The Siege of Baghdad | Khem Karan, 1596
from The History of Genghis Khan (cropped)

Overview

A boot set on an emperor’s neck.
Fruit and ice sent to a sick enemy king.
A river running black with ink.

Part 9 built the empire. Part 10 climbed its two summits. Now, Part 11 closes the Golden Age itself, as the Islamicate world is besieged from two horizons at once, then again from a third. From the east come the Turks (first the Ghaznavids, then the Seljuks), who reshape the Middle World and shatter a Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071. From the west come the Franj of the Crusades, marching through a fractured patchwork of rival caliphates toward Jerusalem. And from the farthest east come the Mongols, the al-Mughal, whose storm ends five centuries of Abbasid Baghdad in a single February. Along the way we meet the age’s two faces: the butchery of 1099 (told from the Crusaders’ own records) and the magnanimity of Saladin.

We describe the three invasions that closed the Golden Age, trace the Arabic exonyms al-Rum, al-Franj, and al-Mughal, and interpret how Muslims and Christians narrated one another across these encounters.

Assigned Reading
Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapters 8-9

Key Terms for this Section
al-Rum • Mamluk • sultan • Seljuk
al-Franj • Saladin • al-Mughal • Baybars

11.1 | The Coming of the Turks

Rome & the Middle World

A thousand years ago, the height of civilization from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Wall of China was the Islamicate world. For centuries, Islam held together the Middle World, and to the Islamicate mind of the day, Muslims were not merely one of the earth’s civilizations — they were civilization.

And they had good reason to believe that.

In vast metropolises like Baghdad, Isfahan, and Córdoba, the knowledge of other lands and peoples was carefully documented. Jews, Christians, Turks, and other minorities lived and worked in these cities. And the Arabs in charge carried an air of superiority toward them — the help from less prosperous places.

It was well known that the learned Jews, respected as able physicians and bookkeepers, had lost their dominion over Israel centuries ago. But they were at least monotheists, holding to many of the same rituals and values as Muslims. Christians, on the other hand, were framed as a superstitious, odd, unclean people out of the dark forests of Europe. Stories of their barbarity entertained the Islamicate courts: they did not bathe, did not read, and still ate pork (like the Arabs in the Time of Ignorance).

When the largest towns of the Latin West held 25,000 souls, the Islamicate city of Córdoba dominated Europe with half a million citizens, and Baghdad, at the heart of the Middle World, held well over a million. Baghdad had more than a hundred shops for paper alone. Theirs was a world of public fountains and street lamps, of spice-laden bazaars, honest courts of justice, and libraries boasting hundreds of thousands of volumes. In a time when nearly every European was seen as a destitute peasant who could not read and would never travel more than ten miles from his birthplace, a townsman of Baghdad or Córdoba could generally read and write, dress in silk, and to travel across the world on the hajj.

In short, medieval Muslims saw themselves, with some justification, as the civilizing force of the world. It is against that towering self-assurance that the shocks of Part 11 must be measured.

A world so certain of its own centrality
had never imagined that it might one day be overrun.

There was, however, one vestige of European greatness the Islamic imagination never lost sight of: Rome, not the ruined city — the empire. The Islamicate world looked on the surviving Roman state, centered now on Constantinople, and called it al-Rum, as the Byzantine Christians living there called themselves Romans and their Christian realm Romania. These were the Greek-speaking Christians of Eastern Europe who, after the Great Schism of 1054, would split from the Roman Catholic West and become the known as the Eastern Orthodoxy.

For Muslims, from the Prophet’s day forward, al-Rum was the face of Christendom: a world with a capital at Constantinople, a mother tongue in Greek, and a religion in Orthodox Christianity. The Qur’an’s 30th surah is itself titled al-Rum. The Romans.

The Romans have been defeated in a nearby land, but after this defeat of theirs they will be victorious within a few years. Qur’an 30:2–4 (paraphrased)

The verses look out at the great war of Muhammad’s own lifetime (Christian Byzantium against Zoroastrian Persia), and the tradition remembers the first Muslims hoping the Romans would win, as fellow People of the Book.

Manzikert & the Steppe

In 1071 (463 AH), on the outskirts of Manzikert, a Turkish prince named Alp Arslan meets the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes in battle. For four centuries the Islamic advance to the north had stalled at the foothills of Byzantine Romania. Now Arslan faces a Christian army (by the chroniclers’ count, a hundred thousand strong), and Arslan wins.

For the first time in history,
a Christian emperor is the prisoner of a Muslim commander.

Arslan asks the emperor what he would do if their places were reversed. “Perhaps I’d kill you,” the emperor replies, “or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.” The commander sets his boot on the emperor’s neck, and then sets him free.

Released, Romanus went home to be deposed and blinded by his own court (1072). The appeal to the West came a generation later, from another emperor, Alexios I (1095). Little did anyone know that twenty-six years after Manzikert, Crusaders from the West would come marching through the civilized Middle World like a natural disaster.

Alp Arslan was the great-grandson of Seljuk, the founder of the Turkish dynasty that bears his name. The story begins on the steppes of ancient Central Asia. Unlike the great river valleys to the south, east, and west, this was a land cold, dry, and infertile, a place that supported no agriculture and thus, in the classical sense, no ‘civilization’.

Its nomadic peoples excelled at two things: horsemanship and battle.

These horsemen turn up all across the map. To the south, tradition makes them ancestors of the warrior class of northern India. To the east, the Chinese walled them out: the Great Wall was raised against the nomads they feared as the ‘Xiongnu’. The same group were feared as the ‘Huns’ by Rome. About three centuries after the famous Hun invasion of Europe came the encounter between this Central Asiatic group of nomadic horsemen and Islamicate civilization.

By the medieval period, the nomads had settled into two great geographic groups.
The western nomads became the Turks (in Arabic, al-Atrak).
The eastern nomads became the Mongols — al-Mughal.

Mamluks, Sultans, & Seljuks

The Turks entered Islamic history much as the Germans had entered Roman history.

As history so often echoes and rhymes, when the Romans grew too decadent to serve in their own army, the emperors conscripted German barbarians, until the emperor’s own bodyguard was almost entirely German, drawn from the very tribes that most threatened Rome.

So too, when the Abbasid empire needed to fill its ranks, the caliphs of Baghdad turned to the barbarian Turks who constantly harried their borders. The caliph’s reasoning was that Arabs and Persians could not be trusted near the palace, where a caliph might die at an assassin’s hand at any time.

So the Abbasids took Turkish boys from the frontier (bought or captured) and forced them into imperial service. The caliph al-Mu’tasim built the first great Turkish guard at his new capital, Samarra (836).

A strange system of control grew up around the boys: they were raised in special military schools that taught nothing but total allegiance to the caliph. They had no family, no ethnicity, and no ties of any kind except to one another, to Islam (which they were forced to embrace), and to their master. When these children grew up, they entered a class of outsiders called Mamluks — slave-soldiers, from the Arabic mamluk, ‘owned, possessed’. With the caliph increasingly hidden behind an ever-growing bureaucracy, the fearsome Mamluks became the very face of Abbasid power.

That Arab bureaucracy, meanwhile, was largely staffed by Persian intellectuals, so that the empire was held together by Turkish/Mamluk strength, Persian intelligence, and Arab religion.

Because the Persian administration concentrated on the great cities, the Abbasids gradually lost their grip on the smaller realms along the frontier, and some of those Mamluk garrisons rose up, killed their masters, and founded dynasties of their own.

Such was the case of the ill-fated Persian Samanids of Bukhara, whose Turkish slave-general Alp Tegin broke away and seized the frontier town of Ghazni, in today’s Afghanistan (962). Out of his garrison grew the Ghaznavid dynasty.

Its most famous ruler was a conqueror named Mahmud of Ghazni, whose place in Islamic history rather resembles Charlemagne’s in the West. Mahmud is remembered as the first ruler to bear the title sultan — Arabic for ‘power, authority’, a word the Qur’an itself uses (14:22). And like Charlemagne and the Pope in the West, Sultan Mahmud understood himself as the sword arm of Islam, while the Abbasid caliph remained its religious figurehead.

Mahmud savaged the polytheist lands of India to the south (infidels, to his mind, ripe for the taking), and with the plunder he paid for hundreds of Persian artists, poets, and philosophers to adorn his court.

One of them was the poet Firdausi, author of the Shahnameh, the famous ‘Book of Kings’. It is an epic of 50,000 rhyming couplets and unmatched sophistication. The story goes that when Mahmud reneged on his promised payment, offering silver where he had pledged gold, the poet fled to a rival court. The Shahnameh was written just as Persian culture was beginning once more to eclipse Arab culture (cf. Part 9), and it sang of the long line of Iran’s ancient kings.

After Mahmud, his son Masoud eventually rose as sultan, and by his day the Turkish horsemen had already pushed into the old Persian frontier at Khorasan. By 1040, at Dandanaqan, Masoud had lost all his western territory to Turks led by Seljuk’s grandsons, Tughril and Chaghri, and with the fall of the Ghaznavids the Turkish Seljuk dynasty began.

These early Seljuks could not read or write: they were the Vikings of the East. They had embraced Islam generations earlier on the frontier, and what they carried south was a rough approximation of Sunni Islam as they understood it.

A generation later it was the Seljuk prince Alp Arslan who faced the Byzantine emperor at Manzikert. A year after that battle his son Malik Shah inherited the sultanate, though the real brains of his reign belonged to his brilliant Persian vizier, Nizam al-Mulk. Together they took Syria and the Levant, so that Damascus and Jerusalem became Turkish cities.

And the frontier’s rough edges were already wearing smooth: in 1067 Nizam al-Mulk founded the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the madrasa where al-Ghazali would one day hold his chair (cf. Part 10).

But unlike the cultured and tolerant Abbasids, the Seljuks brought their provincial religious attitudes with them, and reports began reaching Europe of Christian pilgrims harassed in the Holy Land. It never quite amounted to bloodshed, but the humiliations made for memorable tales back home, and to the Europeans who heard those tales, this was not Seljuk rural pride. It was, as they told it, Islamic hatred of Christians.

11.2 | 1099: The Crusades

al-Franj & the Three Caliphates

Enter Kilij Arslan, the ‘Sultan of Rum’ — that stretch of Anatolia that the Seljuks had taken from the Christian Byzantines (today, Türkiye). In 1096, word reached him of a ragtag ‘army’ that had entered his territory from the west, barely dressed for battle, announcing that it had come to kill Muslims and take Jerusalem, beginning with his land!

The members of this ‘army’ wore a little red cross stitched to the shoulder and called themselves pilgrims, men who had ‘taken the cross’. Later centuries would name their journeys from that cross: crusade, from the Latin crux.

So the Sultan of Rum did the obvious thing:
he sent his men to meet them and crushed them with ease.

Where were these odd people from? The only western kingdom of any repute whatsoever to the Islamicate world was that of the Franks — in Arabic, al-Franj. Paris, the homeland of many traveling pilgrims, was known to some of the more worldly scholars. The tiny cities of London, Dublin, and Cologne were barely known at all.

So anyone seen wearing a Latin cross in the Middle World was assumed to speak French, the tongue of unsophisticated ‘European barbarians’ (keep in mind, after 1066, not even the kings of England spoke English), so the Arabic word for a Westerner, a European, a Crusader, settled on al-Franj.

But the next wave would be different. The first had been laypeople whipped up by the preaching of Peter the Hermit, who felt no need to organize a capable military force because he had God on his side. The second wave was what the Pope himself had organized: great lords and landless knights with élite training, heavy cavalry, and archer support. They took Arslan’s city, as they had trained their whole lives to do, and turned south toward Antioch, on the road to Jerusalem.

Thus began the First Crusade.

It’s important to note here, that before the first Crusaders arrived, the Islamicate world had already been coming apart at the seams. Part 9 ended with Abd al-Rahman, the fugitive Umayyad who made himself master of Córdoba in 756. Well, in 929 his descendant went further and proclaimed himself caliph. By then, no one could pretend anymore that there was a single Ummah. From now on, the Abbasids ruled from Baghdad, and the reborn Umayyads ruled from Córdoba.

Meanwhile, in 909, Ismaili Shia (the ‘Seveners’, cf. Part 5) proclaimed a caliphate of their own in Tunisia, and in 969 its armies seized the grain supply of the Nile and took Egypt in the name of Shia Islam. They named their new capital Qahira (‘the Victorious’, the city we call Cairo) and called their state the Fatimid dynasty, claiming descent from Fatima as the self-styled representatives of the Party of Ali.

So, now there were three rival caliphates: Córdoba, Cairo, and Baghdad.

From Egypt the Fatimids ruled North Africa and dominated the trade of the Mediterranean. They controlled the Red Sea east to the ports of Yemen and reached into the Indian Ocean, trading with the East without having to bother with the nomads of Central Asia. This made them very rich, and though they had come to the game late, they proved every bit as ambitious and resourceful as the older powers.

For a century (929 to 1031), a traveler could cross three rival caliphates (Córdoba, Cairo, and Baghdad), each claiming to be the true successor of the original Rashidun caliphate, and each branding the other two as impostors. Add the rowdy Turkish Seljuks riding in after the Fatimids, and the Islamicate world of the 11th century was a patchwork of rival dynasties, petty kingdoms, and endless contentious families.

Then the Franj arrived.

Maarat & Jerusalem

In 1097 the Franj took Kilij Arslan’s city of Nicaea and headed south toward Antioch, another Seljuk stronghold. Would help come from fellow Seljuk royals in the area? In a word, no. Damascus wanted to help but dared not leave its own city undefended, lest its brother-rival in Aleppo seize it. Mosul agreed to help but fell to quarreling with Damascus. And so no one came, and Antioch fell to the Franj.

The Franj then laid a long siege against Maarat, and again no prince came to its aid. After a lengthy campaign the Franj offered to let the civilians go free if the guards would just open the gates, and because the siege had starved the city, the gates were opened — whereupon the Franj set about taking everything.

Then it got bad. The Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen records that the Muslim adults were boiled in cooking pots, and that the children were impaled on spits and grilled over open fire.

I want to point out, this is not Muslim propaganda. The cannibalism at Maarat is a well-established fact drawn directly from the Crusaders’ own records. A second Frankish chronicler of the campaign, Albert of Aix, wrote that the troops did not shrink from “eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!” What is striking in that sentence is its implication: that eating a dog was somehow the greater scandal, as though a Turk were something less than human, a different species altogether.

The atrocity is real, documented by the men who committed it.

Two things become very clear from these early years of the Crusades. First, the Islamicate rulers of the region did not see the invaders as one side of a larger war between Christianity and Islam. It was not understood as a holy war at all. And secondly (and more to point), the Franj were seen by the rival Islamic leaders not as a rival empire but as a simple horde of dishonorable western barbarians, bent on destroying civilization for its own sake. There was nothing Christian about it.

Proper Christendom, to the Muslim mind, was al-Rum to the north, where the people spoke Greek and ruled from Constantinople. These filthy westerners were something else. More a plague than a rival power. Each Islamic kingdom tried, at their moment, to turn them against its neighbors. In the Middle World, Christians and Muslims generally lived in peace, and it was quite outside Muslim experience to imagine Christians who wanted the ancient territory of the Middle East for themselves alone.

It simply made no sense to them, until it was too late.

Amid all the confusion, the Fatimids managed to take the holy city of Jerusalem from the Seljuks. Rural Jews and Arabs fled from the smaller villages to its high walls, and the Fatimid rulers promised the Franj that they could now safely visit the holy city as pilgrims whenever they wished.

But the Franj ignored the invitation and besieged the city anyway.
After 40 days, on July 15, 1099 (492 AH), the walls of Jerusalem were stormed.

Then, by the account of the Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, the Jews of the city were herded into the central synagogue, and the synagogue was set on fire. The hands and feet and heads of the Arabs were piled in the streets, where (again by the Christian testimony of the chronicler Raymond of Aguilers) the blood of civilians ran knee-deep in the streets of the Holy City.

In the end, the Franj set up four short-lived ‘Crusader states’ at the heart of the discordant Islamicate world: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli. Many Franj died in them. Some were born and lived out entire lives in them. Yet there was never any sense of permanence. So why had the Franj come in the first place?

Clermont & the Jihad Reply

The single unifying political power of medieval Western Europe was the Catholic Church. In 800, the Pope had crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor of a new ‘Holy Roman Empire,’ and throne and Church had risen together ever since. In 1054 came the mutual excommunications of the Great Schism.

Pilgrimage, meanwhile, remained big business. Pilgrims came home with lead badges and little flasks of holy oil (the souvenirs of the age), and the pilgrimage economy built churches, abbeys, and roads.

The Holy Land was the queen mother of all pilgrimages.

Then came Alexios’s appeal. At Clermont, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II preached the sermon that set the West in motion, speaking directly to Europe’s trained, armored, landless knights.

The Pope’s call for crusaders was the solution to everyone’s problems at once.

• Help for Constantinople
• Safe roads for pilgrims
• Revenue for the Church
• and estates and glory for the knights

Best of all, the Pope sold it not as a war but as a pilgrimage, with remission of penance for all who went in true devotion. For many, that promise stirred sincere piety (crusading was ruinously expensive, and lords sold their lands to go). For others, it blurred into license to pillage and plunder.

Thousands signed on, and once Peter the Hermit’s amateur ‘People’s Crusade’ had spent itself, the real Crusaders went in and took whatever they could by any means that crossed their minds.

The four Crusader states did not last long. The first to fall was Edessa, in 1144, to the Seljuk lord of Mosul and Aleppo. This was thrilling to local Muslims, who had not seen a major victory against the Franj in decades. But something else was shifting, too.

More and more Friday sermons in the mosques began to speak of jihad against the western invaders. At first the idea seemed almost quaint: in living memory no Muslim had spoken seriously of defending Islam from an external enemy. Was the struggle against the Franj truly a battle for Islam? Was jihad now the right language for it?

Truthfully, the Seljuk lord of Mosul was a hard-drinking soldier with no great claim to piety (in 1146 a slave killed him, by most accounts as he slept off the wine). But his men liked his raucous Seljuk manner, the preachers were stirring the right energy in the people, and so the raucous lord let the jihad talk run.

When his son succeeded him, the tone changed entirely. Nuruddin was a genuinely devout man (perhaps overly so) who kept his father’s zeal for combat and turned it to a purpose, calling on all the Muslims of the Levant to embrace jihad as a way of life.

In the 1160s, Nuruddin sent his Sunni general Shirkuh to take Egypt from the Shia Fatimids (‘heretic hands,’ as Nuruddin saw them), lest it slip into the grip of the barbarian Franj. Shirkuh campaigned three times and finally seized the government in January 1169. Two months later he suddenly died, leaving his nephew, a Kurdish officer of about 31, almost by accident, as the vizier of Egypt.

That nephew was Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. The West knows him as Saladin.

11.3 | Saladin & Richard

Saladin the Untouchable

Nuruddin wanted his hold on Egypt (a far larger and wealthier prize than Syria) secured as quickly as possible, and every minute it was not made him nervous. He ordered Saladin to end the Shia Fatimid caliphate and establish Sunni Abbasid dominance. Instead, Saladin played it cool: he restored the Abbasid name to the Friday prayers (1171) and let the already sickly Fatimid ruler die of natural causes.

Nuruddin then demanded a meeting, so the two could settle who really controlled Egypt, but Saladin kept putting it off, again and again, until the aged Nuruddin himself died (1174).

That left Saladin the master of Egypt and soon of Syria (Damascus within the year, Aleppo by 1183). The savior of the Levant had arrived.

More pious than the father and more even-tempered than his son, Nuruddin, Saladin carried none of the cocksure swagger that had plagued the Seljuks. He also did not consider himself part of the Arab aristocracy at all. In fact he was ethnically a Kurd, and so he became the Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria. His name, Salah al-Din, means ‘righteousness of the faith’ and is indeed a fitting appelation.

Saladin’s wisdom made him famous, and his kindness made him a living legend.

There are dozens of stories of Saladin helping Christians, Jews, women, and orphans, so that by all accounts he would have been a great man in any man’s religion. After surviving two assassination attempts (by the Nizari Ismailis, the sect whose enemies call hashishiyyun, a hostile label English keeps as assassin), he became an almost mythic figure: Saladin the wise, Saladin the king, Saladin the untouchable.

Stronghold after Christian stronghold fell to Saladin’s army, and wherever he could he took them without bloodshed: he would encircle the Franj, cut off their supply lines, and bring them to the negotiating table, doing anything he could to stop unnecessary violence. His was a strategy of patience and pressure rather than slaughter (the very opposite of the reputation the Franj had earned at Maarat and Jerusalem), and it is largely why his name survives, in the West as well as the East, as the model of the chivalrous adversary.

Jerusalem & the Lionheart

Then Saladin set his sights on Jerusalem.

In July 1187 (583 AH), at the Horns of Hattin, he destroyed the kingdom’s field army in a single day. The aftermath belongs to the record too: the captured knights of the military orders were executed, and Reynald of Châtillon, the lord who had raided toward Mecca and Medina and attacked caravans in time of truce, Saladin killed with his own hand.

That autumn he asked the Christian knights to leave the holy city peacefully. For that, they could take their property. Those who wished to stay on as pilgrims could stay, all the Christian sites would remain unharmed, and pilgrims could come and go as his guests. The Franj, who had held Jerusalem for some 88 years, declined the offer.

So Saladin took the city — by siege, not by storm. After twelve days its defenders, led by Balian of Ibelin, surrendered on terms very like the ones Saladin had offered before.

There would be no plunder and no mass killing.

A ransom was set (10 dinars a man, 5 a woman, 1 a child), and when the ransoms were paid, the prisoners were freed. Saladin and his brother freed many more without payment. Thousands who could not pay (perhaps 15,000) were taken into slavery. Eastern Christians could remain in their homes, and Jerusalem was again open to all the people of God.

The Third Crusade followed soon after. Europe’s three greatest living kings (Barbarossa of Germany, Philip II of France, and Richard of England) answered the call to defeat Saladin. On the way, Barbarossa drowned in a few inches of water (true story). Philip took part in the battle of Acre and then went home exhausted. And so it fell to Richard alone to deal with Saladin and Jerusalem.

The two fought for over a year. Richard won the field battles (Acre and Arsuf in 1191, Jaffa in 1192), and at Acre, when the negotiations stalled, he executed some 2,700 Muslim prisoners. Saladin kept the city.

And when Richard fell sick, the chroniclers tell, Saladin sent him his own doctors, along with fresh fruit and ice. Still Richard demanded Jerusalem, but Saladin simply waited behind the high walls for Richard’s army to give up. They did, though not before Saladin promised to continue safeguarding the Christians inside the city, a promise written into the Treaty of Jaffa (1192): a three-year truce, the coast to the Franks, Jerusalem to Saladin, and the city open to unarmed Christian pilgrims. It was, in effect, a moral victory Saladin handed to Richard so that the English king could depart with his honor intact.

al-Franj Remembered

After Richard, the Franj would never again pose a real threat to the Middle World.

The Fourth Crusade did not even reach the Holy Land: it stopped at the Orthodox capital of Constantinople (1204), where Catholic Christians destroyed the holy places of their fellow Christians and sacked the ancient city so thoroughly that it never fully recovered.

And though we speak of ‘this crusade’ and ‘that crusade’ now, in truth there was always a steady stream of Western Europeans leaving to fight. They did not wait for the next official crusade but simply set out for Jerusalem when they came of age, so that for about two centuries the journey to go kill Muslims in the Holy Land was a normal part of a certain masculine identity. But the impulse never really recovered after Richard ‘the Lionheart’ sailed home in 1192.

The last Frankish stronghold in the Middle World fell to the Mamluks at Acre in 1291.

• 1187 (583 AH) | Jerusalem returns to Muslim rule
• 1192 | The Treaty of Jaffa ends the Third Crusade
• 1204 | The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople
• 1250 | Louis IX’s crusade is crushed in Egypt
• 1291 | Acre, the last Crusader stronghold, falls to the Mamluks

So what did the Islamicate world make of al-Franj? Not much. There was some cultural exchange between the two, but it ran almost entirely one way: from the Middle World out to Europe. The Franj carried home exotic spices, satin, silk, cotton, olive soap, better medicine, better food, and, in rare cases, better ideas, along with rumors of an almost mythical paradise of natural wealth called ‘the Indies’.

Conversely, to Muslim eyes, the whole affair was a minor inconvenience on a single shore of the civilized world. It barely touched al-Andalus as the East knew it, and the Franj never took Cairo or Baghdad, much less Mecca or Medina (the nearest they came was Mansurah, 1250, where Egypt’s slave-soldiers crushed the crusade of the French king Louis IX). In Yemen, in Morocco, in Persia, generations lived and died without ever once meeting or even discussing al-Franj.

For most of the Islamicate world living outside the Levant,
the Crusades were almost a non-event.

It is one of the quiet ironies of history that the Crusades, which loom so large in the Western imagination, left so faint a mark on the Islamicate memory.

11.4 | 1258: The Mongol Storm & Baghdad

Genghis & the Horde

Back on the eastern steppe of Central Asia, the Mongols (al-Mughal) had just about had enough of the Chinese Jin dynasty meddling in their tribal rivalries.

For years the Jin had understood that they could keep the nomads too busy to threaten China by setting one Central Asian tribe against another: Tatar against Mongol, Mongol against Tatar, and for a long time it worked. But a lowly nomad boy turned military genius, Genghis Khan, had a score to settle, for the Tatars had killed his father. With Jin funding he destroyed and absorbed the Tatar clans, then turned on his patrons and took the Jin’s own northern China (in a war begun in 1211), and with that the Mongols had reached the Pacific.

And that was only the beginning.

To be taken into Genghis’s army was usually good news for a warrior. It meant your side had lost (which happens to everyone), that he was not going to kill you (at least not yet), and that you were now limited only by your own ambition, strength, and imagination. Congrats, you are now a member of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. Genghis did not care who your father was, whom you prayed to, or what you looked like. He cared about one thing — your ability on the battlefield — and he paid in the silk, gold, and plunder of the perfumed cities you helped him sack. The Mongols were not out to make the world a better place. They held that Eternal Heaven had granted them the earth, but they had no faith to spread and no religious calling.

They simply took whatever was not nailed down and burned what they could not carry.

Their war machine seemed to belong to mythology. Their composite bows, layered and glued, far outranged the weaker and more expensive solid bows of settled peoples. Their horses were bred small and grass-thrifty, so that a rider could hang off the flank or beneath the belly and shoot his arrows using the animal as a living shield. Many Persians honestly believed Genghis had bred horses with men. They were not far off.

The horsemen slept in the saddle as they rode. The old story says they never stopped to eat, but chewed raw meat tenderized under the saddle and drank the blood of their mounts when thirsty. People in the old world carried a fixed sense of how quickly an army could move from one city to the next, and al-Mughal always beat those numbers by days or even weeks, appearing where and when they could not possibly be. No one could stand against them — not the Turks, who fancied themselves a warrior class, and not the Chinese, nor India, nor Persia. To those who faced it, the horde seemed a supernatural scourge, a thing out of a nightmare rather than a rival army.

The spark came in 1218, at the border city of Otrar, where a governor of the Khwarazm-shah’s empire massacred a Mongol trade caravan. When Genghis sent an envoy to demand redress, the Shah killed him too. Bad idea…

Genghis moved through Afghanistan and Persia with terrible ease. Libraries were destroyed so completely that to this day we do not know all that was lost. Bukhara, Nishapur, and Balkh fell. Balkh (1220–21) was the city the boy Rumi’s family had fled just ahead of the storm (cf. Part 10). At Herat the chroniclers counted the dead in the hundreds of thousands. The fields, crops, and granaries were burned.

People had feared the Turks in the days of the Seljuk conquest, but it had never been like this. The great historian Ibn al-Athir confessed that for years he shrank from writing the Mongol chapter of his chronicle, wishing his mother had never borne him rather than live to record it. In Khorasan, an ancient network of underground water channels (the qanats) had irrigated the land into an agricultural paradise. The Mongols filled the channels with sand. To this day, some of that land has never recovered.

Baghdad, 1285

After Genghis died, his descendants carried the destruction outward across the world. One line of his heirs ruled Russia as the Golden Horde, one ruled Central Asia, and the homeland line produced the Great Khans. In the 1250s the Great Khan Möngke sent his brother Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis, south to deal with the Middle World of Islam, and with the Abbasid power in Baghdad and its caliph, al-Musta’sim.

Their exchange of letters survives, preserved by the Persian historian Rashid al-Din. Hulagu demanded surrender. The last caliph answered with the serene confidence of a man who could not conceive of his world ending: “How are you going to capture a star?”

It took Hulagu Khan less than three weeks to wipe Baghdad from the face of the earth.

Everything was destroyed. As a courtly courtesy, the Mongols promised not to spill royal blood. So that rolled the Baghdadi royal family into carpets and trampled them to death. Absolutely no life was spared. And five centuries of libraries, the House of Wisdom’s among them (cf. Part 10), were thrown into the river until the water ran black with bleeding ink.

So ended the Abbasid dynasty.
Al-Mansur’s round City of Peace (cf. Part 9) came to an end after 496 years.

Goliath’s Spring & Conversion

Next came Egypt.

