But What about Egypt?

This post is really a reminder to myself that I appear to have left out Egypt, somewhat, in my appreciation of my early political history of Islam-by-region. I have referred to it somewhat in my earlier discussion of cities and in discussing the Maghreb and its Fatimids (and even in some of my Asian discussion when I mentioned the Asian origins of the Mamluk Dynasty that ruled in Egypt and Syria for some time). I haven't yet done enough specific research to give a significant Egyptian post, however.

What I can say (or perhaps repeat) is that Egypt was an early conquest and that there was also a second wave of major Arab tribal colonisation a few centuries later (that also extended beyond it to the Maghreb including Spain and Portugal). Also, Cairo early on became a cultural capital (under the Fatimids and since) and Egypt was generally unified and virtually politically independent from (or even ruling over) other parts of the Arab world from its earliest Islamic history. Al-Azhar mosque-university at Cairo is today still generally regarded as the pre-eminent Sunni authority and teaching institution in Islam and it has a long and distinguished history in that role (despite occasionally bending its will to that of Egyptian secular leaders and modernist thinking - perhaps its great strength in future and Islam's salvation may be its continuing of a modern imagination opposed to the Wahhabism and radicalism emanating inexorably from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Iran).

Culturally, Egypt has been so significant in Arab, Islamic and Middle Eastern history and yet politically it has been a little uninteresting ironically because of a tendency to stability, I think, and this may explain why I don't have a lot to say about it yet. That stability-tendency may have to do with the stability originating from Egypt having a one-river geography and the successful local political model of pre-Islamic centralised dynasties (also owing to that geography, I would say). There may be a lot more of use to say but I have tended to treat the "Central Lands" a little sparsely, generally, on the perhaps questionable assumption that closeness to the central authority of Islam produced relatively uninteresting uniformity of political, religious and cultural experiences. I must admit that for much of Islam's history most of the backwater that became Saudi Arabia, for example, generally came under no central political authority at all despite its closeness to the seats of the major Eastern Caliphates and that the Persia that the Arabs overran in the 7th Century also deserves much more of my attention than it has so far received from me, as I've mentioned before.

I will certainly discuss the cultural contribution of Egypt in later posts on culture even if I don't post region-by-region on culture and when I write about the 19th Century Arab Nahda (Renaissance) and beyond, readers will notice Egyptian influence in this period was vital as it has always been to Arab-Islamic culture.

Having now discussed all the major regions in some way from various non-economic perspectives, in my next post I will undertake a general exposition of the economics and trade of the entire region encompassed by Islam in its early successful history. Economic success follows political success so my economic 'treatise' follows logically a discussion of what was actually happening around the world politically to the Arab-Islamic project.

I will follow that post with a further deepening of my discussion of what Arabs and Muslims and others eventually made of Islam itself religiously, culturally, legally and politically (as a way of thinking about this world and the putative next one, in other words). Yes, science will be involved and I will suggest now that, at first, Islam was good for the Old Western World version of science that was being widely suppressed by Christians in both the East and the West.