Islam summary

Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, was born in Mecca, Arabia in 570 CE. He received his first revelation in 610 during his annual retreat to the mountains outside the city to pray and fast in the holy month of Ramadan. There, he was woken up by a powerful presence and heard the first words of a new Arabic scripture pouring from his mouth. It was an answer to the profound spiritual crisis of Arab society.

Muhammad belonged to the Quraysh, a powerful tribe whose control over trade in the Arabian Peninsula had made them fantastically wealthy. But the new mercantile spirit embraced by this Meccan elite had displaced older values, such as social justice, troubling those who thought of care for the poor and weak as a sacred duty.

Muhammad built up a following of around 70 families. Mecca’s elite initially paid Islam little attention. They regarded it as an unimportant sect and its “so-called prophet” as a fraud. That changed around 616, as relations between the city’s ruling class and Muslims broke down. Two issues stood out: Islam’s opposition to Mecca’s cutthroat capitalism and the growing sense among its elite that Muhammad sought a political position.

Both points had theological and political dimensions. Muslims had more in common with monotheistic Christians and Jews than Mecca’s largely pagan rulers. When they prayed, they faced Jerusalem. And, like Jews and Christians, they believed in the Last Judgment – God’s final judgment of humankind after the end of the world. So why did that trouble the Meccan elite? Well, the idea that everyone would face judgment implied that they’d be condemned for their greed and failure to look after the poor!

Yathrib, a settlement 250 miles north of Mecca, faced disaster after centuries of feuding between its inhabitants. Its leaders needed a neutral adjudicator to settle their conflicts and reached out to Muhammad.

Muhammad’s acceptance of the offer marks the beginning of the Islamic era. Mecca’s Muslims made the move north – known as the hijrah or “migration” – in 622. It was a radical decision. Leaving one’s tribe behind was unheard of in Arabia. The Islamic community – ummah – established in Yathrib was the first based on ideology rather than kinship.

Muhammad died in 632, his work of unifying Arabia complete. But Muslims faced a thorny issue. Islam’s prophet had been divinely inspired. His successors, in contrast, were regular humans whose authority was questionable. It was a puzzle that the rashidun caliphs – “rightly guided rulers” – who succeeded Muhammad grappled with from the start.

The first major test of Islam’s unity came during the reign of the first caliph, Abu Bakr (632-634). Bakr faced a rebellion led by tribes who believed their agreement not to attack each other no longer applied, now that Muhammad was dead. Bakr defeated them in the wars of riddah or “apostasy,” cementing Arabia’s unity but leaving the cause of the uprising unaddressed.

The “rightly guided” caliphs were succeeded by two dynasties – the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) and the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258). They consolidated the empire built after Muhammad’s death, but struggled to reconcile the practical business of ruling and early Islamic values.

This was because consolidating and running a vast empire required a centralized and absolute monarchy. That offended Arabs’ longstanding distrust of kingship, as well as the Quran’s egalitarianism. Even worse, as far as many Muslims were concerned, absolute monarchy created a ruling class around the king’s court, a culture and lifestyle that lacked any distinctively Islamic qualities.

By the tenth century, it was clear that Islamdom couldn’t function effectively as a single political unit. The position of supreme leader – caliph – remained, but it was largely symbolic. As the old empire broke apart into separate regions, many Muslims worried that Islam itself was in decline. They were wrong – it was beginning of a golden age.

At the heart of this renaissance were the breakaway regions. Real power was now in the hands of local rulers who established their own courts and dynasties, like the Samanids who ruled Iran between 874 and 999. The Spanish kingdom of al-Andalus was established in 912 before falling in 1085. Meanwhile, the Fatimids founded a Middle Eastern and North African Empire based in Cairo in 909, and were only displaced in 1171.

Islamic countries were among the most advanced in the medieval period. Art and science flourished and Arabic became a globe-spanning language of learning. Europe, by contrast, stagnated. It was only in the thirteenth century that it began to catch up with the Islamic world. By the sixteenth century, it had pulled ahead. By the eighteenth century, it dominated.

So what was behind this turnaround? Well, Europe experienced revolutionary social transformation that allowed it to surpass all other societies. The key was technological development and capital investment. By leveraging new technologies and reinvesting profits, Europeans were able to overcome natural limits to growth and reproduce their resources indefinitely. That fuelled an extraordinary age of innovation.  

The colonization of the Islamic world was a traumatic experience. European authorities disrupted established customs and hierarchies. What troubled many Muslims most was what this meant for Islam itself. The Quran claims that a society that submits to God’s will can’t fail, so what had gone wrong in Muslim countries?

One answer was that they’d simply failed to keep up. All they had to do, many claimed, was to imitate the West and its societies. Rulers of states that hadn’t been colonized tried to modernize their countries at breakneck speed. Take Muhammad Ali (1769-1848), the ruler of Ottoman Egypt. He reformed the army, adopted Western technology, confiscated all religious property and marginalized religious authorities. To be modern, he believed, was to be secular.

Fundamentalism is often seen as a purely Islamic phenomenon, while Muslim fundamentalists are usually depicted as little more than fanatical opponents of the West. In truth, every religion – whether Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim or even Confucian – has its own fundamentalist movements.

What they share is disenchantment with modern society. That’s why they can emerge anywhere. The key isn’t geography, but the extent to which believers feel that their values are under attack by aggressive secularism. Take one of the first major fundamentalist movements in the modern world. It appeared in the United States in the 1920s as Protestants attempted to prevent evolution being taught in schools. Secularism has two faces as far as fundamentalists are concerned: the banishment of religion from public life and the emancipation of women. Virtually all fundamentalist movements share a fondness for old-fashioned gender roles and seek to remove women from public life.