A decade earlier, as Louis IX’s crusade collapsed at Mansurah, the slave-soldiers had taken the Egyptian throne itself: the widowed queen Shajar al-Durr (and former slave) ruled briefly in her own name, and her new husband, the Mamluk commander Aybak, became the first sultan of the Mamluk dynasty (1250).

So in 1260 it was the reigning Mamluk sultan, Qutuz, who marched out to meet the Mongols at Goliath’s Spring: Ain Jalut, with the legendary general Baybars leading the vanguard. The spring’s name is the Qur’an’s own, for Jalut is Goliath, felled by the young David:

…and David killed Goliath, and God gave him sovereignty and wisdom.
Qur’an 2:251 (paraphrased)

At the spring where tradition set the duel, on September 3, 1260, David had met Goliath again. Only this time, by some Mamluk accounts, David did not bring a sling. He brought fire.

The mythic, seemingly centaurian Mongols turned out not to be unstoppable after all. The Mamluks won the day, and the Mongols never reached Egypt. It was the first defeat that ever halted the Mongol advance.

On the march home, Baybars and his fellow emirs killed the victorious Qutuz, and Baybars took the throne for himself. In the land of the pharaohs, the slaves would now be kings. And theirs would be no ordinary dynasty, for like the Mongols the Mamluks ruled by merit: the sultan would not, as a rule, be the son of the sultan but the greatest warrior among them — a pattern that anchored an Egyptian ascendancy in the Arab world that has more or less continued into the modern era. It was Baybars’s dynasty that swept the last Crusader states into the sea.

Nor was the slave-throne of Egypt the only way the world had turned upside down. Three years before the battle at Goliath’s Spring, a Mongol khan had converted to Islam: Berke, lord of the Golden Horde — and Berke was so outraged by his cousin Hulagu’s destruction of Baghdad that he allied with Mamluk Egypt against him.

Within a few generations most of Hulagu’s own descendants embraced the faith of the people they had conquered. In Persia, Hulagu’s line ruled on as the Ilkhanate (ilkhan, ‘subordinate khan’). In 1295 his great-grandson Ghazan converted, and Islam became the dynasty’s faith: the dynasty under whose rule a Sufi order at Ardabil would begin its slow rise toward the Safavid throne (cf. Part 12) and, in time, the ascendancy of modern Iran.

The storm that had ended the Golden Age was, in the end, absorbed into the very world it destroyed.

Last Section: Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism
This Section: Invasions East & West
Next Section: Europe & the Gunpowder Empires (1300-1850)

Sufi Muslim dancing in prayer | 2026
Photo Credit: Shahin Alam via Pixabay, CC BY-SA 4.0

Overview

A lost library. A House of Wisdom. Thirty birds crossing seven valleys in search of their King. Part 9 built the empire. Now, Part 10 asks what the empire thought, and, perhaps more importantly, what it felt. The Golden Age reached two summits, and Part 10 climbs both. The first is falsafa (philosophy), as Muslim thinkers inherited the Greek achievement, translated it, and made it their own, from al-Kindi and al-Farabi to Avicenna, and through al-Ghazali’s critique and Ibn Rushd’s reply. The second is Sufism, the mystical path that seeks not to reason toward God but to be annihilated in Him. We trace the debate between reason and revelation, follow the Arabic vocabulary the age left to the sciences, and interpret the Sufi Way through Attar’s Conference of the Birds and the poetry of Rumi.

Assigned Reading
Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapter 7
Aslan, No god but God, chapter 8

Key Terms for this Section
Falsafa • Avicenna • al-Ghazali
Sufism • tariqah • nafs • fana • dhiker

10.1 | Falsafa: Reason Meets Revelation

Kalam & the Mihna

Part 6 told the story of Islam’s first great argument: the Rationalists, who read the Qur’an through history, language, and context, and the Traditionalists, who held that an uncreated Qur’an transcends logical analysis (cf. Part 6). Since that debate first reared its head during the Umayyad dynasty, the ebb and flow of rational and traditional discourse has moved through the Islamicate world like ripples in a pond.

That debate had names and institutions. The Mu’tazila (‘those who stand apart’) were the great rationalist school. They held that God’s justice required human free will, that reason was a God-given tool for discerning moral truth, and (most controversially) that the Qur’an was created in time rather than co-eternal with God.

Among their number were wide-ranging minds like al-Jahiz (d. 869), whose curiosity ran from biology to ethics to language, and Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1025), who built a systematic account of ethics grounded in human agency and accountability.

Against them, and eventually beyond them, stood the synthesis of al-Ash’ari (d. 936), who used the tools of reason but placed them in the service of revelation. His school gave classical Islam its characteristic account of causality: occasionalism, the view that no created thing truly causes anything. God is the direct author of every event, moment by moment.

For a brief and remarkable period, the rationalist position became state policy. The Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, a lover of learning, made the ‘created Qur’an’ doctrine an official test in 833 (218 AH), an inquisition known as the Mihna (‘the trial’): judges and scholars were pressured to affirm it or lose their posts. One jurist, Ibn Hanbal, refused under imprisonment and became a folk hero for it. Asked whether the Qur’an was created, he answered only with the testimony of faith. By 848 the caliph al-Mutawakkil abandoned the whole experiment.

The lesson the Islamic tradition drew was lasting: reason had its place, but the state would not dictate the content of faith.

However, the ulama’s holy struggle with the Qur’an, though certainly significant, has not been Islam’s only textual debate.

As the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties spread their influence farther and wider, Muslim thinkers came into contact with the best ideas of the outside world. They were soon faced with the formidable intellectual traditions of the Hindus of India, the Buddhists of China, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and especially the ancient Greek philosophy of the West.

The caliph who presided over the Mihna is the caliph who threw those doors open:
al-Ma’mun stands behind both the inquisition and the translations.

Alexandria & the House of Wisdom

When the Ummah took Alexandria in 642 (cf. Part 9), it inherited one of the legendary homes of Western thought. The Library of Alexandria had been, simply put, the internet of the ancient world. It once housed more books than almost any other place had ever gathered.

But by 642 the Great Library itself was long gone, lost in stages over the centuries before (to fire, war, and neglect). The famous legend that the Muslim conquerors burned it is simply false. What the conquest actually inherited was still alive: Alexandria’s working schools of medicine and philosophy, and the Greek and Syriac books kept in the monasteries and schools of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.

And the timing was telling. About a century before the Muslims arrived, the Christian emperor Justinian had closed the doors of Plato’s Academy in Athens (529). The Greek East went on copying its manuscripts, but the Latin West had lost its Greek, and much of that learning fell out of circulation there for centuries afterward.

It takes only a generation to set aside a tradition of critical inquiry.
Civilization is a fragile thing.

South of Europe, in the Islamicate world, the opposite happened. The Arabs had arrived with a single book, the Qur’an, and an enormous appetite for more! The governing Islamic view was that if something is good, then it must be from God — it doesn’t matter who first said it or where it came from.

Did the Hindus have a better number system? Adopt it. Did the Chinese have a specialized knowledge of the eye? Take it. Did the Greeks have a systematized notion of logic? Use it.

This is the ethic that produced what we now call the Golden Age of Islam. One of the early civilization’s principal virtues was its ability to assimilate, preserve, and even revive the crumbling achievements of the cultures around it. Where one civilization had let its inheritance lapse, another took it up, copied it, argued with it, and carried it forward. For several centuries, the momentum of that appetite was extraordinary!

The engine of that assimilation was Baghdad’s great translation project, housed in the caliphal library and research center remembered as the Bayt al-Hikma (the House of Wisdom), under al-Ma’mun’s own patronage. There, works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Greek physicians were rendered into Arabic.

The translators themselves were largely Christians. The greatest of them, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), was a Nestorian Christian physician whose surviving catalog lists over a hundred works of Galen. Syriac-speaking Christians had been translating Aristotle for centuries before Baghdad existed. From its first page, the Golden Age was the work of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Muslims alike (cf. Part 9).

From the West, Islamicate scholars inherited philosophy, geometry, and medicine. Plato and Aristotle, all but forgotten in the Latin West, became influential voices in Islamic writing. The discourse the Greeks called philosophia (‘the love of wisdom’) entered the Islamicate world as Falsafa, and a philosopher became a faylasuf. The Golden Age is replete with it: an amalgamation of Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian traditions absorbed and enjoyed across the empire.

Avicenna & al-Ghazali

The first great figure of Falsafa was al-Kindi (d. c. 873), remembered as ‘the Philosopher of the Arabs,’ who insisted that the truths of philosophy and the truths of Islam could not finally conflict, since truth is one, whatever its source:

A generation later, al-Farabi (d. 950) earned the title ‘the Second Teacher’ (Aristotle being the first). He described an ideal state ruled by a philosopher-prophet in the spirit of Plato’s Republic, and he explained prophecy itself in philosophical terms, as the perfection of the human intellect and imagination.

The summit was reached by Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), whose Canon of Medicine was authoritative for centuries and whose Book of Healing and Book of Salvation laid out a complete cosmology for the Islamicate world.

Avicenna drew a famous distinction between the necessary and the contingent. Only God exists necessarily, by His own nature, while everything else exists only because something caused it. From the one necessary God, he argued, the whole cosmos flows in a timeless emanation, which led him to the conclusion that the universe, as an eternal outflowing of an eternal God, had no beginning in time. He also held that God knows the world in its universals rather than in every passing particular. These were dazzling ideas, and to many scholars they were alarming ones. They seemed to place the philosopher’s reason above the plain teaching of revelation.

Not every thinker of the age fit the mold. The physician al-Razi (d. c. 925), one of the great clinicians of the medieval world, carried a skeptic’s distrust of dogmatism into his science, insisting on disciplined observation over inherited authority — a reminder that ‘falsafa’ covered not one doctrine but a whole spectrum of temperaments, from the system-builders to the empiricists.

The reckoning came with al-Ghazali (1058–1111).

Al-Ghazali is the thinker who broke away from the authority of reason. A brilliant jurist and theologian who would end his life as a mystic, he decided that the way to beat the philosophers was to master their methods and turn those methods against them.

His Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers — a tahafut is a collapse) worked through about twenty of their key claims, and on three he charged the philosophers with outright unbelief (kufr): that the world is eternal (against creation by God’s free will), that God knows only universals and not particulars (against His omniscience), and that there is no bodily resurrection (against the promise of scripture).

Al-Ghazali’s attack on causation was the philosophical heart of it. Fire does not truly burn cotton, he argued. Rather, God causes the burning, and we merely mistake constant sequence for necessary connection. This is Ash’ari occasionalism pressed to its sharpest point, and it is no exaggeration to say it anticipated the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s critique of cause and effect by more than 600 years!

Before al-Ghazali, three intellectual currents competed for the Islamicate mind: the scholars of the law, the philosophers, and the Sufis. After him, only two remained.

Al-Ghazali then turned from argument to experience. He tells the story himself in his Deliverance from Error: in 1095, at the height of his fame, a crisis seized him, he became unable to lecture at all, and within months he had given up his chair in Baghdad and gone on the road as a Sufi.

Falsafa did not vanish. It received one more great defense. In Muslim Spain, Ibn Rushd (cf. Part 8) answered al-Ghazali with a rebuttal titled, pointedly, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), and argued (in his Decisive Treatise) that philosophy is the ‘twin sister’ of religion: the two seek the same truth, one in demonstration and the other in symbol.

In the Islamic East his reply did little to reverse the tide. But his commentaries on Aristotle (once translated into Latin) lit up the universities of Christian Europe, where thinkers like Thomas Aquinas wrestled with ‘the Commentator,’ and a whole school called Averroism grew up around him.

It is one of history’s ironies that philosophy receded as a formal discipline in the Sunni schools at almost the same moment that a Muslim philosopher was helping to reawaken it in the West.

10.2 | From Baghdad: Algebra to Coffee

Stars, Numerals, & Paper

In Egypt and beyond, Islamicate thinkers also folded the older naturalistic sciences into their curriculum: the astronomy and geometry that had measured a round world, fixed a calendar, and raised the pyramids. The naturalistic accounts of the world made by the Greek philosophers, the seedbed of what would one day become modern science, survived and thrived in the schools of the Abbasid empire.

From the East, the Islamicate world added Hindu numerals, pharmacology, Chinese paper, and a sophisticated, empirical view of astronomy. Tradition holds that papermaking reached the caliphate with Chinese prisoners taken at Talas in 751 (cf. Part 9). A paper mill is reported in Baghdad by the 790s.

Islamicate astronomy enabled navigators to reckon direction without the sun, and so Muslim sailors became the world’s night-navigators, guided by the stars to ports in China and southern Africa. The instruments and tables they perfected (the astrolabe among them) would one day guide European sailors to the New World. Six of our brightest stars still answer to Arabic names: Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, Deneb!

But as far as they might journey, Muslim explorers and merchants always returned to Mecca for the hajj. They came from as far east as India and as far west as Spain, and at the center of it all stood the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. Its very centrality is why it became the greatest repository of knowledge on the planet — the Oxford of its day, the place to which scholars carried the writings and inventions of distant lands, and from which traveling pilgrims carried them home again.

If a new surgical technique for cataracts succeeded in Samarkand, within a year it could be practiced a continent away in Seville, Spain.

Nothing quite like this had happened before. Baghdad connected the world.

The Greeks had conquered a wide world, but their knowledge tended to flow one way — outward from Athens. The Romans built an immense empire, but their reach followed the coastlines their armies could hold. The Islamicate achievement was different in kind: to gather the world’s best ideas into one place, under one language and one restless appetite for learning, and to send them circulating back out again to every corner of the map with the next year’s hajj.

Algebra, Algorithm, & Zero

Such is the legacy of the rational thought that permeated the medieval Muslim world. We remain its inheritors every time we use its vocabulary. A whole family of Arabic words still serves the modern technician. There would be no math without algebra (al-jabr). There would be no computers without algorithms (from the name of the mathematician al-Khwarizmi) and ciphers (sifr, also the root of our “zero”). There would be no chemistry without alkalis (al-qaliy). No engineering without azimuths (al-samt) and zeniths (samt al-ra’s), or their opposite point, the nadir (naẓir).

Candy, Mocha, & Coffee

On the lighter side, the Islamicate world handed us kohl (kuḥl, the ground cosmetic, and, the same root that gives us alcohol), along with lacquer and magazine (makhzan, a storehouse). Damask fabric is named for Damascus. Mocha is named for a port in Yemen. Candy comes from the Arabic qand (a lump of crystallized sugar), and sugar itself is sukkar. In fact the very idea of the three-course meal and the dessert that ends it comes to us from the medieval Arab courts.

But my personal favorite contribution from the Islamicate world?
Coffee. Qahwa. I could not have written this lesson without it!

The three-course meal even has a name attached: tradition credits Ziryab, a musician who came from Baghdad to Umayyad Córdoba in 822 and taught the city how to dine. And coffee as a drink is younger than the Abbasids. By most accounts it was first brewed in Yemen in the 1400s, by Sufis who wanted to stay awake through long nights of remembering God. Mocha (al-Mukha) was the port that shipped it.

Interesting that the age’s most famous drink belongs to its mystics.

Wisdom, logic, and reason have long been cornerstones of Islamic thinking, and the age shows them at full strength. But rationalism was never the only path open to a Muslim. There has always been another road.

An esoteric one.

10.3 | The Sufi Way

Rabia of Basra

So — is this all there is?

Islam had become a system that produced mathematics, science, and unprecedented wealth. From it came philosophy, domed cities, and coffee.

But was that really why God spoke through an angel to the Prophet Muhammad? For architecture and hot beverages? Is that the end of the Qur’an? Are tax revenues and commodities really what a Muslim is meant to contemplate while kneeling to pray in the tangerine-red beauty of a sunset? Shakespeare’s Hamlet says it well:

For most people, the sheer productive energy of a city like Baghdad was more than enough to justify five daily prayers. The rich and comfortable lived charmed lives. For them, Islam was simply a culture that one inhabited: eat this, not that. Say this, not that. Make it to the mosque on Friday, and enjoy the rest of the week.

But for a rare few, this was not enough. It was not that everyone else was doing Islam wrong. It was that some exceptional Muslims wanted more. And so they began to experiment, to push at the boundaries of ordinary religious convention.

Some read the Qur’an deep into the night by candlelight, seeking its most esoteric interpretations. Some lost themselves chanting the name of God until they slipped into a trance. Some prayed the daily prayers dozens or hundreds of times over, waiting for the shift in consciousness that would bring them nearer to Him.

Consider the story of the freed slave Rabia of Basra (d. 801). The tradition tells that she spent her nights in prayer, and that her owner was so struck by her piety that he came to believe he was in the presence of a saint and set her free.

When he offered her a marriage to any man in the city, she confessed that she was already consumed by a deep and passionate love. Asked with whom, she answered simply: “With God.” Then she shared with her former master a poetry so enchanting that he became her first disciple:

O my Lord, the stars are shining and the eyes of men are closed, and kings have shut their doors and every lover is alone with his beloved, and here am I alone with Thee.
Rabia of Basra, trans. Margaret Smith (1928)

Wool & the Pearl

While the wealthy of 8th-century Iraq lived in splendor, the mystics went the other way. To them, all that comfort was an obstacle to experiencing the nearness of God. In deliberate contrast to the perfumed élite, they gave away their wealth, lived on bread and water, and wore simple garments of rough wool. The Arabic word for wool is suf, and so these mystics came to be called Sufis.

Sufism is neither a branch of Sunni or Shia Islam nor something wholly apart from them. It is the esoteric path within Islam.

The Sufis’ own account of the path begins at the beginning: with the Qur’an and the Prophet, handed down through unbroken chains of teachers. In most countries, Muslims who formally belong to a Sufi order are a small minority.

And yet in one sense Sufism is larger than either Sunnism or Shiism, for scholars have long noted in it ideas with parallels among Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Greeks, and Christians. Both accounts are true. That makes sense once we take seriously the two central Sufi claims: that the outward forms of religion (Sharia, fiqh, the Five Pillars) are not sufficient to the great task, and that, when you get right down to it, the reality of all things is One.

The great task of the Sufi is union with God. The Greek philosopher Plotinus (a student of Plato’s thought) had argued that all things emanate from a perfect One and will, in the end, return to it. Plotinus reached Muslim readers in Baghdad in an Arabic version that circulated under Aristotle’s name (the Theology of Aristotle), and the idea of the return to the One fascinated the philosophers there.

The Sufis set out to live this truth. They took hold of the Qur’anic teaching that God is One (tawhid) and everywhere present:

Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God. Qur’an 2:115 (paraphrased)

Above all, the Sufi sought a return to God, though how they imagined that return would scandalize the ulama and the rulers of their day.

In fact, it did more than scandalize. In 922 (309 AH), Baghdad executes the Sufi al-Hallaj, who had cried out ana’l-Haqq, ‘I am the Truth’ (the Truth being one of God’s own names). To the authorities it is blasphemy. To the Sufis it is the opposite of pride: a man so emptied of himself that only God was left to speak.

For if ‘all is One,’ then the distinctions the ulama guarded so jealously are, for the Sufi, rather beside the point. Superficial differences over a deeper unity. To the Sufi, every religion is like a hard clam shell. What matters is the pearl inside. And what is that pearl, beneath all the orthodoxy and orthopraxy? In a word: LOVE.

For this reason the Sufis set aside much of the outward machinery of religion, the externalities (zahir), as beside the point, since no human mind can adequately comprehend God anyway. What the Sufi seeks lies beneath (batin) all of that. Love is the substance behind Sharia. Love is the face behind the veil. Love is the pearl beneath everything we call “religion.”

The social élites of Baghdad, needless to say, did not agree, for the Sufis undercut the very reason the ulama existed and exposed the extravagance of the aristocratic perfumed parlors as hypocrisy.

The Sufis did not want merely to be pointed toward God.
They wanted to drown in Him.

As the Sufi adage has it:
If you cannot change the king, you must work to change yourself.

The orders themselves answer in a three-step formula of their own: sharia, tariqa, haqiqa. The law, the way, the truth. In Rumi’s framing: the law is the candle that shows the road, the way is the walking of it, and the truth is the arrival.

The Way & the Pir

The vocabulary of that inner work reaches back to Genesis. Jewish mystics long connected the animating breath of God at creation with the love that moved Him to create. When God formed Adam, He breathed life into him. That breath (Hebrew ruach, Arabic ruh) is what the Sufi seeks to be filled by. It shares parallels in Hindu prana and the Daoist qi.

I have fashioned him, and breathed into him of My spirit. Qur’an 15:29 (paraphrased)

But there is a struggle in reaching for God’s ruh, and it is waged against the nafs, the ego or lower self. The Sufi seeks a kind of Buddhist extinguishment of the nafs. But for a Muslim the point of releasing the ego is precisely to attain union with God. The Qur’an gives the soul three stations:

• the soul that commands evil (12:53)
• the soul that reproaches itself (75:2, cf. Part 8)
• the soul at peace (89:27)

This inner struggle is itself the Greater Jihad (cf. Part 3): the Believer’s struggle against everything that keeps him from righteousness. The jihad of the Sufi is the interior battle between the nafs (ego) and the ruh (the Spirit of God) for possession of the qalb, a word that does not translate cleanly into English. Qalb carries the senses of ‘intuition’ and ‘apprehension.’ It sits closer to ‘heart’ than to ‘mind.’

The journey from the self-centered outer life to the selfless attainment of the divine reality is called the tariqah (‘the path’), the Way. In time the word also named the orders that walk it: the Qadiri, the Naqshbandi, the Chishti, the Mevlevi.

There are many schools of tariqah, but all agree on one thing: the traveler needs the direct supervision of a master, a Shaykh in Arabic (the clan title of Part 2), or a Pir in Persian (‘elder’).

Not all Muslims are Sufis, but all Sufis are Muslims first and foremost. Without proper guidance, the tourist who picks up a book of poetry one day and calls himself a ‘Sufi’ stands opposed to the storied Islamic schools of Sufism, which have risked life and limb to preserve their teachings. Anyone drawn to this path should tread it with respect, context, and the Shahadah.

Every tariqah has stages. They are not studied the way one studies a math equation. There is no website or set of talking points that will carry a person into selfless union with the Divine. This is the reason for a Pir (Elder).

The student (the murid, ‘one who seeks’) is led from one ineffable experience to the next by the master’s guidance. Like the Shahadah, it is finally something a believer must do herself. Even the Pir cannot walk the path for her. As the Persian poet shared:

10.4 | The Conference of the Birds

The Seven Valleys

In the 12th century a Persian Sufi gave the whole journey its most beloved parable. It may be my favorite book.

In The Conference of the Birds, Attar (his pen name means ‘perfumer’) tells a tale of the birds of the world gathering around the hoopoe (the bird that carries Solomon’s letter in Qur’an 27) on a journey to see the Simurgh, the mythical King of the Birds.

First, the birds must swear an oath of obedience to their guide, for the road ahead is treacherous. But the spiritual power of the Pir (his baraka) is equal to it.

The birds must cross seven perilous valleys along the Way:

• Quest | they renounce their love of the world and turn from their sins
• Love | each bird plunges into a sea of fire
• Mystery | each must break off and follow a separate path
• Detachment | all “lust for meaning” disappears
• Unity | the many are merged in “the oneness of diversity”
• Bewilderment | the birds escape duality itself and let go of every desire for certainty
• Poverty & Nothingness | having destroyed the “mountain of self” and abandoned intellect for love, they are consumed by the spirit of the universe and rise, cloaked in oblivion, to meet the Simurgh

Thousands had set out. Only 30 birds remain at the end.

And what do they behold on the throne? Themselves. For Simurgh can be heard in Persian as ‘thirty birds’ (si murgh, Attar’s pun), and the seekers discover that what they sought, they were.

Fana & Rumi

While the destination matters, for the Sufi the journey matters even more.

It is the task of the Pir to purify the student as an alchemist purifies gold, burning away every impurity until only the pure and dazzling metal remains.

And, as in Attar’s parable, it is the task of the murid (student) to seek self-annihilation: fana, ‘passing away.’ Its classical partner is baqa, ‘abiding’: the self passes away, and what abides is God. The Sufis teach that only in the extinguishing of the self can one truly find God here on earth.

The greatest voice of that teaching is Rumi, and even the name tells a story. It means ‘the Roman,’ for Islamicate Anatolia was known as Rum — the land of eastern Rome.

Jalal al-Din (1207–1273) was born, by most accounts, in or near Balkh (today, Afghanistan), went west as a boy ahead of the Mongols (cf. Part 11), and settled in Konya, where he taught, danced, and wrote from his heart. The Mevlevi order takes its name from his title, Mawlana, ‘our master.’ As the greatest Sufi poet once wrote:

Dhiker: Remembrance

Some come to Islam as the rich tradition of their family. Some come for the logic it offers and the order it brings to a life. And then there are the rare few who seek sheer transcendence: to be engulfed by joy and by an immediate sense of connection with God, here and now.

The history of Sufism, however, has often collided, sometimes violently, with the orderly workings of mainstream Islam. The Sufis were frequently unwelcome to share their practices at the noon prayer of the local mosque. It is partly for this reason that acts of dhiker (‘remembrance’) became the central Sufi practice. The practice has its own verse:

Truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find rest. Qur’an 13:28 (paraphrased)

The forms of dhiker run from the spoken to the danced:

• vocal dhiker: most common: the repeated chanting of the Shahadah or a verse
• silent dhiker: quiet and meditative
• artistic dhiker: often taking the form of calligraphy
• musical dhiker: in Pakistan, the spirit-filled devotional concerts called qawwali
• dancing dhiker: most famously the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey (the Mevlevi sema), who spin in circles, orbiting their Pir as they contemplate the Divine

All of these exercises, of body and mind, serve a single purpose: the annihilation of the self (fana) and the walking of the path of love all the way back to God.

The two summits of Part 10 stand closer together than they may at first appear.

The philosopher’s One, from which all things emanate and to which they return, and the mystic’s One, in which the seeker seeks to be dissolved, are recognizably kin, which is why al-Ghazali, having exhausted the arguments, went looking for the experience.

Reason built the ladder. The Sufi attempt to climb past its top rung.

To this day the great Sufi orders endure, from Turkey to the Balkans, from West Africa to South Asia (Turkey banned the dervish lodges in 1925, and the sema continues there as a state-celebrated ceremony). They gather for dhiker, honor their lineages of Pirs, and keep alive within the house of Islam the conviction that beneath the law and the learning lies a pearl.

And that the pearl is love.

Last Section: Umayyads & Abbasids
This Section: Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism
Next Section: Invasions East & West

The Dome of the Rock | Jerusalem, 2022

Overview

A murdered election, an Islamicate map that runs from the Atlantic to the Indus, and a brand-new capital drawn as a perfect circle. Part 9 opens Module III, The Golden Age (Parts 9, 10, and 11). Module II read the Qur’an: how it is interpreted (Part 6), what it demands in peace and war (Part 7), and what it says is real (Part 8). Now the Ummah becomes an empire. This Part traces the turn from the elective caliphate to dynasty under the Umayyads, follows the conquest map from Jerusalem to Tours, and watches the Abbasid revolution raise its black banners, ending at the gates of Baghdad.

Assigned Reading
Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapters 5 & 6

Key Terms for this Section
Damascus • al-Maghreb • the Dome of the Rock
waqf• Abu Muslim • al-Mansur • Islamicate • Baghdad

9.1 | From Ummah to Empire

The Last Shura

Around 676 (56 AH), the shura that convened to debate the next caliph after the Umayyad Mu’awiya (cf. Part 4) was an absolute farce.

In the circle of those gathered to discuss it, one of Mu’awiya’s henchmen openly threatened to kill anyone who dared raise an objection to Mu’awiya’s son, Yazid, becoming the next caliph.

And Yazid did end up as the next caliph. It was under his rule that Husayn and most of his household were killed at Karbala (cf. Part 5), with the seat of power held from Damascus. There would never again be another shura to debate the caliph.

From here on out, the Islamicate empire would be dynastic.

The Prophet Muhammad may have started the Ummah as a religious entity, but as of the leadership of Mu’awiya and Yazid, the Caliphate had become a political empire. The Umayyad empire was the first of many Islamic empires. Some would be Sunni and some Shia. Some Arab, others Persian or Turkish. Some housed in the Middle East, others in places as far-flung as India, Iran, North Africa, or even Spain.

But the Umayyads came first.

The Umayyad Inheritance

Their empire marks the beginning of Islamicate civilization.

Its court language was Meccan Arabic, and its principal ethnicity was Arab. Back in Muhammad’s time, the Umayyads had been the wealthy élite clan whom the Prophet had railed against for their mistreatment of the poor (cf. Part 2). Back then, they ran the city of Mecca. Now, having converted to Islam en masse, their enormous wealth ran not just a city but an empire that spanned continents.

The charitable view is that the Umayyad penchant for wealth made them the perfect inheritors of the Islamic throne. They had the trade networks, the know-how, and the ambition needed to grow the first Islamic civilization across the 7th and 8th centuries.

And, like all the world’s empires, the Umayyads had no compunction about aggressing against their neighbors in a perpetual state of border war. While the Qur’an limits the casus belli (the justifiable grounds for war) narrowly (cf. Part 7), the fact is that the Umayyad dynasty kept pushing at its frontiers through military means. Growing up next to their regional counterparts, the Christian Byzantines and the Zoroastrian Persians, this was simply the political reality of the times.

