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Monographs on Comparative Religions
Islam
Ron Duncan Hart
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Islam: Submission to Allah
2. The Holy Qur-ān, Sharia and the Caliphate: The Religious Basis of Islam
3. The Umayyad and Abassid Caliphates
4. Al-Andaluz: Muslim Spain
5. The Turkish Empires: Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman
6. Islam in the Twenty-First Century
Bibliography
About the Author
Introduction
In addition to this volume, the Monographs on Comparative Religions Series include Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to give a complete overview of the religions identified with the Abrahamic covenant of monotheism. This series is published with the purpose of providing education and understanding of the religions traditions in our increasingly linked world. These volumes are written as an anthropology of religion, and I have attempted to state the beliefs, practices, and histories in words that are consistent with each religious tradition. I have provided historical, social, and cultural information to define the context within which each religion has come into being and developed as a living society today. To the extent possible, I have discussed and reviewed these materials with religious scholars and believers from each tradition although I recognize that there are internal differences in belief and practice within religions, and I have tried to reflect those in a correct manner. Belief and behavior are at the heart of our self definition as human individuals and the emotional core of our identity. Our religious and/or ideological identity is so important that it shapes major life decisions. This series is published recognizing the powerful importance of religious belief and practice among us as humans, respecting and honoring the uniqueness of the spiritual nature that defines us.
Islam
1 Islam Submission to Allah
A Muslim is one who submits to Allah in all things. Muslims believe that Islam started in the mind of Allah, and it was then that He created Adam and Eve. The history of Islam and Judaism coincide until the birth of Ishmael, the first born son of Abraham who is the father of the Arabs. The second born son, Isaac, became the father of the Jews. Later, Ishmael and his mother Hagar left Abraham’s camp because of jealousy with the principal wife, Sarah, and they traveled to Mecca. Over time Arabs forgot their religious origins, and a time of ignorance settled over the land until the life of Muhammad, the prophet, who once again brought the word of God to them. Islam is an Arabic word that means “submission to God,” and a Muslim is “a person who submits” to God, no matter what his or her ethnic, racial, or national origin.1 The universalism of Islam has made it a major world religion. It has generated a distinctive social system, art and architecture, and literature, and it is one of the dominant economic, political, and intellectual forces in the world. The word Islam comes from the Arabic root SLM, which is the same root for salaam, or peace. The practice of Islam focuses on the oneness and indivisibility of God, and The Holy Qur-ān records the words of God as spoken by Muhammad. God requires absolute devotion and loyalty. The believer’s cultural, personal, and spiritual identity have a unitary focus: the oneness of God.
2 The life of the Muslim is submission to this total immersion in the unity of life and reality around God, and Muslims believe that Allah will provide if one completely submits to Him. Muslims use the word “Allah” rather than the word “God” because the latter in Arabic implies a plural meaning. Since God is one, Muslims use “Allah”, which refers to the oneness of the Divine. The account of creation illustrates the centrality of Allah in Islam as the creator and possessor of all knowledge. The belief in this relationship between God and humans in the beginning defines how Muslims see their relationship with the divine in their own lives today.
3 The creation account in The Holy Qur-ān affirms the omnipresence and omniscience of God, who is central to all life and all existence. In the Beginning Islam is theocentric, and the account of creation focuses on Allah as the creator and possessor of all knowledge. The belief in this relationship between God and humans in the beginning defines how Muslims see their relationship with God in their own lives. The Holy Qur-ān says: 30. Behold, thy Lord said to the angels; ‘I will create a vicegerent on earth.’ They said: ‘Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? Whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?’ He said: ‘I know what ye know not’ 31. And He taught Adam the names of all things; then He placed them before the angels, and said: ‘Tell Me the names of these if ye are right.’ 32. They said: ‘Glory to Thee: of knowledge we have none, save what Thou hast taught us: in truth it is Thou who are perfect in knowledge and wisdom.’ 33. He said: ‘O Adam! Tell them their names.’ When he had told them their names, Allah said: ‘Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of heaven and earth, and I know what ye reveal, and what ye conceal?’ 34. And behold, We said to the angels: ‘Bow down to Adam:’ and they bowed down: not so Iblis: he refused and was haughty: he was of those who reject Faith. 35. And We said: ‘O Adam! Dwell thou and thy wife in the Garden; and eat of the bountiful things therein as (where and when) ye will; but approach not this tree, or ye run into harm and transgression.’ 36. Then did Satan make them slip from the (Garden), and get them out of the state (of felicity) in which they had been. And We said: ‘Get ye down, all (ye people), with enmity between yourselves. On earth will be your dwelling place and your means of livelihood for a time.’ 37. Then learnt Adam from his Lord certain words and his Lord turned towards him; for He is Oft-Returning, Most Merciful. 38. We said: ‘Get ye down all from here; and if, as is sure, there comes to you guidance from Me, whosoever follow My guidance, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. 39. ‘But those who reject the Faith and belie Our Signs, they shall be Companions of the Fire; they shall abide therein.’
4 Muhammad and Early Islam In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries C.E. the Middle East was dominated by the Byzantine (Christian) and Sassanid (Zoroastrian) Empires. Since Zoroastrianism and Christianity along with Judaism were ethical, monotheistic religions, monotheism was the dominant current of religious thought in the region. It was in this religious environment that Muhammad gave the teachings of Islam. In the examples of the Sassanids and the Byzantines, Arabs saw the use of religion as an instrument of politics, and later they would also fuse religion and politics in creating the Muslim empire. The Arab population was divided into northern and southern groups who had quite different lifestyles.
5 The central part of the Arabian Peninsula is called the Al-Rab’ Al-Khali, or the vacant quarter, because it is an uninhabited desert waste land. To the north there are desert lands that are interspersed with inhabited oases and valleys. The northern Arabs were divided between the farmers who settled in the oases and others who lived a Bedouin lifestyle herding camels, sheep, goats, and horses from grassland to grassland. The southern Arabs lived along the Arabian Sea from Yemen to Oman. This was a well-watered region of cities and cosmopolitanism set apart from the rest of Arabia. It was a wealthy area because of the spice trade with India, and the Greeks and Romans called it Arabia Felix (or Pleasant Arabia) in contrast to the harsh desert interior of that land. Mecca and the Quraysh Clan. However, it was a third area of Arabia that was to become important in the rise of Islam, the zone along the Red Sea between Yemen in the south and the deserts of the north. This was the land of Mecca and Medina, an area divided between town based merchants and Bedouins. The merchants of Mecca and lesser towns organized caravans to carry the spices and other trade goods from Yemen to the trade centers of Syria and the Mediterranean. A nomadic clan, the Quraysh, settled in Mecca in the fifth century and eventually gained control of this caravan trade. As the prominent family in Mecca, the Quraysh also became responsible for the Ka’aba, the most sacred shrine in the Arabian Peninsula, and other sacred places around the town. The Quraysh clan was also responsible for selling food and water to the pilgrims. Muhammad was born into this clan, but he remained marginal to the management of the Ka’aba and the established religion of Mecca. The religious tradition that dominated Mecca and the desert tribes of Arabs was the Semitic polytheism that traced its roots to the original Mesopotamian cultures, especially the worship of natural forces and celestial bodies. It included animistic elements, such as the worship of sacred stones. During caravan trips to Palestine and Syria Muhammad came into contact with Jewish and Christian thought and came to know the Bible. As Muhammad received teachings from Allah, he understood the origins of Islam from Abraham. In Muslim sacred history the cube-shaped Ka’aba (the House of God) in Mecca was originally built by Adam and later destroyed in the great flood. Abraham re-built the Ka’aba while on a visit to his son Ishmael, and he encrusted the famous black stone (a meteorite) into one corner. Muhammad the Prophet. Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 and since he was orphaned early, he grew up under the care of an uncle.
6 He spent much of his childhood in the desert with a nomadic branch of the family, and like all Bedouin children he tended sheep. At the age of twelve he began working with his uncle in the caravan trade. At the age of twenty-five he headed a caravan to Syria for a rich widow, Khadija, also of the Quraysh clan, and he became close to her. Although she was fifteen years older, they were eventually married which brought stability and leisure to Muhammad. She became Muhammad’s closest confidant and supporter as he later matured into the great prophet. During this period, Muhammad developed interests in broad religious issues, such as the Last Judgment and the prohibition of polytheism by the existing monotheistic religions. When he was forty-years-old, he began the practice of meditating in the mountains around Mecca. One night (known as “The Night of Power and Excellence”) while he was meditating on Mount Hira, the archangel Gabriel, the Messenger of God, appeared to him and said, Recite in the name of your Lord who created – created man from clots of blood Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know...
7 Allah had called Muhammad to recite his words to the world. Allah was the creator god worshiped by the Quraysh clan. Initially, he feared the vision and went home to confide in Khadija. She reassured him that he should trust the vision, and her cousin Warakah also predicted that God would speak through Muhammad, as he had with Moses. Warakah was a wise, old blind man who was an important source of instruction on faith and ethical conduct for the Prophet. After several months of self-questioning and hesitation Muhammad had another vision of Gabriel sitting on a throne between heaven and earth, and Gabriel told him that he was to be the prophet of God. Gabriel then took him to Jerusalem where he stood on the rock on the temple mount, where Abraham had offered his son to God. From there he ascended to Heaven to stand before God, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and received the charge to carry the word of God. With that Muhammad knew that he had been chosen as “Messenger of God.” Muhammad began to recite his rhymed revelations to family members and friends, and many believed that he was inspired. Khadija his wife, Ali Talib his cousin, Abu Bakr his friend, and others believed that the one and only God was speaking through him. His early revelations were about God creating the universe and the final judgment where people would be judged for the good and evil in their lives. People would go to Paradise or Hell depending on their actions. His followers began writing down the verses that he pronounced, and after his death they were organized into The Holy Qur-ān.
The Muslim Community. Muhammad began to preach to the people of Mecca to give up polytheism and idols to accept the one invisible God, but there was considerable opposition from those who believed in the traditional religion. Others saw this as a threat to Mecca’s role as a pilgrimage center and the economic and social importance that resulted from it. Some tried to disrupt his gatherings and put pressure on Muhammad’s followers to disavow him. The biggest blow to him, however, in this period was the death of his wife, Khadija, who had encouraged and supported him. Shortly afterwards his uncle and protector Abu Talib also died, leaving Muhammad doubly bereaved over the loss of the two people most important to him.
8 At that time of personal loss and opposition from Meccan groups, Muhammad was approached by a delegation from Medina that invited him and his community of Muslims to come and live there and take the leadership of the town. In 622, Muhammad and two hundred followers left Mecca and moved to Medina. That was the hijra (or flight), and it marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar and the official start of Muslim history. In Medina, Muhammad built the first mosque, continued his teachings, and worked on building the ummah or community of believers. There were also a Jews in Medina and although Arabs accepted Muhammad’s teachings, Jews did not. Some of the Jews initially thought that Muhammad might be the messiah for whom they were waiting, but after a couple of years of theological discussions, they concluded that he was not.
9 Muslims had originally prayed toward Jerusalem, but when the Jews did not accept Muhammad’s teachings, the decision was made to change the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to the Ka’aba in Mecca. Later, the Jews were attacked, killing some and expelling the others from Medina. Muslims gradually gained acceptance among the nomadic groups in the area and wore down the Meccans by raiding their caravans. During this period Muhammad married a young woman, Aisha, who was the daughter of one of his earliest followers, Abu Bakr. He also took other wives, but Aisha was his favorite. In 630 the Meccans surrendered to Muhammad, and the Muslims made the first pilgrimage to the Ka’aba, which was to become the center of the new faith. Although Muhammad does not seem to have intended to set up a worldly empire initially, the nomadic groups and Meccans pledged themselves to him politically as they accepted the new faith, making him a political leader as well as a military and religious one. Within ten years of his flight to Medina, most Arab groups from Yemen to the Euphrates River had pledged loyalty to Muhammad and Islam, and the new religion had become a political power. Then in 632 after a brief illness Muhammad died, and a crisis of leadership emerged in the new movement because he did not have male heirs. Abu Bakr, his father-in-law and close friend, was named as his successor, the Caliph, or successor. He was to lead the community (ummah) of Muslims on earth, but he was not expected to be a messenger of God like Muhammad. Over the next twenty-four years there were three different caliphs, or successors to Muhammad.
