A Bedouin family and its camels near Najaf, Iraq. Mario Tama/Getty Images
The peoples who have embraced Islam form what the Armenian American scholar Vartan Gregorian has called a mosaic, not a monolith. They are widely various, inhabiting traditional lands, industrialized European cities, and every terrain in between. They practice business, plant crops, and herd cattle, and they speak a multitude of languages. Though they are unified by their belief in the Qur’an and the use of Arabic in worship, they also retain their distinct ethnic identities. This chapter discusses a small but representative sample of groups whose populations are largely, if not wholly, Muslim.
An Arab is commonly defined as anyone whose native language is Arabic. Before the spread of Islam and, with it, the Arabic language, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. In modern usage, it embraces any of the Arabic-speaking peoples living in the vast region from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to southwestern Iran, including the entire Maghrib (the region of North Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea), Egypt and The Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Syria and Iraq.
This diverse assortment of peoples defies physical stereotyping, because there is considerable regional variation. The early Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula were predominantly nomadic pastoralists who herded their sheep, goats, and camels through the harsh desert environment. Settled Arabs practiced date and cereal agriculture in the oases, which also served as trade centres for the caravans transporting the spices, ivory, and gold of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa to the civilizations farther north. The distinction between the desert nomads, on the one hand, and town dwellers and agriculturists, on the other, still pervades much of the Arab world.
Islam, which developed in the west-central Arabian Peninsula in the early 7th century CE, was the religious force that united the desert subsistence nomads—the Bedouins—with the town dwellers of the oases. Within a century, Islam spread throughout most of the present-day Arabic-speaking world, and beyond, from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula. Arabic, the language of the Islamic sacred scripture (the Qur’an), was adopted throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the rapidly established supremacy of Islam in those regions. Other elements of Arab culture, including the veneration of the desert nomad’s life, were integrated with many local traditions. Arabs of today, however, are not exclusively Muslim; approximately 5 percent of the native speakers of Arabic worldwide are Christians, Druzes, Jews, or animists.
The majority of Arabs continue to live in small, isolated farming villages, where traditional values and occupations prevail, including the subservience and home seclusion (purdah) of women. While urban Arabs tend to identify themselves more by nationality than by tribe, village farmers venerate the pastoral nomad’s way of life and claim kinship ties with the great desert tribes of the past and present. Nationalism and the change in standards of living that have been made possible by the expanded oil industry, however, have radically altered the nomadic life.
The pastoral desert nomad, the traditional ideal of Arab culture, makes up barely 5 percent of the modern Arab population. Many of the remaining nomads have given up full-time subsistence pastoralism to become village agriculturists or stock breeders, or to find employment with oil companies or other employers in the towns and cities.
Called Badawi (plural Badw) in Arabic, the Bedouin (Beduin) are an Arabic-speaking nomadic people of the Middle Eastern deserts, especially of Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.
Although they constitute only a small part of the total population of the Middle East, they inhabit or utilize a large part of the land area. Most of them are animal herders who migrate into the desert during the rainy winter season and move back toward the cultivated land in the dry summer months. Although the Bedouin, as a matter of caste, traditionally despise agricultural work and other manual labour, many of them have become sedentary as a result of political and economic developments, especially since World War II. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia and Syria nationalized Bedouin range lands, and Jordan severely limited goat grazing. Conflicts over land use between Bedouin herders on the one hand and settled agriculturists on the other have increased since then.
The traditional Bedouin can be classified according to the animal species that are the basis of their livelihood. First in prestige are the camel nomads, who occupy huge territories and are organized into large tribes in the Sahara, Syrian, and Arabian deserts. Beneath them in rank are the sheep and goat nomads, who stay mainly near the cultivated regions of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Cattle nomads are found chiefly in South Arabia and in The Sudan, where they are called Baqqarah (Baggara).
Following World War I the Bedouin tribes had to submit to the control of the governments of the countries in which their wandering areas lay. The tribal character of Bedouin society continued, however, as did the patriarchal order in their extended, patrilineal, endogamous, and polygynous families. Among the Arabic-speaking tribes, the head of the family, as well as of each successively larger social unit making up the tribal structure, is called sheikh; the sheikh is assisted by an informal council of male elders.
