The Institute for the Study of Islam is a non-profit think-tank committed to counter-terrorism by helping others understand the enemy. The enemy is not Muslims . . . the enemy is Islam.

Section 800: The Crusades & Medieval Times


The Crusades (1095-1241)

The Crusades were a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin (Roman Catholic) Church in the medieval period. The most commonly known Crusades are the
campaigns in the Eastern Mediterranean aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule, but the term “Crusades” is also
applied to other church-sanctioned campaigns.

The First Crusade (1095-1091)

The First Crusade was the first of a number of crusades that attempted to recapture the Holy Land, called for by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Urban called for a military expedition to aid the Byzantine Empire, which had recently lost most of Anatolia to the Seljuq Turks. The resulting military expedition of primarily Frankish nobles,
known as the Princes’ Crusade, not only
re-captured Anatolia but went on to conquer the Holy Land (the Levant),
which had fallen to Islamic expansion as
early as the 7th century, and culminated in July 1099 in the re-conquest
of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Second Crusade (1147-1149)

The second major crusade launched from Europe. The Second Crusade was
started in response to the fall of the County of Edessa in 1144 to the forces of Zengi. The county had been founded
during the First Crusade (1096–1099) by King Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098. While it was the first Crusader state to be founded, it was also the first to fall.

The Third Crusade (1189-1192)

The Third Crusade was an attempt by European Christian leaders to reconquer the Holy Land following the capture of
Jerusalem by the Ayyubid sultan, Saladin, in 1187. Also known as the Kings’ Crusade for its main leaders, kings Richard I of England and Philip II of
France (echoing the name “Princes’ Crusade” given to the successful First
Crusade), the campaign was largely successful in capturing the important
cities of Acre and Jaffa, and reversing most of Saladin’s conquests, but it failed to re-capture Jerusalem.

The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204)

The Fourth Crusade was a Latin Christian armed expedition called by Pope Innocent III. The stated
intent of the expedition was to recapture the Muslim-controlled city of Jerusalem, by first
conquering the powerful Egyptian Ayyubid Sultanate, the strongest
Muslim nation of the time. However, a sequence of economic and political
events culminated in the Crusader army sacking the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Greek Christian-controlled Byzantine Empire.

The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221)

Pope Innocent III and his successor Pope Honorius III organized crusading
armies led by King Andrew II of Hungary and Leopold VI, Duke of
Austria, and an attack against Jerusalem ultimately left the city in
Muslim hands. Later in 1218, a German army led by Oliver of Cologne,
and a mixed army of Dutch, Flemish and Frisian soldiers led by William I, Count of Holland joined the crusade. In order to attack Damietta in Egypt, they allied in Anatolia with the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm which attacked the Ayyubids in Syria in an attempt to free the Crusaders from fighting on two fronts.

The Sixth Crusade (1228)

The Sixth Crusade started in 1228 as an attempt to regain Jerusalem. It began seven years after the failure of the Fifth Crusade and involved very little actual fighting. The diplomatic maneuvering of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, resulted in the Kingdom of Jerusalem regaining some control over Jerusalem for much of the ensuing fifteen years (1229–39, 1241–44) as well as over other areas
of the Holy Land.

The Seventh Crusade (1240-1254)

The Seventh Crusade was a crusade led by Louis IX of France. His troops were
defeated by the Egyptian army led by the Ayyubid Sultan Turanshah supported by the Bahariyya Mamluks led by Faris ad-Din Aktai, Baibars al-Bunduqdari, Qutuz, Aybak and Qalawun and Louis was
captured. Approximately 800,000 bezants were paid in ransom for his return.

The Eighth Crusade (1270)

The Eighth Crusade was a crusade launched by Louis IX of France against the city of Tunis in 1270. The Eighth Crusade is sometimes counted as the Seventh, if the Fifth and Sixth Crusades of Frederick II are counted as a single crusade. The
Ninth Crusade is sometimes also counted as part of the Eighth. The
crusade is considered a failure after Louis died shortly after arriving on
the shores of Tunisia, with his disease-ridden army dispersing back to Europe shortly afterwards.

The Ninth Crusade (1271-1272)

Louis IX of France’s failure to capture Tunis in the Qur’an always Eighth Crusade led Henry III of
England’s son Edward to sail to Acre in what is known as the Ninth
Crusade. The Ninth Crusade saw several impressive victories for Edward over Baibars. Ultimately the
Crusaders were forced to withdraw, since Edward had pressing concerns at home and felt unable to resolve the internal conflicts within the remnant Outremer territories. It is arguable that the Crusading spirit was nearly “extinct” by this period as well. It also foreshadowed the imminent collapse of the last remaining crusader
strongholds along the Mediterranean coast.

The Tenth Crusade (1365) – Alexandrian Crusade

Peter I spent three years, from 1362 to 1365, amassing an army and
seeking financial support for a Crusade from the wealthiest courts of the day. When he learned of a planned Egyptian attack against his Kingdom of Cyprus, he employed the same strategy of preemptive war that had been so successful against the Turks and redirected his military ambitions against Egypt. From Venice, he arranged for his naval fleet and ground forces to assemble at the Crusader stronghold of Rhodes, where they were joined by the Knights of the Order of St. John.

