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Sophisticated Arabs often explain that in the Arab world, everyone understands that exaggerated language is not to be taken literally and that the West must not take it literally either. Still, elfyza (verbalization) decisively shapes Arab thought and action. Arabic tends to act as a compensatory mechanism, producing a world far more attractive than the real one. Such an escape from reality was the recent blatant Nasser-Hussein lie that Anglo-American planes helped Israel. Arabs believed it because it could have happened: Arab truth is meant to be only approximate or potential. There is no credibility gap among Arabs, so long as a statement, however fantastic, fits in with what they want to hear. "Everyone knows that Jews cannot fight," Arabs explain. "Therefore somebody else must have fought for them."
The Rise of an Empire
Language is also a vital element of the Moslem religion. Mohammed's one miracle was the Koran's language: the fact that this highly literate and eloquent body of precepts suddenly flowed from the mouth of an illiterate merchant in 7th century Mecca. The book of 77,934 words, memorized by millions for 50 generations, embodies much of Judaism and Christianity, which sprang out of the same awe-inspiring desert. Both simpler and more static, Islam postulates a fixed way of life ordained by God and transmitted to man through a series of mortal messengers (prophets), notably Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Until Mohammed, man misinterpreted the message, but the Prophet revealed it correctly. He permitted Moslems four wives (he had about a dozen) and invented a masculine eternity full of nubile virgins, a paradise assured by good works and obedience to simple rules, such as praying to Mecca five times daily. The quickest way to heaven was by dying in a holy war to spread the faith, the only war permitted.
Islam had no priests, only "teachers," and virtually no theology. Crucial to its later stagnation was the fact it had no analogy to Christ's martyrdom, no sense of suffering in the Jewish pattern that might have prepared Moslems for adversity. Islam was an instant success. In the power vacuum left by the disintegration of the last remnants of Roman and Byzantine order, Mohammed's hard-riding followers quickly achieved one of the world's greatest military conquests. Armed with fast cavalry and such innovations as the stirrup (giving lancers leverage), Arabs swept east to India and west to France, subjugating Persia, Egypt and Spain. Within 100 years, they won an empire bigger than the one the Romans had built up in 600 years, and they commanded the world's trade routes from Canton to Cordova.
No mere destroyers, the fighters under the banners of Islam set up garrisons and developed a high culture. The world owes to them algebra, trigonometry, many chemical compounds, pioneering work in astronomy, medicine and horticulture. Yet missing in Arab science was any true sense of creativity; despite its technical inventions, it regarded knowledge more as a matter of gathering the known than exploring the unknown.
The Fall of a Culture