901 – 002 – The Spread Of Islam: The Rise Of Islamic Empires And States

The Spread Of Islam: The Rise Of Islamic Empires And States

The Spread of Islam

WTH THE DEATH of Muhammad, the Muslim community found itself without a leader. While as the ‘seal of the prophets’ he could ‘no successor, as a political guide Muhammad was succeeded by the so-called al Khulafa’ al Rashidun, the four ‘rightly-guided caliphs’ who were chosen from his most loyal companions. It was during the leadership of these caliphs (632 – 656), and particularly under the second caliph and great statesman ‘Umar ibn al Khattab (634–44), that the conquest of territories outside Arabia began. Influenced by the political systems of these conquered areas, the leadership became hereditary, and the Umayyad dynasty (661 – 750) emerged out of the aristocracy of the Quraysh. While the Rashidun caliphs were based at Mecca and Medina, the Umayyads moved the seat of power to Damascus. Their successors, the ‘Abbasids (750 – 1258), who were less Arab-centered, built a new capital, Baghdad, in a fertile area on the main routes between Iraq, Iran and Syria.

The History Of The Conquests

The Arab conquests started as sporadic tribal raids. A proper army was probably not organized before 634, but once formed, it made expeditions eastwards towards the Sasanian empire and northwards to Palestine and Syria against the Byzantine empire.

Under the leadership of commanders such as ‘Amr ibn al ‘As and Khalid ibn al Walid, the army defeated the Byzantines at Yarmuk (636), and
the newly organized Muslim navy destroyed the Christian fleet at the Battle of the Masts (655). Constantinople was sporadically besieged during this period, though never captured. On the oriental front, the Sasanian army suffered a crushing defeat at the battle of al Qadisiyah (637), and Ctesiphon was taken soon afterwards; this caused the disintegration of the Sasanian empire. ‘Amr ibn al ‘As then moved westwards towards Egypt in 639, and by 646 Heliopolis and Alexandria had fallen. The city of Fustat was founded in 643, and northeast Africa was occupied. From Alexandria, naval expeditions were launched against Cyprus and Sicily and under the Umayyad dynasty the Muslims emerged as a major seapower. The eighth century saw further expansions eastwards as far as the river Indus and the Sind region and westwards through northern Africa to Spain and France where the over-stretched army was stopped at the battle of Poitiers by Charles Martel.

Conversions

The expansion of the Arab Empire in the first centuries after Muhammad’s death soon established Muslim dynasties in North Africa, West Africa, to the Middle East, and Somalia.

Within the century of the establishment of Islam upon the Arabian peninsula and the subsequent rapid expansion of the Arab Empire during the Muslim conquests, one of the most significant empires in world history was formed. For the subjects of this new empire, formerly subjects of the greatly reduced Byzantine, and obliterated Sassanid Empires, not much changed in practice. The objective of the conquests was mostly of a practical nature, as fertile land and water were scarce in the Arabian peninsula. A real Islamization therefore only came about in the subsequent centuries.

There existed two separate strands of converts of the time: one is animists and polytheists of tribal societies of the Arabian peninsula and the Fertile crescent; the other one is the native Christians and Jews who existed peacefully before the Muslim invaders arrived.

Islam was introduced in Somalia in the 7th century when the Muslim Arabs fled from the persecution of the Pagan Quraysh tribe. When the Muslims defeated the Pagans, some returned to Arabia, but many decided to stay there and established Muslim communities along the Somali coastline. The local Somalis adopted the Islamic faith well before the faith even took root in its place of origin.

For the polytheistic and pagan societies, apart from the religious and spiritual reasons each individual may have had, conversion to Islam represented the response of a tribal, pastoral population to the need for a larger framework for political and economic integration, a more stable state, and a more imaginative and encompassing moral vision to cope with the problems of a tumultuous society. In contrast, for sedentary and often already monotheistic societies, Islam was substituted for a Byzantine or Sassanian political identity and for a Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian religious affiliation. Conversion initially was neither required nor necessarily wished for: The Arab conquerors did not require the conversion as much as the subordination of non-Muslim peoples. At the outset, they were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs.

Only in subsequent centuries, with the development of the religious doctrine of Islam and with that the understanding of the Muslim ummah (community), did mass conversion take place. The new understanding by the religious and political leadership in many cases led to a weakening or breakdown of the social and religious structures of parallel religious communities such as Christians and Jews.

The caliphs of the Arab dynasty established the first schools inside the empire which taught Arabic language and Islamic studies. They furthermore began the ambitious project of building mosques across the empire, many of which remain today as the most magnificent mosques in the Islamic world, such as the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. At the end of the Umayyad period, less than ten percent of the people in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Spain were Muslim. Only on the Arabian peninsula was the proportion of Muslims among the population higher than this.

The Abbasids are known to have founded some of the world’s earliest educational institutions such as the House of Wisdom.

Expansion ceased and the central disciplines of Islamic philosophy, theology, law and mysticism became more widespread and the gradual conversions of the populations within the empire occurred. Significant conversions also occurred beyond the extents of the empire such as that of the Turkic tribes in Central Asia and peoples living in regions south of the Sahara in Africa through contact with Muslim traders active in the area and Sufi orders. In Africa it spread along three routes, across the Sahara via trading towns such as Timbuktu, up the Nile Valley through the Sudan up to Uganda and across the Red Sea and down East Africa through settlements such as Mombasa and Zanzibar. These initial conversions were of a flexible nature. The reasons why, by the end of the tenth century, a large part of the population had converted to Islam are diverse. According to British-Lebanese historian Albert Hourani, one of the reasons may be that,

“Islam had become more clearly defined, and the line between Muslims and non-Muslims more sharply drawn. Muslims now lived within an elaborated
system of ritual, doctrine and law clearly different from those of non-Muslims. The status of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians was more precisely defined, and in some ways it was inferior. They were regarded as the ‘People of the Book,’ those who possessed a revealed scripture, or ‘People of the Covenant,’ with whom compacts of protection had been made. In general they were not forced to convert, but they suffered from restrictions. They paid a special tax; they were not supposed to wear certain colors; they
could not marry women.”

It should be pointed out that most of these laws were elaborations of basic laws concerning non-Muslims (dhimmis) in the Qur’an. The Qur’an does not give much detail about the right conduct with non-Muslims, in principle recognizing the religion of “People of the book” (Jews, Christians, and sometimes others as well) and securing a separate tax from them in-lieu of the zakat imposed upon Muslim subjects.

There appeared to be “interwoven= terms of political and economic benefits and of a sophisticated culture and religion” as appealing to the masses.

The question of why people convert to Islam has always generated intense feeling. Earlier generations of European scholars believed that conversions to Islam were made at the point of the sword, and that conquered peoples were given the choice of conversion or death. It is now apparent that conversion by force, while not unknown in Muslim countries, may have been, in fact, rare. Muslim conquerors ordinarily wished to dominate rather than convert, and many conversions to Islam were voluntary. In some cases worldly and spiritual motives for conversion blended together. Moreover, conversion to Islam did not necessarily imply a complete turning from an old to a totally new life. While it entailed the acceptance of new religious beliefs and membership in a new religious community, most converts retained a deep attachment to the cultures and communities from which they came.

The result of this can be seen in the diversity of Muslim societies today, with varying manifestations and practices of Islam.

Conversion to Islam also came about as a result of the breakdown of historically religiously organized societies: with the weakening of many churches, for example, and the favoring of Islam and the migration of substantial Muslim Turkish populations into the areas of Anatolia and the Balkans, the “social and cultural relevance of Islam” were enhanced and a large number of peoples were converted. This worked better in some areas (Anatolia) and less in others (e.g. the Balkans, where the spread of Islam was limited by the vitality of the Christian churches.)

Along with the religion of Islam, the Arabic language, number system and Arab customs spread throughout the empire. A sense of unity grew among many though not all provinces, gradually forming the consciousness of a broadly Arab-Islamic population: something which was recognizably an Islamic world had emerged by the end of the tenth century. Throughout this period, as well as in the following centuries, divisions occurred between Persians and Arabs, and Sunnis and Shiites, and unrest in provinces empowered local rulers at times.

