Muslim history

Background

Like most major world religions, Islam's historical development has affected political, economic, and military trends both inside and outside its primary geographic zones of reach (see Islamic world). As with Christendom, the concept of an Islamic world may be useful in looking at different periods of human history; similarly useful is an understanding of the identification with a quasi-political community of believers, or ummah, on the part of Islam's practitioners down the centuries.
Islam appeared in Arabia in the 7th century . Within a century of Muhammad's first recitations of the Qur'an, an Islamic state stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Central Asia in the east. This empire did not remain unified for long; the new polity soon broke into a civil war known to Islamic historians as the Fitna, and later affected by a Second Fitna. After this, there would be rival dynasties claiming the caliphate, or leadership of the Muslim world, and many Islamic states and empires offered only token obedience to a caliph unable to unify the Islamic world.
Despite this fragmentation of Islam as a political community, the empires of the Abbasid caliphs, the Mughals, and the Seljuk Turk, Safavid Persia and Ottomans were among the largest and most powerful in the world. Arabs made many Islamic centers of culture and science and produced notable scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, doctors and philosophers during the Golden Age of Islam. Technology flourished; there was much investment in economic infrastructure, such as irrigation systems and canals; stress on the importance of reading the Qur'an produced a comparatively high level of literacy in the general populace.
Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries C.E., Islamic regions fell under the sway of European imperial powers. Following World War I, the remnants of the Ottoman empire were parcelled out as European protectorates. After many centuries, no major, widely-accepted claim to the caliphate (which had been at least claimed by the Ottomans) remained.
Although affected by various ideologies, such as communism, during much of the twentieth century, Islamic identity and Islam's salience on political questions have arguably increased during the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Rapid growth, western interests in Islamic regions, international conflicts and globalization influenced Islam's importance in shaping the world of the twenty-first century.

Note on early Islamic historiography

There are several Muslim versions of early Islamic history, as written by the Sunni, Shi'a, and Ibadi sects. 19th century Western scholars tended to privilege the Sunni versions; the Sunni are the largest sect, and their books and scholars were easily available. Over the last hundred years, Western scholars have become much more willing to question the orthodox view and to advance new theories and new narratives. Still today, many parts of Islamic history are not as well known internationally as other components of history, such as that of the west!

Muhammad

By his death in 632, Muhammad had managed to unite the entire Arabian peninsula.
Main article: Muhammad
Arabia before Muhammad was scantily populated by various Arabic-speaking people. Some were Bedouin, pastoral nomads organized in tribes. Some were agriculturalists, living either in oases in the north, or in the more fertile and thickly settled areas to the south (now Yemen and Oman). At that time the majority of Arabs followed polytheistic religions, although a few tribes followed Judaism, Christianity (including Nestorians) or Zoroastrianism. The city of Mecca was a religious center for some of the northern Arabian polytheists, as it contained the sacred well of Zamzam and a small temple, the Ka'aba.
Muhammad was born on the outskirts of Mecca in the Year of the Elephant. Most Muslims equate this with the Gregorian year 570 but a few prefer 571. He was orphaned at an early age and was raised by his uncle Abu Talib. He became a trader, married a wealthy widow, and could have looked forward to a life of ease and prosperity.
However, when he was some forty years old, he experienced what he apparently believed to be a divine revelation while he was meditating in a cave outside Mecca. This would have been in 610 C.E. After an initial period of doubt and fear, he started to preach to his kinfolk and then in public, to all Meccans.
Muhammad believed he had been chosen by God, like the Hebrew prophets before him, to preach repentance, submission to God, and a coming day of judgment. He said he was not preaching a new religion, just reviving the old and pure tradition which he thought the Christians and Jews had debased. He attracted followers.
In 622 A.D, Muhammad and many of his followers fled to the neighboring city of Medina. This migration is called the Hijra; it was the first year of Muhammad's "reign" as a secular ruler as well as a religious leader. Following the custom of the time, later historians took that year as the start of the Muslim calendar.
The two cities of Mecca and Medina went to war. Muhammad and his followers won one battle (Battle of Badr) and managed to stalemate a Meccan attack in the Battle of the Trench. Through conquest and conversion, Muhammad was able to unite the surrounding tribes behind him and eventually assembled such a large force that Mecca capitulated without a fight. By the time Muhammad died, on June 8, 632, he and his followers had united the entire Arabian peninsula under Islam, and had started to expand into the areas now known as Syria and Iraq.

