Islam in the World Today

A Handbook of Politics, Religion, Culture, and Society

Werner Ende, Udo Steinbach, Werner Ende, Udo Steinbach

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801464898
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Considered the most authoritative single-volume reference work on Islam in the contemporary world, the German-language Der Islam in der Gegenwart, currently in its fifth edition, offers a wealth of authoritative information on the religious, political, social, and cultural life of Islamic nations and of Islamic immigrant communities elsewhere. Now, Cornell University Press is making this invaluable resource accessible to English-language readers.

More current than the latest German edition on which it is based, Islam in the World Today covers a comprehensive array of topics in concise essays by some of the world's leading experts on Islam, including:

• the history of Islam from the earliest years through the twentieth century, with particular attention to Sunni and Shi'i Islam and Islamic revival movements during the last three centuries;

• data on the advance of Islam along with current population statistics;

• Muslim ideas on modern economics, on social order, and on attempts to modernize Islamic law (shari'a) and apply it in contemporary Muslim societies;

• Islam in diaspora, especially the situation in Europe and America;

• secularism, democracy, and human rights; and

• women in Islam Twenty-four essays are each devoted to a specific Muslim country or a country with significant Muslim minorities, spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union.

Additional essays illuminate Islamic culture, exploring local traditions; the languages and dialects of Muslim peoples; and art, architecture, and literature. Detailed bibliographies and indexes ensure the book's usefulness as a reference work.

Part One

Historical Expansion, Political and Religious History

I

THE WORLD OF ISLAM

A Brief Historical Survey

(Heribert Busse)

1. The Prophet Muhammad and the Emergence of Islam

Islam, at present the religion of more than 1 billion people all over the world, emerged on the Arabian Peninsula in the early decades of the seventh century, at a time when decisive changes were taking place in world history. In Europe, the unrest owing to the migration of populations gave way to the kingdoms of the Goths, the Lombards, and the Merovingians. Muhammad’s contemporary on the papal throne was Gregory I, called Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), who reorganized ecclesiastical institutions, fought remnants of paganism in Italy, and made a name for himself as the author of homilies and Bible commentaries that were considered exemplary for many centuries. Byzantium had to defend itself on two fronts, in Syria and Mesopotamia versus the Sassanid Empire, its hereditary enemy, and in the Balkans against the Avars, pressing in from the steppe. It assumed the tradition of Rome and carried on the Greek-Hellenistic culture; Christianity had been made the state religion by Theodosius I (379–395) and had become the mainstay of state and society. Persia was ruled by the Sassanids, who saw themselves as heirs of the Achaemenid Empire and protectors and modernizers of Zoroastrianism. In the north they were in direct contact with China, which after unification under the Tang dynasty had expanded its power throughout all of Turkistan. The Arabs still lived according to the traditions of a tribal society that had become semi-settled. In South Arabia the Himyarite kingdom had collapsed in the first half of the sixth century; it was initially succeeded by Ethiopia, which also attempted to expand its influence all the way to Mecca. But then the Sassanids appeared on the scene and established themselves in South Arabia, which played an important role as the hub of trade with India and Africa.

Mecca lay beyond the horizons of the major powers at the time, but it was tied to them in manifold ways. The city was situated on the trade route that led from South Arabia to the Fertile Crescent, reaching the Mediterranean Sea in Gaza. Mecca was ruled by the Quraysh; its businessmen played a leading role in transit trade. There is an echo of it in the Qurʾan: “For the taming of Quraysh/For their taming (We cause) the caravans to set forth in winter and summer./So [as thanks] let them worship the Lord of this House [i.e., the Kaʿba],/Who hath fed them against hunger and hath made them safe from fear” (sura 106: 1–5, “The Quraysh”). Mecca lived off long-distance trading, and the Kaʿba, the most significant shrine of heathen Arabia, provided the security that was absolutely essential for it. The city, with the neighboring Plain of ʿArafat, was the site of the annual pilgrimage festival (hajj), which was combined with a highly frequented market. Christianity had not yet gained a firm foothold in Arabia. South of Mecca, at the border of present-day Yemen, lay Najran, where there was a large, ethnically diverse Christian community. Christian anchorites had settled in the desert; isolated Christians also lived in the few cities; and Christian traders and adherents of other religions certainly visited the annual market in Mecca. Legend has it that the apostle Bartholomew preached in Arabia, although organized missionary work had not yet begun there, outside the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Only in the north, in present-day Jordan and Syria, were there Christian Arab tribes with their own church hierarchy. Arab Christianity mirrored the different denominations of the Christian heartland, whereby the two main forms of Eastern Christianity, Monophysitism and Nestorianism, considered heretical by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Church, certainly had the upper hand.

