Toynbee has always captivated us by his willingness to see through his own prejudices. He brings us up.
As he traveled around the world with his co-author wife as retirees, meeting face to face with people and places they knew more of than the people they were meeting who lived there, he could be shocked and inspired anew. The trip is through predominantly non-European regions.
For example, in traveling Indonesia, he points out that this vast population converted peacably to Islam without being conquered by Arabs. And its population practices are a beacon to all religions.
While many historians have mined the mother lode of irony, Toynbee has a way of making it ring. Of the Umayyads, Toynbee writes: "One of the greatest of ironies of all history is the fate of the house that Muhammad built. Muhammad had a great fall. The unsuccessful prophet succumbed to the temptation to succeed as a statesman and a strategist. Yet, in seeking and winning worldly success in Medina, Muhammad was unwittingly working for his adversaries in Mecca....Mu'awiyah was one of the greatest masters, known to history, of the artful, patient type of statesmenship. He ranks with Augustus, Philip of Macedon, Liu Pang, and Cavour...Within twenty-nine years of Muhammad's death, the state that Muhammad had founded, and that his successors had swiftly expanded into a vast empire, became the undisputed spoil of Mu-awiyah the son of Hind: that redoubtable Meccan merchant-princess who had been Muhammad's bitterest enemy. Unlike Muhammad, Mu'awwiyah founded a dynasty--the house of Umayyah--which lasted for ninety years and ruled the world from Multan and Tashqand to Aden, and from Aden to Gibraltar and Narbonne." [214]
Toynbee visited the pleasure palaces of the Caliphs, noting the absence of any religious affiliations, and with their mosaics of half-naked houris. [216] He lauds their tolerance and love of beauty. ( )