A New Introduction to Islam E-Book

Daniel W. Brown

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 818

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Covering the origins, key features, and legacy of the Islamic tradition, the third edition of A New Introduction to Islam includes new material on Islam in the 21st century and discussions of the impact of historical ideas, literature, and movements on contemporary trends.

• Includes updated and rewritten chapters on the Qur’an and hadith literature that covers important new academic research
• Compares the practice of Islam in different Islamic countries, as well as acknowledging the differences within Islam as practiced in Europe
• Features study questions for each chapter and more illustrative material, charts, and excerpts from primary sources

Leseprobe

A NEWINTRODUCTION TOISLAM

Third Edition

Daniel W. Brown

This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permision to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Daniel W. Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for.

ISBN 9781118953464 (Paperback)

Cover Image: Charles O. Cecil/Alamy Stock Photo

CONTENTS

Preface to the Third Edition

Source Acknowledgments

Part One The Formation of the Islamic Tradition

1 Islam in Global Perspective

The Problem of Defining Islam

Mapping the Islamic World

Arabs and Non-Arabs

Sunnis and Shiʿites

Islamic Ritual

What to Expect from This Book

Essential Resources for the Study of Islam

Questions for Study and Discussion

2 Arabia

Geography

Pre-Islamic Poetry

Arab Religion

Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia

Mecca and the Quraysh

The Gifts of the Arabs

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

3 The Pre-Islamic Near East

Christianity in the Near East

Saints and Relics

Zoroastrianism

Judaism

Manichaeism

Mazdak

The Place of the Arabs in the Near East

Chronology of the Near East of Late Antiquity

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

4 The Life of Muhammad

Prologue and Setting

Birth and Childhood

Early Adulthood

The Beginning of Revelation

Opposition

The Night Journey and Ascent to Heaven

The Hijra

The Battle of Badr

Confrontation with the Jews of Medina

The Battle of Uḥud

The Peace of al-Ḥudaybiya and the Farewell Pilgrimage

Evaluation

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

5 The Qur ʾan

The Qurʾan in Modern Imagination

The History of the Text

The Language of the Qurʾan

The Context of the Qurʾan

Jesus in the Qurʾan

The Qurʾan in Muslim Piety

The Eternity of the Qurʾan

The Inimitability of the Qurʾan

Interpreting the Qurʾan

Central Themes

Qurʾanic Narratives

Qurʾanic Law and the Problem of Abrogation

Women and Gender in the Qurʾan

Qurʾan, Sīra, and Hadith

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

6 The Tradition Literature

The Science of Hadith

The Origins of the Hadith

In Quest of the Historical Muhammad

The Sīra and the Shaping of an Islamic Worldview

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

Part Two The Expansion of Islam

7 The Conquests

Psychological Impact

Archeological Data: The “Invisible” Conquests

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

8 Religion of Empire

Early Arab Administration

Conversion to Islam

Leadership

The First Civil War

The Martyrdom of Ḥusayn

The Deputy of God

Personal Piety

The Dome of the Rock

The Constitution of Medina

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

9 The Caliphate

Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ

The Shiʿite Vision

The ʿAbbasids

Twelvers

Ismāʿīlīs

Nizārī “Assassins”

Kharijites

The Sasanian Revival

Al-Māwardī and the Sunni Compromise

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

Part Three Islamic Institutions

10 Islamic Law

The Coffee Debate

Revelation and Reason

Qiyās

The Schools of Law

Islamic Law and the State

Ijmāʿ

The Uṣūl al-Fiqh

The Substance of the Law

Ritual Purity

Acts of Worship

Marriage and Divorce

The Origins of Islamic Law

Al-Shāfiʿī and Islamic Legal Theory

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

11 Islamic Theology and Philosophy

Freedom and Determinism

God's Attributes

Anthropomorphism

Faith and Works

Leadership

The Sunni Consensus

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal

Al-Ashʿarī

Kalām

Al-Māturīdī and other Alternatives to Ashʿarite Kalām

Jewish and Christian Influences

The Challenge of Philosophy

Prophecy and Revelation in Islamic Philosophy

Philosophy and Mysticism

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

12 Sufism

The Parliament of Birds

Stages on the Path

The Spiritual Master

Sufi Brotherhoods

Sufi Ritual

The Destination

Sufi Cosmology

Sufism in History: The Case of al-Ḥallāj

Beginnings to the Tenth Century

Classical Manuals and the Growth of Ṭarīqas

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

Part Four Crisis and Renewal in Islamic History

13 Turks, Crusaders, and Mongols

The Saljūqs

Al-Ghazālī and the Sunni Revival

Slave Soldiers

The Crusades

The Mongols

The Impact of the Mongol Invasions

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

14 Revival and Reform

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires

The Rise of European Power

The Religious Environment

The ʿUlamāʾ

Sufi Reformers

The Wahhabi Movement

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

15 Islam and The West

Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt

The Birth of Orientalism

Jihad Movements

Al-Afghānī

Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Aligarh

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

16 The Turbulent Twentieth Century

The Abolition of the Caliphate

Nationalism

Secularism

Rashīd Riḍā and

al-Manār

The Muslim Brotherhood

Jihad and Martyrdom

From Shariʿa to Secular Law and Back

Modern Qurʾan Interpretation

The Problem of Sunna

Ijtihād and Ijmāʿ

A New Kalām?

Muhammad ʿAbdūh

Muhammad Iqbal

Sufism and Modernity

The Modernist Moment

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

17 Salafism

Café Salafis

Salafi Doctrine

The Ibn Taymiyya Connection

The Albanian Watchmaker's Son

Salafi Apocalypse

Salafi Spring?

