Islam’s rise blocked Eurasian trade routes and positioned Arabs as intermediaries
Evidence
A key factor in this was that after the seventh century AD, “sea-routes and land-routes alike were barred by the meteoric rise of Islam, which interposed its iron curtain between West and East” (Latham 1958, 8). It was Arab middlemen who brought eastern goods to the European seaports of the Mediterranean and Black Sea to sell. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 558
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Used by later Islamophobia readings to frame ‘Islam as barrier’ as a historical trope worth interrogating.