Islam

A New Historical Introduction

Carole Hillenbrand

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780500772614
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Carole Hillenbrand's book offers a profound understanding of the history of Muslims and their faith, from the life of Muhammad to the religion practised by 1.6 billion people around the world today.

Each of the eleven chapters explains a core aspect of the faith in historical perspective, allowing readers to gain a sensitive understanding of the essential tenets of the religion and of the many ways in which the present is shaped by the past. It is an ideal introductory text for courses in Middle Eastern studies, in religious studies, or on Islam and its history.

1

introduction

We must not, like the frog in the well, who imagines that the universe ends with the wall surrounding his well, think that our religion alone represents the whole Truth and all others are false. A reverent study of the other religions of the world would show that they are equally true as our own, though all are necessarily important. mahatma gandhi¹

My objective in this book is to describe as accurately and objectively as possible the core beliefs, practices, and doctrines that over the years have shaped and unified the worldwide community of Muslims. The book defines and analyzes these basic building blocks, which serve as the indispensable foundation for all studies that aim to explain to non-Muslims how and why Muslims think and act as they do.

I aim to present Islamic faith and practice in a historically nuanced way, showing how the past has impacted, and continues to impact, on the present. Modern Islam, as is followed by the vast majority of Muslims throughout the world, rests on a foundation created by a series of historical events, especially in the early centuries of the faith. While most key beliefs and practices were definitively fixed in these years, their details were not set in stone. Accordingly, it is a crucial aim of this book to show that Muslim belief and practice on a multitude of issues developed in the course of the centuries, and saw much modification, adaptation, and refinement during that time. For example, modernist Muslim thinkers have interpreted Islamic law to respond to the demands of modern society (see Chapter 5). The details of how a precept was interpreted and applied in a specific situation were indeed subject to change; but that change was carried out within the familiar context of the Qur’an and the sayings and example of the Prophet Muhammad. I hope that I may justifiably claim that the particular strength of this book is the consistent historical perspective that it brings to bear on these issues. The emphasis has deliberately been on the formative period, especially the lifetimes of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, but I have also tried to pay due attention, notably in Chapter 7, to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since this period was of critical importance in that it saw the revival and reform of Islam, thanks to a succession of towering personalities. Readers will be equipped with the understanding and historical perspective necessary to understand how modern Muslims go about their lives; the book touches on rites of passage, daily rituals, and considers how Muslims respond to contemporary issues, such as the ethics of banking, and political crises.

There are many ways to write a book about Islam, and the perennial demand for such books is an encouraging sign that there are uncounted masses of people, not just in the West but worldwide, and not just non-Muslims but also Muslims themselves, who are hungry to know more about this faith that has become so important globally in the last century or so. So what approaches can one discern among the authors of such books? Happily, many—often written by non-Muslims—offer a description of modern Islam, and that of course is very relevant to a modern audience eager to find out how Muslims live their lives and what they believe, especially given the huge role they play in today’s world. The findings of such books are of central importance to this book too. After all, for most people who embark on a study of Islam—no matter whether this is as part of a university course or as a matter of personal curiosity—the driving motive is to understand the post-9 /11 world. So books that meet that demand have informed my own work in ways too numerous to calculate. Similarly, it has proved helpful to me in writing this book to take into consideration books written deliberately from within the faith by Muslims who urgently want to lay before a global public what their authors view as eternal religious certainties.

Yet another approach, and this too is one from which this book has drawn constant inspiration, is taken by authors who present the particular version of Islam practiced by a single community, whose customs and interpretation often differ from what can be observed elsewhere in the Muslim world. For it cannot be said too often that Islam is a worldwide faith, practiced not merely from west to east in a line stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, and across every country in between them, but also in a great deal of Africa, in Europe, and in America. There are communities of Lebanese Muslims living in Brazil, and Gaelic-speaking Pakistani Muslims in the Outer Hebrides, an island group off the coast of Scotland.

When one ponders these various approaches, all of which have much to recommend them and all of which have influenced the writing of this book, the inevitable conclusion is that it would be unwise to make dogmatic claims that any one of them describes the only right way to follow in the hope of achieving a deeper understanding of the faith. The present book results from an effort to consider all these approaches carefully, and to learn as much as possible from them. It also tries to present as much material as is practicable from each of them, in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible.