13th Century

Pope Innocent III also began preaching what became the Fourth
Crusade in 1200, primarily in France but also in England and Germany. After gathering in Venice, the Crusade was used by Doge Enrico
Dandolo and Philip of Swabia to further their secular ambitions.
Dandolo aimed to expand Venice’s power in the Eastern Mediterranean,
and Philip intended to restore his exiled nephew, Alexios IV Angelos, along with Angelos’s father, Isaac II Angelos, to the throne of Byzantium.

Children’s Crusade

The Children’s Crusade was a failed popular crusade by European
Christians to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims, said to have
taken place in 1212. The crusaders left areas of Northern France, led by Stephen of Cloyes, and Germany, led by Nicholas.

Norwegian Crusade

The Norwegian Crusade, led by Norwegian King Sigurd I, was a crusade
or a pilgrimage (sources differ) that lasted from 1107 to 1111, in the
aftermath of the First Crusade. The Norwegian Crusade marks the
first time a European king personally went to the Holy Land.

Crusade of 1101

The Crusade of 1101 was a minor crusade of three separate movements,
organized in 1100 and 1101 in the successful aftermath of the First
Crusade. It is also called the Crusade of the Faint-Hearted due to the number of participants who joined this crusade after having turned back from the First Crusade.

Venetian Crusade

The Venetian Crusade of 1122–24 was an expedition to the Holy Land launched by the Republic of Venice that succeeded in capturing Tyre. It was an important victory at the start of a period when the Kingdom
of Jerusalem would expand to its greatest extent under King Baldwin II. The Venetians gained valuable trading concessions in Tyre.
Through raids on Byzantine territory both on the way to the Holy Land and on the return journey, the Venetians forced the Byzantines to
confirm, as well as extend, their trading privileges with the empire.

Crusade Of 1197

The Crusade of 1197, also known as the Crusade of Henry VI (German:
Kreuzzug Heinrichs VI.) or the German Crusade (Deutscher Kreuzzug)
was a crusade launched by the Hohenstaufen emperor Henry VI in response to the aborted attempt of his father, Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa during the Third Crusade in 1189-90. Thus the military campaign is also known as the “Emperor’s Crusade” (echoing the name “Kings’ Crusade” given to the Third Crusade).

Call For Crusade

During the Holy Week (March) of 1195,
Emperor Henry made a pledge and at the Easter celebrations in Bari publicly announced the Crusade. Henry’s original
plan in April 1195 was for a force of 1,500 knights and 3,000 sergeants, but this total would be exceeded. In the summer he was traveling through Germany in order to gain
supporters.

Barons’ Crusade

The Barons’ Crusade, also called the Crusade of 1239, was in territorial
terms the most successful crusade since the First. Called by Pope Gregory IX, the Barons’ Crusade broadly spanned from 1234-1241 and embodied the highest point of papal endeavor “to make crusading a universal Christian undertaking.” Gregory called for a crusade in France, England, and Hungary with different degrees of success.

Smyrniote Crusades

The Smyrniote crusades (1343–1351) were two Crusades sent by Pope
Clement VI against the Emirate of Aydin under Umur Beg which had as
their principal target the coastal city of Smyrna in Asia Minor.

Alexandrian Crusade

The brief Alexandrian Crusade, also called the sack of Alexandria,
occurred in October 1365 and was led by Peter I of Cyprus against Alexandria in Egypt. Relatively devoid of religious impetus, it differs from the more prominent Crusades in that it seems to have been motivated largely by economic interests.

Savoyard Crusade

The Savoyard crusade was a crusading expedition to the Balkans in 1366–67. It was born out of the same planning that led to the Alexandrian Crusade and was the brainchild of Pope Urban V. It was led by Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, and directed against the growing Ottoman Empire in eastern Europe.

Barbary Crusade

The Barbary Crusade, also called the Mahdia Crusade, was a Franco-
Genoese military expedition in 1390 that led to the siege of Mahdia,
then a stronghold of the Barbary pirates in Hafsidi Tunisia. Froissart’s Chronicles is the chief account of what was one of the last crusades.

Battle Of Nicopolis

The Battle of Nicopolis took place on 25 September 1396 and resulted in the rout of an allied crusader army of Hungarian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Wallachian, French, English, Burgundian, German and assorted troops (assisted by the Venetian navy) at the hands of an Ottoman force, raising of the siege of the Danubian fortress of Nicopolis and leading
to the end of the Second Bulgarian Empire. It is often referred to as the Crusade of Nicopolis as it was one of the last large-scale Crusades of the Middle Ages, together with the Crusade of Varna in 1443–1444.

Crusade Of Varna

The Crusade of Varna was an unsuccessful military campaign mounted by several European monarchs to check the expansion of the Ottoman
Empire into Central Europe, specifically the Balkans between 1443 and 1441. It was called by Pope Eugene IV on 1 January 1443 and led by
King Władysław III of Poland, John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania,
and Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy.

