ABSTRACT
In recent years Arab nationalists have taken exception to the custom of regarding the appearance of Muhammad as the starting point of Arab history; Persians too have shown a similar attitude and have protested against treating Islam as the beginning of a new epoch rather than a political and religious intrusion into an older cultural development. Despite all these quite legitimate shifts of accent in the service of a new self-confidence there are two related facts that cannot be denied: first that it was only the mission of the Prophet that made the Arabs capable of taking a positive initiative in world history, and second that the lines of development in the Near East were one and all, like rays through a lens, refracted through Islam, and even where they showed themselves resistant to its temptations and pressures they were deeply affected, if not radically changed, by being aligned into a new historical system of relationships.