The Appeal of Salafism

Salafis and Sufis

Resources for Further Study

Questions for Study and Discussion

18 Islam in the Twenty-First Century

The Challenge of Pluralism

Islamic Liberalism

Islam in the West

Islamic Feminism

The Challenge of Islam

Questions for Study and Discussion

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1

Linxia, Gansu province, China, Da Gongbei Mosque, mausoleum of Qi Jingyi and a center of the Qādiriyya Sufi order. The Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada, is rendered in calligraphy above the arch. Source: Roland and Sabrina Michaud / akg-images.

Figure 1.2

Indian Shiʿite Muslim devotees sit on a decorated float during a religious procession marking ʿĀshūrāʾ in Allahabad November 15, 2013. ʿĀshūrāʾ is observed on the tenth day of the month of Muḥarram and commemorates the death of Imam Ḥusayn, a son of ʿAli and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was killed by armies of the Yazīd near Karbala in 680 CE. Source: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images.

Figure 1.3

A Muslim father whispers the call to prayer to his newborn child. Ideally, the words of the adhān are the first words heard by a Muslim infant, and will be heard at the start of every act of worship throughout his life. Photo: World Religions Photo Library/Alamy

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1

Bedouin children in northern Arabia. The Bedouin are pastoral nomads and their patterns of life have shaped images of the Arab culture since before the rise of Islam. Photo: Dorothy Miller/Saudi Aramco World/PADIA

Figure 2.2

Allāt, ancient Syrian mother and fertility goddess, with lion, relief, from altar, marble, 2nd century, Temple of Baal-Shamine, Palmyra, Syria. Source: The Art Archive / Palmyra Museum Syria / Gianni Dagli Orti

Figure 2.3

Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son Ismāʿīl in Mecca; Jibrīl (Gabriel) exchanges a sheep for Abraham's son. Turkish miniature, late sixteenth / early seventeenth century. Source: akg-images / British Library

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1

The newly-elected Catholicos-patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Gewargis III (formerly known as Mar Gewargis Sliwa), looks on during his inauguration ceremony, Saint Youhanna Church, Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, September 27, 2015. Mar Gewargis Sliwa was elected by a council of Prelates and will succeed to the late Mar Dinkha IV under the ecclesiastical name Mar Gewargis III. Source: Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images.

Figure 3.2

Council of Nicaea. Sistine Chapel fresco. Source: Niday Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 3.3

Coptic-orthodox priest Boulos Shehata celebrates a mass at the St. Marien church in Düsseldorf, western Germany, January 6, 2011. The Coptic-orthodox Church arose from fifth century disputes over whether Jesus had one nature, or two distinct natures, one divine and one human. The Coptic Church took the one nature, or Monophysite, position. Source: Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1

Angels attending the birth of Muhammad (detail from a fourteenth-century illustrated life of the Prophet). Artistic depictions of Muhammad are anathema to modern Muslims, but this was not always the case. The image of Muhammad as an infant, while not shown here, appeared in the original painting. MS H1223, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, Turkey. Source: Sonia Halliday Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 4.2

Pilgrims at the Kaʿba in the early twentieth century and today. The cube-shaped building was a center of pilgrimage before the rise of Islam. It has been rebuilt numerous times since the time of Muhammad. The most distinctive feature of the site is a black stone built into the foundation of the building. Source: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo: Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library

Figure 4.3

Burāq, the winged steed that carried Muhammad on his night journey, painted on the side of a truck in Pakistan. Source: Roland and Sabrina Michaud / akg-images.

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1

Birmingham Qurʾan Manuscript, Arabic, written between c.?568 and 645, thought, at the time of writing, to be the oldest known manuscript of the Qurʾan. Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library. Source: akg-images / Pictures From History

Figure 5.2

Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), the German historian whose study of the Qurʾan remains seminal in the field of Qurʾanic studies. Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1

The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius depicted on a seventh century coin. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Source: The Art Archive / DeA Picture Library / L. Romano

Figure 7.2

Saddam's battle of Qādisiyya depicted on Iraqi postage stamp. Source: Fotolia / konstantant

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1

Dome of the Rock, Temple Mount, Jerusalem. Source: Fotolia/demerzel21

Figure 8.2

Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, who commissioned the Dome of the Rock, depicted on a gold dinar of 696 CE. Source: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1

Fayrūz, a crafty hare, tricks the king of the elephants, from 1354 manuscript Kalila wa Dimna, Mamluk, possibly Syrian. Source: The Art Archive/Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

Figure 9.2

Pakistani Shiʿite Muslim devotees parade a white horse, symbolizing the one used by Ḥusayn, during a religious procession on the ninth day of the holy Islamic month of Muḥarram in Lahore on January 7, 2009. Annual Muḥarram rituals commemorate Ḥusayn's martyrdom at Karbalāʾ in 680. Source: Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images.

Figure 9.3

The Agha Khan IV, imam of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community since 1957, at the ‘Prix de Diane-Hermes’ horse race on June 12, 2005 in Chantilly, France. Source: Michel Dufour/WireImage/Getty Images.

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1

Fishawi's famous coffee house in Cairo has been open 24 hours a day for over 200 years. Source: Chris McLennan / Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 10.2

New Delhi, Muslim Women performing ablutions before prayers, Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). Source: Charles O. Cecil / Alamy Stock Photo

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1

Medical information about the skull, lungs, stomach, and heart, from Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sīnā, 990–1037, fourteenth-century Arabic manuscript, Damascus, Syria.National Museum Damascus. Source: The Art Archive / National Museum Damascus Syria / Gianni Dagli Orti

Figure 11.2

Al-Fārābī (870–950) on a Kazakhstan 1 teng banknote. Source: DeAgostini/Getty Images.