Portuguese Expedition To Otranto

The Portuguese expedition to Otranto in 1481, which the Portuguese call the Turkish Crusade (Portuguese: Cruzada Turca), arrived too late
to participate in any fighting. On 8 April 1481, Pope Sixtus IV issued the papal bull Cogimur iubente altissimo, in which he called for a
crusade against the Turks, who occupied Otranto in southern Italy.

Northern Crusades

The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were religious wars undertaken by Catholic Christian military orders and kingdoms, primarily against the pagan Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic peoples around the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, and to a lesser extent also against Orthodox Christian Slavs (East Slavs). The crusades took place in mostly in the 12th and 13th centuries and resulted in the mass extermination, subjugation and forced baptism of indigenous
peoples.

Wendish Crusade

The Wendish Crusade (German: Wendenkreuzzug) was a military campaign in 1147, one of the Northern Crusades and a part of the
Second Crusade, led primarily by the Kingdom of Germany within the Holy Roman Empire and directed against the Polabian Slavs (or “Wends”). The Wends are made up of the Slavic tribes of Abrotrites,
Rani, Liutizians, Wagarians, and Pomeranians who lived east of the River Elbe in present-day northeast Germany and Poland.

First Swedish Crusade

The First Swedish Crusade was a mythical
military expedition in 1150s to Southwest Finland by Swedish King Eric IX and English Bishop Henry of Uppsala.

Second Swedish Crusade

The Second Swedish Crusade was a possible 13th-century Swedish
military expedition against the Tavastians, in present-day Finland, led
by Birger jarl. A lot of the details of the Crusade are debated. After the crusade Tavastia gradually started to fall under the rule of
Catholic Church and Swedish kingdom.

Third Swedish Crusade

The Third Swedish Crusade to Finland was a Swedish military
expedition against the pagan Karelians in 1293.

Aragonese Crusade

The Aragonese Crusade or Crusade of Aragon, a part of the larger War of the Sicilian Vespers, was declared by Pope Martin IV against the King of Aragon, Peter III the Great, in 1284 and 1285. Because of the recent conquest of Sicily by Peter, the Pope declared a crusade against him and officially deposed him as king, on the grounds that Aragon was a papal fief: Peter’s grandfather and namesake, Peter II, had surrendered the kingdom as a fief to the Holy See.

Prussian Crusade

The Prussian Crusade was a series of 13th-century campaigns of Roman
Catholic crusaders, primarily led by the Teutonic Knights, to subjugate and exterminate or, alternatively, Christianize under duress the pagan Page Old Prussians. Invited after earlier unsuccessful expeditions against the Prussians by Christian Polish kings, the Teutonic Knights began campaigning against the Prussians, Lithuanians and Samogitians in 1230. Old Prussians. Invited after earlier unsuccessful expeditions against the Prussians by Christian Polish kings, the Teutonic Knights began campaigning against the Prussians, Lithuanians and Samogitians in 1230.

Battle On The Ice

The Battle on the Ice was fought between the Republic of Novgorod
led by prince Alexande Nevsky and the forces of Livonian Order and
Bishopric of Dorpat led by bishop Hermann of Dorpat on April 5, 1242,
at Lake Peipus. The battle is notable for having been fought largely on the frozen lake, and this gave the battle its name.

Lithuanian Crusade

The Lithuanian Crusade was a series of campaigns by the Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order, two crusading military orders, to convert the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Roman Catholicism. The Livonian Order settled in Riga in 1202 and the Teutonic Order arrived to Culmerland in 1230s. They first conquered other neighboring Baltic
tribes – Curonians, Semigallians, Latgalians, Selonians, Old Prussians.

People’s Crusade

The People’s Crusade was a popular crusade. It lasted roughly six months from April to October 1096 and was a prelude to the First Crusade. It is also known as the Peasants’ Crusade, Paupers’ Crusade or the Popular Crusade as it was not part of the official Catholic Church-Organized expeditions that came later. Led primarily by Peter the Hermit with forces of Walter Sans Avoir, the army was destroyed.by the Seljuk forces of Kilij Arslan at Civetot, northwestern Anatolia.

Popular Crusades

The popular crusades were several movements “animated by crusading
enthusiasm” but unsanctioned by the Church. They contrast with the “official crusades” authorized by the Papacy. While the latter consisted of professional armies led by apostolic legates, the popular crusades were generally disorganized and consisted of peasants,
artisans and only the occasional knight. The term “popular crusade” is
a modern scholarly convention.

Crusade Of The Poor

The Crusade of the Poor was an unauthorized military expedition — one
of the so-called “popular crusades” — undertaken in the spring and summer of 1309 by members of the lower classes from England, Brabant, northern France and the German Rhineland. Responding to an appeal for support for a crusade to the Holy Land, the men, overwhelmingly poor, marched to join a small professional army being assembled with Papal approval.

