In its first fifty years, Islam expanded to the western edge of the Indian Ocean, to the eastern lip of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Nile, to the Caspian Sea, to the Persian Gulf. In this area, this intercommunicative zone so richly permeated with preexisting channels of interaction, Muslim stories and ideas went humming from person to person through gossip and tale-telling, street talk and scholarly debate, flowing easily because the ideas were not that new.