10 Abu Bakr was caliph for only two years before he died, but during that time he collected all of the revelations of Muhammad that people had written down and began to organize them into The Holy Qur-ān. He also consolidated control over Arabia. Under the second caliph, Umar (634 to 644), the Muslims gained control of Syria (636) and Egypt (639), and under the third caliph, Uthman (644 to 656) they gained control of Iraq and Persia (651) when they defeated the Sassanid shah (or king). Uthman completed the preparation of The Holy Qur-ān in its final form before his assassination in 656. Other sayings of Muhammad, called the Hadith, were also compiled. Islam grew dramatically in the seventh century C.E. from a religion to a political and economic power that linked many widely disparate cultural groups from Africa to Asia. The essential pluralistic character of Muslim society and civilization can be traced from this time period, and it included the major populations of the Middle East: Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Egyptians among others. The initial spread of Islam occurred under the Arabs, and today Arabic continues to be the liturgical language of the Muslim world, and it is the daily language in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Although this history gives a strong Arabic influence to Islam, most Middle Eastern people and most Muslims are not Arabs. The Ummah, the Community of Muslims. The term for the community of Muslims is ummah wahidah in Arabic, and it refers to all of the people in the world who are united in their submission to Allah. All those who submit to God are equal and should support and protect each other. The Holy Qur-ān refers to the ummah as people identified by God to receive the prophecy and have a part in God’s divine plan for the world. There are references to different ummah to which Allah sent messengers, who were not accepted. After the death of Muhammad the term came to be used to refer to the religious community of Muslims. The Division of Islam into Sunni and Shi’ite Groups. The definition of the true leadership of the ummah, the community of Muslims, became a factor in the division of Islam between Sunnis and Shi’ites, which has continued to shape Muslim history to the present day. The problem occurred in the choosing of the fourth caliph, Ali Talib. After the assassination of Uthman, Ali Talib became the caliph. Since he was the cousin of Muhammad and the husband of Fatima, the only surviving daughter of Muhammad and Khadija, many felt that he was the rightful heir as caliph. Shortly after Ali Talib accepted the caliphate, he was challenged by a group led by Aisha, the later wife of Muhammad and daughter of the first caliph, Abu Bakr. The succession focused on the surviving women closest to Muhammad, Fatima, his daughter and Aisha, his last wife. The two groups went to war, and Ali defeated Aisha and her followers in battle, but in short order, he was assassinated. The followers of Ali felt that one of his two sons, Hasan or Husayn, Muhammad’s grandsons, should have been elected as the next caliph, but in a compromise solution, a relative of Uthman, Mu’awiya, was named. His descendants kept control of the caliphate for the next century, forming the Umayyad Dynasty. The assassination of Ali divided Islam into two camps: those who believe that the first three caliphs were correctly chosen (Sunnis, known as the “people of tradition and community”),
11 and those who believe that Ali was the rightful heir to Muhammad and that the leader of the Muslims should be one of his descendants (Shi’ites). The conflict between these two groups continues until today in the heartland of the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and Syria being Sunni. Iran and Iraq are majority Shi’ite. In Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority in western Iraq, but the Shi’ites are the majority in the south and east, the area of old Sumer. Lebanon is divided between the Shi’ites in the south (Hezbollah) and Sunnis and Christians in other regions. Many other countries have Shi’ite minorities. There have been other groups in Islam that have taken independent identities, and the Sufis are one of the most important. Sufis approach God through mysticism, and they are known for using altered states of consciousness to achieve a unity with the supernatural, and one such technique is a spinning meditative dance through which they create a spiritual focus on God. The name Sufi means a person who wears wool, and it refers to rough spun woolen robes they wore in the eighth century when they first appeared. They were ascetics who adopted an austere lifestyle, as did many of the early Christians and Hindus. They adopted the simple woolen robe, practiced celibacy, and meditated for long uninterrupted periods. They had few if any belongings, avoiding the materialism of this world in order to achieve union with God in this life rather than waiting for the afterlife. Sufis repeat the “beautiful names of God” for long periods or engage in other ecstatic activities to make possible the mystical union with Allah. Poetry has also been important among Sufis, especially Persian poetry. One of the early Persian Sufi poets, al-Hallaj, was crucified as a heretic by orthodox Muslims in the early 900’s, and he became an important martyr for the group. The most famous of the Sufi poets was the Persian Jalal-uddin Rumi who lived in the 1200’s, and his poetry about his love for God has a classical quality that has rarely been matched in its intensity and beauty. His appeal is cross-cultural and seems to be timeless. As the twentieth-first century began, Rumi was one of the top selling poets in the United States. The Prophets. Although the Islamic calendar is traced from the days of Muhammad, Muslims believe that Islam was founded originally by Abraham. Allah chose Abraham, then Moses and Jesus as messengers to bring His word to humanity.12 The Holy Qur-ān has long narratives explaining the lives of each, as well as the words they brought from Allah. Muslims believe that the messages from each of the first three prophets were corrupted by later people, and that is the reason that God had to send a new prophet each time to correct the errors that people had introduced into the teachings of the last one. Muhammad was the last and final prophet. That God has sent four major prophets to humanity shows His patience and repeated efforts to reach all people. Family and Community in Islam Since Muslims come from a mosaic of cultures from Africa to Asia, there are many traditions of family organization and gender behavior. However, the Arab model has greatest influence throughout the Middle East and North Africa and in some other Muslim areas. The Arab family has ideally been a multi-generation extended family with patriarchal authority. The men work together, and the role of women has traditionally been in the household. Members of the family are expected to be completely loyal, and family ties are valued above all other. Social life is family based and is segregated by gender. Men and women live in separate but contiguous subcultures that interact primarily in the home. The sense of community is important in Islam. Family and community are at the heart of close-knit Muslim societies and an expression of Islam itself. Most Muslim marriages are monogamous, but there were exceptions, and a husband can marry additional wives if the first is barren. Divorce is also possible if the wife is compensated, but adultery is forbidden. Marriage is frequently arranged by the parents, but love marriages are also made. Although the purpose of marriage is to produce children, especially sons, there are love poems and songs showing the importance of romance. Parents are affectionate with their sons and daughters, and family ties are very close. Although the husband is the head of the family, women have authority in administering the house and educating the children. Men are instructed to love and care for their wives, guaranteeing them good food, clothing, and other needs. The seclusion of women is an Arab cultural practice that has been incorporated into Islam and has taken on religious significance. Traditionally, women were confined to the house, so that they would not have contact with men outside of their family who might look on them inappropriately. But, of course, women do eventually have to leave the house for some activities, and the practice of veiling has been to insure their seclusion even when in public places. During the post-World War II period, women in many countries gained more freedom to work outside of the home and to stop veiling themselves. However, the growth of the Islamic movement in the 1980’s and 90’s has led many women to wear the hijab, or head scarf, or even veiling in public as a religious statement of modesty. Conclusions Monotheism has been the greatest religious legacy that the Middle Eastern cultures have given to humanity, and the Middle East stands out as a source of religious contributions to the world. The monotheistic legacy tends to put strict demands on its followers, requiring exclusivity and loyalty to the one God. Much of Muslim history is dedicated to protecting the faithful and admonishing them against the temptations of assimilation with competing belief systems. The command for divine exclusivity is clear to Muslims. The Holy Qur-ān says: And your God is One God: There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.13 This command is also found in the first of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible: I the Lord am your God...You shall have no other gods besides Me.14 The exclusivity of monotheism is one of its defining principles. Although the purity of the abstraction of one God is the firm faith and guiding light for almost half of the world’s people today, the belief in monotheism is an unfathomable mystery for the other half of the world’s people.
Endnotes 1 . Farah, Cesar E. 2003. Islam: Beliefs and Observances. Seventh edition. Hauppauge, New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc. Page 105. 2 . Esposito, John L. 1988. Islam: the Straight Path. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 26-27. 3 . Ayoub, Mahmoud. 1984. The Qur’an and Its Interpreters. Vol. 1. Albany: State University of New York Press. Page 1. 4 . The Holy Qur-ān. 1989. King Fahd Holy Qur-ān Printing Complex, AL-Madinah AL-Munawarah under the Auspices of The Ministry of Hajj and Endowments. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 1410 H. Pages 15-18. Surat 2, Ayat 30 to 39. 5 . For a discussion of Arabia, Mecca, and the early life of Muhammad see Farah, pages 16-19, 21-22, 31-34, and 146-147. 6 . For more information on the life and work of Muhammad see Esposito, pages 7-20. Also Lewis, Bernard. 1966. The Arabs in History. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. Pages 36-48. 7 . The Holy Qur-ān, Surah 96, verses 1-2. 8 . For a discussion of Muhammad’s problems during this period and the hijra see Esposito, page 11. Also Farah, pages 41-42. 9 . For more information on Muhammad’s experience in Medina and the expansion of his influence in Arabia see Farah, pages 49, 54-55, 57-58. 10 . For a discussion of the early calipates and the struggles for power see Esposito, pages 41-43. 11 . For discussions of the Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Sufis see Farah, pages 161-162 and 214-219. Also for a discussion of the Shi’ites and their role today in the Middle East see Lewis, Bernard. 1993. Islam and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 155-165. 12 . For a discussion of The Holy Qur-ān and the Jewish and Christian prophets see Esposito, pages 21-22. 13 . The Holy Qur-ān, Surat 2, Ayat 163. 14 . Bible, Exodus 20: 1 to 3.
2 The Holy Qur-ān, Sharia and the Caliphate: The Religious Basis of Islam
The Holy Qur-ān is God’s divine word and last covenant with humans, and it was spoken on earth through the messenger of God, Muhammad. It is the absolute, word of God which is to be memorized, but not questioned. The Sharia is the body of God’s commandments to humans on how to behave on earth, and its first expression is in The Holy Qur-ān. The combination of the holy texts and the Sharia establish the guidelines for correct Muslim behavior. Muslims understand that The Holy Qur-ān and the Sharia come directly from God and are therefore unquestionable and unchangeable. The Holy Qur-ān and the Hadith (additional teachings by Muhammad) are understood to be inspired by God and the infallible source of Sharia teachings. Religious scholar/judges interpret these teachings according to their understanding of God’s will. The Holy Qur-ān For Muslims the The Holy Qur-ān is the final Divine revelation, and it updates the imperfect understandings of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. God has provided a succession of prophets throughout human history, and their teachings have been to faithfully follow the One True God. The message of each prophet from Abraham to Jesus was correct and followed a sequence of stages based on the human capacity to understand. Each message has superseded the previous one, giving new directions and understandings of God’s work. Muslims expect to find spiritual guidelines in The Holy Qur-ān for any life issue, but not all are stated so that contemporary people can understand them, so they have to be interpreted and explained by those who are trained in Sharia. The first interpreter of the meaning of The Holy Qur-ān was the Prophet Muhammad, who had the kitab (i.e. the book) and also hikma (or wisdom), which can be seen in the actions of his life and which other people can apply in their own lives. All of his sayings and actions were divinely inspired and gave examples of how to live. In this way, his life was an extension of these teachings in understanding good and evil. As God’s direct message to humanity, and because of its divine origin The Holy Qur-ān has the truest instructions for religious belief and practice and everyday behavior. It is the final and most perfect revelation from God. The revelations spoken by Muhammad are the direct word of God, and they are the creed of Islam. The central belief is in the omnipotence and absolute unity of God, and they accept Muhammad as the last of the prophets who completed the work initiated by Abraham.1 “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” This is the Muslim confession of faith in God, monotheism, and the role of Muhammad as the prophet or messenger. In Islam, God is one and undivided, and Muslims see the division of God into three parts in Christianity as a corruption of the original pure monotheism practiced by Abraham. Muslims believe that God existed in the beginning and is the creator of all things, and in the final Day of Judgment God will save the true ones who have submitted to his will and worshiped him. There are one hundred names of Allah, ninety-nine of which are spoken, and those ninety-nine names may be repeated in prayer or worship. The unspoken name of God is only for contemplation. Allah is known as the God of mercy, and in The Holy Qur-ān there are 192 references to mercy while wrath and vengeance are mentioned only seventeen times. The second half of the profession of faith affirms Muhammad’s position as a prophet. God has historically revealed himself to people through prophets, and Muhammad was the last one. God cannot be actually seen because his appearance is too powerful, so he communicates through intermediaries such as the archangel Gabriel. There is no pretension that Muhammad was divine, and he did not have supernatural powers. The Holy Qur-ān, not the Prophet Muhammad, is of divine origin, and it takes centrality in the practice of Islam. Angels also have a place in Islam, and it was the archangel Gabriel whom God used to reveal his will to Muhammad. But, there is little other information about angels. Muslims believe in the Devil as a fallen angel, a belief they share with Christians and Zoroastrians. The Devil and his followers try to thwart God’s will, but they are limited by God’s power. In the Last Judgment, people are sent to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether or not they submitted to God in this life. There are evil forces in life led by Satan, and they choose not to obey Allah. After creating human beings, Allah told the angels to bow before them in deference, but Satan refused. His disobedience to Allah led to his expulsion from Heaven. The evil spirits that follow Satan are called jinns, and they are to be found in all parts of the world. Allah ordered the angels to kill the jinns at one point, but they did not accomplish their task, so Satan and the jinns are ever present in the world today tempting people to do evil. Allah will judge the people who give into temptation and commit evil acts. A person has two angels, one on each shoulder, and one writes down the good deeds and the other the bad ones. On the Day of Judgment each person will appear before Allah and the annotations of the deeds will be reviewed. People who have not accepted Allah and followed His precepts will go to Hell to join Satan and the jinns.2 Muslims are expected to read the The Holy Qur-ān and pray in Arabic even though it is not their native language. The fact that Islam has a common language has given it a universalism in which people from many different parts of the world can understand each other religiously. The beauty of its Arabic language is greatly admired, much of it being written in poetic stanzas. Although The Holy Qur-ān describes the heavenly paradise where believers will go after death, no specific description of God is given, so that the image of God cannot be reified in an anthropomorphic sense. God is not portrayed in human form as in Christianity. Sharia: Code of Conduct Based on God’s Will Sharia is a system of teachings about what is correct behavior laid down in The Holy Qur-ān by the Prophet Muhammad and further demonstrated in the example of his life and the rulings that he gave in specific cases in his lifetime, the sunnah. Sharia law is intended to create just society where the state, religion, and the citizens live in harmony. The interpretations of Muslim scholars over the first two centuries of Islam are also included in the Sharia. Sharia law regulates worship and ritual practice, and it addresses judicial issues, such as family law, marriage, and inheritance. Since the principles of the Sharia are rooted in The Holy Qur-ān and the life of Muhammad, they are understood to also be divinely inspired. How Sharia Works. Sharia is the frontier between law and ideology, and it is focused on building a stable social order based on divine rules rather than being an abstract system of right and wrong based on philosophical reasoning. Sharia is the definition of how to live in a Muslim society, and even non-Muslims living that society are expected to follow it. Today Sharia law is most rigorously followed in those parts of the Muslim world that are less secular, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. The