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Islam summary

Name: Islam
Rating: 4.4 (199 reviews)
Author: Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong

A Short History

4.4 (199 ratings)

32 mins

Brief summary

Islam by Karen Armstrong is a comprehensive introduction to the history and theology of Islam. It explores the religion's origins, beliefs, and practices, while dispelling common myths and misconceptions associated with it.

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Islam The Middle East

Table of Contents

Islam
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What’s in it for me? An in-depth tour of Islam from Muhammad to modernity.

Islam, a religion with almost two billion followers, has one and a half millennia of history behind it. From a small sect protesting injustice in seventh-century Arabia, it grew to a vast empire spanning three continents before falling prey to Western colonial expansion in the modern age.

Today, its civilization remains complex, contradictory and – most of all – misunderstood.

Whether it’s the oppressor of women, the terrorist hijacker, the suicide bomber or the ruthless tyrant, the view of Islam for many is often little more than a series of clichés and stock images. That’s hardly new: Europeans, for example, have looked eastward at the Islamic world with a mixture of fear and loathing since the eleventh-century Christian Crusades.

It’s high time, then, to dispel some stereotypes! These blinks will transport you into the heart of a faith that’s inspired poets, mystics, soldiers, scholars and citizens in their quest to create a just society for 1,500 years.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn:

why Muhammad’s message resonated with a society in spiritual crisis;
what the transformation of the West meant for the Islamic world; and
why “fundamentalism” isn’t nearly as conservative as it claims.

Islam is a religion uniquely concerned with creating a just society in this world.

What is religion? Well, it usually has two sides. On the one hand, there’s spirituality – a search for transcendence. Though believers might wish to withdraw from the world, a purely personal faith usually remains beyond reach. Religions also have an “external history,” in which they’re forced to confront the harsh realities of power politics.

All religions take part in the global battle for survival and expansion, but most regard this struggle as a necessary evil that corrupts their sacred ideal. Take Hinduism. It regards historical events as meaningless compared to the eternal truths of faith. Christianity has a similar view. That’s why Jesus reminded his followers that the Kingdom of God wasn’t a blueprint for a new society in this world, but a metaphor for personal salvation. Even the Enlightenment philosophers who argued for the separation of church and state didn’t want to banish religion from public life. Rather, they sought to protect it from political rivalries. Belief, they thought, was a personal matter too important to be dragged into everyday conflicts.

That said, every religion is a product of its time. After all, people usually turn to faith because they feel that the present is unjust. But transcendence is only possible by learning to see the divine in this world. This is what the author terms “earthing.” That’s another way of saying that real objects can become gateways to the ultimate truth. To understand this, just think of the role sacred rocks, temples, holy images and texts play in the great religions. These are earthly symbols through which the faithful encounter the divine.

Islam, unlike Christianity or Hinduism, doesn’t have religious icons. The symbols that really matter are the deeds of Muslims in this world. For Muslims, making history is a way of experiencing divinity. Islam is thus a uniquely political faith. Its highest aim is to create a just society in the here and now, and political action to achieve that ideal is seen as a kind of sacrament imparting spiritual grace.

That means Islam’s “internal” and “external” sides can’t be separated. To understand the religion, one has to grapple with its historical development, which is exactly what we’ll be doing in the following blinks.

Muhammad’s message was an answer to a spiritual crisis in seventh-century Arab society.

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.

Islam faced stiff opposition from the Meccan elite as it began to grow.

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!

Muhammad built the first Islamic society in Medina, his base in the war against Mecca.

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.

Muslims built a vast empire after Muhammad’s death by raiding non-Muslims outside Arabia.

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.

Islam’s law – the Shariah – emerged in opposition to rulers who championed empire over faith.

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.

Islam experienced a golden age as its empire became less centralized.

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.

The rise of the West in the eighteenth century resulted in the colonization of the Islamic world.

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 relationship between Islam and modernity has long preoccupied Muslims.

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 isn’t unique to Islam, but part of a universal backlash against modern society.

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.

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What is Islam about?

Islam: A Short History (2000) charts the meteoric rise of Islam from its birth as a small sect in seventh-century Arabia to a global religion with just under two billion followers. What makes Islam unique among faiths, Karen Armstrong argues, are its refusal to postpone justice to the next world and quest to create the perfect society in the here and now. She follows this thread in her fascinating tour of 1,500 years of Islamic history.

Best quote from Islam

One of the chief characteristics of Islam has been its sacralization of history.

—Karen Armstrong

Who should read Islam?

Believers and non-believers
History and politics buffs
Whoever seeks to understand Islam is beyond the headlines

About the Author

Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Catholic nun before becoming one of the most highly regarded experts writing on the history of major world religions today. She is the author of the bestselling A History of God as well as Jerusalem, The Battle for God, Buddha and Through the Narrow Gate. Armstrong currently teaches at the Leo Baeck College in London.

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