ISLAM

 

ISLAM

Ref. Islamic History- A very short introduction by Adam J. Silverstein

Oxford University Presws , First published in 2010

EXCERPTS

Islam began in Arabia. To Muslims this happened not with Muhammad but with Abraham who- together with his son Ismael, the progenitor of the- Arab build the K-aba in Mecca.

Muhammad was born in Mecca circa 570….. he began to receive revelations that would become verses of the Koran,…... In 622 , he was forced to flee together with his supporters.

……as his relation with the Jews soured, their tribes were gradually expelled from the town and even, in some instance , executed. The Meccans were defeated eventually in 630 and over the next two years Muhammad managed to unite the tribes of Arabia under the umma’s banner.

Ali became caliph in 656 and struggled to exert his influence widely …... After Ali’s death…… Mu’awiya’s accession came to be known as the first civil war or strife in Islamic history…… Mu’awiya move the capital to Damascus and designated his son Yazid as his successor thereby establishing the principle of hereditary succession -  ….. Yazid ran into trouble early on - killing All’s son Hussein at Karbala (Iraq) in 680……

What did Islam mean in this period ? Much of the period conversion of the conquered people to Islam was discouraged by the caliphs which meant two things; yet more people resented them (non-Muslims paid more taxes) and a majority of the caliphs subjects were non-Muslims and non-Arab Muslims, Arab non-Muslim and non-Arab non-Muslims, all had cause to oppose the caliphs in Damascus.

Islam exists at all is due to events in the 600 two 800 period. The spread of Islam beyond its traditional boundaries in the Great Arid Zone was enabled by the actions of regional rulers; the Fatimids and Barbers in North Africa made inroads into sub-Saharan Africa, just as Ghaznavids did in India with the Sultan Mahmoud ( r997 to 1030) launching no fewer than 17 raids into the subcontinent Africa, India and Southeast Asia.

The rivalry between the Shiite Buyids and Fatimids on the one hand, and the Sunni Seljuqs and Ghaznavid’s on the other, had an ideological, sectarian edge to it. All Shiites trace the leadership of the ummah, the’ imamate from Ali through two of his sons and their descendants. Ismaili Shiism was thoroughly systematized, and the Fatimids challenged their Sunni rivals to the east at all levels. Sunnism’s response to the Shiite challenge was impressive: in the 800- 1100 period the six most prestigious collection of had its or traditions about Muhammad, were assembled.

In the second half of the 11^th century, waves of Turkish tribes continue to migrate westwards following the pastoral lands on which they depended to northern Iran and into Azerbaijan and Anatolia, they conducted raids into Byzantine territory provoking a military response. The Turks defeated the Byzantine forces at Manzikert in 1071 and within two decades most of Syria, Palestine and Anatolia was in their hands.

The Crusades were not merely a response to the Byzantine request for assistance against the Turks: ranging over three continents and five centuries …..First Crusade, launched in 1095, had less to do with the Byzantine- Turkish rivalries than with the wider context of Christian offensive against Islam and of course the recovery of Jerusalem and the Holy Land of Christianity. Muslim historians at the time, …. interpreted them within the context of Christian gains against Muslims in Iberia, Italy and elsewhere. Sicily, which had been ruled as a Muslim state from mid-10^th century was reconquered by a combined force of Normans from Italy and Italian soldiers between 1061 and 1091 though the last Muslims were expelled only in the 1240s.

Thereafter, another Sunni Kurd, known to Europeans as Saladin, united Egypt and Syria, putting an end to the Shiite dynasty of the Fatimids in 1171 and regaining the Jerusalem for the Muslims by defeating the Crusaders at Hattin in 1187.  Saladin successors entered into strategic truces with the Crusaders and surrounded themselves with Turkish slave soldiers ( mamaluks) of their own. These Mamaluks overthrew the Ayyubids and rulled a large region that included Egypt, Syria and parts of Iraq, Arabia and North and East Africa. They evicted the Crusaders from Palestine by 1291 having already defeated the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260.

It was Mongols rather than the Crusaders who commanded the attention of Muslims worldwide. Like the prophet Muhammad, Temujin (1206-27) achieved power by uniting numerous nomadic tribes under his rule and enter the spotlight at around the age of 40 when he was renamed Genghis Khan.