differences between liberal and conservative Muslim jurists can result in different interpretations of the law. A liberal Muslim jurist might use analogies (qiyas) to make a decision about correct behavior, based on logic and rational reasoning. In contrast, strict constructionists do not allow the use of qiyas because they do involve human reasoning, which they consider to be fallible. Since there is no one centralized authority in Islam, different jurists can give different opinions, and not all opinions will be accepted by all jurists. If there is no information in The Holy Qur-ān or the life of Muhammad on an issue in question, the judge can use his own judgment to interpret God’s will. The decision of each judge then becomes a reference case for later judges. The decisions by early judges sometimes referenced older Arabic law systems, including Meccan commercial law and agrarian law from Medina. They could even draw from the legal codes of the Greco-Roman world as well as those of the Sassanid Empire which occupied old Persia. During the earliest period of Islam, Sharia law was not an independent discipline with full time judges, but rather it was the practical interpretation of religious teaching as applied to everyday life. Muhammad saw no distinction between “legal” and “religious” issues, and they are understood to be and the same. Later, during the Abbasid period a distinction began to emerge between ilm, or empirical/positive knowledge consistent with theology, and fiqh, or understanding/law derived from religious teachings. Figh is called the science of the Sharia, and it has been compiled into a number of books which are used by students and religious scholars. There are various schools or traditions of how to interpret the Sharia, and each uses the figh books. Only the head religious scholar/judge of a school of Sharia has the right to issue public legal opinions (fatwas) based on his interpretations of the figh. Although Islam does not have a hierarchy of clergy that intervenes between the faithful and God, there is a class of Muslim scholars and jurists who are recognized as the interpreters of religious law, including mufti, allamah qadi, faqih or muhaddith. This class of religious scholars has the de facto authority in the community to render decisions about correct belief, ritual, and behavior. They are called the ulama, the community of scholars. When the ulama has consensus, its conclusions are considered to be binding and irrevocable. The decisions of the ulama combined with the divinely inspired nature of The Holy Qur-ān and the Sharia create a rigid structure of belief and practice in Islam that allows only a narrow range of possibilities for change. The authority of The Holy Qur-ān, Sharia, and ulama cannot be questioned. To disobey (or even not rigorously follow) the teachings of this authority is to challenge the Divine itself and can incur punishment in this life or the afterlife. Mullahs and imams are leaders in local mosques but usually not religious scholars or judges. Punishments ordered under Sharia have been criticized by some in the West as harsh. For example, capital punishment is meted out for a number of crimes, including adultery, and a hand may be severed for theft. In spite of these seemingly harsh sentences, Muslim scholars point out that capital punishment is in fact rarely used in the Muslim world where there are fewer executions than in the United States. So, they suggest that Sharia law threatens harsh punishment as a deterrent to criminals although it is rarely practiced. Moderate Muslim scholars today argue that Muhammad would not have used such harsh punishments if he had access to the rehabilitation services available in the modern wealthy societies. The Sharia is as much religious duty as it is law. It is not so much a formal law code, as it is a body of teachings and the focus of discussions about correct behavior. If there is not a specific injunction against a behavior or an analogy that applies, it is thought to be permitted. Muslim belief says that God created humans with free will and that they use it to determine the degree to which they follow religious law. If people follow the Sharia, they are using their free will correctly, but if they do not follow it, they are abusing their free will and committing a grievous religious fault. The Practice of Sharia Law Today. Just as the Muslim world is fragmented into thirty-five nation-states, it is also fragmented in the practice of Sharia. Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shi’ite) are the only two countries with religious courts for all jurisprudence with no secular system of law. Sudan and Libya also implement Sharia law, but they also have secular provisions. The Taliban also relied exclusively on religious courts for jurisprudence during their period of rule in Afghanistan. Sharia law has also been adopted in the Muslim areas of northern Nigeria, but its implementation has been focused primarily on punishment. The Nigerian example has not included the strict rules of evidence required in the traditional practice of Sharia, making it somewhat different from its application in the Arab parts of the Muslim world. On the other hand are the countries with largely secular legal systems which include Turkey and the Muslim republics of South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan). These countries do have a few Islamic provisions to cover family issues. It is notable that these countries have not been arabized and maintain their own unique ethnic identity. In the Sunni world, the degree of contemporary strict implementation of the Sharia seems to be somewhat related to the degree of arabization of the culture. The implementation of Sharia law varies widely across the Muslim world. In contrast to the devaluation of Muslim institutions and authority under colonialism, Islamic movements in recent decades have created renewed interest in the creation of Muslim societies based on Sharia law. According to Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, this loss of traditional Muslim authority created a backlash. He says, ...In this intellectual vacuum, Puritanism and religious extremism found ample space for growth. The Puritanism of the late 1970s and 1980s reflected a rabid hostility to all forms of academic social knowledge or critical intellectualism. However, this hostility was not directed only at Western or Eastern social and political theories, but at the Islamic intellectual tradition as well. Classical intellectual orientations such as Mu’tazilism, Ash’arism, Maturidism, the whole juristic tradition of disputation and deductive reasoning, and the theology of Sufism were considered as aberration and corruption.3 El Fadl goes on to suggest that Sharia is at the core of the controversy between fundamentalists and modernists within Islam. He also says the Wahabi Islam, which is based in Saudi Arabia and does a strict interpretation of Sharia, has become the dominant thought on Sharia law. Wahabi Muslims advocate an interpretation of the Sharia restricted to the writings of The Holy Qur-ān, the Hadith, and the life of Muhammad while modernists advocate that additional use of the sunnah and contemporary interpretations. Key Content of Sharia Law. To understand some examples of Sharia law helps define more clearly what it is. It covers issues of gender and family law, dietary regulations, faith and practice of Islam, and many others. Circumcision. Following the commandment of God to Abraham that the true believers should be circumcised, it is the religious custom for men in the Muslim world. The age at which it is performed and the kind of ceremony varies from one part of the Muslim world to another. In East Africa, Muslims (and non-Muslims including Christians) also practice female circumcision. Although it was a pre-Islamic cultural practice, some African Muslims believe that it is required in Islam. Although religious authorities have repeatedly stated that female circumcision is not a religious obligation in Islam, many local groups continue to practice it. Depending on the group, this practice can vary from a relatively minor alteration to a complete surgical removal of the genitalia, which has been widely denounced internationally. Marriage. Muslims are expected to marry other Muslims, and they are prohibited from marrying non-believers, which means people of a non-Abrahamic religion. Men may marry a woman of the “People of the Book”, i.e. Jewish or Christian, but women cannot do so unless the man converts to Islam. According to Islamic law, men and women can divorce their spouse for any reason by saying “I divorce you” three times before witnesses, but in practice most Muslim governments have other legal requirements before the divorce is finalized. One religious court recently ruled that a man could divorce his wife by text messaging if the message were clearly stated with no room for doubt. By law the divorced woman keeps the dowry that she received for the wedding, as well as any property that she owns, and she is given child support for any small child still nursing. After the child is weaned, she is considered to be independent, and the child may go with the father or mother, depending on which is considered to be most appropriate. Correct Behavior in Marriage. Within marriage a man is supposed to protect and care for his wife and provide for her in the manner that she was accustomed to living before marriage. Women can work, but they cannot be a religious scholar or an imam of a mosque. Sharia law makes clear that women are responsible for housework and caring for both her parents and the husband’s parents. Women are expected to be subordinate and obedient to the husband. If a woman is disobedient, the husband should first warn her verbally to correct her ways, and if she continues to be disobedient, the husband should refrain from any intimate relationship with her for a time. If she continues to be disobedient after that, the husband is authorized to hit her lightly. Many religious scholars emphasize that it is definitely better not to hit the women even if she is disobedient, but it can be used in extreme cases. Honor killings are not sanctioned within Sharia law, and when it is done in the Muslim world, the people are following non-Islamic cultural practices. Although Sharia envisions a quiet domestic life for women, many women work today throughout the Muslim world. Although traditional practice says that women should not have important jobs or work in the government, twenty-first century Muslim women work in a wide range of professional and lower class positions. Many have been heads of state or of the government, including Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, and Tansu Ciller in Turkey. All of these are secular governments that do not apply Sharia law. Women have also held other prominent positions in both government and private industry in the Muslim world. Modesty of Dress. Both men and women are expected to dress modestly, but it is most important for women. The Holy Qur-ān says that a woman should not show her hair or the shape of her body to men who are not of the family, and that she should lower her eyes so as to not look in the eyes of a man. She may show her face, hands, and feet, and this has led to the practice of Muslim women wearing the chador, a robe like garment. This requirement is interpreted in different ways in different societies. In the more liberal Central and Southeast Asian Muslim societies (i.e. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia or Malaysia), women may need only a head scarf in addition to their regular modest dress. In the more strict Arab countries (i.e. Saudi Arabia and parts of the Middle East) women wear the chador mentioned above, which may or may not include veiling. In the most-strict countries (i.e. Afghanistan and Pakistan) women wear a burqah, which is a tent-like covering of the entire body including the face. The more secular the country, the more relaxed religious dress codes are. Men also have a dress code, but it only requires the man to be covered from the waist to the knees. The dress requirement is to avoid that either a man or women should be viewed in sexual terms. Compliance with the ideal of modesty in dress depends on an individual’s personal level of religious observance. So, in every society there are variations in observance of dress codes depending whether the person is more or less religious. Dietary laws. There are a number of prohibited meats, including pork, dog, cat, monkey and carnivores among others. Lamb is the preferred meat in much of the Muslim world. The animal must be killed in a quick and relatively painless way, and the blood should be drained completely from the animal so that the blood is not eaten with the meat. The animal should be butchered in the name of God by a Muslim, and the preferred method of killing the animal is cutting the jugular vein so that it bleeds to death quickly. The meat of an animal killed by a Jew or Christian is also acceptable if the dietary rules are followed. Jewish kosher practices are similar to those in Islam because the dietary laws in the books of Moses are similar. Ethical Conduct. Muhammad’s revelations in The Holy Qur-ān gave detailed guidelines for correct behavior toward other people. His teachings emphasized inclusive behaviors and brotherhood in contrast to the divisive behavior of tribal life that existed in the Arabia of his lifetime. He taught that all people were equal which led to the opposition of the Arab elite of his day, but it laid the foundations for latter Islam which has wide a following in Asia, as well as the Middle East and Africa. Islam has the best record of race and ethnic relationships of any of the major religions. Moral behavior in Islam also includes a prohibition on drinking alcoholic beverages, gambling, and sexual immorality. Eating wholesome foods and having a healthy life are religious obligations because the believer should care for the body as well as the spirit. Muhammad’s teachings gave a higher status to women (in many aspects higher than Judaism or Christianity of that day), and it specified gender relationships between men and women. Women have the right to own property and have their own earnings, and they frequently keep their own family name after marriage. Ideally a Muslim woman has a dowry which she controls, and that guarantees her a certain degree of financial independence. The rules for marriage were made more restrictive, but women were given the opportunity to study more. The practice of female infanticide was prohibited. Muhammad approved the practice of polygyny in part as a protection for widows. In the Arab world at that time there was a high death rate for men because of the on-going wars that had racked the region, and many widows were left. They were given the right to re-marry, which was a progressive measure at the time, and polygyny solved that imbalance of numbers between the sexes. Jihad (struggle) has multiple meanings. The Greater Jihad is the struggle against evil that each person carries on in their interior self. Jihad is also a collective obligation, and it refers to defending Muslims and expanding the sphere of influence of Islam in the world.4 Muslims are given the charge to spread the word of Allah to the entire world although the beliefs of Jews and Christians are to be respected. Conversions to Islam should never to forced, and Muslims should not be compelled into behaviors in which they do not believe. Jihad can refer to two kinds of struggles. First is the spiritual struggle of the faithful with their hedonistic or egoistic desires. These must be overcome to find unity with God. The other jihad is a physical struggle or war which may be invoked as a last resort in a conflict. Jihad is subject to sacred law, which lays down stringent rules. Fighting can only occur in self-defense, in defense of the faith, or for those who have been forced from their homes. It is prohibited to harm civilians or destroy the crops, trees, and livestock (the means of livelihood) in war. The Holy Qur-ān says, Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. God does not love aggressors.5 Moral and ethical standards can be the victims of other ideologies and conflict, leading people to commit violence not supported by The Holy Qur-ān. The Five Pillars of the Faith The religious practice of Islam is organized around five sets of behaviors which a faithful Muslim should carry out in his or her life, including the confession of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.6 1. Declaration of faith (Shahada). “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” By making this statement a person confesses their faith in the one and only God and identifies themselves as submitting to him and being a Muslim. This statement is not a one-time formulaic confession, but it is a phrase that a person hears regularly in the Muslim world, reaffirming the recognition of God. A person converts to Islam by making this statement in front of three Muslim witnesses. 2. Prayer (Salat). Five times a day the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer from the minaret or over a loudspeaker system. A person may pray in the mosque, at home, in the business, in the desert, or any other place where they are. Before prayer a person should wash, then roll out the prayer rug and kneel toward Mecca to pray. Muslim prayer is an expression of praise to God and submission to his will, rather than making requests to be granted from God. Prayers are commonly a repetition of the Fatihah, the Muslim equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, The Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favored, Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray.7 Worship in Islam is centered on prayer and the repetition of The Holy Qur-ān. Although a practicing Muslim should pray five times each day, the Friday noon prayer period is the most important time in the week for gathering at the local mosque to pray. Friday Noon Prayer Knowing that I was writing about Islam as an anthropologist, a Muslim friend invited me, after consulting with his Imam, to attend Friday services at his local mosque. As I entered the prayer hall, several men were already there reading the The Holy Qur-ān. I sat on the carpeted floor some twenty feet away from the podium. At 12:00 the hall filled quickly and the Imam came out to start the prayers. Men organized themselves into long prayer lines, standing, kneeling, and bowing to the floor in unison. While standing in a row the worshipers raised their hands to their ears and then crossed them on their chests. Everyone bowed and placed their hands on their knees and then stood again. Then, they kneeled and bowed their heads to the floor and came back to the sitting position. This prayer sequence was repeated twice. After that the men next to me turned to me and said “peace on you and the mercy of Allah”. It was explained to me later that although Muslims are wishing peace to each other, some also say that they are greeting the two angels that sit on their shoulders recording their good and bad deeds. Specific prayers celebrating the goodness and greatness of God were said, and the exercise of prayer was physical and communal. The acts of bowing one’s head to the floor and full prostration are displays of the believer’s submission to God, and the prayer line emphasizes the unity and equality of believers before God. Prayer is an active process of praising God and celebrating His greatness. After the prayers the Imam asked a visiting scholar to speak. As is the custom in Islam, anyone can speak during the prayer service, and it is not always the Imam. The speaker was a young man, a teacher from Algeria, and he spoke about the importance of parenting and education. He emphasized the role of parents in training children in the values that would guide their lives. After he spoke, the prayer ended. 