In the 600s AD, Mecca was a village of a few hundred people, off the beaten path, a backwater uninteresting to distant empires. Then along comes a guy — Muhammad — and somehow within five years he and his heirs went from ruling one oasis to controlling all of Arabia, and thirty years later everything from Morocco to Pakistan. HOW?!
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To start, let’s look at a satellite map of the region.
1. The Middle East at the Eve of Islam
For 1,000 years, the Middle East had been the battleground between two megapowers: one from the sea, the other from land.
Sea vs Land
Greece vs Persia Rome vs Parthia Byzantium vs Sassanids
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You might have heard about the Battle of Thermopylae where a few Greeks were able to delay the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire in 480 BC. Then, how Alexander the Great conquered everything from Greece to India, finishing around 323 BC. After that, the Parthians took over Persia, and the Romans took over Greece, and they continued the war. They were followed respectively by the Sassanid Empire and the East Roman Empire, until their last war ended in 628 AD.
In all three cases, we had a sea-based power built around the Mediterranean on the west.
Simple intro to such comments.. "Ruthless colonization + ethnic cleansing".. "con artist". Simple words revealing twisted ignorant minds. Islam is based on the Quran. Muhammad claims only 1 miracle: The Quran. If the above ignorant minds want to…
