been judged by those historians concerned with the more recent discipline of African history to represent the arrival on the continent of a unifying factor not only in terms of culture, but more basically in terms of source materials.