Ways of The World: Chapter 9

Quran

Holy book of Islam

Umma

The community of all Muslims. A major innovation against the background of seventh-century Arabia, where traditionally kinship rather than faith had determined membership in a community.

Pillars of Islam

The five core practices required of Muslims: a profession of faith, regular prayer, charitable giving, fasting during Ramadan, and a pilgrimage to Mecca (if physically and financially possible).

Hijra

The Migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622, marking the founding of Islam

Sharia

Islamic law; a combination of the Quran and the Hadith.

Jizya

The tax on people in the Umayyad Caliphate who did not convert to Islam.

Ulama

Muslim religious scholars. From the ninth century onward, the primary interpreters of Islamic law and the social core of Muslim urban societies.

Umayyad Caliphate

(661-750 CE) The Islamic caliphate that established a capital at Damascus, conquered North Africa, the Iberian Pennisula, Southwest Asia, and Persia, and had a bureaucracy with only Arab Muslims able to be a part of it.

Abbsaid Caliphate

Sufism

An Islamic mystical tradition that desired a personal union with God--divine love through intuition rather than through rational deduction and study of the shari'a. Followed an ascetic routine (denial of physical desire to gain a spiritual goal), dedicating themselves to fasting, prayer, meditation on the Qur'an, and the avoidance of sin.

al-Ghazali

Brilliant Islamic theologian; struggled to fuse Greek and Qur'anic traditions; not entirely accepted by ulama

Sikhism

Indian religion founded by the guru Nanak (1469-1539) in the Punjab region of northwest India. After the Mughal emperor ordered the beheading of the ninth guru in 1675, warriors from this group mounted armed resistance to Mughal rule.

Ibn Battuta

(1304-1369) Morrocan Muslim scholar, the most widely traveled individual of his time. He wrote a detailed account of his visits to Islamic lands from China to Spain and the western Sudan. His writings gave a glimpse into the world of that time period.

Timbuktu

City on the Niger River in the modern country of Mali. It was founded by the Tuareg as a seasonal camp sometime after 1000. As part of the Mali empire, Timbuktu became a major major terminus of the trans-Saharan trade and a center of Islamic learning.

Mansa Musa

Emperor of the kingdom of Mali in Africa. He made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and established trade routes to the Middle East.

al-Andalus

A Muslim-ruled region in what is now Spain, established in the eighth century.

Madrassas

Formal colleges for higher institutions in the teaching of Islam as well as in secular subjects founded throughout the Islamic world in beginning in the 11th century

House of Wisdom

Combination library, academy, and translation center in Baghdad established in the 800s.

Ibn Sina

A physician and intellectual, also known as Avicenna. In his own philosophical writings, he sited Aristotle to the effect that the world operated not only at the will of Allah, but also by its own natural laws, laws that could be ascertained by human reason.