The Birth of the Islamic Caliphate as a Multi-Level Contingency

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Contingency and Particularity

Abstract

The explosive rise of Islam in the seventh century puzzled generations of scholars. After being first enunciated in the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca, the new religion spread around the Middle East with a remarkable speed. By the mid seventh century, the Arabs controlled the enormous territory of Afroeurasia stretching from the Central Asia to the North Africa. In the academic literature, two social-scientific approaches to the rise of Islam can be identified (Donner 1981: 8). A deterministic approach interprets the rise of the Islamic caliphate as the result of structural processes in the Arab world that would have made such or similar outcome inevitable. An accident-like approach views the advent of Islam as one of the Black Swan events of history, a great unpredictable happening to which historians can adduce only spurious post factum interpretations (Cook 2024: 55-56). This paper develops an alternative interpretation, which I call a multi-level contingency approach. A multi-level contingency refers to the temporally bounded episode of synchronization and interaction of the causal processes that operate at different socio-structural levels (micro, meso, and macro) but neither of these processes can singularly produce the outcome in question. Viewed from this perspective, the rise of the Islamic Caliphate was a by-product of synchronization and interaction of several low-probability events that occurred at the different socio-structural levels. The micro-level event was emergence of a heterodox monotheistic community in one of the settlements in Arabia (Mecca). The meso-level condition refers to a unique power-network structure in another settlement (Yathrib), which provided the monotheists with an opportunity for a retreat and religiopolitical upscaling. The macro-level event refers to the dramatic weakening of the hegemonic power structure in the Middle East created by a long and devastating war between Byzantium and Persia.

Author

• Pavel I. Osinsky, Appalachian State University