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In the late 670s the aging caliph Mu'awiyah nominated as his successor the son of his favorite wife, a Christian. That son was Yazid, and the nomination was confirmed by the consultative body Mu'awiyah had created from leaders of the Arab tribes. Helping Yazid's succession was his having been a heroic figure in the assault against Constantinople, and perhaps some bribery.
Mu'awiyah died in 680, and a few prominent people were among those who did not accept his son's succession. One opponent was Abduallah ibn Zubayr, from Medina. He had a following among those who disliked Umayyad rule and resented the shift of power from Medina to Damascus. Also opposed to Yazid were three men who believed that if power were to pass from father to son they had more right to rule than did Yazid. One was the eldest surviving son of Ali, a man by the name of Hussein. Another was the son of the former caliph Abu Bakr. The third was the grandson of the former caliph Umar (Omar). Moreover there was opposition to Yazid from those who believed that he was insufficiently pious.
In Kufa, supporters of Hussein invited him to make their city his capital, and they offered to fight for him. Hussein left Mecca and led a small band of relatives, his harem and a horde of followers that included some Bedouin tribesmen. Yazid sent a force of Syrian troops toward Kufa. Hussein was warned that a battle against the Syrians was hopeless. His Bedouin supporters abandoned him, leaving him with just seventy fighting men. The Syrians and Hussein met at the city of Karbala twenty-five miles northwest of Kufa. Hussein was determined to die fighting. One by one his warriors, including two of his sons and six brothers, were slaughtered, as was Hussein.
The heads of Hussein's men were sent as trophies to Damascus. Hussein's head was returned to be buried with his body at Karbala. Hussein became a Shia martyr. At Karbala the Shia built their holiest of shrines. And into modern times the day of Hussein's death would be commemorated as a day of grief.
In Medina and Mecca, Zubayr won additional support from those outraged by the deaths in Muhammad's family. Yazid tried reconciliation, but those from Medina who visited Yazid denounced upon their return the godless luxury they had found in Damascus. Yazid sent 12,000 Syrian troops against Medina and conquered the city in August, 683. Many nobles of the Quraysh tribe were annihilated in the process, and the surviving leaders of Medina's rebellion were executed.
The rebellious Zubayr had relocated in Mecca, and there he was recognized as leader. For two months, beginning in September 683, Yazid's army besieged Mecca. Rocks from catapults fell into the sacred Kaaba. To the horror of believers, the Kaaba caught fire, burned to the ground, and the sacred Black Stone split and fell from its socket. Then in November the leader of Yazid's army learned that Yazid had died. The leader of the Syrian forces offered Zubayr his allegiance and the caliphate if he would promise to take no vengeance regarding previous warfare and if he would rule from Damascus. Zubayr refused the latter condition. The Syrians then lifted their siege and returned to Syria, where conflict erupted over who was to be Yazid's successor.
Yazid was succeeded by his son, a sickly nineteen-year-old, who died a few weeks later, leaving no successor to the Umayyad dynasty. Zubayr won support across much of Arabia, while the senior member of the Umayyad clan, Marwan, took power for the Umayyads. A great battle was fought in 684 at Marj Rahit, a little to the east of Damascus, the Syrian army winning and allowing Marwan to hold on to power in Syria. Marwan extended his rule through Palestine to Egypt, persuading Arab tribesmen in Egypt to change their support from Zubayr to himself. Then on May 7, 685, after nine months as caliph, Marwan died of plague, which had been ravaging Syria and Mesopotamia.
Marwan was succeeded by his son, Malik. The civil war raged for seven more years, until 692, when the Syrian army killed Zubayr and overran Mecca. Malik was caliph for twenty years, and more than any preceding caliph he ruled by force of arms rather than consensus.
Berber tribes had taken advantage of Islam's civil war by attacking Arab enclaves in North Africa. In 689 they overran the Muslim outpost at Kairawan and massacred the retreating Muslims. Then in 694, after he had defeated Zubayr and ended the civil war, Malik sent his Syrian army against the Berbers and against Constantinople's hold on Carthage and Tunis. From the harbor at Tunis Constantinople's navy fled to Sicily. European landowners also fled. Then Malik's military overcame Berber resistance, Malik's forces capturing the legendary Berber warrior queen, Kahinah, who had long been an obstacle to Arab imperialism in North Africa.