3. Almsgiving (Zakat). A Muslim is expected to give alms (or a tithe) to the mosque or to the poor. In addition to being a religious obligation, Muslims believe that the giving of alms to others purifies their possessions. In religiously based kingdoms this has been collected sometimes as a tax, which was then re-distributed as needed for religious and social causes. Although people are encouraged to give in secret, the poor frequently gather at the mosque as people leave the Friday noon prayers to receive alms in public from the more affluent. 4. Fasting (Sawm). During the month of Ramadan the faithful fast and avoid sexual contact from dawn to dusk in memory of the month when Muhammad received his first revelations from God. This is also a special time of spiritual devotion and renewal when the faithful should consider their lives and meditate on the greatness of God. As the Muslim world has become more urbanized, how Ramadan is practiced has become a point of contention between secularizing people and religious people. Although it is a time of spiritual renewal and most people observe the fast from dawn to dusk, many do not follow the spiritual dimensions of this month. When the sun goes down, it is an invitation for celebrations and dinners that can turn the nights of Ramadan into elaborate social events. Restaurants that were closed during the daylight hours open and people gather to celebrate the end of the daily fast. For the younger generations it is a happy social time that offsets the hardship of going twelve hours or more without food or drink. Religious people call attention to the issue that for some think of Ramadan as the nightly social events rather than the spiritual renewal which is its religious purpose. 5. Pilgrimage (Hajj). Muslims face Mecca when they pray, and it is the focal point of the practice of Islam. People are expected to make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least one time in their lives. Some two million Muslims come to Mecca during the last month of the Muslim calendar each year on this pilgrimage. The most holy site within this Holy City is the Great Mosque with the Ka’aba at its center. It has been expanded in recent years to hold as many as 700,000 worshipers at a time. The pilgrim should do seven turns around the Ka’aba, and each time as they pass the Black Stone, they should ideally kiss it or at least touch it. Other festival activities at this time of the year include retracing Hagar’s frantic search for water for the infant Ishmael and a pilgrimage to Arafat, which is nearby. Pilgrims make the trip to Medina in memory of Muhammad’s flight to that city to save himself and his followers from their enemies. For centuries pilgrims arrived overland by caravan for the pilgrimage to Mecca, but today they arrive by chartered airplanes. The cost of the pilgrimage is considerable, and many poor Muslims are never able to carry out this last pillar of the faith. Those who do make the pilgrimage to Mecca have a special prestige upon returning to their communities. As the Holy City of Islam, Mecca is also an important center for the study of religion, and throughout the year scholars and teachers come to the city for study. After women make the Hajj many celebrate their new status by wearing a full face veil when in public. In countries where full veiling is not normally practiced, the few who do practice it can be recognized as having fulfilled this fifth pillar of the faith. The Schools of Sharia The Holy Qur-ān, the Hadith, and the traditional commentaries surrounding them are believed to be infallible. Since neither is a systematic statement of Muslim law, religious judges have created systems or schools of Muslim jurisprudence. In Sunni Islam, there are four schools of interpretation of the Sharia. It is common for the students in one school of thought to study the decisions of the other schools, and a judge may borrow an interpretation from another school if he thinks it is appropriate. Within each school there is a wide range of opinion about the various issues being discussed, and scholars in the same school may rule differently on a behavior, some saying it is forbidden and others that it is desirous. There can be considerable fluidity of opinion, but if a consensus is reached, then the agreement becomes locked in place as a new law. The various schools of Sharia each developed from the teachings of a historically important religious scholar. The most important schools are Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi’i. Hanafi School, the Iraqi School. Imam Abu Hanifa was the founder of this orientation of interpreting Muslim law although he never established a formal school. He was born in Iraq in 700 C.E., and he worked as a textile merchant, dedicating his free time to the study of Muslim law. The Hanafi School is known for the pluralism of opinions among its followers which makes it one of the more flexible schools. This school is particularly important in Central Asia from Afghanistan through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan. It is also important in some of the North African countries, and in Egypt it is recognized as the official school of Sharia law. Hanbali School, the fundamentalist school. Ahmad bin Hanbal was the founder of this school. Although he did not have a formal school, he taught students in Baghdad where he worked much of his life. This is the most traditional and strict of the various schools of Sharia study. Hanbal accepted only The Holy Qur-ān and Hadith as authoritative sources, rejecting the interpretations and analogies made by later scholars. This is the strict constructionist interpretation of Muslim law, which does not accept human rational deductions based on earlier law. This permits the Hanbali School to claim infallibility in its conclusions. This school was historically important in Iraq and Syria, but over the last two centuries it has become the dominant school of the conservative Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, and it is the legal basis of the modern Islamist groups. Maliki School, the African School. This school is based on the work of Malik bin Anas whose teachings are recorded in the oldest surviving Muslim law book, Kitab al-Muwatta’. It is a survey of the consensus of the believers about the proper practice of justice, ritual, and religious behavior in Medina in the eighth century C.E. Malik drew from the actual exercise of law in Medina, which was not a tightly integrated code and included contradictory interpretations. When there were contrasting decisions on a single subject, Malik tried to smooth the differences between them, and he frequently chose an interpretation that was half way between the two contrasting ones. Malik’s main contribution was the formation of a legal system. This school is most important in North Africa, stretching from Morocco in the West to southern Egypt in the East. The scholars of this School commonly use human reason to identify correct behavior relying on community consensus about correct behavior, accepting opinions from other scholars, and using analogy. This is the most open and flexible school of Sharia thought, relying heavily on human reason. Shafi’i School. This school is based on the teachings of Abu Abdullah ash-Shafi’i who lived in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The scholars of this school try to reach a balance between divine revelation and human reason in making interpretations about the law. Shafi’i was a strict constructionist in allowing only The Holy Qur-ān and Hadith to be used for interpretations and not allowing the opinions of later Muslim scholars. On the other hand, he was liberal in accepting the use of analogies and the importance of human reason to make interpretations applicable to the present. This school is commonly followed in East Africa, Yemen, and Indonesia. The various schools of Sharia law reflect the social and cultural differences of the regions of the world where they have been accepted. They also reflect the divisions within Islam between fundamentalists who advocate strict interpretation of the law and the more liberal approaches that admit contemporary interpretations. The Caliphate: Islamic Government Islam is unique among the religions of the Abrahamic tradition in the emphasis on theocracy. Islam has woven the threads of government, leadership and law into a unified and whole. Muhammad was not only the Prophet who brought the original teachings of Allah to the world, but he was also the military and political leader of the early Muslim community, and the ideal in Islam is a leader who can follow the model of Muhammad. The early successors to Muhammad were caliphs, who were the religious, military, and political heads of the Muslim world. The true Caliph should rule all Muslims (Ummah), and Muslims should live under a Muslim ruler. The uniting of Islam, Sharia law, Ummah (Islamic community), and caliphate give a unitary religious life and community. Sunnis believe that the Caliph should be elected by the Ummah, the community of Muslims, but Shi’ites believe that the Caliph should only come from the direct descendants of Muhammad. Although there should only be one Caliph at a time, there have been times in the history of Islam when competing caliphates were declared, and there have been instances when a caliphate was declared, and not all Muslims would accept it. The existence of one Caliph ruling the Ummah, the community of Muslims, has resulted in a history of caliphate led empires in the Muslim world, beginning with the Ummayads and the Abbasids. The caliphate is in contradiction to the modern system of nation states in which secular rulers lead countries defined by culture, language, and geography. The modern nation states of the Muslim world have come into existence in the last century after the dissolution of the Turkish caliphate and the demise of European colonialism. The division of the Muslim world into dozens of countries from Morocco to Kazakhstan in the twentieth century is a challenge to those who would establish a modern day caliphate. The contemporary ideal of having a caliphate is more prominent in the Arab Middle East, and less so in the non-Arab Muslim countries of Central and South Asia and Africa. A caliphate was declared by the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria in 2014, but the surrounding Muslim nation states have not recognized it. Conclusions The Holy Qur-ān and Sharia are at the heart of Muslim belief and practice. The Sharia is a distillation of the truths of the holy texts and Muhammad’s life as they may be practiced in everyday life of people. The Sharia defines how a person should worship, dress, eat, and interact with others among many other daily activities. It is the charter of Muslim life. How a person defines the Sharia indicates what kind of Muslim the person is. The ideological struggles in the Muslim world today frequently are over how to interpret the Sharia and how to apply it.
Endnotes 1 . For a discussion of the creed and ethical conduct in Islam see Farah, pages 104-112. 2 . The concept of evil and the Last Day or Day of Reckoning is explained in Esposito, John L. 1988. Islam: the Straight Path. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 34-35. 3 . Abou El Fadl, Khaled M. 2001. And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses. New York: University Press of America, Inc. Pages 4-5. 4 . For more information of the concept of jihad see Esposito, pages 170-171. 5 . The Holy Qur-ān. Surat 2, Ayat 190. 6 . Smith, Huston. 1991. The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Pages 242-248. 7 . The Holy Qur-ān. Surat 1, Ayat 1 to 7.
3 The Umayyad and Abassid Caliphates
Shortly after the death of Muhammad in 632, the newly Islamized Arabs spread out of their homeland onto the world scene with an almost unstoppable energy and in the process built the first Muslim empire. Without a commander-in-chief and with little military experience, the Arab forces were able to quickly conquer the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. For the next 1,300 years, Muslims lived under a series of imperial regimes, first Arabic then later Turkish. Muslims created a great civilization that competed with Europe, India, and China. They drew from the many layers of civilization in the ancient Middle East, and they made it better. The fusion of religion and state in Islam began with Muhammad. Throughout the early centuries of Islam, the Caliph, or religious successor to Muhammad, was also ideally the most powerful political and military leader. So, the religious history of Islam became inseparable from its political history of Islam and the civilization it produced. The Sassanid Empire As the Roman Empire broke up in the third and fourth centuries C.E., the Arab world was bordered on the northwest by the Byzantine Empire (Christian) and on the northeast by the Sassanid Empire1 (Zoroastrian). The Sassanids were a key part of the puzzle of the pre-Islamic world of the Middle East because they stopped the spread of Byzantine Christian influence and established a strong kingdom based on Middle Eastern traditions. The capital of the Sassanid Empire was located near present day Baghdad on the Tigris River. It included the Semitic peoples of the ancient cultures in the Tigris and Euphrates river basin, as well as the Persians to the east. Although it did not extend its control to the south to the Arabian Peninsula, it had an important cultural and commercial presence there. The Sassanid rulers had contact with the nomadic Arab tribal groups on their borders and so linked them to the economy and politics of the more culturally sophisticated Persian world. Arabs also became involved in trade between the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires, carrying Asian trade goods across the desert to Syrian trade centers. Since Zoroastrianism, the official state religion of the Sassanids, was also monotheistic, the Arabs were surrounded by monotheistic religions. This contact with the Sassanids was to prove fateful because after the Arab conquest, the new rulers borrowed the administrative structure of the Sassanid Empire to form the nucleus of their own. Table 3.1 The Muslim World: 632 to present The Arab Stage of Muslim Power The Arab Empire 632 to 1517 After the death of Muhammad the Arabs swept out of Arabia. The Umayyad Dynasty 661 to 750 Umayyads led the Arabs to conquer from Central Asia to Spain. The Abbasid Caliphate 750 to 1517 Abbasids consolidate the cultural and religious gains of Islam. The Turks and Mongols of Central Asia 1000 to 1405 The Turks & Mongols invaded the Middle East destroying cities. The Turkish Stage of Muslim Power The Safavid Empire 1501 to 1723 Turkish leaders set up an empire over Persia, largely Sufi and Shi’ite. The Mughal Empire 1526 to 1805 Another Turkish group invaded India and set up an empire. The Ottoman Turk Empire 1453 to 1918 Ottoman Turk Empire extended from Europe to North Africa. Nation State Period Contemporary Nation States 1918 to present Resulting from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and European Colonialism The Arab Empires: Islam Became a World Power The original followers of Muhammad created the Arab Empire2 in the century following the death of the Prophet, and it lasted six hundred years until the 1200’s when it fell into disarray after the Mongol invasions of the Middle East. When the Muslims launched the first military campaigns out of the Arabian deserts, they borrowed the arts of culture from the previous civilizations that surrounded them in Iraq, Persia, and Egypt. Territorial expansion was characteristic of early Islam, and during the last ten years of Muhammad’s life, Muslims gained the submission or allegiance of virtually all of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. A few years after his death, Arab forces quickly gained control of Egypt (639), Syria (640), and the Sassanid Empire (650), consolidating their hold on the core of the Middle East from Persia through Egypt. This beginning of the Arab expansion was continued with the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty which extended Arab control from Spain to India. The Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) and the Spread of Islam Umayyad rule was established by Mu’awiya, the fourth caliph or “successor”, and over a period of ninety years these rulers built the Arab Empire through military conquest.3 Umayyad rule was spread beyond the Middle East to the western reaches of India (present day Pakistan) in 713 and across North Africa to Spain in 711. They even invaded present day France where their advance was stopped in 732 at Poitiers. Muslims ruled Spain for the next eight centuries until their final defeat by the Christian kings Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. In the eighty-one years from Muhammad’s death in 632 to their conquest of the Indus Valley (today Pakistan) the Umayyads occupied an empire larger than any other that had existed in history. Their capital was Damascus, and they looked as much to their empire in the west (Spain) as they did to their empire in the east (Pakistan). What was the source of the explosive energy of the Umayyad expansion? There was no single leader like Alexander the Great leading these conquests, nor was there a carefully crafted war machine like the Roman legions. Since the Muslim armies were organized around kin groups, there were many commanders, some competent and some not. Since it was a “Muslim” expansion, it might seem that religious zeal drove the process, except for the fact that the warriors in the Arab-led armies probably knew little about Islam.4 For example, the conquest of Spain was carried out by Berbers who had only recently been introduced to Islam themselves, and actually Jewish and Christian Arab soldiers were also fighting in Arab armies. Soldiers were rewarded with the war booty, but much of the Umayyad conquests were of arid lands where there was little booty to be won. So, booty alone does not seem to explain such a sustained campaign. The belief in jihad would have been a factor motivating the Arab soldiers. Technically