Figure 11.3

Portrait of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) by D. Cunego, after Raphael's “School of Athens” fresco, engraving, 1785. Source: Wellcome Library, London.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1

Hoopoe bird. The Hoopoe makes an enigmatic appearance in the Qur'an as a source knowledge for Solomon and became an important symbol for Sufis and lead character in ʿAṭṭār's

Parliament of Birds

. Source: Fotolia/Erica Guilane-Nachez

Figure 12.2

Dancing dervishes, painting from poetic anthology by Hafiz, 1320–1389, Iranian Sufi poet, sixteenth-century manuscript. Source: The Art Archive/National Museum Damascus Syria/Gianni Dagli Orti

Figure 12.3

The Friday dhikr of the Sammāniyya Sufi Ṭarīqa in Omdurman, Sudan. Forms of dhikr (literally ‘remembrance’) differ widely among Sufi ṭarīqas. In this case devotees jump in unison, and the uniform of the ṭarīqa includes Sam Browne belts which were formerly used in the British Army. Source: Michael Freeman/Corbis via Getty Images

Figure 12.4

Illustration from

The Hanging of Mansur al-Hallaj

, by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi (d.

ca.

729 AH/CE 1328). Source: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Chapter 13

Figure 13.1

Ibn Ṭūlūn mosque, 879, Cairo. Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn founded one of the first slave dynasties in 868 when he established his own rule in Egypt. Source: Ivan Vdovin/Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 13.2

Pope Urban II preaching the Crusade at Clermont in the presence of King Philippe I of France in 1095; from

Les Grandes Chroniques de France

(

ca.

1640). Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/The Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 13.3

Chingiz Khān. Photo: National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan/The Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 13.4

Diagram of a typical qanat. Profile, cross sections, and aerial view illustrating the varying dimensions of a tunnel-well. Source: English, Paul Ward: “The Origin and Spread of Qanats in the Old World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 112 (3): (Jun. 21, 1968), pp. 170–181, fig 1. http://www.jstor .org/stable/986162

Chapter 14

Figure 14.1

Fetih 1453 movie poster depicting the conquest of Istanbul by Mehmet the Conqueror. In twenty-first century Turkey increasingly lavish and elaborate commemorations of the conquest have been part of a revival of Ottoman symbols in Turkish political discourse. Source: Photos 12/Alamy Stock Photo/Aksoy Film Production

Figure 14.2

Sufi Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani talks with Pope Benedict at the UN-controlled buffer zone of the divided island of Cyprus, on June 5, 2010. Until his death in 2104 Shaykh Nazim was the spiritual leader of the Naqshbandī-Haqqani ṭarīqa, tracing his spiritual lineage back through Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī. Source: REUTERS/Osservatore Romano

Figure 14.3

Abd al-Azīz ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Āl Saʿūd founder of the modern state of Saudi Arabia, with Franklin Roosevelt on the deck of the US Navy Warship, anchored at Cairo, March 12th 1945. Source: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Chapter 15

Figure 15.1

Detail from the Battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798; oil on canvas by Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835). Photo: The London Art Archive/Alamy

Figure 15.2

Edward Said, author of

Orientalism

, in his office at Columbia University in New York City, February 8, 2003. He died on September 25, 2003. Source: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images

Figure 15.3

Muhammad Ali, Pasha of Egypt, oil on canvas, 1841, by Louis-Charles-Auguste Couder (1790–1873). Source: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 15.4

Jamāl al-dīn Al-Afghānī. Source: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Chapter 16

Figure 16.1

Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) and his wife, Latifeh Hanoum near Ankara, February 1923. Source: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 16.2

Gamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir, portrait 1955. Source: Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Figure 16.3

Members of Islamist group “al-Gama'a al Islamiya,” carry their party's flags and a picture of Ḥasan al-Bannāʾ, the Muslim Brotherhood founder, during a demonstration against Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Beirut, February 4, 2011. Source: REUTERS/ Sharif Karim

Figure 16.4

Pakistani President Ayyub Khan accompanying Jackie Kennedy during her tour of Pakistan, 1962. Source: Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Figure 16.5

Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbdūh, English Photographer, nineteenth century. Source: Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

Figure 16.6

Fethullah Gülen at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Gülen is the spiritual leader of the Hizmet movement and is charged in Turkey with plotting to overthrow the Turkish government. Source: Selahattin Sevi / AP / Press Association Images

Chapter 17

Figure 17.1

Salafyo Costa members take part in a march in front of state television building in Cairo in Cairo on October 9, 2012 to mark one year since nearly 30 demonstrators were killed in a Coptic Christian demonstration that was violently crushed by security forces. Source: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images.

Figure 17.2

Juhaymān al-ʿUtaybī who led the attack on 20 November 1979 against Mecca's Great Mosque in expectation of the Mahdī’s advent. The building was stormed with the help of French and Pakistani commandos sent at Riyadh's request. An official toll put the dead at 153 and 560 wounded. Source: AFP/Getty Images.

Figure 17.3

A Palestinian militant of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) stands next to a poster picturing recently-killed al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqāwī, June 11, 2006. Source: Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images

Chapter 18

Figure 18.1

Swiss Muslim intellectual, Oxford University professor and grandson of Ḥasan al-Bannāʾ Tariq Ramadan, speaks in France on March 4, 2012 Source: Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images

Figure 18.2

Moroccan Muslim sociologist and feminist, Fatima Mernissi. Source: Giovanni Giovannetti/effigie

List of Maps

Chapter 1

Map 1

Distribution of Muslim population by country

Map 2

Major languages spoken by Muslims

Chapter 2

Map 3

Major regions and settlements of the Arabian Peninsula, ca. 600 CE

Chapter 3

Map 4

The Near East in the early seventh century

Chapter 7

Map 5

The expansion of Islamic rule, seventh and early eighth centuries

Chapter 9

Map 6

Shiʿite bids for political ascendancy, tenth and eleventh centuries

Chapter 14

Map 7

The “Gunpowder Empires”

ca.