Bengalis form the majority population of Bengal, the region of northeastern South Asia that generally corresponds to the country of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. They speak dialects of Bangla—as they call the Bengali language—which belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.
The Bengali are of diverse origins, having emerged from the confluence of various communities that entered the region over the course of many centuries. The earliest inhabitants of the region are believed to have been the Vedda from Sri Lanka. Later the Vedda were joined by Mediterranean peoples who spoke Indo-European languages. In the 8th century peoples of Arab, Turkish, and Persian descent began to enter the area. Eventually all these groups merged to become the people now known as Bengali.
Most of the Bengali in Bangladesh are practitioners of Sunni Islam, while the majority of the Bengali in West Bengal follow Hinduism. This religious difference traces largely to the 13th century, when Muslim forces invaded the region from the northwest. At the time, the population of Bengal comprised a mixture of Hindus and Buddhists. Following the arrival of the Muslims, most of the residents of eastern Bengal converted to Islam, while Hinduism became the predominant religion in the western region.
In the early 21st century the majority of the Bengali population remained rural, in both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Whether Hindu or Muslim, they engage in a broad spectrum of artistic activity. Both Hindus and Muslims share the Hindustani classical music and dance tradition, while they also display a strong penchant for nonclassical popular forms. The Bengali of Bangladesh, for instance, created many unique popular music genres, such as baul and marfati, that have remained without true equivalents outside the country. Meanwhile, the Bengali of West Bengal produced internationally acclaimed films, most of which have a prominent musical component.
The Hausa people live chiefly in northwestern Nigeria and adjacent southern Niger. They constitute the largest ethnic group in the area, which also contains another large group, the Fulani, perhaps one-half of whom are settled among the Hausa as a ruling class, having adopted the Hausa language and culture. The language belongs to the Chadic group of the Afro-Asiatic family and is infused with many Arabic words as a result of Islamic influence, which spread during the latter part of the 14th century from the kingdom of Mali, profoundly influencing Hausa belief and customs. A small minority of Hausa, known as Maguzawa, or Bunjawa, remained pagan.
Hausa society was, and to a large extent continues to be, politically organized on a feudal basis. The ruler (emir) of one of the several Hausa states is surrounded by a number of titled officeholders who hold villages as fiefs, from which their agents collect taxes. Administration is aided by an extensive bureaucracy, often utilizing records written in Arabic.
The Hausa economy has rested on the intensive cultivation of sorghum, corn (maize), millet, and many other crops grown on rotation principles and utilizing the manure of Fulani cattle. Agricultural activity has yielded considerably more than subsistence, permitting the Hausa to practice such craft specializations as thatching, leatherworking, weaving, and silversmithing. The range of craft products is large, and trading is extensive, particularly in regularly held markets in the larger towns. Hausa are also famous as long-distance traders and local vendors of Hausa-made leather goods as well as tourist items.
The Hausa have settled in cities (of pre-European origins, such as Kano), towns, and hamlets; but the great majority of the population is rural. A typical farm household consists of two or more men and their families grouped in a mud- or stalk-walled enclosure of some 1,000 square feet (93 square metres) containing small round or rectangular huts with thatched roofs and a larger rectangular hut in the centre for the headman of the compound.
The Javanese form the largest ethnic group on the island of Java, Indon. Their language is spoken by more than 71 million people. The Javanese are Muslim, though Hindu traditions of an earlier era are still evident.
Traditional Javanese social organization varied in structure from relatively egalitarian villages to the highly stratified society of the cities, with their complex court life. These differences found linguistic expression in styles of speech that vary according to status differences between the persons speaking: an informal style, a polite style, an extremely polite style, and several others. These styles are more elaborate in Javanese than in other languages of the area and are used habitually.
The Kurds are an ethnic and linguistic group living in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Anatolia, the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, portions of northern Iraq, Syria, and Armenia, and adjacent areas. Most of the Kurds live in contiguous areas of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—a somewhat loosely defined geographic region generally referred to as Kurdistan (“Land of the Kurds”). The name has different connotations in Iran and Iraq, which officially recognize internal entities by this name: Iran’s northwestern province of Kordestan and Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region. A sizable, noncontiguous Kurdish population also exists in the Khorasan region, situated in Iran’s northeast.