Accounts of Mongol destruction are chilling even when filtered for hyperbole. Most devastating to the Muslims was the Mongol conquest of Iran/ Iraq in the 1250s:  agriculture was destroyed, as were libraries, mosques and entire populations in leading towns and cities ….. -  sacking of Baghdad took place in 1258.

Mamluks, on the other hand, emerged as the heroes. Devastating campaign by the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur (Tamerlane  1336 to 1405) was unleashed along the lines of the earlier Mongol conquests.

It is telling that he gained far more booty from his conquests in Muslim India than anywhere else, and it is in India and neighboring region that Islamic rule and religion would make impressive progress in this period. India had been targeted systematically by Muslims rulers since Ghaznavid’s times, but it is only from the late 12th and early 13^th centuries that Muslims would rule there independently, first under the Ghurids from Afghanistan and then under Turkish and Afghani dynasties that comprised the Delhi Sultanate (1206 to 1526.). Aybek, a Ghulam of the Ghurids, who conquered Delhi in 1206 and established a mamluk state in India.

A large proportion of today’s Muslims are descendants all of those who converted in this period. The Ottoman Empire was the first Muslim super state of this period to rise and the last to fall, lasting in some form or another from the early 14^th to the early 20^th centuries. By the mid-16^th century stop Ottoman had created is strong centralized and cosmopolitan empire that incorporated some of Islam’s greatest cities and resources with footholds in Europe. Ottoman cities were boosted through the absorption of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. Ottoman military machine was partly made-up of Christian youths and having inherited the disparate groups of Turkmen who inherited Anatolia.  Ottomans ruled over a significant population of Shites and Sufis all as well as various groups of Christians that even at its height barely half of the empires subjects were Muslims and less than half of the world’s Muslims were Ottomans.

A native of Azerbaijan named Safi- al -Din (1252 to 1334) founded a Sufi brotherhood in Ardabil whose followers were known as Safavids.

Persian literature reached new heights and both the Ottomans and Mughals adopted Persian as the language of high culture. The Safavids where at the very center of Islamic civilization. They realized that imposing one’s religion by force is no way to win friends and influence people.

From Afghanistan in the early 16^th century a Prince known as Babur launched a successful raid into India and in 1526 when his forces defeated the Sultan of Delhi and established a dynasty in India. Under his grandson Akbar (1556 -1605) Mughal empire was created and by the time of Aurangzeb ( 1658 to 1707 ) the Mughals ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent . Aurangzeb waged Jihad against Hindus and imposed Jizya tax.

The Mughals and the Safavids lost power in the early 18^th century and the ottomans managed to survive only by reorganizing their empire how long European lines the failed footman sees of Vienna in 1683 and the humiliating defeats suffered in the Russian Ottoman war of 1768 274 this abuse the sultans of any ideas that they were militarily superior. Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe leading to the reorganization of the empire (1839 to 76) through which secular law replaced Sharia ‘a, Non-Muslims were made equal to Muslims.

Islam gained more converts during the period of European colonial rule then in any other. And in the post-colonial geographical distribution of Muslims was also dramatically increased. Without the British in India and the French in North Africa there would be few Pakistanis in Britain and few Algerians in France.

Who want to read the seminal works of Islamic law theology Quranic studies Hadith history and so forth must have a total grounding in Arabic as Islam spread for the most part in the regions and periods where literacy was very limited if Muslims first experience was to learn to read and write Arabic.

Many Arab intellectuals where Christians and they sought to propagate Arab rather than Islamic identity. Arab nationalism and Pan Arabism were consciously secular movements. The Arabs and Turks owe their prominence on the world stage to Islam. The Persians do not. Persians have a proud long history of statehood that dates back to the Achaemenid period. 559 to 330 BCE when Arab conquerors defeated the Sasanid empire 224-651.

The Mongol and Timurid conquests, destructive though they were, also contributed to the success of the Persian language. The Mongol in Iran patronized Persian scholarships even in those fields that hitherto had been reserved for Arabic. On the other hand, the havoc wrought by the conquests, forced leading Iranian scholars to seek safety and patronage elsewhere, mostly in Muslim India. Persian was the leading language of high culture throughout the Islamic world.

