WHEN HAVE THE PRINCES EVER BEEN WILLING TO SHARE POWER WITH THE PRIESTS?:

The Pragmatic Caliphs: PEACE BE UPON YOU: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence By Zachary Karabell (JASON GOODWIN, 1/06/08, NY Times Book Review)

Karabell, the author of “Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal,” begins with a brief but very clear account of early Islam, turning easy assumptions on their heads. He explains that the faith was not created in direct opposition to the other monotheistic religions; it built upon them, and against the tribal pantheism of seventh-century Arabia. Muslims believe that with Muhammad, the revelation given to earlier prophets was perfected.

Islam was generally not spread by the sword, either. True, a Muslim military caste defeated, and replaced, existing rulers, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian or pagan. Still, ordinary life went on. Even the dreaded jihad, Karabell writes, was an ambiguous concept, and could mean a moral program of self-discipline and purification.

Karabell’s Islam is a multifaceted faith that has no pope, no single interpretation of the law. In Muhammad’s lifetime the holy city of Medina was an ideal, never “a viable model for Muslim society.” After the Arabs conquered the Middle East scarcely a decade following the Prophet’s death in 632, they faced the problem of how to govern the conquered. What, in effect, would Muslim society be in the real world?

The short answer, Karabell says, was: tolerant. Pragmatism prevailed in most Muslim states from then on, for nearly 1,400 years. In both North Africa and Spain, ordinary people sometimes converted, hoping for access to wealth and status. Often the conversions were sincere. They were welcomed, within limits, but they were very rarely forced. Only reverse conversions were anathema to the Muslim authorities: apostasy was a crime.

Islamic rulers, like rulers anywhere, enjoyed the benefits of the powerful, financed by public taxation, while the public, as usual, grumbled, married, had children, died.