The machinery of the empire tells the same story. Around 697, the caliph Abd al-Malik (the builder of the famous Dome of the Rock, below) made Arabic the language of imperial administration. In 696–697 he also struck a new gold dinar that carried no images at all, only words quoting the Qur’an. Yet the clerks who kept the empire’s books, from Morocco to Iran, were still largely Greek- and Persian-trained administrators, many of them Christian and Zoroastrian.

3 Empires, 3 Stories

Those three powers were remarkably alike.

In the halls of each king’s court, the dangerous ‘Other’ was warned about, and every ruler reminded his subjects that the sacred peace they enjoyed within their borders was owed in large part to the armies they raised and sent to the frontier.

Christians, Muslims, and Zoroastrians all played this same game — and played it effectively. And each intended, eventually, to rule the others in the name of God.

Each of the three empires had a narrative around which its soldiers gathered. The Zoroastrian Persians praised themselves, rightly, as the most ancient and civilized culture on earth, defending itself against more recent regional upstarts (heirs to a grandeur that reached back long before any of their rivals existed). The Byzantine Christians upheld the gospel and the miracles of Jesus, while remaining tied culturally to the ancient greatness of Rome. Theirs was the story of an empire that had already conquered the world once and been baptized into a new faith.

But the Umayyad Muslims had a far more compelling narrative than history lessons and stories of days gone by. The Muslim forces rallied behind a simple story: a new miracle. They were winning. By leaps and bounds, the Islamicate civilization just kept seeing victory after victory.

And a people who are winning need no ‘ancient pedigree’ to explain themselves.

Critically, all three narratives did the same work: each told a people that history, or God, or destiny had chosen them, and that the empire next door was the threatening godless Other. The Persian looked at his rivals and saw barbarous newcomers. The Byzantine saw heretics and infidels. The Muslim saw a world not yet brought to submission. Three expansionist empires, each certain God was on its side, and one of them (for now) riding a wave of success the other two could not match.

What follows is a description of that wave.

9.2 | Mapping the Conquest: Jerusalem to Tours

Jerusalem, Alexandria, & Persia

First, the Byzantine Christians lost the Levant: Jerusalem itself fell to Caliph Omar in 638 (cf. Part 4). Within a century, the map of the Mediterranean world was redrawn.

• 638 | Jerusalem falls to the Ummah
• 642 | Christian Alexandria falls, and with it, Egypt
• 651 | The last Sasanian king of Persia is killed
• 670 | Kairouan is founded as the forward operating base for North Africa
• 691 | The Dome of the Rock is completed in Jerusalem
• 698 | Carthage (today, Tunisia) is taken
• 711 | The Iberian peninsula (ie. Spain) and the Sindh are invaded
• 732 | The Battle of Tours halts the Muslim advance into France

The famous Temple Mount is the hill where King Solomon had once built the Jewish Temple, and where, in Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad had taken his Night Journey more than a thousand years later. By the 7th century, the Mount had been used as a trash dump under Christian rule. The Mount itself was cleaned up by the Ummah, and around the Foundation Stone was built the glittering Dome of the Rock in 691, under the caliph Abd al-Malik. As the empire expanded, Christians and Jews would live within it as protected communities, and Jerusalem itself would remain a shared holy city for all three traditions.

The Dome still carries its founding inscription, dated 72 AH (691–692), in a long band of gold mosaic, and the choice of text is striking. At the heart of newly conquered Jerusalem, the empire’s first great monument quotes the Qur’an’s words about Jesus:

People of the Book, do not exaggerate in your religion. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was God’s messenger and His word, given to Mary. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not speak of a Trinity. God is one God. Qur’an 4:171 (paraphrased)

The first great monument of Islamic architecture honors Jesus as God’s messenger.
In gold, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

After Syria and the Levant came the Christian province of Egypt (essential to the Byzantines for grain, for ships, and as the European gateway to Africa). The Ummah mounted a 3-year campaign to wrest the strategic Nile from Byzantine hands, and in 642, with the fall of Christian Alexandria, the once-Coptic province of Egypt passed under full Islamic control. From then on, if drought came to Arabia, the breadbasket of the Nile would guard the Ummah against famine.

Next came Persia. The once-united Persian empire (today, Iran) had already begun to fold, in large part from overextending itself in endless wars with the neighboring Byzantines. By the mid-7th century, the Zoroastrian Persians were economically, politically, and socially unprepared for a major Arab incursion from the south (cf. Part 4). In 628, the Persian king was executed, and no fewer than ten kings replaced him over the next four years!

Civil war tore the thinly-spread empire apart just as the Arab Muslim forces were poised to strike. In 633, the Ummah invaded Persian-controlled Mesopotamia (today, Iraq). By 636, the Persians had lost the entire west of Iran. Sheltered behind the Zagros Mountains, the rest of Persia held out until 651 before it fell militarily.

Still, Persia would always be a special case. Conversion from Zoroastrianism came over centuries. (Iran’s famous Shia identity is a later story, cf. Part 12.) The Persians never embraced Arabic. They kept their own non-Semitic language, their Iranian traditions, and much of their pre-Islamic culture.

In many ways Arab Islam and Persian Islam would always remain distinct. The former spread west from Arabia across North Africa. The latter traveled north and east from Persia into the lands of the Turks, the Central Asians, and India.

That fault line will matter for the rest of the course.

From the Atlantic to the Indus

And so it was that in 661 (40 AH), the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiya was able to hand his family Egypt (the gateway to Africa), Persia (the gateway to Asia), and naval control of most of the formerly Roman Mediterranean. One point deserves emphasis: these lands were controlled by Muslims, but only 10 to 20 percent of the population identified as Muslim at the time.

This was minority rule.
There was a thin governing class atop a vast and largely non-Muslim populace.

By 670, the Tunisian city of Kairouan was serving as a forward operating base for North Africa (in Arabic, al-Maghreb, ‘the west’). By 698 the Maghrebi forces had taken the city of Carthage, and in 708 the Moroccan city of Tangiers fell as well.

Islam was now an Atlantic civilization.

East of Persia, the Turkic-Buddhist region of Transoxiana (today Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan) was pried open slowly: first raids, striking Bukhara (673) and Samarqand (675), then conquest in earnest under the general Qutayba ibn Muslim (705–715). From the Far East, China grew alarmed at the prospect of losing authority over the priceless Silk Road and backed the Turkish defenses. The contest was settled only in 751, when Abbasid and Tang armies met at the Talas River and the Chinese were turned back. Transoxiana would belong to the Islamicate world.

South of Transoxiana, the Ummah took the Indian province of Sindh (today part of Pakistan) in 711, and by 714 controlled the entire lower Indus Valley. A word about a word: the name ‘Hindu’ that the Muslim forces used for the local non-Muslims was itself inherited, not invented. Persian speakers had long called the peoples and lands beyond the Indus ‘Hindu’ (from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the river), and the conquerors spread that usage. It would be many more centuries before the full extent of Islamicate dominance in India took hold.

Back in the west, the Islamic conquest of Christian Spain came rapidly. The local forces were mostly North African Berbers (Amazigh, as they call themselves), not Arabs, unified from Kairouan to Tangiers. The Maghrebi incursion was dramatic. As in Persia, the fall of Spain was preceded by the death of a monarch: the Germanic Visigoth king Wittiza died in 710, and internal division among the Gothic kingdoms triggered the Islamic conquest in 711. The capital city of Toledo surrendered peacefully, and the local Spanish Jews welcomed the egalitarian Muslims as long-prayed-for liberators.

By 716, most of Iberia (today Spain and Portugal) was under Islamic control (the mountainous north of Asturias never fell). Muslim rule would last, shrinking over the centuries, until Granada, the last emirate, surrendered in 1492. The Islamic advance into Western Europe ended famously at the northern Battle of Tours in 732, when the Frankish general Charles Martel repelled the Muslim forces. Though Spain left Christendom for seven hundred years, France would remain Catholic.

Damascus & the Waqf

The unprecedented wealth that came pouring into Damascus from across the world ushered in an age of prosperity and public works the Middle East had frankly never seen. Lavish building projects (the Dome of the Rock among them) went up, and the blending of Roman, Persian, and Arab sensibilities became the very basis of Islamic art and architecture. Ambitious public works, schools, roads, and charitable endowments were paid for at no cost to citizens.

Beyond the Middle East, an Arab nouveau riche sought its fortune by establishing grand estates in garrison cities throughout the young empire. These motivated families would become the silk-swaddled landed nobility of Islamic society for centuries.

One of the ways the new Islamic lords displayed both their greatness and their piety was by funding a local waqf. The word comes from the Arabic root w-q-f, ‘to stop, to stand’: the endowed property is ‘stopped,’ held out of sale for good (plural awqaf). A waqf was a philanthropic religious foundation that worked autonomously for the good of the community. It was never owned or operated by its donors. It functioned instead as an independent, non-profit charity: collecting donations for the poor, building mosques, and running schools, hospitals, and orphanages.

Critically, once a waqf was founded, its own donor could not shut it down. It was legally self-perpetuating, insulated by design from the whims of the wealthy family that had endowed it. In Europe, charitable efforts of this kind were centrally organized through the Catholic Church, under the Pope and his subordinates. In the Islamicate world, the waqfs were independently and regionally controlled.

It was from the charitable work of the waqfs that local Muslims across the empire could, if they were pious and clever, rise from nothing to become Islamic scholars. Many did exactly that, and the Islamicate world flourished as a result of this focus on education and social development, the very seedbed of the ulama, the scholarly class of the age (cf. Part 10).

9.3 | The Abbasid Revolution

An Arab Aristocracy

The Umayyad empire’s greatness was also its most dangerous liability. As the empire grew in size, so too did the distance between those who could afford to participate in the new civilization and those who could not. Historically, the price of political stability has often been the rich growing richer while the poor grow poorer.

Arabization and Islamification of the local ethnic groups within the Caliphate occurred haphazardly and unevenly. North Africa, for example, Arabized quickly, since there had been no unified culture there to resist it. The Persians, as we have seen, were the most resistant of all. But whatever level of assimilation a local population reached, one thing was clear. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the Arabs were the aristocrats now.

The Umayyad class structure took shape primarily along religious strata.

At the very top of society were pure-blood Arab Muslims. Within the borders of the Islamicate world, from Morocco to Iran, Arabs were generally treated with royal deference. The second tier were Muslims with one Arab parent. Beneath them came the rest of the world’s Muslims (those with no Arab heritage who nonetheless held to the Prophet’s message).

Then, across a harder line, came the Jews and Christians — the People of the Book. These dhimmi (the ‘protected peoples’ of Part 3) were not treated as co-equals with Muslims, but they held opportunities others did not. And who were those others? In a word, the polytheists and pagans. At least the Jews and Christians knew the prophets and had some sense of what Islam promised. When Muslims spoke of God, the People of the Book understood what was meant! The polytheists had none of that shared background, and so they generally stayed at the bottom rung. Until they converted (to Islam, or at the very least to Christianity), they had virtually no legal rights.

Eventually this classist arrangement produced a growing theological problem. One of the core promises of Islam was that Muslims lived in a brotherhood of equals. The Qur’an had set that standard itself:

God created humanity from a single pair and made it into nations and tribes, so that they might come to know one another. The noblest among them, in God’s sight, is the most mindful of Him. Qur’an 49:13 (paraphrased)

The Islamic origin story told of a simple, rugged people who braved the hot desert sands together and fought valiantly, side by side, for the good of all. The Prophet Muhammad famously slept on a single sheet folded four times, serving as both his mattress and his cover. Caliph Omar was known to sit at his cobbler’s bench and mend his own worn shoes.

Now, though, the Ummah seemed to stand for the perfumed few hoarding most of society’s wealth, while most non-Arabs scrapped for whatever the Umayyads left out for them.

This became a recipe for revolution.

Abu Muslim & the Black Banners

There was a particular sting to this friction. The Arabs now lording it over the empire were mere upstarts in the eyes of many they governed: a desert people grown suddenly and fabulously rich on the spoils of conquest. The Persians, by contrast, were the heirs of one of the oldest and most sophisticated civilizations on earth, a culture that had been building cities and for a thousand years before Mecca’s caravans.

To be ruled as a second-class subject by the nouveau riche was galling enough — to be ruled by nouveau riche who claimed the sanction of God Almighty for the arrangement was intolerable. This is the grievance at the center of the age: not merely poverty, but the humiliation of the once-great made to bow to the newly-arrived.

That grievance did not smolder evenly everywhere. In the Persian east, the anger over Husayn’s death and the massacre at Karbala had never cleared away, and the widening wealth gap between Arab Muslims and Persian Muslims only sharpened it. The Persians saw themselves twice over as underdogs: an ancient people facing an Arab aristocracy, and partisans of the Prophet’s family facing the dynasty that had cut that family down in cold blood.

Never Arab enough, never the right family — always second-class while the Umayyads ruled.

From this discontent, two very different opposition movements took shape. Only one would matter in the end. The Kharijites (the fierce, uncompromising purists of Part 4, who held that any sinning caliph forfeited his office) ultimately fizzled as a political force. Their absolutism was too extreme to build the broad coalition a revolution needs, and they spent their energy in scattered, doomed risings.

The Shia were the real threat. After Karbala they possessed the two things the Kharijites lacked: a concrete grievance the whole east could feel, and a legitimate bloodline claim to the caliphate through the family of the Prophet. They would remain the Umayyads’ most dangerous opponents, and, in the end, the instrument by which the dynasty was finally brought down.

The leader who finally turned that discontent into a revolution was a mysterious figure who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muslim — which means, plainly, ‘a Muslim man’ (more literally, ‘father of Muslim,’ an Arabic byname). The anonymity was deliberate. It is fitting that history barely knows who he really was, because he was, in every sense, a professional revolutionary.

Khorasan, in the Persian east, was the far frontier, distant enough from Damascus that an organizer could work for years without the caliph’s spies catching the scent. From there, Abu Muslim built his movement the way a modern insurgent builds one: patiently, in cells, arming and training a cadre hellbent on purging the Caliphate of Umayyad control, and drawing on the ready reservoir of Shia and Persian resentment.

What is striking is what he did not do. He was studiously vague about who, exactly, would sit on the throne once the Umayyads fell. Name a specific candidate too soon, and every faction with its own preferred claimant would peel away. But keep the question open, and everyone who hated the Umayyads could march under one banner.

So the cadre was told only that the caliphate would be restored to its rightful house —the house of the Prophet. That doctrine, the Hashemite claim, was drilled into them until it became an article of faith. The claim ran through the Banu Hashim, the Prophet’s own clan. The revolutionaries even gave the ambiguity a slogan: al-riḍā min āl Muḥammad, ‘the one acceptable from the family of Muhammad.’

But which one? The slogan, very deliberately, never said.

And here the revolution’s careful ambiguity paid a strange dividend: with no willing descendant of Ali stepping forward to lead, the movement could quietly enlist Abu al-Abbas, a descendant not of Ali but of Muhammad’s uncle. He was a man of the Prophet’s clan, technically, though not of the line the Shia had bled for.

The banners went up black. The Umayyads, for their part, reflexively flew the white banner. What they failed to appreciate, back in Damascus, was that white is the Persian color of death.

• 747 | Abu Muslim raises the black banners
• 750 | The revolution wins and the last Umayyad caliph is run down in Egypt
• 754 | al-Saffah dies of smallpox
• 755 | Abu Muslim is murdered on al-Mansur’s orders
• 762 | Baghdad is founded

Of course, the Abbasid authorities made much of that omen. But in truth, this was not a simple fight over right and wrong. It was about Umayyad hegemony. It was about broken promises. And, of course, it was about Ali’s line, cut down at Karbala.

In 750 (132 AH), the armies of black and white met for the future of the empire at the Great Zab River. Though outnumbered, the black army of Khorasan won a stunning victory that sent the last Umayyad caliph fleeing to Egypt. Within the year, he had been found and executed.

In his place, the Abbasid dynasty was born.

The Red Feast

The Hashemites declared Abu al-Abbas the new, rightful caliph of the Ummah.

Then came a gesture of goodwill. The new regime invited the leading members of the Umayyad clan to a lavish dinner. No expense was spared. The Umayyads laughed with the new Abbasid leadership, draped across plump cushions as servants brought them their every culinary desire.

It was a feast indeed — until it wasn’t. When the signal was given, the servants dropped their waiters’ garb to reveal the armor beneath. This had never been a dinner. It was an execution.

In the aftermath of that bloody affair, Abbas proudly took the name al-Saffah, ‘the Slaughterer’. There’s every indication he relished the infamy, however short-lived: soon after, Abu al'-Abbas contracted smallpox and died. Stepping out from behind the Slaughterer’s shadow to lead was Abbas’s brother, al-Mansur, ‘the one made victorious.’ This was the actual beginning of the Abbasid dynasty.

Fooled you, didn’t I?

Except they were fooled too! One Umayyad escaped: the young princeling Abd al-Rahman, who fled west across North Africa, crossed into Spain, and was embraced as their new leader! From 756 he ruled from Córdoba, where the Umayyad house would outlive its own fall by nearly 300 years.

Al-Mansur left nothing to chance. He set about cutting every loose end, killing off his enemies (both real and imagined). He even sensed a looming threat in the sheer popularity of Abu Muslim, the revolution’s own general.

So al-Mansur threw a campfire dinner for the famous commander and his men. The first night was a rollicking good time! However, by the end of the next evening, Abu Muslim’s throat had been slit and his body thrown in the river. His closest lieutenants and advisors were also killed for good measure. Al-Mansur wanted absolutely no one left who might threaten his claim to the throne.

The new boss was the same as the old boss…

For all of their revolutionary rhetoric out of Persia, the Abbasids generally ran things exactly as the Umayyads had. Both dynasties were run by secular rulers who kept control through spies and secret police rather than through the holy authority of religious scholars.

In truth, the Abbasid élite had little interest in matters of religion. Once they held the empire, they quickly dropped all pretense of any association with Shia Islam. Instead, the scholars already in the halls of power kept their vaunted positions. The Abbasid rulers honestly did not care one way or the other.

If anything, the long-standing distrust of the Shia in the east led the Abbasids to hunt down Shia leadership and kill anyone with even a remote connection to Ali, Fatima, or the imams. This is how the dream of a Shia caliph of Islam died — in the dark, hidden chambers of the paranoid Abbasid palace.

9.4 | Baghdad: The Crown Jewel of the Age

A Capital from Scratch

And yet, for all the treachery, there was also an historic greatness and an unparalleled vision among the Abbasids. Like the Umayyads before them, they presided over an era of prosperity, culture, and art. When al-Mansur needed a new capital, he did not repurpose an old city — he designed one from scratch.

He found the perfect site on the west bank of the Tigris, at the point where it and the Euphrates run closest to each other, joined by canals. There, the Middle World’s most fertile fields spill toward the strategic waters of the Indian Ocean. And in 762 (145 AH), the city of Baghdad was founded.

The chronicler al-Tabari preserves the caliph’s own reasoning at the site:

“This is the Tigris. There is no obstacle between us and China. Everything on the sea can come to us from it.” Al-Tabari, History

The Round City

It was, in its original design, a marvel of geometry. Al-Mansur’s architects laid out a perfectly circular city: Madinat al-Salam, the ‘City of Peace’. It measured about a mile and a half across, ringed by a round wall that medieval accounts make some 98 feet high and, at its base, nearly 145 feet thick. Four great gates pierced the wall at equal intervals, each opening onto a road to a corner of the empire, so that the whole realm seemed to converge on this single point.

Inside, the city radiated outward in concentric rings, and at the dead center (insulated from the bustle by ring after ring of the plan) sat the caliph’s palace and the great mosque, the twin poles of Abbasid power.

Over the next twenty years, Baghdad would become, by many estimates, the largest city in the world — the first on Earth to grow past a million inhabitants since Ancient Rome. Blacksmiths and goldsmiths, florists and cloth merchants, philosophers, poets, and artists all streamed toward the Abbasid capital, the gem of the eighth century

(We’ll pick up on this story in Part 10.)

“Islamicate”

The Abbasids were an Islamicate (cultural) rather than a purely Islamic (religious) empire. This word is a modern coinage (cf. Hodgson, 1974), built on the model of ‘Italianate’: in the style of a civilization, not the religion itself. The Abbasid empire was Islamicate in exactly that sense, run by largely secular rulers, staffed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and defined more by a shared civilization than by devotion.

Much of this age is still visible. The Dome of the Rock that Abd al-Malik raised over the Foundation Stone in 691 still crowns the Temple Mount in Jerusalem today, one of the oldest surviving works of Islamic architecture on earth.

The Sunni–Shia divide that ran beneath the Abbasid revolution, and the split between Arab and Persian Islam that opened during these conquests, are not museum pieces. They remain live categories in the modern Middle East and in the scholarship that studies it. And the very distinction Part 9 has drawn (between an Islamicate civilization and an Islamic religion) is a working tool that historians still reach for when they describe the achievements of this world, precisely because so much of what came next was the work of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Muslims alike, living under one sprawling empire.

Baghdad now stands at the center of that world, poised to become the beating heart of a golden age. Four gates, four roads, the four corners of the empire, all converging on one round city. For the next two hundred years, this is where the roads of the world will run. Until they suddenly don’t…

Last Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife
This Section: Umayyads & Abbasids
Next Section: Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism

Lucifer | Franz von Stuck, 1890

Overview

Ask what the Qur’an teaches about Heaven and Hell and the answers come quickly. Gardens and couches. Fire and boiling water. Rivers of milk, and a tree whose fruit looks like the heads of devils. But here’s the wrinkle: the Qur’an itself insists those pictures are not the point. This is the last of three parts spent inside the Qur’an. Part 6 asked how the scripture is read. Part 7 asked what it demands in peace and war. Now, Part 8, asks what it says is real, and what it admits it cannot say. This part focuses on the Qur’an’s ontology (ie. its account of what is real): evil and the freedom behind it, death and what follows, and the two destinations the tradition calls the Garden and the Fire.

Assigned Reading
Haleem, Understanding the Qur'an, chapters 7 & 8

Shaytan • the Problem of Evil • al-Dunya & al-Akhirah
barzakh • adalah • al-Jannah • Jahannam • mathal

8.1 | Evil & the Adversary

The Gift of Freedom

In the Qur’an, evil is not a rival power set against God at the beginning of things.
It enters the world through a door God Himself opened.
That door is human freedom.

Surah al-Baqarah narrates the creation of Adam as God’s vicegerent on earth (2:30). The Arabic word is khalifa, a deputy who acts in the owner’s stead. Adam is the one appointed to act, and therefore is capable of both good and of evil (cf. Sec. 6). Adam’s success or failure is then of his own making (2:30, 76:3, 90:10, 91:8–10).

Put simply, the Qur’an does not treat evil as an accident that befalls a passive creature. It treats the human being as a moral agent, and evil as one of the things an agent can choose. Evil is therefore a possibility folded into the gift of freedom itself.

What follows is that the capacity that makes righteousness possible is the same capacity that makes evil possible. One cannot be granted without the other, and the Qur’an grants both together.

Iblis Refuses

Against that freedom the Qur’an sets an adversary of its own: Shaytan, the figure known in the Christian tradition as Satan.

It’s important to point out the Qur’an did not merely borrow a ‘Christian Satan’ from the Bible whole cloth. The Islamic notion of Shaytan bears its own narrative and origin. The scene runs like this. God commands the angels to bow before the newly created Adam. One angel refuses. Iblis will not prostrate himself before a creature of clay when he himself was made of fire. His pride hardens into an enmity toward humanity, and he asks for (and is granted) respite to pursue that enmity until the Day of Judgment (2:34, 7:11–18).

From that initial refusal, Iblis takes up the role of the Shaytan of Islamic scripture: the deceiver, the whisperer, the one who works to lead human beings astray. The Qur’an’s word for that whispering, waswasa, is an onomatopoeia — it’s the seductive hiss of Iblis’ sinful suggestions. In the Qur’an, it is Iblis he who tempts Adam and Eve in the Garden, and through them their descendants ever after.

Yet the Qur’an’s portrait remains somewhat balanced. Shaytan is a deceiver, yes, but he is only that. He can suggest, but he cannot seize. We, for our part, are granted an inborn ability to resist Shaytan. The temptation is real, but so is the resistance. In the Qur’an’s moral universe, nothing about the human situation is left without a defense. The same creation who can be tempted is the creation who can say no.

The whisper can always be refused.

The Problem of Evil: Islamic Edition

Behind the figure of Shaytan lies an older and more fundamental question — one that every theistic tradition eventually confronts. Philosophers call it the Problem of Evil.

The problem is philosophical, and belongs as much in the philosopher’s seminar as to the mosque. This series will not adjudicate it. What we can do, however, is briefly describe the two responses that recur across the tradition’s reflection on the question.

The first is an appeal to the limits of human understanding. On this view, God’s wisdom simply exceeds human comprehension, and the believer is asked to accept that the full purpose behind suffering may not be graspable from within our limited point of view. What follows from this premise is that a creature who cannot see the cosmic whole is in no position to declare that the whole is unjust. So, what may appear like unredeemed evil from where we stand may be ordered within a design we are not equipped to survey. This is the appeal to mystery. No one denies that suffering is real. The claim is that suffering’s final meaning lies beyond us.

The second classic Islamic response is the greater-good response. It is more ambitious. Here, the claim is that evil is permitted precisely because it serves a higher end — a world of free agents who can fail is a greater thing than a world of automata who cannot, even though that freedom comes at the price of real suffering. The good, it argues, simply could not be logically reached any other way.

Together, these two answers (the appeal to mystery and the appeal to purpose) are the classical shape of what philosophers call theodicy, from the Greek theos (God), and dikē (justice). The attempt herein is to put God on rhetorical trial and argue the defense. Different thinkers across the tradition have reached for one answer or the other to the question of theodicy, and sometimes for both at once. The task in our nonsectarian reading remains to see what each response is claiming and why.

Whatever weight one gives the problem, the Qur’an does not leave the human being alone with evil and its adversary. Against both the Qur’an sets God’s mercy, His forgiveness, and the standing possibility of redemption. Surah al-Zumar offers one of the scripture’s most expansive reassurances: no sin, however grievous, lies beyond the reach of God’s mercy for the one who sincerely repents (39:53). Indeed, in the Qur’an’s own frame, God’s mercy encompasses all things (7:156).

8.2 | Death, Resurrection, & Judgment

The Near & the Last

Each of the three Abrahamic traditions holds that a life is made meaningful by filling one’s days with good works.

The Psalms tell the Jewish reader to “turn away from evil and do good, so you shall dwell forever” (Psalm 37:27). Matthew enjoins the Christian to “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16). And the Qur’an promises that “whoever comes [to Judgment] with a good deed will have ten times its worth [to their credit]” (6:160).

In each case, the good done here is redeemed in eternity.

Belief in the Afterlife is a fundament of Islam. Nearly every page of the Qur’an makes some reference to it, and the tradition holds that the world to come was central to Muhammad’s message, as it was to every prophet before him. Again and again, belief in the Afterlife is named in the same breath as belief in God. The two convictions travel together for Muslims.

Then comes the Arabic, and the theology it shapes. Al-Dunya is the life of this world. The word grows from a root meaning ‘near’: this world is, quite literally, ‘the nearer life’. Al-Akhirah is the Afterlife, ‘the last’ or latter life. Arabic does not name the two as places. It names them as positions in a chronological sequence — the near and the last.

The Qur’an binds the two so tightly that its own language makes them nearly impossible to speak of apart. Neither term stands alone. Each is always named in reference to the other. And fittingly, each word occurs exactly 115 times in the Qur’an.

The symmetry itself is a kind of teaching.

The practicing Muslim is therefore called to stay mindful of the Judgment to come. The Fatiha, recited 17 times a day across the canonical prayers, names God “Master of the Day of Judgment” (1:4, a line Part 6 lingered over), while inattention to that Day is marked as the sign of the unbeliever (30:7). To live well in al-Dunya is to live with al-Akhirah always in view.

And the reason for the whole architecture (resurrection, Judgment, eternity) is justice. According to the Qur’an, God did not create the heavens and the earth “without a true purpose — the Hour will certainly come” (15:85). That Hour is the resurrection. The resurrection exists so that the labor asked of human beings is, in the end, justly rewarded. Islam claims people are created with an innate sense of right and wrong, a conscience the Qur’an calls the ‘reproachful soul’, that moves them toward the good and reproaches them for evil. The one judged to have lived well is rewarded in eternity. To Islamic thinking, without a final reckoning, the moral life would be a demand without a resolution.

Resurrection Ontology

The nature of the resurrection is a hotly debated subject within the tradition.

The Sufis, Islam’s mystical dimension (cf. Part 10), have long held the resurrection to be ‘spiritual’, reading every reference to a bodily rising as poetic allusion to a truth that is not, at bottom, physical. Other sources have held it to be ‘bodily’, an actual raising of the person, flesh and all.

The Qur’an offers credence to both possibilities. It calls resurrected bodies “new” creations (56:35, 61). It says that things in the world to come are “like” what they are here, and that its food merely “appears similar” (13:35, 47:15, 2:25). Muhammad’s Companion Ibn Abbas (counted among the tradition’s earliest authorities on the Qur’an’s meaning) maintained this world and the next share nothing at all except the names of things. The words carry over. The substance behind them does not.

