Islamic Background (Going Way Back)
... Fasting
Pilgrimage Charity
Major figures
Muhammad
Abu Bakr Ali
Household of Muhammad
Companions of Muhammad
Prophets of Islam
Texts & Laws
Qur'an Hadith
Jurisprudence Theology
Biographies of Muhammad
Sharia
Branches of Islam
Sunni Shi'a Ibadi
Societal aspects
Academics Theology
Philosophy Science
Art Architecture Cities
Calendar Holidays
Women
in the Qu'ran
Leaders Politics
Islamism Liberalism Sufism
See also
Vocabulary of Islam
Muslim history involves the history of the Muslim people.
Background
Like most major world religions, Islam's historical development has affected political, economic, and military trends both inside and outside its primary geographic zones of reach (see Islamic world). As with Christendom, the concept of an Islamic world may be useful in looking at different periods of human history; similarly useful is an understanding of the identification with a quasi-political community of believers, or ummah, on the part of Islam's practitioners down the centuries.
Islam appeared in Arabia in the 7th century . Within a century of Muhammad's first recitations of the Qur'an, an Islamic state stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Central Asia in the east. This empire did not remain unified for long; the new polity soon broke into a civil war known to Islamic historians as the Fitna, and later affected by a Second Fitna. After this, there would be rival dynasties claiming the caliphate, or leadership of the Muslim world, and many Islamic states and empires offered only token obedience to a caliph unable to unify the Islamic world.
Despite this fragmentation of Islam as a political community, the empires of the Abbasid caliphs, the Mughals, and the Seljuk Turk, Safavid Persia and Ottomans were among the largest and most powerful in the world. Arabs...
View Full Essay
