Islam

Islam began in Mecca, a trading town in western Arabia and a place of pilgrimage. Muslims believe that in 610 the angel Gabriel brought the first words of the Qur’an to Muhammad, a merchant of the Quraysh tribe, as he prayed in a cave on Mount Hira. Over the following twenty-two years, the revelations continued.

Muhammad preached that there is only one God and that people will answer for their deeds on the Day of Judgement. Facing hostility in Mecca, he and his followers moved in 622 to the town of Yathrib, later called Medina, “the city of the Prophet”. This migration, the hijra, marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. By his death in 632, most of Arabia had accepted Islam.

Within a century, armies led by the caliphs, his successors, had built an empire from Spain to the Indus. Conversion was gradual: in many lands Muslims remained a minority for generations. Merchants and Sufi teachers then carried Islam along trade routes to West and East Africa, Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia, where it became the faith of most people in Indonesia and Malaysia.

After the Prophet’s death in 632 the community was led by four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, whom Sunnis call the “rightly guided”. Under Umar, Arab armies took Byzantine Syria and Egypt and overran the Sasanian empire of Persia, and under Uthman a standard text of the Qur’an was issued. The murder of Uthman in 656 began a civil war, the first fitna. After Ali was killed in 661, Mu‘awiya founded the Umayyad dynasty, ruling from Damascus. The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691–692, and made Arabic the language of government, while conquests reached Spain and Sindh by 711–712.

In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and in 762 founded Baghdad, which became one of the great cities of the world. In the following two centuries the classical shape of Sunni Islam emerged. Scholars founded the schools of law (madhhab) named after Abu Hanifa, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi‘i and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and the great hadith collections were compiled. Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic, and thinkers such as al-Kindi and Ibn Sina built on them. How quickly the peoples of the empire converted is debated, but Muslims had probably become a majority in Iran, Iraq and Egypt by around the 10th or 11th century. Political unity did not last: an Umayyad prince ruled al-Andalus from Córdoba, and in 969 the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shia dynasty, founded Cairo and soon the mosque of al-Azhar.

From the 11th century Turkish dynasties held power. The Seljuks entered Baghdad in 1055 as sultans ruling in the caliph’s name and founded colleges (madrasas), where the scholar al-Ghazali (d. 1111) helped reconcile Sufi mysticism with law and theology. Sufi orders took shape over the next two centuries, among them the Mevlevi, inspired by the poet Rumi. Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, but Saladin recaptured it in 1187. In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid caliphate there, yet within decades the Mongol rulers of Iran had themselves become Muslim. Islam spread further with the Delhi Sultanate in India, with traders and teachers in West Africa, where Mansa Musa of Mali made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, and across the Indian Ocean. In Iberia, the Christian reconquest ended with the fall of Granada in 1492.

Three great empires dominated the early modern Muslim world. The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and, after conquering Egypt in 1517, became guardians of Mecca and Medina. In Iran, Shah Ismail I made Twelver Shia Islam the religion of the Safavid state from 1501, setting Iran apart from its Sunni neighbours to this day. In India, the Mughal dynasty ruled from 1526, its emperors presiding over a largely non-Muslim population.

The 18th and 19th centuries brought movements of renewal and the shock of European power. In Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) preached a strict return to the Qur’an and Sunna and in 1744 allied with the ruler Muhammad ibn Saud. In West Africa, Usman dan Fodio founded the Sokoto Caliphate. By the early 20th century most Muslims lived under European rule: British in India and Egypt, French in North Africa, Dutch in Indonesia, Russian in Central Asia. Responses ranged from modernist reformers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh to traditional seminaries such as Deoband in India, founded in 1866.

After the First World War the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and in 1924 the parliament of the new Turkish Republic abolished the caliphate. Nation states took its place: Saudi Arabia was proclaimed in 1932 and Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of British India. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, inspired movements seeking a larger public role for Islam, which varied widely in aims and methods. In 1979 a revolution in Iran established an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Migration in the later 20th century created large Muslim communities in Europe and North America.

The heart of Islam is tawhidtawhid The oneness of God, the central teaching of Islam. Glossary, the oneness of God: God has no partner, no son and no equal. The declaration of faith, the shahadashahada The declaration of faith: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. Glossary, says: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

Muslims believe in angels, in the books God revealed (the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospel and the Qur’an), in the prophets from Adam to Muhammad, in the Day of Judgement, and in God’s decree. Life is lived in submission to God, which is what the word islam means.

Practice rests on the Five Pillars: the declaration of faith, prayer five times a day, almsgiving, fasting in the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca for those who are able. Islamic law, the shariasharia The path or law of Islam, as worked out by scholars from the Qur’an and the sunna. Glossary, guides worship, family life and ethics, as interpreted by scholars in several schools of law.

Five times a day the call to prayer sounds from the minaret, and Muslims pray facing the Kaaba in Mecca, wherever they are. Prayer follows set movements of standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting, after washing. On Friday at noon, the community gathers in the mosque for prayer and a sermon.

During Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, taking no food or drink, and break the fast together in the evening. The month ends with Eid al-Fitr. Each year nearly two million pilgrims perform the Hajj in Mecca; its climax coincides with Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice, kept by Muslims everywhere.

Many Muslims also follow Sufism, the mystical path of Islam, with its masters, orders and remembrance of God through chant and poetry.

The Qur’an, “the recitation”, is for Muslims the word of God itself, revealed in Arabic. It has 114 chapters, called suras, arranged roughly from the longest to the shortest. Muslims recite it in Arabic in prayer, and translations are regarded as interpretations rather than the Qur’an itself.

Alongside the Qur’an stands the Hadithhadith A report of what the Prophet Muhammad said or did; collections of hadith guide Muslim life. Glossary, reports of what the Prophet said and did. Scholars sifted them for reliability, and the collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, from the 9th century, are the most respected among Sunnis. Together with the Qur’an, they form the basis of Islamic law.