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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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RETREAT AND RAGE |
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gap between fact and history, as generally written and taught, is
however, not my interest right now. I wish to emphasize that by the
eighth century, Muslims had acquired from Spain to India "a
core position from where they were able to link the two major
economic units of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean....Muslims
dominated all important maritime and caravan trade routes with the
exception only of the northern trans-Eurasian silk route....the Arab
caliphate from the eighth to the eleventh century achieved an
unquestioned economic supremacy in the world....in monetary terms
the result of the Muslim conquest was...a unified currency based on
the gold dinar and the silver dirham.... Possession was taken of all
important gold-producing and gold-collection areas...." 2
This economic supremacy provided so
powerful an underpinning for the Muslim ummah (universal community
of believers) and, therefore, civilization that they could survive
all internal upheavals, including the Shia-Sunni divide; the decline
of the Abbasid caliphate from the tenth century onwards, culminating
in the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols; the upsurge of Turks
so much so that they can be said to have dominated the Islamic
enterprise from the tenth century to the abolition of the caliphate
in 1924. (The Safavid rulers of Iran too were Turkic and so were the
Ghaznavids in Kabul.) |
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