CAUSES, EFFECTS AND PATTERNS IN ARAB HISTORY
This research paper focuses on, and offers some explanations for two central patterns in Arab history, especially the contradictory themes of Arab unity and disunity, brotherhood and factional discord, which have coexisted throughout Arab history from the time of the Prophet Muhammad (571-632 A.D.) to the end of World War II.
Arab unity and the rise of Islam. The Islamic faith captured the minds and souls of the quarrelsome Arabian tribes of 7th century Medina and Mecca primarily because of Muhammad's militant faith and charismatic personality and his astuteness as a political, military and religious leader. According to Hitti, the Bedouin of the Arabian deserts and villages of that time had little concept of attachment to the common good "beyond that which pertains to his tribe" (10). The religion Muhammad founded was a great unifying force. According to Hitti, the Prophet replaced "the most vital bond of Arab relationship, that of tribal kinship [with] a new bond, that of faith" (40). The Islamic community of believers or umma accepted the central tenet that 'there is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet,' the Koran as the word of God, the hadith, which Hourani defines as "traditions of what the Prophet had said and done" and the sharia or Islamic law (1). A Muslim accepted without question the Five Pillars of Faith, shahada or the acceptance of Allah, the salat, prayer to Mecca five times a day, zakat or alms giving, sawm, the annual fasting and abstinence from sex during the month of Ramadan and Hajj, the obligation to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during one's lifetime.
The Arab world reached the zenith of its power during the 8th and 9th centuries, the great wave of conquest which resulted in a unified empire under the central direction of the Prophet's successors, the Umayyad caliphs (660-749) in Damascus. Hitti says that "within 100 years after the death o...