Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (25 page)

“The Romans were an agricultural people who expanded into their Mediterranean empire from a relatively humid base in Italy. It was natural that they should extend this approach to the natural environment into the African provinces. The Arabs were on the contrary a nomadic people, nurtured in the true desert of Arabia, and totally unused to an agricultural economy. Their technique was unequal to understanding or managing the highly-developed irrigation works of North Africa bequeathed to them by the Romans, and they had no need for dependence on the agriculture which these works had supported. Their different use of the land does not need to be explained by a change in climate. No military conquest is conducive to the maintenance of civil order nor the administration and technical organization which an intricate irrigation economy requires, especially when the conquerors are nomads. The Arab conquest destroyed the Roman irrigation works, or allowed them to deteriorate, and established in their stead a nomadic pastoral economy over most of North Africa.”
[11]

Murphey goes on to note that “Similar well-documented cases, for example, the Masai, are recorded from east and West Africa, where Hamitic or semi-Hamitic peoples in later ripples of the Islamic invasion displaced and overlaid sedentary Negro agriculturalists and substituted nomadic herding in areas where the only change was in social and economic custom rather than in the natural environment.”
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He continues: “Nevertheless, it is possible that the changed land use which the Arabs brought with them did in time affect the natural environment in a critical way. By the end of the eighth century AD there were approximately one million Arabs in North Africa. Each Arab family kept a large flock of sheep and goats, variously estimated at between fifteen and fifty per family. Goats are notoriously close croppers, and their unrestricted grazing in the Mediterranean area has had a virtually irreparable effect. In North Africa too, the added presence of several million goats undoubtedly destroyed large areas of grass, scrub, and trees, increasing the run-off, decreasing precious supplies of groundwater and lowering the water table perhaps critically, adding to the erosion of water courses, and disrupting the optimum distribution of surface water …”
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Furthermore, “Contemporary Arab disrespect for trees (notorious in both Arabia and North Africa) except as lumber or firewood, and lack of understanding of the long-term value to themselves of tree-cover may suggest a further deteriorating effect of Arab land use on the productivity of North Africa. Indeed, one student of the problem, while agreeing that the North African climate has not changed significantly in the last 2000 years, states that the primary cause of the economic decline during that period has been deforestation, for which he lays the blame at the door of the Arabs.”
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We should note that even Hodges and Whitehouse admit to the great destruction wrought by the Arabs in North Africa. They refer specifically to several locations in modern Libya, where there is evidence of deliberate and systematic devastation. The enormous palace at Apollonia in Cyrene, excavated by Richard Goodchild, was razed by the Arabs, who seem then to have squatted in the ruins for a while. Nearby churches were demolished at the same time. There are similar signs of violent overthrow in the great church at Berenice, modern Benghazi.
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The opulence and size of these structures, incidentally, give the lie to the picture which Hodges and Whitehouse earlier attempted to paint of a decrepit and crumbling Graeco-Roman society in the region. They note that Goodchild was mystified by the overthrow of the “extraordinarily impressive” Byzantine defenses in the Cyrenaean Jebel; and he reached the conclusion that the Arabs could only have breached these fortifications with the assistance of local Coptic Christians, who were at loggerheads with the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. This is in line with the theory that the Arab conquest of Egypt was also assisted by the Coptic Christians. However, there is no documentary evidence, either in Libya or in Egypt, of Coptic collusion with the invaders, and such collusion is only surmised to account for the otherwise inexplicable fact of a few Arabs on camels conquering such a vast and densely population region.

Indeed, as we saw above, it was the very rapidity and apparent ease of the Arab conquests that has, perhaps more than any other single factor, induced scholars to assume that the late classical world was somehow in terminal decline.

Fig. 23. One of the Byzantine churches at Petra, another classical city which came to an end in the mid-seventh century.

We should note, at this point, that similar destruction of churches and monumental buildings is observed throughout Syria/Palestine and Anatolia at this time; though in Anatolia the initial destruction is more commonly attributed to the Persians a couple of decades before the arrival of the Arabs.

So great was the damage wrought by the Arabs in North Africa that Hodges and Whitehouse actually speak of a “Dark Age” in the region from the late seventh century onwards: “Unlike the Vandals,” they say, “who prized the classical cities of North Africa, the Arabs simply abandoned them. As a result North Africa experienced a Dark Age which lasted until the tenth century, when the Mediterranean and trans-Saharan trade revived and many new towns were developed.”
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Hodges and Whitehouse thus hold that the Arabs simultaneously initiated a Dark Age and a Golden Age! The inherent contradiction here never seemed to have troubled them.

