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Sunday Morning Book Review #1: Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited
 By lotp.In 410 AD, the city of Rome was overrun and sacked by Germanic tribes. If you're of a certain age, you will have been taught that these and other tribes attacked a decadent empire, bringing to an end the Classical period in history and launching the Dark Ages -- centuries during which the mechanisms of civilization were absent, standards of living collapsed and which ultimately gave rise to feudalism and the Middle Ages. The evidence seems clear: after about 400 AD, archaeological evidence shows a much lower standard of living, a much less rich and robust economy and interruptions of civic mechanisms in the Roman heartland itself. Rome's legions were withdrawn from Britain and elsewhere in Europe and the empire decayed rapidly. In Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisted: The History of a Controversy Emmet Scott says it didn't happen that way. Scott picks up, extends and broadens a competing theory: namely, that the Empire as a whole -- whose center had long since moved to Constantinople and the bulk of whose citizens lived in the East, not the West - prospered after the sack of Rome, that Germanic and other tribes were eager to adopt Roman ways and that the sudden collapse of the Empire was due to the effects of militant Islam on a richly interdependent trade economy across the Mediterranean. Scott cites detailed examples of 5th and 6th century Frankish, Gothic and other tribal leaders who explicitly adopted Roman administrative methods, appointed officials to offices defined in Roman law and acknowledged the emperor's authority. He notes evidence that Classical authors were well known and cited by Western (and not just Byzantine) writers during this period, illustrating that Classical learning was alive and well in the western portions of the empire. And he documents the role of the Catholic church and monasticism in not only preserving but also in advancing science and technology throughout these and later centuries. So if Roman civilization was thriving, what happened to cause a collapse? Scott cites detailed evidence for a major collapse around 620 AD all across the Mediterranean world. Sophisticated agricultural infrastructure in the form of irrigation and field use suddenly become silted and inperable. Coins are no longer minted. Luxury goods that once were commonly imported no longer appear in the archaeological record. New building projects cease and old infrastructure crumbles rapidly. Scott says the answer is clear. Muslim piracy and constant attacks on key economic centers destroyed the web of trade in the Mediterranean world. Islamic conquests resulted in rule by Arabs who neither knew nor cared about agriculture, so that countries like Egypt -- once the breadbasket of the Roman empire -- turned to sand. Slave trading became prevalent and skilled workers from the empire were forced into servitude in Muslim courts. Sometimes a technology becomes critical to an entire civilization. In the Roman empire, that technology was, arguably, papyrus and written documents. Official activities, day to day business transactions and the education of the young -- all depended on the availability of papyrus as the medium for record keeping and writing in general. The Arab conquest of north Africa resulted in a total embargo on papyrus exports to the empire and, says Scott, as a result the sophisticated, complex empire was unable to recover from and respond to the piracy and physical attacks launched by the Muslims. A millennium-old civilization collapsed nearly overnight. Scott's account is an important corrective to the narrative established in the 19th century, which promoted Islam as a tolerant and sophisticated society who invented and transmitted knowledge to the backward West. Scott insists, for instance, that while some transmission did occur, such inventions as the use of zero in mathematics came from India, with whom the Roman empire had had open trade for centuries that was subsequently interdicted by the Muslims. Scott's account will be welcome to many Rantburg readers and contains a good deal of useful information. I am cautious about whole heartedly embracing his account, however, for several reasons. First, he has a repeated tendency to cite some information and then assert that we can make no other interpretation of that information except his own. When accounting for complex events that happened long ago and for which we have only fragmentary and indirect evidence, sweeping hand waves are not enough to convince me that the evidence has been carefully weighed and evaluated. And that brings me to Scott himself. Although the book cover describes him as a "historian specializing in the ancient history of the Near East" I have not been able to find any corroborating evidence of his training, any prior publications or any institutional affiliation. Historians tend to publish less often, and with longer papers, than is common in scientific or technical fields, but they do publish and their publications are peer reviewed with often trenchant commentary from the unconvinced. So far as I can tell, Scott has only written this one book, which was published by the New English Review Press. Editors for the New English Review include Theodore Dalrymple, Ibn Warraq and several of the writers for the JihadWatch website -- in other words, people who have in common a belief that Islam is a major and destructive threat to our own civilization. They may well be right, but this book needs to be taken with a certain skepticism. Scott cites many sources, but he has a tendency to greatly oversimplify a number of relevant theories and facts along the way. Historians have since the 1950s seen the interaction between the various tribes, both IndoEuropean and Hun, and the Roman empire as a complex dance in which they are now allies, now military enemies. Moreover, there is strong evidence that the empire did indeed suffer for two centures from significant internal political, economic and demographic problems which would have made it much more susceptible to Muslim attack in the 620s. Scott neither acknowledges these nor generally speaking seems to understand the complexity of issues at work in the period. An historian trained at the doctoral level would, I think, at a minimum address 60 years of scholarly work in these areas, if only to refute it. The question of Scott's training and experience matters specifically because he advances a position with sweeping claims. If he had trained at the doctoral level, we would know under whom and therefore with what bias. If he had published before, we could fill in the gaps in his argument from shorter, more detailed works and thereby accept or reject his argument with reference to those works. As it is, the book appears out of a vacuum, sponsored by people who themselves are not historians and who, furthermore, have a very specific political and cultural position they seek to advance. Caveat lector - let the reader beware. I would like, though, to note one interesting speculation that Scott reports. Just how was it that the Arabs were able to so rapidly conquer and control vast areas of the Mediterranean region, especially since they lacked maritime expertise of their own? Scott briefly proposes that some members of the Persian elite converted to Islam specifically because of their hatred and envy of the West and out of enmity to the Romans with whom they had fought a number of inconclusive wars. Frustrated at their inability to expand into Europe and at their loss of influence with e.g. Egypt, they saw the Arabs and this new ideology as a means to reassert Persian influence across the ancient world. It was, says Scott, Persian-allied fleets that gave the Arabs the means to control shipping, launch raids and attack the West. Worth thinking about today..... Some readers will also be interested in Scott's assertion that the holy war mentality exhibited by the Crusades was adopted by the Church in response to the effectiveness and justifications for Muslim jihad. Posted by: 2012-06-10 |
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