Jeune Street

Larabanga Mosque, Ghana

It may be difficult to imagine today, but Islam was at one time the main civilization for the world — not just the Middle East and parts of Africa. I’m reading Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, a fascinating study by Philip D. Curtin, in which he highlights the role of Islam in connecting parts of the world through a trade axis that extended from China to Europe. These trade arteries allowed important new inventions to cross civilizational boundaries and accelerate development half a world away:

In the broadest perspective of Afro-Eurasian history, in the period from about 750 AD to at least 1500, Islam was the central civilization for the whole of the Old World. Not only was it the most dynamic and creative of Rome’s and Persia’s successors; it was also the principal agency for contact between the discrete cultures of this period, serving as the carrier that transmitted innovations from one society to another. Arabic numbers are called Arabic because Europeans learned bout them from the Arabs; but positional value notation was an Indian invention. Chinese inventions like the compass reached Europeans, and European inventions like artillery passed through the same hands. Nor was transmission linked to technology. The Muslim religion was also carried as part of a broad process of culture change – largely by traders, not conquerors. It is worth remembering that the two countries with the largest Muslim populations in the last quarter of the twentieth century are Indonesia and China, where Arab armies never trod.