Sublime

Much of what was known in the Latin West about the intellectual life of the classical world was transmitted to it by Muslim scholars in Spain.35 The commercial life of the Muslim world had been far more advanced than that in much of Europe. Prestige goods and luxury wares, as well as silver and gold, flowed west into Europe, not the other way round

Islamic law and theology, and the cultural aspirations of rulers in Egypt, Iran and the Fertile Crescent, had permitted a remarkable flowering of literature, art (especially architecture), science and philosophy. Islam’s cosmopolitan individualism and the wide dissemination of its legal traditions also favoured the growth of a far-flung commercial

That view is partly the result of a famous document called the Constitution of Medina, which Muhammad may have drafted sometime after settling in the oasis. The document—often celebrated as the world’s first written constitution—was a series of formal agreements of nonaggression among Muhammad, the newly arrived Emigrants, the Ansar in Medina who h

Perhaps because of the distinctive ecology of the Near and Middle East, where agrarian society played second fiddle to long-distance trade, Islam was strikingly cosmopolitan. Muslims were first of all members of the umma, the great body of Islamic faithful, and only secondly subjects of their territorial ruler.

Can there be a connection between online universities and the serial insurgencies which, in media noise and human blood, have rocked the Arab Middle East? I contend that there is.

In the modern era, as questions of individual religious obligation have entered the political realm, the Ulama’s ability to define the public discourse regarding correct behavior and belief has increased dramatically. They have even managed to broaden their audience by playing a far more active role in the political developments of the Middle East.