The 1100s philosopher Ibn Rushd (a working judge in Cordoba, known to the Latin West as Averroes) resolved the tension by focusing on the reader. Most people need simple, concrete explanations, Ibn Rushd reasoned. While scholars can bear a more complex and abstract eschatology. And so the Qur’an supplies both registers at once. It is a striking early statement of an idea we will meet again in Part 13: that a text can rightly mean different things to different readers, and that the authority to say which is which is itself a question.

The Qur’an’s first audience included deniers who found the whole idea simply absurd. Scattered bones, gathered and made to live again? To them the book answers with an argument, not merely a promise.

Does man think We shall never put his bones together again?
...Yes indeed: We can remold his very fingers. QUR’AN 75:1–4

A fingerprint today is a kind of signature. No two are alike, not even in identical twins. For the modern Muslim: the God who can fashion a thing so fine, so individual, and so unrepeatable once can surely fashion it again. The reasoning turns the skeptic’s own intuition against them. The very intricacy of the human body, which seems at first to make its reconstitution unthinkable, becomes instead the evidence that its Maker could do it twice.

Barzakh & the Day of Judgment

Death, of course, is the natural conclusion of all life.
The Qur’an acknowledges this poetically (”every soul will taste death,” 31:85).
The Qur’an also acknowledges this conclusion as a gateway of return to God (6:61–62).

The first stage of that return is barzakh, an intermediate state between this life and the Afterlife. The word itself means a barrier or a partition. The Qur’an uses it elsewhere for the unseen barrier between two seas, the fresh and the salt, which meet and do not mix (25:53). This is what the dead inhabit — a partition between two waters.

Souls in barzakh already receive a measure of reward or punishment (3:169–171, 16:32, 40:45–46, 71:25). Yet at the resurrection, the whole of that interval will feel “no longer than an hour” (10:45). Barzakh is a threshold rather than a destination. A waiting that, from the far side, will seem to have taken almost no time at all.

The Islamic resurrection itself falls at the End of the World, whose hour is known to God alone (7:187). No prophet was given the date. No believer claims to have it either.

Far less debated than the resurrection’s nature is the Judgment that follows it. Each person is shown a complete record of their deeds: “Read your record; today your own soul is enough to calculate your account” (17:14). The accounting requires no witness beyond the soul itself. No one bears another’s account. No one is spared the reckoning.

Whoever has done an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever has done an atom’s weight of evil will see that. QUR’AN 99:7–8

In Islam, Judgment is what gives the moral life its stakes.
It is the reason the choices of al-Dunya finally matter.

And yet (this surprises many first-time readers) the weight the Qur’an gives to the Afterlife never devalues this life. Muslims are commanded not to “neglect [their] rightful share in this world” (28:77). Asceticism is not counted a virtue in Islam, and celibacy is unknown to the Qur’an. Believers are encouraged to take pleasure in life. To learn, to build a family, to bring joy to others. The tradition even recounts Muhammad affirming the value of good-humored joking with relatives (Sahih al Bukhari 81).

This life is to be enjoyed, but never at the cost of one’s soul.
The world is good, and it is not the end. The two truths are meant to be held together.

8.3 | The Hidden Garden

Cosmic Justice

The Ancient Greek image of justice is a familiar one. Lady Justice, blindfolded, a set of scales in one hand and a sword in the other. She captures a deep and widely shared intuition: every deed warrants its reward or its punishment — and the accounts must, somehow, be balanced.

Different traditions give that intuition different names. Hindu eschatology calls it karma. Arabic calls justice adalah. The distinction between them is structural, not necessarily a ranking. Karma is assessed in the background of a life by unseen cosmic forces, an impersonal law woven into the fabric of the universe, running on its own without a judge. Adalah is assessed by God alone, the act of a personal being Who sees, weighs, and decides.

The blindfold marks the difference too. Lady Justice wears it to promise impartiality: she will not see who stands before her. The Qur’an’s Judge makes the opposite promise, yet arrives at the same place. God sees everything and is partial to no one.

Here, cosmic impartiality achieved not by seeing less but by seeing everything.

The reckoning must be deferred because justice in this world is manifestly incomplete. We have all watched evil go unpunished and seen the lives of righteous people cut short. The Qur’an itself acknowledges as much: worldly justice is neither complete nor lasting, because this world is imperfect (42:30, 3:165, 87:17). The balance the Greek scales promise is not, for Muslims, struck here.

And so the full reckoning is carried forward to Judgment Day, after which those who have tipped the divine scales toward righteousness receive an eternal reward. The Garden and the Fire are the tradition’s answer to a problem everyone recognizes: in this life, the accounts simply do not add up. Islam’s response? They will after death.

The Hidden Garden

The Arabic word for eternal Paradise is al-Jannah, literally ‘the Garden’. Its etymology is one of the two keys to Part 8 of this series.

Al-Jannah grows from the native Semitic root J-N-N, ‘to hide, to cover, to conceal’ (the same three-consonant root device Part 7 walked through with S-L-M). What makes the J-N-N root so illuminating is that its entire family of derivatives carries the same thread of hiddenness through it. From J-N-N comes:

• janīn, the embryo (hidden in the womb)
• majnūn, a madman (whose mind is hidden somewhere we cannot follow)
• jinn, beings of fire (hidden from everyday human sight)

There is also an old saying in Arabic: when night falls, jannat al-layl.
The night has hidden everything.

Womb, madness, spirit, nightfall. Each names something present but unseen. Arabic wears its theology in its grammar (Part 7 made the same point with the mu- of Muslim). The same is true for Paradise, Jannah, a hidden garden. A place that is both real and concealed from the living.

Notably, our own English word ‘Paradise’ also comes from the Middle World, starting as Old Persian pairidaēza (‘enclosed garden’) then moving into Hebrew as pardes (the ‘orchard’ of Song of Songs 4:13), then into Greek as paradeisos, which is how it finally arrived in English as paradise. The Old Persian pairidaēza also travelled south into Arabia, where it became firdaws (فِرْدَوْس), which is also a Qur’anic name for Paradise.

Describing Paradise

In the Qur’an, entering Paradise is an auspicious occasion (39:73). The very act of ‘entering’ al-Jannah recurs some 57 times, each occurrence bound up with peace, security, and delight. Light shines before the righteous as they enter, and the angels are there to greet them (57:12, 39:73).

The ontology of Islamic Paradise is elaborate and detailed.

Al-Jannah is as wide as the cosmos (3:133, 57:21). And although ‘the Garden’ in the singular names the single abode of the righteous, the Qur’an also speaks of multiple Jannat, for there is a private garden for each believer and their family. A home of one’s own within the whole. The residents are free to move wherever they wish (39:74), and wherever they go, their homes are peaceful and pleasant (9:72). Within those homes, large extended families relax on couches, hold pleasing conversation, and recall happy memories with shining faces (80:38–39). While spending time with their loved ones, attending servants offer them whatever they desire (76:15–19).

The picture is domestic as much as it is paradisal.
Less a reward earned than a household restored.

But the food and drink of Paradise, the Qur’an is careful to say, are not for sustenance. They are tokens of honor. The true reward of Paradise is not the sensual delight so vividly described but the honor God bestows on the righteous. The position of being welcomed, received, and held in favor by God.

The feast is a meant as a sign. It doesn’t serve a need.

8.4 | Damnation & the Limits of Language

The Valley of Gehinnom

The second etymological key of Part 8 is the name of the Fire, and like the first, it carries us back through the shared vocabulary of the Abrahamic traditions.

The Arabic Jahannam traces to the Hebrew Gehinnom, which is a real place in ancient Israel. Gehinnom (the Valley of Hinnom) is just outside of the walls of Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible remembers it as cursed ground, the place where evil kings of Judah burned their own children in sacrifice — an atrocity that left the whole valley under a curse (Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2–6). 600 years later, the valley was still known as the ‘burning place’ by the Jewish locals. The lowest point in Jerusalem. Where the city’s refuse was dumped and set alight. A fire that seemed never to be quenched.

Over time, the vision of a smoking, smoldering pit at the edge of the holy city became the image of final cosmic punishment.

Later, in the Gospel era, Jesus warns that the unrighteous risk having their bodies cast into Gehinnom (Mark 9:43–48). Across the Greek of the New Testament, three different terms come to name the same dreadful destination: Gehenna (straight from the Hebrew Gehinnom), Hades (Matthew 11:23), and Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4). Today, all three are rendered in modern English by a single Old Norse word, ‘Hell’ (from Hel, the name of the underworld of Germanic myth).

Over time, geography became theology. By the time the Qur’an speaks of Jahannam, the word already carried centuries of cosmic freight. The Islamic Fire inherits both the name and the smoke of that valley outside Jerusalem.

A Theology of Contrasts

The Qur’anic Jahannam (in parallel with the Christian concept of Hell) offers no respite, mercy, or help to those consigned to it (2:161–162, 4:52). It is a place of “intense heat” (52:27). Its fires are fueled by men and stone (2:24). Its waters are boiling and fetid (14:16). Boiling water is poured over the heads of the damned while the water within their bodies boils, and they are beaten with maces (22:19–21). The Qur’an says many will regret the lives they lived the instant they face this eternal torment — but there will be no second chances (2:167).

Qur’anically, the Fire is nearly always drawn against the Garden.

Where al-Jannah has fruit, milk, and shade, Jahannam offers only the fruit of the Tree of Zaqqum, which springs from Hell’s floor, its fruit like the heads of devils (37:64–65). The damned eat it, drink boiling water on top of it, and are returned to the fire (37:68). The place is named a “torment for wrongdoers” (37:63), and against it the Garden stands as protection: “Which is better, this or the lasting Garden that those who are mindful of God have been promised…?” (25:15).

The full set of contrasts runs deep. Hell is “an evil home, a foul resting place” and Heaven “a happy home and a happy resting place” (25:66–76). The residents of Heaven are spared not only the fire but every “harm,” “fear,” “shame,” “malice,” and “grieving” (39:61, 66:8, 15:47, 10:62). Their food brings no discomfort or intoxication (37:47, 56:19). Their drink brings no idle talk or sin (52:23). There is no end to their gifts, their fruit, or their belonging (38:54, 56:32, 35:35). While the cries of the tormented are silent to those in the Garden (21:102).

And where each soul in Hell suffers alone, the righteous are reunited with generations of their loved ones. The solitude of the Fire is part of its punishment.

One makes one’s home in Heaven forever. The thought of leaving, the Qur’an says, never so much as crosses one’s mind (18:108).

The last and most important contrast is not sensory but spiritual. For all the vividness of the imagery, the Qur’an gives primacy to the spiritual reward over the material. It signals that primacy in the very order of its phrasing. Mention goes first to the righteous “brought nearest to God,” and only then to “the Gardens of bliss” (56:10–11). The command is to enter first “among My servants,” and then “into My Paradise” (89:29–30). The Heavenly spouses are named “good natured” and only afterward are they “beautiful” (55:70).

Each time, the moral or relational good is placed ahead of the sensual one. In a book this attentive to its own language, word order is no accident. The order is the teaching. The physical delights of the Garden are secondary to the nearness they signify.

The reward of Paradise is, finally, closeness to God.

Mathal: Analogical Description

Our Module on the Qur’an (Parts 6, 7, and 8) closes where the tradition itself closes the question: by admitting the limits of its own descriptions.

The 10th-century philosopher al-Amiri explains that the rewards of the Garden must be rendered “in a way which is pleasing,” and that the nature of Paradise “cannot be apprehended except by giving a standard or gauge for it of what human senses have experienced.” In other words, al-Amiri is pointing to the claim that we can only picture Paradise in the borrowed terms of what we already know. Every tradition that speaks of eternity or perfection eventually meets this wall.

What is striking, is how plainly the Qur’an ‘breaks the fourth wall’ as it were, by pointing out the limits of its own use of language.

The Qur’anic descriptions of the Garden are given as mathal — a similitude, analogy, or parable “of what is actually the case” (13:35, 47:15) — because language cannot carry the reality of a perfect and eternal abode. The similitudes are offered, the Qur’an says, “so that they may reflect” (59:21). This is the same book that calls the resurrected bodies “new” creations and says the food of Paradise merely “appears similar” to the food of earth. The Qur’an is uniquely self-aware among Abrahamic scripture.

So, the graphic imagery of the preceding lessons should not be read as reportage. From the boiling water and the Tree of Zaqqum, to the couches and the shining faces — the Qur’an works with what human senses can know, to describe a theological reality that lies beyond its grasp. Islamic tradition holds that no living person has direct knowledge of the Afterlife. The Fire and the Garden are figures for a truth no text can finally hold.

What remains, in the end, is not a cosmic geography for the reader to paw at. Rather, the Qur’an is presented as a way of orienting a life in al-Dunya toward an al-Akhirah that can be named only in analogy, and reached only by the choices made here.

The Garden is hidden. But the road is written.

Last Section: Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance
This Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife
Next Section: Umayyads & Abbasids

The Collision of Moorish Horsemen | Eugène Delacroix, 1844

Overview

Most folks think they know what Islam says about war. That’s the first problem.

Many come to Islamic Ethics with an already settled picture before any serious reading actually starts. A religion of the sword, carried by conquest, hostile to the outsider by design. However, Part 3 argued that the question behind this picture is posed in bad faith. Here, in Part 7, we look to the verses in question specifically. We will also look to the concept of religious tolerance and how Qur’anic language frames this question.

Assigned Reading
Haleem, Understanding the Qur'an, chapters 5 & 6

The S-L-M root • salaam • fi sabilillah • Just War Theory • tasamuh
People of the Book • antisemitism • apostasy

7.1 | Peace as the Social Norm

The Missing Sword

It comes as a surprise to many: the word ‘sword’ does not appear in the Qur’an.
Not even once...

Moreover, the Qur’an acknowledges war as a hateful enterprise, ordained for believers though hated nonetheless (2:216). The Qur’an also acknowledges that the world is filled with a wide variety of peoples, traditions, and folkways. This variety is not condemned by the Qur’an; it is acknowledged as God’s very intention (5:48). Further, the Qur’an flatly denies the goal of enjoining everyone into one community (11:118). In sum, religious differences are not a failure of Islam. According to the Qur’an, religious differences are part of God’s plan.

It is good, the Qur’an teaches, for different tribes to know one another (49:13).

However, the Qur’an also acknowledges the difficulties that can arise when encountering tribal differences (6:65). When those encounters come to war, the scripture promises tranquility for those who keep the faith when under attack (24:55). In any event, the Qur’an is clear that Islamic war is a contingency, permitted only in self-defense and to check an evil that would otherwise spread unchecked (2:251). Scripturally, war is forbidden as a tool of empire or acquisition. To wit, there is, in the Qur’an’s own terms, no such thing as a ‘holy war’. The phrase makes no sense in Arabic (as Part 3 argued at length).

So, the first thing to say about Qur’anic ethics and war is that Islam treats war as the exception. It is not a goal, a good, or necessary to the Islamic tradition except as a means of self-preservation.

Peace in Arabic

Peace is central to the Qur’an, in both theology and language.

Like Hebrew and Aramaic before it, Arabic is a Semitic language. Most Semitic words are built on a three-letter root — a spine of three consonants from which a whole family of related words grows. The root carries a core, shared meaning. The words branch off it, each one bending that meaning in a new direction.

The root at the center of the Islamic tradition is the S-L-M root, three consonants written س ل م in Arabic. From it grows:

• Salaam, peace (also a greeting)
• Salamah, safety
• Salim, whole/unbroken

Salaam is the first of these and the one the others lean on: not merely the absence of war, but the safety and wholeness its two cousins name. It is the condition the Qur’an prizes above all others, and the reward it promises the righteous.

From those same three letters comes the word Islam, and the word Mu-slim, the one who performs S-L-M. (The mu- prefix is Arabic’s way of marking the doer of an action, so a Muslim is, quite literally, one who does Islam.)

This may seem like a theological boast at first, but it’s literally welded into the grammar. A speaker of Arabic does not need to be told that Islam and salaam are relatives, the way an English speaker may be told that ‘peace’ and ‘pacify’ share a distant Latin parent. In Arabic, the kinship is right there in the consonants, impossible to miss.

In short, the Islamic tradition takes its own name from the Arabic root for peace.

You can hear it in the ordinary greeting a Muslim gives: as-salamu alaykum, ‘peace be upon you’, the same three consonants offered across a billion doorways each day. The word for the religion and the word for hello share the same root.

In the Way of God

When the Qur’an does permit war, it attaches one primary condition that governs all the rest. The fighting must be fi sabilillah, ‘in the way of God’ (9:60).

For the observant Muslim, to fight in the way of God is to fight from a righteous intention — for devotion, not plunder.

In a famous hadith (a report of Muhammad’s words, not on the level of the Qur’an, but trusted by Muslims as part of the larger tradition), the Prophet is asked about men who go to war for different reasons. One fights for treasure and spoils. One fights for personal glory. One fights so that others will call him a hero. Which of them, the questioner asks, is fighting in the way of God?

None of them, the Prophet answers. The one who fights ‘in the way of God’ is the one who fights so that the word of God is highest, and for nothing else at all.

So, the Islamic criterion for a just war is not the outcome, the spoils, or the gain of reputation. For Muhammad, the sole test of a warrior fighting ‘in the way of God’ is what sits in his heart before he lifts his fist. Pointedly, a man can keep every law of war and still fail, because the Qur’an counts him as having fought for nothing. Such is the standard for the fighting Muslim.

7.2 | Islamic Just War Theory

A Shared Inheritance

Long before the Islamic tradition, there was a massive, detailed history of Jews and Christians wrestling over the theological justifications for war. This field of ethics continues to the present day and is known as Just War Theory.

From a Jewish standpoint, the Hebrew Bible is already full of just war claims. Deuteronomy lays down rules for warfare, among them the duty to offer a city terms of peace before laying siege to it (Deut. 20:10–12), and to spare its fruit trees even in the taking of the city. The Jewish prophets return repeatedly to justice and mercy in the middle of a war.

Christianity took up the same work. St. Augustine, in The City of God, set out the conditions under which a war could be just (a rightful cause, legitimate authority, the aim of restoring peace), the cluster of questions later writers would file under jus ad bellum, ‘the right to war’. In the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas pressed on the conduct of the fighting itself, jus in bello, ‘justice in war’. Here, both Christian philosophers tackle two central questions of just war theory: when may you fight and how you may fight.

Islam answers these two questions narrowly.
War becomes an obligation in only a handful of situations.

• In defense of religious freedom (22:39–41)

• In self-defense against an attack (2:190)

• And to aid oppressed people who ask for help (4:75), though even that last duty can be deferred if the aggressor happens to be a Muslim ally, since the Qur’an will not make a man break faith with his own people to keep faith with a stranger (8:72)

Lastly, the Prophet is told to urge the believers to fight (4:84), never to force them. Even the summons to a just war is an appeal, not an order, and the decision stays with each fighter’s conscience.

The Limits of Just Islamic War

Permission to fight, once granted, is fenced in by two major limitations.

• The people you may fight are the people actively fighting you, never civilians (2:190)
• The force you may use is limited to the harm done to you (2:194)

Read strictly, those two conditions rule out both first strikes and waging war with weapons that cannot tell a soldier from a child. The nuclear and biochemical arms of the modern world fail this test outright. A weapon that kills the combatant and the infant in the same blast violates the immunity of the one and the proportion owed the other.

After the Qur’an, Islamic commentators drew the boundaries even tighter.

From a single verse (2:190) the 1200s Persian exegete al-Baydawi, whose Qur’anic commentary became one of the most studied in the Sunni world, derived a whole list of prohibitions.

• A Muslim may not begin a war
• A Muslim may not break a treaty
• A Muslim may not attack without first offering peace
• A Muslim may not destroy crops
• A Muslim may not kill certain protected classes of people

These restraints are not a pious varnish later brushed onto Islam. This is found in the very grammar of the Qur’an itself. Across 2:190–195, the text keeps circling back to one phrase, “do not transgress the limits,” and pairs it, time after time, with a warning. God does not love the aggressors. The verses that look like a license to fight are hedged, clause by clause, with the language of restraint.

Which is where the first of two notorious verses sits. Directly after that restraint language comes 2:191.

…slay them wherever you find them.
a portion of QUR’AN 2:191

Lift it clear of its surroundings and it sounds horrific. But look at what ‘them’ points back to. The verse before it named them. ‘Those who fight against you’ (2:190).

So, the sentence says slay those who are attacking you, wherever you find them. And the ‘wherever’ answers a real question the early Muslims were asking. Could they defend themselves even inside the sacred precincts of Mecca, the sanctuary they had been shut out of? The verses on either side (2:189, 2:196) are about exactly that. The pilgrimage. The holy ground. The holy city. Yes, you are permitted to defend yourselves.

Read whole, 2:191 is not a battle cry. It is a reassurance. You may defend yourselves even here, even where you would have hesitated to raise a hand because this place is holy. It is a rule about where self-defense holds, not a permit for aggression anywhere.

The Sword Verse

The second notorious verse has been called the Sword Verse, which is rich, given that ‘sword’ is a word the Qur’an never uses. We look now at 9:5.

…when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them.
QUR’AN 9:5

Our author M.A.S. Abdel Haleem calls the verse “much referred to but notoriously misinterpreted.” I agree with him.

That passage is not about idolaters or idolatry in general. It is about one specific enemy at one specific moment of Islamic history: the hardened polytheists of Arabia who would settle for nothing less than the Muslims’ expulsion or their return to polytheism, who broke their treaties, backed others against the Muslims, struck first, blocked would-be converts, and drove Muslims from their homes and their mosque. The Qur’anic passage recites those offenses at least eight times over.

Even against that enemy, no one is simply turned loose. An ultimatum goes out, and four sacred months are granted (a season of grace in which the enemy may reconsider) before any fighting can begin. The same passage then exempts the polytheists who kept their word and kept the peace (9:7), and orders that any enemy asking for safe conduct must be protected and escorted all the way to the place where he will be safe (9:6).

Some readers pull the middle clause loose, ‘kill the polytheists’, and let it stand for the whole of Islam’s attitude to war. A few go further and claim it cancels every other verse on the subject, that this one line quietly repealed the hundred verses of restraint that came before it. Haleem’s verdict on that is blunt. He calls it a “pure fantasy,” built by inappropriately isolating and mischaracterizing a single scrap of a sentence.

7.3 | Tolerance & Tasamuh

Western Tolerance

In English, when the enlightened among us reach for a word to describe their disposition toward foreign religions, you will often hear the word ‘tolerance’ invoked.

Tolerance comes to us from the Latin tolerāre, to bear, to endure. Its Greek cousin tolmáō similarly means to endure. Buried in the word tolerance is the act of putting up with something unpleasant. Carrying a weight you would rather set down. Enduring a person you have already judged to be in the wrong.

Tolerance also assumes a hierarchy. That is, tolerance is something the powerful grant to the different. It flows downhill, where the ‘tolerated’ live on sufferance, dependent on the goodwill of the powerful.

By its own standard, Europe was slow to endure or tolerate its ‘lesser’ others — even in the modern period.

Jews lived across Christian Europe for millennia with no legal toleration to speak of, the standing targets of antisemitism: a collective hostility toward Jews, whether dressed as theology, as economics, or, later, as race. In France, Jewish emancipation came only with the modern French Revolution, in 1791. Even so, European antisemitism long outlived the modern laws meant to end it.

Historically, Christians also often did not tolerate other kinds of Christians. After the modern Reformation, Christian wars of religion tore Europe apart, with as much as a third of the population dead in the worst-hit German lands. Religious dissenters in England had no legal standing until the Toleration Act of 1689 — and even that act pointedly withheld its protection from Catholics. Irish Catholics were officially persecuted by the British establishment until Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

In America, the theologian Roger Williams founded Rhode Island as a refuge for the religiously unwelcome, and his experiment fed the freedom of religion the First Amendment would later promise. In short, the social reality lagged behind the ‘ideal of tolerance’ for most of Western history — for groups like Jews, Catholics, the Amish, the Latter-day Saints, and the beliefs of Indigenous and enslaved peoples.

However, while the West speaks of the modern virtues of ‘tolerance,’ the Islamicate world has always operated from a different foundational thought.

Tasamuh in the Middle World

The closest Arabic word to ‘tolerance’ is tasamuh. But it does not mean to endure. Instead, it grows from the root S-M-Ḥ, in Arabic س م ح. Just as S-L-M gives us salaam (peace), salamah (safety), and salim (unbroken), S-M-Ḥ, the root of tasamuh, gives us:

• Samaḥa, to allow
• Samuḥa, to be generous
• Sammaḥa, to walk softly/act kindly

Put together, tasamuh enjoins Muslims not to merely ‘endure’ Christians and Jews but to allow (samaḥa) their freedom and dignity, and to do so generously (samuḥa). Again, like salaam, the behavior of the Muslim next to his monotheistic cousins is written into the very fabric of his language. Moreoever, tasamuh is a reciprocal concept. That is, it is not something one side extends to a lesser. The generous allowance runs mutually between parties.

Breaking Down Assumptions

So, no. The Qur’an does not enjoin the Muslim to merely ‘tolerate’ the Jew and the Christian. The language of the Qur’an expects the generous allowance of the Other, next to whom the Muslim ought to walk softly and act with lovingkindness.

Compare this to modern ‘tolerance,’ by which we generally mean putting up with something unpleasant. It’s the same word we use for over-spiced food. What level of heat can you tolerate?

However, in the language of the Qur’an, tasamuh is centered on communal generosity, an ease shared by all sides at once.

Put another way, tolerance is vertical. It is a forbearance handed down from the powerful to the weak. Tasamuh is horizontal, a rough equality of regard, each party generous to the other. The first requires a hierarchy. The latter dissolves the hierarchy as its opening move.

In the end, the two concepts, one Latinate and one Arabic, are asking for different things of a person. One asks you to endure your neighbor. The other asks you to be generous with him.

That being said, the point here is not to prove which civilization behaved better in history — a question that centuries of historians and theologians have battled over and will not be settled here. The point is that the two vocabularies reach for different things while often assuming the other means what they mean.

Much religious strife starts not in the differences,
but in the assumptions we begin with.

7.4 | The People of the Book

Ahl al-Kitab

Another way we can see the regard that Islam has for Jews and Christians can be found in the collective Arabic name it gives them: ahl al-Kitab.

This famous Arabic phrase, ahl al-Kitab, means ‘the People of the Book.’ The ones who received the earlier scriptures. In Islamicate society, the People of the Book are not ‘minorities’ to be managed, nor a problem to be administered. They are the people with the book, the Bible, which in Islam is one of the highest honors the Qur’an bestows on a people. Also, keep in mind that what you call someone sets the range of how you may regard them. The name ‘People of the Book’ forecloses a great deal.

First, the Qur’an does not flatten all the People of the Book into one type. “They are not [all] the same,” the Qur’an says, which then singles out among them “a staunch community” who recite God’s words through the night, who believe in God and the Last Day, who call for good and forbid wrong and hurry to do it (3:113–115). Here we see a category of respect, with room still left for theological difference.

But the text goes well past respect, to a kind of shared intimacy.

The Qur’an allows for Muslims to eat with, befriend, and even marry Christians and Jews (5:5). The tradition recounts that Muhammad himself married across these lines: Safiyya, a Jewish woman who converted, and, by some accounts, Mariya, a Coptic Christian (though her status as wife is disputed). Additionally, Muslims are enjoined not to argue all day about their differences with the People of the Book, except to say, “We believe in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to you. Our God and your God is One” (29:46).

Let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to Him, and none of us takes others beside God as lords.
QUR’AN 3:64

You may recognize here the reach for a monotheistic common ground that we saw in the Opening (al-Fatiha) in Section 6. Where real differences persist, the Qur’an is content to leave them for God to settle on the Last Day (5:48). Until then, the instruction is peace.

The fifth surah puts the obligation about as sharply as it can be put. “You have no true basis unless you uphold the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been sent down to you from your Lord” (5:68). Protecting the Jews’ rights and protecting the Church is not a mere modern tolerance, grudgingly extended. On this reading it is a Muslim’s sacred duty.

Islamic history gave the principle a test.

When Caliph Umar (Omar) took Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638 (cf. Sec. 4), the assurance preserved in the later sources had him guarantee the city’s Christians security for their lives, their property, and their churches, and promise that none would be harmed and none forced from their faith.

Now set that against what came after. In 1099 the Crusaders retook Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. When Saladin, the Kurdish general who commanded the Muslim armies, won the city back 88 years later, he did not answer the massacre in kind. He spared the Christians and let nearly all of them go free. Section 11 will tell that story more fully.

Obligations & Taxes

The same Muslim ethic that governs the start of a war governs its end: the moment an enemy stops fighting, the Muslim must stop too.

If they incline towards peace, you must also incline towards it.
QUR’AN 8:61

A state might find itself in any of several conditions. Open war against an aggressor. A lasting peace. A temporary truce. A safe-conduct extended to an enemy who has come to negotiate. Whichever it is, one rule binds them all. Always keep your word.

“Fulfil your obligations” (5:1). “Fulfil any pledge,” and do not “break oaths after you have sworn them” (16:91). To break a sworn oath, the Qur’an says, sinks a person below the animals (8:55). Prisoners of war are to be treated humanely, fed and clothed, and then freed outright or ransomed once the fighting ends (76:8–9). The dignity of the defeated is written into Islamic law, not offered as a modern courtesy.

