Islam

1
Islam
2
A First Note

• Everything in this religion is based on
  Muhammads life and teaching yet
• Muhammad is not worshiped.
• The religion is Islam meaning submission to
  God.
• Adherents of Islam are called Muslims.
• The term Muhammadan and its variants are
  offensive to Muslims.

Muhammads lifelong friend and follower Abu Bakr
said, "Whoever worshipped Muhammad, let him know
that Muhammad is dead, but whoever worshipped
God, let him know that God lives and dies not."
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Pre-Islamic Arabia

• Tribal Society
• Primal tribal religions
• Observable phenomena explained by tribal gods
• Rain, fertility, disease
• Worship and appeasement for practical ends
• Gods were respected while they were useful
• A famous story informs us that "in the days of
  paganism Banu Han-lfa had a deity made of dates
  mixed with clarified butter. They worshipped it
  for a long time. Then they were hit by a famine,
  so they ate it.''
• Little personal commitment
• Shamanistic
• Abstract truths regarding the nature and meaning
  of life of little significance.

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Pre-Islamic Arabia

• Tribal feuds
• Tribal states conquered to survive
• A pre-Islamic poet "We slew in requital for our
  slain an equal number of them, and carried away
  an uncountable number of fettered prisoners . . .
  the days have thus raised us to be foremost with
  our battles in warfare after warfare
• Militaristic
• Yet an ethnic and cultural unity

5
History

• Muhammad (570-632 AD) the founder of Islam
• Born to a family of the Quraysh clan, the ruling
  tribe of Mecca in the Hijaz region of
  northwestern Arabia.
• Orphaned by 6 and raised first by his grandfather
  and then by an uncle
• In his twenties, entered the service of a widow
  (Khadijah) as a merchant engaged with trading
  caravans to the north. He later married Khadijah,
  by whom he had two sons (who did not survive) and
  four daughters.

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Muhammad

• In his forties he became a religious seeker
• In 610 AD, while meditating in a caveon Mt
  Hira, outsideof Mecca he heardthe angel
  Gabrielsay to him,
• Recite In the name of thy Lord who created,
  created man from a clot of blood.

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Muhammad

• Early Teaching in Mecca
• After a decade, opposition to Muhammad increased
  and some of his followers were persecuted.
• Some followers were sent to Ethiopia and Medina.
• In the fall of 622, after learning of a plot to
  murder him, Muhammad received a divine revelation
  to leave Mecca for Medina.

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Muhammad

• Hijrah The flight
• Fled to the cave of Thawr on the outskirts of
  Mecca.
• After three days he rendezvoused with Ali, his
  cousin, and migrated to Yathrib or Medina.
• The beginning of the Muslim era and calendar.

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In Medina

• Muhammad laid the foundation for what is today
  the Prophet's Mosque, the second holiest site in
  Islam.

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The Holy Wars

• This First Holy War or Jihad
• The Quraish of Mecca imposed an economic embargo
  on Medina
• The Battle of Badr
• Though the Muslim force was 1/3 the size of the
  Meccan army, they were victorious.
• The Second Battle
• Meccans struck back at Uhud, a ridge outside
  Medina and the Muslims were not victorious.

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The Holy Wars

• The Battle of the Trench
• The Meccans abandon their attempt to defeat
  Medina.
• Medina was entirely in the hands of the Muslims.

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The Holy Wars

• After six years, Muhammad decided to go to Mecca
  to perform the pilgrimage to Ka'ba.
• The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah allowing Muslims to
  perform the pilgrimage
• The Quraish of Mecca broke the terms of the
  treaty
• Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630 AD (8 AH)

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Ka'bah

• The first house of worship built for mankind.
• Originally built by Adam
• Reconstructed by Abraham and Isma'il
• It is a cubed shaped structure in the city of
  Mecca to which all Muslims turn in their five
  daily prayers.
• In 629 Muhammad cleansed the Ka'bah destroying
  idols and putting an end to pagan practices.
• Located in the Great Mosque in Mecca
• Considered by Muslims to be the most sacred place
  on Earth

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The Confederation

• The Constitution of Medina
• Clans accepting Muhammad as the Prophet of God
  formed an alliance, confederation
• The place of non-Muslims defined
• Christians and Jews (people of the book) were
  dhimmis (protected people)
• Obeyed the laws, oppressive tax, could not own
  land, have arms, discrimination
• Polytheists, were not tolerated
• Islam defined itself as a people and politically

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Spread of Islam

• The Muslims believed (and still believe) that
  Islam is destined to control all the earth.
• Therefore no permanent peace could be made with
  infidels.
• Areas controlled by Islam known as the dar
  al-Islam or the territory of Islam
• Areas controlled by infidels known as the dar
  al-harb, or the abode of war
• The whole Arabian peninsula, either voluntarily
  or conquered, becomes Muslim.