Official Crusade

On 4 November 1309, Pope Clement admitted what had long been
suspected, that the Hospitaller expedition would not go to the Holy
Land. It was merely a preparatory campaign to help defend Cyprus and
enforce the prohibition on Catholics trading with Muslims. The official
expedition was ready to sail from the Italian port of Brindisi in January 1310, but was delayed until spring by bad weatherman.h

Shepherds’ Crusade (1320)

The Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320 was a popular crusading movement in
northern France. Initially aiming to help the Reconquista of Iberia, it
failed to gain support from the church or nobility and instead
murdered hundreds more of Jews in France and Aragon.

Crusades Against Christians

The Bosnian Crusade was fought against unspecified heretics from 1235 until 1241. It was, essentially, a Hungarian war of conquest against the Banate of Bosnia sanctioned as a crusade. Led by the Hungarian prince Coloman, the crusaders only succeeded in conquering peripheral parts of the country. They were followed by Dominicans, who erected a cathedral and put heretics to death by burning.

Albigensian Crusade

The Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in southern
France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and
promptly took on a political flavor, resulting in not only a significant
reduction in the number of practicing Cathars, but also a realignment of the
County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the
French crown and diminishing the distinct regional culture and high
level of influence of the Counts of Barcelona.

Aragonese Crusade

The Aragonese Crusade or Crusade of Aragon, a part of the larger War of the Sicilian Vespers, was declared by Pope Martin IV against the King of Aragon, Peter III the Great, in 1284 and 1285.

Despenser’s Crusade

Despenser’s Crusade (or the Bishop of Norwich’s Crusade, sometimes just
Norwich Crusade) was a military expedition led by the English bishop Henry le Despenser in 1383 that aimed to assist the city of Ghent in its struggle
against the supporters of Antipope Clement VII. It took place during the great Papal schism and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. While France supported Clement, whose
court was based in Avignon, the English
supported Pope Urban VI in Rome.

Hussite Wars

The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, were fought between the Christian Hussites and the
combined Christian Catholic forces of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, the Papacy and various European monarchs loyal to the Catholic Church, as well as among various Hussite factions themselves.

Battle Of Vítkov Hill

After the death of his childless brother Wenceslaus, Sigismund
inherited a claim on the Bohemian crown, though it was then, and remained till much later, in question whether Bohemia was a hereditary or an elective monarchy, especially as the line through which Sigismund (claimed the throne had accepted that the Kingdom of Bohemia was an elective monarchy elected by the nobles, and thus the regent of the
kingdom (Čeněk of Wartenberg) also explicitly stated that Sigismund had not been elected as reason for Sigismund’s claim to not be accepted.

The Second Anti-Hussite Crusade

Internal troubles prevented the followers
of Hus from fully capitalizing on their
victory. At Prague a demagogue, the priest Jan Želivský, for a time obtained almost unlimited authority over the lower
classes of the townsmen.

Bohemian Civil War

Bohemia was for a time free from foreign
intervention, but internal discord again broke out, caused partly by theological strife and partly by the ambition of
agitators. On 9 March 1422, Jan Želivský was arrested by the town
council of Prague and beheaded. There were troubles at Tábor also,
where a more radical party opposed Žižka’s authority.

The Third Anti-Hussite Crusade

Jan Žižka leading troops of Radical Hussites, Jena Codex, 15th century Papal influence had meanwhile succeeded in calling forth a new crusade against Bohemia, but it resulted in complete failure. In spite of the endeavors of their rulers, Poles and Lithuanians did not wish to attack the kindred Czechs; the Germans were prevented by internal discord from taking joint action against the Hussites; and the King of Denmark, who had landed in Germany with a large force intending to take part in the crusade, soon returned to his own country.

Livonian Crusade

The Livonian Crusade was the conquest of
the territory constituting modern Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia during the
pope-sanctioned Northern Crusades, performed mostly by Germans from the Holy Roman Empire and Danes. It ended with the creation of the Terra Mariana and Duchy of Estonia.

The Fifth Anti-Hussite Crusade

On 1 August 1431 a large army of crusaders under
Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg, accompanied by Cardinal Cesarini as papal legate, crossed the Bohemian border. On 8 August the crusaders reached the city of Domažlice and began besieging it. On 14 August, a Hussite relief army arrived, reinforced with some 6,000 Polish Hussites and under the command of Prokop the Great, and it completely routed the crusaders.

Reconquista

The Reconquista (Portuguese and Spanish for “reconquest”) was the
period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492. The completed conquest of Granada was the context of the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest (Columbus got royal support in Granada in 1492, months after its conquest), and the Americas — the “New World” — ushered in the era of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.

Crusade Of Barbastro

The Crusade of Barbastro (also known as the Siege of Barbastro or War of Barbastro) was an international expedition, sanctioned by Pope
Alexander II, to take the Spanish city of Barbastro, then part of the .Hudid Emirate of Lārida. A large army composed of elements from all over Western Europe took part in the siege and conquest of the city (1064).

