The spread of islam

Let me say before anything else that the first article Ayoub, "Spread of Islam" assigned on the spread of Islam around the world was fascinating. Not only did it provide an illuminating historical analysis, it also posed some pretty loaded questions, like what does the term missionary or militant religion mean in its relation to its prophetic base, and how far any religion can go while maintaining any semblance of purity. These are question that I will get to later.
However it is my unfortunate duty to read and write about both articles and, although the second article Ernst, "Following Muhammad" did make some good points, I found that particularly the beginning was unnecessary in its extreme view of modern academia. First of all I went to my local bookstore after reading this article (now to be fair I live on the Danforth, which is the equivalent of a hippie commune to a resident of west Virginia), and of the many views on Islam in the world today, I found not a single one which gave the opinion that it was anything but a severely misunderstood religion with a rich cultural heritage, demonized by the west for what it cannot understand: in other words, carbon copies of this article. Now I can understand that Muslims in the United States have a tough time of it, and I am not for a moment saying that at least at least some of that has not trickled into the academic community. But acting as if this piece is alone standing against the tide when it is at the head of a wave of literature that dominates academic thought makes me mad.

Now on to a far more fun discussion. Islam is, like Christianity, a missionary religion. The first article does a very good job of explaining exactly what this means. It has also a very good comparison to make to Christianity. Both were as described, religions of the Book, both believed in the one God who left very specific instructions for us to follow. At first glance we have a tried and tested formula, more a missionary and militantly expansionist religion. However, were the other examples of missionary faiths so clear cut? The answer is no. One of the oddest faiths that I have ever encountered is Indian Buddhism. It can best be described as desperately seeking oblivion. It sees the gods of the world the same way it sees everything else: as an annoying if not actively harmful presence, to be annihilated through self discovery. It is hard to think of a religion further away from Islam. It is hard to think of a religion further away than anything. And yet it had the same result, the rapid and sometimes violent conversion of the Silk Road along almost the exact same route that Islam would follow. And then there is Zoroastrianism, a religion now so xenophobic that the biggest controversy today is whether or not they should allow people to convert. This from a religion whose original mandate was to convert all from the truth to the lie.

But I digress.

Another fun topic, which can also be applied to Christianity, is the purity of the faith. As in any faith-based religion, Islam's only real claim to fame was that it had the direct words of God as they kept repeating, just in case anyone is tempted to call the Quran an inspired text. And in this case Islam seems to really give it their all. They have a direct line of the prophet as heads of state of a powerful Muslim empire which spreads from central Asia to Spain; however it doesn’t last and it fragments. What really surprises me, though, is that all the evidence indicates that the religion seemed to wait for political fragmentation before religiously fragmenting. The only real schism in the Islamic tradition today is Shia and Sunni and, although these have more in modern times to do with cultural differences, Iran being ??difficult, it seemed to really have a lot to do with the political schism of the Abbasid caliphate in the beginning. It seems inevitable that religions will change with the times, but with religions of the books, it seems they have three choices: admit defeat and say that the particular book isn’t relevant anymore; change your philosophy and hope no one notices; or define the times yourself and drag the world back to a place where it is relevant. Religions throughout history have tried all three of these options; it will be interesting to see which one Islam chooses in the near future.