There are a number of historians who see the rule of the Umayyads as responsible for setting up the “dhimmah” to increase taxes from the dhimmis to benefit the Arab Muslim community financially and to discourage conversion. Islam was initially associated with the ethnic identity of the Arabs and required formal association with an Arab tribe and the adoption of the client status of mawali. Governors lodged complaints with the caliph when he enacted laws that made conversion easier, depriving the provinces of revenues from the tax on non-Muslims.

During the following Abbasid period an enfranchisement was experienced by the mawali and a shift was made in the political conception from that of a primarily Arab empire to one of a Muslim empire and c. 930 a law was enacted that required all bureaucrats of the empire to be Muslims. Both periods were also marked by significant migrations of Arab tribes outwards from the Arabian Peninsula into the new territories.

Conversion within the Empire was a relatively slow process (10 percent) of non-Arab subjects during the Arab centric Umayyad period, in contrast with estimates for the more politically multicultural Abbasid period which saw the Muslim population grow from approximately 40 percent in the mid-9th century to close to 100 percent by the end of the 11th century. This, however, does not explain the continuing existence of large minorities of Christians in the Abbasid Period. Other estimates suggest that Muslims were not a majority in Egypt until the mid-10th century and in the Fertile Crescent until 1100. Syria may have had a Christian majority within its modern borders until the Mongol Invasions of the 13th century.

The expansion of Islam continued in the wake of Turkic conquests of Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the Indian subcontinent. The earlier period also saw the acceleration in the rate of conversions in the Muslim heartland while in the wake of the conquests the newly conquered regions retained significant non-Muslim populations in contrast to the regions where the boundaries of the Muslim world contracted, such as Sicily and Al Andalus, where Muslim populations were expelled or forced to Christianize in short order. The latter period of this phase was marked by the Mongol invasion (particularly the siege of Baghdad in 1258) and after an initial period of persecution, the conversion of these conquerors to Islam.

The Ottoman Empire defended its frontiers initially against threats from several sides: the Safavids on the Eastern side, the Byzantine Empire in the North which vanished with the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the great Catholic powers from the Mediterranean Sea: Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Venice with its eastern Mediterranean colonies.

Later, the Ottoman Empire set on to conquer territories from these rivals: Cyprus and other Greek islands (except Crete) were lost by Venice to the Ottomans, and the latter conquered territory up to the Danube basin as far as Hungary. Crete was conquered during the 17th century, but the Ottomans lost Hungary to the Holy Roman Empire, and other parts of Eastern Europe, ending with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.

Islam has continued to spread through commerce and migrations; especially in Southeast Asia, America and Europe.

Age Of The Caliphs

Arabia

At Mecca, Muhammad is said to have received repeated embassies.

Greater Syria

Like their Byzantine and late Sasanian predecessors, the Marwanid caliphs nominally ruled the various religious communities but allowed the communities’ own appointed or elected officials to administer most internal affairs. Yet the Marwanids also depended heavily on the help of non-Arab administrative personnel and on administrative practices (e.g., a set of government bureaus). As the conquests slowed and the isolation of the fighters (muqatilah) became less necessary, it became more and more difficult to keep Arabs garrisoned. As the tribal links that had so dominated Umayyadp politics began to break down, the meaningfulness of tying non-Arab converts to Arab tribes as clients was diluted; moreover, the number of non-Muslims who wished to join the ummah was already becoming too large for this process to work effectively.

Palestine

The Great Muslim army siege Jerusalem, held by the Byzantine Romans, in November, 636 AD. For four months, but they the siege continued. Ultimately, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusale=pm, Sophronius, an ethnic Arab, agreed to surrender Jerusalem to caliph Omar in person. The caliph, then at Medina, agreed to these terms and travelled to Jerusalem to sign the capitulation in the spring of 637. Sophronius also negotiated a pact with Omar, known as the Umariyya Covenant or Covenant of Omar, allowing for religious freedom for Christians in exchange for “jizya,” a tax to be paid by conquered non-Muslims, called “dhimmis.” Under Muslim Rule, the Christian and Jewish population of Jerusalem in this period enjoyed the usual freedoms.

Having accepted the surrender, Omar then entered Jerusalem with Sophronius “and courteously discoursed with the patriarch concerning its religious antiquities.” When the hour for his prayer came, Omar was in the Anastasis church, but refused to pray there, lest in the future Muslims should use that as an excuse to break the treaty and confiscate the church. The Mosque of Omar, opposite the doors of the Anastasis, with the tall minaret, is known as the place to which he retired for his prayer.

Bishop Arculf, whose account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 7th century, De Locis Sanctis, written down by the monk Adamnan, described reasonably pleasant living conditions of Christians in Palestine in the first period of Muslim rule. The caliphs of Damascus (661-750) were tolerant princes who were on generally good terms with their Christian subjects. Many Christians (e.g., St. John Damascene) held important offices at their court. The Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad (753-1242), as long as they ruled Syria, were also tolerant to Christians. Harun Abu-Ja-‘afar (786-809), sent the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to Charlemagne, who built a hospice for Latin pilgrims near the shrine.

Rival dynasties and revolutions led to the eventual disunion of the Muslim world. In the 9th century, Palestine was conquered by the Shi’a Fatimid dynasty of North Africa. Palestine once again became a battleground as the various enemies of the Fatimids attacked. At the same time, the Byzantine Greeks continued to attempt to regain their lost territories, including Jerusalem. Christians in Jerusalem who sided with the Byzantines were put to death for high treason by the ruling shi’ite Muslims. In 969, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, John VII, was put to death for treasonous correspondence with the Byzantines. As Jerusalem grew in importance to Muslims and pilgrimages increased, tolerance for other religions declined. Christians were persecuted and churches destroyed. The sixth shi’a Fatimid caliph, Caliph Al-Hakim, 996-1021, who was believed to be “God made manifest” by the Druze, destroyed the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. This powerful provocation helped ignite the flame of fury that led to the First Crusade.

Persia And The Caucasus

Islamization Of Iran, Muslim Conquest Of Armenia, And Muslim Conquest Of Azerbaijan

It used to be argued that Zoroastrianism quickly collapsed in the wake of the Islamic conquest of Persia due to its intimate ties to the Sassanid state structure. Now however, more complex processes are considered, in light of the more protracted time frame attributed to the progression of the ancient Persian religion to a minority; a progression that is more contiguous with the trends of the late antiquity period. These trends are the conversions from the state religion that had already plagued the Zoroastrian authorities that continued after the Arab conquest, coupled with the migration of Arab tribes into the region during an extended period of time that stretched well into the Abbassid reign.

While there were cases such as the Sassanid army division at Hamra, that converted en masse before pivotal battles such as the al-Qādisiyyah, conversion was fastest in the urban areas where Arab forces were garrisoned slowly leading to Zoroastrianism becoming associated with rural areas. Still at the end of the Umayyad period, the Muslim community was only a minority in the region.

Through the Muslim conquest of Persia, in the 7th century, Islam spread as far as the North Caucasus, which parts of it (notably Dagestan) were part of the Sasanid domains. In the coming centuries, relatively large parts of the Caucasus became Muslim, while the larger swaths of it would still remain pagan (paganism branches such as the Circassian Habze) as well as Christian (notably Armenia and Georgia), for centuries. By the 16th century, most of the people of what are nowadays Iran and Azerbaijan had adopted the Shi’a branch of Islam through the conversion policies of the Safavids.

Islam was readily accepted by Zoroastrians who were employed in industrial and artisan positions because, according to Zoroastrian dogma, such occupations that involved defiling fire made them impure. Moreover, Muslim missionaries did not encounter difficulty in explaining Islamic tenets to Zoroastrians, as there were many similarities between the faiths. For the Persian, he would meet Ahura Mazda and Ahriman under the names of Allah and Iblis. At times, Muslim leaders in their effort to win converts encouraged attendance at Muslim prayer with promises of money and allowed the Qur’an to be recited in Persian instead of Arabic so that it would be intelligible to all.

