Mongol Catastrophe

“Besides all this internal bigotry, the most destructive blow to Islamic reason, and actually to Islamdom itself, would be an external threat: the “Mongol catastrophe” of the mid-thirteenth century. The armies of  Genghis Khan and his successors stormed the Middle East, conquering everything between Syria and India. All invaders are brutal, but the Mongols’ terror was “unprecedented,” for they “loved destruction for its own sake.” As they marched through Islamdom,

Again and again, almost the entire populace of a city was massacred without regard to sex or age, only skilled artisans being saved and transported away; even peasants were involved, being used as a living mass of rubble forced ahead of the army to absorb arrows and fill moats.

In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad—then the most vibrant and polished city of Islamdom, if not the world. They massacred almost the whole Muslim population, including the caliph, and destroyed the House of Wisdom, with its magnificent collection of the works of the Mutazilites and other intellectuals of Islam. It was said that so many manuscripts were thrown into the Tigris that the river turned black from the ink for days on end. The Mongols even shattered the irrigation systems of the Middle East, reducing agricultural production to one-tenth of what it had been before. This was colossal destruction that Europe was lucky to have never faced.