When I was writing the book, I wanted the text to be accessible to that perhaps mythical creature, the general reader. So I have avoided enticing detours into subsidiary topics that are of interest mainly to specialists, and I have also avoided transliteration, which is off-putting for people who know no Arabic and redundant for people who do. In the same spirit I have kept technical terms to a minimum, while also rejecting the temptation to use footnotes to conduct controversies or to pile on extra information. Such a work as this, however well intentioned, could easily be ruined by information overload. The desire to confine the discussion to what most Muslims believe and how they live their lives should also help to explain why I have given relatively less space to certain subjects, such as theology and philosophy, which are of pressing intellectual interest to modern scholars but are often treated with indifference by the Muslim man or woman in the street (see Chapter 7). More generally, I have tried to adopt a sober tone of objective exposition, holding fast to a broad perspective and constantly alert to the dangers of partiality.

Readers have a right to know where I am coming from, since that will color what I say. My background as a university professor of Arabic is that of a historian of Islam as a religion and a civilization. I have devoted most of my adult life to the study of Islam—its doctrines, its history, and its culture—and to studying the principal languages used in the central Muslim lands, passing on the knowledge that I have acquired on these subjects to generations of students. Their responses have often been both stimulating and challenging. In my published writings I make direct use of primary Arabic, Persian, and Turkish sources; and I have taught classical Arabic and Persian religious texts dealing with Islamic law, political thought, and Sufism for many years. I have also taken part in a number of television and radio programs about Islam that have been shown in Britain, the USA, and the Middle East.

I mention all this to justify my taking what may seem to be the bold step of writing this book. I am not a Muslim myself, and indeed I have a deep personal attachment to the Christian religion and culture in which I was raised. So I cannot speak from personal experience about Islam as a faith lived from within. But I would not have lived my professional life in the way I have chosen to do unless I had developed a deep admiration and respect for Islam, both as a religion and as a culture. So this book is shaped by long study of the Muslim world, by almost half a century of visiting its many countries, and by decades of explaining that world to Western students. These experiences have cumulatively had a profound effect on me as a person and as a scholar. They have sharpened and refined my understanding of Islam and my attitudes toward it. I hope that I may claim that they have determined what has gone into this book, and how I have presented the material in it.

In passing, I would add that I regard it as a serious misconception that only a Muslim could write a book like this. Indeed, I would argue that it is easier for a non-Muslim scholar of Islam than for a Muslim to identify which questions about Islam are regularly asked by non-Muslims—be they students or the general public, those of other faiths, or those who have no religious faith at all. The need to explain what is often misunderstood, to present a narrative of the basic facts and concepts that have made the Muslim world what it is, underpins the way this book is constructed. I have thought long and hard in an attempt to identify the key issues, to separate what really matters from what is of merely subsidiary importance. That has involved a difficult and protracted process of selection so as to ensure that nothing of central importance has been omitted. Each of my chapters has a one-word title. That is a deliberate strategy. I adopted it to concentrate my own mind, and I hope that it will correspondingly concentrate the minds of my readers. It means that those of them who want to check out a given topic can find it easily. Hence the lavish use of subheadings within each chapter and on the contents pages.

This is not a book to be read at a single sitting. Instead, it is intended to orientate serious readers and to tell them where to look for more information on a given subject if they wish to pursue it further. It is a curious and perhaps telling fact that, of the many dozens of books published in the last thirty years or so that lay out the essentials of what Muslims believe, and of what governs the way they live, only a few present the requisite information in this way. The interested reader therefore has to look unreasonably hard for discussions that cover the middle ground between a simple summary of two or three paragraphs—a summary that can scarcely avoid being superficial—and an entire book, the level of detail of which proclaims that it is aimed at the specialist rather than at the general reader. Of course it is not rare to find a book that has a discussion of, say, the Qur’an, or the Prophet Muhammad, or of Islamic law, that is of just the right length for that kind of reader. But such a book may have nothing at all to say of other subjects that warrant a full chapter in the present book. So the information is all out there somewhere, but it is so scattered as to be hard for non-specialists to access. The present book aims to solve that problem.

This book, then, examines how the present is shaped by the past, in the belief that to understand the one you need to know about the other. That is particularly true in the case of the Muslim world, where events that happened almost fourteen hundred years ago can have a direct impact on events today. An obvious example is the split between Sunnis and Shi‘ites that is causing such bloodshed in the Middle East at the time of writing (see also Chapter 11). So the material in this book is intended to present the basic information about the Muslim past in such a way as to contextualize the Muslim present as clearly as possible. And it is also worth emphasizing, although it is increasingly obvious in many different parts of the world, that the previous simplistic view held by so many Europeans and Americans, namely that Muslims live only in the Middle East, is no longer tenable. Indeed, it is more untrue than true. Given the ubiquity of the Muslim presence all across the world today, it is more important than ever that this faith should be better understood.