Turks were not native to the Near East, their original homeland being in Mongolia. the empire of the Turks (744 to 840) for instance had to close relation with the Chinese ruling families. Turkish slave soldiers ( Ghulam’s ) fiercely loyal to their Caliph and lacking political ambition, quickly came to dominate the Abbasid court in the 9^th century and eventually establish their own states , from the Mamluks in the West to the Ghazanavids and Delhi Sultans ( Ghurid Ghulam’s ) in the east .For over a Millennium most Muslims lived under the rule or protection of Turks.

The fact that the Crescent and star symbol with which Islam is often associated ease of ancient Turkeys rather than Arab provenance and also that Turks have literally naughtiest Islamic civilization through their culinary influence.

The largest mosque in the world is the great mosque of Mecca the second largest is said to be the two mosque in Casablanca, Morocco. As far as Islamic law is concerned mosques are basically unnecessary. All a Muslim need to perform the prayers is where a clean surface on which to prostrate and an idea of Mecca’s location. And yet the Islamic world from the 7^th to the 21^st centuries is full of mosques that had once been churches and temples al Aqsa Mosque and the nearby Dome of the rock were built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus previously had been the Church of Saint John, the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople was converted by mammoth on Sophia of Istanbul. There are literally hundreds of examples of this process.

Muslims rarely, if ever, derive religious instructions directly from the Quran. It is through the analysis of the” ulema “who made sense of Quranic verses and rationalized them with other sources of religious law, that shari’a was formulated. Most of these scholars say that ‘jihad’ means warfare aimed at spreading Islam, a phrase that itself is open to interpretation. Was Islam’s spread meant to achieve political power over others or converts to the religion. All agreed that the answer was both, with conversion being the priority and political power seen as a stepping stone. The extremists main selling point is the insistence that global jihad efforts are defensive. This makes jihad immediately attractive to Muslims who may feel beleaguered by something. Islamists believe that jihad must be waged by the community as a whole to expand the borders of an Islamic state.

The Quran tells us surprisingly little about Muhammad and the rise of Islam, traditions about Muhammad and his companions.

The identification of foreign words in the Quran, a pursuit rejected by modern Muslims as a hostile Orientalist enterprise, was first undertaken by Muslim lexicographers in the Abbasid period. More crucially, the process of identifying the smaller number of authentic hadiths from the huge mass of fabricated ones was pioneered and developed by Muslims. Thus al- Bukhari (870), the compiler of one of the six authoritative collections of hadiths, is said to be have chosen these 7400’ sound ‘hadiths from an original corpus of 600,000. About 2/3rd of the all these 7400 are repetitious, so the actual number of acts and statements attributed to Muhammad is considerably fewer than 3000 .

Every audience contains two parts, a man which is a statement about something Muhammad or another early authority said or did, and as isnad or chain of authorities that serves as a sort of near eastern footnote telling us how each report has reached us.

Ignaz Goldziher (1921) argued that hadiths tell us more about 8th and 9^th century legal debates than they do about Muhammad’s life. The authors of Hagarism also concluded that Islam and the Quran as we know them are not as 7^th and 8^th century Muslims knew them. They postulated on the basis of non-Muslim sources from the period that Mecca was not the original sanctuary of Islam; that the early conquests took place before Islam had emerged as a religion distinct from a form of Judaism.

Muslim scholars, it is thought, really should know better. Hence, when Suliman Bshear (d. 1991) argued that Islam developed gradually just as other religions did, his students at the University of Nablus (Palestine) threw him out of second story window. And for suggesting that Quran is a literary text and must be read as one, the Egyptian scholar Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd was declared an apostate and his marriage was accordingly annulled (he and his wife fled Egypt). Some 70 years earlier in, 1926, Taha Hussain (d 1973) -a leading Egyptian intellectual and education minister - argued that much of pre- Islamic Arabian poetry is inauthentic, for which he too was branded an apostate. Such instances of scholastic in tolerance are, of course, extremely rare, but the mere existence of a few well publicized cases of the sort can have an intimidating effect on those within the Muslim world who might otherwise be inclined to adopt an outsiders approach to the study of tradition.

How did Muslim historians themselves view Islamic history ? A short comparison of the lives and works of al-Tabari (838 – 923) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) -arguably, the two greatest Muslim historians, presents us a very different answers to this question. In many ways, the two approached Islamic history from opposite ends; al-Tabari was an easterner and Iranian from Amul whereas Ibn Khaldun was a westerner - an Andalusian Arab born in what is now Tunisia. The former lived and worked during the high point of Arabo Islamic civilization; the latter during one of its low points. And whereas al Tabari was consciously detached from governmental circles and independent of political influence, Ibn Khaldun spent much of his adult life immersed in self- serving schemes and political machinations. His view of Islamic history was thus heavily conditioned by religious concerns. To him God created the world and after 7000 years (he explains the calculation in the introduction to his work), He will bring to an end.