1700 CE

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Preface to the Third Edition

This book straddles two traditions. The first, the Islamic tradition, is its obvious subject. Like any great human venture, the movement of ideas and people through history that we call Islam deserves serious attention from anyone who wants to understand the world in which we live. But there is also another tradition at play here, that is the tradition of scholarship about Islam that we call Islamic Studies. Islam is not just a great religion that gave rise to a great civilization; it is also the subject of a body of scholarship that has its own history, debates, heroes, and villains. This book aims to introduce Islam not just as a system of beliefs, but also as a field of study. Any serious introduction to a field of study should take into account the most significant ideas being debated in that field. This has not been the norm in the field of Islamic studies. Many of the most interesting debates in the field over the last thirty or so years have been slow to find their way into introductory texts. It is rare, for example, to find John Wansbrough's work on the Qurʾan mentioned in a college textbook, even though his studies continue to exert enormous influence twenty-five years after their publication. Wansbrough's work is so technical that perhaps the omission can be excused, but what of Joseph Schacht or Ignaz Goldziher? Some of the questions these and other scholars raised are deeply controversial, calling into question the traditional story of Muhammad's life, how the Qurʾan came into being, and the nature of early Islam. Yet no student, Muslim or not, should come away from an introductory course in Islam without knowing these names and understanding something of the challenges they have posed to traditional understandings of Islamic origins. To ignore them is like teaching a college-level New Testament course without mentioning Rudolph Bultmann or discussing form criticism. Consequently, my aim here is to introduce students to critical questions in the field in an original and lively way.

In the third edition two areas, one at each end of the historical timeline of the book, required significant revision. First, scholarship on Islamic origins – the life of Muhammad, the Qurʾan, and the hadith literature – has proliferated rapidly since the book was first written. Consequently chapters on the Qurʾan and the hadith literature needed to be thoroughly rewritten. Some speculative questions posed by revisionist scholars that still seemed open at the time I first wrote have been put to rest, while new questions have arisen. In the case of the Qurʾan renewed and fruitful attention is being paid to the importance of the Syriac context. New manuscript evidence has also come into play, and this in turn has fed into scholarship on textual variants and the early history of the text. In the field of hadith studies, scholars who build on the pioneering work of Juynboll and Motzki have been slowly and painstakingly increasing our confidence that at least some hadith reports can be traced to the first generations of Muslims. At the other end of the timeline, contemporary events continue to challenge our judgment about what ideas and movements should be judged historically significant. Apocalypticism, for example, has turned out to more important than we knew in shaping contemporary trends. Moreover, the emergence of Salafism in a variety of places and forms seemed to call for contextualization, and I have therefore devoted an entirely new chapter to the history of global Salafism.

In addition to these revisions, the third edition aims to make the book more accessible to students in a number of ways. To make the text more readable I have adopted a simplified system of transliteration. Arabic words that have come into common English usage – Qurʾan, hadith, jihad, or imam, for example – are given in conventional English forms. The new edition also includes study questions for each chapter, and I have updated the “resources for further study” section at the end of each chapter. To supplement the main text this edition also includes more illustrative material, charts, and excerpts from primary sources.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the hundreds of scholars, most unknown to me, from whose painstaking scholarship I have learned. Thank you to the many readers who have taken the trouble to comment on earlier editions or on the present manuscript. I appreciate your many suggestions, and especially your correction of errors, and I regret that I have been unable to incorporate all of your valuable suggestions. The errors that remain are my own.

Since long before I began this book, Carol has been my constant companion and support – “more-warm-than-soul, more-deep-than-flesh are one” – and I am profoundly grateful.

Source Acknowledgments

The editor and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material.

A. J. Arberry, 1955.

The Koran Interpreted

. New York: Macmillan and London: Allen and Unwin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1955 Arthur J. Arberry

P. Crone, 1987.

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam

. Copyright © Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press

O. Grabar, 1996.

The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem

, p. 55. © Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press

O. Grabar, 1996.

The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem

. p. 58. © Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press

R. Hattox, 1988.

Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East

. © University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. Reprinted by permission of The University of Washington Press

A. H. Johns, 1987. Tarique. In

Encyclopaedia of Religion

, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 14, p. 346

R. Nicholson, 1959.

The Kashf al-Mahjub of al-Hujwīrī

, p. 195. London: Luzac

Qushayrī, 1990.

Principles of Sufism

, trans. B. R. von Schlegell. pp. 14, 49, 116, 170, 177, 207, 274, 316–317, 327–328, 343. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press

M. Sells, 1989.

Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes

, pp. 48–56. © Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT. Reprinted by permission of the Wesleyan University Press

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The editor and publisher will gladly receive any information enabling them rectify any error or omission in subsequent editions.

Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the Qurʾan are from Yūsuf ʿAlī, The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾān, 6th edn., revd. Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1989.