Nestorianism

This topic was one of surprising personal interest for me. At the beginning of this discussion I knew something about the subject matter, I knew that Nestorianism was a heresy which made itself well known in Asia which resulted from a debate about the singularity of Jesus Christ. However I also assumed that the divide was much bigger than it was. I assumed for example that the east, as it were would have swallowed up the faith so much that it would be unrecognisable as my own (I am Roman Catholic). As such I saw the Nestorian faith much the same way I saw for example Zoroastrianism, as a faith which was interesting from largely a historical perspective, which, what do you know? Have some odds and ends that connect it with mine. The first major break in this theory was the use of the term Assyrian church in class, I had never before associated the Nestorian church, what in my mind was a purely historical phenomenon with this real live living church which was a fundamentally similar to my own. The second major break to my preconception was the article assigned intitled Oxtoby, "Christian Origins". As a lifelong Catholic with 12 years of Catholic school to my name, I was brought up with this information, and not a real word of it was unknown to me having celebrated the traditions all my life. Ironically the only part that I was unfamiliar with was the actual break with the Nestorian church, I found out later that that was the only part we were obligated to read, although I was familiar with the bare bones of heretical separation. This brings up once again the uncomfortable subject of whether or not people should be permitted or whether it is possible to give a real interpretation of what is essentially ones own religion from a historical point of view. It was certainly an incredibly uncomfortable experience having to go through those explainations of the key points of my faith for the first time with a real critical eye, looking at it not as a faith to be awed at but rather as a historical conceptions, to explore or even critique. There is still no doubt in my mind that Nestorianism is a fundamentally different religion than my own but if you asked me before today what was number 1 on my list of descriptions of Christianity, the single natural of Jesus Christ would not be high on my list of defining features. I was much more on a firm footing with the other articles. I found particularly interesting the descriptions of the daily life in the Tang dynasty not only were these rich in historical detail but presented a very interesting picture of a society that is probably the most like ours of almost any civilization in the ancient world. The image of hundreds of different religions, skin colors and points of view conjure up images of a society very much like our own Toronto. After a more nuisanced reading of course one discovers the fear that people had when confronted with these new religions and cultures, the ministry in charge of them, and the slowly closing fist of Chinese imperial xenophobia which would clench entirely in the events of the An Lushan rebellion just a few years earlier. As for the last article, the description of the Nestorians as almost apologetic of there faith does seem to be of great interest in terms of there theological development as a religion and could easily be attributed to an evolution of the faith due to there time in the east. However it seems much more likely given the circumstances, that like many faiths that are surrounded on all sides by potentially, but not openly hostile forces, they as individuals decided to leave well enough alone and not draw trouble to themselves by openly proclaiming superiority.

Indian Buddhism

First of all in the point of Indian Buddhism I must say that by all evidence there must have either been an extremely bloody conversion, or traditional Hinduism must have been among the weaker faiths of the world religion. When considering evidence like the Ashoka edicts one must parallel it with the conversion of the Christian conversion to Protestantism in the west. In the west, without a war that killed literally killed half of Europe there was no way that any king ever, insults and curtails the power of the priest in any form, let alone openly mocks the basis of the religion, like sacrifice. It seems that by far given the evidence, that Hinduism is an extremely weak faith to put up with that kind of abuse from what is after all simply a mortal king and therefore quite low on the celestial totem pole.
The main point I would like to address in this blog entry is something that has always troubled me about the larger topic of Buddhism and particularly at its Indian roots, when precisely does a philosophy become a religion. When did something which surely started out simply as reformist movement in the wider Hindu faith, evolved into a fully fledged faith on its own merits. And a question I actually consider much more interesting, when does summarily dismissing all the gods in a society, either directly or as irrelevancies stop becoming an organised faith and start becoming philosophy or even atheism. These sort of questions fascinate me endlessly, not the least of reasons being that it is my contention as a student of history that humans have never made a truly atheist society, none but us. First of all if one considers the original religion of the Buddha it is a very different matter than those of even those adapted even by Indian leaders like Ashoka, and bears little if any resemblance to the later versions exported to china. Therefore, I it is perfectly possible that the original Buddhism was in fact atheistic, while the religion it created was not, therefore not creating an atheistic society.
First of all in the discussion of religion versus philosophy, we must of course ask ourselves whether the mere distinction is simply a western idea. It should be noted that by what seems to be a remarkable co-incidence, almost the exact same revolution in traditional polytheistic religious procedures was happening in western Greece although of course it would be foolish to assume a significant ideological correspondence. As to the central philosophical question, it is my basic opinion that a philosophy, is something that must make all forms of the supernatural not part of the process in terms of creating a way of life. The original way of Buddhism therefore can take credit for the fact that it made the gods irrelevant in the wider process of attaining transcendent nothingness as they are simply other larger players of the same game, the fact that they do control the material world is irrelevant because of course the material world is irrelevant. However there is one snag to this theory, reincarnation, although it is the subject of constant and stimulating debate exactly to what extent, in any of Buddhism’s many, many incarnations, one soul has to do with another’s creation, whether it is just one soul lighting another or direct reincarnation, this does not jive with our modern scientific defintion of life. And so we hit the snag in our little theory, for to the people of ancient India, the word supernatural would have surely had almost no meaning, after all it was fact that the world was created by the gods, that life was suffering that the soul was reborn with no less belief than the fact that the sun set. The reason that faith wasn’t the major part of most ancient religions is because there was nothing to test it with, that is why Buddhism as a belief functioned it made rational arguments based on the basic precepts of society. Should these people be penalised or worse categorised simply because they don’t edit out what we might consider the supernatural, and what do we know any more then them anyway? No the short answer is that as far as I can tell there is no way to apply words like philosophy or religion to the belief system like Buddhism simply because there is no real difference.
As for those who call Buddhism atheism, all that they prove is that they have no idea what the word atheism means. Aethism means no god, period. Buddhism fully acknowledged the fact that there were gods, in India it acknowledged Vishnu and Brahma and all the pantheon, and wherever it went it acknowledged those gods too, because the material world still needed to be governed and ruled, there was evidence for these gods existence in the sheer creation of the world, in the fact that, with no human involvement the sun rose and set, and that with proper sacrifice the crops grew well. Buddhism tried to create a world where they didn’t, but to say that that was atheist, would be like saying that someone who believed that modern science was irrelevant in understanding the human heart, is dismissing and disagreeing with each and every scientific discovery ever conceived.