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The Final Days of Mohammad

• Farwell Pilgrimage
• In year 10 AH Mohammad and 90,000 set out for
  Mecca for the pilgrimage.
• After leaving the city he received a revelation
  and some claim he also established Ali, his
  son-in-law, as his successor.
• Ali not respected by the majority.
• Less than a year later, Mohammad died in Medina
  after 3 days of illness.

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Succession

• Some claim that the Prophet appointed Ali as the
  one to follow him.
• No mention in the Koran
• The majority followed Abu Bakr, Mohammads father
  in law, as Caliph.
• Shia The minority group that followed Ali
• Sunna The majority that followed Abu Bakr

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Succession

• Abu Bakr
• Umar (634 AD)
• Uthman (644 AD)
• Ali (656 AD)
• Sunnis led by Umayyad tribe for 100 years

The period after Mohammads death marked by
internal tension.

• With the death of Ali the split between the Shia
  and Sunna becomes permanent.
• War between the two groups in 680 with Alis son,
  Husayan as their leader.
• The Shia were defeated and Husayan killed at the
  battle of Karabala.
• Succession for Shiites continues through Husayan.

Uthman collected material purported to be from
the Prophet, determined authenticity, and
compiled it in what is known as the Koran.
It is under the Umayyad dynasty that Islam saw
its greatest and most rapid expansion.
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Spread of Islam

• The military expansion of the Islamic faith is
  one of the remarkable stories of the medieval
  era. Within a century of its beginning in 622 it
  had spread to the Indus Valley in the east to
  Spain and across the Pyrenees in the west.
• 732 The Battle of Tours in France.

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Spread of Islam
21
Spread of Islam
22
Spread of Islam
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The Rise of Islam

• The Arabs converted to Islam because Allah was a
  greater power than any other spirit endowed with
  a name and a cult so far known in Arabia, and the
  problem is not the ease with which they could
  convert, but the inducement.

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The Rise of Islam

• Arabian settlements were usually plagued by
  feuds.The feuds to which Muhammad offered a
  solution were a constant of Arabian history, not
  a result of change. It was only the solution that
  was new. The novelty of the solution lay in the
  idea of divinely validated state structures and
  it was Muhammad's state, not his supposed
  blueprint for social reform, which had such
  powerful effect on the rest of Arabia Muhammad
  was neither a social reformer nor a resolver of
  spiritual doubts he was the creator of a
  people. (Crone )

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The Rise of Islam

• It is felt that religious and material interests
  must have been two quite different things. But
  holy war was not a cover for material interests
  on the contrary, it was an open proclamation of
  them. "God says . . . 'my righteous servants
  shall inherit the earth' now this is your
  inheritance and what your Lord has promised
  you...," Arab soldiers were told on the eve of
  the battle of Qadisiyya, with reference to Iraq
  If you hold out . . . then their property, their
  women, their children, and their country will be
  yours." God could scarcely have been more
  explicit. He told the Arabs that they had a right
  to despoil others of their women, children, and
  land, or indeed that they had a duty to do so
  holy war consisted in obeying. Muhammad's God
  thus elevated tribal militance and rapaciousness
  into supreme religious virtues the material
  interests were those inherent in tribal society,
  and we need not compound the problem by
  conjecturing that others were at work. It is
  precisely because the material interests of Allah
  and the tribesmen coincided that the latter
  obeyed him with such enthusiasm.
• (Patricia Crone. Meccan Trade and the Rise of
  Islam. Princeton University Press. 1987. 231ff.)

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Population

• The fastest growing religion in the world.
• Worldwide
• Second largest after Christianity
• 1/5 of the worlds population
• 1.1 billion today
• 1.6 by 2006
• Largest population in one nation Indonesia
• 300,000 Muslims are born every ten days.
• Palestinians are the fastest growing group.
• Arafat said "The Palestinian woman is the
  biological weapon by which we will blow up the
  state of Israel."