The Unity of Islamic Empire

They simply could not afford such lethal civil war. They wanted strong government, and Muawiyyah, an able ruler, was able to give it to them. He revived Umar's system of segregating the Arab Muslims from the population, and even though some Muslims in Arabia were still agitating for the right to build estates in the occupied territories, Muawiyyah continued to forbid this.

He also discouraged conversion, and built an efficient administration. Islam thus remained the religion of the conquering Arab elite. At first the Arabs, who had no experience of imperial government, relied on the expertise of non-Muslims, who had served the previous Byzantine and Persian regimes, but gradually the Arabs began to oust the dhimmis from the top posts. In the course of the next century, the Umayyad caliphs would gradually transform the disparate regions conquered by the Muslim armies into a unified empire, with a common ideology. This was a great achievement; but the court naturally began to develop a rich culture and luxurious lifestyle, and became indistinguishable in many respects from any other ruling class.

Therein lay a dilemma. It had been found, after centuries of experience, that an absolute monarchy was the only effective way of governing a pre-modern empire with an agrarianbased economy, and that it was far more satisfactory than military oligarchy, where commanders usually competed with one another for power. The idea of making one man so privileged that rich and poor alike are vulnerable before him is abhorrent to us in our democratic era, but we must realize that democracy is made possible by an industrialized society which has the technology to replicate its resources indefinitely: this was not an option before the advent of Western modernity.

In the pre-modern world, a monarch who was so powerful that he had no rivals did not need to fight his own battles, could settle the quarrels of the great and had no reason to ignore the entreaties of those who pleaded for the poor. So strong was this preference for monarchy that, as we shall see, even when real power was wielded by local rulers in a large empire, they still paid lip service to the king and claimed to be acting as his vassals. The Umayyad caliphs governed a vast empire, which continued to expand under their rule. They would find that in order to preserve the peace they would have to become absolute monarchs too, but how would this cohere with Arab traditions, on the one hand, and with the radical egalitarianism of the Quran on the other?

The Indian Style