Balearic Islands Expedition

In 1114, an expedition to the Balearic Islands, then a Muslim taifa, was launched in the form of a Crusade. Founded on a treaty of 1113 between the Republic of Pisa and Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona, the expedition had the support of Pope Paschal II and the
participation of many lords of Catalonia and Occitania, as well as
contingents from northern and central Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica. The Crusaders were perhaps inspired by the Norwegian king Sigurd I’s attack on Formentera in 1108 or 1109 during the Norwegian Crusade.

War Against Saaremaa (1206–61)

The last Estonian
county to hold out
against the
invaders was the
island country of
Saaremaa (Ösel), whose war fleets had continued to raid Denmark and Sweden during the years of fighting against the
German crusaders.

Battle Of Las Navas de Tolosa

The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, known in Arab history as the Battle of Al-Uqab, took place on 16 July 1212 and was an important turning point in the Reconquista and in the medieval history of Spain. The Christian forces of King Alfonso VIII of Castile were joined by the
armies of his rivals, Sancho VII of Navarre, Peter II of Aragon and
Afonso II omf Portugal, in battle against the Almohad Muslim rulers of
the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. The Caliph al-Nasir
(Miramamolín in the Spanish chronicles) led the Almohad army, made up of people from the whole Almohad empire. Most of the men in the
Almohad army came from the African side of the empire.

The Influence Of Islam On Medieval Europe

The last several centuries of the near millennium of interaction between Islam and Christendom saw a number of events that served as a kind of transition from the Middle Ages to a new era of international engagement. Two events in particular, the fall of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century and the final expulsion of Muslims from Andalusia at the end of that century, illustrate this transition.

Islamophobia

In the immediate aftermath of September 11 anti-Muslim hate crimes significantly increased, including physical assaults, verbal abuse, and property damage to mosques and Muslim-owned businesses.  In 2004, a report for the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Britain found that 80 percent of Muslims felt harassed or discriminated against in some way, compared to 45 percent in 2000 and 35 percent in 1999.

The Early Muslim Kingdoms Of Aceh

Aceh was the first region of modern-day Indonesia in which Muslim kingdoms were founded.  Marco Polo observed a Muslim king on the north coast of Sumatra in 1292, more than a half century before the oceanic voyage of Ibn Battutah landed him further to the south on the same island.  The Portuguese voyager Tome Pires, writing on the cusp of sixteenth century, provided the earliest ethnographic record of Acheh.  His unparalleled account reinforces the notion of fragmentation: while the center may be held together by a strong ruler, it is the surrounding villages that both protect and challenge the harbor cities. 

The Litmus Test: Will Muslims Appropriate Western Values?

Several issues have been highlighted since the beginning of the twenty first century as Westerners have begun to question once again whether Muslims will be able to assimilate into Western societies or whether the religion of Islam will impede their assimilation and adoption of Western values.

The Great Indo-Muslim Rulers In South Asia

Because the reign of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (what is now Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan) set the tone for much of what followed, his legacy has been marked by controversy. Mahmud was a dogged campaigner who conducted no less than seventeen military forays into India, and he delighted in chronicling his own military feats. Like other Persian and Turko-Persian rulers, Mahmud commissioned the official histories that he wanted to stand as the record of his reign for posterity. Was he a religious zealot or a cosmopolitan pragmatist?

Journey Of Muslim Kingship

Islam is above all a pan-Asian religion. It shapes the beliefs and practices of millions of Asians, from Central to South to Southeast Asia. There are other pan-Asian religions — Hinduism to the far south, Buddhism to the Far East — but none that spans the southern rim of the Asian continent to the extent that Islam does.

Crisis and Change in the Ottoman System: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

For centuries the Ottoman ruling system was built up on the basis of the systematic rationalization of regional political, cultural, and historical precedents. Ottoman state power was grounded in a
refinement of the Byzantine, Muslim, Seljuk, and Mongol precedents for regional power. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the era of construction was over and the Ottoman society was evolving in ways that were detrimental to the continuation of a dominant centralized state.

The Economy Of The Ottoman Empire:
Land, Urban Markets, And International Trade

The Ottoman empire was unusual among Middle Eastern empires in the
degree to which it was able to bring the subject population under state
control. Critical to this control was the regulation of the economy. The Ottomans operated on the principle that the subjects should servethe interests of the state, and the economy was organized to ensure the flow of tax revenues, goods in kind, and services needed by the government and the elites.

Ottoman Culture And The Concept Of Empire

The authority of the Ottoman sultans was derived from several layers of Middle Eastern cultural tradition. The Ottomans primarily derived their legitimacy from Turko-Mongol concepts of royal family
supremacy, warrior sovereignty, and what they considered to be a
divinely given mission to conquer the world. This patrimonial conception, which based the right to rule on aristocratic noble lineage combined with victories in battle, had its origin in the Ottoman Turkish and Central Asian past.