The Kurdish language is related to Persian and Pashto. The Kurds are thought to number from 20 million to 25 million, but sources for this information differ widely because of differing criteria of ethnicity, religion, and language; statistics may also be manipulated for political purposes.
The traditional Kurdish way of life was nomadic, revolving around sheep and goat herding throughout the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands of Turkey and Iran. Most Kurds practiced only marginal agriculture. The enforcement of national boundaries beginning after World War I (1914–18) impeded the seasonal migrations of the flocks, forcing most of the Kurds to abandon their traditional ways for village life and settled farming; others entered nontraditional employment.
The prehistory of the Kurds is poorly known, but their ancestors seem to have inhabited the same upland region for millennia. The records of the early empires of Mesopotamia contain frequent references to mountain tribes with names resembling “Kurd.” The name Kurd can be dated with certainty to the time of the tribes’ conversion to Islam in the 7th century CE. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, and among them are many who practice Sufism and other mystical sects.
The principal unit in traditional Kurdish society was the tribe, typically led by a sheikh or an aga, whose rule was firm. Tribal identification and the sheikh’s authority are still felt, though to a lesser degree, in the large urban areas. Detribalization proceeded intermittently as Kurdish culture became urbanized and was nominally assimilated into several nations.
Kurdish nationalism came about through the conjunction of a variety of factors, including the British introduction of the concept of private property, the partition of regions of Kurdish settlement by modern neighbouring states, and the influence of British, U.S., and Soviet interests in the Persian Gulf region. These factors and others combined with the flowering of a nationalist movement among a very small minority of urban, intellectual Kurds.
The Malay are an ethnic group of the Malay Peninsula and portions of adjacent islands of Southeast Asia. They were once probably a people of coastal Borneo who expanded into Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula as a result of their trading and seafaring way of life. That this expansion occurred only in the last 1,500 years or so is indicated by the fact that the languages of the Malay group are all still very much alike, though very divergent from the languages of other peoples of Sumatra, Borneo, and other neighbouring lands. In the early 21st century the Malay constituted more than half of the population of Peninsular Malaysia (West Malaysia) and more than one-eighth of the population of East Malaysia (Sarawak and Sabah).
The Malay culture has been strongly influenced by that of other peoples, including the Siamese, Javanese, and Sumatran. The influence of Hindu India was historically very great, and the Malay were largely Hinduized before they were converted to Islam in the 15th century. The population of the Malay Peninsula today includes large numbers of Indians and Chinese.
The Malay religion is Islam of the school of Shafi‘i. Muslim religious holidays are observed. Some Hindu ritual survives, as in the second part of the marriage ceremony and in various ceremonies of state. In rural areas the Malay have also preserved some of their old beliefs in spirits of the soil and jungle, which are partly Hindu in origin; they often have recourse to medicine men or shamans for the treatment of disease.
The predominant ethnic group of Iran (formerly known as Persia) and a significant minority community in western Afghanistan are Persian. Although of diverse ancestry, the Persian people are united by their language, Persian (Farsi), which belongs to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family.
The name Persia derives from Parsa, the name of the Indo-European nomadic people who migrated into southern Iran—to an area then called Persis—about 1000 BCE. As the Parsa expanded their sphere of political influence, the entire Iranian plateau became known to outsiders (such as the ancient Greeks) as Persia; its various peoples were designated (collectively) the Persians. Subsequent rulers—including Alexander the Great—fostered cultural consolidation.
The vast majority of Persians practice Shi‘ite Islam. (This form of Islam is one of the two largest branches of the Islam faith, the other one being Sunni Islam.) Before the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE, most Persians followed Zoroastrianism, based on the teachings of the ancient prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), who lived during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. In 21st-century Iran there remain a small number of Zoroastrians; larger groups now live in South Asia. In addition to the Zoroastrians, Persian adherents of the Baha’i faith (which originated in Iran) constitute a tiny minority of the population, their religion having been strongly discouraged by the Muslim government.
