Haya ‘alas Salat. . . . Haya ‘alal-Falah. Allahu Akbar. La ilaha illa Allah. . . . Come to prayer. . . . Come to prayer. . . . God is Great. . . . There is no God but Allah.” At first predawn light the call was heard from the minaret of the mosque, summoning the Muslim faithful to the first of five daily prayers. It was heard first in the Spice Islands and on Mindanao, then moved west with the light across Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, while far to the north another sequence began in Beijing. Thence it flowed to Xi’an, to Turfan, and on through the oases of the Silk Road to join the southern stream in Persia. In Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, the chants from the many mosques came from all sides, forming in the thin light an uncanny human sound that is as characteristic of Islam as the sound of bells is of Christendom. North of the Mediterranean it stopped abruptly where the Ottoman camps along the Danube faced the Christians; south of the Mediterranean it flowed on to Morocco and also south of the Sahara to the great mosques and schools of Timbuktu and the trading centers that reached down to the Atlantic along the Senegal River.
Everywhere the faithful turned toward Mecca in prayer. Everywhere they acknowledged one Prophet, one Holy Quran. Everywhere the faithful hoped to go once in their lives on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Islam is deeply rooted in events that took place in a particular place, in revelations made to a particular man. Those revelations were for all men, and while much of the first expansion of Islam had been warlike, its later extensions to China, Southeast Asia, and south of the Sahara had been the work not of warriors but of merchant communities settling and spreading their faith among the local people by example and teaching. In 1688 the world of Islam was politically dominated by what have been called the gunpowder empires: the Ottoman centered in Anatolia and reaching from Algeria to Bosnia to Yemen; the Safavid in Persia; and the Mughal in India. The Ottomans were locked in a long conflict with Christian Europe, in which they were losing ground, and in a stalemated struggle with Persia. The Mughals had neared the end of their advance into southern India and were grappling with the cultural and political problems of ruling the vast Hindu majority. The Hindus were not the only non-Muslims they had to worry about; the European presence in the Indian Ocean made more complications.
In the communications of their rulers, the travels of their merchants and pilgrims, and the rich mix of people in Istanbul or even more in Mecca at the time of the Hajj, the Muslims formed a vast network throughout the Old World, one of the most important connecting links of the world of 1688 and of 2000 as well.