it is “striving in the way of the Lord” although it is frequently translated as “holy war”.5 The idea of jihad is based on the tradition of raids among the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, but after the Arabs were unified under Muhammad the idea of jihad was turned outward toward their neighbors in the Middle East. The one integrating factor behind the Arab expansion was the caliphate. Although caliphs did not lead armies, they did guide the conquests. Another factor that permitted the Arabs to expand rapidly was their policy of leaving local social and economic structures intact with Arab leadership at the top. Since they did not destroy the infrastructure of a conquered kingdom, they did not have to rebuild it. They also had a corollary policy of non-occupation, which meant that conquered peoples frequently retained their lands. Some land grants were made to reward military leaders, but common soldiers were required to stay in military camps and not occupy conquered land. They were rewarded with regular military pay and occasional booty. The local people in conquered lands were not required to convert to Islam, but the followers of polytheistic and animist religious were actively proselytized to join Islam. The monotheistic Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, were called the “protected ones” or dhimmi because of their scriptures, and they were not proselytized.6 In fact, some splinter Christian groups, such as the Nestorians, Jacobites, or Copts, were persecuted by orthodox Christianity but protected by Islam. There were incentives for converting to Islam, including easier access to positions of power in the government and exemption from certain taxes. During some time periods, Christians and Jews were allowed to occupy positions of economic and political importance within the Muslim world, but it was not always the case. Zoroastrians were ultimately forced to emigrate from their homeland in Persia, and most today live in Mumbai, India where they are known as Parsis. The Umayyad Caliphate had a narrow base of support, primarily among the Arabs and the original Arab families of the conquest.7 No more than ten percent of the conquered peoples had converted to Islam, but they outnumbered the descendants of the original conquerors, and they wanted more participation in the governance of their world. In this unrest in the year 750, Shi’ites led a coup to overthrow the Umayyads, and the Shi’ites hoped to name an heir of Ali to the caliphate. The Abbas family, who were descendants of one of Muhammad’s uncles, entered the conflict and defeated the Shi’ites, claiming the caliphate for themselves. In so doing, people from the small group of Arabs that surrounded Muhammad in the beginning continued to control Islam. The Abbas family tried to kill all of the Umayyads to avoid challenges to the throne, but one of the heirs escaped and established himself in Spain where the Umayyad Dynasty continued for another three hundred years.8 The Abbasid Caliphate (750-1517) and the Golden Age of Islam In contrast to the Umayyad Caliphate which marked a time of territorial expansion, the Abbasid Caliphate consolidated the cultural and religious achievements of Islam. It was a revolt against the Arab aristocracy that had grown wealthy during the conquests, and the Abbasids broadened the base of participation by giving more important roles to Persians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Egyptians. Bernard Lewis says, The cessation of the wars of conquest, the sole productive activity of the Arab aristocracy who were the ruling class of the Umayyad kingdom, made that class historically redundant, and the way was open for the establishment of a new social order based on a peace economy of agriculture and trade and with a cosmopolitan ruling class of officials, merchants, bankers, landowners and the ulama, the class of religious scholars, jurists, teachers and dignitaries.9 The Abbasids built Baghdad as their new capital, moving the focus of the empire eastward back into the heartland of the Middle East. Islam became not only a religion but a world political and economic system. Long distance trade and camel caravans became important. Entire industries grew up around those who produced textiles from the fibers (wool, cotton, linen), to those who spun them, those who did the weaving, and those who transported and sold them. In addition to the multi-colored rugs, they produced fine brocades and linens for clothes, and they imported silks from China. To facilitate this long distance trade, they developed a sophisticated banking system, and checks could be written on banks at one end of the Muslim world and cashed at the other end. The Abbasids borrowed court ceremonies and customs from the Sassanid kingdom and cultural sophistication in the arts and literature from the Persians. Abbasid caliphs encouraged learning and the arts, and they sponsored translations of Greek, Persian, and Indian classics into Arabic, drawing from all of the civilizations that surrounded them. It was through these Arabic translations of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among others that European scholars were to rediscover classic Greek thought centuries later. The study of Islamic theology and religious law were also emphasized at court. The stories of The Arabian Nights are set in this time period and reflect the splendor of the Abbasid court. Baghdad became the center of learning for the Muslim world as it continued to be for the next five hundred years until the Mongol invasion destroyed it. The Arab Empire had grown to cover much of the world, and the rulers needed solutions for urban, agricultural, and military problems. They created The House of Wisdom in Baghdad and invited scholars to come and work there, Christians, Jews, or Muslims. They borrowed knowledge from any source that was available. The spirit of questioning and testing of ideas made the Arab world a center of scientific process. Although Arab rule extended over much of Africa and Asia north of the Equator, Arab culture and civilization were slower to spread. During the early centuries of the Abbasids, most of the Egyptians were still Christians and spoke Coptic. Spain and North Africa were more influenced culturally by Berber traditions than Arab ones. Even today, the Persians never have adopted Arabic as a spoken language for the majority of the people. Persians developed a non-Arabic Muslim culture with literary and artistic traditions admired throughout the Muslim world, and at the present Iranians continue to walk a different path from the Arab world. This cultural pluralism permitted Islam to become a multilingual and multi-ethnic world with a degree of religious tolerance. The Abbasids were unable to control the distant reaches of their empire, and by the mid-tenth century, the Spanish, North Africans, and Egyptians had set up rival governments and caliphs. The Abbasids themselves even fell under the control of secular rulers in the heartland, but they retained their status as the head of Islam. Notable Figures from the Fourteenth Century Ibn Batuta (1304-1368) was the great traveler of the fourteenth century, and his descriptions of diverse world populations that he visited anticipate the development of cultural anthropology later. He was born in Tangier and studied Islamic law. When he was twenty-one, he traveled to Mecca, making the hajj, or pilgrimage. To arrive to Mecca he traveled across North Africa and Egypt. After completing the hajj, he traveled for another year throughout the Tigris-Euphrates region and down the east coast of Africa. Arriving back to Mecca, he heard that sultan of Delhi was offering good incomes to Muslim legal scholars, and he decided to go there. He traveled northward around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea across south central Asia and arrived to India from the north. He stayed there for several years before traveling further to present day Myanmar, Indonesia, and China. At the age of forty-five he returned to Morocco traveling through India, the Middle East, and North Africa again. Later, he traveled to the Muslim kingdom in Spain and traveled with a caravan across the Sahara into Africa. He visited the territories of almost fifty modern nation-states in his travels. Although the description of his experiences, Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354, ranks him with Marco Polo as one of the two most important cross-cultural observers of the time, his work is known by few in the West. Just as Ibn Battuta anticipated anthropology, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a scholar whose work ranged from history to philosophy of history and an early version of sociology. He was one of the first scholars to propose culture as the cause of differences in behavior between people of different groups, and he also approached history as a social science. In Universal History he attempted to create an integrated historical narrative based on a cyclical theory. He proposed that the source of cultural renewal comes from the nomadic people who invade cities, settle down, become urban dwellers themselves, then become mellow with the comforts of civilized living and fall prey to the invasion of the next wave of more vigorous nomadic people who in turn invade the city again. This was a cycle that could be observed in the history of those areas of the world where arid and well-watered lands were closely juxtaposed, such as North Africa and the river valleys of the Middle East. His proto-sociological work includes a study of the city of Baghdad in which he describes the various quarters of the city including their populations and institutions. He describes how the different quarters complement each other in occupations. When read today, this study still sounds amazingly contemporary. The Mongols of Central Asia Under the leadership of Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongols invaded the Middle East and sacked Baghdad in 1258, ending the power of the Abbasid caliphate. Simultaneously Genghis Khan’s other grandson, Kubla Khan, invaded China, defeated the Sung Dynasty, and established a Mongol dynasty to rule that country. Hulagu’s army destroyed much of Baghdad from palaces, mosques, and libraries to the agricultural infrastructure in the hinterland. In 1260 the Mongol forces took Syria and sacked Damascus. Not long after they were defeated and their advance into the Muslim heartland was stopped. The Mongol attack ended the golden age of Muslim civilization in Tigris-Euphrates area, and Baghdad would not recover for centuries. The Abbasids fled to Egypt and re-established their much weakened caliphate which lasted until 1517. The Muslim world was fragmented politically during this period with power in the hands of various regional rulers. The Mongols destroyed Muslim civilization in the Arab heartland from Baghdad to Damascus. Although some of the Mongol rulers converted to Islam, their occupation had a devastating effect on the lands that had been the cultural, political, and economic center of the Muslim world. The loss of population in Iraq was so severe that it continues to be an under populated country today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. After the sack of Baghdad, the Mongols maintained control of the territory to the east of Iraq for the next century during which urban cultural life was neglected. The Mongols were not urban people, and they did not encourage the rebuilding of the cities. Even after they converted to Islam, they had a casual attitude toward religion which did not encourage the continued development of Muslim thought or art. They moved the Silk Route trade to the more northerly routes, closer to their own homeland, which eliminated Syria and Iraq from that lucrative business. In the meantime, Europeans discovered sea routes to India and China, eliminating the Middle East altogether as the intermediaries in that trade. Tamerlane (1330-1405), also known as Timur the Lame, followed the Mongols making lightning conquests that stretched from Syria to India and well into Central Asia. The capital was located in Samarkand, today the capital of Uzbekistan, where he built major mosques, libraries, and study centers in the Persian style of architecture. Not having developed urban traditions of their own, the Central Asian groups borrowed from the Persians for architecture and the arts. Islam brought an overlay of urban civilization to Central Asia, but much of the society was, and even today is, organized primarily around clan and tribal identities. The dramatic growth of Islam in the seventh century C.E. from a religion to a political and economic power linked many distinct cultural groups from Africa to Asia. The central Asian Muslims, such as the Uygurs, are Turks, not Arabs. They were traditionally in contact with Arabs along the Silk Route carrying trade goods across the desert from China to trade centers on the Mediterranean. The Turks have been middle men, merchants, and long distance traders and China’s intermediaries with the Muslim world and the West for centuries. Like most other groups in Asia, they were conquered during the Mongol expansion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Most Turks remained in central Asia to become the Uygurs, Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and Turkmens of today, and the central Asian homeland of the Turks remains solidly Turkish. One branch of the Turks migrated to the Middle East and occupied Anatolia, modern day Turkey. After 1258 the Arab core of the Middle East (Arabia, Syria, and Iraq) gradually lost its economic and political importance and its place as the center of a cosmopolitan world. However, Islam continued to expand into new areas, including Africa, Russia, and Central Asia. Since Egypt had historically played an important role in Africa, it was the catalyst for the expansion of Islam into that continent. The Turkish Empires After 1000 C.E., Turkish nomadic groups from the steppes of south Central Asia migrated into the Middle East and eventually gained political control. Known as the Seljuk Turks, they established a Turkish Muslim state, taking Iraq and Syria and then challenged the decadent Byzantine Empire and conquered Anatolia. In later centuries their Turkish descendants would take Constantinople and most of eastern Europe. A couple of centuries later after the Mongol invasions dealt a devastating blow to the last Arab Empire, the Turks initiated the second Muslim empire period, and they divided the territories of the Arab Empire into three contiguous empires. One, the Ottoman Empire, which was formed in Turkey and eventually covered Eastern Europe much of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Two, the Safavid Empire, which reached from the southern Caucasus region through Persia into Central Asia as far as Uzbekistan, and three, the Mughal Empire, which occupied Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent. Each of these Turkish empires had a different relationship to Islam. The Ottomans were Sunnis, the Safavids were Shi’ites, and the Mughals were more ecumenical attempting to make ties with other religions. The Turkish-origin empires are referred to as the “gunpowder empires” because these were the first ones built with the use of firearms. Both the first wave of Muslim empire builders, the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, and second wave, the Turks of Central Asia, started as nomadic peoples who acquired the arts of civilization through contact with urbanized people in the Middle East. Both turned to conquest and rapidly absorbed the pre-existing civilizations. In turn these civilizations co-opted their invaders, transforming them into urbanized people. Both Arabs and Turks went on to create civilizations that were brilliant in art and architecture, literature, religious thought, public administration, and the military arts. Conclusions The Middle East has had profound cultural influence on much of the contemporary world. The religious heirs of Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflect the cultural brilliance of ancient Iraq, a cultural legacy that has been resurrected time and again throughout history from the Babylon to the Muslim fluorescence. The early civilizations produced a prolonged cultural golden age in the Middle East, and it would be repeated in recurring cycles during the later Arab and Turkish Empires. Many people in the Middle East today dream of the time when Islam will return to its historic role of power, wealth, and influence in the world. Muslim dominance of the Middle East and much of Africa and Asia started by creating a world system of trade, cultural exchange, and religion during the 600 and 700’s C.E. That dominance endured through different dynasties and empires up to the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire fell. After that, political power fragmented in the Middle East, leaving no dominant Muslim powers in the region. Middle Eastern nationalism became the new force around which the region was re-organized, creating the modern nations. Although the Middle East has the longest history of civilization in the world, the organization of most of the contemporary countries only dates from recent decades. The oldest countries are also among the newest as the Middle East re-organizes to be a part of the contemporary world. The Muslim struggle to define the shape and values of their new countries is occurring at the same time that they are confronting economic and cultural encroachments from the West.
Endnotes 1 . The Sassanid kingdom is discussed in Bentley, Jerry H. and Herbert F. Ziegler. 2000. Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past. New York: McGraw-Hill. Pages 140-141. 2 . The term “Arab” refers to people who were culturally Arab from the Arabian Peninsula and immediately surrounding areas largely in present day Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. “Muslim” refers to any person of Muslim faith, whether they were Arab, Egyptian, Persian, Turkish, Berber, or other cultural origin. 3 . The expansion of Islam and the establishment of the Umayyad Dynasty is discussed in more detail in Bentley and Ziegler, pages 308-311. Also in McKay, John P., Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler. 1996. A History of World Societies. Fourth edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Pages 252-256. 4 . Lewis, Bernard. 1966. The Arabs in History. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. Page 56. 5 . Esposito, John L. 1988. Islam: The Straight Path. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 16-17, 40. 6 . For discussions about the interaction between Islam and other religious groups see Spodek, Howard. 2001. The World’s History. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Page 361. Also Esposito, page 39. 7 . For the change from Ummayad to Abbasid rule see Lewis, pages 73-74. Also Esposito, page 57. 8 . Menocal, Marí Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Pages 5-6. 9 . Lewis, pages 80-81.
