GROWTH OF ISLAM --- Episode 3

It may be that the Arabs had fully expended their resources even before the battle of Tours and that they could not have, in any case, conquered France. But, their defeat put a stop to their further advance to the north, and they remained satisfied with Spain. Meanwhile, in 717 the Arabs made their last great assault on Constantinople before the fifteenth century and were unable to take the great fortress on the Bosporus. The Arabs quickly became masters of the Mediterranean and conquered Sicily and Crete, and they attacked Constantinople from the sea. But the citadel on the Dardanelles was able to withstand the Moslem onslaught in part because of a new weapon that the Byzantines had developed : the so-called GREEK FIRE, a form of incendiary bomb that the Greeks used to inflict great damage on the Moslem fleets. CONSTANTINOPLE THUS MANAGED TO TO SURVIVE THE ARAB ATTACK AND THEREBY SAVED WESTERN EUROPE FROM MOSLEM CONQUEST VIA THE SOFT UNDERBELLY OF THE EUROPEAN PENINSULA. Yet, of all its great and wealthy eastern provinces, Byzantium had managed to hold on to only Asia Minor . The harassed emperor was now forced on the defensive, and there was no possibility of the exhausted Byzantine state undertaking a war of reconquest against the Arabs for another two hundred years. 

   Until the middle of the eighth century, the extensive territory that the Arabs had conquered was under ONE RULE. The caliph made his capital in Damascus and ruled these vast territories and peoples with an autocratic government modeled on the oriental monarchy of Persia. In the eighth century the non-Arabic peoples who had been conquered and had converted to Islam became dissatisfied with their with their subject position and demanded a share of the government of the vast Arabic empire and equal citizenship with the warrior caste that had come from Arabia. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century the subject peoples revolted against the caliph of the Omayyard dynasty, who ruled from Damascus and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, who were mainly Persian in background seized the title of caliph and set up a new capital in Baghdad. 

   The supplanting of the Omayyad by the Abbasid dynasty was a signal for revolt and political decentralization throughout the Islamic world, and by the end of the ninthe century, instead of one great Arabic empire, the Islamic world was divided into several states.  The rulers of these states continued to respect the caliph as the successor of the Prophet, but the political power in the Islamic world had fallen into the hands of various despotic princes. Among these princes was the ruler in Spain, where the Omayyad dynasty alone had managed to prevail. The Mediterranean world was now united by the Arabic religion and language, and it formed a great economic system, BUT THE ARABIC CIVILIZATION WAS NO LONGER A POLITICAL ENTITY. From the eighth century the term Arabic identifies a great civilization on the eastern and southern shores of the Meditarranean to which many peoples --- Greek, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, Jewish, and Berber, as well as Arab --- contributed.