In 699 the Muslims extended their rule in North Africa as far west as Tangier. Some Berbers superficially converted to Islam and about twelve thousand of them joined the Arab army. Europeanized North Africa, which had been extensively Christian and tied to the Roman Empire, would now reorient itself toward Islam and to trade and expansion south into western Africa. Islam's navy moved into what had been Constantinople's ports, from which they would threaten Europe.
In the year 700, Islam was poised for more expansion. And just as Romans had not foreseen the change that empire would bring to their city, the conquering Arabs did not foresee the change that would accrue to Islam. The caliph in Damascus was pursuing a policy of maintaining the identity of the conquerors by keeping them segregated from the conquered, including the conquered who had converted to Islam. By the year 700, non-Arab Muslims outnumbered Arab Muslims, and, despite resistance from Arab leaders, the non-Arab Muslims were destined toward integration and becoming a greater force within Islam.
In the early 700s Islam's caliph in Damascus sent his Syrian army to consolidate his power in Mesopotamia. And elsewhere Islam's expansion continued. In response to the plundering of Arab ships by pirates near the mouth of the Indus River, the Muslims launched an expedition with six thousand horses and equal number of camels, through southern Persia and into the southern Indus Valley. Muslim armies from Khurasan went northeast, overrunning the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand and further northeast to what is now China's border. In 711, from around Tangier, an army of about seven thousand Berbers and three hundred Arabs crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and began a conquest of Spain, made easy by disunity there. Spanish towns opened their gates to the conquerors, and Jews welcomed them as liberators.
The new caliph from 715, Sulaiman, saw absurdity in Islam having conquered from Spain to China while nearby Constantinople had not yet been conquered. He believed that victory over that city -- Byzantium and its empire -- would bring an end to the prolonged and exhausting campaigning. In 716 he sent his army and navy to begin another siege at Constantinople. The great city was imperiled again. A general named Leo the Isaurian put the city's defenses in order. Sulaiman's forces were unable to penetrate Constantinople's fortifications. A shorter and more direct route to the heart of Europe than through Spain was thereby blocked. Sulaiman left his forces just outside Constantinople, and there they continued to wear down and to grow weaker. Angry, while on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Sulaiman invited his courtiers to try their swords on four hundred persons recently captured during the fighting at Constantinople, and the courtiers beheaded them as Sulaiman looked on. Sulaiman consoled himself with food and women. Then suddenly he died, and his rule passed to another Umayyad -- his cousin Umar II.
Umar II (Omar II) withdrew Islam's forces from around Constantinople. He discouraged raids against peaceful nations and made peace with all he could. He believed that he and other Arab leaders should live up to Islamic ideals. He disbanded his harem and began practicing frugality. Umar tried to address economic grievances. He made his wife give her jewelry to the public treasury. He supported assimilation between Muslim Arabs and those from conquered lands who had converted to Islam, believing that Islam should bind the empire together. And he attempted reconciliation with the Shia.
Umar encouraged Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to convert to Islam despite the loss this would be in tax revenues. And those who would not convert he left with restrictions. Christians and Jews would not be allowed to hold public office. They were to be prohibited from wearing turbans and would be required to wear clothing that identified them as Christians or Jews. They could ride only packhorses and had to ride without a saddle. They could erect no new places of worship. And Jews were ordered to cut their forelocks.
Umar II died in 720, at the age of thirty-nine, after less than three years in office. After him the pendulum swung back to pleasure and self-interest. The new caliph, Yazid II, enjoyed luxury. He is accused of having been more interested in music and poetry than he was in the Koran. Yazid reversed Umar's reforms and returned to a policy of economic inequality and segregation between Arabs and non-Arabs. And Mesopotamians, Berbers, Egyptians and Shia who did not want a return to the old ways, were embittered.
Despite the recent failure at Constantinople the expansions of the last forty years had left the Arabs with more wealth. Grants of money and land had been accruing to members of the Umayyad clan, to Muhammad's family and to various other Arab leaders. The wealthy owned more slaves. But the rise in affluence was accompanied by the state doing more good works. Grants were given to popular poets, and money was spent on improving conditions in Islam's cities -- cities that had been growing rapidly. New mosques, roads and hospitals were built, creating employment. A pony express now connected Damascus with distant points in Islam. And money was allocated for subsidies to the blind and the chronically sick, in keeping with the Koran's call for helping the poor.
