Chapter 19 India in Coma The zeal of the Arabs to spread Muhammad’s word that catered to their innate urge to plunder, which for Edward Gibbon made Islam ‘the profitable religion of Arabia’, obliterated the great cultures of the time, occasioned by his thesis that “the Koran inculcates, in the most absolute sense, the tenets of fate and predestination, which would extinguish both industry and virtue, if the actions of man were governed by his speculative belief.” Whatever, after the initial fanatical momentum of the booties, the Arabs, bereft of any political culture to name began to yield the pan-Islamic