Part OneThe Formation of the Islamic Tradition

1Islam in Global Perspective

The Problem of Defining Islam

If we were to draw a circle and designate the contents of that circle as the complete set of phenomena that fall under the rubric of Islam, how would we decide what would be included within the circle and what must be excluded? Provocative examples are easy to find. Do the actions and motivations of those who fight for the self-designated Islamic State in Syria and northern Iraq or those who destroyed New York's World Trade Center or the London Underground bombers fall within the circle of Islam? Or should “true” Muslims abhor and repudiate such actions? The problem is not limited to the question of violence, of course. Does the rigorous constraint of women's rights by IS, the Taliban of Afghanistan, or the present regime of Saudi Arabia belong in the circle? If so, how can the ideas of Muslim feminists like Amina Wadud or Fatima Mernissi also fit alongside them? When Elijah Muhammad, twentieth-century Prophet of the Nation of Islam asserted that the white man is the devil and the black man God, was he representing Islam? Reaching back into Islamic history we can multiply the examples. Do the doctrines of Shiʿite Muslims who taught that ʿAli was an incarnation of God fall within the circle of Islam? What of the speculations of the Islamic philosophers who held that the universe is eternal and treated revelation as little more than philosophy for the masses? Were the targeted assassinations of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs “Islamic”? What of the modern Aḥmadiyya movement, rejected as heretical by many Muslims, but whose members insist they represent the true expression of Islam?

This exercise quickly exposes a common confusion. For the believing Muslim the question is meaningful. It is essential for the believer to determine where the boundaries of his faith community lie and to decide what represents Islam and what does not. But for those, whether believers or not, who seek to understand Islam as a movement of people and ideas in history, this way of thinking will not do. Whether we take an anthropological, historical, or religious studies perspective, all of the phenomena I have listed belong within the realm of the study of Islam.

And this raises a further problem that is central to any attempt to offer an overview of a major religious tradition. If such conflicting movements of people and ideas all belong in the circle of Islam, how is one to go about introducing the whole lot of them? How is it possible to “introduce” such a diverse, indeed contradictory, set of phenomena? One common answer is that the attempt is in itself misleading and fruitless; the idea of “Islam” with an upper-case “I” is a false construct; we should rather speak of many different lower-case “islams” which must be examined as separate phenomena. To paraphrase a political maxim, all religion is local, and to imagine that all these different “islams” have something in common which can be labeled “Islam” is to imagine something that has no reality. Since I have already written several hundreds of pages in which I have tried to introduce Islam with an upper-case “I,” it is too late for me to take this perspective. Nor am I inclined to do so.

My own perspective is best introduced by analogy. When a student sets out to study a language, Arabic for instance, she will soon learn that there are many quite different varieties of Arabic. Yet she will not normally trouble herself with the question of whether such different linguistic phenomena deserve to be called “Arabic.” And she is quite right not to be troubled. Arab grammatical police might worry about demarcating the precise boundaries of true “Arabic,” but from a common-sense perspective it is clear that all of the different dialects and varieties of the Arabic language rightly share the family name. Even if speakers of Moroccan and Palestinian Arabic may sometimes have some difficulty communicating, they all belong within the circle of Arabic speakers. In particular, the dialects they speak share sufficient common roots, sufficient common vocabulary, or a close enough grammatical structure to make it clear that they belong to the same family. It would be perfectly reasonable for a linguist to set out to survey the common structures, lexicon, and heritage of the whole family of dialects that are called Arabic, and so to introduce Arabic.

This analogy may help in another way. A linguist who sets out to write a descriptive survey of a family of dialects is doing something quite different from the language instructor whose job it is to teach a “standard” form of the language. While the goal of the language instructor is to help the student to become immersed in and to actually use the language, the academic linguist has no such ambition or expectation. In a similar way, I have little expectation that a book like this will be much help to anyone who comes to it hoping to find help in becoming a practicing Muslim.

It is in that spirit that I have set out to introduce Islam here, and this book might be seen as an attempt to explain the evolution of the common grammar and vocabulary of Islam. Thus the Islamic feminist and the Taliban both belong here, for although they are diametrically opposed in their conclusions, they make use of a common vocabulary and reference a common heritage. Similarly the Muslim pacifist and the suicide bomber, the Nizārī “assassin” and the Sunni religious scholar who condemns him, are responding, albeit in very different ways, to a shared tradition. Indeed, they are contending for control of that tradition.

Mapping the Islamic World

Clearly the set of phenomena to which we apply the label “Islam” is exceedingly varied, and there is enough complexity in the literatures, histories, philosophies, theologies, rituals, and politics of Islamic civilization to engage many lifetimes of study. Oversimplifying will not do. But keeping that danger in mind, we can still attempt to gain some sense of the big picture before our attention is consumed by details. There is a place for the global view that excludes most detail just as there is for the street-level view that includes it all.

A map turns out to be a useful starting point. If we peruse a map of the contemporary Islamic world, what will we notice? We can begin with a simple demographic survey. Map 1 is a graphic depiction of the world's Muslim population by country. The first thing to notice about this map is that it includes the entire world. The time when we could depict the Muslim world on a single hemisphere is long past, although many cartographers have yet to catch on. The contemporary Muslim community, the umma, is worldwide. Muslims live, work, raise families, and pray everywhere, from China to California, from Chile to Canada; there is almost no place on earth where Muslims have not settled. This simple fact turns out to be both easily forgotten and immensely important to understanding contemporary Islam. The modern Muslim diaspora is shaping the course of Islam, and of the world. Many critical issues facing contemporary Muslims arise precisely because so many influential Muslims are German, French, British, Canadian, Dutch, or Australian. Muslims work throughout the world as scientists and scholars, teachers and doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs, farmers and factory workers. Their responses to this geographical mobility and the pluralism of the varied societies in which they live fuel rapid change in Muslim communities, and significant conflict among Muslims as well as between some Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors. The experience of Muslims as a truly worldwide community has stimulated new and pressing discussions of the relation of Islam to women's rights, human rights, bioethics, religious diversity, tolerance, and freedom of expression.