4 Al-Andaluz: Muslim Spain
The Muslims invaded Spain in 711 under General Tariq after having swept across North Africa within a few decades of the death of Muhammad.1 The Christian Visigoth kings that ruled Spain at the time gave little resistance to the Muslims, and by 720 this army had conquered the Iberian Peninsula and Provence in southern France. The Muslims gradually pushed further north into France, raiding and laying siege to towns for booty and captives. Their northward advance was stopped at Poitiers in 732 by a Frankish army led by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne. After their defeat the Muslim armies withdrew behind the Pyrenees to consolidate their control over the Iberian Peninsula, and they established the Muslim capital in Córdoba located in a warm river valley of southern Spain. The Spanish Muslim kingdom was named al-Andalus, a name still used for the southern region of Spain. The majority of the Spaniards continued living their same lives, now with Muslim rulers instead of Visigoth rulers, and many of the wealthy were even allowed to retain their lands. The landed estates of the Visigoth monarchs and military were confiscated for redistribution to the conquering Muslim army.2 An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Muslim men came into Spain at that time, mostly Berbers from Morocco. Many of them acquired wives in Spain, but some brought families and slaves, so the total migration was somewhat larger than the number for men. Migration from North Africa over the next eight hundred years slowly made the population more and more Moorish. There was also a notable Jewish minority already in Spain, and the three cultures, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, coexisted throughout the eight hundred years of Muslim occupation of Spain. Muslim rule can be divided into three major periods named for the capitals of each, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada. Córdoba: Umayyad Dynasty (756 to 1031) In 756, Abd al-Rahman, a young man of the Umayyad family who escaped the Abbasid coup in Damascus, arrived to Cordoba and took control of the new kingdom of al-Andalus in name of the Umayyad Dynasty.3 He ruled for thirty years, and during that time he consolidated control over southern and central Spain. The Umayyad kingdom extended into North Africa where they also controlled present day Morocco and much of Algeria, giving them a large multi-cultural realm. They also introduced new industries, especially in the skilled crafts, such as metal, wood, leather, ceramics, ivory, and glasswork, which the Muslims made with sophisticated geometric designs. They introduced paper-making and the production of books from the east along with silk and woolen textiles. When the Muslims invaded Spain in 711, it was a Christian kingdom, and it had been since 394 when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The new Muslim government of Spain did not require Christians or Jews to convert.4 In fact, the Berber soldiers who made up most of the army were recent converts themselves. The new Muslim government respected the provision in Islamic law that guaranteed religious tolerance for Christians and Jews as people with scripture, who worship the same God. As non-Muslims, they were required to pay an additional tax but not necessarily pressured to convert. There was a gradual conversion process under the Muslims, and after the first century of the Muslim invasion, only 15 percent of the population was Muslim, and approximately 85 percent was still Christian. After 250 years approximately 50 percent of the population was Muslim, and after five hundred years 90 percent was Muslim. By the 1200’s fewer than 10 percent were Christians, and they were known as Mozarabs because they had adopted Arab culture and lifestyle.5 Over the next century, the Muslim kingdom increased in wealth and power, and during the forty-nine year reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912 to 961) an economic and cultural golden age started in Córdoba and continued into the next century. In 929, ‘Abd al-Rahman III declared himself Caliph, or successor to Muhammad, in direct competition with the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. He made Córdoba a rich capital, worthy of the Caliphate. It became a major city with various estimates putting the population at 100,000 to 250,000 people, at least the size of Byzantium, the other large city of the Mediterranean world of the day. The main streets were lighted and paved, and an aqueduct brought water to the city, which was distributed through lead pipes. Córdoba was known for its hundreds of public baths, mosques, churches, and synagogues, and among its seventy libraries was purported to be the best one in Europe with a collection estimated at 300,000 to 400,000 volumes. It had the first university in Europe, and many bookshops. Al-Andalus became a center for learning in medicine, philosophy and literature, mathematics, architecture, and engineering among other fields. Since the most advanced knowledge of the day was in Arabic, Jewish and Christian scholars had to be fluent in that language. The doctors of Córdoba were famous, and Christian kings and nobility came to be treated by them. Córdoba was the center of the civilized world in Europe. The Muslims introduced new crops into Spain including: rice, improved wheat, sorghum, sugar-cane, cotton, oranges, lemons, limes, bananas, pomegranates, watermelons, spinach, and artichokes, as well as introducing new irrigation technology and expanding the lands under irrigation. They expanded mining to obtain metal ores and minerals for use in making tools, weapons, and other goods. The increased production in al-Andalus led to active export trade with North Africa and beyond. Middle Eastern merchants brought valued luxury goods from India for trade with al-Andalus. Two buildings constructed during the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman I show the wealth and cultural sophistication of the Caliphate. The first was the mosque beginning in 784. It was expanded over the next two centuries as the number of Muslims in Córdoba increased, and it still stands. The Córdoba mosque is evidence of the technical skill and esthetic quality of the architecture from the Umayyad period in Spain. It is made up of nineteen naves with columns and arches supporting each, so that the interior is a forest of columns. Many of the columns were re-cycled from Roman buildings, so they are made in different styles and sizes. Since the mosque was built over a period of time, the styles of the arches change from one part of the mosque to another. The oldest arches were made in a simple horseshoe style, but later ones were more complex crisscrossed arches. The prayer niche, the mihrab, is a horseshoe arch lined in marble and elaborately carved plaster work. The mihrab arch is divided into nineteen sections, and each is decorated with delicate floral designs with verses from The Holy Qur-ān placed around the arch. The mihrab is supposed to be oriented toward Mecca, but in the Córdoba mosque it is placed on the south wall in memory of the mosques in Damascus, where Mecca is due south. The second building was the largest and most impressive of the buildings in Córdoba, a magnificent palace and governmental complex built just outside of the city. It was called Medina Azahara (City of the Flower), named after his favorite wife. Marble was brought from North Africa, and columns came from as far away as Byzantium. The walls and ceilings were sheathed in marble, so thin, it was said to be translucent. There were multiple throne rooms, each designed to receive visiting diplomats and to impress them with the wealth and power of the Caliphate, and one had a pool of mercury that created dazzling light effects on the ceilings and walls when light hit it properly. The Medina Azahara was destroyed during a siege of the city from 1010 to 1013. Córdoba was burned and looted, and the power of the caliphate was broken. Al-Andalus went through a period of fragmentation without centralized authority for the next seventy-five years until 1086 when a new group invaded from Morocco and re-established control. Seville and the Moroccan Period (1086 to 1248) With the fragmentation of power among the Muslims during the eleventh century, the Christian kings attacked and took much of central Spain, including the important city of Toledo which fell in 1085. In response to these events, Morocco invaded the peninsula in 1086 and over the next sixty years gained the submission of each of the Muslim city-states to Moroccan authority. A coup in Morocco replaced the government with a new group, the Almohades, who also took control of Spain. The Almohade period (1146 to 1248) was the most important intellectual period in the history of Muslim Spain, and Seville became the new center of power and cultural activities. The Almohades were religiously intolerant at the beginning, but they soon learned the tolerance of Spanish Islam. The leaders were religious idealists, and they believed in unity of God which led to their coexistence with Christianity and Judaism. This was the period of the great Jewish philosopher and scientist, Maimonides (who actually fled during the early period of intolerance), and the Muslim thinkers Ibn Tufail, Avempace, and Averroës who were known in all of Europe. The Almohades also initiated a program of public works with aqueducts, bridges, and docks along with the famous palace the Alcázar, one of the most beautiful buildings in Muslim Spain. They built a mosque that rivaled the one in Córdoba with a tower, the famous Giralda, which still stands. The mosque was torn down after the fall of Seville to the Christians in 1248, and the cathedral of Seville was built in its place with only the Giralda surviving. Granada: Nasrid Period (1248 to 1492) When Seville fell to the Christians, thousands of Muslims fled to the last remaining Muslim kingdom in Spain in Granada. Al-Andalus had shrunken from the entire peninsula to less than a quarter of it in the southeastern corner of the country. In Granada, the final elegance of Muslim culture in Spain is recorded in the architecture of the Alhambra palace. “Alhambra” means the Red Palace, and it refers to the rust red color of the stones of the walls and fortress that protect it. The fountains, reflecting pools, and patios of the palace show how the Spanish Muslims enjoyed life. The geometric complexity of the designs on the tile work that cover the lower walls, and the elaborately carved plaster work on the upper walls and ceilings create a total ornamentation that dominates the senses upon entering the rooms. Life in Granada did not have the intellectual ferment of life in Seville or Córdoba, but it was known for its richness in art, architecture, and music. In 1440, the Gypsies arrived to Granada, fleeing turmoil in the Middle East. Although their origins are commonly thought to be in India, they arrived to Granada from Egypt and were called Gypsies. They have preserved the old music (cante jondo) and dance (flamenco) of Al-Andalus. The Nasrite Dynasty never had the economic resources, nor the power, of the earlier Muslim periods, and they had to pay tribute for much of the period to the kings of Castile. After a siege in 1491, the last Muslim king, Boabdil, surrendered the keys of the city to Queen Isabella of Castille and King Fernando of Aragon on January 1, 1492, ending the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. Although thousands of Muslims chose to leave for North Africa, especially Morocco, many stayed in Spain. Islam, Christendom, and the World after 1450 During this period Muslims were a cosmopolitan people with contacts through the known world of the time, from Spain on the West to Africa on the South across the Middle East and India to Indonesia on the southeast and deep into Central Asia. For one hundred years between 1450 and 1550, the dynamic of the world changed radically and put a new world order in place. Europe was only beginning to emerge from its insular, medieval period, defined by the passiveness of the walled castles and towns where people congregated to protect themselves. By the end of this period in 1550, Spain had transformed Europe and the world as a result of making contact with the American civilizations, and American gold and silver began to pour into Spain and Europe greatly increasing its wealth. Portugal had transformed trade with its voyages to the East by demonstrating the possibility of water routes to the sources of the spices and luxury goods from Asia that Europeans so admired. As the overland Silk Route was replaced by the water routes, the Central Asian and Middle Eastern traders lost their lucrative businesses, and those regions of the world fell into economic and political decline. With Europe controlling the Americas and the sea routes to the East, it was launched suddenly into the first era of global trade with the resulting power and wealth. In the mid-1400’s the Muslims and Chinese were the strongest civilizations in the world, but within one hundred years world power had begun to shift to the Europeans. Conclusions Spain is located at the crossroads of Europe and North Africa, and since Roman times it has been the contact between the different cultures from those two continents.6 For the last 1,400 years, that world has been divided along Muslim and Christian lines, and for 800 years the two groups fought back and forth over control of Spain until the Christians won in 1492. The long Muslim occupation of Spain and the subsequent re-conquest by the Christian kings marked Spain culturally, making it unique within the countries of Europe. The multiculturalism of Muslim Spain gave way to a Christian Spain that was intolerant of religious diversity. The Muslim occupation of Spain created a unique culture within Europe, leaving an impact on language, family structure, architecture, sciences, and literature. Endnotes 1 . For the history of Muslim Spain and its culture see Fletcher, Richard, 1992. Moorish Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Also Harvey, L.P. 1990. Islamic Spain: 1250-1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2 . The Arab leaders received the more fertile lands in the river valleys, and the Berber common soldiers were given the more arid lands in central Spain and in the mountains, which many of the Berbers resented. The discrimination of Arabs toward Berbers led to a revolt in 740 and continued unrest in Spain for the next decade. 3 . For a description of culture and society under Abd al-Rahman I and the subsequent history of Muslim Spain see Menocal, Marí Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 4 . For a discussion of the cultural blending that occurred between Jews, Muslims, and Christians during this period see Mann, Vivian B., Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, editors. 1992. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. New York: George Braziller, Inc. 5 . Adapted from Bulliet, Richard W. 1979. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an Essay in Quantitative History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 6 . For a history of Spanish culture see Crow, John A. 1985. Spain the Root and the Flower: An Interpretation of Spain and the Spanish People. Third edition, expanded and updated. Berkeley: University of California Press. 5 The Turkish Empires: Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman The Turks are originally from Central Asia, and over centuries they gradually moved out of their homeland of arid prairies into richer lands in the Middle East. Some Turks came with the Mongol expansion of the mid-1200’s, and they eventually consolidated their control over much of the Middle East, Iran, and India. They created three empires which dominated much of the world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The Safavid Empire (1501-1723) After the fall of the short-lived empire that Tamerlane had built in Samarkand and south central Asia in the 1300’s, a Turkish speaking group from near the Caspian Sea emerged to dominate the area from the south Caucasus through Persia into Uzbekistan and even parts of the Arabian Peninsula creating the Safavid Empire. It occupied the territory between the Ottoman Empire on the west and the Mughal Empire on the east, but it was the weakest of these three Muslim empires. The leaders of this empire were called “Shah” in contrast to “Sultan” in the Ottoman Empire. The founder of the Safavid Empire was Shah Ismail who conquered much of Iran and Iraq in 1501 and assumed the title of Shah of Persia.1 Shah Ismail was from a region where Sufi religious mysticism was important, and religion was to play an important role in the making and unmaking of this empire. The Sufis emphasized the emotional experience of religion, rather than the more studied, scholarly approach of established Islam. Rather than reading and contemplating The Holy Qur-ān, Sufis would dance themselves into an ecstatic state to experience the greatness of God. Sufism became common among the nomadic tribal groups in this region, and eventually these Sufis converted to the more fundamentalist Shi’ite tradition. Shah Ismail sent Shi’ite preachers as missionaries to the Turkic tribal people in the Ottoman Empire, provoking the ire of the Sultan. This led to a series of confrontations between the two empires over the next century with the Safavids gradually losing ground to their more powerful Ottoman neighbors. During the seventeenth century, militant Shi’ites increasingly gained power and influence within Safavid society. They imposed a strict religious orthodoxy on the people, limiting the intellectual and religious freedoms. In the relative openness of the early empire period women had freedom of movement like in the Ottoman world, but under the Shi’ites, women were required to wear the veil and retire to the seclusion of the home. Restrictions on the religious practices of non-Muslims, including Christians, Jews, and Mandeans created unrest among these groups. Eventually, the Safavid Empire succumbed to its internal conflicts and stronger forces from the outside. The Shi’ites have continue to be important in Persia/Iran to the present. The Safavid Empire fragmented and collapsed in the early 1700’s even before its stronger neighbors, the Ottomans and the Mughals. Later, in the 1700 and 1800’s, British colonialism encroached on the latter two empires, and they also fell. The Mughal Empire (1526 to 1858) The Muslim occupation of Indian territory (713 to 1483) occurred in three long stages over eight centuries.2 The First Period of Muslim Invasion (713 to 1206). consisted of repeated invasions out of Persia. Muslims took the Sind region of the lower Indus Valley in the early 700’s, but they stopped there while they were consolidating their rapidly acquired territories in the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. They did continue proselytizing in the region, and they gained many converts among the Turkish speaking central Asia peoples. It was these central Asian peoples who were to eventually make the Muslim conquest of India. In 986 Turkish Muslims were on the march out of Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass into the Punjab region of northwest India. They conquered the entire Indus River Valley from north to south, including the long established Arab kingdom in the south. They had turned toward the rich Ganges Plain before the death of their leader brought their advance to a halt. Religious Muslims considered the elaborate art of Hinduism and Buddhism as idolatry and systematically destroyed it along with looting palaces and temples. From that time to the present the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) has been under Muslim control. The Second Stage of the Muslim Conquest of India. This period is called the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). A Turkish Muslim group successfully invaded through the northwest corner of India in 1192 and took all of