by Ed Husain
Islam was spread through a combination of Arab merchant traders upholding the moral character of faith in their business conduct (fair prices, not cheating, reliable); Arab conquerors expanding the borders of their power to prevent attacks and gain riches; some degree of missionary activity of evangelical Muslims; and most widely disseminated by the charisma and conviction of the mystical Sufis. Often times, it was an amalgamation of all of these strands that led to the speedy advance of Islam. Today, however, the growth of Islam is not due primarily to conversions, but high rates of fertility.
The world’s 1.7 billion Muslims live in seven different cultural and geographic spheres. The first is the Arabic-speaking domain from Iraq to Mauritania, home to approximately 400 million Muslims. This is the oldest wing of the House of Islam. The Prophet himself resided in Arabia and sent envoys to neighbouring lands to invite them to join the Muslim community. Only 20 per cent of the Muslim world lives in this realm today. The poetic language of the Quran spread throughout these lands with the early Muslims. Iraq, Syria, North Africa and Egypt all adopted Arabic. Ethnically, therefore, these nations were not originally Arab, only linguistically. This distinction is now rarely made. In fact, the beating heart of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s lay in Cairo and Damascus, not Riyadh or Doha. Persians and Turks did not start speaking Arabic, though they did embrace the faith.2
The Persian sphere, consisting of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, is the second zone of the House of Islam. Here, the 100-million-strong population speaks Farsi, Dari or Tajik – different dialects of the same language. Persian Muslims usually have a strong feeling of affinity with the companion of the Prophet Salman al-Farsi (d. 656), the first Persian convert to Islam. As early as 636, the Muslims were engaged in conflict with the Persians, most famously at the Battle of Qadisiya (636–7). By 750, after more than a century of trade and taxation for protection of Persian municipalities by the Muslims, the Persian presence within Islam was strong enough to topple the Umayyad rulers and replace them with a new dynasty, that of the Abbasids, descendants of the family of the Prophet.
Today, Iran is home to the largest Shi‘a Muslim population in the world. Of its 80 million populace, the vast majority are adherents of Shi‘a Islam, with its greater emphasis on respecting the household of the Prophet. Away from Iran, and from Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, most Muslims are not Shi‘a.
Sub-Saharan Africa, home to some 250 million Muslims, is the third zone. Islam first spread to Mali and Senegal in the seventh century. Several companions of the Prophet Mohamed were buried in Chad, pointing to an Islamic presence there in the first century of Islam. By the eleventh century, nearby Ghana had a powerful Islamic kingdom. Arabs and Persians traded and settled on the coastal areas of east Africa, Kenya and Somalia, bringing Islam to those regions. Islam only arrived in Nigeria, with its varied languages, somewhere around the tenth century. For Africans, Bilal al-Habashi, a beloved companion of the Prophet and the first African convert to Islam, has special resonance. Bilal was the first muezzin, the first to call people to prayer from the roof of the Prophet’s mosque in Medina.
The fourth sphere is the Indian subcontinent. Mohamed bin Qasim, a general of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), conquered Sindh in 710, but it was the gentle Sufis, with their music, miracles, mysticism and meditation, who spread Islam throughout India from the tenth century. Today, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka make up this domain, which has the world’s highest concentration of Muslims, around 400 million. The Mughal empire consolidated and codified Islam in this region from the sixteenth century.
The fifth concentration is Turkic. It spans around 170 million Muslims who speak mostly Turkish, but also include others of backgrounds such as Azeri, Chechens, Chinese Uighur, Uzbek, Kirghiz and Turkmen. Turks conquered and took Central Asia from the Persians in 1071 during the battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt, in present-day Turkey). This was the precursor to the Seljuk Muslim empire’s conquest of Anatolia, which led to the Ottomans’ eventual seizure of Constantinople in 1453. The Turkic sphere, care of the Ottomans, ruled over the entire Middle East for six centuries, dominating the Arabic-speaking hinterlands.
