georgeob1 wrote:However the evolution of independent seculasr government bodies in Europe was not matched by any corresponding development in the Islamic world, and that made all the difference.
As you've mentioned, things are never that simple. In the world of Islam, political "solidarity" did not even last as long as the Orthodox Caliphs. The Caliphate never actually exercised the sort of authority that people like to imply, both inside and outside of Islam. At the beginning, it exercised more authority than the Papacy did, but it was not long before internal squabbling between Ali and the Companions ended that ephemeral authority. With the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, all authority of the Caliphate ended, and they became puppets of whichever Turkish warlord currently held sway in Baghdad. In the era of the first crusade, one of the Muslim worlds first great historians, Ibn Qalinisi bewails the lack of unity to confront the "Franj." Throughout the Middle East, and beyond in the North African littoral and in Adalusia, all the local tribal leaders vied with one another. The great Kurdish warrior, Ayyub, was a battlefield commander of one of the erstwhile Turkish tribal leaders who briefly held Baghdad, and he managed to succeed his master and to take control of almost all of the Middle East south of Anatolia, with the invaluable aid of his nephew, Yusuf--known to the Crusaders as Saladin. But the dynasty was weak as is any such tribal dynasty, with Saladin's son lacking the military and leadership skills of his father and his great-uncle. The Mongol invasion put paid to the pretensions of any leader in the region.
I personally see the principle difference between the Muslim world of a millenium ago and the European world as being one of feudalism. Feudalism is basically a primitive coporate relationship, with rights and duties working upward and downward at all a levels. In the Muslim world, the tribalism which characterized pre-Roman Europe continued to prevail. Might made right, and no obligations were understood to be entailed other than those deriving from
force majeure. A Muslim living in Andalusia, Ibn Kaldun, travelled from Spain to Cairo in the era before the Mongol invasion, because of a substantial legacy owing to him. Having no family left in Andalusia, and no other strong ties, he determined to become a traveller in the Muslim world. He eventually reached the East Indies (what we call Indonesia), and his record is invaluable, if little known in the West. He visited land held by the Franj in the "Holy Land," and commented at length on the "barbaric" practices of the despised Europeans. At one point, he describes a trial by combat, comparing it with contempt to the well-established courts of "civilized" Muslim cities (whose writ ran no further than the city walls in practice), but then commenting in a puzzled manner that good Muslim farmers and herdsmen seemed to prefer living in the land of the Franj rather than their "natural" Muslim leaders.
He missed the point. A Muslim peasant in the lands of the Franj may have only had a third of the land to call his own--but that was worlds away from his brothers under Muslim control. In the essentially tribal socities of the Muslims, a peasant had nothing, not even that third of the land they worked, and anything they possessed could and often would be taken from them. When the Franj laid seige to Antioch, the city defenders took stock of their supplies, and drove from the city literally thousands of people whom they considered "useless mouths" which they did not intend to feed, and those people could lay no claim to any property, to any residence, to any right of residence. The lowliest serf in European society had some marginal rights in property, and feudalism had come to coarsely recognize simplistic equations of labor supply and demand.
The Muslim irruption out of Arabia toppled a tottering and corrupt Sassanid Empire. The subsequent Seljuk invasion simply ran over the same ground. No vestiges of former systems existed, and the conquerors dictated terms. The barbarian invasion of Europe three centuries earlier had been accomplish more by coporate take-over than by conquest. From the Goths to the Lombards, the major incursions of Germanic tribes had been initially absorbed as
foederati--when they seized power, there were already systems of law and commerce in place, and those whom they were to dominate as peasants when Roman authority evaporated in the west already has traditions of rights in property from the days in which the new conquerors has orginally been federated into the Empire. For as shakey as it was, a structure was in place, and there was something upon which to build. Islam swept away all that preceded it, and this is no particular criticism of Islam, this has been true of almost all conquests in history wherever they have occured. I usually don't accept that what existed in China in the Autumn and the Warring States period, and what especially what existed in Japan in the Muromachi and Sengoku periods was feudalism. Although in China, clever military leaders of peasant origins could and successfully did appeal to peasant support--there was never any formal structure which recognized rights at all levels such as existed in feudal Europe. In Japan, it was even more the case--as one sees in early Muslim southwest Asia--that no one had anything which were not granted by the Daimyo, or the Daimyo's overlorad.
Among a host of significant reasons for the eventual rise of European culture from the lowly origins of post-Roman disintegration, feudalism is rarely understood for the great advantage it conferred. Certainly not a perfect system, and as evident in the breach as much as in the observance, it nevertheless represented a concept of right, privilege and duty at all levels of society which has been unique in world history.
Religion ain't got nothin' to do with it . . .