When a war ended, the conquered could leave or stay. Those who stayed kept their lives, their property, and their freedom to worship. They could join the new community, as many did, or remain Jews and Christians on payment of the jizya.

Section 3 introduced the jizya tax. The jizya tax stood in place of two duties that fell on Muslims but not on the People of the Book — almsgiving (zakat) and military service. Those two together, Haleem argues, cost more than the jizya did, which would make it the lighter burden of the two.

However, it should be noted that other historians have weighed the actual practices found in later centuries and find them differing widely from the Qur’anic teaching, and the history of the jizya is genuinely contested. What can be said without dispute is that the Jewish and Christian poor and elderly were exempt, monks and women and children were exempt, and the tax bought a protection that, when it failed, the treasury was expected to refund.

Compulsion & Apostasy

Of course, Qur’anic ethics reach well past the People of the Book — to Buddhists, Hindus, Daoists, Indigenous people, etc. While the special standing of Jews and Christians rests on their scriptures, the wider rules of Islamic conduct do not necessarily depend on a shared theology. The sheer variety of peoples on the earth is, the Qur’an says more than once, something God intended (30:22, 49:13). And it all comes down to this:

There is no compulsion in religion.
QUR’AN 2:256

It is not a Muslim’s task to force anyone into Islam. The Qur’an nowhere endorses conversion by pressure of any kind. Not in war, as the first lesson showed. Not in peace, as it insists here.

In sum: a person cannot be forced to be a Muslim, a Muslim ought to be generous to non-Muslims, and cultural variety and distinctiveness are ordained by God.

But there’s one issue left out here, and it’s critical. What about the Muslim who wishes to leave Islam? This act is called apostasy — when one leaves their religion. The Islamicate world’s history with apostasy is not flattering.

There is a hadith (cf. Bukhari), whose provenance measures up by the tradition’s own standards, in which Muhammad says, “whoever changes his religion, kill him.” It was on that report, not on any verse of the Qur’an, that classical Islamic law built its penalties for apostasy. The penalties were real, and their footing in the tradition was equally real.

While the Qur’an itself prescribes no worldly punishment for a change of belief, there are at least eight countries in the world today where leaving Islam is, on the books, a capital offense — including Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen. Some counts also include the UAE, the Maldives, and the sharia-code states of Malaysia and northern Nigeria.

However, there is also push-back in these countries. Mauritania, though the law against apostasy is on the books, has never carried out an execution for it. In Malaysia, apostasy is a state matter, and only two states, Kelantan and Terengganu, prescribe death (which federal Malaysian law bars in any case). In Nigeria, sharia criminal codes run in 12 of the 36 states, all in the Islamic north, binding on Muslim Nigerians only. Meanwhile, Sudan repealed its apostasy laws in 2020.

Our author Haleem reads the classical penalties as often punishing treason (the abandoning of the community and the taking up of arms against it), rather than the private act of ceasing to believe in Muhammad’s prophethood and the Qur’an. Critics answer that such a distinction was rarely observed in practice, and the modern statutes above do not observe it at all. Both things are true, and the second is why national laws against leaving Islam remain a very real condition in parts of the Islamicate world. It is one reason of many that some Muslims choose to live in the secular West, where religion, creed, and practice are a person’s own decision.

What, then, is a Muslim to do in a place like ours: a liberal society full of other faiths and of none? Five Qur’anic injunctions guide her.

• Seek the good and forbid wrong (16:125).
• Live by the law of the land, so long as the law leaves you free to be Muslim.
• Compel no one to religion and let no one compel you (2:256 again).
• Let those who wish to believe, believe. Let those who wish to refuse, refuse (18:29).
• And when the difference simply will not close, answer with generosity, with tasamuh, but without giving up your own religion.

You have your religion and I have mine. QUR’AN 109:6

It is a generous picture. An ideal held out, whatever the mixed record of histories and governments. May we all one day live up to our best ideals.

Last Section: Hermeneutics & the Qur’an
This Section: Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance
Next Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife

Pictured: A Panel of Foliated Calligraphy, Qajar-era Iran
Malik Muhammad Qazvini, 1835

Overview

Part 5 ended in the prayer hall, on the words every Muslim recites in every one of the day’s prayers. This section opens the book those words come from. We describe how the Qur’an was shared, memorized, and gathered into a codex, and we trace its long and sometimes strange road into English. We then closely read the Qur’an’s opening chapter, and we follow one Arabic root, face, from the ordinary, to the divine, to an unexplained verse that will become the fault line of the section’s second half: the argument between Rationalists and Traditionalists over how God’s speech is to be read, and the machinery of Sharia and fiqh by which Muslims have sought, for 14 centuries, to turn a book into a life.

Assigned Reading
Haleem, Understanding the Qur'an, chapters 1, 2, and 9
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapter 6

Key Terms for this Section
Qur’an · surah · Al-Fatiha · Rationalism · Sharia · Fiqh · Sunnah · ijtihad

6.1 | The Qur’an as Text

The Recitation

Seventeen times a day, a practicing Muslim bows through the cycles of Salat (Namaz), and in each cycle the same seven verses are spoken aloud. We promised in the last section to read those verses. Before we can, however, we must know what kind of book they open.

The Arabic “Qur’an” does not mean “book.” It means Recitation, from the same Arabic root as “Read!” The command in Sec. 2.3 that the angel gives Muhammad in 610 CE. Taken from their etymological bases, The Jewish Torah is a teaching. The Gospels are good news. And the Qur’an is a recitation of messages from God to Muhammad.

The Qur’an was heard before it was ever read as text. The Ummah today still largely holds that, at its fundament, the Qur’an is a sound: the exact words, language, and cadence of God’s final and authoritative message.

The Qur’an did not descend from a single volume. Islamic tradition holds that it was “sent down” (this phrasing is repeated over 200 times in the Qur’an) in installments across 23 years of Muhammad’s ministry. Roughly, this works out to about two pages a month. With each installment, Muhammad “recited” the new verses to his Companions (Sahabah), who memorized and recited them to others.

Critically, the written text came after Muhammad’s life. The gathering of testimony, notes, and scraps of paper into one authoritative codex under the third caliph Uthman (Osman) is told in Sec. 4.2. By 650 CE, there is one text, Al-Qur’an.

The textual form of Al-Qur’an is “mapped” in a very specific way: the ulama (learned ones) sorted the 114 chapters of the text by the location where they were revealed.

The Meccan revelations lay out the basic theology: one God, earlier prophets teaching the one God, and a coming judgement. Later, the revelations from Medina (when Muhammad was governing a city) expand on society, its laws, and governance (this will be essential to know for Part 7). As to those earlier prophets, its crucial to point out that the Qur’an does not claim to be a new religion. The Bible, ‘properly understood’ according to Islam, is still holy. What the Qur’an does claim to be is the final, authoritative voice of the Biblical tradition. The Torah (al Tawrat), the Psalms (al Zabur), and the Gospel (al Injil) are honored by Muslims as genuine revelations from genuine prophets. However, according to Islamic theology, the original Biblical text suffered tahrif — corruption and alterations over time. For the Muslim, the Qur’an is the final correction of the Biblical narrative.

It is not chronological like the Torah. It is not genealogical like the Gospels. Nor is it an anthology of earlier scripture. Rather, the Qur’an is presented as what the earlier scriptures said all along, before their (claimed) corruption and alteration.

Surahs & Signs

The Qur’an is divided into 114 surahs (typically smaller than a book of the Bible, but larger than a Bible chapter). Qur’anic surahs run from about forty pages down to a single line. Each surah is made of ayas (meaning “a sign from God”). For the Muslim penitent, every line of the Qur’an is a signpost to righteousness. The surahs are not arranged in the order they were revealed. Roughly speaking, the longest come first and the shortest last, which means a reader who starts at the beginning is reading Medina before Mecca — the laws before the thunder.

And with one exception, the ninth surah, every chapter opens with the same line:

In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful.
QUR’AN 1:1

The Qur’an is also the first book of the Arabic language.

Before it, Arabic was the colloquial speech of a peninsula, kept alive in poetry recited around fires. After it, Arabic became the liturgical language of an empire. It reshaped neighboring Persian, then the Turkish of the Mediterranean, then Urdu in South Asia, Indonesian in the islands, and Swahili on the East African coast. Wherever the Qur’an went, its vocabulary went with it and shaped the people reading it.

And because it is a recitation, it is still recited. The Opening is spoken at least seventeen times a day by every practicing Muslim on earth. A hafiz (the word means guardian) is a person who has committed the entire Qur’an to memory, all 114 surahs, and can recite any passage on request. There are millions alive today, many of them children. Think about what that means: this is a text that could survive the loss of every printed copy and still live on.

The Qur’an in English

The first English translation appears in 1649.

It is a century and a half after Columbus lands in the Americas. Virginia has been an English colony for a generation. The Crusades ended centuries in the past, and yet, by 1649, no living person has ever read the Qur’an in English.

Alexander Ross changes that, and he does it badly. His title tells you everything about his intent: The Alcoran of Mahomet, the Prophet of the Turks … newly Englished for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities. Ross does not read Arabic. He is translating a French translation. In his introduction he warns his readers about the “heresy of Mahomet” and calls the book in their hands a “dangerous book.”

In other words, the first English Qur’an was published to inoculate England against it.

This pattern holds for 200 years. Rodwell’s translation of 1861 and Bell’s of 1937 both set out, in different ways, to disprove the Qur’an in Christianity’s favor. But alongside the polemic runs a second, quieter tradition, and it is the one that ultimately wins. George Sale (1734), E. H. Palmer (1880), then the two renderings Muslims themselves came to admire for their beauty: Marmaduke Pickthall in 1930, an English convert, and A. J. Arberry in 1955, the Cambridge Orientalist who tried to carry Arabic’s cadence into English.

Which brings us to the translation this course uses. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, the Egyptian-born scholar at the University of London, memorized the Qur’an as a boy before he ever studied it as a scholar. He is, in other words, a hafiz who became a philologist. His Oxford translation (2004) reads like it. When this course quotes the Qur’an, it is generally Haleem’s English you are hearing. And it is Haleem who will now walk us through the first seven verses.

6.2 | Al-Fatiha & the Face

The Opening

Al-Fatiha simply means the Opening. It is how the Qur’an begins.

29 words in seven verses, recited in every unit of every daily prayer, learned by billions of Muslims. Haleem claims that these 29 words are a condensed summary of the whole Qur’an, and that they move in three deliberate steps:

• Invocation
• Affirmation
• Petition

The invocation is the line we saw in 6.1. In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful.

The Muslim beginning her prayer, or her reading, or her meal, is declaring the purpose of the act: it is done for God, not for herself, her nation, or any other power. “Allah” is simply al-ilah — “the God” — and Haleem observes that it is the only personal name for God in the entire Qur’an. In the Qur’an, every other name is a description, and the two that open every surah are the descriptions the book uses most: ar-Rahman and ar-Rahim, both from the root for mercy, the first of them reserved in Arabic for God alone. We built the doctrine behind this in Sec. 5.3 (tawhid, the 99 names, al-Tahawi’s warning that imagination does not reach Him). All praise belongs to God, the second verse says, and the next three describe the God to Whom it belongs.

Then the affirmation: It is You we worship; it is You we ask for help. Notice the logic. Once the God of the first four verses has been described, worshipping Him alone follows as a matter of course, and asking Him for help presupposes something the verse takes for granted: that He can. This is not a ‘necessary’ Creator bound up in the language of philosophy. The God of the Opening of the Qur’an is imminent, real, and able to act.

And finally the petition: Guide us to the straight path. The path is the one walked by those God has blessed, and the last verse defines the blessed by contrast: those who have not incurred anger and have not gone astray. Haleem reads that verse as covering all of humanity, sorted into two camps, on the path and off it. And here the Fatiha does something a suspicious reader might miss. The blessed, in the Qur’an’s own cross-references, include Moses and Aaron, shown “the straight path” (37:118), and Jesus, counted among the righteous (6:85). The daily prayer closes, “Peace be to us and to the righteous servants of God,” followed by a blessing on the family of Abraham. When a Muslim asks seventeen times a day to be guided on the straight path, she is asking, on Haleem’s reading, to walk where the Jews and Christians before her walked.

Al-Fatiha in a Life & Death

The Opening is the first passage of the Qur’an a Muslim child learns. It is what a Muslim student recites before an exam. It is read aloud at the ceremony before a Muslim marriage contract is signed, and in much of the Islamicate world it is read before a business deal closes, because a promise made over the Fatiha is a promise people are reluctant to break. It has nicknames. Some call it al-Shafia, the Healer, or al-Kafiya, the Sufficient, and recite it over the sick. It is the most common text in Islamic calligraphy, on the walls of homes and the domes of mosques, sometimes whole, more often a single verse: the first, the second, or the fifth.

And its opening phrase has escaped the surah entirely. The Bismillah — “In the name of God” — is the grace before a meal. It is said stepping out of the house and stepping back in, before a speech, before sleep. When a Muslim woman gives birth, tradition has the midwife say it over the child. And Islamic tradition holds that when the dead rise from their graves on the Day of Judgment, the first words in their mouths will be the same ones: Bismillah.

Freedom & the Face

Since we’re talking about petitioning, let’s look more closely at the Qur’anic view of human agency. In the Biblical story of Fall, Eve reaches for the fruit first and is singled out for it. But the Qur’an tells the story differently.

In the Qur’an, Adam and Eve are admitted to the garden together, warned together, deceived together, and Eve is not made the cause of the fall, implicitly or explicitly. What the Qur’an’s version puts in the foreground is choice. From the beginning, Haleem writes, “man was meant to live on earth and even to have both the moral capacity to judge between good and evil and the freedom to choose between them, so that his success or failure are of his own making” (2:30; 76:3; 90:10; 91:8–10). In Islam, human beings are not the objects of a fate handed down to them. They are agents, and the weight of what they choose is their own.

The governing principle fits in half a verse:

There is no compulsion in religion. QUR’AN 2:256

While guidance is offered (the whole Fatiha is a request for it), it remains for each Muslim to take that guidance and walk (or not). And because the choice is real, so is the bill. Accountability is freedom’s other face.

Islam does not make this claim alone. Judaism ties freedom to destiny in a single verse, “I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Christianity makes free response central to salvation, though it frames that freedom inside a long argument, sharpest in Augustine, between the initiative of grace and the reality of choice. What all three share, however, is the conviction that a moral life requires a free agent to live it. For Islam, that conviction had to be won against the fatalism of the Jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic sense of qadr, a lot parceled out by the old gods and by Time itself, against which a man could do little. The Qur’anic call to responsibility stands over against that. It is context, not the last word. How far human freedom reaches, and how it squares with God’s sovereignty, is exactly what Muslim theologians would spend centuries arguing. That argument is 6.3.

But first, the face. Why might a chapter about human freedom end there?

Because the face is where freedom becomes visible, the point at which an inner agent takes an outward direction. And in Arabic that isn’t a metaphor. It’s a root.

The root is و ج ه, w-j-h. In ordinary Arabic, as in ordinary English, the face is the seat of a person’s identity and presence. We deal with one another ‘face to face.’ A person’s face, Haleem writes, “stands for what he projects himself to be,” which is why the Arabic for a hypocrite is dhu’l-wajhayn, the man with two faces. The face carries dignity. To lose one’s honor is, in an old idiom, to “spill the water of one’s face.” From the same root, wajih comes to mean a chief, a notable, a person whose face commands respect. When the angels bring Mary the news of her son, they promise he will be wajih, ‘illustrious’ in this world and the next (3:45). In Arabic, wajh is face. Wijha is direction. Ittijah is orientation. Face and direction are, quite literally, the same word.

The Qur’an uses the idiom directly, and with urgency:

Set your face to the religion as one of pure faith… before there comes a day which may not be put off against the will of God. QUR’AN 30:30, 43

To set one’s face to something is to adopt a course, and the choice of course, the verse warns, cannot be deferred forever. The same picture carries the accountability that opened this beat: on the day of resurrection, the faces of those who lied about God will be seen “darkened” (39:60). A face wears the record of the direction its owner chose. And to surrender one’s face to God is to go where He directs, which the Qur’an names the surest sign of righteousness.

Who has a better religion than he who surrenders his face to God, does what is right, and follows the faith of Abraham? QUR’AN 4:125

Then the word climbs from the human to the divine. The Qur’an speaks of God’s own Face: when everything on earth has perished,

the face of your Lord will endure forever. QUR’AN 55:27

But is that Divine Face literal or figurative? Does God have a face as a human being has one, or is “face” a way of speaking about God’s enduring presence and honor? The Qur’an does not directly say. And that silence, how such language about God is to be read, is the question that split Muslim theology into two great camps.

6.3 | Rationalists & Traditionalists

Created or Uncreated?

We defined kalam in Sec. 5.3: the discipline of theological argument. This is its first real fight.

By the 800s, two camps of Ulama had formed around the question of hermeneutics (ie. how to interpret scripture) and the Qur’an. Reza Aslan calls these two camps the Rationalists and the Traditionalists. In later Islamic thought the Rationalist position came to be represented most clearly by the school called the Mu’tazila, and the Traditionalist position by the Ash’ari. (The Ash’ari school takes its name from a theologian who died in 936, so the labels are a little later than the fight.) As nonsectarian scholars, our job here is not to pick a winner. It is to understand why serious people found each position irresistible.

The Rationalism of the Mu’tazila starts from tawhid and follows it all the way down.

If God is perfectly One, nothing can be co-eternal with His essence. Not His attributes. Not even His speech. The Qur’an, therefore, is created: it is God’s word, but a word comes after the one who speaks it. And once the Qur’an is a created thing, standing apart from God, something else must be the final arbiter of theology, and the Mu’tazila said it was reason. A perfect God is a rational God, and reason is the surest road to Him. Where a religious text contradicts reason, the text is telling you to read it again.

The Traditionalism of the Ash’ari makes the opposite claim: the Qur’an is uncreated. It is not a message about God — it is God speaking. The Traditionalists distrusted rational proofs as limited and fallible, and they enjoined Muslims to read the Qur’an zahir, according to its plain and literal sense, as the perfect voice of God. Religious truth is to be accepted, not audited.

Two sets of hermeneutics. Two ways to see the scripture.

Bila Kayfa: Without Asking How…

Let’s look at the Rationalist method first.

If a verse is consistent with the rest of the Qur’an, with the basic tenets of Islam, and with scientific and historical fact (that is, with reason), a literal reading is justified. However, if a contradiction arises, the verse is to be read poetically or morally instead.

For example, the Qur’an speaks of “the hand of God” (48:10). But God has no body. The literal reading contradicts a doctrine every Muslim holds, so the phrase must be read as figurative: God’s power, God’s generosity, God’s grip on events. Reason and revelation, the Rationalists said, work hand in hand.

Now bring the Traditionalist to the verse that ended 6.2. The face of your Lord will endure forever (55:27). God has no parts. And yet God has a face, because the Qur’an says so. How can both be true? The Traditionalist answer is two words: bila kayfa, “without asking how.” The apparent contradiction is not ours to resolve. It simply stands, and to demand an explanation would itself be a sin, a refusal to take God at His word. Where the Rationalist turns the Face into a figure of speech, the Traditionalist turns the question away in the name of reverence.

On either road, rationalism or traditionalism, the Qur’an makes claims about God that press against the Qur’an’s own doctrine of God — and often does not tell the reader how to hold the two together. Someone has to decide. Two ways of deciding became two competing theologies, and the theologies became, over time, two ways of reading Islamic scripture.

Tafsir & Ta’wil

In Sec. 5.2, we found that tafsir is interpretation concerned with the plain, literal, contextual meaning of the text, while tawil is concerned with its hidden or esoteric meaning. Here, we will see how the two theological camps use them.

Because the Rationalists reject an uncreated Qur’an, they often contextualize the scripture in history. A created text has a context, and its meaning cannot be grasped without serious study of the language, the events, and the politics of 7th-century Arabia. And the Rationalist draws the implication the Traditionalist most bristles against — what was appropriate in the 7th century may not be appropriate in the 21st century.

However, for the Traditionalists, the Qur’an is eternal and perfect, so the Qur’an should interpret the Qur’an. Verses explain other verses. Where more is needed, look next to the authenticated Hadith, then to the Companions who knew Muhammad, then to the generation immediately after them. For the Traditionalist, context is a ladder that climbs toward the Prophet, not outward into history.

And ta’wil, the esoteric reading? Both camps agree the Qur’an contains hidden teachings. The book says so of itself (3:7). But neither camp is much interested in them. The Rationalists concentrate on what reason can reach by analysis, and the Traditionalists remain at the surface the text presents.

Indeed, the search for the Qur’an’s inner meaning will pass to a tradition — the Sufis, whom we’ll meet in Section 10.

6.4 | Sharia & Fiqh

Sharia Is Not a Law Code

Next to jihad, “sharia” may be the second most misunderstood word in Islam. Here, we will explore what sharia is and how it came about.

Within a generation of Muhammad’s death, the young caliphate needed exactly what the Qur’an does not supply: a codified set of standards for conduct. So, the Ulama turned to the Sunnah, the customs and practices of Muhammad and the first Ummah, the record of how the Prophet actually lived. There exists a sharp line here between Sunnah and Hadith: the Hadith are what a Muslim believes (ie. the Prophet’s specific teachings), while the Sunnah governs how a Muslim behaves. Over centuries of interpreting the Qur’an and Sunnah together, a body of moral conventions was gathered to guide Islamic life: Sharia.

But Sharia is not a set of laws.

Rather, sharia is the ideal Islamic form of righteousness: perfect justice, perfect peace, centered on a perfect religion. Because it’s perfect, sharia has never been attained. But Muslims aim at it anyway. The word itself refers to a path to water — the distant thing a desert traveler steadfastly reaches for. When a newspaper column warns that Muslims want to “implement sharia law,” it has made a category mistake before it has made a political one, because sharia is not the kind of thing that gets implemented. It is the horizon a Muslim reaches for.

The ‘walking toward the water’ also has a name.

Fiqh is Islamic jurisprudence: the all-too-human, fallible, endlessly revised effort to derive practical rules from the sources. Put simply, sharia is perfect. Fiqh is what imperfect scholars, arguing with one another, have made of it. The closest Jewish analogue is halacha: a body of religious practice under continual interpretation, with a living argument at its center.

Sharia is the horizon. Fiqh is the walking.

Fiqh: Schools of Law

Because fiqh is a human effort, it has produced not one system but a family of them (and the family tree is worth learning because it will reappear in most sections after this).

Sunni Islam classically recognizes four schools of law: the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shafi’i, and the Hanbali, each named for an 8th or 9th-century jurist. Shia Islam has its own: the Jafari school of the Twelvers, which we met in Sec. 5.2 as the fiqh of Iran and Iraq, and the schools of the Ismaili and Zaidi traditions. The Ibadi school of Oman stands apart from both. And running across all of them are devotional and reform movements, Sufism and Salafism among them, that are not ‘schools of law’ at all but orientations toward it.

So, what do the schools argue about?

Above all, Islamic sources. Every school builds on the Qur’an and the Sunnah, but the Sunnah reaches us through Hadith, and Hadith have to be vetted. Did the Prophet really say this? Did he really do that? The study of answering is isnad — the chain of transmission from Muhammad down to the reader, and the schools differ sharply in how strong a chain of custody they demand. Some accept only the most rigorously attested reports. Others admit weaker chains or supplement them with theological or historical reasoning.

There are many fiqhs. There is one sharia.

One further distinction settles a question American readers often ask. Sharia has two dimensions: religious duties and legal codes. It’s only religious duties that bear on Muslims living in the United States, and for a reason internal to Sharia itself. Sharia holds that Muslims are to obey the law of the land in which they live. The legal-code dimension governed medieval Córdoba; it has no standing in Texas, and Muslim jurists say so. In Sec. 3.1 we read the Constitution of Medina, in which Muhammad’s community guaranteed freedom of religion to the Jews of the city in exchange for their loyalty. The reciprocity runs the other way too: wherever freedom of religion is promised, the Muslims who live there owe that government their allegiance. That is not a modern accommodation. It goes all the way back to Medina.

How Islamic Law Is Rendered

How, then, does a jurist get from a 7th-century text to a ruling on a question the text never imagined? The tools are medieval, and every one of them is still in use.

The first was analogy (qiyas). Because no case will ever match a Quranic situation exactly, early medieval Islamic jurists reasoned by resemblance: surely one story of the Prophet would be similar enough to draw a line from. As the dense web of clever analogies grew, its density irritated the Traditionalists (who preferred a Qur’anic answer to a clever one). Over time, the weight of that web gave way to something sturdier: ijma, the consensus of scholars and judges. For Sunni Muslims, consensus is the third source of law after the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and its power cannot be overstated.

Consensus is also what keeps any single voice in check. A qualified scholar may issue a personal legal opinion (a fatwa). But a fatwa is nonbinding. An opinion may be disregarded, and it is disregarded if the consensus of other scholars does not endorse it. There is no pope of Islam. There is no Islamic office that decides for everyone. The need for consensus across so many questions, geographies, and centuries is exactly what produced the schools: the Hanafi consensus governed medieval Baghdad while the Maliki spread from North Africa into Spain.

However, consensus has a shadow. Over the centuries, the schools hardened into precedent, and later jurists began to follow their predecessors rather than argue with them. The practice of repeating earlier rulings without fresh reasoning is called taqlid (imitation), and Muslims today mostly say the word with a grimace. Against it stood the jurists who prized independent thought. Where no consensus yet existed, a qualified jurist was free to reason for himself, and that act has the name we introduced in Sec. 5.2: ijtihad.

Then, the tradition says, the gates closed. With the rise of Traditionalist attitudes in the late Golden Age (a story we follow through Module 3), the “gates of ijtihad” were declared shut. Imitation was encouraged over independence. Whether they were ever really closed is another matter. The legal historian Wael Hallaq argued in the 1980s that the “closing” is more legend than legal fact, and that jurists went on reasoning independently the whole time. Either way, the reopening of ijtihad is the rallying cry of Islamic Modernism, and we take it up in Sec. 13.

In closing, Muslims generally agree that every source of Islamic law except the Qur’an is the work of human hands. It is therefore unreasonable to treat the whole apparatus as the infallible, binding law of God.

There are, sadly, draconian laws against women and religious minorities written in the name of Islam. But the majority of Muslims decry such laws as not reflecting sharia (and do their best to change the system from within, or leave the system in favor of a freer set of laws elsewhere). Further, when a fatwa is issued by a militant in Tehran, it may rightly draw the ire of Western media — but it has no standing for a billion Muslims who do not recognize its authority. That’s simply not how Islam works.

Rather, Islam operates as a system of consensus (ijma), analogy (qiyas), and independent reasoning (ijtihad) in a never-ending argument aimed at the Qur’an’s highest ideals. As nonsectarian scholars, we do not adjudicate that argument. We only note that it is an argument conducted in good faith by the quarter of our species who call themselves Muslims.

Last Section: Kalam & Shia Islam
This Section: Hermeneutics & the Qur’an
Next Section: Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance

Pictured: Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Qeysarie Gate • Isfahan, built 1598–1629
Photo Credit: Amir Pashaei via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

Before we cover any Islamic content, we will separate the nonsectarian point of view from the sectarian — scholarship from theology — and knowledge from belief. We meet the three tests a claim must pass before it counts as scholarly knowledge: the insider/outsider problem that has occupied scholars of religion for a century, and the distinction between describing what a tradition is and prescribing what it ought to be — the distinction every later section depends on.

Assigned Reading
None for this Section.

Key Terms for this Section
Islam · Mosque (Masjid) · Madrassa · Nonsectarian · Theologian
Scholar of Religion · Insider/Outsider Problem · Normative/Descriptive Claims

1.1 | Welcome to the Scholarly Study of Islam

An Introduction to this Series

This is a survey of Islam: its history, its literature, its thought, and the civilizations it has built. No foreknowledge of Islam or Arabic is required. Key Arabic terms are introduced and taught as we go, and by the end you’ll carry a working vocabulary of several dozen of them.

Here’s the map.

Module 1 | The Rise of Islam. We begin with method (this section), then move to the socio-political world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born, the Ka’ba, the tribal order of pre-Islamic Arabia, the monotheisms already circulating through the peninsula.* We follow Muhammad’s life, his revelation, his flight to Medina, his war with Mecca, and then the succession crisis that fractured the community within thirty years of the Prophet’s death.

Module 2 | The Qur’an. A close reading. How an oral recitation became a written codex, what the text says about war and tolerance, about evil and mercy, about paradise and judgment, and how Muslims have argued for fourteen centuries over how to read the foundational text of 2 billion adherents.

Module 3 | The Golden Age. Baghdad. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics, mysticism. The centuries when the Islamicate world was the intellectual center of gravity for half the planet, and the invasions (Turkish, Crusader, Mongol) ended them.

Module 4 | Islam & Modernity. Empire, colonialism, secularism, nationalism, oil. How the Islamic world met the modern West, and the range of responses it produced.

Three principal writers guide us. The first is Reza Aslan (Iran), whose No god but God carries the narrative spine of the early centuries. The second is Tamim Ansary (Afghanistan), whose Destiny Disrupted tells world history from the inside of the Islamic world looking out — a genuinely disorienting experience if you learned history the other way around. The third is the University of London’s M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Egypt), whose scholarly descriptions and translation of the Qur’an are unparalleled.