Central Asia

A number of the inhabitants of Afghanistan accepted Islam through Umayyad missionary efforts, particularly under the reign of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik and Umar ibn AbdulAziz. Later, starting from the 9th century, the Samanids, whose roots stemmed from Zoroastrian theocratic nobility, propagated Sunni Islam and Islamo-Persian culture deep into the heart of Central Asia. The population within its areas began firmly accepting Islam in significant numbers, notably in Taraz, now in modern-day Kazakhstan. The first complete translation of the Qur’an into Persian occurred during the reign of Samanids in the 9th century. According to historians, through the zealous missionary work of Samanid rulers, as many as 30,000 tents of Turks came to profess Islam and later under the Ghaznavids higher than 55,000 under the Hanafi school of thought. After the Saffarids and Samanids, the Ghaznavids re-conquered Transoxania, and invaded the Indian subcontinent in the 11th century. This was followed by the Ghurids and Timurids who further expanded the culture of Islam.

South Asia

Contrary to popular belief, Islam came to South Asia prior to the Muslim invasions of India. Islamic influence first came to be felt in the Indian subcontinent during the early 7th century with the advent of Arab traders. Arab traders used to visit the Malabar region, which was a link between them and the ports of South East Asia to trade even before Islam had been established in Arabia. The first ship bearing Muslim travelers was seen on the Indian coast as early as 630 AD.

The first Indian mosque is thought to have been built in 629 AD, purportedly at the behest of an unknown Chera dynasty ruler, during the lifetime of Muhammad (c. 571–632) in Kodungallur, in district of Thrissur, Kerala by Malik Bin Deenar. In Malabar, Muslims are called Mappila.

In Bengal, Arab merchants helped found the port of Chittagong, where Sufi missionaries settled in the region as early as the 8th century.

It is believed that the first Arab Muslims settled on the Indian coast in the last part of the 7th century.

The Arab merchants and traders became the carriers of the new religion and they propagated it $wherever they went. It was however the subsequent expansion of the Muslim conquest in the beginning Indian subcontinent over the next millennia that established Islam in the region.

Embedded within these lies the concept of Islam as a foreign imposition and Hinduism being a natural condition of the natives who resisted, resulting the failure of the project to Islamicize the Indian subcontinent and is highly embroiled with the politics of the partition and communalism in India. These are typically represented by the following schools of thought:

• That the bulk of Muslims are descendants of migrants from the Iranian \plateau or Arabs;
• A related view is that conversions occurred for non-religious reasons of pragmatism and patronage such as social mobility among the Muslim ruling elite or for relief from taxes.
• Was a combination, initially made under duress followed by a genuine change of heart.

As a socio-cultural process of diffusion and integration over an extended period of time into the sphere of the dominant Muslim civilization and global polity at large.

Muslim missionaries played a key role in the spread of Islam in India with some missionaries even assuming roles as merchants or }to speak potential converts in their own language. Some Ismaili missionaries traveled to India and employed effort to make their religion acceptable to the Hindus. For instance, they represented Ali as the tenth avatar of Vishnu and wrote hymns as well as a mahdi purana in their effort to win converts. At other times, converts were won in conjunction with the propagation efforts of rulers. The Khaljis encouraged conversion to Islam by making it a custom to have the convert presented to the Sultan who would place a robe on the convert and award him with bracelets of gold. During Ikhtiyar Uddin Bakhtiyar Khilji’s control of the Bengal, Muslim missionaries in India achieved their greatest success, in terms of number of converts to Islam.

In 1380, Sufi orders carried Islam from here on to Mindanao. Java was the seat of the primary kingdom of the region, the Majapahit Empire, which was ruled by a Hindu dynasty. As commerce grew in the region with the rest of the Muslim world, Islamic influence extended to the court even as the empires’ political power waned and so by the time Raja Kertawijaya converted in 1475 at the hands of Sufi Sheikh Rahmat, the Sultanate was already of a Muslim character.

Another driving force for the change of the ruling class in the region was the concept among the increasing Muslim communities of the region when ruling dynasties to attempt to forge such ties of kinship by marriage. By the time the colonial powers and their missionaries arrived in the century the region up to New Guinea was overwhelmingly Muslim with animist minorities.

In the mid 7th century AD, following the Muslim conquest of Persia, Islam penetrated into areas that would later become part of European Russia. A century’s later example that can be counted amongst the earliest introductions of Islam into Eastern Europe came about through the work of an early 11th century Muslim prisoner whom the Byzantines captured during one of their wars against Muslims. The Muslim prisoner was brought into the territory of the Pechenegs, where he taught and converted individuals to Islam. Little is known about the timeline of the Islamization of Inner Asia and of the Turkic peoples who lay beyond the bounds of the caliphate. Around the 7th and 8th centuries some states of Turkic peoples existed – like the Turkic Khazar Khaganate and the Turkic Turgesh Khaganate, which fought against the caliphate in order to stop Arabization and Islamization in Asia. From the 9th century onwards, the Turks (at least individually, if not yet through adoption by their states) began to convert to Islam. Histories merely note the fact of pre-Mongol Central Asia’s Islamization. The Bulgars of the Volga (to whom the modern Volga Tatars trace their Islamic roots) adopted Islam by the 10th century under Almıs. When the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck visited the encampment of Batu Khan of the Golden Horde, who had recently (in the 1240s) completed the Mongol invasion of Volga Bulgaria, he noted “I wonder what devil carried the law of Machomet there.”

Another contemporary institution identified as Muslim, the Qarakhanid dynasty of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, operated much further east, established by Karluks who became Islamized after converting under Sultan Satuq Bughra Khan in the mid-10th century. However, the modern-day history of the Islamization of the region – or rather a conscious affiliation with Islam – dates to the reign of the ulus of the son of Genghis Khan, Jochi, who founded the Golden Horde, which operated from the 1240s to 1502. Kazakhs, Uzbeks and some Muslim populations of the Russian Federation trace their Islamic roots to the Golden Horde and while Berke Khan became the first Mongol monarch to officially adopt Islam and even to oppose his kinsman Hulagu Khan in the defense of Jerusalem at the Battle of Ain Jalut (1263), only much later did the change became pivotal when the Mongols converted en masse when a century later Uzbeg Khan (lived 1282-1341) converted – reportedly at the hands of the Sufi Saint Baba Tukles.

Some of the Mongolian tribes became Islamized. Following the brutal Mongol invasion of Central Asia under Hulagu Khan and after the Battle of Baghdad (1258), Mongol rule extended across the breadth of almost all Muslim lands in Asia. The Mongols destroyed the caliphate and persecuted Islam, replacing it with Buddhism as the official state religion. In 1295 however, the new Khan of the Ilkhanate, Ghazan, converted to Islam, and two decades later the Golden Horde under Uzbeg Khan (reigned 1313-1341) followed suit. The Mongols had been religiously and culturally conquered; this absorption ushered in a new age of Mongol-Islamic synthesis that shaped the further spread of Islam in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

In the 1330s, the Mongol ruler of the Chagatai Khanate (in Central Asia) converted to Islam, causing the eastern part of his realm (called Moghulistan) to rebel. However, during the next three centuries these Buddhist, Shamanistic and Christian Turkic and Mongol nomads of the Kazakh Steppe and Xinjiang would also convert at the hands of competing Sufi orders from both east and west of the Pamirs. The Naqshbandis are the most prominent of these orders, especially in Kashgaria.

Africa

North Africa

The Great Mosque of Kairouan, founded in 670 AD (the year 50 according to the Islamic calendar) by the Arab general and conqueror Uqba Ibn Nafi, is the oldest mosque in western Islamic lands and represents an architectural symbol of the spread of Islam in North Africa, situated in Kairouan, Tunisia.

