We may express the historical function of the 'Abbasid Caliphate by describing it as a reintegration and resumption of the Achaemenian Empire - a rei… - Arnold J. Toynbee

On the whole the Aramaean or Syrian element, rather than the Iranian, may be regarded as the deeper influence, and, if we peer back behind the time of troubles, the Iranian element fades out and we catch a glimpse of a society in Syria, in the generation of King Solomon and his contemporary King Hiram, which was just discovering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and had already discovered the Alphabet. Here at last we have identified the society to which the twin Islamic societies (subsequently combined in one) were affiliated, and we call it the Syriac Society.

We have observed that the germ of creative power in Christianity was not of Hellenic but of alien origin (in fact of Syriac origin, as we can now identify it). By contrast we can observe that the creative germ of Islam was not alien from, but native to, the Syriac Society.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.