Islamic Civilization
The civilization that arose on the periphery of Classical-Mesopotamian Decay in seventh-century Arabia and reached its Universal Empire in the Ottoman state
Also known as: Islamic, Islamic Civilization, Islam, Muslim civilization
Islamic Civilization is Quigley's analytical unit for the civilization founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century CE. Like Western Civilization and Russian (Orthodox) civilization, it arose on the periphery of late-Classical and dying Mesopotamian society — making the three peripheral successors to the Mediterranean-Near Eastern complex that gave each its mixture (EoC 148, 88). Quigley locates its core area in western Arabia and traces successively more peripheral dynasties — Umayyad from Damascus, Abbasid from Baghdad, the Seljuk Turks, and finally the Ottomans — culminating in the Ottoman Empire as its Universal Empire (EoC 88, 157). Its disruption, Quigley argues, came not from internal Decay alone but from intrusion by the Western expanding civilization in the first half of the twentieth century.
Origin and Mixture: A Peripheral Successor Civilization
Islamic civilization, in Quigley's analysis, arose on the periphery of late-Classical and dying Mesopotamian society in the seventh century CE (EoC 148). Its mixture combined the pre-existing pastoral Arabian tribal culture, the surviving high culture of the Byzantine-Persian Near East, residual Hellenistic-Classical scientific and philosophical tradition (transmitted especially through Syriac Christianity), Jewish religious-textual tradition, and pre-existing Arabian merchant culture along the Mecca-Medina-Yemen routes. From this mixture, around the prophetic mission of Muhammad in 610–632 CE, emerged a new producing society. Quigley pairs Islamic civilization with Russian (Orthodox) civilization and Western civilization as the three peripheral successors to the Classical-Mediterranean complex, all three drawing from the same general matrix but each developing distinct instruments and ideologies (EoC 88).
Instrument of Expansion: The Religious-Political Caliphate
Quigley treats Islamic civilization as a case where the instrument of expansion is best understood as the religious-political organisation of the Caliphate — a synthesis of the Mesopotamian-type religious instrument and direct political-tributary rule, more tightly fused than in any of his other cases (EoC 138, 88). The early Caliphate satisfied the three conditions of an instrument of expansion. Incentives to invent existed in administration (the rapid development of the diwan and the postal system across an enormous polity), in military organisation (the rapid evolution from desert raiding-band to settled garrison-army to professional standing army), in scholarship (the great age of Arabic science between roughly 800 and 1200 CE, including astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, geography, and history), in agriculture (the diffusion of Indian and Iranian crops across the Mediterranean basin, the spread of irrigation technique), in urban form (the foundation of new cities — Kufa, Basra, Baghdad, Fustat, Kairouan — each conceived as administrative centre, marketplace, and religious focus simultaneously), and in long-distance trade (the integration of the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Saharan trading systems into a single network). Accumulation of surplus operated through the religiously legitimated tribute system: jizya on protected non-Muslims (dhimmi), kharaj on agricultural lands, zakat as religious obligation on Muslims, plus the great early flow of war-spoils from the conquests of Byzantine Syria-Egypt and the Sassanian Empire. Investment of that surplus financed the great mosques, the new cities, the translation movement that brought Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, and the maintenance of the standing army. This instrument drove a vast Age of Expansion across North Africa, the Levant, Iran, Central Asia, and Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries. As with every Quigley civilization, this instrument then institutionalised — into hereditary dynasties, vested ulama, and tribute-extraction without productive reinvestment — and an Age of Conflict followed.
The Seven Stages Applied to Islam
Quigley maps the seven stages onto the Islamic case in a way characteristic of his general pattern of dynasties progressively peripheral to the core. "The core area of this civilization is to be found in western Arabia. As its culture spread over most of western Asia and northern Africa, political domination fell to increasingly peripheral dynasties: the Ommiad Caliphate, of Arabic origin, ruled from Damascus during much of its [career]" (EoC 156–157). The successive peripheralisation — Umayyad (Arabian-Syrian), Abbasid (Iranian-influenced from Baghdad), Seljuk Turks, and finally the Ottoman Turks — exactly follows the Quigley rule that the Universal Empire arises from the most peripheral power. The Ottomans furnished the Universal Empire (EoC 88), conventionally datable from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. Quigley reads the long Ottoman millennium as Stages 5–6: Universal Empire passing into Decay, with the structural pathology of a tribute-state in which productive reform was politically impossible.
