Asian Art

History of Islam

The history of Islam is believed, by historians, to have originated with the Islamic prophet Muhammad's mission in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE, although Muslims regard this time as a return to the original faith passed down by the Abrahamic prophets, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, with the submission (Islām) to the will of God. The study of early Islamic history —spanning the period up to the rise of the Abbasids— based on insufficient objective data, combined with varying methodological approaches to traditional sources, has given rise to revisionist historical theses. These challenge the (conservative) narrative that the faith originated from a single root and spread across diverse regions; instead, they propose that the story is a construct built retrospectively by piecing together elements developed in different locales —such as texts, legal codes, genealogies, and anecdotes— and suggest that the actual history is best explained through evolutionary-syncretic models of varying nuances. The early Muslim conquests taking place across the vast territories —which could be considered empty space— of Arabia, as well as over the expansive lands of two empires in the north that were collapsing under their own weight were responsible for the spread of Islam. Revisionists characterize this as a form of secular Arab expansionism, adding that the extraordinary human stories and archetypes from the early Islamic period were fabricated to construct the religious rhetoric of this expansion and to address contemporary needs. By the 8th century CE, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from al-Andalus in the west to the Indus River in the east. Polities such as those ruled by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (in the Middle East and later in Spain and Southern Italy), the Fatimids, Seljuks, Ayyubids, and Mamluks were among the most influential powers in the world. Highly Persianized empires built by the Samanids, Ghaznavids, and Ghurids significantly contributed to technological and administrative developments.

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See also

• ▸Conservative Judaism
• ▸Gert Town, New Orleans
• ▸East Asian religions

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.