This section is more for the technologically minded. Photo: Purity of line characterizes the late twelfth century Kutubiyah Mosque of the Berbers in Marrakesh. In 2015, Muslims made up 24.1% of the global population. The Ghaznavids patronized al-Biruni, one of the greatest and most original scholars of medival Islam, and the Hamdanids, a purely Arab dynasty, patronized such poets as al-Mutanabbi and philosophers like the great al-Farabi, whose work kept the flame of Arab culture alive in a difficult period. But as more revelations enjoined him to proclaim the oneness of God universally, his following grew, at first among the poor and the slaves, but later also among the most prominent men of Mecca. Western penetration also drew the Middle East into the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire sided with (Germany, and Great Britain, in response, encouraged and supported the Arab Revolt against the Turks. The Christians permitted Muslims to work, serve in the army, own land, and even practice their religion - all concessions to the importance of Muslims in Spain's still prosperous economy. Not only does it educate people's understanding of the world around them but also has rules and obligations which influence what people can or can't do. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds; Islam had profound effects on all aspects of daily life and society but these did vary over time and place. Photo: Pilgrims at the climax of their hajj, "standing" before God at 'Arafat near the spot where Muhammad delivered his farewell sermon. Muhammad's Mission and Campaigns. Abu Bakr was known as the first caliph (from khalifa, the Arabic for successor). In addition, the early Muslims tended to oppose figural art (and in some cases all art) as distracting the community from the worship of God and hostile to the strictly unitarian religion preached by Muhammad, and all four of the schools of Islamic law banned the use of images and, declared that the painter of animate figures would be damned on the Day of Judgment. Guide us in the straight path, Photo: Preeminent among artists of the Muslim world is the calligrapher, as it is his privilege to adorn the word of God. The sunnah - which supplements and complements the Quran, the Word of God, and is next to it in importance - embodies the meticulously documented acts and sayings of the Prophet recorded in a body of writings called the hadith. Photo: Founded in 970, the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo is one of the earliest and finest examples of the Egyptian style in Islamic architecture. Photo: Symbol of the oneness and centrality of God, the Ka'bah stands in the courtyard of Mecca's Sacred Mosque where at the season of the hajj the faithful gather for rituals that precede and end their pilgrimage. They moved the capital of the empire from Syria to Iraq, where they built a new capital, Baghdad, from which, during the next five centuries, they would influence many of the main events of Islamic history. Although individual Turkish generals had already gained considerable, and at times decisive, power in Mesopotamia and Egypt during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the coming of the Seljuks signaled the first large-scale penetration of the Turkish elements into the Middle East. One was a system of banking and exchange so sophisticated that a letter of credit issued in Baghdad could be honored in Samarkand in Central Asia or Kairouan in North Africa. They imported the technologically advanced "ondanique" steel from India, for example, and then processed it at such famous centers of weapons manufacture as Damascus and Toledo, both of which cities won fame for their blades. Dome of the Clocks, Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria. Much of the 'Abbasid administration, for example, was left in the hands of well-educated Persian civil servants, many of whom came from families that had traditionally served the Sassanid kings. Important books were written on soil analysis, water, and what kinds of crops were suited to what soil. If you want to answer this question, then you have to think about the Crusades from the Muslim's point of view. Photo: Another basmalah in ornamental thuluth script is written in the shape of an oval. There was also a vast literature on the correct deportment of princes, as well as anthologies of witty sayings and anecdotes with which to enliven one's epistolary style. Emergence of Islam; Umayyad and Abbasid Empires. The sublime "Verse of the Throne" is perhaps one of the most famous: God - There is no god but He, Who would be its leader? If you need a Login or Registeration, this is your starting point. This pattern was repeated throughout the Byzantine Empire. The military conquest was inspired by religion, but it was also motivated by greed and politics. Cordoba also had some 900 public baths, Europe's first street lights and, five miles outside the city, the caliphal residence, Madinat al-Zahra. As the exact pronunciation was important - and learning it took years - special schools were founded to be sure that no error would creep in as the traditional chanting methods were handed down. Passages of impassioned beauty are no less common than vigorous narratives. Photo: The minaret of the Great Mosque at Kairouan in Tunisia became the prototype for the majority of North African minarets. They also improved trade and agriculture, patronized the arts, made valuable contributions to science, and established Cordoba as the most sophisticated city in Europe. Sharia law has wide-reaching influences on business within the region which need to be appreciated. The Middle East is a geographical region that has been of great importance in history since ancient times. These campaigns, known as the apostasy or ridda wars, effectively consolidated Arabia into a single country under Muslim control within two years. In the tenth century he proposed a plan to dam the Nile. The Muslims also traded medicines, an offshoot of 'Abbasid advances in medical science, as well as paper and sugar. They affirm the Last Judgment, when God, the Judge, will weigh in the balance the faith and works of each man, rewarding the faithful and punishing the transgressor. Islam is based on the belief in one God (Allah) and the teachings of Muhammad as recorded in the Quran, the holy book of Islam. This is a great article i ever seen Ma.Shaa.Allah. This expansion of commercial activity led to other developments too. Muslim Heritage - were Muslim rulers to blame for the decline? The Constitution of Medina - under which the clans accepting Muhammad as the Prophet of God formed an alliance, or federation - dates from this period. Now with the Battle of Nihavand, called the "Conquest of Conquests," 'Umar sealed the fate of Persia; henceforth it was to be one of the most important provinces in the Muslim Empire. Although he assigned Muslim governors to the new provinces, existing Byzantine and Persian administrations were retained wherever possible. 