Muhammad and the revolutionary community

Arabia was the natural transport route between the Mediterranean and India. Trade were to create poles of wealth and poverty and shatter the old equal-sounding communities in the area, and drive many into debt slavery. Indebtedness was the biggest issue in the classical empires.

Muhammad was a merchant who undertook to restore the equality that invading capitalism had destroyed. In his hometown of Makkah, he gathered around him a party of equals, regardless of origin, who soon aroused the suspicion of the authorities. On the other hand, citizens of the conflict-torn neighboring city of Yathrib appealed to Muhammad and his group, as outsiders, to make impartial peace there. Of the dissenting Yathrib, Muhammad’s group, the Muslims or ”those who submit to God”, soon created a revolutionary and expansive society that for a few years subjugated Arabia and then – with the help of anti-imperialist Christian groups – Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Persia.

The rapid successes quickly led to new inequalities within the group - which, moreover, increasingly began to perceive themselves as an elite in relation to the rest of society and did not like to let in newcomers. New revolutionary communities that relied on Muslim principles therefore emerged and would do so for hundreds of years. After a few hundred years, one group, the Shiites, revolted backed by several dissatisfied groups, leading to a regime change. Dissatisfaction with this regime created new rebel groups such as the Fatimids, the Ismaili movement, the Fatimids, the Zanj movement etc etc who created regimes based on their view of what was ”genuine”, just Islam. Unfortunately, everyone applied roughly the same principles to achieve this in practice – bureaucratic administration – so they were all corrupted after some generation and new movements succeeded them. However, the ban on debt slavery in the Islamic area remained to this day.

After a few hundred years, however, the Muslim area fell victim to military adventurers. Islamic organization now took two forms. On the one hand, intellectual, legal, civil servants in the form of various law schools that trained judges and other functionaries who were happy to stand up both as government officials and as support for opposition groups. And partly popular, so-called Sufi movements that emphasized popular equality and the mysterious unity with God. In contact with aggressive European conquerors from the 18th century onwards, it was primarily the latter who took on the role of defending their communities – while providing social community, security, education, health care and other people may need.

Reading
Maxime Rodinson: Muhammad, Pantheon 1980
Ira Lapidus: A history of Islamic societies, Cambridge University Press 1988.