Judaism had been more widespread than Christianity in Arabia for centuries. That was true for South Arabia, and also for the Hejaz (Hijaz). There were Jewish communities in the towns of Wadi al-Qura, stretching in a southeastern direction from Tabuk to Medina. Very little is known of these Jews, whether they were immigrants or Arabs who had adopted Judaism. They were, in any case, strongly Arabized, living in tribal organizations and engaged in agriculture and handicraft. Their role in the emergence of Islam can hardly be overestimated. The same is true of Christianity, with its different denominations. Muhammad drew from both sources, whereby he learned to see Judaism from a Christian perspective. Opinions differ with regard to the part that each of these faiths played in the formation of Islam, but one can say without qualification that Islam would have been inconceivable without the preliminary work of these two religions on the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad had definitely at least heard of Zoroastrianism, the state religion of Persia, but it hardly influenced emerging Islam. Manichaeism, by contrast, did leave its mark, as well as, perhaps, the flourishing Baptist sects in southern Mesopotamia. Finally it should not be overlooked that pagan traditions also live on in Islam, such as the hajj celebrated in Mecca, in which the ritual was retained in its original form and merely reinterpreted in a monotheistic sense.

The Arab world was in a period of religious upheaval when Muhammad began his work. He was born in 570 in Mecca into the Hashim family, an impoverished branch of the Quraysh. According to tradition it was the “year of the elephant,” named after Abraha, the Ethiopian governor of South Arabia, who in that year is said to have advanced toward Mecca with an army that included a war elephant. The undertaking, which from the later perspective of the Muslims was directed chiefly against the Kaʿba, failed. The episode has been eternalized in the Qurʾan, sura 105, “The Elephant.” God protected his shrine, although at that time it had not yet been purged of idolatry. The purification was to be reserved for Muhammad, not the Christian Abraha. It appears to be historically certain, however, that the Ethiopian advance actually took place about two decades earlier than assumed by Muslim tradition.

Muhammad’s father, according to tradition named ʿAbdallah, “servant of Allah” (it later became the preferred name of Muslim converts), died before the birth of the Prophet. The child was raised by his uncle Abu Talib. As a young man Muhammad worked in the service of the wealthy widow Khadija, owner of a commercial house that engaged in long-distance trade with Syria and Egypt. Khadija later became his first wife. From this marriage came Fatima, the only one of the Prophet’s children who survived him. Her marriage with ʿAli—Muhammad’s cousin and son of his foster father Abu Talib—produced two sons, Hasan and Husayn, progenitors of today’s numerous sayyids or sharifs (Arab. sing. sharif), whose genealogy traces back to the founder of Islam. After Khadija’s death in 619, Muhammad remarried several times, usually for political reasons. Khadija can lay claim to the honorary title of being the first Muslim woman. There are numerous traditional stories about how Muhammad first confided in Khadija and was encouraged by her in his conviction of having received revelations and was referred to her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who knew the scripture of the Christians and may even have been a Christian himself.

