Throughout the coastal areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, archaeologists have uncovered a layer of subsoil that was deposited over a period of three hundred years beginning in the middle of the seventh century AD.
This stratum, named the “Younger Fill” by the geologist Claudio Vita-Finzi, covers the ruins of all the major cities and settlements that were established along the Mediterranean littoral during classical antiquity. It stands as a coda to Graeco-Roman civilization. For three centuries after the year 650 the archaeology of the region is all but barren. Wastelands or severely diminished primitive settlements have replaced the formerly great cities of the Roman Empire and the Near East.
One might surmise that the Younger Fill is the result of some yet unidentified climatic trauma that afflicted the entire Mediterranean basin. However, the same phenomenon has been observed in an entirely different watershed: Mesopotamia, the land drained by the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and also including the coastal regions adjoining the Persian Gulf.
During the same period — from the middle of the seventh century until the middle of the tenth — archaeology in the entirety of Europe and the Middle East virtually disappears. This civilizational interruption might be thought a result of the Dark Ages in Europe, except for the fact that it includes areas of the Middle East which were never part of the Roman Empire, and where advanced cultures independent of Rome and Greece had flourished.
What all these areas have in common, of course, is that they were conquered by the Arabs during the initial period of Islamic expansion, when the Near East, North Africa, and Iberia were subjugated within the space of less than a century.
Islam came to the Mediterranean and left as its principal legacy the Younger Fill.
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The idea that Islam was the primary cause for the end of classical civilization has been out of favor for the last eighty years or so, ever since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne first proposed it in his ground-breaking book Mohammed and Charlemagne.
In Pirenne’s time it was commonly understood — and still is — that the end of civilization began in the fifth century with the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions, a full two hundred years before the legions of Mohammed raged across the eastern and southern littorals of the Mediterranean. According to the scholarly consensus, Roman civilization was already moribund by the time the Arabs arrived on the scene, and the Islamic incursion simply tipped the last vestiges of it into oblivion.
Using recent archaeological data, Pirenne concluded that classical civilization did not end in the fifth century, but rather in the seventh, when the fragments of the later Roman Empire were overrun by the Arab invaders. The Islamic predators terminated civilization wherever they encountered it, in whatever form it happened to take.
This thesis was not well-received in its time. It was relegated to the fringe, where it has remained ever since. In the politically correct 21st century, which extols the grandeur of the “Golden Age of Islam in Iberia”, Pirenne’s stock can only decline further. Our degraded culture is not receptive to the idea that it was Islam, rather than the Germanic barbarians, that destroyed the culture and civilization of Rome.
What happened to Pirenne in the 1920s and 1930s, however, reminds us that politically correct notions about Islam did not originate in the late twentieth century. The myth of al-Andalus was firmly established in the nineteenth century by British and German scholars, who discovered in Islam the “saviors of classical knowledge”. By the time of the Great War these ideas were firmly entrenched, so that Pirenne faced an uphill battle in his attempts to propagate an alternative theory.
Fortunately for his modern admirers, a wealth of additional archaeological data has accumulated in the eight decades since Pirenne first published his analysis. More recent evidence not only corroborates Pirenne’s assertions, it demonstrates conclusively that no other explanation can reasonably be adduced: the Islamic invasions wrecked the agricultural systems of the Mediterranean basin, all but destroyed literacy, and brought down the vibrant, prosperous, and civilized successor states to the late Roman Empire in North Africa and Iberia.
In writing Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy, Emmet Scott has published the most important piece of scholarship of this young century. The New English Review Press deserves great credit for making his book available to the general public.
Mr. Scott describes in detail the magnitude of the destruction — much worse than most of us had previously thought — wrought by Islam on classical antiquity. Far from saving the works of the ancients, Islam all but annihilated them, even as it destroyed the advanced civilizations that created them.
The destruction was both ideological and physical. When the Arab armies overran the Near East and North Africa, their heedless pastoral practices destroyed the topsoil, and thus the agriculture that sustained the wealthy economies of the region. By pillaging existing infrastructure and permitting complex irrigation systems to fall into ruin, they forced hardship and starvation upon what remained of the indigenous population. Hence the Younger Fill: the tangible evidence of what Arab culture brought to Mediterranean civilization.
Islam also systematically destroyed the ideas that underlay classical learning, bringing into disrepute any corpus of knowledge that did not agree with the Koran and did not further the spread of Islam. Entire fields of knowledge were consigned to the dustbin, further guaranteeing the poverty and backwardness of the Islamic states that displaced their classical predecessors.
Finally, Islamic piracy and predation brought sea trade in the Mediterranean to a virtual standstill. This was not only devastating to the economies of Europe, but it also halted the export of papyrus from Egypt to the rest of the region. The use of papyrus for written material was the major engine of widespread literacy in the Mediterranean. After the supply dried up, parchment proved to be scarce, expensive, and inadequate as a replacement.
Thanks to Islam, the Mediterranean basin was transformed from a peaceful, literate, civilized culture into a violent, illiterate, and backward one — all in the space of a generation or so.
[Lengthy exposition redacted -- visit the link below to read the whole thing.]
If you are on a limited budget or have limited time and can only read one book this year, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited is the one to buy. And a purchase will most likely be necessary, since it will be unavailable in most libraries, what with the hot breath of CAIR and MCB and all the other surrogates of the Muslim Brotherhood breathing down librarians’ necks.
For more than a thousand years Europe and the European diaspora have struggled to cope with the enormity of the devastation inflicted on us by the Islamic invasions. Our collective memory has attempted — and failed — to retain an accurate idea of what actually happened to us.
In earlier centuries our ability to understand was limited by the inadequacy of communication over vast distances and times. Later, during the European ascendancy, it was difficult to comprehend how much damage could be inflicted by such a primitive and barbaric culture.
By the time the European colossus stood astride the globe in the nineteenth century, Islam was a trivial retrograde rabble that deserved no respect and even less attention. How could it have come within a hair’s breadth of smothering European civilization in its cradle?
The truth of what Islam did — and continues to do — to Western Civilization has finally been reconstructed. Like an accomplished forensic detective, Emmet Scott has assembled all the pieces of evidence and built an airtight case against Islam.
The only verdict possible is “Guilty!”
In the days and months to come the airwaves and the internet will be flooded with ads for books about Barack Hussein Obama, or Mitt Romney, or the meltdown of the euro. Resist their blandishments. Forego just one of those transient and evanescent books.
Instead, read Emmet Scott’s magnum opus. This one is for the ages.
After you finish Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, your understanding of and reverence for our precious civilization will be fundamentally reorganized. This book is truly artful because it changes the way you see.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-really-killed-pax-romana.html
I just downloaded Scott's book and look forward to reading it.
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