So this book is a modest, one-woman attempt to counter the flood of ignorance that threatens to swamp objectivity and that has created such powerful prejudices against Islam. Its aim is to marshal the facts about Islam and then to interpret them. I hope to do so from the standpoint of religious studies, tempered by a constant awareness of how history molds the development of religion. For no religion exists in a historical vacuum. And no religion is the same in every time and place. The views of certain Islamic scholars have on occasion been taken to represent the faith itself by some believers, without the ever-present necessity to assess those views, as noted earlier, in the context of the Qur’an and the sayings and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And this has influenced the way that many non-Muslims view the faith. For many people in the West, indeed, the word “Islam” has become a convenient, simplifying shorthand for a religion, a society, a culture, and an overarching political entity. In this book, though, I use the term “Islam” in a primarily religious sense, though of course society, culture, and politics are never far away.

One apparently minor issue of usage should be addressed here. The text of this book tries to differentiate clearly between the two words “Islam” and “Muslim,” both as nouns and in their adjectival forms. They are often used as synonyms; but they are not. The first denotes a set of beliefs, institutions, and practices that govern human affairs in all their moral, social, and political dimensions. “Islamic” in this sense refers to the religion, the writings, and the culture of Islam. “Muslim,” on the other hand, denotes the inhabitants of countries that are largely Muslim, or those individuals who follow the religion of Islam. Examples of these different usages are “the Islamic Republic of Iran” or “the Muslim world” or “the Islamic rules of the Shari‘a.”

It seems appropriate to end with a brief look at how Islam is frequently treated by the modern media. Talented journalists report extensively and often objectively about current affairs in the Muslim world. But these are transient events; to assess them properly requires a degree of distance, which a detailed knowledge of history affords. It is to be hoped that the historical, nuanced discussion in this book will enable the reader to approach with an enquiring, well-informed, but critical mind the superficial and unreliable polemic against Islam and Muslims that unfortunately often passes for news and opinion in segments of the popular press. Of course, Islam is not the only subject to suffer in this way, but it is hard to overestimate the negative impact of that constant drip-drip of disinformation and prejudice. It is a particular tragedy that the good name of a world religion has been besmirched by the murderous, politically motivated deeds of terrorists who call themselves Muslims while acting in ways that the faith roundly condemns. Hence the widespread, kneejerk, but mistaken association of Islam with terrorism in the minds of many non-Muslims across the world. Yet this is the religion of one-and-a-half billion people, of whom the vast majority have no truck with terrorism, and can on the contrary point with pride to a millennial historical tradition of religious tolerance and coexistence with other faiths, from Cordoba to Jerusalem to Delhi—and beyond.

2

Muhammad

Muhammad is the Prophet of Islam, the “Seal of the Prophets,” chosen by God to bring His final message to humanity. This chapter sets Muhammad in his religious, historical, and cultural context, it considers his achievements, and discusses how Muslims have understood his life, personality, and significance over the centuries.

Arabia before Islam

The Prophet Muhammad was born into a particular society at a specific moment in history—Arabia in the sixth century CE—and it is, of course, important to understand the impact this background made on his life and message.

Geography

What was Arabia like at this time? Scholars usually make a clear distinction between South Arabia (especially the southwestern corner, which corresponds to modern Yemen) and the rest of the peninsula. This distinction is based on geographical factors: vast areas of desert, fringed with oases, in the north; and the much more fertile south, called Arabia Felix in the ancient world, which enjoyed plentiful rainfall and highly developed agriculture, supported by extensive and elaborate irrigation systems.

South Arabia was heavily populated; its inhabitants had been largely settled agriculturalists from around the eighth century BCE. Its towns had relatively highly developed political institutions, art, and architecture. The Classical authors of Greece and Rome spoke about the fabled luxury of the Sabaeans (and notably the Queen of Sheba), and archaeological evidence testifies to a mature urban culture in the area. The famous irrigation system at Ma‘rib (in modern Yemen), first mentioned in the eighth century BCE, was praised in antiquity as an engineering wonder. Shortly before the advent of Islam, the Ma‘rib dam, which had broken several times before, had definitively collapsed, with far-reaching repercussions for the rest of Arabia. This event, as enshrined in later Muslim oral tradition, came to symbolize the decline of the South Arabian kingdom. Significant population shifts northward resulted.

Oasis. Wadi Bani Khalid, Oman. Water, trees, shade, fertility—everything...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Frontispiece
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Map
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Muhammad
• 3 The Qur’an
• 4 Faith
• 5 Law
• 6 Diversity
• 7 Thought
• 8 Sufism
• 9 Jihad
• 10 Women
• 11 Tomorrow
• Notes
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright