The impact of the birth of Islam on the Western landscape
The development and spread of Islam in the Western world has had a profound impact on the history and pattern of the Western world. It has become an important driving force for the development of the Western world, and it is also an important symbol that distinguishes it from the Chinese and Western worlds.
Let's take a look at how Islam has shaped the Western world.
Everywhere in the Islamic world, one will see a single authoritative empire, a manifestation of the early Islamic halyafat, which, while not reaching the glory of the Roman Empire, also demonstrated the vision of a universal state.
However, the collapse of great empires throughout history often stems from their own size. The fallen empire was crushed by the nomads of the north, but in the Islamic world, the north refers to the steppes of Central Asia, and the nomads were not Germanic, but Turkish.
The invaders reduced the vast empire to fragments of small kingdoms, the entire of which was infiltrated by a single, unified Orthodox religion, Catholicism in the West and Sunni Islam in the East.
The story of world history is always about how "we" got to this moment, so the shape of the narrative depends on who and when we say "we" and "this moment".
In the traditional Western conception of history, we are led to believe that the current is a democratic industrial (and post-industrial) civilization. In the United States, this view is further extended by saying that the course of world history has given birth to a vision of freedom and equality, thus making it a leader in the future development of the planet.
This notion gives direction to history and sets the end of a path that we are moving on. So it's easy to accept the assumption that while some people don't reach the end, we're all moving in the same direction.
Developing countries"This is called because they started late, or because they are relatively slow. When the ideal future of post-industrial Western democracies is seen as the end of history, we look back and see several important historical stages: the birth of civilizations, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia; Greece and Rome in the classical era; The rise of ** religion in the Dark Ages; the Enlightenment and the revolutions of science, democracy, industry, and technology; the rise of the nation-state, and the First and Second World Wars; The Cold War period, and finally the triumph of democratic capitalism.
If we look at world history from an Islamic perspective, we may find that we have a different perspective. We don't see ourselves as a secondary version of the West, and although we are heading towards the same destination, we may be lacking in efficiency.
My view is that Islam provides us with a unique perspective on how to divide history. Our year 0 is the year of the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, and it is this year that gave birth to our Muslim community, and it is also the starting point for our understanding of the meaning of "civilization".
Over the centuries, however, we may find communities that have stopped expanding, bewildered and plagued by destructive countercurrents, constantly caught in competing historical directions.
As inheritors of Muslim traditions, we are forced to look for historical meaning in defeat, not in victory.
Between these two impulses, we are faced with a choice: follow the trend of history and revise "civilization", or fight against the tide of history and rediscover our "civilization".
If we place the trajectory of Islamic society within the framework of world history, the story can be divided into the following stages: 1. Antiquity: Mesopotamia and Persia.
2. The rise of Islam. 3. The quest for world unity: Harry's mission. 4. Fragmentation: The period of Sudanese salt. 5. Catastrophe: Crusader and Mongol invasions.
6. Revival: The Age of the Three Empires. 7. The penetration of the West into the East. 8. The reform movement. 9. The Triumph of the Secular Modernists. Islamic Reaction literary critic Edward Said points out that the West has spent the last few centuries constructing an illusion of the Islamic world called "Orientalism," in which a sense of "difference" is intertwined with an image of decadent luxury and envy.
It is true that Islam has penetrated into the imagination of the West, which can be considered to some extent descriptive.
What interests you is that it is different from the others, and it is not overly flashy depictions. For example, in Shakespeare's day, the center of power in the world was concentrated in three Islamic empires.
Did you find all the Muslims in his work? If you don't know that the Moors are Muslims, you won't know this from Othello.
There are two vast worlds here, but little attention is paid to each other. If the Western world and the Islamic world were two separate human societies, we might see symptoms of mutual repression.
We may ask, "What happened between them?" Were they ever lovers? Do you have a history of ** staying? "But I think there's a less compelling explanation.
Looking back at history, the core of the West is actually the Islamic world as it is now, like two separate universes, each focused on its own internal affairs, each believing itself to be the center of human history, each living in a different narrative that did not begin to converge until the end of the 17th century.
At some point, two diametrically opposed points of view have to be compromised because they cannot coexist. The power of the West is indisputable, and its influence has swept across the globe, pushing other views into retreat.
However, the forgotten chapters of history have not really disappeared, they are like torrents, lurking beneath the surface of the water, still quietly flowing. When you look at the world's hot spots – Kashmir, Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, Israel and Palestine, Iraq, you are actually exploring entities that have disappeared from the map but are still struggling to survive.
I emphasize the "story", which is a kind of in-depth **, like when we meet in a café, if someone asks, "What is the history of parallel worlds like?" ”
The point I made can be found in many of the books in the university library today. If you're willing to accept academic language and commentary, you might as well go there and read more.
If you want to know about this fascinating story, you might as well read it here. Although I am not a professional scholar, I have borrowed from the methods used by scholars to sift through historical source material, and they have based them on it to reach their final conclusions.
