The Arabs and the Mongols

While Harsha was reigning over a powerful kingdom in north India and Hsuan-Tsang, the Chinese scholar-pilgrim, was studying at Nalanda University, Islam was taking shape in Arabia. Islam was to come to India both as a religious and a political force and create many new problems, but it is well to remember that it took a long time before it made much difference to the Indian scene. It was nearly 600 years before it reached the heart of India and when it came to the accompaniment of political conquest, it had already changed much and its standard-bearers were different. The Arabs, who in a fine frenzy of enthusiasm and with a dynamic energy, had spread out and conquered from Spain to the borders of Mongolia, carrying with them a brilliant culture, did not come to India proper. They stopped at its north-western fringe and remained there. Arab civilization gradually decayed and various Turkish tribes came into prominence in Central and Western Asia. It was these Turks and Afghans from the Indian borderland who brought Islam as a political force in India.

Some dates might help to bring these facts home to us. Islam may be said to begin with the Hijrat, the departure of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, in AC 622. Mohammed died ten years later. Some time was spent in consolidating the position in Arabia, and then those astounding series of events took place which carried the Arabs, with the banner of Islam, right across Central Asia in the east and across the whole North African continent to Spain and France in the west. In the seventh century and by the beginning of the eighth, they had spread over Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. In AC 712 they reached and occupied Sind in the north-west of India and stopped there. A great desert separated this area from the more fertile parts of India. In the west the Arabs crossed the narrow straits between Africa and Europe (since called the Straits of Gibraltar) and entered Spain in AC 711. They occupied the whole of Spain and crossed the Pyrenees into France. In 732 they were defeated and checked by Charles Martel at Tours in France.

This triumphant career of a people, whose homelands were the deserts of Arabia and who had thus far played no notable part in history, is most remarkable. They must have derived their vast energy from the dynamic and revolutionary character of their Prophet and his message of human brotherhood. And yet it is wrong to imagine that Arab civilization suddenly rose out of oblivion and took shape after the advent of Islam. There has been a tendency on the part of Islamic scholars to decry the pre-Islamic past of the Arab people and to refer to it as the period of Jahiliyat, a kind of dark age of ignorance and supersition. Arab civilization, like others, had a long past, intimately connected with the development of the Semitic