Expansion of Islam during the Medieval Period Essay

The development of Islam in beingness history has resulted in major political, economic, and military ramifications, non that in the Islamic field, but alike in the world-wide community at that period. scarce decades following the first recitations of the Quran by Prophet Muhammad, a vast pudding stone of the Islam religion can be traced from the Atlantic Ocean going all the way to Central Asia in the east. Islam has expanded greatly so during the Medieval Era. This modern global order has massive implications, and resulted into various wars, and states and g everywherenments fought with each other and outside forces. scorn counter-revolutions in the dispel of the religion, Islam continued to gain ground in the vast regions of Africa, the India, and Southeast Asia. The Islamic acculturation was indeed one of the most highly genuine in the world during the Medieval Era, which was later on exceeded by the Europe empires with the economic and military growth of the weste rn hemisphere. The advancement of Islam during the Medieval period was great and non able, as the religion that is fairly young grew to be one of the most dominant world religions even today, with an estimated to a greater extent than 1 one thousand million follower, second altogether if in size to Christianity.The preceding paragraphs shall be the historical estimate of this origin of the Islam religion. Islam religion Brief all overview The Islamic tradition finds its origins from the teachings of their prophet Muhammad during the 7th Century. Consisting of more than a billion followers all over the world, Islam can be said to be the 2nd biggest of all the world religions. The most holy text of Islam is the Quran, which is believed to have been given to Muhammad by God, or Allah.This religion also recognizes Moses and messiah as prophets, and regard their teachings as important, which would account for certain parallelisms with world religions such as Christianity. The Is lamic brio is basically guided by the Five Pillars, which prescribes certain aspects of life and forms their culture and traditions. Believing in a single God whom Islamics would call Allah, most of the Quranic teachings are even used as laws of states that have Islam as the state religion. Like Christianity, the teachings of Jesus are one viewed with high regard but for Islam, Jesus is a prophet sooner than God, hence they reject the Trinity concept. Islamics follow certain codes of conduct, like the daily unavoidableness of praying for a number of times a day and a strict diet, like the refusal to ingest pork. The church service of Islam is called the Mosque, wherein like all other religions, certain rituals are being conducted. The history in the medieval epoch Rise of the caliphate (632750) Before starting his move to Medina, where he migrated, Muhammad commenced his teaching of Islam at the holy city of Mecca, and achieved the inclination of uniting the Arabian family li nes of Arabia into a unified Arab Moslem religious polity.Following the death of Muhammad during the year of 632, there were rising conflicts in the Islamic community on who would succeed him as leader of the community. Nominated to chance such position was Abu Bakr, who was one of the closest people and collaborator to Muhammad his name was raised by Umar ibn al-Khattab, also Muhammads companion. Abu Bakr was then became the first caliph, as his leadership gained great support. Although his leadership walso experience slightly ambition who would support another person in the name of Ali ibn Abi Talib, is argued to be a designated successor.The avengement of a buck in war by the Byzantine forces was made one of the first agenda, although the Ridda wars, or Wars of Apostasy, which was an Arab tribe rebellion, were the first acts of Abu Bakr. The territory of the Caliphate in 750 Umar succeeded as the caliph, when Abu Bakr passed away in the year 634, which was then followed res pectively by Uthman ibn al-Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib, and these first quad leaders where dubbed as the al-khulafa ar-rashidun or Rightly Guided Caliphs. Under their collective leadership, the Islamic territory saw continual expansion into Persian and Byzantine empires.When Umar was assassinated in 644, the election of Uthman as successor was met with increasing opposition. In 656, Uthman was also killed, and Ali assumed the position of caliph. After fighting off opposition in the first civil war (the First Fitna), Ali was assassinated by Kharijites in 661. Following this, Muawiyah, who was regulator of Levant, seized power and began the Umayyad dynasty. These disputes over religious and political leadership would give rise to schism in the Muslim community. The majority accepted the legitimacy of the three rulers prior to Ali, and became known as Sunnis.A minority disagreed, and believed that Ali was the only rightful successor they became known as the Shia. After Muawiyahs death in 680, conflict over succession broke out again in a civil war known as the Second Fitna. Afterward, the Umayyad dynasty prevailed for seventy years, and was able to conquer the Maghrib and Al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula, former Visigothic Hispania) and the Narbonnese Gaul in the west as well as expand Muslim territory into Sindh and the fringes of Central Asia.While the Muslim-Arab elite engaged in conquest, some devout Muslims began to question the piety of indulgence in a worldly life, emphasizing rather poverty, humility and avoidance of sin based on renunciation of bodily desires. Devout Muslim stark exemplars such as Hasan al-Basri would inspire a movement that would evolve into Sufism. For the Umayyad aristocracy, Islam was viewed as a religion for Arabs only the economy of the Umayyad empire was based on the assumption that a majority of non-Muslims (Dhimmis) would pay taxes to the minority of Muslim Arabs.A non-Arab who wanted to convert to Islam was supposed to first become a client of an Arab tribe. Even by and byward conversion, these new Muslims (mawali) did not achieve social and economic equality with the Arabs. The descendants of Muhammads uncle Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib rallied discontented mawali, pathetic Arabs, and some Shia against the Umayyads and overthrew them with the help of their propagandist and general Abu Muslim, inaugurating the Abbasid dynasty in 750. Under the Abbasids, Islamic civilization flourished in the Islamic Golden date, with its capital at the cosmopolitan city of Baghdad.The Islamic Golden Age (7501258) By the late 9th coke, the Abbasid caliphate began to fracture as various regions gained increasing levels of autonomy. Across North Africa, Persia, and Central Asia emirates organize as provinces broke away. The monolithic Arab empire gave way to a more religiously