The World's of Islam

Key points of this chapter:

"The Worlds of Islam":

  • The many faces of contemporary Islam reflect earlier history of this newest of major religions.
  • The world of Islam took a central position in the larger international arena interacting with other civilizations. 
  • The burgeoning Islamic world thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history.
"The Birth of a New Religion":
  • Christianity and Islam emerged from the margins of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations.
"The Homeland of Islam":
  • Recognized a variety of Gods, ancestors, and nature spirits, valued personal bravery, group loyalty, and hospitality. 
  • Mecca came to occupy a distinctive role in Arabia. 
  • Mecca was the site of the Kaaba, the most prominent religious shrine in Arabia which housed representations of some 360 deities and was the destination for many pilgrims. 
"The Messenger and the Message":
  • Muhammed had a powerful overwhelming religious experience that left him convinced that he was Allah's messenger to the Arabs. 
  • According to Muslim tradition the revelations began in 610 and continued periodically over the next twenty two years. those revelations became the sacred scriptures of Islam. 
  • The message of the Quran challenged not only the ancient polytheism of Arab religion and the social injustices of Mecca but also the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society which was so prone to war feuding and violence. 
"The Transformation of Arabia":
  • the new community or umma that took shape in Medina was a kind of super tribe but very different from the traditional tribes of Arab society. 
  • The young islamic community constituted a state and soon a huge empire at the very beginning of its history. 
  • A new and vigorous state had emerged bringing peace to the warring tribes of Arabia. 
"The Making of an Arab Empire":
  • The new Arab state became a huge empire encompassing all or parts of Egyptian, roman, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Indian civilizations. 
  • the Islamic faith spread widely within and outside the empire. 
"War, conquest, and tolerance":
  • Within a few years of Muhammad's death in 632, Arab armies engaged the Byzantine and Persian Sassanid empires, the great powers of the region. 
  • These great empires weakened by decades of war with each other and by internal revolts, continued to view the Arabs as a mere nuisance rather than serious threat. 
  • Muslim forces, operating on both land and sea swept westward across North Africa, conquered Spain in the early 700s and attacked southern France. 
"Conversion":
  • converting to Islam was or subsequently became a matter of profound spiritual or psychological transformation, but far often, at least initially, it was social conversion. 
  • islam was from the beginning associated with the sponsorship of a powerful state, quiet unlike the experience of early Buddhism or Christianity.
  • The preservation of Persian language and culture had enormous implications for the world of Islam. 
"Divisons and Controversies":
  • The first four caliphs known among most muslims as the rightly guided caliphs were close companions of the prophet selected by the muslim elders of Medina. 
  • As the Arab empire grew, its caliphs were transformed from modest Arab chiefs into absolute monarchs "the show of god on earth". 
"Women and Men in Early Islam":
  • The Quran was quiet clear and explicit: men and women were equal.
  • In social terms and especially within marriage, the Quran viewed woman as inferior and subordinate.
  • Other signs of tightening patriarchy were honor killings of woman by their male relatives for violating sexual taboos likewise derived from local cultures with no sanction in the Quran. 
"Islam and Cultural Encounter":
  • the rapid spread of islam had been accompanied by the creation of an immense Arab Empire very much in the tradition of earlier Mediterranean and middle eastern empires. 
"The Case of India":
  • In south Asia islam found a permanent place in a long-established civilization as invasions by Turkic-speaking warrior groups from Central Asia, recently converted to Islam, brought the faith to northern India, 
  • Substantial muslim communities emerged in India particularly in regions less tightly integrated into the dominant hindu culture. 
  • Muslims usually lived quite separately remaining a distinctive minority within an ancient Indian civilization which they now largely governed but which they proved unable to completely transform. 
"The Case of Anatolia":
  • At the same time India was being subject to turkic invasion, so too was Anatolia where the largely christian and greek-speaking population. was then governed by the Byzantine Empire. 
  • The Turkish rulers of Anatolia built a new society that welcomed converts and granted them material rewards and opportunity for high office. 
  • all of this contributed to the thorough religious transformation of Anatolia and laid a foundation for the ottoman empire.
"The Case of West Africa":
  • Islam accompanied Muslim traders across the Sahara rather than being brought by invading Arab or turkic armies. 
  • By the 16th century a number of west African cities had become major centers of islamic religious and intellectual life attracting scholars from throughout the muslim world. 
  • Islam remained the culture of urban elites and spread little into the rural areas of west Africa until the 19th century. 
"The Case of Spain":
  • Spain's agricultural economy was the most prosperous in Europe during this time and its capital of Cordoba was among the largest and most splendid cities in the world. 
  • Spain experienced a religious reversal as Christian rule was reestablished and Islam painfully eradicated from the Iberian peninsula. 
"The World of Islam as a New Civilization":
  • As the religion spread and the Abbasid dynasty declined, the civilization of Islam unlike that of china but similar to western Christendom, operated without a dominant political center, bound more by a shared religious culture than by a shared state.
  • Despite these external threats and its various internal conflicts, islamic civilization flourished and often prospered, embracing at least parts of virtually every other civilization in the afro-eurasian hemisphere. 
"Networks of Faith":
  • The ulama were an International elite and the system of education they created served to bind together an immense and diverse civilization.
  • Sufi orders were especially significant in the frontier regions of islam because they followed conquering armies or traders into central and Southeast Asia, India, Anatolia, parts of Africa, ad elsewhere. 
"Networks of Exchange":
  • the world of islamic civilization cohered not only as a network of faith but also as an immense arena of exchange in which goods, technologies, food products, and ideas circulated widely.
  • Muslim merchants, Arabs, and Persians in particular quickly became prominent and sometimes dominant players in all the major afro eurasian trade routes of the third wave era. 
  • Traditions mixed and blended to generate a distinctive islamic civilization with many new contributions to the world of learning. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Worlds Of Christendom