In Egypt, the victorious Muslims granted religious freedom to the Christian community in Alexandria, for example, and the Alexandrians quickly recalled their exiled Monophysite patriarch to rule over them, subject only to the ultimate political authority of the conquerors. In such a fashion the city persisted as a religious community under an Arab Muslim domination more welcome and more tolerant than that of Byzantium.

Byzantine rule was ended by the Arabs, who invaded Tunisia from 647-648 and Morocco in 682 in the course of their drive to expand the power of Islam. In 670, the Arab general and conqueror Uqba Ibn Nafi established the city of Kairouan (in Tunisia) and its Great Mosque also known as the Mosque of Uqba; the Great Mosque of Kairouan is the ancestor of all the mosques in the western Islamic world. Berber troops were used extensively by the Arabs in their conquest of Spain, which began in 711.

No previous conqueror had tried to assimilate the Berbers, but the Arabs quickly converted them and enlisted their aid in further conquests. Without their help, for example, Andalusia could never have been incorporated into the Islamic state. At first only Berbers nearer the coast were involved, but by the 11th century Muslim affiliation had begun to spread far into the Sahara.

The conventional historical view is that the conquest of North Africa by the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate between AD 647–709 effectively ended Catholicism in Africa for several centuries. However, new scholarship has appeared that provides more nuance and details of the conversion of the Christian inhabitants to Islam. A Christian community is recorded in 1114 in Qal’a in central Algeria. There is also evidence of religious pilgrimages after 850 AD to tombs of Catholic saints outside of the city of Carthage, and evidence of religious contacts with Christians of Arab Spain. In addition, calendar reforms adopted in Europe at this time were disseminated amongst the indigenous Christians of Tunis, which would have not been possible had there been an absence of contact with Rome. During the reign of Umar II, the then governor of Africa, Ismail ibn Abdullah, was said to have won the Berbers to Islam by his just administration, and other early notable missionaries include Abdallah ibn Yasin who started a movement which caused thousands of Berbers to accept Islam.

Horn Of Africa

The history of commercial and intellectual contact between the inhabitants of the Somali coast and the Arabian Peninsula may help explain the Somali people’s connection with Muhammad. The early Muslims fled to the port city of Zeila in modern-day northern Somalia to seek protection from the Quraysh at the court of the Aksumite, Emperor in present-day Ethiopia. Some of the Muslims that were granted protection are said to have then settled in several parts of the Horn region to promote the religion. The victory of the Muslims over the Quraysh in the 7th century had a significant impact on local merchants and sailors, as their trading partners in Arabia had then all adopted Islam, and the major trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea came under the sway of the Muslim Caliphs. Through commerce, Islam spread amongst the Somali population in the coastal cities. Instability in the Arabian peninsula saw further migrations of early Muslim families as well.

East Africa

On the east coast of Africa, where Arab mariners had for many years journeyed to trade, mainly in slaves, Arabs founded permanent colonies on the offshore islands, especially on Zanzibar, in the 9th and 10th century. From there Arab trade routes into the interior of Africa helped the slow acceptance of Islam.

By the 10th century, the Kilwa Sultanate was founded by Ali ibn al-Hassan Shirazi (was one of seven sons of a ruler of Shiraz, Persia, his mother an Abyssinian slave girl. Upon his father’s death, Ali was driven out of his inheritance by his brothers). His successors would rule the most powerful of Sultanates in the Swahili coast, during the peak of its expansion the Kilwa Sultanate stretched from Inhambane in the south to Malindi in the north. The 13th century Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta noted that the great mosque of Kilwa Kisiwani was made of coral stone (the only one of its kind in the world).

In the 20th century, Islam grew in Africa both by birth and by conversion. The number of Muslims in Africa grew from 34.5 million in 1900 to 315 million in 2000, going from roughly 20 percent to 40 percent of the total population of Africa. However, in the same time period, the number of Christians also grew in Africa, from 8.7 million in 1900 to 346 million in 2000, surpassing both the total population as well as the growth rate of Islam on the continent.

Western Africa

The spread of Islam in Africa began in the 7th to 9th century, brought to North Africa initially under the Umayyad Dynasty. Extensive trade networks throughout North and West Africa created a medium through which Islam spread peacefully, initially through the merchant class. By sharing a common religion and a common transliteralization (Arabic), traders showed greater willingness to trust, and therefore invest, in one another. Moreover, toward the 18th century, the Nigeria based Sokoto Caliphate led by Usman dan Fodio exerted considerable effort in spreading Islam.

Europe

Tariq ibn Ziyad was a Muslim general who led the Islamic conquest of Visigothic Hispania in 711-718 A.D. Under the orders of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I he led a large army and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from the North African coast, consolidating his troops at what is today known as the Rock of Gibraltar. The name “Gibraltar” is the Spanish derivation of the Arabic name Jabal Ṭāriq meaning “mountain of Ṭāriq,” which is named after him.

There are accounts of the trade connections between the Muslims and the Rus, apparently Vikings who made their way towards the Black Sea through Central Russia. On his way to Volga Bulgaria, Ibn Fadlan brought detailed reports of the Rus, claiming that some had converted to Islam.

According to the historian Yankee al-Hamawi, the Böszörmény (Izmaelita or Ismaili / Nizari) denomination of the Muslims who lived in the Kingdom of Hungary in the 10th to 13th centuries, were employed as mercenaries.

Hispania / Al-Andalus

The interior of the Cathedral of Cordoba, formerly the Great Mosque of Córdoba was built in 742. It is one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the Umayyad style and inspired the design of other Mosques in Al-Andalus.

The history of Arab and Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula is probably one of the most studied periods of European history. For centuries after the Arab conquest, European accounts of Arab rule in Iberia were negative. European points of view started changing with the Protestant Reformation, which resulted in new descriptions of the period of Islamic rule in Spain as a “golden age” (mostly as a reaction against Spain’s militant Roman Catholicism after 1500).

The tide of Arab expansion after 630 rolled through North Africa up to Ceuta in present-day Morocco. Their arrival coincided with a period of political weakness in the three centuries old kingdom established in the Iberian peninsula by the Germanic Visigoths, who had taken over the region after seven centuries of Roman rule. Seizing the opportunity, an Arab-led (but mostly Berber) army invaded in 711, and by 720 had conquered the southern and central regions of the peninsula. The Arab expansion pushed over the mountains into southern France, and for a short period Arabs controlled the old Visigothic province of Septimania (centered on present-day Narbonne). The Arab Caliphate was pushed back by Charles Martel (King of the Franks or French) at Poitiers, and Christian armies started pushing southwards over the mountains, until Charlemagne established in 801 the Spanish March (which stretched from Barcelona to present day Navarre).

A major development in the history of Muslim Spain was the dynastic change in 750 in the Arab Caliphate, when an Umayyad Prince escaped the slaughter of his family in Damascus, fled to Cordoba in Spain, and created a new Islamic state in the area. This was the start of a distinctly Spanish Muslim society, where large Christian and Jewish populations coexisted with an increasing percentage of Muslims. There are many stories of descendants of Visigothic chieftains and Roman counts whose families converted to Islam during this period. The at-first small Muslim elite continued to grow with converts, and with a few exceptions, rulers in Islamic Spain allowed Christians and Jews the right specified in the Qur’an to practice their own religions, though non-Muslims suffered from political and taxation inequities. The net result was, in those areas of Spain where Muslim rule lasted the longest, the creation of a society that was mostly Arabic-speaking because of the assimilation of native inhabitants, a process in some ways similar to the assimilation many years later of millions of immigrants to the United States into English-speaking culture. At the descendants of Visigoths and Hispano-Romans concentrated in the north of the peninsula, in the kingdoms of Asturias/Leon, Navarre and Aragon and started a long campaign known as the ‘Reconquista’ which started with the victory of the Christian armies in Covadonga in 722. Military campaigns continued without pause. In 1085 Alfonso VI of Castille took back Toledo. In 1212 the crucial Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa meant the recovery of the bulk of the peninsula for the Christian kingdoms. In 1238 James I of Aragon took Valencia. In 1236 the ancient Roman city of Cordoba was re-conquered by Ferdinand III of Castille and in 1248 the city of Seville. The famous medieval epic poem ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ narrates the life and deeds of this hero during the Reconquista.