The Ottoman State Apparatus
And Religion

The Ottoman state was built on the very same institutional base as its
Middle Eastern predecessors. At the center was the court or palace apparatus, the household of the ruler, comprising his family, his harem, his boon companions, and his highest ranking officers, administrators, and religious functionaries. The court served as an extended family and the government’s nerve center, a training institute for Ottoman cadres, and a theater of cultural display.

The Ottoman Empire: Its Origins And World Conquests

The Ottoman empire also had its origins in the two great trends of earlier centuries: the Turkish migrations and the post-Abbasid reconstruction of state and society, which provided the institutional
and cultural precedents for later Ottoman society. The legacy of Persian monarchical, Byzantine and Roman, Seljuk Anatolian, and Mongol
and Timurid precedents interacting with Turkish cultures and transformed by the Ottoman synthesis led to the Ottoman of the &version of high imperial, late Middle Eastern civilization.

Shi’ism In Early Iran

The most astonishing chapter in the Safavid consolidation of power was the decision to promote Shi’ism as Iran’s official religion. Until the
Safavid era, Iran was largely Sunni, although there was a minority Shi’ite presence in Qum and Isfahan. Although the Safavid shaykhs claimed descent from the seventh imam and integrated Shi’ism into their religious identity and authority, the original Shi’ism of the Safavids was a minority orientation. The murshids and loyalists understood Shi’ism as a claim to embody divinity. They worshiped the master of the order as the bearer of the living spirit of Allah.

The Safavid Empire

The Safavid empire was strongly shaped by the political and religious
institutions and the cultural accomplishments of the previous era. The
Turkish and Mongol migrations had profoundly changed the character
of northern Iran. A large Turkish population had settled in eastern Iran, in the region of the Oxus River, and in northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia. Turkish peoples constituted about 25 percent of the total population, and the Turkish presence radically changed both the
economy and the society.

The State And Religion

The emergence of new political and religious bodies raised again the
problem of the division of authority between the state and religious
institutions. In Middle Eastern societies this issue goes back to the ancient temple communities of Mesopotamia and the emergence of the first empires. Ever after, the boundaries of authority and functions “between rulers and priests would be an open question. The Islamic era began with its own position on this issue. For Muslims the Prophet
himself embodied both religious and political authority. He revealed God’s will and God’s law for his people; he was the ruler of the community, who also collected taxes, waged wars, and arbitrated disputes.

The New Political And Social Order

The basic political facts make it hard to grasp that beneath the surface of events, this was also a period of reconstruction and the creation of new governmental and societal institutions. Everywhere
the legacy of the Islamic caliphate and the heritage of Persian concepts of imperial monarchy were blended with Turkish concepts of political chieftaincy, law, and world conquest.

The Sultanate Era, 950-1500

The collapse of the Abbasid empire in the tenth century opened the
way for the further transformation of Middle Eastern regimes, societies, and cultures and for a new and creative, albeit tumultuous era in the history of the region. On the surface the political changes were anarchic. With the breakup of the Abbasid empire, provinces and even small districts came under the rule of new military elites.
Nomadic peoples broke through the frontier defenses, invaded, and
migrated en masse into the Middle East.

Sultanates And Gunpowder Empires

The era of gunpowder empires represents a new phase in the development of Middle Eastern and Islamic societies. The term gunpowder empires imputes a great importance to the innovative military technology of infantry armed with muskets, operating in conjunction with siege and battlefield artillery, that allowed the new..>empires to sweep away their rivals and to establish a dominion that
would last until the eve of the modern era.

The End Of The Middle Ages

The last several centuries of the near millennium of interaction between Islam and Christendom saw a number of events that served as a kind of transition from the Middle Ages to a new era of international engagement. Two events in particular, the fall of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century and the final expulsion of Muslims from Andalusia at the end of that century, illustrate this transition.

Medieval Muslim Views of Europe, Christians, And Christianity

The vast majority of Muslims in the eastern part of the empire had
little if any knowledge of the western regions of Christendom, as well
as little interest in discovering anything about lands they considered bleak and remote, inhabited by peoples they thought to be little more than barbarians. They considered the Europeans’ manners and habits to be loathsome, their level of culture exceedingly low, and their religion superseded by Islam.

The Eastward Spread of Sufism

Often emphasized in scholarship, the missionary role of Sufis in the early Islamization of Eastern Turkestan has been overestimated. In
fact, we have only a few traces of Sufi presence already in the thirteenth century in Almaliq, among other places, but Sufi proselytizing activities in the region probably did not start before the mid-fourteenth century. At that time, the Chaghatay ulus were
divided into two khanates, western and eastern, when in 1348 the tribal lords of Semireche and Eastern Turkestan seceded and enthroned Tūghlūq Timūr (d. 1363). His kingdom became known as Moghūlistān.

The Muslim Reaction To The Colonial Order

The return of China to the Central Asian scene took place through a series of decisive events following the Manchu conquest of Dzungaria. As early as 1715, the regents of Qomul (Hami in Chinese) pledged allegiance to the Qing emperor Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and opposed the Dzungars. Five years later, several regents of Turfan surrendered to general Yongzheng’s army. Under Qianlong (r. 1736–1795), the Qing
troops seized the Ili basin in 1755 and Kashgaria in 1759.

