Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam

AS WE SAW in part I, the first two hundred years of Islam are mired in obscurity, and although we possess a great deal of material documenting these centuries, the fact is that much of that material comes from a later period. In the years after Muhammad’s death in 632, the veil slowly begins to lift, and we eventually can see more clearly as Muhammad’s message gradually becomes the cornerstone of what will emerge as a major social movement from Morocco in the West to as far as India in the East (and gradually beyond that). Nevertheless, the problem of later sources’ claiming to be eyewitness accounts remains omnipresent in these early centuries. Sorting through this material—reading it selectively and contextually—will ideally shed some light on how the Muhammad movement transformed into Islam, one of the “world religions.”¹

This chapter provides the general historical and social backdrop for the remaining chapters in part II, all of which concern themselves with both the formation and the development of sectarian differences and the doctrines associated with these differences. It examines, in broad stokes, the historical spread of Islam, taking stock of the dramatic changes that it underwent as it moved beyond the Arabian Peninsula and encountered a range of new political, religious, and cultural challenges. The question of how or even whether to incorporate non-Arabs in the movement was an important feature in the early geographic spread and religious development of Muhammad’s message. Questions that need to be addressed are: Where did all the Muslims come from? The majority of new Muslims consisted of non-Arabs who had no genealogical or ethnic connection to the Arabian Peninsula, so how did they know or learn what it meant to be a Muslim? What, other than a political label (e.g., “Islam”), held the movement together and how?

It seems that, first and foremost, Muhammad regarded himself as a messenger of God and that his career as statesman was intimately connected to his prophetic message. If he were simply state building or, as later Christian polemicists would put it, power hungry, then surely he would have put firmly in place a mechanism to determine his successor. Contrary to later hadith reports marshaled by rival claimants, it is not at all clear that Muhammad designated his successor. By the same token, however, it is also not at all clear that he did not designate such a successor. The issue of Muhammad’s succession, in other words, cannot be decided on the basis of the historical record. And despite what later theological dogma claimed, it is uncertain whether Muhammad saw himself as the last prophet and messenger to humanity. Although the Quran (33:40) speaks of Muhammad as the “seal of the prophets,” the original intent or meaning of this phrase is by no means obvious.⁴ Given the Quran’s highly apocalyptical and eschatological nature, Muhammad might well have had no idea what God’s plans for the future would be.

These groups gave momentum to what most likely emerged as one of the earliest sectarian or ideological divisions in the nascent Islamic polity: What set of actors possessed legitimacy to guide the community? Although the end of this legitimacy process witnessed the formation of Shiʿism and Sunnism (discussed in chapters 5 and 6), it is worth noting that neither of these sects existed at the time of Muhammad’s death. Rather, both took decades, if not centuries, to develop and form, and they did so largely in response to each other. We should also avoid assuming that Sunni Islam was normative and that Shiʿism somehow broke away as a heterodox movement, as certain later sources would like to have us believe.

In the immediate aftermath of Muhammad’s death, the leaders among the ansar apparently assembled at the Portico (saqifa [entranceway]) of the Banu Saʿida clan in Medina to elect a man to lead the community.⁵ Their choice appears to have been Saʿd ibn Ubada, one of the clan’s main chieftains. The ansar’s claim was predicated upon their role as protectors of the early immigrants to Medina, the muhajirun, and the fact that they had played a key role in Muhammad’s earliest battles against the Quraysh. The muhajirun, however, heard of these political developments at the Portico, and one of their main tribesmen, Abu Bakr—Muhammad’s father-in-law, Aisha’s father, and, according to later (Sunni) tradition, the first male to accept Muhammad’s message—headed there to confront the ansar. Again according to later accounts, Abu Bakr informed the ansar that the Arabs would accept a leader only from the Quraysh, so the Quraysh should be the leaders, and the ansar their ministers. Abu Bakr seems to have been successful because he emerged from the Portico as the first successor (khalifa or caliph) of Muhammad.⁶

The first four caliphs (successors) to Muhammad are referred to as the “four rightly guided ones” (al-rashidun).⁷ Many later Muslims look to this period as a “golden age” in terms of both its purity and its righteousness, presumably on account of its close proximity to the source of Islam’s message. It is a common theme in the history of religions that the farther one moves from the originary source responsible for a religion’s or movement’s formation, the greater the likelihood that corruption enters into the original message, thereby tainting it. It is for this reason that various reform movements arise to try and restore what they perceive to be the original message. Many so-called Muslim fundamentalists (see chapter 9) look to this period of Muhammad and his early followers with such fondness that they reject certain features of modernity in their desire to re-create that period. For historical purposes, however, and given the sectarian milieu and internecine strife associated with this period, it is perhaps not insignificant to note that three of the four rashidun were assassinated. Beyond the sectarianism, however, this period was also one of the rapid expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

It seems that as long as Muhammad was alive, many of these tribes were content to be nominally followers of the new message, but after his death they renounced this religious aspect of their allegiance as well. Abu Bakr, however, seems to have insisted that these tribes had not just submitted to a simple human leader but had joined a religious community under God, of which he was the new head. So, in contrast to pre-Islamic times and the usual treaty practices created therein, their allegiance was not seen as having ended. To protect the new community and prevent it from imploding, Abu Bakr attempted to stem the tide of apostasy and seems to have been largely successful in doing so. Thus, the main accomplishment of his short two-year tenure was the reestablishment of the Arabian Peninsula under the central authority of the caliph based in Medina.