"The Worlds of christendom" The non-muslim regions of Africa witnessed an explosive advance of Christianity during the twentieth century. Europe and North America have been increasingly outnumbered in the census of global Christianity.  "Christian contraction in Asia and Africa"  Europe was the principal center of Chrisitan faith. "Asian christianity" It was in Asia that the decimation of earlier christian communities occurred most completely and most quickly. in both areas, the majority of people turned to Islam voluntarily, attracted perhaps to its aura of success.  The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century offered a brief opportunity for christianitys renewal as the religiously tolerant mongols welcomed Nestorian Christians as well as people of various other faiths.  "byzantine christendom" the contraction of of the christian faith and christian societies in Asia and Africa left Europe and Anatolia, larg...
Read more

Commonalities and Variations

I am going to approach my blog a little differently this time and put the main points of each section that I found interesting. The first section, "Continental Comparisons" Human cultures evolved in quite similar fashion around the world.  Almost everywhere hunting, gathering, and fishing remained the sole basis for sustaining life and society.  The absence of most animals capable of domestication meant that few pastoral societies developed in the Americas.  Eurasia, Africa, and America had the momentous turn of the Agricultural revolution.  The next section, "Civilizations of Africa" Africa was the most tropical of the worlds three supercontinents.  Climate conditions spawned numerous diseases. "Meroe" A Nubian civilization almost as old as Egypt.  Queens appeared in sculptures as women with prominence and power equivalent to their male counterparts.  Meroe had a reputation for great riches. Declined because of deforestation c...
Read more

commerce and culture

For this blog Ive decided to do the main point and key ideas of each section: This chapter addresses the role of exchanging goods and its effects on human history, for example: trade diminished the economic self- sufficiency of local societies even as it altered the structure of those societies as well. trade had the capacity to transform political life. trade became a vehicle for the spread of religious ideas, technological innovations, disease-bearing germs, and plants and animals.  Silk roads: exchange across Eurasia: The growth of the silk roads: Eurasia gave rise to one of the world's most extensive and sustained networks of exchange among its diverse peoples.  products of the forest and semi-arid northern grasslands were exchanged for the agricultural products and manufactured goods of adjacent civilization. silk road trading networks prospered most when large and powerful states provided security for merchants and travelers.  the Mongol empire b...
Read more