Week 3

February 10, 2005

Dr. Sefik Hikmet Toprak

IDSA at UTD

Topic: A Brief Account of the Spread of Islam After Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

Summary: Excerpt from “Islam: An Introduction” by the famous orientalist late Annemarie Schimmel

Muhammad’s death confronted the young community with difficult problems. The office of prophet no longer existed, for the revelation (Sura 33/40) had spoken of Muhammad as the ‘seal’, the last of the prophets. His successors, khalifa, (Caliphs) inherited only the office of leading the community in prayer and war and judging according to the revelation.

Abu Bakr, the father of the Prophet’s wife ‘Aisha and his first successor, managed to overcome the rebellions that broke out soon after Muhammad’s death, for the freedom­loving Bedouins, who particularly disliked the Islamic tax system, tried to regain their old independence. During Abu Bakr’s short reign (632—634), the armies of the Mus­lims reached southern Iraq and Palestine. These enterprises can be explained when one remembers that in 628—so tra­dition has it—the Prophet had sent letters to the rulers of Byzanz, Iran, and Egypt to invite them to embrace Islam. Shortly afterwards, first encounters with the Byzantines took place. This opened the way for his successors to fur­ther conquests, and military success of spectacular scope was achieved under Abu Bakr’s successor, the stern Umar ibn al-Khattab (634—644). Damascus was conquered in 635, Egypt in 639—644, and most of Persia between 640 and 644.

After Umar’s assassination in 644, Uthman ibn Affan (644—656) successfully continued sending out Mus­lim armies east and west. Members of the ancient aristo­cratic Meccan family Umayya now reappeared at the polit­ical forefront, although this very family had been among Muhammad’s staunchest opponents. Some of those disaf­fected with the new regime rose against Uthman who was murdered in 656 while reading the Koran; it was he who was responsible for the final redaction of the sacred book. Ali the son of Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib and husband of his youngest daughter Fatima, became Uthman’s suc­cessor, but had to fight Muawiya, from the house of Umayya. In the battle of Siffin, 657, Muawiya persuaded Ali to stop fighting (though Ali was about to gain victory) and to submit himself to arbitration. A segment of Ali’s partisans, outraged at his acceptance of this proposal, left Ali (they are known as Kharijites, “seceders”); in 661, a Kharijite assassinated Ali, and Muawiya, understandably, took advantage of his death.

With Muawiya begins the Umayyad dynasty, whose rulers resided in Syria to reign in the spirit of traditional Arabic leadership and chivalry, while Medina turned into the repository of piety without political power. Under the Umayyads the Muslims extended their rule to the Atlantic in 691; they reached the borders of Byzantium, and their armies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar (Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq) in 711. During the same year they en­tered Transoxiana and also conquered Sind, the lower Indus Valley (now the southern part of Pakistan).

When Muawiya’s son Yazid took power in 680, Ali’s younger son Husain, then in his late fifties, tried once more to regain power for his house. After all, was he not the le­gitimate grandson of the Prophet? His elder brother, Hasan, had perished more than a decade earlier (possibly poi­soned), although he had forfeited his claims to the ccaliph­ate. Husain, his companions, and members of his family were killed in the battle of Kerbela in southern Iraq, on 10 Muharram (the first month of the Islamic year).

At the same time a counter-caliph appeared in Mecca. Abdullah ibn Zubair, son of a well-known companion of the Prophet, rebelled against the Umayyads. As for Iraq, where the party of Ali shi’at Ali, was in any case the strongest political force, new doctrines developed. Ideas appeared concerning the future return of some Alids, who now were living in the hidden world, and grew into a large body of speculations in both theology and folk piety in the centuries to come. Again in Iraq, relations between the Arab conquerors and the mawali (non-Arabs who were attached to an Arabic tribe as clients in order to be full members of the Muslim community) grew tense, for the mawali understandably requested the complete equality of believers, as guaranteed by the Koran.

All these different currents formed a movement whose representatives requested the office of caliph for members of Muhammad’s clan only. The propagandists of this move­ment very skillfully used the pro-Alid feeling in Iraq and Iran to enthrone as Caliph a descendant of the Prophet’s un­cle Abbas (749), thus deeply disappointing the partisans of Ali’s children.

The last Umayyad fled to Andalusia where he founded, in 756, a kingdom which was to produce the fin­est flowers of Arabic culture in art and poetry. The Spanish-Umayyad kingdom reached its culmination under Abdur Rahman III (912—961). It continued until 1031, wit­nessing a unique cultural cooperation between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. After 1031 the country fell to pieces, and Berber groups—the Almohads and the Almoravids—entered the Iberian peninsula to rule there while the Span­ish reconquest increased in strength year by year. The only kingdom able to survive till 1492 was that of the Banu Ah­mar in Granada; the Alhambra is the last work of Arabic art in Spain.

As for the Abbasid rulers, they tried to prove their ad­herence to religious law more than their predecessors had done. More importantly, the empire they ruled was no longer meant to be Arab, as it had been under the Umayy­ads, but rather was intended to be Islamic. The transfer of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad in 756 opened all doors to Persian cultural influence, and when the external power of the Caliphs decreased in the late ninth century, Turkish mercenaries and war slaves (mamlüks) from Cen­tral Asia protected the government and finally founded kingdoms of their own.