Umar ibn al-Khattab (ca. 586–644, r. 634–644), eventually Muhammad’s father-in-law, was originally hostile to Muhammad’s message and was part of the Meccan elite that persecuted the earliest followers of that message. Converted just before the hijra, Umar became a powerful believer in the new message. As caliph, he greatly pushed expansion of the message beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The Fertile Crescent, Jerusalem, Egypt, and most of Iran now became part of the burgeoning Islamic Empire. A subsequent section in this chapter addresses the logistics by which a region became at least nominally “Muslim,” but the point to emphasize now is the geographic extent of what was for all intents and purposes a new transregional empire in the area.

Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656) was a member of the Umayya family in Mecca, a family that represented the old Meccan aristocracy and whose members held out the longest against Muhammad. Uthman was an early convert despite his family’s opposition. Some of the earliest immigrants to Medina treated these conversions with suspicion and as a matter of convenience. The fact that many of these later converts rose to power again under Uthman seemed to violate the principle of sabiqa, or precedence, an unwritten rule that held that those who had converted first to the new message had more prestige than those who converted at a later date.

It is unclear why Aisha was so opposed to Ali; regardless of her reasons, the tensions between them culminated in the Battle of the Camel, in which Talha and Zubayr were killed and Aisha’s political aspirations, whatever they may have been, were all but quashed. Dealing with Muʿawiya would prove to be more difficult, however. Ali’s and Muʿawiya’s forces soon met in what is known as the Battle of Siffin. After some indecisive skirmishes, they agreed to arbitration, which focused on the issue of whether the murder of Uthman was justified. That Ali would agree to this arbitration upset many of his supporters and in their opinion served to undermine his right to be caliph. At this point, Ali’s supporters split: some remained with him, and this group is often referred to as the shiʿat Ali (Party of Ali); others opposed Ali for his willingness to arbitrate and referred to themselves as “Kharijites,” or “those who had gone out” from the community.

In 661, Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite, at which point Muʿawiya seized power. His reign was to last for some twenty years, and even later sources that are quite critical of the way he seized power speak grudgingly of the prosperity of his rule.⁹ However, later sources say, he seems to have engaged in very little state building, nor did he use the Muhammadan message as the legitimizing ideology of his rule, preferring instead to rely on his sway with the tribal chiefs in the Arabian Peninsula. “When Muʿawiya died,” states one scholar, “his polity died with him.”¹⁰ Muʿawiya, however, is credited with establishing a hereditary dynasty of caliphs, known as the Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad dynasty (661–750).

Perhaps most important, Abd al-Malik seems to have been instrumental in making Muhammad’s religious message the major ideological pillar of his burgeoning empire. According to the evidence marshaled by Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds,¹² he and subsequent Umayyad caliphs styled themselves as God’s representatives on earth, interestingly a category that the later spiritual heads of Shiʿism would adopt. Moreover, the caliphs did this in opposition to the concept of “representatives of the Prophet of God,” which would eventually become normative Sunni belief under later dynasties. Again, this stylization attests to the fluidity of ideas, terms, and concepts at this still very early stage of Islam’s theological development. Umayyad religious language, monuments, and understanding of Muhammad’s message thus spoke to a particular understanding of the message of Islam that would be contested by later dynasties.

Abd al-Malik’s reign also witnessed the construction of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem (figure 5). Although the chronology remains uncertain owing to the removal of Abd al-Malik’s name from an inscription and the addition of a later caliph’s name, the building seems to have been completed in 692, making it one of the earliest surviving Islamic architectural structures. Some have argued that the Dome of the Rock was built to rival the Kaʿba, which, at the time of the Dome’s construction, was under the control of a rival caliph in Mecca.

A more likely explanation for the construction of the mosque in Jerusalem, however, is that the nascent Muslim community was articulating a set of religious beliefs and practices for itself in ways that sought to make it distinct from the Near Eastern religious (including pilgrimage) heritage that it had inherited.¹³ That the Kaʿba eventually won out as the main site of Islamic faith is probably the result of later rulers in the eighth century. Both sanctuaries, it should be noted, revolve around a rock and its circumambulation, have connections to earlier prophets, and form the focal point for prayer and pilgrimage in Islam practice.

