Chapter 9 - The Worlds of Islam

The Birth of New Religion

• Confucianism and Daoism from China, Hinduism and Buddhism from India, Greek philosophy from the Mediterranean area, and Zoroastrianism from Persia Most of the main religious or cultural traditions of the second-wave era came from the core of existing civilizations. By contrast, Christianity and Islam arose from the outside of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations.

The Homeland of Islam

• Bedouins, nomadic Arabs who herded their sheep and camels in seasonal migrations, had long inhabited the middle part of the Arabian Peninsula. These people lived in fiercely separate clans and tribes that were frequently involved in blood feuds.

• Mecca, one of such cities, grew to play a unique position in Arabia. Mecca was the site of the Kaaba, Arabia's most renowned religious sanctuary, which featured depictions of approximately 360 deities and was a popular pilgrimage destination despite being off the main long-distance commerce routes.

• The Byzantine Empire, heir to the Roman world, and the Sassanid Empire, heir to the imperial traditions of Persia, were on the fringe of two established and opposing civilizations at the time.

  

The Messenger and the Message

• Muhammad Ibn Abdullah, who was born into a Quraysh household in Mecca, was the trigger for those events and the foundation of this new faith. Muhammad lost his parents as a child, was raised by an uncle, and worked as a shepherd to support himself.
• Submission to Allah (the word “Muslim” literally means “one who submits”) was the main requirement of Muslims and the only way to live a God-conscious life in this world and to enter Paradise after death.
• The Quran's message attacked not just Arab religion's ancient polytheism and Mecca's social inequalities, but also Arab society's entire tribe and clan structure, which was prone to conflict, bickering, and violence.
• Another obligation for believers was “struggle,” or jihad in Arabic, which was frequently referred to as the sixth pillar. The “greater jihad,” as Muhammad referred to it, was an inward personal effort by each believer against greed and selfishness, a spiritual strive toward living a God-conscious life.

The Transformation of Arabia

• When Muhammad's revelations were made public in Mecca, they drew a tiny following of close relatives, a few important Meccan leaders, and a mix of lower-class dependents, freed slaves, and members of poorer tribes.
• Medina's new community, or umma, was a form of "super tribe," yet it was very different from Arab society's conventional tribes. Membership was based on faith rather than birth, which allowed society to grow quickly.
• However, this was not blanket extermination of Jews, as some Jews stayed loyal to Muhammad's new empire. However, the Prophet diverted his followers' prayers to Mecca, effectively defining Islam to be an Arab religion with a universal message.

War, Conquest, and Tolerance

• Arab troops attacked the Byzantine and Persian Sassanid empires, the region's main powers, within a few years after Muhammad's death in 632. It was the start of a process that would quickly result in an Arab empire stretching from Spain to India, reaching both Europe and China and ruling the majority of the regions in between.

  

• Periodic plague outbreaks devastated the urban populations of the Byzantine and Persian empires for a century or more, but the more distant and scattered Arabs of the Arabian Desert were more shielded from the disease.

• The majority of conquest violence involved imperial soldiers, although people were occasionally caught up in the conflict and suffered horribly. A fight between Byzantine and Arab armies in Palestine, for example, claimed the lives of 4,000 people in 634.

Networks of Exchange

• The globe of Islamic civilization was not only a network of faith, but also a vast marketplace where goods, technologies, food products, and ideas were freely exchanged.
• Furthermore, commerce was regarded favorably in Islamic teaching, and laws governing it were prominently featured in the sharia, providing a predictable framework for cross-cultural trade.
• The pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as the urbanization that accompanied the rise of Islamic civilization, aided in the growth of trade. Baghdad, which became the capital of the Abbasid Empire in 756, quickly expanded into a magnificent city with a population of half a million people.
• The Abbasid caliph al-Mamun, himself a poet and scholar with a passion for foreign learning, founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 830 as a study and translation center.

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