Учебное пособие по английскому языку для студентов-историков. Период: Средние века

46 Unit 5 Muhammad and Islam A prophetic amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of the seventh century might have concluded very rea-sonably that it was only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domination. There were no sings of order or union in western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian empires were manifestly bent upon a mu-tual destruction. India was also divided and wasted. On the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which probably at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people who were growing to power in central Asia were disposed to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the thir-teenth century when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and Persian empires, over Egypt and most of India. Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would have been in understanding the recuperative power of the Latin end of Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia would have seemed what it had been for time immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an empire now for more than a thousand years. Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splendour. They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boundaries of China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that is still to this day one of the most vital forc-es in the world. The man, Muhammad, who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young husband of the widow of a rich mer-chant of the town of Mecca. Until he was forty he did very little to distinguish himself in the world. He seems to have taken con-siderable interest in religi...