Ibn Khaldun, by contrast, saw history as the product of certain identifiable dynamic processes, such as the interaction between barbarians imbued with tribal cohesion and the settled civilizations that they bordered. Ibn Khaldun saw history as cyclical and subject to rules and patterns. Arnold J Toynbee called the Muquaddima (the theoretical introduction to even Khaldun’s historical work which these observations are found) a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind and has ever yet been created by any mine in any time or place.

Contrasting approaches to Islamic study are not limited to modern western scholarship; traditionally Shiites and Sunnis have few unfolding of history from very different perspectives.

RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE p109

Muslims seek to emulate Mohammad for three reasons. First, the Quran tells them to do so repeatedly and in different ways; Quran 33 21 is the closest it gets and even this verse is far from explicit on the matter. Second it is thought that God revealed the meaning of the Quran 's says to Mohammad as well as the versus themselves, his actions. Finally, once Muslim traditions came to the view Muhammad as having been infallible, the doctrine emerged that Mohammad Sunna mast always be followed.

In recent centuries, two problems have presented themselves to Muslims who wish to adhere strictly to the sunna. First, as seen, the diversity of practice that resulted from Islam's spread amongst peoples of different religious and cultural backgrounds led to the assimilation of beliefs and rituals that Islam that bore little resemblance to sunna and. importantly created the Salafis deem to be intolerable religious variety amongst Muslims. Second, changing historical circumstances modernity in particular have created situations for which there is no obvious answer in the Sunna as it is recorded in hadiths, sira and other traditional sources-,

Islamists hold that whatever was or was not done then should or should not be done now. Modernists follow different principles; to them God and his religion are inherently just and merciful, whatever He enjoined in the 7th century-through the Quran and sunna was necessarily just as merciful. Times change, however. and some of the sannas details while perfectly acceptable at the time of revelation are less acceptable nowadays. Modernists believe in egalitarianism, democracy and human rights just as they believe in the Quran and in Sunna.,

From his hometown in the naye province of Arabia, ibn Abd al – Wahhab Stretched the incompatibility with true monotheism of popular religious practices search as visiting shrines and tombs of Saints, and adhering blindly to reach walls and beliefs that had no basis in the Quran or Sunna - and declared those who did not meet his religious standards to be infidels. Has in 5 bells non Wahabi Muslims where to be subjected to jihad, and the shrines and tombs of the Saints through home intersection with God was shot where to be destroyed.

In the mid-18th century, the Wahhabis aligned themselves with Mohammad. Evan sood the ruler of a nearby town and for the next century and half the Saudi family fought to extend both its role and the baby is brand of slum throughout Arabia.

When in 1938 large quantities of oil were discovered in the Kingdom territories, Wahhab Islam secured the means by which it's message could be propagated more extensively than any other interpretation of Islam.

Corrupting influence of sudden and fabulous wealth and by the influx of large numbers of migrants from other Muslim societies whose Islam differs from Wahhabi version.

In the 18th century a debate between two branches of Shiism ensured. Shiism that accounts for the Iranian revolution: the proliferation of qualified practitioners of ijtihad led to the creation of a clerical hierarchy at the top of which are the Grand Ayatollahs, one of whom- Ayatollah Khomeini-was the dominant figure.

According to all Shiites, Ali's second son Hussain was the 3rd imam in line to succeed Muhammad. When the Umayyads came to power in 661, it became increasingly clear that Hussain was unlikely to rule as imam and in 680 together with his supporters he launched a rebellion against the Umayyads Khalifa Yazid. This was brutally quashed at Karbala on the 10th day of the first month of Muslim calendar, commemorate Hussain's martyrdom at Yazidis hands. Shiites have marked this anniversary by staging passion -plays (tazia) in which Hussein’s suffering and murder are reenacted.

Martyrdom operations or suicide mission, are theoretically prohibited in Sunni Islam.            Those who die waging jihad will become martyrs, of course but classical sources maintain that it is forbidden to set out with intention of dying in battle.