Islam. A Study Guide

1. Islam in History

The Age of the Prophet

570 (?) Birth of the prophet Muhammad

610 Beginning of the revelation of the Quran

622 Hijra (emigration or flight from Mecca to Medinah)

630 Surrender of Mecca

632 Death of Muhammad

The Period of the Caliphate (Arab dominance)

632 - 661 Period of the "Rightly Guided Caliphs" (Medinah)

661 - 750 The Umayyad Empire (Damascus). Continued in Spain (Western Caliphate).

750 - 1258 The Abbasid Empire (Eastern Caliphate: Bagdhad).

The Period of the Sultanate (Turkic and Mongolian dominance)

1258-1517 Mamluks (Turkic, Cairo. Religious: Sunni)

16th - 20th century:

Ottoman Empire (until 1923, Turkish, Istanbul)

Safavid Empire ( until 1736. Political: Il Khanid. Cultural: Persian, Isfahan; Religious: Shi'ite)

Mughal Empire (until 1857. Political: Il Khanid. Cultural: Indian, Delhi; Religious: Shi'ite)

 

Revival Movements in the 18th and early 19th century (internally motivated)

Arabia: Wahhabi Movement

(revival of equation of Arab and Muslim; return to original 7th-century Islam)

Africa: Jihad Movements in Nigeria, Morocco, Libya, Sudan

(Sufi leadership; fight against Afro-Islamic syncretisms)

India: Social and moral reform of Mughal empire on Islamic basis

 

Modern Movements (Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, motivated by confrontation with Western colonialism and industrialization)

- Westernization: founding of secular (Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), Muslim (most Arabic states), and Islamic (Saudi Arabia; post-revolutionary Iran) states

- Reaction to Westernization: establishment of Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that lead the struggle for re-Islamization and Islamic revival

 

2. Major Aspects of the Muslim Faith

Islam means "submission." Muslim is someone who submits to Allah, God, the one, unique, and omnipotent creator and judge who is merciful and just. For Islam, God has revealed his will to human beings since Adam through a series of prophets and messengers. The ultimate messenger (rasul) and seal of the prophets is Muhammad. God's law (sharia, literally "the path to the watering hole") was revealed to Muhammad in a series of speeches that he was to recite and which are collected in the Qur'an (the recitation). For Muslims, the Qur'an is the flawless representation of the uncreated eternal word of God. Its language is regarded as the pivot of linguistic perfection and can therefore not be appreciated in translation.

The cardinal sin of human beings is unmindfulness or forgetfulness and hence arrogance and an attitude of self-sufficience. The perfect antidote is the remembrance (dhikr) of the words and deeds of the prophet, the Quran and the hadith. The message of the prophet concerns the establishment of a perfectly just and God-pleasing society on earth, the constitution of the religious community-state (the umma). But the submission of the individual in this life will also be rewarded with eternal happiness in paradise; the refusal of submitting to God's will, and the sins of associating God with another being (idolatry) and of apostasy will be punished in hell.

Popular Islam cherishes the belief in djinn and angels. Shii Islam also knows the worship of saints and martyrs, especially of members of the holy family (Ali, Fatima, Hysayn), as intercessors between humans and God. This belief and its practices are rejected by Sunnis.

As a revealed legislation, Islam emphasizes conduct. Religious and moral obligations are determined by the Islamic legal tradition according to certain principals or sources of the law (see above).

The five pillars of Muslim faith are

1. Confession of the monotheistic faith (shahada): "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger (rasul)." The oneness and uniqueness (tawhid) of God is the basic creed of Islam.

2. Ritual prayer (salat); kneeling and bowing five times a day at precisely the same moment symbolizes the ritual unity of the Muslim community (umma) all over the globe.

3. Fasting during the month of Ramadan (saum); due to the lunar calendar the fast during Ramadan occurs at all seasons over time and is thus completely dissociated from the natural cycle of the solar year. In comparison, Jewish and Christian festivals retain a certain association with much older animistic and fertility-religious cults due to their seasonal occurance.

4. Almsgiving (zakat); Muhammad's revelation concerned the establishment of a social system of trans-tribal solidarity

5. The obligation to make pilgrimage (hajj) to the Ka'ba in Mecca. By choosing Mecca as the direction (qibla)of Muslim prayer, Muhammad founded both a new religion and a pan-Arabic (and pan-Muslim) focal point, uniting ancient Arabian piety with the message of ethical monotheism. Pilgrimage to Mecca is to be made at least once in one's lifetime and constitutes a pivotal religious experience for the Muslim.