homogenized Muslim world where the Shia Fatimids contested even the religious authority of the caliphate. By 1055 the Seljuq Turks had eliminate d the Abbasids as a military power, just they continued to respect the caliphs titular authority.During this time expansion of the Muslim world continued, by both conquest and peaceful proselytism even as both Islam and Muslim trade networks were extending into sub-Saharan West Africa, Central Asia, Volga Bulgaria and the Malay archipelago. The Golden Age saw new legal, philosophical, and religious developments. The major hadith collections were compiled and the four modern Sunni Madhhabs were established. Islamic law was advanced greatly by the efforts of the early 9th century jurist al-Shafii he codified a method to establish the reliability of hadith, a topic which had been a locale of dispute among Islamic scholars.Philosophers Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Al-Farabi sought to incorporate Greek principles into Islamic theology, while others like the eleventh century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against them and ultimately prevailed. Finally, Sufism and Shiism both underwe nt major changes in the 9th century. Sufism became a full-fledged movement that had move towards mysticism and away from its ascetic roots, while Shiism split due to disagreements over the succession of Imams.The circularise of the Islamic dominion induced hostility among medieval ecclesiastical Christian authors who saw Islam as an opponent in the light of the large numbers of new Muslim converts. This opposition resulted in polemical treatises which depicted Islam as the religion of the antichrist and of Muslims as libidinous and subhuman. In the medieval period, a few Arab philosophers like the poet Al-Maarri take a critical approach to Islam, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides contrasted Islamic views of morality to Jewish views that he himself elaborated. Starting in the 9th century, Muslim conquests in the West began to be reversed.The Reconquista was launched against Muslim principalities in Iberia, and Muslim Italian possessions were lost to the Normans. From the 11t h century onwards alliances of European Christian kingdoms mobilized to launch a series of wars known as the Crusades, convey the Muslim world into conflict with Christendom. Initially successful in their goal of taking the Holy land, and establishing the crusader states, Crusader gains in the Holy Land were later reversed by subsequent Muslim generals such as Saladin who recaptured Jerusalem during the Second Crusade.In the east the Mongol Empire put an end to the Abbassid dynasty at the Battle of Baghdad in 1258, as they overran in Muslim lands in a series of invasions. stave in Egypt, the slave-soldier Mamluks took control in an uprising in 1250 and in alliance with the Golden Horde were able halt the Mongol armies at the Battle of Ain Jalut. Mongol rule extended across the width of almost all Muslim lands in Asia and Islam was temporarily replaced by Buddhism as the prescribed religion of the land.Over the next century the Mongol Khanates converted to Islam and this religious and cultural absorption ushered in a new age of Mongol-Islamic synthesis that shaped the further spread of Islam in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Ottomans and Islamic empires in India (12581918) The Seljuk Turks conquered Abbassid lands and adopted Islam and become the de facto rulers of the caliphate. They captured Anatolia by defeating the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, thereby precipitating the call for Crusades. They unless fell apart rapidly in the second half of the 12th century giving rise to various semi-autonomous Turkic dynasties.In the 13th and 14th centuries the Ottoman empire (named after Osman I) emerged from among these Ghazi emirates and established itself after a string of conquests that included the Balkans, parts of Greece, and western Anatolia. In 1453 under Mehmed II the Ottomans laid besieging to Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. The Byzantine fortress succumbed shortly thereafter, having been battered by superior Ottoman cannonry . Beginning in the 13th century, Sufism underwent a transformation, largely as a result of the efforts of al-Ghazzali to legitimize and reorganize the movement.He developed the model of the Sufi ordera community of spiritual teachers and students. Also of importance to Sufism was the creation of the Masnavi, a collection of mystical poetry by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. The Masnavi had a profound influence on the development of Sufi religious thought to many Sufis it is second in importance only to the Quran. In the early 16th century, the Shiite Safavid dynasty assumed control in Persia and established Shia Islam as an official religion there, and despite periodic setbacks, the Safavids remained powerful for two centuries.Meanwhile, Mamluk Egypt fell to the Ottomans in 1517, who then launched a European campaign which reached as far as the gates of Vienna in 1529. After the invasion of Persia, and realise of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, Delhi became the most important cultural centre of the Muslim east. Many Islamic dynasties ruled parts of the Indian subcontinent starting from the 12th century. The prominent ones include the Delhi Sultanate (12061526) and the Mughal empire (15261857). These empires helped in the spread of Islam in South Asia. but by the mid-eighteenth century the British empire had ended the Mughal dynasty.In the 18th century the Wahhabi movement took hold in Saudi Arabia. Founded by the preacher Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Wahhabism is a fundamentalist political orientation that condemns practices like Sufism and the veneration of saints as un-Islamic. By the 17th and 18th centuries, despite attempts at modernization, the Ottoman empire had begun to feel threatened by European economic and military advantages. In the 19th century, the rise of patriotism resulted in Greece declaring and winning independence in 1829, with several Balkan states following suit after the Ottomans suffered defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878.The Otto man era came to a close at the end of World War I. proof The history of the Islamic religion during the medieval era is great and dynamic indeed, as the rise into global prominence could be noted to be a magnificent and unprecedented event in world history. Truly, the historical struggle of Islam is one that has witnessed countless conflicts and eventually successes. Even today, even as the religion has not regained the glory of the Golden Ages, it remains to be one of the most dominant world religions in our global community, as billions of followers continue to adhere to the teachings of their prophet Mohammad.