Islam Under And After Mao

The establishment of the Communist order in China had the effect of an earthquake, with periods of lull preceding aftershock, and focused
primarily on agrarian and land reforms. As in the Soviet Union, PRC’s
minorities (minzu in Chinese) posed a vexed problem to Mao’s
revolutionary line: the religious, cultural and historical specificities of
minorities should be respected but they had to ultimately be absorbed
into socialism; every ethnic group and religious minority had the right
to autonomy but was expected to build up China’s national unity.

Islam In Africa To 1800

Islam moved into Africa from three directions. It came from North Africa across the Sahara to Bilad al-Sudan (The Lands of the Black People), which is between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Chad. Despite >six centuries of resistance from Nubian Christians, Islam expanded from Egypt southward, up the Nile valley, and west to Darfur and Wadai. Islam also moved from the Arabian peninsula across the Red
Sea to the Horn of Africa, and from there further south to the coast of East Africa.

Songhay And Timbuktu

In the fourteenth century, Walata — which served as the southern terminus of the Saharan trade — was still more important as a
commercial town than was Timbuktu. The emperor Mansa Musa sought to encourage intellectual life in Timbuktu and Malian scholars to study in Fez. By the first half of the fifteenth century the level of scholarship in Timbuktu was such that a student who came from the Hejaz realized that the scholars of Timbuktu surpassed him in the
knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).

Songhay And Timbuktu In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

Following the Moroccan conquest in 1591, under the qadis’ leadership the people of Timbuktu adopted a policy of passive submission and
noncooperation with the conquering army. Timbuktu, which had been
autonomous under the Songhay rule, became the seat of a military
government. The presence of an occupying force disturbed life in this city of commerce and scholarship and led to a conflict between the
military and the civilian populations.

Kanem And Bornu

An early trans-Saharan route connected Tripoli on the Mediterranean with Lake Chad. Kanem (now part of Chad) emerged as one of the earliest African kingdoms on the northeastern corner of Lake Chad.

Hausaland Before The Jihad

In the entire corpus of Arabic sources for West African history there
is no reference to the Hausa states, with one exception. When in
Takedda in the Aïr (the mountainous region in north-central Niger), Ibn
Battutah referred to Gobir as one of the destinations for the export of Takedda copper. Because the information of the Arab geographers came through commercial routes, Hausaland was not directly connected to North Africa by trade routes across the Sahara.

Eastern Sudan

The defeat of the Arabs in 652 before the walls of the Nubian capital was the worst that they suffered during their conquests. The Nubians were able to resist the Muslim expansion to the south for almost six centuries. Arab and Muslim penetration into the country south of
Egypt was not by means of military conquest but through gradual infiltration. Slave raiding and gold mining brought Arabs to the land of Béja, between the Nile and the Red Sea.

The Horn Of Africa

In the seventh century, when Islam began its expansion into Africa,
Christianity was the dominant religion in the lands that extended along
the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Egypt, in the hinterland of Egypt and of the Red Sea, in Nubia and Ethiopia. By the twelfth century the last indigenous Christians disappeared from North Africa west of Egypt. In Egypt the Christians, who still formed about half of the population in the tenth century, were later reduced to a minority of no more than fifteen percent.

The East African Coast

Islam came to East Africa primarily from Yemen and the Hadramawt on the south coast of Arabia. Muslim sailors crossed the Indian Ocean in special lateen-rigged ships called dhows, similar to the ones still seen in the harbor of Lamu on the Kenyan coast.

The Islamization Of Africa

The process of Islamization began when Muslims’ prayers and amulets succeeded where the local priests failed. Rulers were the early
recipients of Islamic influence, and the royal courts mediated Islamic
influence to the common people. Pre-Islamic customs persisted even at
the courts of rulers who were fully committed to Islam, however. In about 1500 the rulers of Songhay, Kano, and Bornu attempted to reform Islam, with limited results.

The Warrior-Defenders Of The Faith

The Muslim world faced the military powers of European imperial
expansion in many different areas. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century an important part of the Muslim response took the
form of jihads organized by more traditional movements of Islamic
renewal.

European Colonialism And The Emergence Of Modern Muslim States

There are today more than fifty Muslim states, extending from the
Atlas Mountains in the West to the Malay Archipelago in the East, and from Sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. They include some of the most populous countries in the world, such as Indonesia,
Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, as well as some of the smallest, such as the Maldives and the Comoros.

Islamic Reform

Muslim voices of reform, scholars (ulama, religious scholars, and lay
intellectuals), and tele-preachers represent a diverse collection of
Muslim men and women, laity and clergy, professionals, scholars, and popular preachers. Their audiences extend from North Africa to the
Gulf States, South to Central and Southeast Asia, and Europe to
America. These Muslim reformers are significant not only because of
their ideas and orientations but also because they are debunking entrenched perceptions.