Quranic law also concerns diet (no pork, nor alcohol), finance (no lending on interest), criminal law, civil law, laws of inheritance, and, most prominently, family law. The status of women was greatly improved compared to their situation in pre-Islamic patriarchal society.

While the Muslim society and Islamic law regard non-Muslims as second class or "protected" citizens (dhimmi), Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others within the Muslim sphere of influence have generally been treated tolerantly. The Islamic conquest "by the sword" brought Muslim rulers but not forced conversions nor even an immediate Arabization of the recognized minorities.

3. Major Islamic Groups: Sunna and Shia

Sunna means custom, tradition. A Sunni Muslim is someone who seeks to live according to the custom of the prophet Muhammad that is documented in the hadith, a collection of words and deeds of the prophet. Every Muslim is in this sense a Sunni. Historically speaking, however, the Sunni Muslim must be distinguished from the Shii.

The difference between these groups concerns fundamental questions such as the constitution and character of the umma (the religious community-state), leadership (caliph vs. imam), the authority to determine Islamic law (consensus of the ulama vs. infallible interpretation by means of divinely inspired reasoning, ijtihad), and worldview (optimism vs. pessimism; Shii emphasis of martyrdom, suffering, apocalyptic return of the Mahdi, the hidden Imam).

From the outset, i.e., from the Suras of the Quran and Muhammad’s life in Mecca and Medina, Islam addressed religious and political themes: the relation between God and the human being, and interhuman relations. Sunna and Shia emphasize different aspects of Islam without, of course, disregarding the complementary element. While 7th-century Sunni Islam solved the problem of leadership through the establishment of electing a successor to the prophet (khalifa, caliph; constitutionalism), Shii Islam recognizes only descendents of the prophet as divinely invested leaders (imami theocracy). While 9-th century-Sunni Islam developed Islamic law based on four sources of the law (Quran, Sunna of the prophet, analogical reasoning, consensus of the religious layers, the ulama), Shia Islam invests the Imam and, in his absence, his representatives with the authority of the divinely guided ultimate and infallible source of legal decisions.

Shii Islam resembles some branches of Christianity with its focus on the martyrdom of the first Imams, Ali and his son Husayn. Shii piety is expressed in public display of mourning over the death of the righteous Imams. Shii Muslims consider themselves a sacred remnant fighting the good fight against Satan and the powers of evil until the day when the Mahdi (the expected one) will return and set things right.

Offshoots of Shii Islam are the Zayidis (Yemen), the Ismailis (Aga Khan in Bombay as head of an international community), the Ithna Asharis ("Twelvers"; mainly in the contemporary Iran, but also in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere) and the semi-Islamic religions of the Druze (Israel, Lebanon, Syria) and the Bahai (international; center historically in Persia, now in Haifa, Israel).

Sunni Islam is internally differentiated according to the four major schools of Islamic law: the Hanafi in the Arab Middle East and South Asia; the Maliki in North, central, and West Africa; the Shafii in East Africa, Southern Arabia, and Southeast Asia; and the Hanbali in Saudi Arabia.

 

4. Islamic Culture

With the establishment and stabilization of the Muslim empires, especially during the Abbaside caliphate and within the later non-Arab sultanates, many aspects of culture florished. The Abbasid Empire saw the emergence not only of a variety of Islamic sects but the development of two major Islamic movements: Islamic law and Sufi mysticism. The sharia was developed by an emerging class of religious lawyers (the ulama) whose consensus rather than imperial decree decided the scope and principles of Islamic law until today. Sufism arose from the ranks of popular Islam but soon augmented the rational and intellectual pursuit of jurisprudence by emphasizing the "duties of the heart," the communication of the individual with God, etc.

Aside from these inner-Islamic movements, the Abbasids (a dynasty deriving from Abbas, an uncle of the prophet), supported as they were by an elitist Persian administration, were patrons of the arts and sciences, philosophy and medicine. Under their rule, ancient Greek and far Eastern texts were translated into Arabic and philosophy, astronomy, mathematicsm and other disciplines were studied for their own sake. (Islamic renaissance) The Arabic commentaries and expositions of Aristotelian philosophy by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and others laid the groundwork for medieval Jewish philosophy and Christian European scholasticism alike. The European languages are a repository of memories testifying to the fact of European indebtedness to the Arabs for such elements of culture, now considered basic, as Al-gebra, Al-cohol, Al-chemy, Sugar, al-cove, the Arabic numbers, the cipher zero and many more.

Architecture and poetry florished not only under the Arabs but under the Turkish and Persian sultans as well. Arabic story-telling and the phantastic world of popular Islamic imagination can be encountered in the Arabian Nights, detailing exploits at the court of the paradigmatic Abbasid caliph Harun Al-Rashid (786-809).