Baghdad lived through its most splendid period under Harun ar-Rashid (786—809), well known from the tales of the Arabian Nights. Under Harun’s second son Me’mun (813—833), translations of Greek scientific and philosoph­ical works into Arabic were encouraged. These translations influenced the development of Islamic learning and were later transferred to Europe, enriched by Arabic contribu­tions; these works, through the mediation of translators in medieval Spain, helped the growth of European science and medicine.

Slightly later, princes in the border areas of the Abbasid empire moved toward independence, taking their realms as fiefs from the Caliph. The founder of the Persian Shiite dynasty of the Buwaihids (Buyids), Muizz ad­Daula, adopted the title “sultan” for the first time (932). In 945, the Buwaihids took over actual rule in Baghdad, with the Caliph continuing to serve as the figure head.

In Egypt, two Turkish dynasties succeeded each other as supporters of the Abbasids. They were ousted in 969 when the Shiite Fatimids conquered the country, coming from North Africa to found Cairo.

In the east, the Turkish sultan Mahmud of Ghazna extended his power into the Indian subcontinent; in 1026 Lahore became the capital of the Indian province of the Ghaznavids. From that time a rich Persian literature and Persianate culture developed in the subcontinent, extending to Bengal and southern India, the Deccan. Shortly before the Ghaznavids, a new era of neo-Persian as the lan­guage of literature had begun in Khorasan, present-day Af­ghanistan, thanks to the literary interests of the princely house of the Samanids. Although Arabic remained the sa­cred, theological language of the Islamic world, Persian was accepted as the main literary medium in the areas that stretched from the Balkans to Bengal, even though at a later point Turkish became an important literary medium, while in the subcontinent diverse regional languages slowly began to bloom.

While Mahmud and his successors consolidated their empire, other Turkish groups from Central Asia entered Iran and Iraq, and in 1055 the Seljuk prince Tughrul Beg assumed the role of guardian of the weak Abbasid Caliph. The Seljuks, stern Sunnites, formed one of the most im­portant empires in the Near East and inspired new devel­opments in Islamic art. In 1071, their victory over the Byzantines opened the way into Anatolia for the Muslims. To this day one can admire the grand mosques, madrasahs, and mausoleums built by the Rum Seljuks or their suzerains in Erzerum, Sivas, Kaiseri, and their residence, Konya. Their realm extended to the southern coastal area of Anatolia.

Much of the flourishing Islamic civilization was wiped out by the Mongol onslaught, which began in Central Asia in 1220, and to which the Abbasid Empire succumbed; the last Caliph was killed in 1258, and Baghdad was largely destroyed. In Anatolia the Rum Seljuk empire disintegrated under Mongol pressure. Out of the numerous independent principalities, the family of the Ottomans emerged as lead­ers, and under Orhan, the second ruler of this house, Bursa was conquered in 1326. This city on the northwestern fringe of Anatolia became the first cultural center of the na­scent Ottoman Empire. After the battle of Kosova in Yu­goslavia in 1389, large parts of the Balkans came under Ot­toman rule; the new capital was Edirne (Adrianople). But when Constantinople, Istanbul, was conquered on May 29, 1453, it became the heart of the Empire. Did not the Prophet say: “They will conquer Constantinople—hail to the people and hail to the army who will do so!”

The Mongol rule, some of whose rulers converted to Islam about 1300, gave new impulses to the areas of Iran and Iraq, which had been lacking a central authority since 1258, even though the Caliphs had long ceased wielding real power. Following the Mongol conquest a number of principalities emerged in Iran, many of which were overrun by Timur (Tamerlane), the Turkish conqueror from Central Asia (ci. 1405). He reached northwestern India as far as Delhi in 1398, and Ankara in central Anatolia in 1402. An extremely cruel warrior, Tamerlane was nevertheless inter­ested in fine art and literature, took with him master crafts­men from everywhere he went, and had his capital, Samar­kand, adorned with beautiful buildings. His descendants, especially those who ruled the eastern part of the Iranian world, were likewise patrons of fine art. Miniature painting as well as calligraphy reached their first highpoint in the late fifteenth century in Herat, and poetry flourished.

As for Egypt, the Fatimid, Shia-Ismaili dynasty had been replaced after 200 years of rule by the Sunnite Kurd­ish family of the Ayyubids. The most important ruler of this dynasty was Saladin, famed even in Europe as a just and noble ruler, thanks to his role during the Crusades. The marriage of the widow of the last Ayyubid with her Turkish commander-in-chief led, in 1250, to the formation of the Mamluk reign in Egypt. The strong, energetic Mamluk sul­tan Baibars was able to stop the Mongol hordes at Am Jalut in Syria in 1260. During the first half of the Mamluk reign, until 1382, the throne was usually hereditary, while in the second period the sultan was generally elected. The ruler had to be a member of the class of military slaves imported from southern Russia, the Kipchak steppes, or the Cauca­sus; a long and complicated process was required for such a slave to reach higher rungs on the ladder of military hi­erarchy.