The Persian population is engaged in a broad array of occupations, in both urban and rural settings. The traditional handwoven cloth and carpet industries for which they are known have remained strong, despite competition from mechanized textile mills. Persian villages often pride themselves on the unique designs and high quality of their carpets, most of which display the typical geometric figures and floral designs of Muslim visual art. Products of the weaving industry are both used locally and exported. The Persians are known for their intricately inlaid metalwork as well as for their legacy of extraordinary architecture. Finely decorated pre-Islamic structures still stand in several ancient cities, as do spectacular mosques and shrines from the Muslim era. A number of these buildings—including those at Persepolis and Chogha Zanbil—and their surroundings have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites.
The Sundanese are one of the three principal ethnic groups of the island of Java, Indonesia. Estimated to number about 25,850,000 in the early 21st century, they are a highland people of western Java, distinguished from the Javanese mainly by their language and their strict adherence to the Muslim faith.
Historically they were first recorded under the Indo-Javanese Brahmanical states (8th century CE) and subsequently accepted the Mahayana Buddhism adopted by the Shailendra kings. Muslim trade influenced them to accept Islam in the 16th century, the people of Bantam being especially fervent; however, animistic and Hindu influences survive.
The Sundanese village is ruled by a headman and a council of elders. The single-family houses are made of wood or bamboo, raised on piling. Rice culture and ironworking, as well as marriage, birth, and death ceremonies, conform closely to the Javanese pattern, though often mixed with elements of Hindu origin.
The Uighurs are Turkic-speaking people of interior Asia who live for the most part in northwestern China, in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang; a small number live in the Central Asian republics. There were nearly 9 million Uighurs in China and about 300,000 in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 21st century.
Muhammad Ababakari (left), a Uighur of Xinjiang, makes a musical instrument. Musical instruments represent one of the popular handicrafts of Uighurs in this region of China. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
The Uighur language is part of the Turkic group of Altaic languages, and the Uighur are among the oldest Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia. They are mentioned in Chinese records from the 3rd century CE. The group first rose to prominence in the 8th century, when they established a kingdom along the Orhon River in what is now north-central Mongolia. In 840 this state was overrun by the Kyrgyz, however, and the Uighurs migrated southwestward to the area around the Tien (Tian) Shan (“Celestial Mountains”). There they formed another independent kingdom in the Turfan region, but this was overthrown by the expanding Mongols in the 13th century.
The Uighur are, in the main, a sedentary, village-dwelling people, who live in the network of oases formed in the valleys and lower slopes of the Tien Shan, Pamirs, and related mountain systems. The region is one of the most arid in the world; hence, for centuries they have practiced irrigation to conserve their water supply for agriculture.
The chief Uighur cities are Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Kashgar (Kashi), an ancient centre of trade near the Russian-Chinese border. The group’s social organization is centred on the village. Most Uighurs, especially those of Xinjiang, are Sunni Muslims.
The Uzbeks of Central Asia live chiefly in Uzbekistan, but also in other parts of Central Asia and in Afghanistan. They speak either of two dialects of Uzbek, a Turkic language. More than 16 million Uzbeks live in Uzbekistan, 2,000,000 in Afghanistan, 1,380,000 in Tajikistan, 570,000 in Kyrgyzstan, and smaller numbers in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Xinjiang in China.
The Uzbek designation is thought to refer to Öz Beg (Uzbek), the Mongol khan under whom the Golden Horde attained its greatest power. The Uzbeks grew out of a mingling of ancient, settled Iranian populations with a variety of nomadic Mongol or Turkic tribes that invaded the region between the 11th and the 15th centuries. The former were ethnically similar to the Tajiks, and the latter included Kipchaks, Karluks, and Turks of Samarkand (relatively more Mongolized groups). A third element was added with the invasion of Mongol nomadic tribes under the leadership of Muhammad Shaybani Khan in the early 16th century.
The great majority of Uzbeks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite, a group noted for the acceptance of personal opinion (ra’y) in the absence of Muslim precedent. The Uzbeks, especially the urban Uzbeks, are considered to be the most religious Muslims of Central Asia; early marriages for young girls, bride-price, and religious marriages and burials are among the traditions still practiced. The Uzbeks are the least Russified of those Turkic peoples formerly ruled by the Soviet Union, and virtually all still claim Uzbek as their first language.