Disruption by Western Intrusion
Quigley is unusually explicit about the fate of Islamic civilization. "From its wreckage emerged three civilizations: (a) Western civilization, which may culminate in an American empire; (b) Orthodox civilization, which seems to be culminating in the Soviet empire; and (c) Islamic civilization, which did culminate in the Ottoman Empire, and was disrupted by intruders from Western civilization in the first half of the present century" (EoC 88, written c. 1961). This disruption — the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after 1918, the European colonial occupation of the Maghreb, the Levant, Iraq, and Iran, and the post-war state-formation under Western tutelage — represents in Quigley's framework an unusual inter-civilizational event: a still-expanding civilization (Western, in its third Age of Expansion) intruding on a civilization in Decay (Islamic). The result was the breaking of the existing Islamic political order without its full replacement by Western forms, leaving the civilization in a contested late-Decay condition.
The Crisis That Ended Each Stage
Quigley locates several characteristic crises in Islamic history. The Umayyad-Abbasid revolution of 750 CE marks the end of the first phase of Expansion and the shift of the core from Damascus to Baghdad — Quigley's pattern of peripheralisation. The collapse of effective Abbasid authority in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rise of regional emirates, and the Crusades together mark a prolonged Age of Conflict. The Seljuk and Mongol pressure of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries — including the destruction of Baghdad in 1258 — represents an internal invasion that re-set the political map without ending the civilization. The Ottoman Universal Empire (1453 onward) provided two centuries of expansion and four of slow contraction. The final crisis — the Western intrusion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — is qualitatively different: an external civilizational event imposing modernisation in incomplete form on a still-living civilization (EoC 88).
Quigley's Sustained Interest in Islamic Civilization
Although less central to Evolution of Civilizations than the Mesopotamian-Canaanite-Minoan-Classical-Western sample, Islamic civilization receives extensive treatment in Quigley's Weapons Systems and Political Stability (where the Caliphate and Ottoman cases are major studies in the relationship between weapons technology and dynastic durability), in his Tragedy and Hope (where the Ottoman-successor Middle East is treated as a key arena of twentieth-century power-network operation), and in his Georgetown lectures. The civilization functions in Quigley's overall argument as a third comparator to Classical and Western: a case where a religious instrument of expansion could not be successively reformed in the Western manner, and where the Universal Empire stage was reached and a long Decay followed.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 88 Quigley
From its wreckage emerged three civilizations: (a) Western civilization, which may culminate in an American empire; (b) Orthodox civilization, which seems to be culminating in the Soviet empire; and (c) Islamic civilization, which did culminate in the Ottoman Empire, and was disrupted by intruders from Western civilization in the first half of the present century.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 156 Quigley
In the Islamic civilization a similar pattern seems to have occurred. The core area of this civilization is to be found in western Arabia. As its culture spread over most of western Asia and northern Africa, political domination fell to increasingly peripheral dynasties: the Ommiad Caliphate, of Arabic origin, ruled from Damascus.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 148 Quigley
And on other peripheries of Classical civilization were born Russian civilization and Islamic civilization.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 27 Quigley
Islamic civilization, which emerged with the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century and culminated in the Ottoman Empire, is one of the great peripheral successors to the Classical-Mesopotamian world.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
The Caliphate's weapons system — the mounted Arab horseman and the disciplined Janissary infantry of the later Ottoman state — represents one of the great cases of political stability mediated by a specialist weapons class.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 138 Quigley
The instrument of expansion… can be any kind of organization, military, political, social, religious, and so forth.