Sixth is the Malay area of South East Asia, which consists of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and sizeable minorities in Thailand and the Philippines. More than 200 million Muslims live here. Islam arrived relatively late in this location, incrementally from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Sufi traders from Arabia, particularly the descendants of the Prophet from the Hadhramaut valley in Yemen, converted the first Muslims in this part of the world.
The seventh and final home for Muslims is in the West. Roughly 60 million of today’s Muslims live in the West as minorities and new immigrant communities in, for example, France, Germany, Britain and the United States, but also as older, settled majorities in countries such as Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia.
But what does it mean to be a Muslim?
To be a ‘practising Muslim’ or an ‘observant’ one, a believer needs to act on his or her faith. And what should a believer practise or observe?
The Prophet taught that Islam is ‘built on five’. Based on that hadith, or saying of the Prophet, Muslims teach and uphold the ‘five pillars of Islam’, actions that lend a feeling of unity and common purpose to believers from Indonesia to Morocco. A Muslim from Turkey or Bosnia may be white and Europeanised, but they will feel at home observing these ubiquitous rituals, whether in black Sudan or brown Bangladesh. Each one of the five pillars is mentioned in the Quran, meaning that they are broadly accepted by all mainstream Muslims.
The saying of and believing in the Shahadah is the first pillar. The second is the five prayers to which the Prophet referred. The first, Fajr, is at dawn. Dhuhr, the second, is at noon. The third, Asr, comes in the late afternoon, Maghrib at dusk, and Esha, the fifth and last, about an hour after sundown. These daily prayers are the milestones in a believer’s day. They connect the faithful to the divine and remind Muslims why they are on this earth: to worship the creator, be upright with others, and prepare for their return to Allah when they die.
On his deathbed, the Prophet warned Muslims not to abandon their prayers. Turning to those surrounding him, he declared: ‘Al-salah, al-salah – The prayer, the prayer.’
The five daily prayers remain central across the Muslim world. The call to prayer or adhan fills the air as the muezzin invites believers to pray at the mosque. The Prophet taught that the rewards from God were higher in collective prayers, which strengthened this sense of Muslim community, or jama’ah. But a believer may also pray alone, whether at home or on an aeroplane. There is disagreement among the faithful as to when exactly these five daily prayers should be performed – some Muslims pray at five separate intervals, while others merge them. When the Prophet introduced the idea of daily prayers it was neither new nor odd. Standing, bowing and prostrating in worship were normal among Jews and early Christians, and still common in Catholic and Orthodox devotion.
Believers repeat the ritual of these prayers throughout their lives. First, while standing during prayers, they recite in Arabic the first chapter of the Quran, the short and oft-repeated al-Fatiha, or opening:
Praise be to God,
The Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds;
Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
Master of the Day of Judgement;
Thee do we worship;
And Thine aid we seek.
Show us the straight way,
The way of those on whom
Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace,
Those whose portion is not wrath,
And who go not astray.
Then, bowing, the believer says: Glory to My Lord, Most Magnificent.
And, finally, in prostrating: Glory to My Lord, Most High.
Arabs and Muslims of the East wear clothes that are comfortable to pray in, garments that are not too revealing when bowing and prostrating. Most non-b
elievers do not observe the private moments of Muslim faith in the mosque. Worshippers wash their hands, face and arms before prayer. They wipe their heads, and clean their feet with water.
Prayer and the need for daily ablutions drove the advanced water technology of Muslim civilisations – the fountains and wells in the illustrious mosque courtyards of Córdoba. Society centred on regular prayer in other ways, too. The large mosques in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo were built facing Mecca, as that is the direction in which Muslims pray. Marketplaces, hospitals and schools were then located around the mosques, because that was where the masses gathered for worship every day. Craftsmen and calligraphers won commissions to adorn the mosque walls with Quranic verses and poetry. In short, Muslim civilisation was built around the five daily prayers.
Giving alms, or Zakah, to the poor is the third pillar of Islam. Every Muslim is expected to give 2.5 per cent of their surplus wealth to the needy. This money is meant to fund schools, hospitals, orphanages, travel lodges and mosques. In the past, the money sometimes made it into state treasuries. Today, some Muslim governments administer Zakah, but most Muslims distribute it privately among those who are qualified to receive it.