However, centralized authority and a nascent political message can tell us only part of the story. In this regard, it is also important to keep in mind that at this very early date the new Umayyad soldiers brought with them no monolithic Islamic message, contents, or practice. Many different Islamic societies began to develop in these early years, all of which grew up around a combination of local social and cultural customs, previous (i.e., non-Muslim) religious beliefs and practices, and still fluid ideas of who Muhammad was and what his message consisted of. Each of these societies, in turn, had its own particular history and set of traditions to which Muhammad and his message could be adopted and adapted. So even though the Umayyad Empire was nominally Muslim, what this actually meant on the ground is not so easy to determine.

DID ISLAM SPREAD BY THE SWORD?

It is sometimes said that Islam spread by the sword, which presumably means that attacking Muslim armies gave towns, cities, and the individuals within them the choice of either converting to Islam or being killed. Although there might well have been rare instances of such threats, it is impossible that Islam could have spread so quickly and so violently. We possess very few sources that describe such bloodshed, nor would Islam have caught on in the way it did if people were forced to become Muslims on the threat of death.

As shown in this chapter and previous ones, the message of Islam was still in a state of flux, being worked out and developed as need arose, in its early period. It would accordingly be rather difficult to impose a still largely inchoate message on others. Rather, modern scholars who have studied conversion rates argue that the “Islamicization” of regions would have taken centuries to occur and that those responsible for its spread most likely would have been Sufi holy men (see chapter 5) as opposed to murderous marauders.^* The former would have been more tolerant of local custom and would, at least in theory, have been more familiar with what was developing as orthodoxy. There probably would have been many reasons for conversion: social (e.g., the new religion offered social mobility), religious (e.g., the belief that a religion that spread so quickly must be guided by God), financial, and so on.

Moreover, just because a local ruler or the elite classes of a particular area converted to Islam did not necessarily mean that the entire region quickly followed suit. Or, if they did, they might well have been “Muslim” in name only and gone about their daily lives, including their religious lives, as they always had. This mixture of practices undoubtedly created numerous syncretistic beliefs and practices as many tried to fuse local custom with the new religion.

Finally, many Muslim rulers might well have preferred that locals keep their own religion because this ensured that they would pay the jizya (poll tax) that non-Muslim minorities had to pay. These minorities, referred to as dhimmis, were often Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. They received many legal rights, depending on the time and place, and often went about their business, both religious and secular, with little or no discrimination. The poll tax that these minorities paid was frequently an important revenue for the Muslim authorities.

^*See, for example, Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

If one question is when the diverse regions of the empire became Muslim, an equally important one is how they became so. Merchants, mystics, storytellers, poets, and garrison towns undoubtedly did much to spread various interpretations of what they considered to be the authentic contents of Muhammad’s message in various regions. Yet, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, the religious, theological, and legal articulation of Islam arose largely in response to the needs of non-Arabs who otherwise had no idea what the message consisted of. We should not assume that ready-made articulations were simply brought to these regions; rather, they most likely developed there and oftentimes went from there back to the center (as opposed to vice versa).¹⁵

The Abbasids, however, quickly turned on those supporters and ideas that had invoked connections to Ali and his descendents to get to power. Perhaps fearful of their symbolic power, Abbasid authorities over time essentially put many of the spiritual leaders of the Alid (later to be called Shiʿi) movement under house arrest. Once their usefulness was over, the followers of Ali were thus largely pushed aside, and the caliphs began to take on new trappings of power and recycled terminology loaded with religious significance, such as “Amir al-Muminin” (Commander of the Faithful). To say that they simply rejected Shiʿism and adopted Sunni Islam is too anachronistic because neither of these movements had fully developed or extricated itself from the other at this early period in Islamic history.

The early Abbasid Empire was responsible for facilitating many important cultural and intellectual contributions to Islamic and world civilization. Baghdad quickly became the intellectual and artistic center of the empire, the place where many Islamic and nonreligious sciences (e.g., philosophy, science) were developed and studied. Muslim scholars encountered the sciences, mathematics, and medicine of antiquity through the works of Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, and others. These works, translated into Arabic, and the important commentaries written on them were the wellspring of Arab science during the medieval period.

At the Battle of Guadalete in July 711, most of the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) came under Muslim rule. Armies of Muslims (often given the generic name “Moors”) later crossed the Pyrenees to continue their conquest but were defeated in October 732 at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel. The Iberian Peninsula, now part of the Umayyad Empire, was given the name “al-Andalus” and ruled by a series of governors appointed by the caliph based in Damascus. In 750, as noted earlier, the Abbasids defeated the Umayyads, but an exiled Umayyad prince escaped to al-Andalus and established himself there as the emir of Córdoba. Refusing to submit to the Abbasid caliph, he established a tenuous rule over much of al-Andalus.