Note: ﷺ (“peace be upon him”) is a traditional honorific for Muhammad in religious circles. It’s used sparingly in this course to illustrate its usage in the printed and digital world. But as this is a scholarly endeavor and not a religious one, it will not be used throughout.

About Me

Today, I serve as an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Texas at Tyler, where I’ve taught World Religions, Intro to Islam, and Islamic Philosophy since 2019. I’m also the Department Chair of Philosophy, Humanities, and Foreign Languages at Tyler Junior College, where I’ve been a full-time professor since 2012. This series is the culmination of that teaching. (Link to CV)

Before that, I held a teaching fellowship with the Religion Department at Florida State University (2009–2011). At Florida State, I studied Islam at the graduate level under Dr. Adam Gaiser, himself an alum of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Religion program. His mentor was Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina, a renowned scholar who advised the writing of the 2005 Constitution of Iraq. My research with Dr. Gaiser prepared me to publish a 2012 article, “Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination (1528–1588),” in the ERAS journal of Monash University, one of Australia’s “Group of Eight” top-tier universities. It’s available online, and it has been cited internationally.

I also had the opportunity at Florida State to assist in a course called “Introduction to Islamic Culture,” and that experience had a lasting effect on my ability to teach this material to an undergraduate audience. On the strength of it, I taught my own sections of World Religions for Florida State’s Religion department through 2010 and 2011. In 2019 I published “Forgiveness in Judaism” in The Philosophy of Forgiveness (Vernon Press), and in 2020 I received the Thomas H. Shelby Jr. Endowed Chair for Teaching Excellence at Tyler Junior College. I’m happy to note that students have consistently lauded my treatment of Islam in this course.

Defining this Project

Islam is the name of the religious tradition that emerges in 7th-century Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad.

It is not a single institution, not a denomination, and not a set of practices frozen in time. From the very beginning, Muslims have disagreed with each other: about politics, theology, law, interpretation, and authority. Those disagreements are not an inconvenience we need to smooth over. They are the history of Islam, and several of the most consequential ones will occupy us for entire sections.

That means we’ll be careful with the phrases like “Islam says” or “Islam believes.”

Sometimes it’s perfectly appropriate. But often what we really mean is that the Qur’an says something, or a particular scholar says something, or that Sunni Muslims in one century said something that Shia Muslims in another rejected. Learning to pull those apart is not a prerequisite to learning the subject. It is the subject.

Along the way you’ll encounter Muslims praying in a mosque (masjid), studying in a madrassa (Islamic religious school), reading the Qur’an, practicing Sufism, interpreting Islamic law, and disagreeing vigorously with one another about what Islam requires. Our job is never to decide which of them is the “real” Muslim. Our job is to understand what people believe in a specific time and place, why they believe it, how those beliefs developed, and what those beliefs have meant in practice.

Which brings us to the one rule this whole series runs on:

We are here to study Islam, not to practice or prosecute Islam.

All are welcome to study in my courses. But I do not allow proselytization — for or against a religion — in my public courses. This rule isn't there to protect Islam from scrutiny, and it isn't there to protect anyone's faith from history. It's there so that every reader — Muslim, Christian, atheist, or none of the above — can look directly at the same fourteen centuries of evidence without wondering whose side the author is on. The material is far more interesting than any verdict I could render on it.

So the first question we ask is not “Is Islam true?”
That question belongs to someone else, and we’ll meet him shortly.

Our question is: “What can we know about Islam?”

That is the question the scholar brings into the room.
The rest of this section builds the toolkit for answering it.

1.2 | The Scholar’s Toolkit

Sectarian vs. Nonsectarian

The first and most fundamental piece of our method is a word you must know to make any sense of the academic study of religion: nonsectarian.

Nonsectarianism is the attitude that secular institutions of higher learning take toward the study of religion. What it means is that we do not take sides in religious debates. We don’t rank one religion above another. We’re not in the business of proving or disproving any tradition’s tenets. We don’t privilege Sunni over Shia, traditionalist over reformer, mystic over legalist. This series is not “pro-Islam” or “anti-Islam,” any more than it is pro-Christian or antisemitic. This series, proudly, is a nonsectarian study of Islam fit for all readers.

So what does that look like in practice?

Take History, a subject we’ve all sat through. A good history teacher can give you a detailed account of American politics without making one party the good guys and the other the bad guys. That doesn’t mean the teacher has no political opinions. It just means the classroom isn’t being used to advance them. The opinions are not the method.

This stands in stark contrast to a sectarian center of learning, like a religious private school, a Sunday school, a madrassa, or a seminary. What’s the difference?

It’s simple.
A sectarian program of study picks sides. A nonsectarian course like ours does not.

And notice that “sectarian” is not an insult here. A seminary that refused to say what Christians ought to believe would be failing at its job! A madrassa that refused to promote Islamic theology and law would be failing at its job too. These are institutions with a theological purpose, and their purpose is a legitimate one: adherent formation within a religious tradition. I have friends and family who’ve paid good money to attend such institutions, and would be upset if it didn’t take a theological side.

However, ours is a different purpose. And with Islam, the nonsectarian method earns its keep quickly. The tradition contains enormous internal diversity, which means a scholar is constantly standing between Muslim communities that disagree about what Islam requires of Muslims. A theologian may resolve that disagreement. A scholar studies it. For us, the disagreement is not an obstacle to the subject; it is the subject.

What a Theologian Does

That brings us to Theology: the discipline of belief.
Literally from the Greek for the study (logos) of God (Theos).

In a sectarian setting, a theologian — an imam, a pastor, a rabbi — will generally tell you that their view of religion is correct and try to persuade you of it. (There are notable exceptions.) It’s the job of theologians to make religious truth-claims (eg. there is only one God), and part of the job is defending those claims and contesting the rival claims of others. Whether God exists, what God is like, which reading of scripture is correct, what the faithful ought to believe and do: this is theology’s home turf, and Islam’s theological tradition is long, internally contentious, and extraordinarily sophisticated. We will study those arguments with real admiration.

Theology also has an institutional home. Walk into a mosque, and you will find the theologian’s whole world in one room. Prayer. Counsel in a crisis. Instruction. Community. The Friday sermon, delivered from a raised platform, where someone stands up and tells the assembled what God requires of them this week. A church and a synagogue are doing the same work in a different setting. And notice what the person on that platform is doing: not reporting that a community believes something, but telling the community what it ought to believe. That’s the job of a theologian.

This series will describe everything that happens in that room.
It will never perform any of it.

One more thing, because people sometimes assume that “academic” means “skeptical,” or that “nonsectarian” means “anti-religious.” Neither is true. The scholar doesn’t have to reject a religious claim to study it; she simply can’t treat her own acceptance or rejection of the claim as evidence about it. The line between scholarship and theology runs between jobs — not people. A Muslim can be a first-rate scholar of Islam. So can a Christian, and so can an atheist. A theologian can also be an excellent historian (some of them are better historians than the “historians”). The question is never what the author believes when she goes home. The question is which chair she’s sitting in when she writes.

Why They Don’t Compete

At first glance, it might look like theologians and secular scholars are rivals.
Two parties fighting over the same territory.

They’re not, and the reason is simple: they have different goals.

The theologian’s work is directed toward a religious community: preserving a tradition, defending its beliefs, reforming its practices, separating orthodoxy from error. A nonsectarian scholar does something else entirely. I share peer-reviewed scholarship while making no claim whatsoever about metaphysical or absolute truth. The foundation of a nonsectarian claim is empirical evidence and the evolving consensus of scholars worldwide — which is exactly why researchers of every nationality and religious affiliation can sit at the same table and study Islam together. They aren’t trying to prove or disprove Islam’s truth-claims. They’re fascinated by the subject and want to add to what we know about it.

Consider prayer, since we’ll spend some of Section 5 on it.

A theologian teaches a Muslim how to perform the daily prayers correctly — according to his school, and not the school down the road. A scholar asks how daily prayer developed historically, why the schools disagree about its performance, and why the practice looks different in Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, and Texas. Both are looking at the same prayer. But they are asking different questions of it.

The theological question is: What should we believe?

The scholarly question is: What can we know about what people believe?

Neither question cancels the other. Keeping them separate helps make both useful.

Now here’s the part readers sometimes find strange. Like most people, your humble professor has deeply held religious beliefs. But you will not find them in this series. I don’t intend to convince you of my religious beliefs or dissuade you from yours. Your beliefs are likewise not the subject. For some, that restraint is a challenge. For many, it’s a breath of fresh air — a chance to learn about Islam with no one trying to convince you into or out of a religion while informing you.

1.3 | Knowledge & Belief

The Three Tests

To get at the real differences between the theologian and the scholar, we have to get at the epistemic difference between belief and knowledge. And the difference between those two is not a difference in subject matter. It’s a difference in justification.

All of us carry beliefs: about God, politics, beauty, family, and the world. Some are deeply considered, some inherited, some born of experience, and many are held with enormous confidence. None of that, by itself, makes any of them knowledge.

The knowledge of a scholar must be logical, falsifiable, and precise. Beliefs don’t have to be any of the three. Let’s take them one at a time.

Knowledge is logical when it’s limited to rigorous, valid, evidence-based reasoning.
“I know force equals mass times acceleration” clears the bar.

• The conclusion follows from the premises (valid)

• There’s no counter-evidence against it (undisproven)

• It’s been tested by an enormous variety of experts (scholarly consensus)

Compare the above scientific claim to this: “I believe the president must be a great banjo player, because great musicians make great leaders.” Not tested. It’s invalid, as the conclusion doesn’t follow. And there’s abundant evidence against it (ie. there are successful former presidents who cannot play the banjo). A person may believe this sincerely. But it does not count as knowledge.

Knowledge is falsifiable when there is some conceivable way to show it’s wrong — the criterion the philosopher Karl Popper put at the center of scientific reasoning, and it does just as much work in history. “Ottawa is the capital of Canada” can be checked. “The Mona Lisa is the most beautiful painting in the world” cannot be checked against anything, because there is no empirical test for the prize most beautiful. That may be a meaningful personal judgment. Which makes it a belief, not knowledge.

Knowledge is precise when it isn’t assembled out of arbitrary parts. “A calorie is the energy needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius” — precise. Now consider a spiritualist’s claim that “a person’s well-being depends on their overall sense of unity and balance.” What is specifically meant by well-being? Balance of what measurable thing? What evidence would even bear on it? The sentence sounds impressive right up until you ask it to mean something.

Watch how the three tests behave the moment religion enters.

“I believe God exists” is a belief, and a common one. “Muslims have believed in one God since the emergence of Islam in 7th-century Arabia” is an historical claim about a belief, checkable against texts, evidence, and fourteen centuries of scholarship. While the subject is religious in both cases, the kind of claim is entirely different. The theologian deals in the first kind; the scholar deals only in the second.

Now, before you walk away thinking we’re looking down on beliefs… Beliefs are a great deal of what makes a life meaningful, and none of us would be who we are without them. Your humble professor has beliefs about God, about his country, about his community, and about family and friends.

But they’re my beliefs. As smart as I am, my beliefs do not count as knowledge.

The Insider/Outsider Problem

Here’s a question that has occupied scholars of religion for a century:
Do you have to be a member of a religion to study it?

In our case: do you have to be Muslim to study Islam?

Let’s grant the insider his due first. An insider brings something to the table no training can supply: lived experience. A Muslim scholar may understand from the inside why a particular prayer matters, what Ramadan feels like in a practicing household, why a theological distinction that looks like hair-splitting on paper carries real spiritual weight. And the outsider has plenty of ways she can fail if not careful: she can mistake unfamiliarity for irrationality, or confidently assign a ritual a meaning its practitioners would laugh at.

So the naive answer — only Muslims should discuss Islam — at least starts from something true. But follow the next three steps, and it collapses.

First: who counts? To privilege insider voices, someone has to decide who the insiders are. Imagine a professor saying: “We’ll cite Omar, because he’s a real Muslim — but not Yusuf, because although he calls himself Muslim and attends the mosque, he doesn’t act like a Muslim.” That judgment belongs to a theologian. The scholar has no instrument for measuring the sincerity of anyone’s faith, and no business building one.

Second: who gets the last word? If the subjects of a study can simply object to its findings and have them revised to their liking, it is hardly a study at all. Letting the people under examination dictate what may be written about them isn’t scholarship. It’s public relations. And an eager, advocating outsider falls into the same pit from the other side: reproducing the image of a community most desired by those in charge of it. What he produces may be perfectly respectable. It just isn’t research.

Third (and this is the sharpest point), as the University of Chicago’s Bruce Lincoln argues, information from inside a community is complicated by the fact that one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system. Or, as the old line has it: whoever coined the concept of water probably wasn’t a fish. A fish doesn’t notice water. The deeper inside a community you stand, the harder it is to see its shape.

This is one of the real strengths of nonsectarian scholarship — not an apology for it.

So the solution is not to crown the insider, and not to crown the outsider. The solution is scholarship — the method that makes every claim, from either side of the line, answer to evidence and survive criticism.

Let’s run the whole argument back through History, where the stakes feel lower, and the logic is identical. Say I want to know President George Washington…

I’ll read books by Americans and non-Americans alike, and I’ll dismiss anyone who claims a non-American can’t write about Washington. I’ll set aside books that advocate too warmly for him, because I want to see the whole man — his strengths and his faults. I won’t rely on books by politicians, who’ll primarily use Washington to prop up their own positions. And I’ll be wary of texts about Washington produced where the press isn’t free, and peer review isn’t real, because I want my Washington vetted by Washington scholars across the globe.

Now go back through that paragraph and substitute Muhammad for Washington, Muslim for American, and theologian for politician.

That’s what we’re doing here.

The Aslan Interview

Among nonsectarian scholars, there is no assumption that an expert on a religion is a member of that religion. It is, at best, a non-issue.

A famous cable-news interview (I won’t link it here) illustrates the point well. Dr. Reza Aslan — the scholar of religion who wrote the first book on our reading list — had published a scholarly study of Jesus of Nazareth. The interviewer opened by asking why he, a Muslim, would write a book about a Christian topic.

Aslan’s visible bewilderment is what made the exchange famous.

The question didn’t compute for Aslan. He’s a scholar of religions. He holds advanced degrees in the subject and has studied Christianity’s history for decades. That he happens also to be a Muslim is, to every other scholar in the field, completely beside the point — the way it would be beside the point to ask a non-Roman why she studies Ancient Rome.

For scholars, the question is never who are you?

The question is what do you know? For any scholar of any subject, the primary question is: What do you add to the sum of what we understand about this subject?

And notice that this cuts both ways. The insider/outsider problem is not an argument that outsiders make better scholars. It’s an argument that the question is simply the wrong question. Aslan is a Muslim who writes about Christianity — and a Muslim who writes about Islam, and neither fact qualifies or disqualifies him. Some of the finest scholarship on Islam has been produced by Muslims, and some of it by people who’ve never set foot in a mosque except to take notes. The tradition doesn’t belong to its critics, and it doesn’t belong exclusively to its adherents. It belongs to whoever does the work.

What the scholar owes, in either case, is the same: evidence, argument, and a willingness to be corrected.

Which is why I can write this series, and why you can read it.

1.4 | Normative & Descriptive Claims

Two Kinds of [Dental] Claims

So how does a scholar talk about religion without turning into a theologian?
Here’s the machinery.

A Descriptive claim describes what something is.
A Normative claim tells you what something ought to be.

A dentist might tell you, descriptively, that the average adult has 32 teeth. That same dentist might tell you, normatively, that people with good teeth floss daily — if you want good teeth, you ought to floss. One statement reports. The other prescribes.

The distinction is quite old. The philosopher David Hume (d. 1776) warned against sliding from is to ought, and philosophers still call it the is–ought problem — and it is absolutely essential to everything that follows in this series. Get careless with it and you’ll find yourself making strong normative claims about Islam, at which point you’ve stopped doing scholarship and started doing theology.

Now consider these:

A Christian must not serve in the military.
A Jew must have a Jewish mother.
A Muslim woman must cover her face in public.
A Hindu shouldn’t eat beef.
A Buddhist should meditate every day.

Every one of them is normative, because every one draws a line in the sand: on this side is our religion, and on that side is not. They are theological statements, and notice that whether any of them is true isn’t the issue. The issue is what kind of work the sentence is doing.

Here’s where it gets genuinely difficult. Normative claims are very good at dressing up as descriptive ones.

“That group isn’t practicing real Islam” — it looks like a report. It has the grammar of a report. But there’s no fact in the world it corresponds to; it’s a judgment about who belongs, wearing a scholar’s tweed jacket. Watch for the tell: real, true, authentic, proper, genuine. When one of those words shows up in front of the name of a religion, a normative claim is almost always hiding behind it. Real Christianity. True Judaism. Authentic Islam. Somebody is drawing a boundary and hoping you won’t notice their pencil.

One more pair, stripped of religion entirely:

Johnny is a good person.
Bob claims Johnny is a good person.

The first is normative — because it presumes the speaker knows what makes a person good. The second is descriptive, because it simply reports a fact about something Bob said. The scholar’s sentence is almost always the second kind. Not “that isn’t real Islam,” but “this community regards that practice as illegitimate, and here is the argument they make.” Same information about the dispute. None of the refereeing.

The Ahmads & Haddads

Let’s put it to work on a live dispute.

Imagine two Muslim families: the Ahmads and the Haddads. Both identify as Muslim. But the Ahmad family believes Muslims should oppose a particular war, while the Haddads support it.

A Muslim theologian compares good Islam with bad Islam — that’s his job, and he does it in the open. He might say: “The Ahmad family are good Muslims because they are pacifists, but the Haddad family are bad Muslims because they support the war.”

That is a normative, theological claim.
It sorts. It ranks. It tells the reader which family to admire.

But a descriptive, historically defensible claim is the kind nonsectarian scholars are focused on. A scholar of religion makes no claim about who is a “true” Muslim, a good Jew, or a bad Christian. Instead, she pays attention to the people making such claims and reports them as historical and cultural facts. So the scholar may write:

“While both the Ahmads and the Haddads identify as Muslim,
the Haddads support the war, while the Ahmads do not.”

Read those two versions again, back to back. The second one tells you more. It preserves the disagreement instead of resolving it. It treats both families as Muslims because both families say they are. And it leaves the theological question exactly where it found it: with the theologians, who have the standing to argue it out.

This is the tool we will reach for at every moment of live sectarian tension in the weeks ahead. When Sunni and Shia accounts of the same afternoon diverge, when a practice one community treasures is called an innovation by another, when a reformer says a tradition must change and a traditionalist says it cannot: as nonsectarian scholars, our work is to describe both sides as accurately as possible. You’ll see that sentence again.

Not a verdict.
A description accurate enough that both parties would recognize themselves in it.

Which is harder than it sounds, but scholars think it's worth the trouble.

Long Live Theology!

Let me be unmistakably clear about something. None of the above is a criticism of theology. In fact, it’s a defense of it!

Theological training belongs in a religious institution — a private school, a madrassa, a seminary. That’s what those institutions offer and what their tuition buys. A public college has a different purpose: it proudly serves people of many beliefs and none, all of whom have decided together that greater knowledge of religion serves everyone’s interest. So my task is a survey of Islam from a nonsectarian standpoint. I never presume to tell my readers what is and isn’t proper Islam. I leave that work to my friends on the minbar (the pulpit) at the head of the mosque.

The scholarly approach may feel irreverent — especially when scholars discuss a tradition you’re personally invested in. If that happens, remember our objectives. This is an academic study of religion — not a religious course. And no scholar of religion is trying to replace anyone’s theologian.

Consider the limits of my office.

A nonsectarian scholar can’t lead a prayer in a mosque.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t marry a couple.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t counsel the grieving in the middle of the night.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t exhort you to repent.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t tell you the secrets of the universe, and wouldn’t dare try.
A nonsectarian scholar works neither to bring someone to Islam nor out of it.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t take sides on the divisive questions within Islam.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t work to shape Islamic doctrine.

Theologians are not only permitted but expected to do all of these things and more!

So we both have jobs. Both of us are looking at religion, though our methods and our goals are entirely different. Some people have use for one. Some for the other. Some for neither. And some of us, myself included, find real value in both — reading scholars and theologians alike while never confusing the two.

That’s the toolkit.
Nonsectarian, not theological. Knowledge, not belief. Description, not prescription.

Now, with that toolset in front of you, we go back 1,400 years to a dusty settlement in the Arabian desert built around a single cube of stone, to the age the tradition itself remembers as the Jahiliyyah, and to an orphan born there who will change the world.

Salaam.

This Section: Normativity & Religion
Next Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & Muhammad

Pictured: Shia Muharram mourning gathering in Iran • Nov 2014
Photo Credit: Payam Moein via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

In this section, we pick up where Section 4 left us: on a plain in Iraq in 680, standing next to the Prophet's grandson, Husayn. We trace how that afternoon turned a political faction into a religious tradition — through the Penitents, the mourning of Ashura, and the doctrine of the Imams — and follow that tradition forward to the Mahdi, to Safavid Iran, and to the Islamic Republic. We then turn from what divides the Ummah to what unites almost all of it: Islam as an orthopraxic tradition, in which Islamic theology (kalam) is inseparable from Islamic law (fiqh), and the Five Pillars by which a Muslim builds a life. The section closes with Salat, the communal prayer that encompasses the other four pillars.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 6- 7

Key Terms for this Section
Karbala · Fatima (Fatemeh) · Imamah · Sunni · Tawhid · Sawm · Hajj · Salat

5.1 | Karbala

Iraq • 680 🇮🇶

It is the Christian year 680 CE.
The Muslim year 61 AH. 61 years since the Hijra to Yathrib (Medina).

Muhammad’s dream of a free, peaceable, egalitarian community of believers has become so much dust in the desert, and in its place sits a new Islamic empire ruled from Damascus by the sons of the men who once hunted the Prophet.

Here, on a dry plain in Iraq called Karbala, the Prophet’s grandson is about to die.

Husayn (Hossein) is the son of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh), leader of the Hashemite clan, and, to a great many Muslims, the rightful heir to the Caliphate. Against him rides Yazid, the 33-year-old son of Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh), the second Umayyad caliph. Here in Iraq, the sons are fighting their fathers’ war. Ali and Mu’awiya had settled nothing at Siffin (cf. Sec. 4.3); they had only partitioned the disagreement and postponed the war.

The two forces are nowhere near evenly matched, and everyone knows it. Husayn bravely rides out with fewer than a hundred followers, his own family of women and children near him — back at the camp. Yazid meets Husayn with a large, well-paid, mounted Syrian army. What follows is not a battle. Over three days, without water or food, it is the slaughter of a family in the open Iraqi desert.

Husayn’s 18-year-old son, Ali Akbar, dies armed on the field. So does his brother’s 14-year-old son, Qasim (Ghasem). Even Husayn’s infant son is killed, shot in the neck by a soldier’s arrow as Husayn carries the child toward the Syrian lines to beg for water.

Bloodied, and with few left to hear it, Husayn calls out to the riders closing on him:

These are the last words of Husayn, son of Ali, Grandson of the Prophet, Master of Martyrs. Moments later, Yazid’s general decapitates Muhammad’s grandson and carries his head away as a prized trophy. The new Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus celebrated this as the beginning of the first Islamic empire. And it was. But it also gave rise to a rival tradition that fervently mourns the Battle of Karbala to this day.

The Penitents

Husayn had ridden out to Karbala from Kufa, in Iraq: a city of freed slaves and Persian converts, where his father Ali had governed as the fourth Rashidun caliph.

Kufa was the heart of the Party of Ali (Shi’atu Ali, cf. Sec. 4.3). Its people had written to Husayn, promising him an army. But when Husayn came, almost none of them went with him to Karbala.

Four years later, a small group of Kufans gathers at the site of the massacre. They are remembered as the tawwabun, the Penitents. They blacken their faces. They tear their clothes. They weep openly, in public, for a man they had failed. They name their own failure as the reason he died.

This is the moment the Party of Ali stops being a political faction and becomes the religious tradition of Shi’ism. Not at Siffin, where the argument was about who should govern. Shia Islam is born where the argument became about what we owe the one who suffered for us, and what it means that we did not go.

At the heart of Shia Islam is a 1,400-year-old grief. Reza Aslan puts the theology plainly: Shi’ism rests on the conviction that the righteous believer sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice, as Husayn did in the face of his oppressors. He went to Karbala knowing — that’s the whole point. He was not ambushed. He was not outmaneuvered. Husayn chose certain death rather than swear fealty to the Umayyads.

And the Shia reading places that choice in a very long line

The sacrifice-theology of Shia Islam begins in Genesis with Abraham (Ibrahim) raising the knife over his son and ends with Husayn’s brave and willing sacrifice at Karbala. Between those historical bookmarks were the Lawgivers: Moses (Torah/al-Tawrat), Jesus (the Gospel/al-Injil), and Muhammad (al-Qur’an). For the Shia, what starts and completes this circuit is the sacrifice: opened by Abraham and closed by Husayn.

Ashura: Honoring Martyrdom

Every year, on the 10th of Muharram, the largest act of communal devotion in Shia Islam takes place.

Ashura is the anniversary of Husayn’s death. It is less a commemoration and more of a public atonement. The tears that should have been shed at Karbala, by the people of Kufa who stayed home, are shed now, to redeem the tragedy. Hence the Shia saying: a tear shed for Husayn washes away a hundred sins.

The observance takes many forms. Congregations gather for majlis, lamentation assemblies where the story is recited and the room weeps together. In Iran and South Asia, communities stage ta’ziya, passion plays that put Karbala on a stage — one of the very few dramatic traditions in the Islamic world. Processions carry black banners through the streets. Mourners beat their chests in rhythm (latm). And in some communities, a minority practice of ritual bloodletting with blades or chains (tatbir) has drawn cameras (out of all proportion to how common it is), and has been discouraged or forbidden by major Shia authorities, including Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran and Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq, who direct the faithful toward blood donation instead.

Many Sunni Muslims regard the mourning rites as bid’ah, an innovation with no warrant in the Prophet’s practice. That objection is old, sincere, and widely held among the Sunni. At the same time, Sunnis keep the 10th of Muharram too, as a fast, for completely different reasons. Tradition states that Muhammad, arriving in Medina, found the Jews of the city fasting and fasted with them (cf. Sec. 3.4).

So the same date is, in one tradition, a fast for a people delivered, and in the other, a public mourning for a family who were not. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both as accurately as possible.

For the Shia, one does not understand Islam without Karbala.

5.2 | The Imams

Imamah

For the Sunni, nothing stands between the Believer and the Message. But for the Shia, there is a critical link: salvation comes through Muhammad, through his son-in-law Ali, through his grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and through the line of successors the Shia hold to be legitimate. That line is the Imams, and Ali is the first.

There are two basic uses of the word imam.

The word imam (إمام) comes from a Semitic root meaning to go before. The first use of imam is as a title for the Muslim who stands before the congregants at the Friday prayers (analogous to a pastor or rabbi). But there’s nuance in this first form that informs the second. The Qur’an also uses this title for Abraham, an “imam for humankind” (2:124). In honor of this Quranic precedent, the Sunni world honors its four great jurists with the title Imam (Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam al-Shafi’i, and Imam Ahmad). For those great men, English translators use a capital “I” for Imam.

Following this, the Shia world uses the vaunted Imam for the twelve figures after Muhammad who define their tradition. So, if you visit a Sunni mosque for Jummah on a Friday afternoon, you can meet the imam. For them, imam is a job. Every major American city has imams. But an Imam (capital I) in Shia Islam is a wholly other thing.

For the Shia, the Imams are specific members of Muhammad’s family who are ismah — morally protected from error (like God’s prophets and angels). This doctrine is called Imamah, and it is the theological engine of the entire tradition.

In Shia tradition, a Prophet (eg. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) transmits the message, while an Imam (eg. Ali, Hasan, Husayn) translates the message.

Abraham transmitted monotheism. His sons carried it.
Moses transmitted the Torah. His brother Aaron established it.
Jesus transmitted the Gospel. Peter built the Church around it.

For the Shia, Muhammad transmitted the Qur’an. The Imams translated it.

Which is why the Imams are said to possess what no one else does. They carry the living spirit of the Prophet. They know the secret name of God. And where the rest of the Ummah reads the Qur'an through tafsir (standard meaning), the Imams alone can perform ta'wil (fathom the esoteric meaning), tracing a verse back to the hidden meaning beneath its surface. Humanity is made from the dust of the earth; the Imams, tradition holds, were made from light.

The Twelfth Imam

The line of Imams begins with Ali (1), then to his sons Hasan (2) and Husayn (3), then Husayn’s son Ali (4), then his son Muhammad (5), and his son Jafar (6).

Jafar as-Sadiq (Sadegh, d. 765) is the most consequential figure in this list after Ali himself. He formalized the rites of Karbala. He founded the school of law the Shia still follow — Jafari fiqh — which recognizes the teachings of the Imams alongside the Sunnah of the Prophet. And, critically, his school built reasoned interpretation into the machinery of Shia law. As the Shia legal scholar Hossein Modarressi renders the principle: whatever is ordered by reason is also ordered by religion.

