generalspeaking

A Brief History of Islam

In the early seventh century a religious movement appeared on the margins of the great empires, those of the Byzantines and Sasanians, which dominated the western half of the world. In Mecca, a town in western Arabia, Muhammad began to call men and women to moral reform and submission to the will of God as expressed in what he and his adherents accepted as divine messages revealed to him and later embodied in a book, the Qur'an. In the name of the new religion, Islam, armies drawn from inhabitants of Arabia conquered the surrounding countries and founded a new empire, the caliphate, which included much of the territory of the Byzantine Empire and all that of the Sasanian, and extended from central Asia to Spain. The centre of power moved from Arabia to Damascus in Syria under the Umayyad caliphs, and then to Baghdad in Iraq under the 'Abbasids.
By the tenth century the caliphate was breaking up, and rival caliphates appeared in Egypt and Spain, but the social and cultural unity which had developed within it continued. A large part of the population had become Muslim (that is to say, adherents of the religion of Islam), although Jewish, Christian and other communities remained; the Arabic language had spread and became the medium of a culture which incorporated elements from the traditions of peoples absorbed into the Muslim world, and expressed itself in literature and in systems of law, theology and spirituality. Within different physical environments, Muslim societies developed distinctive institutions and forms; the links established between countries in the Mediterranean basin and in that of the Indian Ocean created a single trading system and brought about changes in agriculture and crafts, providing the basis for the growth of great cities with an urban civilization expressed in buildings of a distinctive Islamic style.

This, then, was the description of the initiation to the world of Islam, as described by Albert Hourani, in his precise and occasionally delicately explicated A History of the Arab Peoples.

What followed, after the triumph of the Prophet Muhammad in convincing tribal Bedouin that surrender to and acceptance of his heralding of a new religion, which took many of its precepts from the far older religions of Judaism and Christianity - with the result of unifying Arabs and bringing a common vision of a monotheistic religion - was a prolonged period of combat, conquest, uncertainty and assassinations leading to quarrels and violent disagreements that outlasted the following centuries into the present.

The centuries-later collapse of the caliphate and the greatly mourned passage of the glory of Islamic flowering in the sciences, philosophy, medicine, arts and culture, brought an agony of anger and shame and belligerence to blanket the ummah, resentful of their loss of face and of territory, of privilege and of honour; above all of universal power. For this, the world of the West which had struggled against the juggernaut of Islamic spread and influence, would never be forgiven.

The world of Islam that had bloomed so greatly in the days of its entry into Europe and the spread of its influence which led to a renaissance of knowledge, entrepreneurship, trading and manufacturing, slowly ebbed and fell away. What was left was an over-arching religion that was all things ritual and of sacred necessity to its followers; constraining, constricting, imposing and indomitable, controlling every facet of social, political and daily life.

The religion looked inward, and closed in upon itself, content with its parochialism, spurning what had once made it great. The urge for knowledge fell from its purpose, though it continued to pride itself on its poetry, literature, architecture, mathematics, astronomy. Its ambition to collect itself into the future, to structure itself in such a way as to become more socially and politically enlightened was utterly absent in its indomitable intent to stagnate, to continue to live within the Koran without recognition of modernity.

But the fiery indignation of having been supplanted in geographies once sanctified to Islam burned a slow underground ash of anger and anguished claims to victimhood. The scourge of Islam that had presented to Africa and India with its deadly clashes among the prevailing religions surrendering millions to jihad have never been forgotten; by the victims as unforgettable atrocities; by the conquerors as days of glory long faded and yearned after.

The world has now witnessed decades of Islamist renaissance, where fanatical religious clerics and mujahadeen keenly dedicated to the cause of restoring Islam to its former glory has brought terror once again into the global realization of a festering and frightful danger. These are pathological marauders of religions and societies not their own, and targetting fulsomely their own as well.

These fundamentalists who profess their love for Allah to be so great they are prepared to surrender their very lives to His profit. Who seem to believe that their mass murder of other, innocent Muslims, their destruction of Mosques, of crowded marketplaces, of children's schools, all in the interests of furthering their vision of Islam renascent is pleasant to God's eye.

While, in the same token, ordinary Muslims who have no such vision of conquest refuse to realize that yes, most certainly, it is Muslims who are responsible for murdering their own, for desecrating their houses of worship. Muslims whose great hatred for the world as it is compels them to righteously engage in such atrocities; yet they will not believe that those whose faith is in Islam could commit such hideous blood-letting.

Islam must heal itself. It cannot and will not succeed if the great general body of Muslims, its scholars, clerics, academics, politicians, rulers, aristocracy, poets, writers, philosophers and spokespeople do not feel themselves needfully involved to proceed with casting out the evil within itself. The simple fact is too many 'moderate', ordinary Muslims refuse to believe ill of the radicals among them. Reality eludes them.

They prefer to believe that malevolent forces outside Islam are responsible for the atrocities which Islamists visit upon the world. They prefer also to believe that it is the great animosity of the West and the non-Muslim world at large that is responsible for this great divide between cultures, societies and religions. That the fanatics who wage violent jihad are therefore justified, for their mission is to protect and further the interests of Islam.

That would be true if Islam were indeed an ideology of war and destruction, of hegemonic necessity and devout totalitarianism. Is it, then?

Labels: Human Fallibility, Human Relations, Religion, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, December 24, 2009