In 743 a caliph came to power who was favored by those wanting continued of imperial expansion. This was Walid II, who was to be accused of being a shallow bon vivant, a handsome man who neglected rule, who spent much of the state's money and pursued pleasures that included drink and debauchery at his desert retreats. From among the ruling Umayyad family a conspiracy arose against him, which was joined by some generals from Syria's army -- an army tired of constant campaigning. In 744 Walid was assassinated. He was succeeded by Yazid III, who was the choice of the Syrian generals. Yazid III promised to keep the Syrian troops in Syria and to rule the empire without relying on them -- perhaps an impossibility. Then late that same year Yazid III died. And the disgruntled Umayyad governor of Armenia, Marwan, arrived in Damascus with his army and assumed power, taking the title Marwan II.
Marwan tried to enforce his rule across the empire by military force. But the good will he needed to rule was lacking. Across the empire the frustrations of non-Arab Muslims were made worse by their seeing themselves as belonging to an older and more highly developed cultural tradition than that of the Arabs. Many of the conquered were still converting to Islam -- incidentally saving themselves from the extra taxes applied to non-Muslims. Those who converted to Islam were in theory full citizens of the Islamic religious community, but not so in practice. Outside of Syria, Arabs and non-Arabs were still attending different mosques, and Arab warriors, veterans and government officials formed an aristocratic caste which others could not enter. In some towns an Arab might be ostracized by his fellow Arabs if he were seen walking with a non-Arab Muslim. Many non-Arab Muslims, on the other hand, were embracing the dissident Shia branch of Islam.
Respect for rule from Damascus had deteriorated to the point that it was no longer widely recognized. Even in Syria rule by the Umayyads had come into question. Among Muslims across the empire the feeling had arisen that the Umayyads had strayed too far from Muhammad's teachings.
An integrated rebel army of Arab and non-Arab Muslims from Khurasan headed for Damascus, picking up support along the way. Abbas, a descendant of the paternal uncle of Muhammad, was declared caliph. And Abbas promised a new era of concord, happiness and just rule in strict accordance with God's law. The rebel army and Marwan's army met in Mesopotamia, where the rebel army was victorious. Marwan II fled south through Palestine and into Egypt, where he was overtaken and beheaded. Damascus and other Syrian cities and towns fell to the rebel army with hardly any struggle. The graves of the Umayyad caliphs were opened and their corpses burned -- except for the pious Umar II, still seen by many as a good caliph.
An uncle of Abbas, Abdallah b. Ali, riding high on the success of the revolt, invited eighty princes from the Umayyad clan to a banquet. But this was not to be the gesture of respect and reconciliation that it appeared to be. During the banquet a signal brought executioners rushing into the room who clubbed to death the Umayyad princes. The victims were then covered with a leather carpet, those still dying groaning as the host and his Abbasid friends finished their meal.
The new line of caliphs would be from the family of Abbas, known as the Abbasids. And the capital of Islam was moved from Damascus to what had been a small Christian village on the west bank of the Tigris River, near the ruins of the old Persian capital, Ctesiphon, a town with a Persian name: Baghdad.
The Abbasids began ruling with a show of Islamic piety, and they talked of reforms. They gave prominence in state affairs to Islamic theologians and to experts in Islamic law. Under the Abbasids was a skilled bureaucracy and professional army, manned to a large extent by those who had helped the Abbasids to power. Many of them were Persian. At the Abbasid court were Persian refinement and urbanity, Persian titles, Persian wives, mistresses, wines and Persian garments, while Arabic remained as the language of Islam.
With an increase in trade, meanwhile, the Islamic Empire was having its "golden age." Islam had no scorn for the merchant as did Christians and Confucians – Muhammad himself having been a merchant. Caravans connected Aden, Syria and Egypt, and they connected Baghdad to India and China. Muslim trade by sea dominated the Mediterranean and extended across the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean to the Far East. The Indian Ocean was becoming a great trade route. Muslim traders and mariners spread their language and religion to Southeast Asia. In the 800s, residing in Guangzhou, China, were over 100,000 Arabs, Persians and Jews who had voyaged across the Indian Ocean on Muslim ships.
At Baghdad, the Tigris River was 750 feet wide. At Baghdad's docks and wharves were hundreds of ships: warships, trading vessels including Chinese junks, and pleasure boats. It was the time fictionalized in the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor in A Thousand and One Nights drawn from reports of actual voyages made by Muslim merchants. [note] In the holy cities of Medina and Mecca asceticism remained an ideal, but luxury and the pursuit of pleasure were fact.
