|
The power vacuum that the fall of Rome had created, had brought about three separate developments. One of these was the near explosive development of the Muslim ideology of the prophet Mohammed, which proliferated into a vast movement in a very short time. It spread into Spain, into India and the Indies, and north into Asia.
The Omayyad dynasty became the first imperial center of the Muslim feudal empire. Damascus was chosen as its capital. By 750 AD another dynasty, the Abbasid, took over and moved the capital to Baghdad.
In the course of this religiously based imperial movement the lives of some people were no doubt uplifted by the teaching of the Koran, while great masses would loose their life for the empire in the course of its long strings of wars for territorial dominance. These wars continued for centuries under the direction of the Omayyad caliphs of Damascus, and the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Many of the wars were directed against the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was repeatedly attacked in huge and long drawn-out battles. Though the Byzantine Empire was never conquered by Muslim attacks, massive casualties were suffered on both sides.
None-the-less, vast territories were captured during the 'holy' conquests. The reason was, that the Muslim community was to be ruled in perpetuity by successors of the prophet Mohammed, which became the caliphate. In reality, the caliphs were little more than feudal lords ruling from a distance. Usually, they retained the original owners of the conquered lands as administrators, and in most cases they even retained the previous tax collectors. The Muslim super-lords, did however, add a significant tax demand of their own onto the shoulders of the people they conquered, which did by no means elevate their existence. Still, the Muslim expansion may be regarded as the largest expansion of a humanist type culture in the dark ages of history that became famous as an epoch of near universal feudalist rule.
While the Muslim expansion took a heavy toll on the Byzantine Empire, it was resisted with violence. In the West the Muslim expansion was halted by a series of 'Holy War' crusades, organized to eradicate its influence. Behind the scene, these crusades, of course, were economically oriented crusades operating under a religious pretext, nor did they stop the Muslim advance.
In 1326 a new Muslim empire emerged. It unfolded out of background of the Ottoman Turks. The new empire became eventually ruled by a succession of sultans who remained in control until 1922. During its 600 year existence the Ottoman Empire became an immensely huge collection of territories that stretched from southern Hungary and Russia into Egypt and North Africa, with constantly changing borders. It became the world's greatest political power structure operating behind a religious ideology, even though it remained fundamentally a feudal empire.
Over the combined history of the caliphats and the sultanates, that spans a time-fame of 13 centuries, not a single period of extraordinary cultural advances has unfolded that has raised humanity to a new and higher self-awareness, such as that which unfolded during the Greek Classical Period, or the second period of renaissance that began in Italy in the 1400s.
A fundamental reason comes to light for this failure, which is imbedded in the Muslim structure itself. In the Muslim belief structure the advance of the perception of man in the image of God ended when the prophet Mohammed became deified and had to be personally represented by his special messengers, the caliphs and the sultans. This took the 'soul' out of mankind and cast the rest of humanity as a lower species.
This inwardly self-limiting belief structure effectively closed the door to the spirit of discovery and creativity that alone advance consciousness to higher perceptions of truth and of the individual person as being endowed with the divine qualities of reason, understanding, and creativity. Whatever closes this door, closes the door to the discovery of fundamental principles and the application thereof, and deprives man of its native means for raising the physical, moral, and spiritual platform of human existence.
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
|