The fourth pillar of Islam is perhaps the hardest to uphold, which also makes it the most satisfying. For an entire month of the lunar year, Ramadan, healthy Muslims fast from dawn to dusk.3 During the day, drinking, eating, smoking and sexual contact are forbidden; Muslims in the hottest countries or the coldest do not let one drop of water pass their lips. When the sun goes down, there is a special joy as families and local communities break the fast together with dates and water as the Prophet Mohamed did. A feast follows the regular dusk prayer. After night prayers, there is an additional, longer prayer, the Tarawih, in which the entire Quran is recited over the course of the month.
The final and fifth pillar was once the hardest, but now, in a world connected by planes and trains, it comes with relative ease: the pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj. The airport at Jeddah feels like most other airports, and the motorway to Mecca is now laid with tarmac, busy with cars, and has road signs and advertisements. Throughout most of Muslim history, pilgrims would come on foot, horse or camel to this city in the Arabian desert. As they made their months-long journey, they recited: ‘Here we are oh God, here we are at your service – Labbaik, allahumma labbaik.’ Muslims still raise this chant, and in this there dwells a feeling of connecting to the Divine as they recall Abraham, Ishmael and Mohamed using these words. From Egypt, it used to take two months to reach Mecca. From India or Africa, it took four. As believers made their arduous journey, they relied on God for protection and a safe return home.
My visits to Mecca have always left me wanting to return again. It is still a commercial city, but the prayer-filled, serene quarters surrounding the Ka’bah fill every visitor with awe.
About 200 metres from the Ka’bah, Muslims walk up a small hilltop known as Safa where thousands of pilgrims congregate. From Safa, Muslims walk to Marwa, a nearby hill. Walking, sometimes running, between these hills, believers remember Hagar’s search for water for the baby Ishmael. Hagar was Abraham’s lawful lover, in addition to his wife Sarah, but Muslims refer to Hagar as his ‘second wife’. Muslims all grow up knowing this story from parents, partly mentioned in the Quran and partly told by the Prophet. Hagar ran from Safa to Marwa seven times. Hagar was desperate and lonely, but she relied on God and her love of Abraham and Ishmael. This self-sacrifice brought her divine help. When she returned to check on Ishmael, a small well had appeared beside the infant. The Well of Zamzam still stands in Mecca today.
For millennia, pilgrims have drunk water from this well and remembered Hagar’s trust in God, and His help for a pure-hearted woman, a lover of God and Abraham, in the Arabian Desert. Muslims are descendants of Ishmael. Our Jewish cousins are descendants of Isaac. We share the same patriarch in Abraham, who God promised in the Bible would have ‘descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky’.4
In Mecca, where pilgrims poured in from all over the world, a believer would have met saints and scholars. The keepers of the Well of Zamzam would have poured water from precious jugs passed down through generations for the faithful, and the pilgrim would have walked barefooted through Safa and Marwa on paths that were not paved with marble as they are today. Male pilgrims wearing two pieces of unstitched cotton and women in modest clothes would have fulfilled the rituals of the Hajj that honour Abraham, Hagar and the Prophet Mohamed. After Mecca, Muslims would travel to see Medina, where their beloved Prophet established the first Muslim community, and his final resting place. There, they would stand before his tomb and recite poetry. They would visit the graves of his family and companions, feeling that link of faith through the centuries. Then, each pilgrim would slowly head homeward to Africa, India or Indonesia. The modern Muslim gets home much faster. They absorb the blessings of the Hajj and try to retain the spiritual uplift of the fifth pillar of Islam on their return to normal life. Those who have made the journey are known as Hajji, a title of honour.