Rashidun

After Muhammad passed away, a series of Caliphs governed the Islamic State: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. These first Caliphs are popularly known as the "Rashidun" or rightly guided Caliphs.


The Rashidun made significant conquests, and brought large areas under the fold of Islam.
Abu Bakr's short reign (632-34) was occupied by the Ridda wars - rebellions of Bedouin Arabs. During Umar's rule, Muslim armies invaded Palestine and Mesopotamia. At the Battle of Yarmuk (636), Muslim armies won a crushing victory over the Byzantines, thus paving the way for the conquest of Egypt and Syria. After a decisive victory over the Sassanid empire at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in 637, Muslims overwhelmed the Persians in Mesopotamia. Five years later, after the Battle of Nihawānd, Persia was effectively included in the expanding Islamic empire. ^[1]

The First Fitna

Main article: First Islamic civil war
Umar was succeeded by Uthman ibn Affan, another of Muhammad's earliest followers. Under Uthman, the new empire fell into a civil war called the Fitna, or disorder. Some of Muhammad's family and earliest followers were unhappy with Uthman, feeling that he was unduly favoring his kinsfolk and acting less like a religious leader and more like a king. Rebellious soldiers killed Uthman and offered the leadership to Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad's cousin, foster-son, and son-in-law. Many Muslims (in particular, those who had their own designs on the Caliphate) refused to accept Ali as a leader; he spent his brief caliphate fighting against dissenting factions and Uthman's relatives, the Umayyads. Ali was killed by a Khariji assassin and the Umayyads claimed the caliphate. They managed to retain leadership of the majority of Muslims for several generations, but save for a brief period, never again ruled over an undivided Islamic empire. The Islamic faith diverged as well, splitting into the two main sects of today (Sunni and Shi'a). (This is perhaps a gross over-simplification of a complex religious history).

Early Caliphate

Main articles: Caliph and Islamic Golden Age
After the Rashidun, a series of Caliphates were established. Each caliphate was a monarchy, developed its own unique laws and adopted a particular sect of Islam as a State religion. Until the ninth century the Muslim World would remain a single political entity under the leadership of one Caliph.

Umayyads

Main article: Umayyad
Ali was succeeded by Muawiya I, who became the first Ummayad caliph. The capital, which had been moved to Iraq, was shifted to Damascus, and an elected caliph was replaced by a hereditary Sultan.
Under the Ummayads, the Muslim world expanded into North Africa and Spain in the West, and Central Asia in the East. The glory achieved by Muslims during this period was without comparison. According to Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair,
By the early eighth century, the Islamic empire stretched from North Africa on the west to Transoxiana and Sind (modern-day Pakistan) in the east, nearly one quarter the way around the globe, an area that made the empires of the Persians, Alexander the Great, and the Romans seem puny...The Muslims, no longer Arab merchants from the heartland of Arabia, became masters of the economic and cultural heartland of the Near East, and their faith, Islam, was no longer as obscure Arabian cult but the religion of an imperial elite.^[2]


The territory of the Caliphate in the year 750
Much of the population of this new empire was non-Muslim, and aside from a protection tax (jizya) and other restrictions, the conquered people found their religions tolerated. Indeed, Muslim authorities often discouraged conversions. Under the Umayyads, would-be converts had to find an Arab patron who would adopt them into his tribe. Once they were honorary Arabs they could convert.
Nevertheless, most of the population eventually converted to Islam. Whether this was a fast or a slow movement is a topic hotly debated in academia, and only to be settled by meticulous country-by-country studies. Ummayad conversion policies, however, did create tensions in the empire as greater numbers of non-Arabs (mostly Persians) converted. The tensions increased when Shiites joined the protest against Ummayad rule.^[3]
Umayyad rule was interrupted by a second civil war (the Second Fitna) in 680, re-established, then ended in 758.