There are many things that I noticed from the readings about Zoroastrianism. First I will discuss those ascribed to the great king Darius. This was extremely interesting, as I have often heard of the Behistan inscriptions before but never actually read them, also I have read much of Darius and the policies of the Achaemenid dynasty. The first thing I noticed was the stark contrasts between Cyrus the Great and his semi-maybe 5th cousin? Cyrus was famous not only for his mercy towards conquered citizens, but also for his religious tolerance (not hard when one is a polytheist). Darius seems to have done a complete 180 on the policy of his famous ancestor. This inscription portrays a militantly Zoroastrian figure, who portrays the conquest of conquered territories like Armenia with the same tactics as pacifying states that have gone into rebellion, with complete and utter destruction. Of course there is room for artistic license in these words. After all, if I were running a country, I would want to make it as hard as possibly for the people to revolt, but I might think twice before using words like druj (lie) to describe what was probably the vast majority of faiths in my kingdom, and allow others to destroy them.
Also on a partially irrelevant side note, it is interesting to see that on the Behistan inscriptions there is no evidence of contact with the Greeks, which suggests that Darius didn’t think them important enough to talk about. This is not unusual considering the size of Darius’s empire compared with the size of the Greek city states. I find it astonishing, how one people’s history can be so important to them, and to the whole history of western civilisation, and yet unimportant enough not to make it into another's history books.
Now concerning the real topic: the information on the Zoroastrian bible, the Gathas. I found a number of things interesting. First of all this must be the one religion most single-mindedly devoted to ritual I have ever heard of. After the required readings I looked up more on the Gathas on line, and the list is endless for the proper way to butcher cows, drink haoma, and avoid the various kinds of impurity that plague daily. Now the history of Zoroastrianism as an off-shot from early Hinduism has not escaped me, and although I can see certain similarities from my admittedly small understanding of the Hindu faith, the differences seem more prominent. For one thing, like many faiths that happen to be polytheist, Hinduism, it can be argued, is a religion that seems more tolerant of other gods, as a result of the sheer amount of gods they possess. However, it is clear that this faith is militant in all its dealings with all other faiths by the way that Darius says that all followers of the lie must be converted and equates them with generally bad people. Also I see no evidence of the caste system for which the Hindu faith is of course so famous in these writings. It seems from the Gathas that anyone who believes can not only go to heaven, but also take an active part in ceremony. It should be remembered of course that Zoroaster was an example that all people could and should follow. Also oddly enough, I see no evidence of reincarnation in either these stories or in the wider Zoroastrian mythos. If this truly was a rebel element of the Hindu faith, it is absolutely the most comprehensive revolution that I have ever seen, from origins to deity to daily life, the Zoroastrian community gutted everything but the kitchen sink when they separated from polytheism.
Of course one thing that they kept with them was the treatment of women, especially during menstruation. This emphasis on the impurity of menstruation as a contagion seems older than anything, which divides the human race. It can be found in the Bible, as well virtually every religion, and has been a key element in ensuring or justifying that woman have no real say in society. This is unsurprising but it does give you a real sense of their social structure, where even a women’s husband and children cannot go within 3 paces of her, several days a month. About the only that differs here is that there is no sense that a women in and of course herself has any control over who is near her, or even who sleeps with her at any given time. She receives neither condemnation nor punishment, when a man approaches her when she is in menstruation. This can be interpreted one of two ways the first of course is that this is a good thing, perhaps it shows that abuse or whipping of women was not tolerated in the society at large, but there is another way to interpret it, that the women was entirely passive in society and generally irrelevant. After all if someone has no control besides those that society gives one over their own body, one is not a major player in society. This tells us a lot in general about the society this was being written in. For example, in general hunter gatherer societies that we know of have rules that are far less strict for this sort of thing than agrarian. Which I find odd because all contemporary evidence points to the Gathas being written in a semi-settled lifestyle at earliest, of course, like many faiths this might merely be an addition added later.