That principle has a name — ijtihad, independent legal reasoning — and it produced a powerful Islamic institution. Those qualified to practice it are mujtahids. The highest rank of mujtahid is an ayatollah, a title meaning the sign of God. The title takes decades to earn, and few ever reach it. Those who do gather followers are bound by their rulings (a strong contrast to the Sunni, who have no such practice).

The line continues, and then it splits. Jafar’s eldest son Ismail (Esmail, 7) was to succeed him but died first — or did he?? A small sect of Ismaili Shia, the Seveners, hold that Ismail did not die but entered concealment, and will return at the end of time.

However, for the vast majority of Shia, Jafar’s son Musa (7) succeeded him, followed by Rida (Reza, 8), Jawad (Javad, 9), and then Hadi (10) and Askari (11) — two Imams the later Abbasid caliphs (cf. Sec. 9) feared so thoroughly that they spent most of their lives under guard. Which is why the twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was hidden from public view almost from birth.

The Twelver Shia — the overwhelming majority of Shia Muslims today — hold that the Twelfth Imam did not die but entered occultation: hidden, living, ever-present in the world. He is the Mahdi, the one who guides divinely, and he will reveal himself at the end of days to restore justice to the world.

For the Shia, Muhammad* al-Mahdi, the twelfth Imam (*not to be confused with the Prophet Muhammad), is the summation of history, morality, and Islamic theology. At the end of time, he returns to fill the earth with justice as Jesus the Messiah (Isa al-Masih) descends to pray behind him before hunting down and killing the antichrist (Dajjal). For Sunnis, almost none of this is settled. The Mahdi may be (a) identified with Jesus outright, (b) folded into prophecies of black banners out of Khorasan, or (c) set aside entirely.

As the Mahdi appears nowhere in the Qur’an, if you ask ten Sunni theologians about the Mahdi, you may get ten different answers. Ask a Twelver, and you will get one.

Quietism vs Khomenei

According to Shia tradition, the Imam is alive today, divinely appointed, and thoroughly unavailable to the Islamic world. He is God’s answer to every hard question, but no one can reach him to ask him.

Every argument about religious authority in Shia Islam for the last 1,100 years descends from this problem.

During the Lesser Occultation (ca. 874-941), the Hidden Imam is held to have communicated through 4 successive named deputies, one after the other. Questions went in; rulings came out. Then the fourth deputy died, naming no successor, and the Greater Occultation began. From that point on, there is no one with a direct line.

What develops instead is the doctrine of niyaba — deputyship. If the Imam appoints no individual, then the qualified jurists together stand as his general deputies, and this is precisely why an ayatollah’s rulings bind his followers in a way no Sunni scholar’s do. He is not merely learned. He is standing in for someone.

But standing in for him for how long and how far? That question has never been settled among the Shia, and the tradition’s two answers are genuinely far apart.

The quietist reading is the older and, for most of Shia history, the majority one: the jurist’s deputyship covers law, worship, and the care of the community — and stops there. Politics is not the Imam’s portfolio to lend out. The world will be set right when he returns and not before, so no government, however pious, may claim his authority. On this reading, a cleric who takes power has misunderstood his own office.

The activist reading pushes the argument the other way. If the jurist truly deputizes for the Imam, then he inherits what the Imam held — including the right to govern. This is referred to as the guardianship of the jurist, and it is the contemporary doctrinal core of what 20th-century scholars called Khomeinism.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) worked his namesake doctrine out while living in exile in Najaf: the quietist capital (6 miles from Kufa) where Ali lies buried. Ironically, the most consequential argument for clerical rule in modern Islam was written in the city most opposed to it.

By 1979, in Qom, Iran, Khomeini’s activist reading was penned into a modern Constitution, fusing three things that had never sat together: Twelver theology, a modern state, and an ayatollah as its Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, also from Najaf, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani continues the quietist reading of Shia governance and has trained generations to carry it forward — a Shia scholarship entirely free of Khomeini’s politics.

Two cities, Najaf and Qom, led by two ayatollahs, utterly opposed in their view of what the hidden, Twelfth Imam requires of the awaiting Shia Muslim population.

5.3 | Orthopraxy & the Five Pillars

Right Belief, Right Practice

Every religious tradition is held together by two poles: orthodoxy (Gr. ortho “right” and doxa “belief”) and orthopraxy (Gr. ortho “right” and praxis “practice”). Every tradition has both. No tradition weights them equally.

Focused on belief, Christianity is an exemplar of orthodox religion.

Christian practice varies greatly across the world. A Pentecostal service in South Texas and a Russian Orthodox liturgy share almost no choreography; what makes someone a Christian is what they believe about Jesus. Creedal claims have been the primary Christian instrument. The Council of Nicaea was a fight about belief (cf. Sec. 2.2).

Judaism sits at the opposite pole.

Jewish identity is bound far more tightly to what one does: an observant Jew walks Halacha (the Path), a body of practice covering food, time, labor, and speech. Theology, in Judaism, has never been the membership test.

Broadly writ, Islam belongs closer to the Jewish side of this distinction. While belief matters enormously to Muslims, correct practice has generally been the greater concern of Muslim communities. So much so that the Ulama (Learned Ones) took to calling Islamic theology kalam, from an Arabic word meaning talking — and ahl al-kalam, “the People of Talking,” is what critics called the speculative theologians. The label stuck, which tells you how the argument went.

With this attitude in mind, it comes as no surprise that questions of kalam (theology) are always bound to fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence. In other words, the great theological questions of Islam are always aimed at a practice question: how should a Muslim live?

The Sunni, over 90% of Muslims today, frame their responses along a moral architecture they refer to as the Five Pillars* — Shahadah, Zakat, Sawm, Hajj, and Salat.

With these five building blocks, a person builds a penitent Muslim life.

*The Shia add to these Five Pillars with five beliefs (all but one shared by the Sunni) and six more obligations (two not shared by the Sunni). The Shia belief in Imamah (explained above) and special Shia obligations to Muhammad’s family (loyalty to him and his descendant Imams and disavowal of their enemies) are not shared by the Sunni.

The Shahadah

The first pillar is a sentence. The creed of the Islamic tradition.

The Shahadah is where Islamic belief and Islamic practice meet, because saying it is the doing of it. One performs this belief out loud.

Its first clause is the whole of Islamic theology compressed. In the Qur’an’s language, the Oneness of God is tawhid — literally, to make one. Tawhid is not a claim Islam introduced; it is central to the 5,000 year-old claim of the Jewish Shema in Deut 6:4.

For Muslim and Jew alike, God is indivisible and without equal.

God has no parts, personhood, or children. There is no essence of God that a human sentence can hold. Whatever one can image God to be, the Islamic response is always, Allahu Akbar, God is Greater. Not great. Greater. Greater than the thought you just had.

The 10th-century al-Tahawi put it in five words: imagination does not reach Him.

So the tradition reaches for metaphor and knows it is doing so. The Qur’an calls God Compassionate and Merciful in nearly every surah, and among the ninety-nine names are the Sacred (62:1), the Peace and the Omnipotent (59:23), the Creator (6:102), the Eternal (59:24), the Forgiving (20:82), the Provider (51:58), the Omniscient (2:158), and the Gentle (22:63). Ninety-nine names, and the tradition’s own position is that all ninety-nine fall short.

The opposite of tawhid is shirk: worship directed anywhere but to God. On its face, that means idolatry, and in Islamic theology it includes the Christian Trinity. The claim that Jesus is God, or part of God, is shirk by definition.

But the concept stretches, and the stretch is where it gets interesting. Shirk comes to name anything a person puts between themselves and God. Greed is shirk when the alms go unpaid. Pride is shirk when the ego takes the first seat. Even piety is shirk when it is performed for an audience. One can commit shirk in a mosque!

Which reframes the sentence entirely. To say There is only One God is not to pass a theology quiz. It is to concede sovereignty over every part of one’s own life — and to keep conceding it as a practice of daily living.

The second clause does different work. Muhammad is Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God. The Qur’an he recited is the final revelation — his example is the path — and there is no prophet coming after him. Note what the sentence does not say. Not Muhammad and others. Not Muhammad was. Muhammad is the Messenger — present tense, permanently.

And this sentence is the door. Say it sincerely, before witnesses, and you are a Muslim — no clergy, no committee, no ceremony. It is your choice; it cannot be made for you, and it cannot be taken from you.

Zakat, Sawm, & Hajj: The Great Levelers

The next three pillars all have the same job, but from different angles.
They level the world in the spirit of Muhammad’s teachings.

Zakat is obligatory almsgiving for the poor. The great economic leveler.

For each Muslim, 2.5% of their excess wealth is paid to those in need. This does not include income or homeownership. If you owe more in credit card debt than you have in the bank, you pay nothing. Muhammad built the Ummah as a community that carried its burdens collectively. Simply put, zakat is the debt society owes one another. If a prosperous Muslim lets their neighbor go hungry, it is a sin. How? That Muslim has put their wealth in front of God. Can a Muslim be wealthy? Many are, and zakat is in place to purify their wealth. In fact, the word zakat literally means to purify.

Sawm is an obligatory annual fast. The great hunger leveler.

During the holy month of Ramadan (the first month of the first revelation), from dawn to sunset, physically capable Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking, and physical pleasure. Children, the sick, the elderly, travelers, and pregnant/nursing mothers are exempt. Islam’s fast has Jewish roots: in the earliest Medina years, Muhammad had the Ummah fast on Yom Kippur (cf. Sec. 3.4), and the Qur’an is explicit that the practice is inherited — fasting is prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those before you (2:183). How does it level society? It guarantees that every observant Muslim on earth, prince and poor alike, knows exactly what it feels like to want food and not have it.

Hajj is an obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca. The great class leveler.

Once in a lifetime, every able Muslim is to travel to Mecca and to enter the Grand Mosque. Once there, every pilgrim, of every nation and class and station, must put on the same plain white cloth. There are no social classes on Hajj. This was Muhammad’s dream, made visible for one week of the year.

At the center stands the Ka’ba, the same sacred cube, now emptied of its 360 idols, draped in black (cf. Sec. 3.4). Pilgrims circle it seven times, retracing the circuits Muhammad walked 1,400 years ago. They run between two hills (cf. Hagar), stand at Mount Arafat (cf. Adam and Eve), and throw stones at three pillars representing the Devil. It ends with an animal sacrifice — the meat given to the Meccan poor.

For a quarter of humanity, the Ka’ba is the axis mundi — the center point every Muslim on earth faces to orient themselves to each other and God. So a pilgrim standing at the shrine (whether they be Sunni or Shia) is faced from every direction at once: from the west, Muslims in the Americas; from the south, African Muslims; from the east, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia; from the north, Europe, Russia, and the Levant.

Afterward, the pilgrim puts his ordinary clothes back on and returns to the world a Hajji. But he keeps the white cloth. He will wear it once more as his burial shroud.

5.4 | Salat: the Tent Pole of Islam

Du’a & Salat (Namaz)

This leaves the fifth pillar: prayer (salat).

Islam distinguishes two kinds of prayer. Du’a is the informal prayer of an individual. Any words, any time, at any place where the believer speaks to God directly. Salat is something else: formal, communal, choreographed prayer, performed five times daily: at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night.

Here’s a link to those times in major US cities.

The name tells you what it is. Salat comes from a root meaning to bow, bend, or stretch. It is named for what the body does. Not for what the mind intends, not for what the heart feels, but for the social posture.

The Friday midday prayer, Jummah, is the congregational gathering of the week: the structural counterpart to the Jewish Shabbat service on Friday evening and the Christian service on Sunday morning. Three siblings, three days, one weekend.

Wudu (Vozu) & Prostrations

Like the other four pillars, Salat has sacred conditions.

The worshipper must be modestly dressed, physically clean, and in a clean space. Then comes wudu, ritual ablution: washing the hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hairline and neck, ears, and feet, in order.

Outside, the muezzin turns toward Mecca and calls the adhan (azan) — the Call to Prayer — traditionally from a tower so the whole city hears it. It is easily the most recognizable sound in the Islamic world, and it has marked the hours in Damascus and Cairo and Istanbul for well over a thousand years. Translated, it says:

What follows is a far more physical practice than what most Christians or Jews do in worship. Hands rise and fall together. The congregation goes to hands, then knees, then forehead to the floor — and rises again shoulder to shoulder, in ranks, in time. Qur’anic verses are recited throughout, and God is Greater punctuates the movements.

Allahu Akbar.

Consider what that costs a person. Five times a day, you stop what you are doing, wash, and put your face on the ground in a room full of people doing the same thing at the same moment. There is nothing private about it and nothing convenient about it. Salat is a physical decentering of the self — a body trained, several times daily, to be one rank among many rather than the center of anything.

There are few sacred rituals today more thoroughly opposed to the casual, entertainment-centered instincts of the modern world.

The Tent Pole

So why is salat the greatest of the pillars?
Because salat contains all five pillars at once.

In prayer, the Shahadah is recited. The first pillar, nine times a day over five prayers. The five prayers take roughly half an hour out of 24 hours, which is about 2.5% of the day: the Zakat proportion — in time instead of money. Throughout, the worshipper abstains from food, drink, and physical pleasure — a Sawm in miniature. And every prayer is performed facing Mecca, in rank with other believers — a brief Hajj, made from anywhere a Muslim may find herself.

One pillar, a tent pole, holding the other four inside it.

We opened this section on a plain in Iraq, with a family dying from a question over who should lead. A question that has not been settled in 1,400 years and will not be settled here. Nevertheless, at dawn tomorrow, roughly two billion people will wash their hands and faces, turn toward the same draped cube in the same desert valley, and put their foreheads on the ground in submission to God. Sunni and Shia. Najaf and Medina. The same words, under the same sun, in the same direction.

The Ummah may never agree on who leads.
It has never once disagreed about which way to face.

And the words recited in every one of those prayers — the same verses, in the same 7th-century Arabic, from Jakarta to Dallas — are the subject we take up next.

Last Section: After Muhammad
This Section: Kalam & Shia Islam
Next Section: Hermeneutics & the Qur’an

Pictured: Folio from the Birmingham Qur’an, 20th Surah • 7th c.

Overview

In this section, we describe the crisis that followed Muhammad's death in 632: the invention of the Caliphate, the office built to answer a question the Ummah had never had to ask. We trace the reigns of the first four caliphs — the Rashidun — from Abu Bakr and the Riddah Wars, through Omar’s conquest decade, to Uthman's canonization of the Qur'an and the contested rule of Ali. We then situate the factions whose quarrel over succession broke into open civil war (fitnah) at the Battle of the Camel and at Siffin. The section closes with the Umayyad turn of 661 and the origins of the divide between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapter 5
Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapter 4

Key Terms for this Section
Caliph · Rashidun · Ali · Uthman (Osman) · Ulama · Kharijite

Fitnah · Shia (Shi'atu Ali)

4.1 | The Succession Crisis

The Prophet is Dead • 570-632

Mecca is safeguarded, the idols are broken, but Muhammad does not stay long.

Many in Arabia assumed he meant to make himself King of Mecca. But he had no such political ambition. He wanted change, not power. And once change came to the Arab world, he wanted to go home, to his true home, in Medina. It’s there, two and a half years after the emptying of the Ka’ba, that Muhammad rests his head against his wife Aisha’s (Ayesheh) lap and dies quietly in his home — finally at peace, in Islam’s first mosque.

It is the Jewish year 4392, the Christian year 632, and the Muslim year 11.

After the Prophet’s untimely death, the Ummah comes apart at the seams. His old friend Umar (Omar), a large, hot-tempered man who had spent a decade defending the Prophet with his fists, simply refuses to accept his death. He stands in the mosque loudly insisting Muhammad is not really dead and threatening anyone who says otherwise. It falls to Abu Bakr, who had been leading prayers during the Prophet’s illness, to calm and put the death into perspective for a grieving congregation:

“If anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead. If anyone worships God, God is alive, immortal.” Abu Bakr

It is, in a sentence, the whole problem of the next thirty years. The message survives its Messenger. But who leads, and by what right?

The Prophet Muhammad had named no successor, and (this is the part that matters) he left no procedure for choosing one either. He had collapsed every office of Arab authority into himself — Elder, Judge, Warlord, Mystic — and above them all, Lawgiver and Messenger of God (cf. Sec. 3.2). Now all of those seats were suddenly vacant. The position of Messenger — of Rasul Allah — was sealed forever.

For context, consider the Biblical alternatives known to Muhammad. In the Torah, Moses lays his hands on Joshua before the whole assembly and transfers his authority in public (Num. 27:18-23). In the early Church, when the Apostles replace Judas, the community assembles and casts lots (Acts 1:15-26). But, for reasons lost to the sands of time, Muhammad left the Ummah without a prescribed method of succession. Instead, a grieving Ummah had to find a method on the spot.

The pressure to choose Muhammad’s successor was felt both inside Medina’s mosque and in tribal meetings far away. Client tribes concluded their agreements had been with Muhammad personally, not God, and ended their zakat payments. Additionally, copycat prophets began to spring up in Yemen and eastern Arabia who tried to imitate Muhammad and reproduce his social programs. Some drew real followings.

But perhaps the worst problem the Ummah now faced was the ephemeral nature of Muhammad’s teachings. At the time of his death, there was no Qur’an. Instead, the teachings of the Prophet survived in the memories of his Companions and on the occasional scrap of parchment. The Ummah had no legal code, no settled theology, and no institutional religion. And now, there was no longer anyone to ask.

Successor to the Messenger of God

The argument begins immediately, and it begins over geography.

Should the new leader of Islam come from Medina, the Prophet’s City that had sheltered the movement? Or from Mecca, home of the Ka’ba and of the newly converted Quraysh? Maybe one of each, sharing power?

The debate eventually settles on continuity: the succeeding man should be one of the Companions who had made the original Hijra ten years earlier, and a Meccan of the Quraysh. After hours of heated argument at the shura (the ancient Arab tribal council), the assembly lands on the calming voice that had taken over when Muhammad fell ill and had steadied the community at the funeral. The majority choose Abu Bakr.

But what to call Abu Bakr? This was a political, theological, and philosophical problem that required nuance. He could not be called “prophet,” as the holy revelation had ended with Muhammad (he was very clear on that point). The community decided on the rather modest title of Khalifat Rasul Allah — the ‘Successor’ to the Messenger of God. Caliph for short.

The word is worth pausing on, because it defines an office that governs the rest of this course. A caliph is a successor, a deputy. He’s never a prophet, and never a source of revelation. Abu Bakr inherits Muhammad’s political authority: Shaykh, Hakam, Qa’id. He inherits none of his religious authority. That falls instead to the Ulama — the Learned Ones — (alim in the singular), the scholars who would carry the religious direction of the Ummah forward.

This split — caliph as political successor and alim as theological successor — is the single most consequential piece of institutional design in early Islam. Nearly every fight throughout Section 4 will be about the line between these two forces.

As Caliph, Abu Bakr tells the assembled Muslims in his inaugural address:

“As long as I obey God and the Prophet, obey me; if I neglect the laws of God and the Prophet, I have no right to your obedience.” Abu Bakr

Think about that for a moment. The caliph’s legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed — and it can be withdrawn! Not from bloodline, not from conquest, not from divine appointment. Aslan points out that nowhere else in the 7th-century world had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined. And the practice the shura embodies is not an Arab political habit the Ummah merely carried forward. The Qur’an lists it among the marks of the faithful, set directly alongside prayer itself:

“…respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation…” QUR’AN 42:38

But consent has a shadow side: somebody has to be left out of the room.

The most obvious alternative to Abu Bakr was Ali — Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, raised in his home, the first child to accept his message, and the one who had stood beside him at the Ka’ba. Ali was also a Hashemite, of Muhammad’s own clan. And, interestingly, the Hashemites were not present at the shura when Abu Bakr was chosen by the majority.

The Qurayshi answer was blunt and, on its own terms, principled: no one wanted the whole authority of the Ummah consolidated into one small family. If this community was going to be a new kind of tribe — one anybody could join — it could not become the private property of the Prophet’s relatives. Prophethood and the Caliphate, Abu Bakr and Umar both insisted, cannot live in the same clan.

But the Hashemites, with plenty to lose, simply did not accept this. Neither did the Ansar of Medina, who resented watching a Meccan take the office in their own city. Umar eventually went to the house of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh) — Muhammad’s own daughter — and threatened to burn it down unless they submitted to the new authority. But Abu Bakr restrained him at the last moment. This was the level of tension around the choice of caliph. Umar’s threat was withdrawn, but the message was still received. In the end, Ali would swear his allegiance to the new caliph.

The Ummah had its caliph. It also had its first faction.

The Riddah Wars

Abu Bakr was the first of the Rashidun — the Rightly Guided Ones, the four caliphs who ruled from Muhammad’s death to 661.*

Abu Bakr’s reign barely lasted two and a half years, and he spent nearly all of it at war.

The campaign is remembered as the Riddah Wars — the Wars of Apostasy — and it was aimed at both problems at once: the copycat, rival prophets and the tribes who had stopped paying zakat. The fighting was led by the formidable general Khalid ibn al-Walid, whom our second author, Tamim Ansary, calls the “hero of the Apostate Wars.”

Abu Bakr’s reasoning is the hinge of the whole episode. The deadbeat tribes, he argued, had not made their agreements with the Shaykh of Medina; they had made their agreements with God Almighty. Refusing zakat was therefore not a broken contract or a tax dispute. It was treason against the Ummah and a sin against God — and the penalty for treason was death.

Abu Bakr won his wars against the apostates. Arabia held. But Aslan notes the long shadow the victory cast: by treating the refusal of zakat as apostasy, and apostasy as treason, the Riddah Wars welded the two together in Islamic thought for centuries to come — pay zakat or die by the sword. The Qur’an, by the way, never taught this.

For Abu Bakr’s administration, there was one more piece of critical domestic business. He wanted to check Hashemite influence for good. So Abu Bakr announces an official ruling on inheritance: ‘the Prophet Muhammad left no heirs.’ The widows of Muhammad — the “Mothers of the Faithful,” including Abu Bakr’s own daughter Aisha — would be provided for directly by the Ummah instead. And, as a father and caliph, he kept that promise scrupulously.

Muhammad’s daughter was heartbroken. Fatima (Fatemeh) had lost her father’s estate by decree, and she never spoke to Abu Bakr again. When she died a short time later, Ali washed and buried his wife himself, the daughter of the Prophet, quietly, at night, without informing the caliph. One can imagine his sadness and anger.

It is a small, personal act of protest. 1,400 years later, it is still remembered by those with allegiance to Ali.

*A word of caution on the term. “Rashidun” is not a neutral historical label; it is the Sunni tradition’s own retrospective judgment that these four reigns, and only these four, were rightly guided. Shia Muslims do not read the period this way at all. We use the term because the sources do, not out of deference to either side.

4.2 | Omar’s Conquests & Uthman’s Codex

Commander of the Faithful

When Abu Bakr died in 634 (13 AH), he did something the shura had not authorized: he named his own successor. Ali’s popularity had grown considerably in the two years since the Prophet’s death, and Abu Bakr and Umar remained convinced that the Hashemites must not inherit the office.

So Abu Bakr named his protégé, Umar, as second Caliph of the Ummah.

It has to be said, though, that naming him settled nothing by itself. Umar could not rule without the consensus of the Ummah — the same requirement Abu Bakr had faced. And, like Abu Bakr, he was granted it.

The loud and powerful Umar styles himself Amir al-Mu’manin — Commander of the Faithful. He was an enormous, bald, physically intimidating man, and under his command the Ummah expands at a rate almost impossible to wrap your head around. He personally meets both superpowers of the period in the field of battle and beats them decisively. Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, Libya — they fall like dominoes.

In 636, at Yarmuk, the Muslim armies destroy the main Christian Byzantine field army in Syria. Against the Sassanid Persians near Qadisiya, there is a famous parley in which the Persian commander dismisses the Arabs as poor and starving, comparing them to a mouse that gorges itself until it is too fat to escape its own hole — trapped by its own greed. The Arabs were unimpressed. Within a few years, the Persian capital of Ctesiphon falls. Under Umar, the Ummah destroys the Sassanid (Persian) Empire.

Jerusalem surrendered too. The story goes that the caliph traveled to accept the surrender of the holy city with a single servant and a single donkey, the two men taking turns riding and walking, so that when they finally arrived the waiting Christians mistook the servant for the caliph. “No pomp,” Tamim Ansary writes. “That was Omar’s style, according to legend.”

These were Christian cities, and not incidentally so. Damascus was a Byzantine provincial capital built around the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist; Muslims and Christians would share that site for two generations before it became an Umayyad Mosque. The Jerusalem once burned by the Romans had been rebuilt as a Christian pilgrimage city over centuries of imperial patronage. Egypt was Christian, too.

And Caliph Umar took each of these wealthy Christian provinces as his own. So why didn’t the Eastern (Byzantine) Christians fight harder for them?

Recall the theological fractures we traced back in Sec. 2.2. Most of these Christians were the wrong kind of Christian by Byzantine standards. Syria leaned Miaphysite. Egypt was overwhelmingly Coptic Miaphysite. These were precisely the communities the imperial church in Constantinople had spent centuries pressuring to conform — the losing side of Nicaea’s long aftermath, taxed and legislated and occasionally persecuted by their own emperor for believing the wrong things about Christ.

So consider the arithmetic from a Miaphysite doorway in Damascus, or a Coptic one in Alexandria. Trading a Byzantine emperor for a Muslim caliph was not an obvious downgrade — and, in tax terms, it was frequently a huge win (ie. the jizyah discussed in Sec. 3.4 was often more favorable than eastern imperial Christian tax requirements). Historians still argue over how much this actually accelerated the early Islamic conquests, and we won’t settle it here. But either way, an army at the gate isn’t always a loss for those inside.

To problematize the image of the ‘conquering Islamic horde’ further, consider how Umar garrisons his men. The caliph would deliberately set his standing army apart from conquered populations, rather than letting soldiers settle among them. His standing orders to new regional governors emphasized slow change. And, interestingly, he worked to treat non-Arab Muslims as the equal of Arabs — just as the former began to outnumber the latter.

Back home, in an attempt to make amends with Ali’s clan, he offered to give the Hashemites full control of Muhammad’s Medina estates. He also married Ali’s own daughter, and consulted Ali, now his father-in-law, on matters of state. But the one political reality on which Umar would never move was his and the late Abu Bakr’s position: that the Prophethood and the Caliphate cannot reside in the same clan.

The Deathbed Shura

In 644 (23 AH), Umar is stabbed in the mosque at Medina while leading prayers.

The once hot-headed man who had refused to believe the Prophet was dead had evolved into a shrewd, if not disciplined, ruler. In his final act as caliph, Umar refuses to name a successor — so that the Hashemites, his wife’s clan, cannot be slighted a second time. Instead, he summons the six leading candidates to his deathbed and instructs them to settle it among themselves in the ancient form of the shura, with the Companion Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf serving as Hakam — their neutral arbitrator.

They narrow it down to two: the Hashemite Ali, and the Umayyad Uthman (Osman).*

Uthman was an early convert who had known Muhammad personally. He was wealthy, well-connected, and mild-mannered to the point of utter dullness. In fact, his dullness was his chief qualification. He was the exact opposite of the passionate, brilliant, uncompromising (and, thus, deeply polarizing) Hashemite, Ali.

The Hakam put two questions to each man. The second was whether, as caliph, he would follow the precedents set by the first two caliphs. Uthman said yes. Ali, insulted, said no.

Uthman was then endorsed by the Ummah as the third caliph.

Predictably, the Hashemites went into a rage — not because Uthman was dull, but because he was an Umayyad. The Umayyad clan was among the most powerful of the Qurayshi tribe. In life, they were among Muhammad’s most bitter enemies. Their clan’s part in the Meccan war was devastating — Uthman’s uncle had led the Qurayshi armies against the Prophet and the Ummah! Now, the clan of Muhammad (Ali and the Hashemites) was being asked to bend the knee to the clan of Muhammad’s enemies (the Umayyads), all in the name of Islam.

Then Uthman made it worse. Much worse…

After taking office, he replaced most of the regional governors with members of his immediate family and began handing his relatives enormous sums from the public treasury. And he adopted a bizarre new title: Khalifat Allah, the Successor to God.

Abu Bakr had been Successor to the Messenger of God, and had pointedly refused anything grander. Uthman now presented himself as successor to God Almighty.

The Uthman Codex

All of this has to be set against the other side of Uthman, who was genuinely and strenuously pious. When his wives refused to accept Islam, he divorced them and married two of Muhammad’s daughters. When a group of persecuted Muslims fled to Abyssinia, he went along as their financial backer. In Medina, he expanded the Prophet’s Mosque and bought the community a strategic well out of his own pocket.

But all of this is a small footnote to what he did next.

Uthman set the Ulama, the Learned Ones, to the holiest and most critical task left after the Prophet’s death: to produce one authoritative written edition of the Qur’an.

Until then, the revelation had been preserved chiefly by the Qurra, the Prophet’s authorized reciters, and committed to writing only piecemeal: verses scratched onto pieces of bone, scraps of leather, and the flat ribs of palm leaves. Written verses were collected from across the Islamicate world. Surviving Companions were interviewed. Discrepancies among early local Islamic traditions were resolved.

Around 650 CE, a single binding text was authorized — and the variant collections, tradition states, were rounded up and burned.

