Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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