2 The camera obscura. Some of these were no more than efforts to placate European powers - which by then had great influence on the empire's policies - but others, in education and law, were important. A caliph such as Umar seems to have regarded himself, first and foremost, as the leader of the Arabs, and their monotheistic creed as the religious component of their new political identity. Muslims believe that theirs is the only true faith. The exercise of self-control extends far beyond refraining from food and drink; to make one's fast acceptable to God, one must also refrain from cursing, lying, cheating, and abusing or harming others. To keep the Arab Muslims from quarreling, the next caliph, Omar, launched the Muslim conquests: Syria was conquered around 636, Egypt 641, Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire, 650. The cloth trade produced a number of auxiliary exports: gold and silver thread for embroidery, gum from the Sudan for glazing, and needles, looms, and dyestuffs. All of the letters are strictly speaking consonants, and unlike the Roman alphabet used for English and most European languages Arabic writing goes from right to left. The result was to wipe out much of the priceless cultural, scientific, and technological legacy that Muslim scholars had been preserving and enlarging for some five hundred years. Then, in 1482, in a trivial quarrel, the Muslim kingdom split into two hostile factions and, simultaneously, two strong Christian sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, married and merged their kingdoms. In the East, Umayyad rule in Transoxania brought the Arabs into contact with the Turks who, like the Berbers, embraced Islam and, in the course of time, became its staunch defenders. When, for example, al-Mansur died in 775 after a reign of twenty years, his son, al-Mahdi, inherited a full treasury and an empire that was more devoted to trade than war. Militarily formidable, they were also the first power to defeat the Mongols in open combat when, in 1260, the Mongols moved against Palestine and Egypt. Among his works were such titles as An Introduction to the Art of Music, The Reason Why Rain Rarely Falls in Certain Places, The Cause of Vertigo, and Crossbreeding the Dove. In the wake of the Balfour Declaration, and during the British mandate, Jewish immigration increased. For a time the Fatimids aspired to be rulers of the whole Islamic world, and their achievements were impressive. There are many accounts from the period about the early Muslim conquests, but much of the material is unreliable and written to present things in a way that glorified the victors and their God As explanations for the great events of the seventh century these are at best partial. The Berbers later also launched reform movements in North Africa which greatly influenced the Islamic civilization. The mandates, however, were granted, thus extending Western control of the Middle East and also setting the stage for one of the most tragic and intractable conflicts of modern times: the conflict over Palestine which has, since 1948, ignited four wars, sent masses of Palestinian Arabs into exile, contributed to the energy crisis of 1973, and, from 1975 on, fueled the civil war in Lebanon. My other grandparents believe in god but don't believe in religion. At the beginning of this period, the European presence in the Islamic world was largely based on trade. Fasting is also an exercise in self-control and self-denial whereby one learns to appreciate the pangs of hunger that the poor often feel. One important addition by the Ottoman calligraphers was the script called diwani, so called from the word diwan (meaning state council or government office) since it was at first used primarily for documents issued by the Ottoman Council of State. Ibn al-Haytham, for example, wrote The Book of Optics, in which he gives a detailed treatment of the anatomy of the eye, correctly deducing that the eye receives light from the object perceived and laying the foundation for modern photography. The surahs revealed at Mecca - at the beginning of Muhammad's mission - tend to be short and to stress, in highly moving language, the eternal themes of the unity of God, the necessity of faith, the punishment of those who stray from the right path, and the Last Judgment, when all man's actions and beliefs will be judged. Indeed, the Quran is the cornerstone on which the edifice of Islamic civilization has been built. In 610 CE at Mecca there wasn't any religion to follow. To make things more difficult, the Prophet had not left clear instructions as to who should lead the community after his death. Except such as He wills; Photo: Muslim scientists developed the astrolabe, an instrument used long before the invention of the sextant to observe the position of celestial bodies. The Umayyads, however, did manage to achieve a degree of stability, particularly after 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan succeeded to the caliphate in 685. Muhammad's father, 'Abd Allah ibn'Abd al-Muttalib, died before the boy was born; his mother, Aminah, died when he was six. It seems as if, in their slow retreat to the south, they suddenly realized that they were, as Washington Irving wrote, a people without a country, and set about building a memorial: the Alhambra, the citadel above Granada that one writer has called "the glory and the wonder of the civilized world.". Europe's worldwide nineteenth-century search for raw materials, markets, military bases, and colonies eventually touched most of what had been the Arab empire. But they were not always at the forefront and from the time of Mu'awiyah the caliph's role as "Defender of the Faith" increasingly required him to devote attention to the purely secular concerns which dominate so much of every nation's history. 'Abd al-Malik's organization of government agencies was also important; it established a model for the later elaborate bureaucracies of the 'Abbasids and their successor states. Today, therefore, one can hear Arabic spoken - at least for religious purposes - from Mauritania on the Atlantic, across Africa and most of Asia, and as far east as Indonesia and the Philippines. Consequently, the Holy Text could only be collected as a single corpus - "between the two covers" - after the death of Muhammad. In 1824 Mahmud II finally broke the power of the Janissaries, brought in German advisers to restructure the army, and launched a modernization program. 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