The matter of who leads Muslims in upholding the five pillars causes angst among many Muslims, and confusion among non-Muslims. Muslims do not require religious leadership; Islam is not like Catholicism and has no equivalent of clergy or a pope. The Prophet stressed repeatedly that he bequeathed the Quran, his family and his own example as guiding lights for Muslims. The survival, indeed the thriving of Islam for over a millennium, is ample evidence that the faith’s spiritual core is mostly robust and intact. But in worldly, material, terms, Muslims are suffering from disunity and have no centralised political leadership as they did under the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Some Muslims crave a caliphate because of the glory and power associated with past Muslim civilisations. The so-called ISIS does not uphold this magnificence for most Muslims. When the Prophet died, his companions selected a caliph or leader in Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s closest confidant and father of his favourite wife, Ayesha. The title caliph meant representative; Abu Bakr was seen as the Prophet’s agent after his death.
That first period of the caliphate of the four caliphs after the Prophet’s death lasted only thirty years, from 633 to 661. The governor of Damascus, Mu‘awiya, gave rise to a new order by assuming the caliphate for himself after the assassination of the fourth caliph, Imam Ali, in 661. Known from 661 to 750 as the Umayyad caliphate, it was based in Damascus, as Islam expanded beyond the deserts of Arabia, and it was under the full control of Mu‘awiya. By the ninth century, the Umayyad caliphate had disintegrated in the face of rival caliphates in Spain, subsequently home to a glorious Muslim civilisation in Andalusia. Soon, in the Arab lands, the Abbasids (750–1258) took political leadership of Islam from Baghdad. Then the Mamluks (1250–1517), headquartered in Cairo, overlapped with the Seljuks (1077–1307) in central Asia and then Iran. The Ottomans (1281–1924) ruled Arabia and central Asia, expanding into North Africa, and Eastern Europe by the sixteenth century. In parallel, the Safavids (1501–1732) ruled the Persian Muslims, and the Mughals (1526–1858) ruled the Indians. Throughout, there were other rivals for power, holdouts, and most importantly overlap in the smaller sultanates in India and South East Asia. Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, was divided into princedoms. Rarely, since the Prophet, has there been a single ruler of all the world’s Muslims. Rivalry, competition and even warfare between caliphate claimants was the norm.
It is often assumed that Islam was ‘spread by the sword’, though perhaps this impression is influenced more by today’s headlines than historical fact. The Prophet Mohamed returned to Mecca from Medina in 629 victorious. After years of killing, torture and boycott at the hands of the Meccan elite, he would have been fully within his rights by the standards of the time to raze their houses to the ground in revenge. Instead, he rode into Mecca on a mule, his head lowered in humility, and forgave the city’s residents with a general amnesty. That same spirit, in general, continued among his people. The Oxford historian Peter Frankopan in his magisterial The Silk R
oads writes:
In fact, it appears that the Muslim conquests were neither as brutal nor as shocking as the commentators make out. Across Syria and Palestine, for example, there is little evidence of violent conquest in the archaeological record. Damascus, for instance, the most important city in northern Syria, surrendered quickly after terms were agreed between the local bishop and the attacking Arab commander. Even allowing for some poetic licence, the compromise was both reasonable and realistic: in exchange for allowing churches to remain open and untouched and for the Christian population to remain unmolested, the inhabitants agreed to recognise the overlordship of new masters. In practice what this meant was paying tax not to Constantinople and to the imperial authorities, but to representatives of ‘the prophet, the caliphs and the believers’.5
Arab occupation of surrounding lands and leadership over Muslims did not last. Non-Arabs would come to dominate the Muslim world. The Ottoman Turks ruled Sunnis, for instance, for 600 years until the early twentieth century. After the end of Abbasid rule in 1258, it was the Turks, Indians and Persians that dominated Muslim history. The Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids were not Arabs, but their influence and institutions have shaped Islam.
Today, though 80 per cent of the House of Islam is not Arab, Arabs and conflicts in the Arab world set the global geopolitical and religious agenda. In fact, the Muslim world is undergoing a renewed Arabisation, led by Saudi Arabian-influenced Salafism and the international activism of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, as we shall see.
There were always multiple claimants to Muslim leadership, and the vying started very early in Islam’s history. Only fifty years after the Prophet’s passing away, the peace that he pursued was pilloried. Bloodshed and destruction began with the battle of Karbala.