The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

So Islam itself was torn by the same violent internal dissensions as ancient Rome, and the average life expectancy of a ruler or pretender seemed much the same as under the Caesars. Muawiyah and his son Yazid were the founders of a dynasty – the Ummayads – but this also led to further divisions and slaughter. Yazid died after only two years, and his son shortly after this. The Ummayads chose Marwan, a cousin of Muawiyah, while another candidate was favoured in Syria, Egypt and Iraq. There was a battle in 684, with tremendous slaughter of the rival candidate’s forces. Marwan became Caliph, but it was the beginning of a disastrous feud which would eventually cause the downfall of the Ummayads. The Shi’a continued to hold the Ummayads in contempt, regarding them as worldly and corrupt – which, on the whole, was true. Meanwhile, Arab expansion went on slowly – rather more slowly than before the siege of Constantinople, but surely nevertheless. In 711 they invaded Spain, and others reached India – in 713 there was even an incursion into China. By 715, the Arabs were masters of Spain. Their expansion north continued until the fateful year 732, when they were finally halted at Tours by Charles the Hammer – Charles Martel. The Muslims retreated back over the Pyrenees and never reappeared in Europe. The battle of Tours was as decisive for Europe as the battle of Chalons, where Attila the Hun had been defeated in 451.

Understandably, the Christian world loathed and feared the Arabs; Mahomet’s name was corrupted to Mahound and became a synonym for the Devil. And we might well raise our eyebrows at the notion that a great religious movement, whose central belief was that man should surrender himself totally to the will of God, should lead its devotees to impose their beliefs with fire and sword. This would be naive. Man is a creature with a thorn in his side, with a perpetual will to ‘go somewhere’. At least, he must have the feeling that he is ‘getting somewhere’. This is why human beings sweat and struggle and strive, instead of browsing peacefully like cows in a field. This is why all human children seem to have a perpetual craving for toys, and why human adults continue to need their own grown-up toys: colour televisions, video-recorders, fast cars etc. And when masses of men are united – particularly when these men are ‘have-nots’ – they instantly begin to look around for something to conquer. Expansion is a basic law of history. It is very regrettable, but it is so. It means, in effect, that man is a natural burglar. When a nation takes to the sea and invades another country, it is committing burglary just as surely as the thief who forces open your back window with a jemmy. The Arabs did not even have the excuse that they were converting pagans. The Persians and the Spaniards believed in God as much as they did themselves, and some small disagreement about prophets – Zoroaster, Mani or Jesus – was neither here nor there, since Mahomet himself always acknowledged these prophets as genuine. The truth is that religion only provided the cement that gave the Arabs unity; the laws of history did the rest. An Arab poet admitted as much in a poem addressed to a young Bedouin: ‘No, not for paradise did you forsake the nomad life. Rather, I think, it was your yearning after bread and dates.’

So the Arabs, like the Romans and Persians before them, committed burglary all over the Mediterranean. And then, as with these earlier civilisations, the laws of history began to operate in favour of the conquered peoples – or at least, to offer them some compensation. When a ‘have not’ becomes a ‘have’, the need to commit burglary begins to evaporate and is replaced by a desire for interesting acquisitions. To begin with, the Arabs were as destructive as the Vandals; when they conquered Alexandria in 640, the general pointed to the library and said: ‘If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless; if not, they are infidel. Burn them.’ And the library was set on fire. When they captured Rhodes in 654, they sold the famous Colossus to a Jewish merchant. But a century later, the Ummayads were replaced by the family of the Abbasids. As usual, it was a vicious and treacherous business. Some of the Abbasids – a family who belonged to the same Koreish tribe as Mahomet – were descendants of the murdered Ali, and they gained the support of the Shi’ites by promising that, if they came to power, they would appoint a Shi’ite Caliph. From 747 until 749 there was a murderous civil war; but the rebels finally triumphed. An Abbasid named Abu-al-Abbas proclaimed himself Caliph, although he was no descendant of Ali. In 750, he invited eighty prominent Ummayads to a banquet and, while his guests were eating, signalled his men to kill them. Then the corpses were covered over and the remainder of the terrified guests instructed to go on with their meal. In his first speech as Caliph, Abu proudly referred to himself as al Saffah, the Shedder of Blood. But under the Abbasids, the Arab state entered its equivalent of the golden age.

Its Augustus was the Bloodshedder’s brother, al-Mansur, who came to power on the death of the Bloodshedder five years later. He built himself a new capital, Baghdad, in Iraq, the city of the Arabian Nights. It became the Rome of the Dark Ages, a city of silks and porcelains, linens and furs, ivory, gold and jewels, honey and dates and sherbets. And it also came to replace Alexandria as the world’s centre of learning. One day in 765, al-Mansur fell ill with a stomach complaint, and was cured by a Christian monk from a monastery a hundred and fifty miles away. He was asked by the Caliph to set up a hospital in Baghdad, which he did. He also brought to Baghdad many of the books from the monastery of Jundi Shapur, Greek classics on astronomy, philosophy and ancient science. The Arabs had a practical reason for being interested in astronomy: they wanted to know in which direction Mecca lay, since all mosques had to look towards Mecca and believers had to prostrate themselves in that direction five times a day. The compass was unknown, but the Greek astronomer Ptolemy had invented an instrument called the astrolabe, for measuring the position of the stars on a rotating dial. Now al-Mansur recognised the value of this infidel science and had the Greek books translated into Arabic. Then, eight years later, a traveller from India arrived, bringing more astronomical texts, and with a new way of writing figures that was far more convenient than the Latin method. It was our modern system of placing the units in one column, the tens in the next, and so on. We still speak of ‘Arabic numerals’ although it would be more correct to say Indian numerals; but the Arabs brought the method to Europe.

The Arabs did far more than reawaken interest in astronomy and mathematics; they stimulated the European intellect to new labours. The ancient Greeks had been the last intellectual adventurers of Europe; the Romans had added little but their genius for engineering. And when Rome fell to Alaric in 410 A.D., Bishop Augustine of Hippo – later St Augustine – made it the occasion for a lengthy sermon on the vanity of human achievement called The City of God. Earthly cities are bound to fall, said St Augustine, but the aim of the Christian is to build the city of God. And he warned Christians to shun science and intellectual enquiry: ‘a certain vain desire and curiosity… to make experiments… cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.’ The City of God became the most popular of all Christian books next to the Bible, the great bestseller of the Middle Ages, and the Christian church agreed wholeheartedly with its distrust of science. Five centuries after al-Mansur, the unfortunate Roger Bacon, a scientist of remarkable originality, was condemned to prison for daring to introduce ‘certain novelties’ (i.e. new ideas) into his work. The Church believed that Aristotle was the last word in scientific and philosophical knowledge.

But for these men of the desert, the works on astronomy, science, medicine, philosophy, astrology were an exciting new experience; they fell on them and devoured them ravenously. Arab mathematicians delighted in problem-solving. And although the Church was suspicious of ‘novelty’, it had to admit that Ptolemy’s great work on astronomy, the Almagest, seemed to be a landmark in human knowledge. (In fact, it was basically nonsense, since Ptolemy was convinced that the earth is the centre of the universe and had to make all his calculations fit that mistaken assumption; however, it started Europe thinking about astronomy again.) So the Arabs who had burned the library of Alexandria made amends by re-awakening the European appetite for learning.