The Institutional Foundations Of The Postcolonial State

An important, and yet until recently ignored, legacy of colonialism is
the manner in which it has given form to the institutional foundations,
and thus the parameter of politics, of the postcolonial state.
Independence ended the sovereignty of European powers over their
territories; it did not, however, produce states de novo. The
postcolonial state inherited the machinery of the colonial state, and to
varying degrees, followed the model of the colonial state.

The Globalization Of Islam

Since the early 1970s, western Europeans and North Americans have
become increasingly concerned about an apparent change in the nature jand patterns of human threatens to {alter the ethnic and religious composition of their nation-states, their democratic and capitalist traditions, and their liberal social values. The emigration and settlement of Muslims from more than seventy nations to the West has been of some concern.

Muslim Communities Of The West

Although there are no reliable statistics on the number of Muslims
currently living in the West, a 1986 estimate placed about twenty-
three million Muslims in Europe. The majority lived in the Balkans and
southeastern Europe; they were Slavic converts and remnants of the Turkish expansion into Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia or of the westward migration of Tatars into Finland and Poland. More recent Muslim sources speculate that the current estimate of Muslims in
western Europe and the
Americas may be as high as 17.4 million.

Muslims And The Challenge Of Life In The West

Muslims have emigrated to Western nation-states that have a fully
developed myth of national identity, which has been inculcated in the
citizens over two centuries through schools and codified through legends and a particular reading of history. This identity has shaped several generations of Europeans and Americans through the cauldron of two world wars. It has been celebrated in literature, art, music, and dance. The nation-states have fashioned distinctive identities based on collective assumptions, promoting a particular worldview that includes a core of values and attitudes that are taken for granted as unique to a superior West. At the same time, the process of nation building has delineated what is considered alien, strange, and weird.

Reformation Or Revolution?

While many people speak of “Islam and Muslims” in monolithic terms,
throughout history these terms have represented multiple images and
realities. The story of Islam in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is one of exponential growth, increasing demographic,
geographic and cultural diversity, and also increasing
interconnectedness.

The Development Of
Umbrella Organizations

The formation of Islamic umbrella organizations that are independent
of the state is a recent phenomenon in the experience of Muslim
immigrants. Such organizations are the norm in the West, as
governments and civic institutions expect to deal with a recognized national leadership, a religious hierarchy; simply put, it is the Western way of organizing religion, and Muslims are pressed to reformulate themselves accordingly. Another factor has been the interest of foreign-based organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan.

Islamic Education

The highest priority for most Muslim parents in the West is providing
Islamic instruction for their children. Where that was not available, some of the early immigrants in the United States, eager that their children acquire religious values, sent them to Christian Sunday schools. Those Muslim parents who were concerned about the values that were thought to be propagated in public schools sent their
children to Catholic or Baptist schools.

Islamic Law

Many Muslim leaders in the West would like to see Western states recognize Islamic law as a body of public law, which would provide parallel legal status for Muslims with those of other religions. In a few instances Muslims in the West have been able to negotiate some
accommodation of their particular traditional, cultural, and religious
needs regarding burial practices.

Muslims And Politics In The West

Regardless of their growing numbers in Europe and North America, and their increasing wealth in the United States and Canada, Muslims are aware that they have little political power to influence the government, and the media, or the elites in the West. They have very few channels of communication to policy makers in the societies in which they live. A variety of factors hamper effective participation in the political process, including the lack of experience in participating in political activities, the fear of the consequences of political involvement, and the lack of experience in grassroots organizations or coalition building.

Muslims In The West Post 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world became witness to
the dramatic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York
and the Pentagon in Washington, as well as the downing of a plane in
Pennsylvania. Some 3000 people died, as did the perception that the
OUnited States was a fortress immune to foreign intervention.


803 – 000 – Terrorism In The Name Of Islam – In Progress

September 11, 2001 was a watershed moment in the history of political Islam and of the world. The violence and carnage of that day, ,orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, underscored the real threat posed by religious extremists and global terrorism. Some
characterized the events as evidence that an Islamic threat was now not only a foreign threat, but a domestic one as well.

The Crusades And The Progress Of Islam

The progress of Islam into southeast Europe was generally slow. By
contrast, the Muslim advance into the Iberian peninsula was swift but
its retreat slow and hard-fought. Islam arrived in the spring of 711, with an army, initially, of some 7,000 men. They marched inland without a great deal of opposition until, on 19 July, they were confronted by the Christian king, Roderick of Andalusia, on the River Guadalete.

The Crusades And Their Aftermath

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade to liberate the Holy Land,
especially the city of Jerusalem, from the Muslims. One of the leaders of the First Crusade was Godfrey of Bouillon (ca. 1060–1100), who was elected first ruler of Jerusalem. He became the hero of two French Chansons de Geste dealing with the Crusades. This fourteenth-century
illustration shows Muslims defending their city against the Christian
invaders.

800 – 000

https://discerning-Islam.org

Last Updated:    01/2022

See COPYRIGHT information below.

× How can I help you?