the Ganges River Plain as far as the Bay of Bengal in the east, bringing most of northern India under their control. They struck against Hindu and Buddhist places of worship and learning, including shrines and monasteries, and many Buddhists fled into Tibet and other countries to escape this military and religious attack. The Hindus and Jains, who emphasized non-violence, absorbed the Muslim attacks and carried on with their lives. Some Indians in the Ganges heartland converted to Islam, but most remained Hindu. The Mongol threat occupied the attention of the Muslim rulers for the next century as Mongol armies took Iran and invaded the heartland of the Middle East sacking Baghdad in 1258. Eventually, Tamerlane, one of the Mongol khans (or leaders), did invade India in 1398 leaving a toll of 100,000 or more dead. The Mughal Invasion of India. Another group of Muslim Turks out of the Asian steppes, the Mughals, made the third Muslim invasion of India, and they established a stable Muslim dynasty which was to last for three centuries. The Mughals came out of central Asia, in the early fifteenth century when the empire of Tamerlane collapsed, and central Asia was thrown into turmoil. Babur, who was the leader of the Mughals, was descended from Tamerlane and inherited part of that empire. Benefiting from the use of firearms and artillery, the Mughals conquered Afghanistan and present day Pakistan. In 1526 the Mughals captured Delhi, establishing their control over the rich Ganges plain and the heartland of India.10 The first decades of the Mughal presence in India were a time of struggle and war with the local kingdoms. Eventually under Akbar, who ruled in the late 1500’s, the Mughals completed the conquest of the northern half of India. The reigns of Akbar, and later his son, and grandson were among the most culturally sophisticated periods in Indian history. With his conquests Akbar created the largest kingdom in India since the Mauryan Empire almost 2000 years earlier. The Europeans arrived almost simultaneously with the Mughal conquest. Vasco de Gama, the Portuguese explorer, had arrived to the port of Calicut on the southwest coast in 1498, the first European to have sailed to India.11 The Portuguese came for the rich spice trade, which up to this time had been controlled by Middle Eastern kingdoms. They were determined to take control of this lucrative trade and simultaneously bring Christianity to the Indians. With that in mind, the Portuguese attacked the island of Goa in 1510 using their cannon to defeat the defenders. Shortly afterwards they took the port cities of Calicut, Ormuz, and Malacca, forcing Indians to become Christians. Then, they began the attack on Muslim shipping in the Indian Ocean, boarding and looting ships in a combination of piracy and terrorism. Once they gained control of the seas, they were able to monopolize the spice trade for the next century. India was caught in this pincer movement between European Christians invading from the south just as the Mughal Muslims were launching their own invasion from the north. This simultaneous invasion of India by two different religious and cultural systems, foreshadowed a struggle within India that has continued to the present day. It was in this environment that the Mughals established their empire. Typical of other fragmented kingdoms in Indian history the Mughal Empire was less cohesive than it might seem from the word empire. Although there was a centralized government and the imperial court, local kingdoms continued to exercise considerable autonomy under their own elites. Although the Mughal leaders had the use of cannon and gunpowder and could overpower weak neighboring kingdoms, their conquests seem to have relied largely on traditional siege techniques and negotiation. Akbar (ruled 1556 to 1605). Akbar is considered by many as one of the greatest leaders of pre-Independence India. He organized the empire into provinces that were administered through a strong bureaucracy and tax collection system. One of Akbar’s wives was Hindu, and he did more to integrate Muslims and Hindus than did any of the other Mughal rulers, and he included more Hindus in the imperial bureaucracy than did his successors. His Hindu wife was the mother to the son, Jahangir, who succeeded him on the throne. Akbar also invited European Christians into the court and named a Spanish Jesuit to tutor one of his sons. In keeping with his general attitude of coexistence Akbar was known for religious tolerance, and he made repeated efforts to bridge the differences between Muslims and Hindus. He ended a tax on Hindu pilgrims visiting sacred sites that earned him the appreciation of Hindus. Akbar invited Jains, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Christians to join Muslims in finding a common belief in God and establishing a doctrine of right conduct, the dharma which had been a preoccupation of Indians for thousands of years. He even proposed a new spiritual path, called Din-i-Ilahi (belief in God or divine faith) that combined elements from several religions. A central tenet of Akbar’s new spiritual path was the belief in the infallibility of the emperor based on God’s guidance.3 It was an autocratic appeal to people to accept his decisions without discussion, and it disappeared quickly after his death. Ultimately Muslims and Hindus stayed loyal to their traditional beliefs. The Mughal Dynasty was a golden age for art and architecture, much of it borrowed from Persia.4 Akbar was born in Persia, and he made Persian the court language. He built a new imperial city, and the red sandstone buildings of that city have the delicate decorative details of Persian design adapted to Indian architecture. Although he was illiterate, Akbar prized books and had people read to him daily. Akbar had a large personal collection of books. Although Akbar’s son, Jahangir, was even more known for his patronage of the arts as a part of court life, it was under his grandson, Shah Jahan, that the arts reached their most beautiful expression. Shah Jahan (ruled 1628 to 1657). Shah Jahan expanded the empire into the south of India and north to present day Uzbekistan. However, finances were strained by his military ventures and extensive building projects. Although the vast majority of Indians were peasant farmers living with virtually no money, he raised taxes to support his military and building campaigns, which severely strained the economic resources of the people. Little was done to improve agricultural production during this period or the infrastructure of roads and public works. Shah Jahan left a legacy of brilliance in the arts and architecture. He built a new capital in Delhi which became one of the most important cities in the world. It was characterized by beautiful boulevards, and it had one of the best mosques of all of Islam, the Juma Masjid. Like his grandfather and father, Shah Jahan had a corps of court painters who recorded important events of his reign, painting in the style of Persian miniatures. These small (4 by 6 inches) paintings were put into books which literally became art books about courtly events. Such books were prized gifts from the king. Shah Jahan also commissioned the making of the fabled Peacock Throne for himself. This luxurious example of courtly wealth had legs of gold, and it was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, pearls, and diamonds. But, Shah Jahan’s most famous monument is the Taj Mahal, which he had built for his favorite wife when she died at the age of thirty-nine shortly after giving birth to their fourteenth child. The Taj Mahal is widely considered the most beautiful building in the world. It is built in a garden surrounded by a wall, an example of the Mughal garden tomb tradition. The intention was to create a paradise on earth for the deceased person. The Persian word for walled garden, pairidaeza, is the origin of the English word paradise. The Taj Mahal was done at extraordinary cost. For almost twenty years, twenty thousand artisans and workers were employed to build and decorate it. Its white marble is carved in hundreds of intricate patterns, and delicate inlays of precious stones were made in the shape of beautiful plants and flowers. The enormous sums that he spend on luxurious building programs, rather than on economic infrastructure, eventually weakened the empire. Shah Jahan had planned as a tomb for himself, a second black marble building, in contrast to the white marble of the Taj Mahal, but that plan was never realized. Aurangzeb (ruled 1658 to 1707). In the 1650’s, Shah Jahan fell ill, and a power struggle resulted between his sons for the throne. In a bold step one of them, Aurangzeb, took the throne and put his father under house arrest. Aurangzeb was a devout Muslim and imposed a partisan Islamic rule that tended to separate Hindus from Muslims once again. He re-activated the Muslim non-believers tax on Hindus and prohibited the building of their temples. On the other hand, he made a number of beneficial reforms, such as prohibiting sati (widows being cremated with their dead husbands), as well as prohibiting drinking, gambling, and prostitution. He was a successful general and extended the territory of the empire to its greatest limits. However, after his death local revolts throughout the next century led to a shrinking of Mughal power, and regional kingdoms around India re-asserted their autonomy. Society and Culture. The role of women in India improved during the Mughal reign. Traditionally women had played an active role in Mughal tribal society, and women had even fought alongside men in battle. During the empire period women gave political advice, owned land, and engaged in business. Elite women could be educated, and Akbar established a school for girls. Women of all classes knew how to spin thread, and non-elite women spent much of their lives spinning. Even with the relative freedom of women in Mughal society, most Hindu women continued to be rigidly controlled. The Hindus even borrowed the idea of female seclusion inside the home, purdah, from the Muslims. Child marriage continued for women, and even the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of the husband although it was prohibited. The arts improved greatly in India under the Mughals. Traditionally painting had been done on palm leaves, but the Mughals introduced paper, which was superior for painting. The Mughals initially brought Persian painters who had a rich tradition of miniature paintings made with microscopic detail. Later, Akbar created a painting workshop and recruited hundreds of local artists to work under the direction of Persian master painters. These Indian painters adopted new elements not previously used in Persian painting, such as gradations and shades of coloring, paintings of people in action, and more realistic portraits. These were innovations that were introduced in the Ottoman Empire through its contacts with European painting at the time, and they were gradually borrowed by Persian and Mughal painters. Literature continued to be an elite activity, mostly religious or about court life, because printing had not yet been introduced to make it available to the general public. One of the few libraries in India was located in Agra, and it had a collection of hand-written books estimated to be 24,000 volumes. Poetry and religious literature were the most important literary forms. The Mughals named poet laureates for the court society who wrote in Persian. This poetry tended to be mannered and formal because it reflected the artificiality of court customs rather than the vitality of the broader society. During the Mughal Empire, India was one of the most important manufacturing and exporting countries in the world. Felipe Fernández-Armesto says that, ...eighteenth-century India was an enormous exporter of manufactures the Mughal Empire was almost certainly the world’s most productive state in terms of manufactures for export despite the modest technical equipment with which her industries were generally supplied. Indian workers cut screws without a lathe and made muslin without a spinning wheel...
5 The Slow Decline of the Empire.
In 1739 the Persians sacked the Mughal capital in Delhi and even took the famous Peacock Throne as war booty. In a slow process the Mughal heirs lost land to the Maratha’s Confederation of Hindu kingdoms in the central and western part of the country and to the British along the east coast and in the Ganges Valley. By 1805 the Mughal heirs were largely reduced to the Indus River Valley, present day Pakistan, and Britain had become the stronger power in India. In 1858 the last Mughal emperor was dethroned, and the empire ceased to exist, as British power increased on the subcontinent. Ottoman Empire (1453-1918): Turks in the Middle East and Europe The Ottoman Turks built the most important Muslim empire of the last 500 years.6 Their empire included present day Turkey, as well as North Africa, Egypt, part of Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and much of Eastern Europe. The Byzantine Empire had controlled Eastern Europe and most of Asia Minor after the disintegration of the Roman Empire, but over the centuries the Muslims had gradually chipped away its holdings on the east. During the Fourth Crusade, the Christians sacked Constantinople which weakened the Byzantine Empire, and it was further weakened in 1345 when the Ottomans defeated the Byzantine army, reducing the emperor to a vassal. In the meantime, the Turks conquered the Balkans, and finally, in the siege of 1453 they took Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul and making it the Ottoman capital. This marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-1400’s, it looked like Europe was caught in a pincer movement with Muslims on the West in Spain and in the East in Constantinople and the Balkans. After the Muslim Turks defeated the Byzantines, the eastern Christian stronghold, pressure grew on the Spanish kings to defeat the weakened Muslim kingdom on the West. Responding to that pressure, the combined armies of Castile and Aragon forced out the last Muslim ruler from Spain. After that, contact with Islam declined in Western Europe although contact was never broken in Eastern Europe, and Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo continue to be predominantly Muslim today. The Ottoman Caliphate. The Turkish sultans of the Ottoman Empire proclaimed themselves as Caliphs of Islam in the fifteenth century, and they were widely accepted as the leaders of the Muslim world, even though they broke from the tradition of Arab led caliphates. The greatest of the Ottoman sultans is considered by many to have been Suleiman I, also known as the Magnificent, and he ruled from 1520 to 1566.7 He led the Turkish expansion into Europe taking the Balkans, Hungary, and most of Austria. His forces struck fear into the hearts of the Europeans whose allied forces finally defeated him in Vienna. Under Suleiman and his successors, the Ottomans occupied much of Eastern Europe laying siege to Vienna on two different occasions. The Ottomans controlled much of Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and they were an important presence in the formation of modern Europe.8 By also controlling the Middle East and North Africa, the Ottomans essentially turned the eastern Mediterranean into their own private lake. As the Greeks built their empire on that of the Persians, and the Romans built theirs on that of the Greeks, so the Ottomans built their empire on that of the Byzantine world. The Turks were nomadic horsemen who did not have an urban civilized lifestyle, but they quickly adopted civilization to organize the empire they conquered. They left existing government procedures and bureaucracies in place. Court ritual in the new empire was borrowed from the Byzantine court, and centralized rule was concentrated in the hands of the sultan in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Leaving the existing culture and traditions in place facilitates a rapid and successful transition following a conquest, and that was the policy followed by the Ottomans. In contrast, the Mongols destroyed existing governmental and economic structures, and they were unable to rebuild them, never establishing a civilization of their own. The Ottomans were characterized by their general openness about gender issues and ethnic pluralism. The Turkish tribal traditions were basically egalitarian in gender roles, and in the Empire women were free to own and inherit property, and they owned their own dowries. Women made their own choices about marriage, and they could ask for divorce if the husband were not acceptable to them. Women also served as government officials, and some women reached relatively high positions, even provincial governors. Since the Empire covered diverse regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, it was a culturally pluralistic society. Into this mix came many of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. As the Jews left Spain, most went first to the immediately neighboring countries of Portugal, France, Italy, and Morocco, but many eventually migrated on to the territories of the Ottoman Empire. The Sephardic migration to Ottoman lands continued well into the sixteenth century, and it was significantly aided by Doña Gracia Nasi who established clandestine escape routes from Europe using her own fleet of merchant ships. They were a people who had lived between the Christian and Muslim worlds for centuries, and they knew how to negotiate between them culturally and economically. The Sephardic people were well known for their knowledge of medicine, literacy and scholarship, and international trade and finance. Many settled in the Balkans (Sarajevo) and Greece (Salonika) where they could use their knowledge of international trade developed in Spain. Others settled in the Turkish mainland where they thrived for the next four hundred years until the creation of the state of Israel where most migrated in the last decades of the twentieth century. During the late Ottoman period most of the Latin American colonies became independent from Spain, and many Middle Easterners, (Christians, Jews, and Muslims), migrated to these new countries as merchants and skilled crafts people. They were commonly called “Turks” because of their origin from lands controlled by the Ottoman Empire although they included Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians. Many of the descendants of these migrants went on to become wealthy and powerful members of their new countries, and some even became presidents, such as Carlos Menem of Argentina and Julio Caesar Turbay of Colombia. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the influence of Islam in world politics waned as the Ottoman Empire shrank and bits and pieces of its territory were chipped away. By the late 1800’s the Ottomans were clearly weakened, and the European powers were beginning to move against them.9 They lost most of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 1878. The French took Algeria and Tunisia in the 1880’s, and simultaneously the British took Egypt. In 1912 the Italians took Libya, and the Albanians broke away, becoming independent. The Ottomans allied with the Germans in World War I hoping to be able to drive the British from Egypt, but in contrast the British took Palestine (1917) and encouraged the Saudi tribes to declare independence. Syria and Lebanon came under the control of the French, and the British added Jordan (1918) and Iraq (1920) to their territory, reducing Turkey to its present dimensions. