Skallagrim
Well-known member
A while back on this very thread, I believe it was mentioned one of the really important aspects of a “High Culture” is not just its heartlands, but the frontier. It is the marcher state that is able to approach all this wonderful culture with a hint of pragmatism (they have to be pragmatic due to enemies pressing on the border). Thereafter, the marcher state grows so strong that it ultimately surpasses the heartlands (Rome and Greece, Qin and the other states, Carthage and Phoenicia, etc), if I recall correctly.
Taking that into account, we can somewhat apply it to even the Islamic world. Because whilst the initial Caliphates gained great glory they usually fell apart soon after. A true and long lasting Islamic Empire was ultimately forged in the frontier of the Islamic world, who won its long war against the last vestiges of Rome and would rise to utterly eclipse Old Arabia.
Am I calling the Turks the “Romans” of the Islamic World?
Yes, I think I am. Of course, with Islam being Islam, they got through their time in the sun a little quicker than other empires did, but I think my point still stands as the Ottoman Empire reigned for roughly five centuries.
That is, indeed, the general thesis regarding Islam and the Ottoman Empire. There are certainly convincing points.
However... there's something very off about the timing. A universal Empire arriving early, sure. But that early? More importantly, though, the Ottomans never controlled very large parts of the Islamic world. I can understand a far-flung region like Indonesia remaining independent (in the same way that I could easily see Argentina or Australia staying formally apart from a "Western" universal empire). But surely to qualify as the universal state of Islamic civilisation, one would have to unite...
...well, basically the big dark green blob in the middle there:
The Ottomans didn't do that. Moreover, and this is quite telling, they were never recognised as the rightful Caliphs by huge swathes of the Islamic world. A universal empire at the very least demands that its nominal authority is recognised fairly... universally.
For this reason, my own interpretation is that they represent the foremost of the "national empires" that a civilisation produces before it reaches its universalist phase. In the West, this role occupied by Britain. Which was also a national empire, not a civilisational-universalist one, but which nevetheless held sway over a quarter of the planet. In fact, we might observe that Britain itself was also peripheral to Europe. So it may well be argued that the "frontier factor" can play a role in enabling the success of both national empires-in-the-making and of incipient universal empires.
...As far as the "universal empire" of Islam is concerned: I think it never manifested at all, because Islam was ove-taken by the West. Note that the Islamic world had all manner of feroured religious(-political) movements (not limited to the emergence of Wahhabism and Mahdism) from the mid-18th century onward. Which is precisely what you'd expect. Note also the decay of the Ottoman authority, and the emergence of new powers with distinct ambitions of their own (such as embodied by
Muhammad Ali of Egypt, for instance).
I feel that if all Westerners had magically dropped dead before the era of major colonial imperialism got going, we'd have still seen the Ottoman Empire fall by the early 20th century. But in that case, presumably to a messianic movement of Muslims, thus initiating their equivalent of Caesarism after a few centuries of increasing chaos. Writing on that topic two years ago, I imagined:
"(...) the undivided Caliphate is established with unexpected alacrity, and a meteoric figure -- for a time -- dominates the most civilised regions of the world. He is the Mahdi, his acolytes whisper, even as his enemies call him the Dajjal. Personally, he only styles himself the rightful CaIiph, the legitimate heir to both branches of the long-divided world. Ruler of Cairo and Baghdad, protector of Mecca, guide to the faithful in their multitudes.
If we have any sense of narrative artistry, we must imagine him stabbed to death during the Hajj, dying under a traitor's blade during the Tawaf al-Wadaa (the "farefell"!), stretching out his fingers to touch the Hajar al-Aswad in his last moments."
But that's not how it played out. There was no "Caesar of the muslims". By the time the Ottomans were crushed beneath the wheels of a world-system overtaking them, the Western powers had already been meddling, annexing and policing their way across the Islamic world for quite some time. (Look only to "Chinese" Gordon, putting a decisive stop to one of the Messianic uprisings that define this age of Islam.) So, in the end, there was no great native Islamic power to step into the vacuüm. Instead, Western mandates and yoked vassal-states dotted the landscape. Colonies and puppets.
If you look at the reason why the Islamic radicals (...which is, in fact, a significant segment of the population...) hate the West, it's not just the self-ruining tenets of their religion, although those certainly play a part. They also hate us because we robbed them of their destiny. And they know it. Not intellectually, but in their guts. They know. And they'll always hate us for it. They are doomed to create sad little murderous parodies of their ideal (such as ISIS), and they pour all their spite into it, because they know it's all they can have. They fly airliners into buildings, because that's the closest imitation of a victory that they can muster.
They are fellaheen, living in the ruins of the past-- but they have become so even before they ever had the chance to taste the sweet reward of universal hegemony. That kind of wound is fatal, but the death it deals is slow.
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