The Rough Guide History of Islam

by Justin Wintle

INTRODUCTION ‘Islam’ is an Arabic word meaning ‘submission’ in English, which describes a religious and sociopolitical system founded by the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad in Arabia at the beginning of the 7th century. Following Muhammad’s death in 632, Islam spread into the Middle East, and then further into central, southern and eastern Asia; into Africa; and into southeastern Europe. Today, Islam has approximately one billion followers – one sixth of the world’s population. In the fourteen hundred years since its inception, Islam has manifested itself as a continuous and continuously evolving civilization that has at times outshone other civilizations – as, for instance, at the glittering court of Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the powerful Turkish-Ottoman empire in the 16th century, whom half of Asia and all of Europe held in awe. Earlier, during the 10th and 11th centuries, Islamic scholars did much to preserve the learning of the ancient Greeks, to the benefit of all mankind. In the same period, significant advances in medical science took place within Islam, while throughout its history Islam has promoted an architecture that in its rich diversity is one of the glories of human ingenuity. In the Koran, a scriptural text definitively assembled after Muhammad’s death, he claimed that a comprehensive series of truths emanating from God – Allah – had been revealed to him through the intermediary of the archangel Gabriel. Yet the monotheistic core of the Koran, that there is one God and one God only, was already well established. Both Judaism and Christianity, which had penetrated Arabia, espoused the same philosophy, and long stretches of the Koran are absorbed with measuring Judaic and Christian history and thought against the ‘message’ proclaimed by Muhammad, who, in common with many other Arabs of his time, acknowledged Abraham (Ibrahim) as a founding patriarch. It is sometimes said that Islam has never undergone, or been prepared to undergo, ‘reformation’. This, though, is simply untrue. In its very nature Islam was and remains quintessentially reformist, sometimes being characterized as a ‘reformed Judaism’, as well as (less convincingly) a rehash of Arianism, a Christian ‘heresy’ that insists on the separateness and inferiority of Christ to God. More generally, the Islamic faith strongly emphasizes the concept of renewal, both of the individual and of society, and Islam itself was launched as a political as well as doctrinal revolution. Muhammad contended that the people of Arabia, a barren, tribal and largely nomadic territory on the fringes of the then ‘civilized’ world, were overdue a ‘revelation’ of their own. But the revelation he provided explicitly superseded existing monotheistic revelations, whether Judaic or Christian, giving rise to a supremacist attitude that rapidly translated into conquest and dominion. For not only was Muhammad the outstanding articulator of Arab culture, he was also a warrior politician, and his example inspired others to spread Islam by the sword. In Muhammad’s wake, the Arabs broke out of Arabia, creating with surprising rapidity an empire that stretched from Spain in the west to Afghanistan in the east, overrunning the ancient Persian empire, a large part of the Roman Byzantine empire, and the coastline of North Africa in the process. The impetus behind Arab expansionism was the revolutionary dynamism of the Islamic although for a century at least the conversion of others seems not to have been a priority among Arab conquerors, the great majority of those overrun were eventually persuaded or cajoled into becoming Muslims. And in the longer term, Islam spread its tentacles still down the eastern coast and other parts of Africa; way into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent; into pockets of China; and into Southeast Asia. Most famously, Constantinople, the hub of the Byzantine empire, was seized by Muslim forces in 1453, sealing the fate of Christianity east of the Hellespont. But as Islam spread, it lost much of its Arab character. By the mid-16th century, three discrete Muslim empires existed, none of them the Turkish Ottoman empire, the Persian Safavid empire and the Mughal empire in India. Since then, Islam has sought to come to terms with its fragmentation and diversity. On the one hand, it enshrines the cardinal belief in an Islamic umma, or cohesive transnational community, promoted by Muhammad himself. On the other is the bald fact that as Islam has expanded, so it has been affected by contact with different cultures – never more obviously, perhaps, than with the emergence of Sufism, the ‘mystical wing’ of Islam, partly shaped by the ideas and practices of older kinds of mysticism in Persia and India. From early in its history, Islam was also riven by internal dissent, part political and part doctrinal, which during the course of the 8th and 9th centuries produced an enduring split between ‘majority’ Sunni Muslims and ‘minority’ Shiite Muslims – a divis...

Genres: Islam

520 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2003

Reviews

[trickgnosis]

Very helpful and handy and compact. Someone should give it to McCain so he can look up the difference between Sunni and Shiite.