Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 191<br />
ple, their superiors in power <strong>and</strong> wealth, if not in sophistication<br />
<strong>and</strong> learning. Surely the first two qualities <strong>and</strong> not the latter—the<br />
possibility, that is, of sharing in the Muslims’ power or wealth (or<br />
at least in not suffering the liability of being excluded from the<br />
perquisites of the new order)—prompted at least some of those<br />
other Peoples of the Book to leave their home communities <strong>and</strong><br />
join the triumphalist Muslim umma, even given the disabilities <strong>and</strong><br />
derogation that being a non-Arab began to carry with it early on.<br />
An Arab, <strong>and</strong> Arabic, <strong>Islam</strong><br />
In its earliest manifestation, <strong>Islam</strong> was the faith of Arabs revealed<br />
by an Arab prophet whose message was, it boasted, “in a clear<br />
Arabic.” In the earliest conversions, it was a matter of Arabs passing<br />
from tribe to umma, of losing their tribal identity (though only<br />
briefly), but not, as it turned out, any of the cultural markers of<br />
language, dress, food, <strong>and</strong> so on. <strong>Islam</strong> was at first measured by<br />
prayer, which could not be monitored always <strong>and</strong> everywhere, <strong>and</strong><br />
by payment of the alms-tithe, which could. When the call to <strong>Islam</strong><br />
passed among other peoples—the Greek- <strong>and</strong> Aramaic-speaking<br />
people of Syria-Palestine, the Greek- <strong>and</strong> Coptic-speaking peoples<br />
of Egypt, the Greek-, Aramaic-, <strong>and</strong> Pahlavi-speaking peoples of<br />
Iraq <strong>and</strong> Iran—it may have seemed theologically familiar to the<br />
monotheists, but culturally it was unmistakably Arab. And it continued<br />
to be such <strong>for</strong> a very long time—the anchor of the Arabic<br />
Quran secured it—so that Muslim converts had to assimilate to a<br />
new culture as well as assert a new faith.<br />
The converts’ cultural assimilation to Arabism was astonishingly<br />
rapid; within thirty or <strong>for</strong>ty years the language of the Bedouin<br />
was being used as the language of state. Assimilation also<br />
occurred so thoroughly that it transferred the entire North African–Near<br />
Eastern l<strong>and</strong> mass into an Arab cultural oikoumene.<br />
There were a few survivors—Persian culture, <strong>for</strong> example, held its<br />
breath long enough under the Arab flood that it could revive after<br />
a century or so, though with strong Arab overtones—but the<br />
trans<strong>for</strong>mation was sufficiently complete that those <strong>Christians</strong>,