Controversies over cartoon depictions of Muhammad are a case in point. In 2006 the Danish newspaper al-Jostens published cartoon images of Muhammad. Muslim reaction, sometimes violent, led to wide scale republication of the images in the name of freedom of expression. In the following decade similar controversies followed a similar pattern, culminating most recently in 2015 with the deadly attacks on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. The publication of the al-Jostens and Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and the varied Muslim responses, were a product of a Muslim community that spans the globe. The cartoons were published in the first place because the Muslim community in Europe is sizeable enough to motivate fierce debate about the compatibility of Islam with European cultural and political tradition. Authors like the pseudonymous Ba't Yeor raise the specter of “Eurabia,” a Europe held hostage to Islamic radicalism because Europeans have failed to recognize the threat to freedom and to European tradition posed by Islam. The Muslim response to the cartoons was worldwide, however, and often the fiercest reactions come from outside of Europe.

Map 1 Distribution of Muslim population by country

Muslims are concentrated in Asia, but significant numbers of Muslims now live on every continent. This map should be read with caution, however. Russia, for example, has a population of more than 14 million Muslims, but this population is not evenly distributed throughout its vast territory as the map seems to suggest, nor does Alaska have significant numbers of Muslims. China has a large Muslim population, but there is a great deal of uncertainty about its actual size. Population figures used for this map were drawn from the database at adherents.com.

Map 2 Major languages spoken by Muslims

The map shows something of the linguistic diversity of the Muslim world. For a catalogue of all of the hundreds of languages spoken by Muslims, see the source from which the data for this map was drawn, Raymond G. Gordon, Jr., ed., 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.

But while Islam is worldwide, our map also gives rise to a second, paradoxical observation: Muslims are heavily concentrated in Asia and Africa. More than 50 percent of the world's Muslims live in just eight countries: Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. This list is surprising for two reasons. First, the majority population of only one of these, Egypt, is Arabic speaking. The range of cultures and languages for which the most populous Muslim countries are home is staggering. More than twice as many Muslims speak Indonesian, Bengali, or Urdu as speak Arabic. Map 2, portraying the major languages spoken by Muslims, hints at this cultural and linguistic diversity but also grossly understates it by leaving out hundreds of smaller languages.

The second surprise is that a great many contemporary Muslims live in religiously plural societies. In India, Muslims are, despite their numbers, dwarfed by the size of the majority population. China, with 40 million or more Muslims, presents a similar case. In both countries the Muslim minority faces real or perceived threats from the majority. Nigeria, too, is religiously divided. About 50 percent of its population is Muslim, 40 percent Christian, and 10 percent animist. Communal tensions there are high. Many other nations with significant Muslim populations – Sudan, Lebanon, the Balkan nations, Malaysia – are also multi-ethnic and religiously plural. Consequently a large number of contemporary Muslims do not live in Muslim-majority societies. Rather, they live in societies in which they must live, work, and worship amongst non-Muslim neighbors.

Figure 1.1 Linxia, Gansu province, China, Da Gongbei Mosque, mausoleum of Qi Jingyi and a center of the Qādiriyya Sufi order. The Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada, is rendered in calligraphy above the arch. Source: Roland and Sabrina Michaud / akg-images.

We can add a final observation: among these most populous Muslim countries, most are former European colonies, and all faced significant economic and social upheavals in the twentieth century. During the last fifty years all have contended with high rates of poverty, uneven distribution of wealth, and accompanying political turmoil. In other words, the vast majority of Muslims in the contemporary world live in societies which bore the brunt of colonialism, and which have experienced rapid and disorienting social and economic change in the course of decolonization.

To summarize: the Muslim community – the umma – truly spans the globe, and thus faces all of the challenges of globalization and pluralism; in a great many countries Muslims are a minority community; and, finally, Muslims are demographically concentrated in politically and economically tumultuous regions of the world. Gathered together, these varied facts make for a turbulent picture. We should hardly be surprised if many contemporary Muslims view their community as embattled and besieged. Large numbers of Muslims have suffered a great deal at the hands of European colonizers, Chinese communists, Hindu zealots, and homegrown tyrants. Many are not free to order their lives as conscience or community norms might dictate, either because they live as minorities in societies dominated by non-Muslims or because, even in Muslim-majority societies, they suffer under repressive regimes.

Arabs and Non-Arabs

But dwelling, as we have, on the diversity of the Islamic world, raises an important question. If the majority of Muslims are Indonesian, Indian, Bengali, Pakistani, Nigerian, or Chinese, then why do we tend to think first of Arabs and Arab culture when we think about Islam? And why do books like this one spend so much space making the obvious point that non-Arab Muslims vastly outnumber Arabs, when we know quite well that much of the book will focus on the Arabic-speaking Middle East? Stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason, and in this case the reasons are fairly simple. Islam originated in Arabia. The Qurʾan is in Arabic. The classical intellectual tradition of Islamic civilization was recorded in Arabic. Islamic religious ideas and cultural norms were rooted first of all in Arab culture. For all of these reasons Arabs exert and will continue to exert an influence on Islam disproportionate to their demographic strength. Important as it is, and although nearly 200 million Muslims speak it, Indonesian will never be the classical language of Islam or the lingua franca of Islamic scholarship. Jakarta will never be the worldwide center of pilgrimage. It is too late for that. So long as Muslims continue to read the Qurʾan, study Islamic law, and value their heritage, Arabic and the Arabic-speaking world will remain of critical importance. This should be no more surprising than the observation that the Vatican, a tiny city-state in Italy that still publishes documents in Latin, has an outsize influence on the worldwide community of Christians.