The Islamic state centered in Cordoba had ended up splintering into many smaller kingdoms (the so-called taifas). While Muslim Spain was fragmenting, the Christian kingdoms grew larger and stronger, and the balance of power shifted against the ‘Taifa’ kingdoms. The last Muslim kingdom of Granada in the south was finally taken in 1492 by Queen Isabelle of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon. In 1499, the remaining Muslim inhabitants were ordered to convert or leave (at the same time the Jews were expelled). Poorer Muslims (Moriscos) who could not afford to leave ended up converting to Catholic Christianity and hiding their Muslim practices, hiding from the Spanish Inquisition, until their presence was finally extinguished.

Balkans

Pre-World War I Slovenian mosque in the town of Log pod Mangartom. The town is notable for once being the location of the Log pod Mangartom Mosque, which until 2013 was the only mosque ever built in Slovenia, erected by Bosniak Muslim troops in the service of Austria-Hungary during World War I. After the war, the mosque was abandoned and the deteriorating structure was demolished by the local Italian government, which had taken over the area.

In Balkan history, historical writing on the topic of conversion to Islam was, and still is, a highly charged political issue. It is intrinsically linked to the issues of formation of national identities and rival territorial claims of the Balkan states. The generally accepted nationalist discourse of the current Balkan historiography defines all forms of Islamization as results of the Ottoman government’s centrally organized policy of conversion or dawah. The truth is that Islamization in each Balkan country took place in the course of many centuries, and its nature and phase was determined not by the Ottoman government but by the specific conditions of each locality. Ottoman conquests were initially military and economic enterprises, and religious conversions were not their primary objective. True, the statements surrounding victories all celebrated the incorporation of territory into Muslim domains, but the actual Ottoman focus was on taxation and making the realms productive, and a religious campaign would have disrupted that economic objective.

Ottoman Islamic standards of toleration allowed for autonomous “nations” (millets) in the Empire, under their own personal law and under the rule of their own religious leaders. As a result, vast areas of the Balkans remained mostly Christian during the period of Ottoman domination. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Churches had a higher position in the Ottoman Empire, mainly because the Patriarch resided in Istanbul and was an officer of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, Roman Catholics, while tolerated, were suspected of loyalty to a foreign power (the Papacy). It is no surprise that the Roman Catholic areas of Bosnia, Kosovo and northern Albania, ended up with more substantial conversions to Islam. The defeat of the Ottomans in 1699 by the Austrians resulted in their loss of Hungary and present-day Croatia. The remaining Muslim converts in both elected to leave “lands of unbelief” and moved to territory still under the Ottomans. Around this point in time, new European ideas of romantic nationalism started to seep into the Empire, and provided the intellectual foundation for new nationalistic ideologies and the reinforcement of the self-image of many Christian groups as subjugated peoples.

As a rule, the Ottomans did not require followers of Greek Orthodoxy to become Muslims, although many did so in order to avert the socioeconomic hardships of Ottoman rule. One by one, the Balkan nationalities asserted their independence from the Empire, and frequently the presence of members of the same ethnicity who had converted to Islam presented a problem from the point of view of the now dominant new national ideology, which narrowly defined the nation as members of the local dominant Orthodox Christian denomination. Some Muslims in the Balkans chose to leave, while many others were forcefully expelled to what was left of the Ottoman Empire. This demographic transition can be illustrated by the decrease in the number of mosques in Belgrade, from over 70 in 1750 (before Serbian independence in 1815), to only three in 1850.

Immigration

Muslims have increased immigration to the United States since the 1940’s. Since the 1960s, Muslims have also migrated to Western Europe. They have come as immigrants, guest workers, asylum seekers, as part of family reunification, and illegally. As a result, Muslim population in Europe and the United States has steadily risen.

The writer Bat Ye’or stated in her book Eurabia, that Muslims may become a majority in Europe within a few generations due to continued immigration, and high birth rates partially due to polygamy. This theory has been criticized, however. Many suggest the claims are built on unreliable claims and that fertility rates of Muslims will eventually decrease and that immigration to European nations could be limited.

A Pew Forum study, published in January 2011, forecast an increase of proportion of Muslims in European population from 6 percent in 2010 to 8 percent in 2030. It is my belief that this percentage will be higher, perhaps as much as 12 percent to 15 percent, given higher birth rates of a polygamous society.

The Spread Of Islam In South And Southeast Asia

With nearly 550 million Muslims altogether, South and Southeast Asia encompass the largest Muslim population in the world. Characterized by linguistic and ethnic variety, the majority of Muslims in the area is Sunni, but significant Shi‘i communities can be found in ~Kashmir, Sind and Pakistan.

There are two constants associated with Islam in the region: the role of trade and the missionary activities of Sufi orders. The symbiosis~ with other world religions such as Hinduism and Sikhism in India, Buddhism in Thailand or Christianity in the Philippines, at times erupts into direct confrontation. At a popular level, there is more than one instance of religious syncretism, where ritual practices such as pilgrimages to holy places are shared across the official religious divide.

Islam In South Asia

Islam entered India via two main routes: from the south, where Arab traders’ colonies along the southwest coast of India are recorded since pre-Islamic times, and from the north, where Islam arrived through military conquest by land from Central Asia. In the north, Sind was a crucial outpost for the diffusion of Islam, which spread from there to Punjab and Gujarat. But it was from the eleventh century onwards that Muslim penetration became more substantial. When a new Turkish dynasty under its ruler Mahmud started to expand from Ghazni, a number of Hindu rulers from Delhi, Kalinjar, Ajmer and other cities formed a confederacy to oppose him, only to be defeated at the battle of Waihind in 1008. Mahmud, attracted by the wealth of the Hindu rajas, carried out several campaigns, culminating in the capture of Somnath, but only annexed Punjab. After the Ghaznavids, other dynasties succeeded in expanding Islam into new areas: by 1212, the Ghurids controlled most of the former Ghaznavid territories and had expanded as far east as Bengal. After a few decades, the Khaljis defended this territory against repeated Mongol raids and, under the great sultan ‘Ala’ al-din, extended it to the extreme south. The Turco-Indian Tughluqids expanded to the south and east but the vast empire began to disintegrate with the rise of independent Muslim principalities.

The subcontinent was reunified during the seventeenth century, under the Mughal emperors. However, by the 1770s the Mughal empire
(1526 – 1858) had shrunk to a small province around Delhi . Its legacy re-emerged in 1947 when, upon the British withdrawal from India, the newly-created Muslim state of Pakistan re-affirmed its links with Persia and the Middle East.

Islam In Southeast Asia

Islam in Southeast Asia is also linked to trade, which had been controlled by the Arabs from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the Portuguese entered the international maritime commercial arena. From the fourteenth century onwards, local rulers converted to Islam, and within two centuries almost the entire region was Islamized. By the mid-fifteenth century Malacca had become the chief trading-centre for Southeast Asia as well as the main centre for the spread of Islam , which came to be identified with the state and with its main language: Malay.

The mass conversion in this area was the result of many factors: the missionary activities of Sufi orders; political opportunism and obedience to the Muslim sultans; old and repeated contacts with Muslim traders; and, after the arrival of Christian missionaries with the Portuguese, a revival of Islamic proselytism. With its strong emphasis on mysticism and speculative theology, Islam is characterized by intermingling with local custom, especially in both family and civil law.

The Impact And Legacy Of Western Colonialism

The imposition of British rule in India profoundly affected the religious development of the subcontinent. Despite their initial policy of tolerance, the British began to suppress some religious practices, favored English as the language of administration, increased the influence of the Hindu and Sikh communities and, gradually, made Muslim religious law redundant. The Muslim responses to change were either moderate modernism, outright rejection of Western values, or the creation of a modern Muslim political identity. This latter position led to the formation of West and East Pakistan in 1947, as a nation for the Muslims of India. The issue of national or religious identity was not really solved and, eventually, the national element prevailed in East Pakistan which became the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971.

