Islamic History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Muslim History - Essay ExampleThe history of foundation of Islam is clothed with the veils of invention and obscured by multiple conflicting accounts that make its true outline all but impossible to have a go at it with any clarity. But it is incontrovertible that Northern-Arabia prior to Muhammad was a predominantly tribal environment, structured by exigencies of camel herding, trading, feuding, and raiding. The polite area of Arabia was not in the heartland where Islam was born, but rather had long been located in the coastal confederation and along the gulf. Inland, the only possible location for development of any sort of state was in the impoverished and remote region dominated by Mecca and the Quraysh clan, where ancient pilgrimage centers protected markets in perfume, leather, and other trade goods. But no such development occurred until the advent of Muhammad, who was born around 570, received his first revelations at the age of forty, undertook his momentous journey to Medina (the hijra) in 622 (year one in the Muslim calendar) and died in 632, having led his lot in the conquest of the whole Arab peninsula, and having initiated their great and ultimately successful war against the surrounding Sasanid and Byzantine empires.The devotion of Islam is from the Muslim point of view, the religion of Abraham and Ishmael the forefathers of the Muslims. According to Ibn al-Kalbi, who conveys also the belief of his predecessors, Ishmael settled in Mecca where he became the father of many children who supplanted the Amalekites of Mecca to him is ascribed the origin of the Arabs. Arabs. The Quran states that Abraham and Ishmael raised the foundation of the House and established a proper worship. The rites of the pilgrimage, the circumambulation, the visitation of the lesser pilgrimage, the vigil of Arafat, the sacrifice of the she-camels and the acclamation of the name of the deity came stamp out from the conviction of Abraham and Ishmael, according to Ib n al-kalbi, and they constitute a part of the religion.(Tamara) Islam had come upon the world scene in the seventh century in connection with the explosion of Arabic-speaking, horse mounted warriors out of the Arabian relinquish under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad and his successors. The period of hemispheric history from 1000 to 1500 A.D., what we will call the Islamic nub Period, witnessed a steady and remarkable expansion of Islam, not only as religious belief but as a coherent, universalist model of civilized life. The spread of Islam into new areas of the hemisphere during the Middle Period was given impetus by two major forces. One of these was the advance of Turkish-speaking of Muslim herding stack from central Asia into the Middle vitamin E, a movement that began on a large scale with the conquests of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. The second force was the gradual but persistent movement of Muslim merchants into the lands rimming the Indian ocean, t hat is, East Africa, India, Southeast Asia and China, as well as into Central Asia and West Africa south of the Sahara. A close olfaction at the patterns of travel and migration in the post-Abbasid centuries reveals a quiet but persistent dispersion of legal scholars, theologians, Sufi divines, belle-lettrists, scribes and architects outward from the older centers of Islam to these new frontiers of Muslim military and commercial activity. (Spencer)The Islamic world in Ibn Battutas time was divided politically into numerous kingdoms and principalities. Muslims on the move regarded the jurisdictions of states as a necessary imposition and gave them as little attention as possible. Their primary allegiance was to the Dar al-Islam as a whole. The terrible Mongol conquests of Persia and Syria that occurred between 1219 and 1258 appeared to Muslims to threaten the very existence of