This story that has lasted for thousands of years has left my footprints in the past and present half a century ago. But I am here because this period covers the storied career of the Prophet Muhammad and his first four successors, the founding of Islam.
I portray this story as an intimate human drama because this is how Muslims experience it firsthand. Scholars have been more cautious about the story, and they tend to prioritize non-Muslim *** over so-called less objective Muslim descriptions because they focus on digging up "what really happened."
My aim is to convey the story that Muslims understand, because this is where their faith comes from, and at the same time helps people to understand their role in the history of the world.
We will discuss the origin of Islamic fables below. As with ancient religions such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and even **Christianity, Muslims began to collect, memorize, and preserve the history that introduced them.
Once this history is collected, they don't just preserve it, they embed it in every story. This is not to say that the core story of the Muslim cannot be seen as a metaphor, but we do not expect to find evidence of events in these parables, which is not the focus of our attention.
We don't care if the story is true or not, we want to learn real lessons from it. The stories of Muslims do not provide such ideal lessons, but rather describe what we can learn from real people who are entangled in real history over real problems.
This is not to deny that the stories of Muslims are allegories, but to emphasize that these stories are allegories about real human beings and real history.
Some of the stories may be fictional, and even all of them have been modified by certain people to fit their agenda. However, Muslims have transmitted their basic narratives in the same spirit as historical narratives, and while these stories may be somewhere between history and mythology, they have shaped Muslim behavior over the centuries.
We will explore these stories, which are not purely human dramas, but contain Muslim meanings. Please fasten your seatbelts and let's start this journey.
Before the birth of Islam, the two worlds formed the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Bengal respectively, and each country had its own network of ** and travel routes, one of which was a sea route and the other was a land route.
If you look at ancient maritime traffic, you will see that world history near the Mediterranean Sea has a clear central position.
From Mycenae and Crete to Phoenicia and Lydia, to Greece and Rome, the meeting points of these early cultures were all in the Mediterranean, so it became a place where narratives and destinies intertwined to attract different ethnic groups, forming what we know as "Western civilization".
However, if you pay attention to ancient land transportation, then the world's ** station is the intersection of roads and routes connecting the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Iranian Highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.
These roads spanned the Persian Gulf, the Indus and Oxus rivers, the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas, the Mediterranean, the Nile and the Red Sea, and eventually formed what we know today as the "Islamic world".
Unfortunately, this region does not have an exclusive label like "Western civilization".
Some people are accustomed to calling a place the Middle East, but others will call it the Mediterranean world or the middle world. A name often fails to reveal how closely a place is connected to other places.
From the perspective of Western Europe, the so-called Middle East is actually closer to the Midwest. Therefore, it is advisable to call the entire area from the Indus River to Istanbul the Middle World, as its geographical location is right between the Mediterranean world and the Chinese world.
The Chinese world exists independently and does not have much connection with the other two worlds. This view stems from geography, and the near-insurmountable obstacles such as China's proximity to the Mediterranean world, the Himalayas in the middle world, the Gobi Desert, and the jungles of Southeast Asia have made it difficult for China, its satellites and competitors to enter the focus of "world history"—the middle world.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas were mentioned relatively infrequently in our study because of their unique geographical locations. Sub-Saharan Africa is cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the world's largest desert, while the Americas form a unique universe due to geography.
Geography, however, does not isolate the Mediterranean and the Central World, which have merged into separate worlds because of what historian Philip D. Curtin calls "areas of mutual exchange."
In the Mediterranean, it was more convenient to get anywhere else from anywhere than to Persepolis or the Indus, and similarly, in ancient times, caravans on land routes in the Middle World could depart in any direction at any crossroads.
As they moved westward into Asia Minor (now known as Turkey), the terrain gradually pushed them to the narrowest bottleneck in the world, with only one bridge across the Bosphorus (if the timing was just right).
This often leads to slow and even congested land traffic, forcing caravans to return to the central or southern part of the Mediterranean coast. Gossip, stories, jokes, rumors, historical impressions, religious myths, products, and other cultural fragments are intertwined here, circulating with merchants, travelers, and conquerors.
* And travel routes are like capillaries, transporting the blood of civilization. These societies often become characters in each other's stories because of the destruction of fate, even if they have different views on the good and the bad.
Thus, the Mediterranean world and the middle world have produced different narratives of world history. People living around the Mediterranean have good reason to think of themselves as the center of human history, and people living in the middle world have the same reason to think of themselves as the center of human history.
In the eyes of modern Western scholars, Islam is seen as a bond that intertwines the destinies of different people through the magic of religion and constructs the history of the Western world, which is "Western civilization".
However, in the process of the spread of Islam, the Himalayas and the Sahara Desert made China and Africa independent of the influence of Islam and formed an independent world.
Undoubtedly, the unique "civilization" of the West is closely related to the birth of Islam, which has made the West a civilization completely different from the land of China and Africa.
The two articles respectively study and analyze the development of modern Chinese Islamic translation and the relationship between Islam and the construction of the Middle East nation-state.