Islam
A very small amount of background on Islam
Readings and E-journal Assignments for February 19-28, 1997
| Profession of Faith | Summed up in the Koranic formula "There is no god but God [Allah], and Muhammad is his prophet." |
| Prayer | Five times a day, a Muslim should turn towards Mecca and recite his prayers. He may do this wherever he is. The Friday noon prayer, required for all adult Muslim men, is the only public one; it follows a sabbath address in the mosque by the imam (religious leader), who offers an intercessory prayer on behalf of the caliph (head of state). |
| Almsgiving | Voluntary, pious charity, a duty of Islam, eventually became institutionalized in the zakah, which was roughly analogous to the tithe. The zakah was a two-and-a-half percent property tax imposed only on Muslims. Later, with the dissolution of the Islamic state, almsgiving again became a private act of piety. |
| Fasting | During the month of Ramadan, Muslims should abstain from food and drink from dawn until sunset. |
| Pilgrimage | Once in a lifetime, every Muslim man and woman who is able should make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The hajj occurs at a specific time each year. The pilgrims, wearing seamless garments, enter the holy city and circle the Ka'bah seven times. (A number of other ceremonies accompany the hajj.) |
Like its predecessor Judaism, Islam involves a number of ritual laws: Muslim men are circumcised, for instance, and pork is outlawed along with wine and gambling. Like Christians, Muslims believe strongly in an afterlife in which God judges and rewards faithful believers. The only unpardonable sin is polytheism: ascribing plurality to the one true God.
Muslims consider Muhammad to be the last of a series of prophets (Abraham and Jesus among them) who were all given direct revelations from God. The Islamic doctrine of tahrif, or falsification, holds that Jews and later Christians allowed the sacred texts of God to become corrupted, failing in their duty to transmit the revelations faithfully from generation to generation. Hence God removed his blessing from them and transferred it to the Muslims, the only people who managed to preserve God's word (the Koran) in a pure and unaltered form.
The Conquest
The initial expansion of the Islamic empire was explosively rapid (see the time line and the map on p. 124 of Tierney and Painter's Western Europe textbook); by 750 the Islamic empire stretched from Spain to Iran. The conquering Muslims drew a sharp distinction between pagans and "people of the book"--that is, those who professed a revealed monotheistic religion centred on a sacred scripture. Monotheists (including Christians and Jews) among the conquered populations were allowed to practice their faiths without interference as long as they submitted to Muslim authority. Polytheists, however, were given the choice between conversion and the sword.
The Pact of 'Umar
"The law of the dhimma has its most characteristic form in a document known as the Pact of 'Umar, a kind of bilateral contract in which the non-Muslims agree to a host of discriminatory regulations in return for protection. Though attributed to the second caliph--'Umar ibn al-Khattab, who ruled from 634 to 644, during the first wave of Muslim conquests outside the Arabian Peninsula--no text of the document can be dated earlier than the tenth or eleventh century. But the stipulations themselves evolved out of principles of pre-Islamic tribal custom, precedents established by the Prophet in Arabia, the specific circumstances of the early Islamic conquests, and influences of law in the eastern Roman and Sassanian empires. In particular, as the first wave of expansion outside the Arabian Peninsula incorporated much of the eastern Roman Empire, Byzantine Christian-Roman Jewry law had a marked influence on the content of the Islamic law of the dhimma...Already the Qur'an stipulates 'there is no compulsion in religion.' While it may be true that the verse was meant only descriptively--that it was unrealistic to expect naturally obdurate unbelievers to convert to Islam--later Muslims took the text as a prescription for religious tolerance and pluralism....[Muhammad's] treaties with the Jewish and Christian inhabitants of various other oases and towns in Arabia guaranteed them safety in return for tribute, called jizya (payment), a policy that endured...Albrecht Noth...argues that much of the [Pact of 'Umar] either has its source in the conquest treaties or reflects the reality of Muslim-non-Muslim relations at the time of the conquest. He contends that the terms originally did not have the restrictive, discriminatory purpose so blatant in the text of the Pact as it existed later on. Rather, many of the stipulations were devised to protect the fragile identity of the Arab conquerors. Faced with a massive majority of non-muslims, the conquerors instituted measures designed to distance themselves from their subjects." (Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, pp.54-7.)
This compact of tolerance applied originally to Christians, Jews, and Sabians, but later it was widened to include Zoroastrians, Manichaens, and certain other more or less monotheistic religious groups.
Some additional background on Islam may be found in the medieval history textbooks on reserve in Uris; check their indices. Tierney/Painter discuss Islam briefly on pp. 123-128 and 243-249 (theirs is a markedly Western perspective, as one might expect). The textbook used in Cornell courses on Islam is Philip K. Hitti's History of the Arabs, tenth edition. And of course there is a Penguin Classics edition of the Koran, which is well worth a look if you want to know more about Islamic beliefs.
[History 100.81 Home] [Syllabus] [Calendar] [Grammar Notebok] [Writing Assignments] [Jo's Home]
Copyright © 1996, 1997 Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu
This page is http://www.instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hist100.81/islam.html