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, the Armenians and Kurds tried to win their own independence, but their demands were crushed by the Turks. It resulted in the Armenian genocide, as the Turks suppressed the Armenian cause. This was the first state sponsored genocidal campaign of the twentieth century, a forewarning of what would come later with the Nazis, Serbians, Hutus, and others. Following a policy of deportation and systematic killing, 1 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed out of the population of three million. Throughout these genocidal attacks Europe turned away and virtually ignored that they occurred. Mosque Architecture and the Ottomans. The cultural contributions of the Ottomans are notable in architecture and the arts, which flourished under imperial patronage, and frequently their purpose was to celebrate imperial achievements and power. Religious expression was also important in art and architecture. The sultans employed workshops of artists and artisans in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul as well as in other cities throughout the empire. Ottoman architecture is the most widely known contribution to world art, especially mosque architecture. Until the late 1500’s mosques throughout the Muslim world were built with pillars supporting a series of individual archways or domes, creating a forest of pillars that broke up the line of sight. Worshipers were scattered among the columns. The Ottomans began building their mosques on an open floor plan permitted by creating one large central dome modeled on the plan of the Byzantine church, Santa Sophia which had been converted into a mosque. The Romans had initially experimented with domes to create large open spaces in buildings, but the Byzantine and Ottoman architects mastered and expanded their use. The most famous Ottoman architect was Sinan who built eighty-one mosques throughout the empire, including the world famous Blue Mosque of Istanbul. He influenced mosque architecture throughout the Muslim world.10 His mosques were known for their domes and elegantly slender minarets which marked the four corners of the buildings. The style he created in the mid-1500’s was to be copied by the Mughals in India with the Taj Mahal being the most famous example. Although mosques were traditionally designed with minarets to be used for the call to prayer five times a day, the Sinan style narrow minarets eventually evolved into non-functional towers that had more of an esthetic use than a religious one. The visual lightness of these thin minarets with the curves of the dome served to cancel out the blockish heaviness of the building itself. These visually appealing lines were frequently complemented by elaborate surface designs on the walls, sometimes in the famous blue tiles of the Middle East. The interiors of Sinan’s mosques were characterized by elaborately carved plaster work on the upper parts of the walls and multi-colored tiles decorated in complex geometric designs in the lower part. By using the soaring openness of the dome and frequent windows he created prayer halls that inspired the faithful as did the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. As was common in the Muslim world, Sinan’s mosques were a part of a complex of religious buildings that included a school, library, hospital, and even a mausoleum. Since the mosque was an important urban gathering place with so many activities going on within it, bazaars frequently grew up next to them, furthering emphasizing its importance as a focal point of social activity in the city. In addition to architecture the most important media for the arts were ceramics, calligraphy, rugs, jewelry, silk weaving, and weapons. Ceramics and rugs were important for display in the houses of the ruling elite, and each was created with exquisite designs and techniques. Rug weaving was a village industry, and the weavers of each village used particular colors and designs that identified their work. One design element common to Turkish rugs was the “Gordian knot” which is a knot-like maze design from the Gordes region. Calligraphy was commonly used to write out verses of the Koran in beautiful lines with both the art and the verse showing the devotion of the owner. Silks and jewelry were usually for personal adornment, but silks were also woven for wall hangings and covers of various types. Silk weaving was under the direct patronage of the sultan, and he had control over its distribution which was largely for court use.11 Much of Islamic art was expressed in the design of functional objects, such as metal bowls with embossed designs and glazed ceramics either painted with calligraphy or floral designs. Persian and Turkish ceramics were important, and they interchanged influences with Chinese potters. Blue on white patterns were popular, and the Muslims developed a special process called lusterware which had metallic glazes that reflected light like polished gold, silver, or copper. Muslim ceramics were especially sophisticated in the use of glazed tiles made in complex geometric patterns on houses, palaces, and mosques. These manifestations of classic Muslim culture and religion have created a legacy of fine arts and architecture that can be appreciated today from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to the Taj Mahal in India. The Dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate. Over a 500 year period the Ottomans had controlled territory from the gates of Venice to eastern Europe, Turkey, the Levant, and much of North Africa, one of the largest and most important empires in the world. As the new nation state of Turkey was led into existence by Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, he pushed for the creation of a democratic-styled secular republic. The last Ottoman Caliph, AbdÜlmecid II, had a largely ceremonial role until that ended with the creation of the new Republic of Turkey in 1923. When the Republic of Turkey replaced the Ottoman Caliphate, it marked the beginning of the modern nation state system in the Muslim world. Egypt began negotiation for independence from Britain in 1922, which it fully gained in 1952. Persia was organized as a nation state in 1925. Saudi Arabia was unified into one kingdom in 1932. Iraq became an independent nation state in 1932, Syria in 1936, Jordan in 1946. The North African states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco gained their independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Nationalism and the nation state had replaced the Caliphate. Conclusions From 1500 to the early 1900’s Turkish Muslims were a major power in the world, and today they are still important players on the world stage. The Turkish Empire morphed into the modern Republic of Turkey after losing its non-Turkish territories. The Turks of the Safavid world still exist in Iran, as a minority group today, and in recent decades they have emerged as a new nation-state, Turkmenistan. In India, the Turkish legacy is found in the large Muslim minority. The Turkish Empires left permanent influences on the cultures of the lands they ruled, from India, where they left a rich heritage in architecture and the arts, to Europe where they left a legacy in language, engineering, science, and the arts and crafts.
Endnotes 1 . For a study of the Safavid Empire and the conversion of Persians to Shi’ism, see Abisaab, Rula Jurdi. 2004. Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers. 2 . The long history of the Mughals is discussed in Wolpert, Stanley. 1999. A New History of India. Sixth edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 126-225. 3 . Kulke, Hermann and Dietmar Rothermund. 1986. A History of India. New York: Routledge. Page 203. 4 . For a discussion of Mughal painting see Irwin, Robert. 1997. Islamic Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Literary World. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. Pages 229- 230. 5 . Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1995. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years. New York: Scribner. Page 379. 6 . For a discussion of life in the Ottoman Empire see Faroqhi, Suraiya. 2000. Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers. 7 . Sultan is the Arabic world for ruler, and in Persian it is Shah and in Turkic, Khan. For discussions of the Ottoman Empire and the reign of Suleiman I see Kunt, Metin I. and Cristine Woodhead, editors. 1995. Suleiman the Magnificent and His Age: The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World. London: Longman. 8 . For a discussion of the influence of the Ottoman Empire on Europe see Goffman, Daniel. 2002. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9 . The collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to a rush by the European powers to expand their presence in the Middle East. See Fromkin, David. 2001. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Pages 415-464. 10 . For a study of the architecture of Sinan see Kuran, Aptullah. 1987. Sinan: The Grand Old Master of Ottoman Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Turkish Studies. 11 . For images and analysis of Ottoman art and architecture see Khalli, Nasser D., 1995. Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Collection of Nasser D. Khalli. Fourth edition. London: Azimuth Editions.
6 Islam in the Twenty-First Century
During the twentieth century Muslim countries came into close contact with Western civilization, and many adopted cultural practices from that world. Others reacted against the materialistic focus of European/American capitalism and developed Muslim renewal movements to emphasize traditional Muslim life. As we enter the twenty-first century, the Muslim nations are poised to take their place as a distinctive part of the world system. For African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples who experienced European colonialism from the 1800’s to the 1950’s, Islam offers a model for life that emphasizes brotherhood rather than the racial discrimination and exploitation of colonialism. Islam offers an understanding of family and life that is attractive to many. Believers in Islam understand Islamic culture as completing the cycle of the peoples of Abraham, and Muslim fundamentalists see themselves as reclaiming cultural values in face of the emerging trends toward secularism and materialism. The contrast in wealth today between the Muslim world and the West signals the sharp conflict between the two civilizations, as shown in the table below. Table 6.1 The Muslim World and the West Level of Wealth Per Capita GDP Averages Average Literacy West $34350 98.75 Middle East $ 7200 73.7 Muslim Asia $ 4916 83.5 Muslim Africa $ 1440 42.4 Along with wealth goes literacy, so that the poorer the country, the lower literacy rates are, and the greater the discrepancy between men’s and women’s literacy. World conflicts over the next few decades will be clothed in cultural differences, but much of the conflict will be fueled by differences in wealth and well-being. Islam is growing rapidly in the West, as people migrate from Muslim to Western countries to work, study, and join relatives. Numbers are not large, but Europe now has forty million Muslim residents and the United States and Canada five million. Maintaining a Muslim lifestyle in the context of culturally Christian nations is not easy. Tariq Ramadan, a European based, Muslim philosopher, has emerged as one of the leading spokespersons for this group. He is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the champion of Islamic values who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. In early Islam, religious leaders ruled that Muslims should not live in areas not under Islamic rule, yet, in the global world of today that is not always possible. Although militant Muslims are getting the headlines, Ramadan argues that Muslims living in the West are creating a new kind of Islam, not in opposition to the West, but an Islam rooted in traditional religious precepts and clothed in new cultures and languages. He says that the values of Islam are universal and can be expressed in Western terms. Ramadan represents Muslims who believe that there is no fundamental conflict between Islam and Western civilization.1 Religious belief and faith are at the center of social and political action in the Muslim world. The Muslim Brotherhood was the forerunner of modern Muslim militancy, and it has been the model for most contemporary Islamic activist movements. It was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Sheik Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher who dreamed of recreating the golden age of Islam. It rejects Western values, as it did Communism, and advocates the establishment of an Islamic state based on the Shari’a or Islamic law and under the leadership of a Caliph like the early stages of the Arab Empire. The Brotherhood sees Israel as the enemy of Islam and as an agent of the Western powers. It strongly supports the Palestinian cause and has sent fighters on a number of occasions to fight alongside Palestinians against Israel. A cluster of other militant groups have been organized around the fight against Israel, and the Islamic groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are the most important. Their purpose is the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state that would occupy all of the present day territory of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. They carry out bombings and mortar attacks on Israel Defense Force soldiers and on Jewish settlers in areas considered to be Palestinian. They have also done suicide bombings in Israeli cities. They receive financial support from Iran and logistical support from Syria. They are heirs to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition to the Islamic groups, there are also a number of secular nationalist groups that fight against Israel but which do not appeal directly to a Muslim ideology. The most important of these is the Fatah group. This is the faction that was headed by Yasser Arafat, and it dominates the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority. It is fighting for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and is known for attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers in areas it considers to be Palestinian. Fatah has worked with the Islamic groups, especially Hamas, in organizing the Intifadas against Israel. Another secular group in the fight against Israel is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which is a Marxist organization that has more acceptance among intellectuals but only a small grass-roots following. It has carried out mortar attacks and car bombings but is not considered a major Palestinian organization. The Hezbollah, or “The Party of God”, is a Lebanese Shi’ite group that has led the fight with Israel from its base in southern Lebanon. It was organized in 1982 in opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it has been funded by Iran. The Hezbollah inflicted significant losses on the Israeli army during its occupation of southern Lebanon during the 1980’s and 1990’s, and Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 was seen as a victory by this group. In spite of the withdrawal, it has continued to make periodic cross border attacks. It has representatives elected to the Lebanese parliament since 1992, and it is active in providing social services to the small town and rural populations of southern Lebanon. The attacks on the International Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 brought the transnational Islamic militant group, al Qaeda, “the Base” to the forefront. Since the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, al Qaeda carried out a number of high profile bombings of United States embassies (Kenya and Tanzania) and a ship (U.S.S. Cole in Yemen). This group was directed by Osama bin Laden, and it is reported to have contact with Muslim organizations throughout the thirty-five Muslim nations around the world, as well as Europe and the United States. Bin Laden and others founded al-Qaeda in 1989 to oppose non-Islamic governments and the influence of the West on Muslim countries. Their opposition to the United States grew after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 in reaction to the presence of United States troops in Saudi Arabia, the holy land. They were also opposed to the United States presence in East Africa, especially Somalia. As a vocal and visible opponent of the United States in the 1990’s and onwards, bin Laden became the most charismatic Muslim leader in the world. He was more of a leader of ideas, especially Muslim religious purity, than a leader of tactical forces.
His message responds to three major issues: 1. United States troops should not be stationed in Saudi Arabia because they represent a defiling presence in the Muslim Holy Land. Saudi Arabia should not allow the United States to use its soil to attack fellow Muslims. 2. Israel has taken land from Muslim people, and it has occupied the holy sites in Jerusalem. The United States is the primary support for Israel, and the United States is equally to blame for Israel’s actions. The Palestinian cause against Israel should be supported. 3. The Western countries, especially the United States, are the primary representatives of the forces of materialism in the world. Materialism and capitalism are negative influences from the West that threaten the spiritual values of the Muslim world. The United States led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was seen by many Muslims as an attack by the West on Islam, and it expanded support for the Islamist movement in the Middle East. Iraq has most important holy sites for the Shi’ites, and with its occupation the West either controlled or had troops in the three most important holy places for the Muslims: Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem, and Iraq. After the upheavals of the Arab Spring across North Africa, and the Civil War in Syria, militancy in the Middle East has shifted ideologically to a more religious focus, and the newer militant organizations have become more Islamist. The most prominent has been ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has declared itself a worldwide caliphate. The Middle East is in a period of rapid change as countries and ideological groups struggle between traditional values and the larger international economic and social world in which they live. Contemporary Muslim militant groups appeal to the past golden age of Islam, which they believe can be re-created by strict observance of Islamic life. Many see the expansion of the culture of international capitalism as a threat to the values of Islam and the moral rectitude of its peoples. They demand equal participation for Muslim values in the face of rapid changes and internationalization.
Conclusions
With 1.5 billion followers Islam is one of the dominant religions in the world with a towering presence in the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South Asia. One-fourth of the world’s nations are predominantly Muslim or have a strong Muslim presence. With such an important role, Islam will have a powerful influence on the shape of the world of the twenty-first century. The struggles between Sunnis and Shi’ites and between internationally oriented moderates and tradition oriented conservatives will determine the future of Islam and much of the world.
Endnotes 1 . Ramadan, Tariq. 2003. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2 . Bin Laden, Osama. 2005. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden. Edited by Bruce Lawrence. New York: Verso Books.
About the Author
Ron Duncan Hart, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist from Indiana University. Hart has written a dozen books on religion, cultural history and social change. He is a former University Vice-President and Dean of Academic Affairs. He also has worked in South America with the Ford Foundation, UNICEF, and other international agencies. He has awards from the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Fulbright among others.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hart, Ron Duncan, 1941- Islam / Ron Hart. pages cm. -- (Gaon guides to religion and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935604-78-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935604-84-6 (ebook)
1. Islam--History. 2. Islam. I. Title. BP50.H347 2015 297--dc23 2015004691