At this point I feel I must digress: Although I agree that the Arabs brought immense destruction to North Africa and indeed to Egypt, Syria and Anatolia, any reader of these reports must nonetheless find it strange that virtually all archaeology should disappear from these areas for three centuries. For disappear it did. We are told, after all, that Islam did not have a Dark Age – this was something only Europe is supposed to have experienced. Yet archaeology of all kinds disappears from the regions controlled by Islam as surely as it does from Europe. Take for example Byblos, a site excavated by a French team under M. Dunand during the 1930s. The excavators found rich strata for virtually every period of the city’s history, with one exception: the four centuries between 636 (the Arab conquest) and the advent of the Crusaders (1098) produced
no material remains whatsoever
.
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Stratigraphy of Byblos since Hellenism

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21st period Ottomans +1516 to +1918 rich finds

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20th period Mamelukes +1291 to +1516 rich finds

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19th period Crusaders +1098 to +1291 rich finds

Crusaders of 1110 build right on Byzantine foundations of 600

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18th period Umayyads + Abassids +636 to +1098
no finds

enigmatic hiatus

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17th period Byzantines +330 to +636 rich finds

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16th period Romans -63 to +330 rich finds

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15th period Hellenism -332 to -63 rich finds

Were Byblos the only site to display this mysterious three to four century hiatus, then there would be little problem. The difficulty is that it is found throughout the Islamic world. As Gunnar Heinsohn, who brought my attention to the Byblos excavations, the same hiatus is encountered in the Fars region of Nubia, where the Polish excavators discovered Christian friezes and oil lamps dated to the “6th – 7th century,” after which came a hiatus of more than 300 years, when more or less the same types of friezes and lamps reappear in the 11th – 12th century.
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The same phenomenon is found in the great majority of the excavated sites in the Middle East.

* * *

The archaeological non-appearance of the Islamic Golden Age is surely one of the most remarkable discoveries to come to light in the past century. It has not achieved the sensational headlines we might expect, for the simple reason that a non-discovery is of much less interest to the public than a discovery. Then again, as archaeologists searched in vain through site after site, they imagined they had just been unlucky; that with the next day’s dig the fabulous mosques, palaces and baths would be uncovered. And this has been the pattern now for a hundred years. In fact, the entire Islamic world is a virtual blank for roughly three centuries. Normally, we find one or two finds attributed to the seventh century (or occasionally to the eighth century), then nothing for three centuries, then a resumption of archaeological material in the mid- or late-tenth century. Take for example Egypt. Egypt was the largest and most populous Islamic territory during the Early Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of the country occurred between 638 and 639, and we should expect the invaders to have begun, almost immediately, using the wealth of the land to begin building numerous and splendid places of worship – but apparently they didn’t. Only two mosques in the whole of Egypt, both in Cairo, are said to date from before the eleventh century: the Amr ibn al-As, AD 641 and the Ahmad ibn Tulun, AD 878. However, the latter building has many features found only in mosques of the eleventh century, so its date of 878 is disputed. Thus, in Egypt, we have a single place of worship, the mosque of Amr ibn al-As, dating from the mid-seventh century, then nothing for another three-and-a-half centuries. Why, in an enormous country with up to perhaps five million inhabitants, should the Muslims wait over 300 years before building themselves places of worship?

And it is the same throughout the Islamic world. The city of Baghdad, supposedly a metropolis of a million souls under the fabulous Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid (763-809), has left virtually not a trace. The normal explanation is that since the Abbasid capital lies under the modern Baghdad, its treasures must remain hidden.
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Yet Roman London, also beneath a modern metropolis, a tiny settlement compared to the legendary Abbasid capital, has revealed a wealth of archaeological finds.

Fig. 24. Carthage, one of the north African cities destroyed in the seventh century.

No matter where we go, from Spain to northern Syria, there is virtually nothing between circa 650 and 950. The only notable exceptions to the rule, apparently, are the Islamic settlements of Mesopotamia and Iran. The textbooks declare that eastern cities such as Samarra, Susa and Siraf (in Iran), have produced copious archaeology from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries. The visitor to Samarra, for example, said to have been built by Harun al-Rashid’s successors in the ninth century, is shown the largely mud-brick ruins of an enormous metropolis, a city excavated and mapped between 1911 and 1914 by a German team under Ernst Herzfeld. The Great Mosque of Samarra, with its unique spiraling minaret, is widely advertised as a still visible representation of the flourishing Abbasid world of the ninth century. The case of Samarra is one we shall return to at a later stage (in Chapter 14). Suffice for the moment to state that the evidence indicates, notwithstanding the assertions of the textbooks, that the great metropolis dates from the late tenth century. That, at least, is the date normally assigned to the pottery and other artifacts associated with the ruins when they occur outside of Mesopotamia. Herzfeld and others attempted to stretch the range of these artifacts backwards to include the ninth century and (in places) the eighth, in order to give the supposedly thriving Abbasid Caliphate of the ninth and eighth centuries something in the range of material goods.