TRANSLATION, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITICAL

LEGITIMACY THROUGH THE DAR AL-HIKMA

The translation movement in the ninth and eleventh centuries centered at the Dar al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad was no fleeting phenomenon: it last for more than two hundred years and included the support (intellectual, institutional, and financial) of the elite classes of the Abbasid caliphate. Attempts to account for the rise of this translation project usually involve crediting a few Syriac-speaking Christians for the movement or claiming that it was the result of an enlightened ruler.

Dimitri Gutas has argued more recently, however, that the depth and vision of the translation project transcend such traditional romantic or superficial accounts. He instead argues that the project was intimately connected to the political and ideological aspirations of the nascent Islamic Empire.^* Engaging in this translation, he argues, was similar to creating other genres of Islamic literature (e.g., Quranic commentaries, hadith literature). The early Abbasids’ translation project was, it seems, based on the attempt to legitimate the caliph’s right to rule and to ensure that others perceived the new dynasty to have inherited its political legitimacy from its Muslim and non-Muslim predecessors.

^*Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 2.

The Córdoba Caliphate collapsed through civil war between 1009 and 1013 and was finally abolished in 1031. Political rule in al-Andalus then broke up into a number of mostly independent states called tawaʾif (sing., taʾifa), often translated as “petty kingdoms” or, perhaps more accurately, “independently ruled principalities.”¹⁸ These kingdoms often fought among themselves, which meant that they were too weak to defend themselves from those Christian armies that sought to retake the peninsula. In 1085, for example, these Reconquista (Reconquering) armies took control of Toledo. The tawaʾif kingdoms looked to the south, to the empires in North Africa (e.g., the Almoravids and the Almohads), for help, and although they received it momentarily, the North African empires ultimately conquered and absorbed al-Andalus.

Although this period should not be romanticized as an “interfaith utopia” (as in the “Golden Age of Muslim Spain”),¹⁹ many of the minor kingdoms, following the Córdoba Caliphate, were extremely tolerant of non-Muslim minorities. In Granada, for example, a Jew by the name of Shmuel Hanagid (d. ca. 1056) served as the equivalent of its prime minister. It was in al-Andalus, for example, that the Jews were first attracted to and began to compose Arabic poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres. Famous Jewish thinkers emerged from this environment (e.g., Abraham ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides). Many of these individuals, however, migrated to the northern and Christian parts of the peninsula or left it altogether when the independent kingdoms were taken over by the larger and less tolerant dynasties from North Africa.

Although the Abbasid Empire would carry on nominally for centuries, as early as the late ninth century its massive empire and the bureaucracy needed to administer it began to fragment, giving way to various regional independent movements in places such as North Africa, Spain, and the eastern provinces. The rise of such independent and semi-independent kingdoms did much to circumscribe the power and influence of the Abbasid caliph still based in Baghdad. Although some argue that this period marked the end of Muslim unity, it is unlikely that such unity ever existed because the empire, even at the height of its power, could do little to unify and systematize the many different interpretations of Muhammad’s message.

In an important study, historian Richard W. Bulliet correctly cautions against assuming that all the important theological and intellectual developments in the gradual emergence of Islam took place in caliphal courts among Arab elites. Islam, in other words, was not invented there and then sent out to the provinces for its various inhabitants to assent to. On the contrary, numerous Islams—with all sorts of local colors and teachings—were scattered throughout the vast Islamic Empire. The Islam of Córdoba, for example, would not necessarily be the Islam of Cairo or the Islam of Baghdad. Local religious authority, Bulliet argues, was based on local hadiths and in local systems of interpretation by locally prominent families of religious scholars.²⁰ Although many hadiths and the traditions associated with them would ultimately take on a supralocal legitimacy, this unification did not take place until roughly the thirteenth century.

Local diversity eventually gave way to a more uniform set of teachings and practices. Some local hadith, which were probably more responsible than the Quran for defining the religion to many devout believers, never traveled beyond villages or cities or, if they did, were ultimately rejected as weak. The uniformity that Islam invented for itself in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was largely the product of communal religious institutions brought about by the migration of scholars and what Bulliet calls the need “to feel at one with other members of the universal umma in the dark period before and after the Mongol destruction of the caliphate.”²¹

Given its broad geographic extension, the Ottoman Empire functioned at the cross-section of the Eastern and Western worlds for more than six centuries. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, at which point it entered a long period of conquest and expansion, making its way into Europe and North Africa. Its conquests were enabled by its army’s technical superiority and its navy’s ability to contest and protect key seagoing trade routes in competition with the Italian city-states in the Black, Aegean, and Mediterranean seas and with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.