During this golden age, traditions from Persia and India served a new Muslim intellectuality, which spread to other parts of the Islamic world, including Sicily, southern Italy and Spain. Islam had no ecclesiastical councils or hierarchy of priests as did Christianity, and in Islam diversity developed. From the years 750 to 900 works on science and theoretical mechanics were translated into Arabic. New universities arose in Basra, Kufa, Cairo, Toledo and Cordoba. Two encyclopedists of science would influence Europe: Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 980-1037, and al-Biruni, 943-1048. Muslims were interested in Aristotle's systematic biological observations. Medical doctors drew from classical Greek medical texts and expanded medical research. Works on astronomy from India were translated into Arabic, which for the time being became the language of science.
Islam's empire was marching toward the same fate as other empires. It was disintegrating. Islam's empire was too vast for control from any one center, and rule by force alone was too much of a burden. Grumbling and disrespect for those in power was common throughout history, and in the far reaches of Islam's empire it was encouraged by the distance to Baghdad.
The Abbasids had not fundamentally changed the course of Islamic civilization. They were as autocratic as the Umayyads had been. Their rule was not unlike dynastic rule in China or with Persia's old Sassanid kings. They surrounded themselves with pomp and shielded themselves from the public by a wall of officials and eunuchs. Under the Abbasids no protection of rights of individuals was written into law. What tribal democracy had existed under the Umayyads disappeared.
At various times and at various places in Persia, people revolted against the imposition of Islam into their religious lives. In 767 a rebellion arose led by a man named Muqanna, who preached a combined doctrine of Islam and Zoroastrianism and led thousands against the Abbasids, robbing caravans and destroying mosques. The caliph Mahdi sent armies against him on several occasions and defeated him within five years.
Rebellion by orthodox Muslims also occurred. By the year 800, Spain and north Africa west of Egypt were free of control from Badhdad -- under the rule of an Umayyad prince. In the 800s, in Baghdad itself, the Abbasid caliphs lost control, beginning with Mu'tasim (the son of a Turkish slave woman) who ruled from 833-42. Mu'tasim used Berber and Turkish slaves and mercenaries as bodyguards. These guards rose in number to four thousand, and their meanness and abuse of the people of Baghdad provoked so much hostility from the public that Mu'tasim, in 836, moved his court to Samarra, seventy or so miles up the Tigris River. Four years later, Mu'tasim's troops captured and executed the rebel leader Babak Khorramdin, ending a 34-year Persian rebellion against Islam. [note]
During Mu'tasim's reign, slave officers gained influence at court -- as eunuchs often had in China. After Mu'tasim, the officers of the guard gained in power. In 861 they murdered the caliph Mutawakkil and made his son caliph. A few assassinations later -- in the 880s -- the caliph and his powerful guards returned to Baghdad, and there, into the next century, the Turkish officers of the guard continued to make and unmake caliphs.
While the officers of the guard ruled in Baghdad, the empire's economy weakened, and across the empire respect for the Abbasid caliph fell to new lows. Already there had been a rebellion in Azerbaijan. (There had also been a great slave revolt at the salt mines near Kufa, the slaves killing hundreds of thousands of citizens in the area.)
Meanwhile, since 788 an independent Shia state had arisen in North Africa near Tangier. In 909 the Shia rebellion spread from there eastward to Tunis, where the Shia freed their leader, Said ibn Husayn from prison and declared him caliph. Husayn began a dynasty called the Fatimids, claiming descent from Muhammad's daughter Fatima. Husayn changed his name to Ubaydullah al Mahdi (Mahdi signifying prophsied redeemer of Islam). From his base in North Africa he extended his rule to Sicily and then to Egypt, where the Abbasids had never been popular, and Cairo became his new capital. In 929 Rahman III in Cordoba (Spain) declared himself caliph, and now there were three, including the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad.
During the first half of the 900s the Fatimids expanded their empire into Palestine, southern Syria and to Medina and Mecca. An army of a Shia family called the Buwayhids, from just south of the Caspian Sea, occupied Baghdad in 945. They kept the Abbasids as figureheads, while the Abbasids clung to what prestige they could with their nominal position as caliph and successors of Muhammad.
Contributing to religious fragmentation was a group of devout believers in Islamic monotheism in Lebanon who had broken with others in the 800s, to become known as the Druze (Druse), who addressed their prayers to the Fatimid caliph.
After the year 1000, Christian forces began to reconquer in Spain and Sicily. And whole tribes of Turks were moving through Transoxiana and into Persia. It was much like the disintegration of the Roman Empire. The Islamic empire was fragmented in loyalties and unable or unwilling to rally to defend its frontier against invasion. The Turks conquered much of Persia and then much of Mesopotamia, including Baghdad in 1055, and from the declining Fatimids the Turks took control of Syria and Palestine.
