The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c19.4

v3.c19.4

THE rise of Islam is one of the marvels of history. In the summer of A.D. 622 a prophet, without honour in his own country, fled from his native city to seek an asylum in the town of Yathrib, since known as *Madīnat-un-Nabī*, ‘the Prophet’s City,’ rather more than two hundred miles north of Mecca, the town which had cast him out. Little more than a century later the successors and followers of the fugitive were ruling an empire which extended from the Atlantic to the Indus and from the Caspian to the cataracts of the Nile, and included Spain and Portugal, some of the most fertile regions of southern France, the whole of the northern coast of Africa, Upper and Lower Egypt, their own native Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Transoxiana. They threatened Christendom almost simultaneously from the east and the west, besieging Constantinople three times and advancing into the heart of France, and but for the decisive victory of Theodosius III before the imperial city in 716 and the crushing defeat inflicted on them near Tours in 732 by Charles the Hammer, the whole of Europe would have passed under their sway. The battle of Poitiers decided whether the Christians’ bell or the muezzin’s cry should sound over Rome, Paris and London, whether the subtleties of the schoolmen and later, the philosophy of Greece, or the theology and jurisprudence of the Koran and the Traditions should be studied at Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.