The Handy Islam Answer Book. John Renard
it was up to the elders to choose from among themselves. They considered their course of action to be both in keeping with the example of Muhammad (called his Sunna, SUN-na) and in the spirit of the needs of the whole community (jama’a, ja-MAA-ah) of Muslims. This majority group came to be known as the People of the Sunna and the Assembly (Ahl as-sunna wa-l’jama’ah), or Sunni Muslims for short.
Several other sects made their views known early on. When Ali was doing battle with the Umayyads to claim his rights to the caliphate, a number of his troops seceded on the grounds that Ali was too lax in his appeal to religious principles in the conduct of battle. They judged Ali a serious sinner who was no longer worthy of the name Muslim. That group became known as the Kharijites (or Khawarij, “those who secede”), and a small remnant of their several factions live today largely in Oman on the Persian Gulf. A variety of other groups also expressed their opinions as to how far one might go in judging another person’s suitability for true membership in the Muslim community. One of the more influential believed that only God could judge a person’s soul and that it was therefore best to postpone judgment on the matter. They were known as the Murji’ites or “Postponers,” because they “put off” until God’s judgment any attempt to evaluate other people’s spiritual status before God.
| Major Figures in Early Islamic History | |
| Name | Significance |
| Muhammad (d. 632) | Son of Amina and Abd Allah, clan of Hashim, last prophet |
| Khadija (d. 619) | Muhammad’s first wife (and only wife during her lifetime), mother of Fatima |
| Fatima (d. 633) | Most important of Muhammad’s children, wife of Ali, matriarch of the Shia, mother of the first two imams (Hasan, Husayn) |
| Abu Bakr (d. 634) | Father-in-law of Muhammad, first Rightly Guided Caliph |
| Aisha (d. 678) | Daughter of Abu Bakr, youngest wife of the Prophet, influential in early “civil war” episodes |
| Ali (d. 661) | Cousin of Muhammad, husband of Fatima, first Shia imam, fourth Rightly Guided Caliph (Sunni view) |
| Umar (d. 644) | Important Companion, second Rightly Guided Caliph |
| Uthman (d. 656) | Important Companion, third Rightly Guided Caliph |
| Muawiya (d. 680) | Brother-in-law of Muhammad, “founder” of Umayyad dynasty in Damascus |
| Husayn (d. 680) | Grandson of Muhammad, most-revered Shia martyr killed at Karbala (Iraq) |
Many non-Muslims seem to assume (if not insist) that Islam was, and continues to be, always and everywhere “spread by the sword.” Is this historically accurate?
Unfortunately, even highly placed and influential non-Muslims, such as Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, still make dramatic pronouncements to the effect that everything Muhammad taught was evil and inhumane and that it is a simple historical fact that Islam was spread by violence. A great deal of concrete historical data tells a very different story. The assumption that Islam spread so dramatically because Arab-Muslim armies moving out of Arabia, northward into the central Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine), eastward into present-day Iran, and westward across North Africa, offered conquered peoples the stark option of conversion or death, is seriously flawed. It presupposes an equation between military domination and subjugation to governance by Muslim invaders on the one hand, and being forced to become Muslim on the other hand. On the contrary, Muslim military policy did not force conversion and in fact mandated that once the invaded territory’s authorities accepted terms of peace (often without major loss of life to the general populace), the Muslim armies retreated to newly established garrison cities rather than leave a large footprint on existing cities and towns. Muslim taxation policy also made it financially advantageous for the conquerors not to convert subject peoples en masse, since that would remove the poll tax imposed on non-Muslims.
If Muslims didn’t systematically force the conversion of peoples they conquered, how did these conquered territories become predominantly Muslim?
Recent studies concerning rates of conversion suggest nothing like a meteoric acceptance of Islamic faith. By around 750, 130 years after the death of Muhammad, the population of Persia (Iran) appears to have been around 10 percent Muslim, while at about the same time the populations of much of the Central Middle East (Greater Syria and Iraq) were no more than 20 percent Muslim. A century later (c. 850), Persia’s Muslims numbered around 50 percent of the population. Two-and-a-half centuries later (c. 1096), on the eve of the first Crusade, the population of the central (Arab) Middle East was evidently still less than 50 percent Muslim. In other words, it seems to have taken nearly half a millennium for Muslims to become the clear religious majority in the lands conquered in the earliest invasions by Muslim armies.
How can one organize the huge topic of global Islamic history to make this difficult topic more manageable?
One good organizing concept is that of “culture spheres.” It makes it possible to imagine large swaths of history and geography by thinking of somewhat overlapping areas of the globe, but recognizing each by its distinctive characteristics in a group of shared categories. For example, all of the five Islamic “culture spheres” have unique configurations of the following: First, a dominant religious school of law or “denomination”; second, a distinctive tone of popular spirituality or dominant Sufi order(s); third, signature racial or ethnic elements; fourth, a unique history or understanding of the region’s past; fifth, special geography or demography; and finally, languages that predominate in culture or administrative structures.
What are these culture spheres?
The five spheres, or realms, are as follows: 1) the Arabicate, the oldest historically, in which the Arabic language has been a strong influence on other tongues (such as Swahili), even when Arabic is no longer the dominant tongue; 2) the Persianate, second in antiquity, with Persian casting as long a shadow as Arabic in its sphere; 3) the Turkic, originating in Central Asia and expanding westward with Turkish migrations; 4) the Southeast Asian Malay, where in addition to a blend of Arabicate and Persianate features, Malayo-Polynesian languages predominate; and 5) the Black African, with a host of indigenous sub-Saharan languages. A sixth large, more generic and amorphous sphere, whose Muslim populations are distinctly minorities, would be “Europe and the Americas,” and will be treated separately below and in other chapters.
How would one describe the Arabicate culture sphere? And why not just call it “Arabic”?
With its center more or less in Egypt, the Arabicate sphere stretches eastward across the Central Middle East nations of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and the numerous nation-states of the Arabian Peninsula, the land of Islam’s birth. Toward the west, it stretches across North Africa, encompassing Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, with their Berber and Tuareg ethnicities and non-Semitic languages, as well as the historically crucial cultures of Islamic Spain, or Andalusia. South of Egypt, it includes not only Arabic speaking lands, such as Sudan and Somalia, but also the Swahili populations of Kenya and other parts of East Africa. Numerous smaller Islam-related communities such as the Alawis, Nusayris, and Druze are largely unique to the central part of this sphere, and significant Shi’i populations, including a slight majority in Iraq, are important in the religious mix, especially on the eastern fringe of the sphere. In this very diverse sphere, all four Sunni law schools are well-represented: the Maliki dominant in the western reaches, the Shafi’i and Hanafi more prevalent in the central areas, the Hanbali in the Arabian Peninsula, and the Shi’i schools important in Iraq and parts of the Persian Gulf coast. Finally, why not just “Arabic”? Because Arab(ic) influence in this sphere extends far beyond the actual dominance of Arabic as a language and pure Arab ethnicity and includes regions deeply influenced by Arab language and culture over many centuries.
How did the first Islamic “dynasty,” the Umayyads, come into being?
In 656, after the murder of Uthman, the third Rightly Guided Caliph,