The Mamluk rule of Egypt, Syria, and the holy cit­ies of Mecca and Medina is notable for building activities on a grand scale. It ended in 1516 when the Ottoman troops under Selim the Grim vanquished the Egyptian army near Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo. Ottoman power then extended over the Fertile Cres­cent and the sacred cities; under Selim’s successor, Suley­man the Magnificent (1520—1566), the Ottomans pro­ceeded even farther than before to the west to lay siege to Vienna in 1529. During Suleyman’s reign the master archi­tect Sinan adorned the capital as well as Edirne with mag­nificent mosques.

To the east of the Ottoman empire, Shiite movements that had been evident in Iran for some time crystallized to­ward the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1501, Shah Ismail, at the age of fourteen, ascended the throne of Iran to found the dynasty of the Safavids and to make the Shiite form of Islam the official religion of Iran. Thus, a Shiite wedge was placed between the Sunni Otto­mans in the West and the emerging, predominantly Sunni Mughal Empire in the east (although Shia rulers became more prominent in India in the course of time). This religio­political situation helps explain certain developments in the Middle East and also the special role of Iran during the last decades, for the Shiite form of Islam was never made the state religion in any other country.

At the time when the Ottoman empire was expanding and Iran was becoming a Shiite country while Timur’s de­scendants were losing their grip over eastern Iran, another member of the house of Timur, Babur, born in Farghana, founded a powerful empire in northwestern India. Ever since the inroads of Mahmud of Ghazna after the year 1000, Muslim kingdoms had followed each other in the subcon­tinent, extending soon to eastern Bengal and to the Deccan. Babur overcame the Lodi rulers of Delhi in 1526 to found the dynasty of the Great Mughals, which continued to exist for more than three centuries. Babur’s son Humayun had to seek shelter at the Safavid court of Iran, but was able to return to his homeland and had just begun to consolidate it when he died in an accident. It was his son Akbar (1556— 1605) who gave the empire its true shape. His tolerance for, interest in, and cooperation with Hindus, Christians, and Parsees colored at least part of Indian Islam. His own and his descendants’ lively interest in fine arts, especially ar­chitecture and miniature painting, gave Islamic art new impulses.

Akbar’s son Jahangir and his grandson, Shah Jahan followed his tolerant attitude to a certain extent. Shah Ja­han’s son Dara Shikoh is famed for his interest in mysticism and in the religious systems of Hinduism; he undertook a Persian translation from the Sanskrit of fifty Upanishads. The finest architectural works in northern India belong to the early Mughal time, i.e., the years between 1560 and 1660, such as the famed Taj Mahal, the mausoleum of Shah Jahan’s wife. This glorious period ended with Dara Shikoh’s execution in 1659 at the hand of his brother Au­rangzeb, who in vain tried to expand the Mughal empire into the Deccan where the kingdoms of Bijapur and Gol­conda boasted a refined Islamic cultural life and were seats

of literature and fine arts for more than two centuries. Au­rangzeb died, aged nearly ninety, in 1707. The weakened empire became a toy for different Indian factions and as­sorted invaders: the Persian king Nadir Shah plundered Delhi in 1739 and the Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Durrani led military expeditions against northwest India. The polit­ical awakening of the Hindus (especially the Mahrattas) and the Sikhs and, more than anything else, the increasing ex­pansion of the British East India Company from 1757 re­sulted finally in the political breakdown of the last vestiges of the Mughal empire. After the abortive military revolt, the so-called Mutiny, in 1857, the British Crown took over India with the exception of the princely states; the last Mu­ghal emperor died in Rangoon in exile.

Islam continued to spread in the Indian and Indone­sian areas even in times of political decay; nowadays almost half of the world’s Muslims live in this part of the world. The first modernist movements in the nineteenth century began from the Indian subcontinent in order to help Mus­lims to adapt to—or to resist—modern life as they ob­served it in the activities of their colonial masters. One must not forget the strong, very active groups of Muslims in Central Asia and China, and the steadily growing pres­ence of Islam in East and West Africa. The growing number of Muslims in the Western world should also be mentioned.

From the late seventeenth century, a certain stagna­tion among Muslims can be observed as a result of political weakness and the loss of many important areas after the opening of the sea passage to India and the rapid growth of European power. However, in the eighteenth century—a time usually neglected by orientalists—germs of new inter­pretations of the Koran and of Islam as well as first attempts at self-identification vis-à-vis the West become visible in different parts of the Islamic world. In the nine­teenth century, some Islamic peoples reached a more out­spoken form of self-assertion and attempted to define their role as Muslims in a changing world.

After World War I, nationalism, inoculated into the Near and Middle East by Europeans, appears with full strength. The division of the Middle East after that war, in the attempt to dismember the Ottoman Empire, helped the growth of nationalism. A number of independent states were formed whose names may or may not include references to Islam. The gamut, with changing emphasis, runs from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to Turkey, which claims absolute laicism as the foundation of its constitution, even though many people still feel they are perfectly faithful Muslims.