The Turks were quick learners. They adopted Persian culture, and they converted to Islam. But, with all the upheaval, the empire's trade with China had come to an end and trade with Europeans had declined. The coins that had been numerous in the 800s and 900s diminished in the eleventh century, and soon these coins disappeared.
Decay and alienation in the Roman Empire had been accompanied by change in religion among the Romans, and social changes in Islam's empire was accompanied by changes in religious attitudes among Muslims. During imperial expansion and the glory of conquest, Muslim spirituality was more focused on the external. With conquest replaced by fragmentation and anarchy they lost hope in God as a glorious conqueror. Instead, some Muslims began looking to ecstasy through a personal relationship with God. A new movement called Sufi focused on God as a loving friend -- the way Christians saw Jesus.
Sufism developed also as Persian influence within Islam. Sufis believed that a bit of God was in everyone -- in accordance with the statement in the Koran where Allah speaks about having breathed into every living being its soul. The Sufis believed that one could be united with God by tuning into that part of oneself that was a part of God. Some Sufis saw ritual at the mosques as an obstacle to losing earthly awareness and to achieving a blissful unity with God. Sufi mystics traveled about, attracting Muslims with their devotion to God.
Sufism branched into a variety of forms. Some Sufis denounced the luxury of the caliphs and merchants and proposed a return to the simplicity of the first caliphs. A few Sufis became pantheists. Authorities launched efforts to exterminate what they saw as heresy. In 922, one well known exponent of pantheism, Hallaj of Baghdad, was arrested and, it is said, hanged from a cross, taken down and whipped, his hands and feet amputated, and then executed.
In 1095, a Persian educator, Muhammad al Ghazali, went through a religious crisis and embraced Sufism. He abandoned his career in higher education and became a wandering ascetic. He meditated, and after ten years he began writing of his experiences, and he denounced education that was void of religious enthusiasm. Ghazali's work fused emotion with logical argument and helped overcome the suspicion with which many Muslim held Sufism. He was claimed by supporters to be the greatest Muslim second to Muhammad. Through Ghazali's efforts, Sufism grew and attracted not only orthodox Muslims but many Christians, especially in Egypt and Syria. There, Sufism met the spiritual needs of some Christians, and where Sufism grew Christianity faded.
Contacts with the works of Plato, Aristotle and the neo-Platonists stimulated thinking and influenced Muslim intellectuals, some of whom sought reconciliation between these works and messages in the Koran. They called for an interpretation of the Koran that was allegorical. At lectures at colleges and in some mosques the new rationalism was heard. Their study of the Koran included the study of symbolism, ambiguities, grammar and definitions (lexicography).
Another tradition that remained among some Muslims was that of oral history - the passing of stories from generation to generation. And some stories many Muslims saw as inventions. These were stories of the Prophet Muhammad having performed miracles, including his feed a multitude from food hardly adequate for one man, of the Prophet touching the udders of dry goats and the goats then giving milk, of the Prophet healing with his touch and exorcizing demons. And there was a story of the Prophet loving his enemies. The same force was at work that had turned Siddhartha Gautama into the god called the Buddha. It was the kind of myth-making that the fundamentalist Muslim, Muhammad Wahhab (1703-91) would oppose.
By the year 1200, Hellenistic influences were fading among the Muslims. Muslims were to ignore works such as those of the Spanish Muslim ibn-Rashd (Averroes) and the Egyptian Jew Maimonides -- both of whom had found inspiration in Aristotle and were contributing to a rise of rationalism among Europeans.
Some well-intentioned Westerners have divided Islam into three parts: religion, empire and culture -- while Muslim theologians and historians have seen Islam's wars of expansion as ordered by Allah and Islam's soldiers as fighting Allah's cause. These Muslims recognized that unlike Christianity and some other religions, Islam came into being through conquest. But they recognized too that conversions were for the most part voluntary. As stated in the Koran, Islam does not believe in conversions by force -- no more than does Christianity. Becoming a Muslim has been considered a matter of choice. But conquest encouraged that choice, leaving whether one was a Muslim possibly an accident of geography -- as it was with Christianity. The isolation of Japan left the Japanese people largely neither Muslim nor Christian.
The human imagination created a lot of variations within Islam. Fragmentation was as much a part of Islam as it would be among Christians. Islam by the twentieth century would have divisions within divisions, and without the tolerance that slowly developed in Europe. As late as the twenty-first century, Muslims of all variety were looking upon many of their fellow Muslims as heretics, including Shia viewing other Shia with hostility.