Control of trade as well as exploitation of natural resources motivated European colonial interests in Southeast Asia. The effects of the colonial presence are felt in the polarization of disputes between states and within states, but, above all, in a secularization of society. By and large the modern states emerging after independence were defined along European lines, with little or no place for religion. The conflict of identity still exists between a secular and an Islamic Southeast Asia, between the reality of a largely secular (although nominally Islamic) state, a Muslim communal religious movement and the commitment of some groups to the achievement of the ideal Islamic state.

The Spread Of Islam In The Modern World

The Historical presence of Islam in Europe can be traced back to the rule of Muslim empires: the Umayyads in Spain, the Fatimids in Sicily and the Ottomans in eastern Europe. The population of Muslim Spain and Sicily remained essentially Christian, but the number of converts to Islam in eastern Europe was considerable; the two largest homogeneous Muslim communities in eastern Europe, the Albanian and the Bosnian, date back to the fifteenth century. Eastern European Muslims are mostly Sunni, of the Hanafite legal school, with some Shi’is (Alevis) in Bulgaria.
Islam In Europe Today

Five centuries of Ottoman rule over Albania resulted in a majority Muslim population (70 percent) at the time of independence in 1912. A communist ban (1967–1985) on all religious activities affected the three main religious communities: Muslim, Greek Orthodox and Catholic. However, a religious revival during the 1990s opened the country up to missionaries of other denominations. About two million, mainly Muslim, ethnic Albanians used to live in the Kosovo province of modern-day Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). After General Tito’s death in 1980 the fragile ethnic and national balance of the country collapsed. Serbian nationalism revived under Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic who, in 1989, removed Kosovo’s autonomy. Continued displacement of ethnic Albanians by the Serbs came to the world’s attention in 1998 and NATO intervened. The diaspora of ethnic Albanians from the province exceeded half a million, and there were unknown numbers of casualties.

Unlike eastern Europe, the presence of Muslims in western Europe mainly results from modern economic and political migration from Muslim countries. Waves of immigration often reflect historical links, as in the case of migration from former colonies (from the Maghreb to France, from Commonwealth countries to the UK). The favorable economic and political circumstances of host countries also play a relevant part, as in the case of Turkish migration to Germany. Several factors have an impact on the flow of Muslim migrants; political circumstances; national legislation; the displacement of communities as a result of the Balkan war. Official figures are not always reliable, as shown by the case of illegal immigrants, such as France’s ‘sans papier’.

European attitudes to Islam in general were severely undermined following Islamic jihadist attacks by al-Qaeda on the West, notably the 9/11 outrages in America in 2001, which were followed by bomb attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) and a rash of security alerts. Nevertheless, these events did much to foster renewed efforts to establish closer relations between Muslim and Christian communities in Europe.

The religious configuration of Muslims in western Europe reflects the varieties of Islam in the originating countries. While most immigrants are Sunni Muslims, the role of traditions such as Sufi brotherhoods should not be underestimated, especially for the North African immigrants to France. Popular or reformist movements, such as the Barelwis and Deobandis among Indo-Pakistani immigrants to Britain, are also significant.

Islam In Contemporary Southeast Asia

Indonesia” and Malaysia are the most important countries in Muslim Southeast Asia. Indonesia, though not constitutionally an Islamic state, has the world’s largest Muslim population (about 160 million in 1985, 87 percent of the total). It is overwhelmingly Sunni, following the Shafi‘I school of law. In Malaysia Islam (58 percent of the total in 1990) is the official religion, co-existing with traditional Chinese religions as well as Hinduism and Christianity. Independent Indonesia and Malaysia have built largely secular states on European models, but the political and cultural role of Islam has been consistently increasing. Proselytizing by other religions in either country is illegal, with noticeable signs at border crossings.

The Growth Of Islam In SE Asia And The Pacific

In the Philippines and Thailand, less than five percent of the total population is Muslim. Islam is a minority religion which is trying to resist state control. In the Philippines, the community was marginalized by a process of de-islamization, provoking the emergence of radical groups like the Moro National Liberation Front which used armed struggle and guerrilla techniques to achieve recognition of independence for the Muslim population, concentrated mainly in the south. Autonomy was eventually granted to the Muslim region in Mindanao in 1987 and limited executive powers were transferred to the regional government in 1990. Thailand, although predominantly Buddhist, also has a concentration of Muslims in the south, near the border with Malaysia. Some Islamic separatist movements, allegedly backed by Iran, are active in the southern provinces.

Minority Islam In The Pacific

Although the first Muslim migrations to the Pacific region date back to the late nineteenth century, it is not until the 1950s that Muslim{ communities can be identified. In Australia, Muslims are estimated at 1.4 percent of the total population (1993). The vast majority of Muslims in Australia comes from Turkey and the Lebanon, along with others from the former Yugoslavia. Students from neighboring Muslim countries, especially Malaysia, form an increasingly important presence. New Zealand’s small Muslim community is mainly from Southeast Asia, and there was a particularly important immigration wave after the 1987 coups d’état in Fiji. The mosque in Christchurch is said to be the furthest from Mecca in the world. Both Fiji and New Caledonia have sizeable Muslim communities. Fiji’s Muslims can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when French authorities deported anti-colonial leaders from the Maghreb, particularly Algeria, to the penal colony of Fiji.

The small Muslim community of Japan, in part allegedly of Turkish origin, increased during the twentieth century by immigration from South Asia.

Islam spread through military conquest, trade, pilgrimage, and missionaries. Arab Muslim forces conquered vast territories and built imperial structures over time.

Most of the significant expansion occurred during the reign of the Rashidun from 632 to 661 AD, which was the reign of the first four successors of Muhammad.

The caliphate—a new Islamic political structure—evolved and became more sophisticated during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. Over a period of a few hundred years, Islam spread from its place of origin in the Arabian Peninsula all the way to modern Spain in the west and northern India in the east.

Islam traveled through these regions in many ways. Sometimes it was carried in great caravans or sea vessels traversing vast trade networks on land and sea, and other times it was transferred through military conquest and the work of missionaries. As Islamic ideas and cultures came into contact with new societies, they were expressed in unique ways and ultimately took on diverse forms.

Different Trajectories

To begin to understand the rich history of Islam, let’s start with the historical context and events that led to Islam’s spread. For example, Islam initially spread through the military conquests of Arab Muslims, which happened over a very short period of time soon after the beginning of Islam. However, only a small fraction of the people who came under Arab Muslim control immediately adopted Islam. It wasn’t until centuries later, at the end of the eleventh century, that Muslims made up the majority of subjects of the Islamic empires.

The spread of Islam through merchants, missionaries, and pilgrims was very different in nature. These kinds of exchanges affected native populations slowly and led to more conversions to Islam. As Islamic ideas traveled along various trade and pilgrimage routes, they mingled with local cultures and transformed into new versions and interpretations of the religion.

Another important thing to note is that not all military expansion was Arab and . . . or . . . Muslim. Early on in Islamic history, under the Rashidun caliphate — the reign of the first four caliphs, or successors, from 632 to 661 AD — and the Umayyad caliphate, Arab Muslim forces expanded quickly. With the Abbasids, more non-Arabs and non-Muslims were involved in the government administration. Later on, as the Abbasid caliphate declined, there were many fragmented political entities, some of which were led by non-Arab Muslims. These entities continued to evolve in their own ways, adopting and putting forth different interpretations of Islam as they sought to consolidate their power in different regions.

The First Arab Muslim Empire

During the seventh century, after subduing rebellions in the Arabian peninsula, Arab Muslim armies began to swiftly conquer territory in the neighboring Byzantine and Sasanian empires and beyond. Within roughly two decades, they created a massive Arab Muslim empire spanning three continents. The Arab Muslim rulers were not purely motivated by religion, nor was their success attributed to the power of Islam alone, though religion certainly played a part.