The reality, then, is that a relatively small population of Arabs exerts an outsize influence on the religious and intellectual culture of a far larger population of non-Arab Muslims. The result is a dynamic interaction between a centripetal pull toward uniformity and the centrifugal forces of cultural and linguistic diversity. We see this tension in medieval Muslim travel writers like Ibn Battuta. There was no end to the strangeness that Ibn Battuta encountered as he traveled through India, China, and Indonesia. Yet wherever he went he also found himself on familiar ground. Throughout Islamic history, and continuing into the contemporary period, Muslim practice has been constantly shaped by local environments, while local variations of Islam are constantly under pressure to conform to a uniform standard. We will see this pattern especially in the growth of Sufism, which is often adaptive to local practice, in contrast with the spread of various forms of fundamentalism, which favor uniform adherence to an ideal norm.

Sunnis and Shiʿites

There is more to the diversity of Islam than language, culture, and geography. In fact, a major sectarian fault line splits the Muslim world. Roughly 80 percent of Muslims identify themselves as Sunnis. About 18 percent call themselves Shiʿites. Shiʿites are themselves divided into several communities, and small sects make up the remaining 2 percent. Such a major schism seems to demand explanation, and the short explanation is that Shiʿites and Sunnis are divided over the questions of leadership and authority within the umma. The division is rooted in the early years of Islamic history when Muslims faced the urgent question of who should succeed Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community. Shiʿites supported the leadership of Muhammad's cousin, ʿAli, and his descendants. They came to see authority, both religious and political, as vested in divinely appointed leaders, beginning with ʿAlī. By contrast, Sunnis adopted a pragmatic political stance. The Sunni theory of the caliphate required that the leader of the Muslims be male, a member of the Prophet's tribe of the Quraysh, and meet certain basic qualifications for fitness. Beyond these broad expectations, it was up to the community to decide. Moreover, although the Sunni caliphs had religious obligations and were expected to guard and defend Islamic values, they did not come to be viewed as sources of religious authority in their own right. Authority, for Sunnis, came to be vested in texts – the Qurʾan and the Sunna – and in the scholars who were the guardians and interpreters of those texts. For Shiʿites, by contrast, religious authority was focused on the family of the Prophet and its descendants, humans especially chosen by God to represent him on earth. Many other differences – in law, ritual, attitudes toward suffering, and eschatology – grew out of this basic difference over leadership and authority. In particular Shiʿites make martyrdom and redemptive suffering central values, and these values are given dramatic shape in annual celebrations during the month of Muḥarram.

Figure 1.2 Indian Shiʿite Muslim devotees sit on a decorated float during a religious procession marking ʿĀshūrāʾ in Allahabad November 15, 2013. ʿĀshūrāʾ is observed on the tenth day of the month of Muḥarram and commemorates the death of Imam Ḥusayn, a son of ʿAli and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was killed by armies of the Yazīd near Karbala in 680 CE. Source: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images.

These differences between Sunnis and Shiʿites are significant, but they would be easy to overplay. The two groups share more than divides them, and throughout most of Islamic history Shiʿite communities were demographically dispersed amongst the majority Sunni population. It was only after the emergence of the Safavid empire in the sixteenth century that Iran and southern Iraq came to be almost exclusively Shiʿite. Even in the contemporary Islamic world, where conflicts between resurgent Shiʿites and Sunnis are once again becoming important, it is striking how much the two communities have in common, and this raises a broader question: in the face of the stunning diversity among Muslims, what holds Islam together? Is there anything that all Muslims agree on, whether Sunnis or Shiʿites, Arabs or Indonesians, twelfth-century theologians or twentieth-century scientists? A simple reversal of our map exercise will focus the question. When we survey a map, we place ourselves at some imaginary point in space from which we pretend we can see all. And from that vantage point, we cannot help but be struck by the scope and variety of the world of Islam. But suppose we descend from our imaginary lookout and zoom in on one particular place at one particular time – a local mosque at the time of Friday prayers. This is a field trip that most readers will have little difficulty arranging. On such a visit, what will we notice? And in particular, what will we notice that will be more or less the same regardless of geography, ethnicity, or historical era?

Islamic Ritual

The first thing we are likely to notice, often before even arriving at the mosque, will be heard not seen. The voicing of the call to prayer, the adhān, whether by the unaided human voice or broadcast over loudspeakers, is part of the universal experience of Muslims. These are the first words whispered into the ears of most infants born to Muslim families. The words of the call (although not its intonation) are always the same, and always in Arabic. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, tried to change this, imposing a call to prayer in Turkish in the early part of the twentieth century. The innovation was deeply unpopular, however, and only an iron hand could successfully enforce it. After 1950 democracy undid the change. Now, five times each day, should they choose to listen, Turks, along with Bengalis, Malays, and Canadians, are summoned to worship with the same Arabic words that Muslims throughout history have heard:

Allāhu akbar

God is great (repeated four times)

ashhadu anna lā ilāhā illa Allāh

I testify that there is no god but God (repeated twice)

ashhadu anna Muḥammadan rasūl Allāh

I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God

ḥayya ʿala al-ṣalāt

Hasten to prayer (repeated twice)

ḥayya ʿala al-falāḥ

Hasten to success (repeated twice)

[aṣ-ṣalāt khayrun min an-nawm]

[Prayer is better than sleep] (Sunnis; morning only)

[ḥayya ʿala khayr al-ʿamal]

[Hasten to the best of works] (Shiʿites only)

Allāhu akbar

God is great (repeated twice)

lā ilāhā illa Allāh

There is no God but God (Sunnis once, Shiʿites twice)

It is worth noting the subtle differences between Sunni and Shiʿite practice. These differences are sufficient to mark out a separate communal identity without, however, negating the essential unity of Muslim experience. It is also worth noting that the call to prayer incorporates the most elemental of Muslim credal statements, the Shahāda, or confession of faith. With the call to prayer we would seem to encounter the Islamic belief system at its most basic, stripped of commentary or controversy: God is One and without rival, the messenger of the One God is Muhammad, and worship is God's most basic requirement of his creatures. We will have plenty of opportunity to complicate this picture as we proceed, but at this point it may be worth pausing to admire the simplicity and directness of this message. A person who takes this message to heart is bound to live with a certain seriousness and focus.