In the Middle Ages variations in attitude and belief -- accompanied by political fragmentation -- included the tradition of the Mutazilites. They clung to a belief in the power of reason. They believed the Koran provided truth where reason failed, and they believed that with reason, in association with the Koran, one could attain a greater nearness to God.
There were Muslims called Murjites, who emphasized love, brotherhood and equality among all Muslims. Believing in equality they did not believe in authority, clerical hierarchy or that Muslims should fight one another in contests regarding political power.
Those of a third tradition have been labeled "legalists." They were to dominate among the Sunni and believed in authority and Islamic law: the Sharia. They leaned toward fundamentalism.
Another variation was the Kharijites. They clung to the tradition of warfare producing justice -- a continuation of the old notion of God providing victors, as with the belief among Christians that God had helped Constantine win the battle of Milvian Bridge. They did not mix this with pacifism and love. They believed that God would reveal the true leader of Islam on the battlefield. They were ready to make war against Muslims who did not see Islam as they did and believed they had a right and duty to win against apostate Muslims by killing them.
And there was the Sufi tradition, which developed later than the others. They were mystics, believing they could gain oneness with God through moral purification.
Core beliefs remained among the Muslims. The word "Islam" translated to "a strong commitment to God."
The orthodox adhered to the claim by Muhammad, expressed in the Koran, that he was only a prophet. The Buddhists had the Buddha as their primary teacher. Christians had Jesus as their teacher. The Muslims had the Prophet Muhammad as their teacher. And there were other prophets: Abraham, Moses, Jesus. Muslims believe that various nations were sent prophets, and Muhammad was the last of the prophets. The first Muslim, they believe, was the Adam of Jewish mythology.
And Islamic orthodoxy was what Muslims called monotheism -- a belief in one supreme god. For the Muslims spirits were not gods -- as one might say for animists. Muslims did believe in spirits such as angels and demons -- Jinns.
In accordance with the Prophet Muhammad's wishes, orthodox Muslims refrained from worshipping Muhammad as a god. There would be no images of the Prophet in mosques. The orthodox remained hostile to the worship of any images, and they refrained from imagined views of God's appearance, holding that nobody knew what God looked like. There would be no images of God drawn as Michelangelo did on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Muhammad the Prophet drew from Judaism, and they took seriously what is says in Exodus 20:
Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
Arabic was believed to be God's language, given to Adam. Prayers were in Arabic. And proper Arabic was what was found in the Koran. The Koran, it was claimed, contained no words of foreign origin. And the Koran could not be translated. The Koran in English would be considered not a translation but a mere discription.
In the tradition of scripture, the Koran was poetry – not written entirely for clarity as is secular law or history as written by Thucydides. The Koran consisted of allusions (indirect references) not clear to everyone who reads them. Passages in the Koran would be interpreted differently. Commentators would struggle to explain the allusions and the circumstances that had surrounded Muhammad at the time of the revelations. Others would not be concerned with circumstances. Some Muslim theologians would echo Plato's theory that reality and truths were eternal. With Moses and Jesus as part of the Koran, they held that these two preached Islam and that scripture before the Koran were corruptions corrected by the Koran. Islam held Abraham as central to history. And Islam held Jesus as one of the prophets and as having been granted miracles by God. But they denied that he was sacrificed by God in compensation for humanity's sins.
Muslims believed in sin, and they had their own lists of prohibitions similar to Judaism's Ten Commandments, including prohibitions against theft, murder and adultery. But they did not believe in original sin. They viewed infants as having been born pure. They believed redemption by sincere apologies made in the privacy of one's own prayers rather than public displays or confessions. They believed in heaven and hell, hell being where one suffers eternal pain. And they expected the coming of a Day of Judgment.
Muslims saw justice as a fundamental part of Islam. The Koran, 16:90, reads: "Allah command justice, the doing of good, and liberality to kith and kin, and He forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice..." Muslims have seen themselves as needing to be socially and politically involved as a part of serving justice, and they have been critical of Christianity's withdrawals, as to monasteries, and what they see as Christianity's sweet sounding but unrealistic pacifistic declarations.
As a historical phenomenon born in the time of slavery, the Koran, like the Old Testament, mentions slavery without blanket disapproval. The Koran, 33:50:
Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.
Recommended Books
The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800, by Jonathan P Berkey, 2003
The History of Medieval Islam, JJ Saunders, Barnes and Noble, 1965
The Middle East, Past and Present, by Yahya Armajani, Prentice-Hall Inc, 1970
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