Non-Muslim subjects under Arab Muslim rule were not especially opposed to their new rulers. A long period of instability and dissatisfaction had left them ambivalent toward their previous rulers. Like all other empires, the first Arab Muslim empires were built within the context of the political realities of their neighboring societies.

During the Rashidun caliphates, Arab Muslim forces expanded outward beyond the Arabian peninsula and into the territories of the neighboring Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. These empires were significantly weakened after a period of fighting with one another and other peripheral factions like the Turks, economic turmoil, disease, and environmental problems. The Arab Muslim conquerors were primed to take advantage of this; they were familiar with Byzantine and Sasanian military tactics, having served in both armies.

With the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires on the decline and strategically disadvantaged, Arab Muslim armies were able to quickly take over vast territories that once belonged to the Byzantines and Sasanians and even conquer beyond those territories to the east and west.

Most conquests happened during the reign of the second caliph, Umar, who held power from 634 to 644. The Rashidun caliphate constructed a massive empire out of many swift military victories. They expanded for both religious and political reasons, which was common at the time.
One political advantage the Rashidun caliphate held was their ability to maintain stability and unity among the Arab tribes. Distinct, feuding Arab tribes united into a cohesive political force, partially through the promise of military conquest. However, this unity was tentative and ultimately gave way to major divergences that disrupted state and religious institutions in the coming centuries.

A New Political Structure

The Rashidun can be credited for military expansion, but did Islam truly spread through their conquests? Significant conversion and cultural exchange mdid not occur during their short rule, nor were complex political institutions developed. It was not until the Umayyad Dynasty — from 661 to 750 — that Islamic and Arabic culture began to truly spread. The Abbasid Dynasty — from 750 to 1258,— intensified and solidified these cultural changes.

Before the Umayyads, Islamic rule was non-centralized. The military was organized under the caliphate, a political structure led by a Muslim steward known as a caliph, who was regarded as the religious and political successor to the prophet Muhammad. The early caliphate had a strong army and built garrison towns, but it did not build sophisticated administrations. The caliphate mostly kept existing governments and cultures intact and administered through governors and financial officers in order to collect taxes. The Rashidun caliphate was also not dynastic, meaning that political leadership was not transferred through hereditary lineage. During this period, it seems the Arab tribes retained their communal clan-based systems of choosing leaders.

However, to sustain such a massive empire, more robust state structures were necessary, and the Umayyads began developing these structures, which were often influenced by the political structures in neighboring empires like the Byzantines and Sasanians. Under the Umayyads, a dynastic and centralized Islamic political state emerged.

The Umayyads shifted the capital from Mecca to Syria and replaced tribal traditions with an imperial government controlled by a monarch. They replaced Greek, Persian, and Coptic with Arabic as the main administrative language and reinforced an Arab Islamic identity. Notably, an Arab hierarchy emerged, in which non-Arabs were accorded secondary status. The Umayyads also minted Islamic coins and developed a more sophisticated bureaucracy, in which governors named viziers oversaw smaller political units.

The Umayyads did not actively encourage conversion, and most subjects remained non-Muslim. Because non-Muslim subjects were required to pay a special tax, the Umayyads were able to subsidize their political expansion.

The Umayyads did not come into power smoothly. The transition between the rule of the Rashidun and the first Umayyads was full of strife. Debates raged about the nature of Islamic leadership and religious authority. These conflicts evolved into major schisms between Sunni, Shi’a, and Ibadi Islam.

Ultimately, there were many factions that regarded the Umayyads as corrupt and illegitimate, some of whom rallied around new leaders. These new leaders claimed legitimacy through shared lineage with the prophet Muhammad, through the prophet’s uncle, Abbas. They led a revolt against the Umayyads, bringing the Abbasid caliphate to power.

The Abbasids were intent on differentiating themselves from their Umayyad predecessors, though they still had a lot in common. Abbasid leadership was also dynastic and centralized. However, they changed the social hierarchy by constructing a more inclusive government in a more cosmopolitan capital city, Baghdad. The distinction between Arab Muslims and non-Arab Muslims diminished, with Persian culture exerting a greater influence on the Abbasid court.

Under the Abbasids, Islamic art and culture flourished. They are famous for inaugurating the Islamic golden age. Religious scholars, called ulema, developed more defined religious institutions and took on judicial duties and developed systems of law. It was also during Abbasid rule that many people converted to Islam, for a multitude of reasons including sincere belief and avoiding paying taxes levied on non Muslims. As a result, Islamic culture spread over the Abbasids’ vast territory.

Muslims And Islam: Key Findings In The U.S. And Around The World

Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. The growth and regional migration of Muslims, combined with the ongoing impact of the Islami State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or IS) and other extremist groups that commit acts of violence in the name of Islam, have brought Muslims and the Islamic faith to the forefront of the political debate in many countries. Yet many facts about Muslims are not well known in some of these places, and that most Americans – who live in a country with a relatively small Muslim population – have said they know little or nothing about Islam.

Here are answers to some key questions about Muslims, compiled from several Pew Research Center reports published in recent years:

How many Muslims are there? Where do they live?

There were 1.8 billion Muslims in the world as of 2015 – roughly 24 percent of the global population – according to a Pew Research Center estimate. But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion (after Christianity), it is the fastest-growing major religion.

Indeed, if current demographic trends continue, the number of Muslims is expected to exceed the number of Christians by the end of ‘this century.

Although many countries in the Middle East/North Africa region, where the religion originated in the seventh century, are heavily Muslim, the region is home to only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. A majority of the Muslims globally (62 percent) live in the Asia-Pacific region, including large populations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey.

Indonesia is currently the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, but Pew Research Center projects that India will have that distinction by the year 2050 (while remaining a majority-Hindu: country), with more than 300 million Muslims.

The Muslim population in Europe also is growing; it’s projected that ten percent of all Europeans will be Muslims by 2050.

How Many Muslims Are There In The United States?

As of 2018, an estimated 3.45 million Muslims of all ages lived in the U.S., or about 1.1 percent of the U.S. population. This is based on an analysis of census statistics and data from a 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims, which was conducted in English as well as Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. Based on the same analysis, Pew Research Center also estimates that there are 2.15 million Muslim adults in the country, and that a majority of them (58 percent) are immigrants.

Demographic projections estimate that Muslims will make up 2.1 percent of the U.S. population by the year 2050, surpassing people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion as the second-largest faith group in the country (not including people who say they have no religion).

A 2013 Pew Research Center report estimated that the Muslim share of immigrants granted permanent residency status (green cards) increased from about five percent in 1992 to roughly ten percent in 2012, representing about 100,000 immigrants in that year.

Why Is The Global Muslim Population Growing?

A larger share of Muslims will soon be at the point in their lives when people begin having children. This, combined with high fertility rates, will accelerate Muslim population growth.

Muslims have more children than members of other religious groups. Around the world, each Muslim woman has an average of 2.9 children, compared with 2.2 for all other groups combined. Another undocumented factor, is the polygamous lifestyle which is encouraged and practiced by the religion.

Muslims are also the youngest (median age of 24 years old in 2015) of all major religious groups, seven years younger than the median age of non-Muslims. As a result, a larger share of Muslims already are, or will soon be, at the point in their lives when they begin having children. This, combined with high fertility rates and polygamy, will fuel Muslim population growth.

While it does not change the global population, migration is helping to increase the Muslim population in some regions, including North America and Europe.

How Do Americans View Muslims And Islam?

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2017 asked Americans to rate members of nine religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” from 0 to 100, where 0 reflects the coldest, most negative possible rating and 100 the warmest, most positive rating. Overall, Americans gave Muslims an average rating of 48 degrees, similar to atheists (50).

Americans view more warmly the seven other religious groups mentioned in the survey (Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Mormons). But views toward Muslims (as well as several of the other groups) are now warmer than the were a few years ago; in 2014, U.S. adults gave Muslims an average rating of 40 degrees in a similar survey.

Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party gave Muslims an average rating of 39, considerably cooler than Democrats’ rating toward Muslims (56).

This partisan gap extends to several other questions about Muslims and Islam. Indeed, Republicans and Republican leaners also are more likely than Democrats and those who lean Democratic to say they are very concerned about extremism in the name of Islam, both around the world (67 percent vs. 40 percent) and in the U.S. (64 percent vs. 30 percent). In addition, a December 2016 survey found that more Republicans than Democrats say Islam is likelier than other religions to encourage violence among its believers (63 percent vs. 26 percent of Democrats). And while most Americans (69 percent) believe there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in the U.S. today, views are again split by party: 85 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic and 49 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners hold this view.

Republicans also are more likely than Democrats to say that Islam is not part of mainstream American society (68 percent vs. 37 percent) and that there is a natural conflict between Islam and democracy (65 percent vs. 30 percent)About half of Americans (49 percent) think at least “some” U.S. Muslims are anti-American, greater than the share who say “just a few” or “none” are anti-American, according to a January 2016 survey. Views on this question have become much more partisan in the last 14 years. But most Americans do not see widespread support for extremism among Muslims living in the U.S., according to a February 2017 survey. Overall, 40 percent say there is not much support for extremism among U.S. Muslims, while an additional fifteen percent say there is none at all. About a quarter say there is a fair amount of support (24 percent) for extremism among U.S. Muslims; eleven percent say there is a great deal of support.

How Do Europeans View Muslims?

In spring 2016, Pew asked residents of ten European counties for their impression of how many Muslims in their country support extremist groups, such as ISIS. In most cases, the prevailing view is that “just some” or “very few” Muslims support ISIS, but in Italy, 46 percent say “many” or 7&“most” do. The same survey asked Europeans whether they viewed Muslims favorably or unfavorably.

Perceptions varied across European nations: Majorities in Hungary, Italy, Poland and Greece say they view Muslims unfavorably, while
negative attitudes toward Muslims are much less common in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Northern People unfavorably, while negative attitudes toward Muslims are much less common in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Northern People who place themselves on the right side of the ideological scale are much more likely than those on the left to see Muslims negatively.

What Characteristics Do People In The Muslim World And People In The West Associate With Each Other?

A 2011 survey asked about characteristics Westerners and Muslims may associate with one another. Across the seven Muslim-majority countries and territories surveyed, a median of 68 percent of Muslims said they view Westerners as selfish. Considerable shares also called Westerners other negative adjectives, including violent (median of 66 percent), greedy (64 percent) and immoral (61 percent), while fewer attributed positive characteristics like “respectful of women” (44 percent), honest (33 percent) and tolerant (31 percent) to Westerners.

Westerners’ views of Muslims were more mixed. A median of 50 percent across four Western European countries, the U.S. and Russia called Muslims violent and a median of 58 percent called them “fanatical,” but fewer used negative words like greedy, immoral or selfish. A median of just 22 percent of Westerners said Muslims are respectful of women, but far more said Muslims are honest (median of 51 percent) and generous (41 percent).

What Do Muslims Around The World Believe?

Like any religious group, the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims vary depending on many factors, including where in the world they live.

But Muslims around the world are almost universally united by a belief in one God and the Prophet Muhammad, and the practice of certain religious rituals, such as fasting during Ramadan, is widespread.

In other areas, however, there is less unity. For instance, a Pew Research Center survey of Muslims in 39 countries asked Muslims whether they want Shari’a law, a legal code based on the Qur’an and country. Responses on this question vary widely. Nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99 percent) and most in Iraq (91 percent) and Pakistan (84 percent) support Shari’a law as official law. But in some other countries, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – including other Islamic scripture, to be the official law of the land in their Turkey (12 percent), Kazakhstan (10 percent) and Azerbaijan (8 percent) – relatively few favor the implementation of Shari’a law.

How Do Muslims Feel About Groups Like ISIS?

Recent surveys show that most people in several countries with significant Muslim populations have an unfavorable view of ISIS, including virtually all respondents in Lebanon and 94 percent in Jordan.

Relatively small shares say they see ISIS favorably. In some countries, considerable portions of the population do not offer an opinion about ISIS, including a majority (62 percent) of Pakistanis.

Favorable views of ISIS are somewhat higher in Nigeria (14 percent) than m other nations. Among Nigerian Muslims, 20 percent say they see ISIS favorably (compared with 7 percent of Nigerian Christians). The Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, which has been conducting a terrorist campaign in the country for years, has sworn allegiance to ISIS.

More generally, Muslims mostly say that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam are rarely or never justified, including 92 percent in Indonesia and 91 percent in Iraq. In the United States, a 2011 survey found that 86 percent of Muslims say such tactics are rarely or never justified. An additional seven percent say suicide bombings are sometimes justified and one percent say they are often justified.

In a few countries, a quarter or more of Muslims say these acts of violence are at least sometimes justified, including 40 percent in the Palestinian territories, 39 percent in Afghanistan, 29 percent in Egypt and 26 percent in Bangladesh.

In many cases, people in countries with large Muslim populations are as concerned as Western nations about the threat of Islamic extremism, and have become increasingly concerned in recent years. About two-thirds of people in Nigeria (68 percent) and Lebanon (67 percent) said in 2016 that they are very concerned about Islamic extremism in their country, both up significantly since 2013.

What Do American Muslims Believe?

A 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims finds that Muslims in the United States perceive a lot of discrimination against their religious group. Moreover, a solid majority of U.S. Muslims are leery of President Donald Trump and think their fellow Americans do not see Islam as part of mainstream U.S. society. At the same time, however, Muslim: Americans overwhelmingly say they are proud to be Americans, believe that hard work generally brings success in this country and are satisfied with the way things are going in their own lives.

Half of Muslim Americans say it has become harder to be Muslim in the U.S. in recent years. And 48 percent say they have experienced at least one incident of discrimination in the past 12 months. But alongside these reports of discrimination, a similar – and growing – share (49 percent) of Muslim Americans say someone has expressed support for them because of their religion in the past year. And 55 percent think Americans in general are friendly toward U.S. Muslims, compared with just 14 percent who say they are unfriendly.

Living in a religiously pluralistic society, Muslim Americans are more likely than Muslims in many other largely Muslim-majority nations to have a lot of non-Muslim friends. Only about a third (36 percent) of U.S. Muslims say all or most of their close friends are also Muslims, compared with a global median of 95 percent in the 39 countries we surveyed.

Roughly two-thirds of U.S. Muslims (65 percent) say religion is very important in their lives. About six-in-ten (59 percent) report praying at least daily and 43 percent say they attend religious services at least weekly. By some of these traditional measures, Muslims in the U.S. are roughly as religious as U.S. Christians, although they are less religious than Muslims in many other nations. When it comes to political and social views. Muslims are far more likely to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (66 percent) than the Republican Party (13 percent) and to say they prefer a bigger government providing more services (67 percent) over a smaller government providing fewer services (25). About half of U.S. Muslims (52 percent) now say homosexuality should be accepted by society, up considerably from 2011 (39 percent) and 2007 (27 percent).

What Is The Difference Between Shiite Muslims And Sunni Muslims?

Sunnis and Shiites are two subgroups of Muslims, just as Catholics and Protestants are two subgroups within Christianity. The Sunni-Shiite divide is nearly 1,400 years old, dating back to a dispute over the succession of leadership in the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. While the two groups agree on some core tenets of Islam, there are differences in beliefs and practices, and in some cases Sunnis do not consider Shiites to be Muslims.

With the exception of a few countries, including Iran (which is majority Shiite) as well as Iraq and Lebanon (which are split), most nations with a large number of Muslims have more Sunnis than Shiites. In the U.S., 55 percent identify as Sunnis and 16 percent as Shiites (with the rest identifying with neither group, including some who say they are just a Muslim).

The Spread Of Islam: The Rise Of Islamic Empires And States

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Last Updated:    05/2022

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