Of course the first thing that I think when I read these letters is the very different way that they spoke to each other than we do. Of course there is a language barrier, but I believe that it is more than that. Particularly in the letters written to wives and husbands, a lot can be said for the sense of real desperation and dread of being both away from their spouses and stuck in a foreign land. Obviously this speaks volumes about how this particular group of people saw both far-flung areas on the Silk Road and gender roles in society.
Although it is never easy being alone in a strange land with strange customs and a language barrier, as far as I can tell the Sogdians as a people ruled the Silk Road and administered it; therefore I have a hard time believing that the average Sogdian would have this sense of real fear and distress when talking about a foreign land, even when this was only private conversations with their spouses. This was partially explained by the second letter, which is famous for proving the connection between the Xiongnu and the Huns of Eastern Europe. In fact during this period I have often heard in my study of, for example Russia, about the constant wave of barbarian attacks coming from the fields of central Asia, which makes it even more unbelievable that a realistic trade route could have been maintained.
What really interests me, however, is the political institutions of the Sogdians. They do seem to have local leaders as mentioned in the person of Varzdak, but it seems to me that they lived largely in city states, unconquered, at least at this point, by larger emperors. This shines a fascinating light on just how important the Silk Road was to their life. The fertile flat plains of Central Asia would have been ideal for the making of such empires, purely because they could be so easily conquered, as successive rulers like Tamerlane learned. However the political system in Sogdia was tailored specifically for the use of Silk Roads, suggesting that for the sake of profit they barely tried to unite what would have been already linguistically and culturally one nation, just to keep up profit. This is indeed a wealth-crazed society.
Of course since these documents deal so explicitly with women writing to their husbands, it would be pointless to leave out the valuable information that can be learned about social structure of gender relations. Once again we see a political parallel. I found it very telling that men use many of the same terms to refer to their political superiors as women refer to their men. Here clearly we have a fairly ordinary pre-modern assessment where, at least in title, the man was the head (although these must have been fairly wealthy women, their husbands presumably being fairly important traders and themselves having at least enough surplus income to hire a letter writer). One wonders then why these women seem so desperate for their husband’s return? Of course once again we can safely assume much of the flowery dialogue to be simply a result of the time, and of course it is quite possible that she simply misses her husband, or at the very least wants him to think so. Still, when someone tells their spouse that they imagine themselves dead without them its certainly worth looking into further. It is of course also possible that with her husband gone away for so long, she would have limited access to money for example, or possibly imagined the results of a possible widowhood, although once again emotionally crippling, this would have worked out very badly for her in that society. Since these documents seem so incredibly rare and so extremely valuable as some of the very few documents from this period of Sogdian history, we must of course rule nothing out.

