ABSTRACT
The three exceptional instances involved the contributions of professional Orientalist scholars: Daniel C. Dennett, Jr., Claude Cahen and Elie Ashtor. Dennett rejected Pirenne’s interpretation of the Near Eastern role. But neither Dennett, nor Cahen, nor Ashtor has ever claimed that his contribution offered all that the Orientalists could and should state on the subject of the Pirennean dispute. If, as postulated by Pirenne, the alleged cessation of the Mediterranean trade had been capable of ruining Europe it would have produced similar consequences, if not even more disastrous consequences, for the Near Eastern economy. The economic policy of the Arabs in the conquered territories— especially their indifference to or their interference with trade— was of crucial importance to the Near East, and only secondarily to Western Europe. One of the outstanding demographic problems of the Arab invasion was the mass immigration of the surplus population from the Arabian Peninsula to the sedentarized zone of the Near East.