Muhammad was raised in a pagan environment. In the Qurʾan it says: “Did He [Allah] not find thee wandering and direct (thee)?” (sura 93:7, “The Morning”). From his early childhood on he was a God-seeker, open to all stimuli that rushed in on him from several directions. He is said to have traveled with a trading caravan to Egypt and Syria, but definitive information about that is lacking. In Bosra (near the southern border of present-day Syria) he allegedly met with the monk Bahira, who recognized in a vision that he would be the future prophet of the Arabs and taught him about faith in the one God. The call to prophethood is said to have come to him on Mount Hiraʾ, near Mecca, where he retreated each year to meditate and practice asceticism. As the “Prophet and Messenger of Allah,” as he later called himself, he saw himself in the succession of a long series of prophets, most of them also known in the Bible. His aim at first was less to found a new religion than to create a book that corresponded to the Scripture of the Jews and Christians and would bring the revelation to the Arabs “in plain Arabic speech” (sura 26:195), which had been withheld from them. In terms of content, the Qurʾan follows the Old Testament in many points with its untiring campaign against polytheism. Muhammad was beholden to the message of the New Testament and Christianity with his eschatological sermon on the Last Judgment, but he denied not only the doctrine of the divine nature of Jesus but also the fact that he died on the cross (see sura 4:157), which are central points of the Christian creed, as well as the dogma of original sin committed by our ancestors in paradise and inherited by humankind. This means that Islam rejects the Christian dogma of redemption: that God immolated his only son to remove the sins of the world. According to Islam, redemption occurred when God revealed himself to humankind, showing them the way to salvation. This is, by the way, much nearer to Judaism than to Christianity. The gulf between Islam and Christianity is irreconcilable. For Muhammad, Jesus was a human being, a servant and messenger of God like himself, and thus a Muslim in the strict sense of the word. Muslims believe that Christianity was distorted by the apostle Paul; some of them ascribe this distortion to Emperor Constantine I, who in truth did nothing more than issue the famous edict of toleration of Christianity in 313, and who did not receive baptism until he was on his deathbed. Similar charges of distorting Scripture were voiced against the Jews; as viewed by Muhammad, Abraham was in fact the first Muslim (sura 2:131). Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity the principles of social commitment, care for the needy, and the obligation to act ethically. The Qurʾan includes a list of commandments and prohibitions (sura17:22–39) that closely corresponds to the Ten Commandments promulgated in Exodus 20, which are holy to both Christians and Jews.

In response to his sermon and his call for moral renewal, Muhammad encountered fierce resistance in Mecca from the wealthy merchant class, who feared that Islam would bring the downfall of the shrine that guaranteed the prosperity of the city. The new doctrine also questioned the traditional social order, and the new form of the community of believers (Arab. umma) displaced the tribal order, ultimately making it obsolete. The adherents of the Prophet were at first limited to his family and closest acquaintances. After that it was predominantly the poor and desperate who joined him. In view of the constantly growing antagonism in Mecca, Muhammad soon felt forced to seek help from outside the city. He dispatched a group of followers to Abyssinia, and he himself initiated negotiations with the residents of Taif (al-Taʾif), near Mecca. In the end negotiations were successful with a group of pilgrims from Yathrib (Medina) who had adopted Islam and were seeking an arbitrator to settle disputes that had broken out in the city between the different tribes and groups. In summer 622 Muhammad left his native city in fear for his life and settled in Medina. This resettlement was referred to by Muslims from then on as the hijra, or emigration, and was later declared the beginning of a new calendar. It marked a new stage of development for the Islamic community. Muhammad had changed from being the leader of a persecuted minority into a politician and then a statesman. The so-called Charter of Medina, the details of which are still disputed among scholars, was an instrument with which Muhammad ended the internal chaos and at first integrated non-Muslims, including the large Jewish community that had been living in Medina since time immemorial. The Jews were organized into several tribes, of which three played an important role. Soon after Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, conflicts were sparked that ended with the expulsion of some of the Jews from the city, while others were killed in a massacre that the Prophet had not ordered but had in fact condoned.

With the elimination of the Jews, the political community had been transformed into a purely religious one based on Islam. It was made up of participants of the hijra, the muhajirun, who had either accompanied Muhammad from Mecca to Medina or had followed him there over the course of time, and native Medinans, the “helpers” (ansar), some of whom had joined Islam prior to Muhammad’s arrival in the city. In addition to securing the internal situation, Muhammad also strove to win over the Meccans to his cause. He may have been motivated by thoughts of returning to his home, from which he had been expelled along with the believers. This could also be explained from a religious perspective by his conviction that the Kaʿba was originally a monotheistic shrine, founded or rebuilt by Abraham (see sura 2:125–127) and desecrated through the idolatry of the Meccans, and that it needed to be returned to its original purpose (see sura 9:17–18). Focus on the Kaʿba found symbolic expression in the changing of the...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Part One: Historical Expansion, Political and Religious History
• Part Two: The Political Role of Islam in the Present
• Part Three: Present-Day Islamic Culture and Civilization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Authors