Xiongnu blog response

I find the whole question of the Xiongnu an incredibly fascinating one, particularly their relationship with the Huns in Europe, although I am disappointed by the fact that this article does not site the indeed wide evidence of a mutual relationship between the Hephalites, Xiongnu and the Huns, such as those found in ancient Sogdian manuscripts clearly indicating a group of nomadic Huns, that were seen terrorizing the north of the Han capital Chang’an. It also shows that the Han Empire engaged in war against these people and that the confederacy was so strong that objective foreign travellers were unsure whether the result would be in China’s favour. This is an invaluable first hand resource that is available at http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/sogdlet.html. As for the arguments made against the theory, that the Huns didn’t shave, that they didn’t practice cranical alteration, these would be legitimate gripes if the Roman Empire had actually gone to north China to see them in their original habitat as it were, however, over 300 years and countless contact with other cultures it is perfectly understandable that they finetuned there habits. This whole paper is of great interest to me specifically because I am at this moment also taking a course in Chinese history where I am learning much of the same information from a completely different perspective. First of all I was taught, not 4 days ago that the so-called Martial Emperor Wudi practically controlled an area about twice the size of modern China and perhaps 4 times the size of the Roman Empire, including all of central Asia, southeast Asia and Siberia almost as far as the Arctic ocean. This seems fantastical to say the least, which is why I am relieved to hear about an article which gives a more realistic view of a complex relationship of official sovereignty tempered with the reality of a highly structured tribute based relationships, between two unlikely equals. This is best summed up in some of the ways that China describes its friendly neighbours to the north. First they use the term barbarians as a matter of course, but I particularly liked the terms like the incestuous, unspeakably cruel and perverted king and how they traded with him a thousand horses and of course them breaking up the dispute between the fat king and mad king. However the thing that most strikes me about this article is the way that the Chinese Empire describes its so-called barbarian neighbours. The ethnic slurs of the colonialist Europeans is often focussed on particularly in classes like this, so it is comforting to see that the racial slurs of other peoples are not forgotten. It seems astonishing to me that in this time their government was willing to go to such extremes to avoid the appearance of the Chinese state getting absolutely anything from the outside world. How fast mutual governmental gift giving becomes tribute from an inferior subjugated nation, how fast a steady trade of foreign goods and horses can so easily become a divine gift of the river god and the heavenly dragon of powerful new winged horses. However, you can’t even really blame them for inventing such charming fairytales. Ever since writings of Zhang Qian, China seems to have been very interested not only in its own history, but also the way in which its own actions would have been looked upon by the various people coming after them. How would it look after all if these mad fat and monstrously perverted kings in the barbarian lands outside of China’s borders were seen to be trading with the great Chinese empire. Wouldn’t it be better to show that these new inventions were the latest in the long, long line of China relying on its own ingenuity, on its own gods in order to solve the problems of its day, and even to increase its cavalry and beat out the very invaders that they used to get these things from? Politics is always a dirty business; that is no reason to remember it as such.
Finally, a very fascinating point for me was Zhang Qian himself. This figure, a cross between Marco Polo and Herodotus, answers a lot of questions that I had about Chinese civilization in general, like how much they did know about the various trade empires that there empire, relied on or at least exploited, but all in all it raises many more questions than it answers. First of all I am always fascinated by a society that is completely isolated from the world around it, as I as a historian of the western school always largely assumed China was. I always knew that China built the great wall to keep out foreign invaders, (although this seemed to reinforce the idea that at the very least China did not want to know foreign cultures) This article of course opened my eyes to the fact that besides what I can now only assume would be a largely symbolic wall, they had extensive contact with their neighbours to the north and at least some contact with their neighbours to the west across the steppe. However what really strikes me about this point is that China before the unlikely voyage of a soon to be castrato, China did not know that the people of the Central Asian steppe rode around on what would have seemed to them to be giant horses. Now this would not be like not knowing that a person collects stamps. By all accounts horses were the lifeblood and then some of many of the people occupying the land. Therefore in order not to know this very basic fact about there life, there would have to be almost no contact whatsoever between anyone connected with the Chinese government and the Persian Empire, or the various tribes of central Asia. Now I know very well that the Taklimakan desert was no picnic to get across, and it’s just mean to ask people to cross the Tibetan plateau, but China had been a civilization for thousands of years, and had reliable records for hundreds, and nowhere did it mention that there was a very lucrative horse trading business which would vastly improve China’s army just across the desert there until Zhang Qian. Did this state have a monopoly on adventurers?

One thing that I have noticed in the readings is that the historians are looking at things to be there and finding them, rather than actually looking at the information. For example the book mentioned 5 metropoli named by the ancient Greek writer Strabo. They freely admit that they have not managed to find any information that in any way connects the first 4 cities to any that have ever existed in China, and the last of them called Thyne, they tried to relate back to the short lived Qin Dynasty in 2nd century China, which was by the way 100 years after the expeditions of Alexander the Great. Relying purely on the study of names of cities is always a tricky, and in my opinion unreliable thing to do. After all another one of those names on the list is Carracosta which to me sounds more like California. Now as an aspiring historian myself I know how important it is to try and look for even the smallest shred of evidence in first hand sources, and keeping in mind just how rare these first hand resources are I personally still think that it is important to realise that sometimes people just don't know what they are talking about, or got their wires crossed. After a little research I discovered the exact same spelling to describe a tribe or people living not a hundred miles east of where Strabo was writing from called the Thynia and I find it much more likely that they were talking about them.
The Chinese historians are of course no better. China can be given credit for getting most of the information about the Roman Empire right, or at least much of it. Modern Historical Research does not indicate that all Romans were bald or that they all wore red and they certainly did not possess Asian characteristics as the resources collected on the Da Qin seem to suggest. In fact it seems to me that the Chinese sources were really only representing an exact duplicate of themselves at the end of the Silk Road. This seems to be particularly odd, as historical Chinese imperial sources are so legendarily xenophobic, that ancient Greece only rivals them. Foreigners in outside the 4 oceans of Chinese historical hegemony are referred to as barbarians as a matter of course. Their political systems are usually something to be pitied laughed at or ignored. However in this one incident they not only refer to another kingdom well beyond their borders as equal to itself, but one could argue, that by using the term Da Qin or great Qin, they were actually describing a kingdom outside their own borders as better then themselves. This would be incredibly significant in the history of China if I thought for a second that it was true. It seems to me that China had no idea what was at the end of the Silk Road and simply invented another version of itself, at the end of the world to justify its creation. A world where people looked like them, wore similar, if not better clothes, and lived in an organized empire. Completely with subject kings, like the ones in their own past and a system which to me, far from the democracy of the Roman senate, sounds much like the Heavenly Mandate analogy of China. In short the Chinese Empire knew that it was dependent on trade from another empire. So it made an empire exactly like its own. Another area the authors of this book might look in is the amazing fact that it seems that people who traded with each other knew so precious little about each other.
Also a small point that struck me in the book when they were discussing the Alexandrine Empire is the fact that they seem to be under the impression that no one on earth at that time could have administrated the sheer landmass of the Empire. It should be noted that 14 generations of Achaemenid rulers, had absolutely no problem ruling the Empire, and expanding it, to become the greatest empire in the world up to that point. Alexander on the other hand, did not just fail to completely conquer, losing out the provinces of Armenia and the Caucasus but managed with his death to destroy, and carve up. In truth Alexander was a figure very much like Alaric, the Goth, who destroyed the Western Roman Empire, with the exception that Alexander actually managed to gut an entire empire, whereas Alaric left half of it.
Last but not least concerning the chapter on the actual making of silk itself. I am always struck at the sheer ingenuity of ancient man, I don't know how many generations it took for someone to consider that the webs that bugs weave can be painstakingly collected, to form somehow, into perfectly straight lines in order to fashion clothing out of them. Where they would have found the inspiration to do these things or what there motivation might have been. Besides even that I am always fascinated by the fact that a huge trading empire existed stretching all the way back through human history, to a time, before even the bronze age, long before anyone knew what was on the other side, connecting the 2 greatest empires in early history.