If the visitor heeds the summons of the adhān to come to prayer, he will arrive at the mosque to be greeted at the entrance by a collection of shoes. Here is an image with universality that extends well beyond even the Muslim community. The removal of shoes marks the borderline between sacred and profane space. As we enter the mosque the shoes remind us that we are leaving the marketplace and the mundane world behind, entering what Mircea Eliade calls sacred space and sacred time.

The mosque itself has few universal features. It may or may not have a dome, minarets, a pulpit, a source of flowing water for ritual ablutions, or a niche, the miḥrāb, indicating the direction of prayer. The mosque, at its most basic, is simply a place of worship as its Arabic designation, masjid, communicates. Any space can be transformed into a masjid, whether a rectangle marked out in the sand, an empty office, or a rented church basement. Mosque architecture has been remarkably varied through Islamic history, although modern times and Saudi Arabian money have brought increasing pressure toward uniformity.

Figure 1.3 A Muslim father whispers the call to prayer to his newborn child. Ideally, the words of the adhān are the first words heard by a Muslim infant, and will be heard at the start of every act of worship throughout his life. Photo: World Religions Photo Library/Alamy

What goes on once the worshiper enters the sacred space and joins other worshipers for prayer is also remarkably uniform, and like the call to prayer, is part of the universal experience of Muslims. We will have occasion to describe the detailed requirements of Muslim prayer in chapter 10. For now it is sufficient to note that believers face the same direction, toward Mecca, they recite the same passages of the Qurʾan that generations of Muslims have recited, and they follow a prescribed pattern of movements and prostrations that has remained uniform for centuries. The ritual prayer, in other words, is a universal aspect of Muslim experience, even for those Muslims who may have abandoned it. It is a ritual that any Muslim, whether Sunni or Shiʿite, whether from the tenth century or the twenty-first, will immediately find familiar not just in broad outlines, but in specific detail.

The uniformity of practice demonstrated in the ritual prayer is mirrored in other aspects of Muslim religious practice. The rites followed by pilgrims to Mecca when they perform the Hajj and the rules followed by Muslims when they fast during the month of Ramadan, are all remarkably uniform. So too is the value placed on charitable giving, zakat. Indeed, it is with good reason that every introduction to Islam begins by outlining these so-called pillars of Islam. Like pillars in a mosque, the words of the Shahāda, the practice of ṣalāt, the rules for fasting, the rites of pilgrimage, and the value of generosity enshrined in the notion of zakat seem to remain fixed, solid, and unchanging. In contrast with many other aspects of Muslim experience, essential Muslim religious duties have remained remarkably stable over time and across cultures.

How can we account for this picture, at once so diverse and so valuing of uniformity? On the one hand, the Islamic world is dizzyingly varied, and one cannot presume to know what any given Muslim values or believes without first asking. Indeed, the most practical nugget of advice I usually offer newcomers to the study of Islam is not to assume that one's textbook will be reflected in reality. A new Muslim acquaintance may, in the modern world, be influenced quite as much by Marx as by Muhammad. Yet in the face of all of the diversity of the Muslim community Islam still offers Muslims a remarkably stable set of core practices – what I called earlier in this chapter a common vocabulary and grammar of Islam – that would be recognizable as in some sense “Islamic” by any Muslim of any cultural origin or any historical period.

What to Expect from This Book

How this came about – how Islam came to be what it is today in all of its variety and its paradoxical unity – is the story I have set out to tell in this book. It is a story that is first of all rooted in history, and to begin to explore that history we begin well before the rise of Islam. Part I explores the historical and religious context of the rise of Islam, and surveys the central elements of the Islamic tradition. We begin with pre-Islamic Arabia, and are immediately faced with a critical question: how significant is the Arab background for understanding the rise of Islam? Is sixth-century Arabia a credible context for the rise of a new, vigorous monotheistic faith and a vibrant civilization? And, if not, where should we look for the “cradle” of Islam? These questions will lead us, in chapter 3, on an exploration of the civilizations and religions of the Near East before the rise of Islam.

With chapter 4 we begin to examine the sacred history of Islam, beginning with the key narrative in that history, the life of Muhammad. The story of Muhammad, we will find, is far more colorful and fantastic than many modern treatments of his life allow and it is rooted squarely in the religious context of the Near East. Chapters 5 and 6 take on the two thorniest questions in the field of Islamic Studies – how the Qurʾan came into its present form, and the authenticity of the hadith literature on which the traditional story of Islamic origins, including the life of Muhammad, is based. It is in these chapters that we will have to contend with two centuries of critical scholarship that has increasingly brought into question the traditional account of how Islam came into being.

In part II we turn from sacred history and the formative elements of Islam to the complex historical context in which Islamic civilization grew to maturity. We begin with the Arab conquests. These conquests stand as one of the great turning points of world history, but how much really changed in the Near East? Less, it turns out, than we sometimes imagine. Chapter 8 examines the worldview of the early Arab rulers. In this formative phase in the shaping of Islamic identity, what did these new rulers of the world believe, what motivated them, and how do we know? Finally, in chapter 9, we follow the story forward to the rise of the ʿAbbasid caliphate, the maturing of Islamic political thought, and the emergence of the major schisms in Islam.