Objections came at once, from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. But note what the objectors were not saying. Their specific complaint, Aslan carefully observes, was never that the local Qur’ans were better or more accurate. It was that Caliph Uthman had overstepped the bounds of his secular authority in dictating the sacred text. Which is to say: the fight over the codex was another fight about that line between political power and religious authority — the line Abu Bakr had drawn on his first day in office, and that Uthman had now stepped across in the most conspicuous way imaginable.

Uthman’s authorized edition arranged its surahs roughly by length, which is how they stand today. And the result is extraordinary. The Qur’an that Uthman held in his hands, in the original Meccan Arabic, is the same recited by nearly two billion Muslims this morning.

4.3 | The First Fitnah

The Murder of Uthman, Successor to God

Uthman made enemies at a rate that would have alarmed a less confident man: not just the old enemies of the Umayyad clan, but senior Companions, and eventually even the Hakam who had handed him the office in the first place.

By 655 (34 AH), eleven years in, revolts are breaking out across the Islamicate world — and the grievance is nearly always the same: the corruption and incompetence of the caliph’s relatives in the provinces. The anger reaches into the Medina mosque itself, where the elderly caliph is pelted with stones during Friday Jummah prayers and knocked clean off the minbar (pulpit) onto the floor.

Several Companions urge him to repent publicly of his nepotism and make amends. But his kinsman and adviser Marwan talks him out of it. Uthman holds his course.

Two of his kinsmen governed the richest provinces in the empire, and both were notorious. From Damascus, Uthman’s cousin Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh) was enriching himself at great expense to his subjects. And in Egypt, Uthman’s foster brother Abdullah ibn Sa’d was squeezing his once Coptic Christian province dry.

Prominent Egyptians write to the caliph and get no reply. So they send a delegation to Medina in person, and are joined en route by delegates from Basra, Kufa, and elsewhere. Uthman hears them out and agrees to replace the Governor of Egypt. The delegation starts for home satisfied.

And then, on the road, they intercept a letter. It is carried by one of Uthman’s own slaves. In the letter, Uthman instructs the Governor of Egypt to arrest and execute the delegates the moment they arrive.

Some historians claim the letter is a forgery. Uthman swore he never wrote it, and both of our scholars, Aslan and Ansary, record the judgment of later historians that its likely author was, in fact, Marwan. Honestly, though, it made no difference. The petitioners march back to Medina and arrive as an angry mob. They demand the caliph abdicate his throne. He refuses and goes back to reading his Qur’an.

Touchingly, among Uthman’s defenders were Ali’s sons. Hasan helps to hold the door, as Husayn (Hossein) carries water through the siege. Uthman himself forbids his supporters from shedding blood on his behalf.

Nevertheless, the mob breaks into the house, smashes Uthman’s belongings, and then beats the old leader to death. The tradition remembers his blood soaking into the pages of the open Qur’an he had been reading.

The Party of Ali

Ali was at prayer when word reached him.
His first thought was for Hasan, who had tried to shield the caliph from the mob.

The day after the murder, a congregation gathers at the mosque and begs Ali to take the Caliphate. After twenty-five years of watching other men hold the office, he still says no. The assassination was appalling; the mob still controlled Medina, and to accept the office from them was to accept rule from a mob.

But the support for Ali kept building: the Hashemites, the Ansar of Medina, several prominent Companions, a few Qurayshi clans, and many of the non-Arab Muslim communities. Collectively, these supporters became known as the Shi’atu Ali, the Party of Ali. More commonly known today as the Shia.

Ali finally accepts and takes his oath in the mosque before all of Medina. Believing that Uthman’s bizarre antics had tainted the word itself, he refuses to be called “Caliph,” taking Umar’s old charge instead: Commander of the Faithful. Ali then declares a general amnesty for the mob, and he removes the problematic Umayyad governors, replacing them with qualified local men.

Both decisions were defensible. Both were catastrophic.

By this point the Ummah has sorted itself into four distinct positions on what the Caliphate even is — and it is worth discussing them, because the next thirty years are, by and large, these four arguments conducted with weapons.

The Party of Uthman, led now by Aisha and carrying the convictions of her late father Abu Bakr and his protégé Umar: the caliph’s power should be confined to political matters, with religious questions left to the Ulama.

The Party of Ali, the Shia: Ali and the Hashemites, as the family of the Prophet, should govern both the political and the religious destiny of the Ummah.

The Kharijites, a smaller faction within Ali’s own camp: the most pious living Muslim should lead the divinely ordained Ummah, irrespective of tribe, lineage, or ancestry. At the moment, that man was Ali. But it need not stay Ali. This group also grew obsessed with labeling those who disagreed with them kafir: unbeliever.

The Party of Mu’awiya: the Umayyad clan, who had run Arabia’s economy from Mecca for generations and now held a claim to the office through the murdered Uthman, should rule the expanding empire. To that end, the Umayyad Governor of Damascus was already raising an army on Egyptian taxes.

By Ali’s time as leader of the Caliphate, the neo-tribal dream of Muhammad is all but gone. Larger financial and imperial ambitions have flooded into his Ummah. And the future of Islam is about to be decided on a battlefield.

The Camel & Siffin

Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest widow and Abu Bakr’s daughter, goes to Mecca to raise an army against Ali (her own stepson-in-law, if you’re counting).

Aisha’s position was that of her father’s, held consistently for 24 years: the clan of Muhammad cannot hold both religious and political authority over the Ummah. It is too much power for one family. She rallies the Meccan elite, and with a group of Meccan warriors she rides out to meet Ali in the field, leading the cavalry herself from the back of a camel.

It is remembered as the Battle of the Camel (36 AH), and it is the Ummah’s first taste of fitnah — their first civil war. Muslims are now killing Muslims over the question of who should be their leader.

Talha and Zubayr, two of Ali’s most prominent opponents, both Companions of the Prophet, are killed. Aisha herself is wounded by an arrow. Ansary reckons the field left some 10,000 Muslim dead.

When it’s over, Ali pardons Aisha (his stepmother-in-law and late wife's stepmother, if you’re counting). She lives out her days as a revered teacher and transmitter of the tradition, and her authority in the Hadith remains considerable to this day.

Ali then moves his seat of government to Kufa, in Iraq, to reward the city’s loyalty. He will never return to Medina. Instead, Ali turns west, toward his enemy Mu’awiya — who had by then been parading the alleged bloody shirt of Uthman from town to town, asking local leaders to join him in a coup against Ali.

The two armies met at the Battle of Siffin.

The battle opens with Mu’awiya’s forces trying to block Ali’s army from reaching the river, and then settles into months of stalemate before the real fighting begins. When it comes, the slaughter is staggering: some sources, Ansary hedges, put the toll as high as 65,000 Muslims dead over four blood-soaked days.

Ali tries repeatedly to stop it. He asks Mu’awiya to negotiate, again and again. There was even an offer to settle the Caliphate by single combat — both in their mid-50s — a slender, battle-ready Ali agreed, while a rich and portly Mu’awiya declined.

Then, with the battle apparently turning in Ali’s favor, Mu’awiya orders his soldiers to fix pages of the Qur’an to the points of their lances.

It was a cynical maneuver, and everyone knew it. The Kharijite faction pushes Ali to ignore the stratagem — to cut down the rebels, the kafirs, for their insubordination. He does not. Facing the Qur’an on the field, Ali grounded his refusal in the Qur’an’s own rule of restraint:

“if [the enemy] desists, then you must also cease hostilities.” QUR’AN 2:193

So Ali calls for a parley. A Hakam led lengthy negotiations, and with tens of thousands already dead, the best that could be agreed was a partition: Mu’awiya and the Umayyads would hold Egypt and Syria. Ali would keep everything east.

Ali had obeyed his scripture. It cost him everything.

4.4 | The Umayyad Turn

No Judgment but God Alone

The Kharijites regard Ali’s agreement to arbitration as a grave sin.

Their thinking was, if the Caliphate is a divinely ordained office, then submitting its disposition to a panel of human negotiators is a categorical error. God’s judgment is not the sort of thing men arbitrate.

Crying “No judgment but God alone!” the Kharijites abandon Ali on the blood-soaked field. To their view, Ali forfeited his office the moment he agreed to discuss it.

Three years later, in the mosque at Kufa, Ali is at prayer when a Kharijite named Ibn Muljam pushes through the crowd. “Judgment belongs to God, Ali, not to you!” he shouts, and kills the fourth and final Rashidun caliph with a poisoned sword.

The Kharijite movement itself eventually dwindled into an historical footnote. But what remains of them was their penchant for declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, and treating that declaration as a license for violence. This Kharijite view has resurfaced in every century since, and Muslim critics of modern extremist groups routinely reach for exactly this comparison, naming ISIS in particular as the Kharijites coming round again.

Hasan Steps Aside

Ali’s supporters then turn to his eldest son, Hasan, to take up the Hashemite claim.

He declines.

And Hasan’s reasoning is the epitaph for the whole era. Like it or not, the Caliphate was now a global empire, stretching from the Zagros Mountains of Persia to the desert sands of Libya. It was no longer the holy egalitarian community it had once been dreamed to be. To claim the office at this point, Hasan judged, would be little more than a power grab — one more round of court intrigue ending in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims.

So he steps aside. And with that, the first era of Islamic history was over.

In Ali’s place, Mu’awiya — Uthman’s cousin, the Governor of Damascus — moves the seat of power from Kufa in Iraq to Damascus in Syria, and, in 661, inaugurates the Umayyad Caliphate — just 40 years after the Hijra.

The first Islamic empire. Not a shura. Not a community of consent. A dynasty, seated in a Roman provincial capital, that would pass from father to son.

Sunni & Shia

The question that opened this section — who leads the Ummah, and by what right? — was never actually settled. Not at the Camel, not at Siffin, not at Damascus.

In a real sense, it is still an open question,
as the two great Islamic traditions grew out of it.

Sunni Muslims (the Majority) hold that the community was right to choose its leaders by consensus, beginning with Abu Bakr, and that the Rashidun era is the model of legitimate succession. Shia Muslims (the Party of Ali) trace their name to the Shi’atu Ali and hold that leadership belonged by right to Ali and to the family of the Prophet, and that the community, however sincerely, chose wrong in a courtyard in Medina in 632. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both readings accurately and to leave the adjudicating to those who hold to them.

What is striking is how much the two share. Ali is revered across both branches. For Sunnis, he is the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. For Shia Muslims, he is something considerably more — the first Imam.

Today, roughly two billion people are Muslims. About 90% are Sunni. Nearly all the rest are Shia, concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Think about that — a quarrel among a few thousand people over who should lead a desert oasis community now defines the religious lives of a quarter of our planet.

And it only gets worse from here. Because what makes the Shia claim really burn, what turns a political grievance into a theology of martyrdom and suffering, has not happened yet in our telling. It will take place 20 years later…

In a dusty plain in Iraq called Karbala.

Last Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
This Section: After Muhammad
Next Section: Kalam & Shia Islam

Pictured: Al-Masjid an-Nabawi | The Prophet’s Mosque, Medina, Saudi Arabia
est. 622 CE, expanded many times, last major expansion 1994 CE

Overview

In this section, we trace the Hijra: the emigration that marks Year 1 of the Islamic calendar (AH), and describe the founding of the Ummah at Medina. We situate Muhammad's social reforms within 7th-century Arabian society: the Constitution of Medina, the reform of the ancient Law of Retribution, zakat, and the changing status of women. We then describe the war with Mecca (at Badr, Uhud, and the Trench) and trace the two doctrines of jihad that emerge from this period. The section closes with Islam's early relationship to the Jews and Christians of Arabia: the dhimmi, the jizyah, and the Qibla (direction of prayer).

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 3–4

Key Terms for this Section
Hijra · Ummah · Zakat · Hijab · Hadith · Jihad · Dhimmi · Jizyah

3.1 | The Hijra & the Constitution of Medina

The Secret

In 622, the weeklong exodus of Muhammad's Sahabah (Companions) to the distant city of Yathrib was a well-guarded secret in Mecca.

Known as the Hijra, the flight of the Sahabah was as dangerous as it was alienating. In all, about 70 Meccans left the comforts of home and family for the promise of Muhammad's profound message. These 70 Companions are known as the Muhajirun — those who have made the flight. And those who received them in Yathrib and assisted them became known as the Ansar — the Helpers. Together, Muhammad establishes the first masjid (Arabic word for mosque), which is also his home, in Yathrib. Eventually, the loose collection of villages of Yathrib will become known as Medina, literally the City (Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet), and will become the capital city of the initial Muslim community. This period is so central to the story of Islam that it marks Year 1 of the Islamic Calendar (“After the Hijra,” A.H. 1).

Muhammad, Settler of Disputes

When Muhammad arrives in Yathrib, he is effectively the Shaykh of the Muhajirun — the political clan leader of the new Meccan émigrés. As such, he is one of several Shaykhs in Yathrib. He also makes a name for himself as a Hakam — a settler of disputes between the clans.

Of course, to his 70 or so followers, Muhammad is much more than a mere Shaykh or Hakam. For them, Muhammad is Rasul Allah — the final Messenger of God.

The prevailing political and economic authority of Yathrib was a loose confederation of about 20 Jewish-Arab clans. The Jews of Yathrib, who numbered in the thousands, were craftsmen, weaponsmiths, and cultivators of dates and wine, while the nearby pagan Bedouins herded sheep and camels. These two strata — the settled Jewish Arabs and the nomadic Bedouins — benefited each other in Yathrib’s oasis. Five of these clans held an especially large share of that wealth, including the Banu Qaynuqa, who also controlled the oasis’s only marketplace, along with the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza. But (Aslan is careful to note this), for the most part, the Jews and Arabs of Yathrib lived in relative peace, bound together by strategic alliance and economic interdependence. The real fault line ran between the Arabs themselves: the rival confederations of the Aws and the Khazraj, locked in a feud whose origins had been long lost to memory by Muhammad’s time, and which even the ancient Law of Retribution had failed to settle. By the time Muhammad arrived in Yathrib, the eternal quarrel had spread among the Jewish clans as well. The Jewish Nadir and Qurayza clans sided with the Bedouin Aws, while the Jewish Qaynuqa sided with the Bedouin Khazraj. This split the oasis in two. What Yathrib needed was an outsider — a Hakam and Shaykh — with no kin and no old grievance in Yathrib to answer for.

Muhammad was the right man at the right time, now in the right place to help bring an ancient blood feud to an end.

The Birth of the Ummah

In Yathrib, Bedouin Aws and Khazraj tribes see Muhammad as a wise Hakam — an outsider brought in to end their feud. To the wider oasis, he is one Shaykh among many, and leader of a small clan of outsiders. But to the Muhajirun (those who left Mecca) and the Ansar (the Helpers), he remains Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God.

This is where the Ummah begins.
Not yet an Islamic nation.
Not yet a regional power the Quraysh in Mecca need fear,
but a community of common belief.

Today, the Ummah specifically refers to the international Muslim community. But it’s important to note, as the scholar Frederick Denny shows, that this term has evolved from its Medinan beginnings. The Arabic word ummah (أُمَّة) can be traced at least as far back as Genesis (25:16), where it’s used in Ancient Hebrew to mean tribe. In Muhammad’s 7th-century Arabic use, the ummah came to mean those who agreed to the Prophet’s message. Moreover, Denny ties the ummah to political and theological decisions Muhammad makes as his standing in Medina firms up — decisions this section will follow, including the day he turns the direction of prayer away from Jerusalem and toward the Ka’ba in Mecca.

3.2 | The Medina Reforms: Women & Hadith

The Lawgiver

Over the last 1400 years, the Ummah of Medina has remained the classical standard for Islamic society. Why? Because it was there that Muhammad was finally able to enact the radical social reforms he had once dreamed of pursuing in his native Mecca.

First, he collapses the ancient Arab tribal offices — Elder (Shaykh), Judge (Hakam), Warlord (Qa’id), and Mystic (Kahin) — into one: Lawgiver. And Muhammad, like Moses before him, takes on the mantle of Lawgiver of his people.

No pre-Islamic Arab ever held all four at once; the Arabs were too wary of concentrated power to allow it. The Elder carried the least formal authority but the most moral weight: elected as first among equals, his sole job was to guarantee the protection of every member of the tribe, especially those who could least protect themselves, and his standing rested on a personal oath of loyalty (bay’ah) that could be withdrawn the moment he failed. The Judge was the neutral party brought in to arbitrate disputes the tribe’s Law of Retribution left unclear — his rulings, accumulated over years, hardened into a tribe’s Sunna, its body of unwritten legal precedent. The Warlord led the tribe in battle. And the Mystic held the Kahin‘s office, the tribe’s one sanctioned channel to the divine.

Muhammad now held all four titles in a single person, the Lawgiver.

As Lawgiver to the Ummah, Muhammad opens the tribe to new members. Under the old system, you were born into a clan. Now anyone may join the Ummah by swearing an oath of allegiance, the Creed (called the Shahadah in Arabic): “There is only One God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.”

This makes the Ummah a new kind of tribe — one that can accept anyone and expand forever.

Within the Ummah, the Law of Retribution (ie. an eye for an eye) is reformed. Muhammad implores his followers to grant forgiveness instead — a Jewish and Christian custom — which, he maintains, God will reward (Qur’an 42:40). And where the Law of Retribution is followed, everyone in the Ummah is now treated equally. A Shaykh’s eye is now worth the same as a destitute orphan’s.

The Women of the Ummah

As Lawgiver, Muhammad also makes reforms for women without precedent in Arabia.

After a decisive battle in 625 (cf. Sec. 3.3), the widower Muhammad ensured that the widowed women of the Ummah had the right to inherit their husbands’ property and to keep their wedding dowries as their own. He also limits the number of wives a man may marry, and he grants women permission to divorce their husbands (and keep the dowry!). No doubt this deference to women owes much to the abiding love Muhammad carried for his late wife of 25 years, Khadija.

And what about the men who came to the Prophet complaining about a woman’s traditional place? Muhammad’s answer is simple: those who do not honor these reforms will burn in Hell forever (Qur’an 4:14). End of discussion.

Over his 10 years in Medina, the widower Muhammad will marry nine different women. Generally, these are unions with a political framing — paralleling European aristocratic practices well into the 20th century. In short, marriage was a political act for most of history. It certainly was among the élite of 7th-century Arabia. His betrothal to Aisha (Ayesheh) links him politically to Abu Bakr, while his marriage to Hafsah links him to Umar (Omar) — both central figures of the early Ummah. He joins a powerful Meccan clan by marrying Umm Salamah. He also marries both a Jew and a Christian, Rayhana and Mariyah. He even marries an elderly widow, Sawdah, as an example to other men to marry those in need.

As wives of the Prophet, living in a house that also served as a mosque to countless guests, these women covered themselves with a veil (ie. hijab) to preserve their modesty among visitors in a holy place. In this way, taking the veil — darabat al-hijab — became a way of saying, “married to Muhammad.” She has ‘taken the veil.’ Conversely, in the Qur’an, the term hijab is only ever applied to the Prophet’s wives and to no other woman in the Ummah. (Compare this to the Christian teaching in
I Corinthians 11:5-6, which instructs all Christian women to cover their heads.)

Traditionalist Islamicists read the Qur’an’s modesty verses (24:31; 33:59) as extending the practice of hijab to all Muslim women — and their reading remains authoritative across much of the Islamicate world today. As non-sectarian scholars, we can describe both readings without adjudicating between them.

Almsgiving & Hadith

Muhammad also outlaws interest loans (ie. usury) — the practice the Quraysh had used to keep the poor of Mecca poor. In the Prophet’s City, the market is tax-free, and loans carry no interest. In their place, Muhammad redistributes wealth through zakat: 2.5% of a person’s accumulated wealth, given to the poor.

And make no mistake: zakat is not charity. Islamic almsgiving is a holy obligation, second only to prayer. Every capable member of the Ummah must do this to be a Muslim.

After Muhammad’s eventual death (cf. Sec. 4), a great variety of religious questions (like the hijab) continued to need answers. The Ummah will look first to the early Companions (Sahabah), and their stories will become the beginnings of the Hadith: the oral accounts of the life, deeds, and words of Muhammad not found in the Qur’an.

The practice of looking back on the accounts of eyewitnesses* to Muhammad becomes a research skill in and of itself. Sussing out the authenticity of a teaching’s chain of transmission — its isnad — will become a subject of great study and debate in Islamic theology. Entire schools of thought will swing on the hinge of an Islamic teaching’s credibility via its isnad.

*Especially important to scholars of Hadith is how a teaching was transmitted: sami'tu (direct, as in, “I heard [him say]”), or 'an (the more ambiguous, “on the authority of”). An 'an-report from a trustworthy narrator is generally accepted, but from a narrator with a record of concealing his sources, the vague form can be grounds for theological rejection. The Hadith collectors even disagreed on how much proof of contact between narrators an 'an required.

3.3 | Jihad & the War with Mecca

Jihad: History & Caricature

For years, there has been an unfortunate stereotype of Islam: a horde of savage warriors with scimitars raised, charging on camelback, hellbent on world domination.

Reza Aslan traces this caricature of the “warrior religion” to the Middle Ages, when the leaders of Christendom sought to take the Holy Land (and the lucrative trade roads to China) from the Islamicate world. Whether it’s King Richard fighting Saladin for Jerusalem, the Holy Roman Empire against the Turks, or the Allies seizing oil fields in the modern Middle East, Aslan argues there has always been an economic incentive in the West to draw the Islamic world as a caricature of evil barbarity.

As scholars, our interest is in looking past the headlines, the speeches, and the propaganda to ask how this image actually developed.

7th-century Islam came about in an era of great socio-religious empires. To the north lay the Christian Byzantine Empire — inheritors of the Roman world, from Constantinople to Jerusalem. To the east lay the ancient Zoroastrian Sassanian Empire — descendants of the mighty Persians of Biblical and historical legend. All else was little more than desert and ocean.

The early Islamic attitude toward religion ran parallel to that of their Byzantine and Sassanian neighbors:

“Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.” Reza Aslan, No god but God

As such, the early Ummah was not out to force converts (despite how it is often otherwise portrayed). Conversion for non-Arabs was, in fact, a complicated matter. It’s more accurate to say the Arab Muslims formed a kind of aristocratic clique in the lands they conquered, slow to accept outsiders.

So, was Islam a “religion of the sword” as is often claimed?
Actually, this is the wrong question — or, at least, a question posed in bad faith. Why?

Because the early Ummah had swords just like the Christian Byzantines, the Zoroastrian Persians, the kingdoms of India, the Daoists of China, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Welsh, the Mayans, the Pueblo, and every other culture living in the 7th century. Calling early Islam a “religion of the sword” pretends it is different than their 7th-century Christian, Zoroastrian, and pagan neighbors who also carried swords. Calling it another religion of the 7th century, that also had swords like everyone else, is certainly more fitting.

The fact is, Islam would not have survived the Meccan Quraysh — much less the Byzantines or the Sassanids — without the sword.

Now, what the question of Islam being a “religion of the sword” is often really asking is what role jihad (جِهَاد) has in Islam. Jihad (meaning “to struggle”) may be the most misunderstood concept in all of Islam and is worthy of our attention here, before we start counting off battles in which the Prophet Muhammad engaged.

There are two forms of jihad (struggle) in the Qur’an.

The Greater Jihad is the internal struggle to overcome sin and the obstacles standing between oneself and God — analogous to the “narrow way” Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:14). The Lesser Jihad is the outer struggle to secure the peace and welfare of one’s community. When the community comes under attack, the lesser jihad takes the form of defensive war.

The theological logic here is simple. If the battle is defensive, it is just. If the battle is offensive, it is unjust (Qur’an 2:190). This is why Aslan argues that there is no concept of “holy war” in Islam — only the struggle for peace for one’s community (ie. the lesser jihad) and peace for one’s own soul (ie. the greater jihad).

Such is his normative, modern Islamicist view. But the concept has been put to other uses by other Islamicists. Since the Medieval era of the Crusades, a stream of thought has developed that Aslan calls the “Classical Doctrine of Jihad.” In this way of thinking, the world splits in two — the Islamic world (dar al-Islam) who fights the World at War (dar al-Harb). Here, the former must fight the latter until it yields to Islam. This is the view of breakaway, Islamist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

However, the backlash among Muslims to the so-called Classical Doctrine cannot be overstated. The medieval theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya undermines the Classical Doctrine with the Qur’an itself:

“There is no compulsion in religion.” QUR’AN 2:256

Nevertheless, leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, and Osama bin Laden have used the classical doctrine of jihad to justify modern campaigns of violence and terror in the name of Islam. While the vast majority of their victims have been other Muslims.

Two Fronts, One Victory

In 7th-century Medina, Muhammad comes to understand two things about his prophetic work.

First, the success of the Ummah has shown him that the larger world could benefit from his message (Qur’an 12:104). His vision of a radically egalitarian society could reach millions.

Secondly, it immediately follows from the first point that there will be no expansion of the Ummah so long as the powerful Qurayshi elite control Arabia’s dominant religious and economic center, the Ka’ba in Mecca.

This is why Muhammad comes to confront Qurayshi power on two fronts.

First, Muhammad declares the city of Medina itself a ḥaram — a holy sanctuary — placing it in direct competition with Mecca. Merchant caravans now have a choice: trade in Mecca, or trade in Medina, 300 miles to the north. (This declaration will later be written into the Constitution of Medina, once Muhammad has the standing to make it official.)

Secondly, Muhammad sends members of the Ummah on caravan raids. In 7th-century Arabia, this was a legitimate and traditional way for small clans to take a share of the riches of the super-wealthy. It rarely ended in bloodshed; merchants counted such petty thievery as a normal cost of doing business on the frontier. But Muhammad isn’t aiming to be a nuisance; he does this to disrupt Meccan power.

And it works!
Caravans begin skipping Mecca for Medina, and the Quraysh take decisive notice.

The first flashpoint comes at the Battle of Badr in 624 (AH 2). Nearly 1,000 Qurayshi warriors surprise 300 of Muhammad’s men along a caravan road. After days of eyeing each other across the valley, Muhammad will not allow his men to fight until they are attacked (cf. jihad). In fact, he continues his prayers even after the fighting starts — until Abu Bakr insists he rise and join the fight. Muhammad then leads his men to a 3-to-1 stunning victory! The Quraysh lose about 70 men, among them several key leaders. Muhammad loses 14.

For the Believers, Muhammad’s triumph shows that God has clearly blessed His Messenger. His 3-to-1 victory at Badr signals that the new Ummah has a real chance at eventual victory over the mighty Quraysh — and beyond them, perhaps the entire Arabian Peninsula! From that day until now, the Islamic Ummah controls the desert region of the Hijaz. And Yathrib becomes known as Medina. The City [of the Prophet].

From Badr also come the first principles of Islamic Just War. Unlike the pre-Islamic Quraysh, Muhammad acknowledges moral differences between combatants and non-combatants, and between offensive and defensive war. Later Islamic teaching will expand on these themes — prohibiting the torture of prisoners, the mutilation of the dead, sexual violence, the destruction of property, and protecting religious sites.

The Constitution of Medina

Victory changes everything, including what Muhammad can claim at home.

Islamic tradition places the Constitution of Medina at the very start of his time in Yathrib, drafted almost as soon as he arrived. But scholars like Reza Aslan and Michael Lecker date the document after the victory at Badr. The powers therein make little sense coming from a recently arrived Shaykh, while they fit well with a Lawgiver returning home with a defensive victory enjoyed by all.

It is often held up as history’s first written constitution. The Constitution of Medina binds the Companion émigrés, the Helpers (Ansar), and the rest of Medina’s clans — Jewish, Christian, and pagan alike — into a single pact of mutual defense. Each community keeps its own faith tradition outright: “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion.” But every signatory, Jewish clans included, now owes the others loyalty against outside attack. And the document grants Muhammad authority no mere Hakam had ever held: sole arbiter of every dispute in Medina, its recognized war leader (Qa’id), and — the Constitution states plainly — the Messenger of God.

The historian Moshe Gil reads it more bluntly still: less a ‘peace treaty’ than an early exercise in ‘sorting friend from foe’ before the war everyone sees coming. And the Constitution comes to immediate relevance: when Muhammad comes to suspect the Banu Qaynuqa (one of Medina’s most powerful Jewish clans) of breaking their sworn protection, the Constitution is what gives him the grounds to act. What that action looks like, and what it costs, picks up on the other side of Mecca.

3.4 | Jews, Christians, & the Return

Protected Peoples & Jizyah Tax

As the Muslim world expanded after Muhammad into Christian (northwest) and Zoroastrian (northeast) lands, the Jews the Ummah encountered generally received better rights and treatment than they had under their previous rulers. Put plainly: for Jews in the Middle Ages, trading a Christian ruler for an Islamic ruler was historically a net positive — both in terms of safety and prosperity.

Medieval Christians persecuted Jews for their beliefs, forced conversions on them, or killed them outright. The Muslims generally did not. Under Islamic law, Jews and Christians alike were known as dhimmi — protected peoples — because they were also the ones who brought the Bible and the knowledge of the prophets to Arabia and the wider world. The tradition recounts Muhammad’s warning: He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.

Because they were not Muslims, the dhimmi did not pay zakat. Instead, they paid a (now controversial) protection tax: the jizyah. In exchange, Jews and Christians received religious autonomy and an elevated social status in the Islamic world. Facing the Christian antisemitism to the north, Medieval Jews came to call the Islamicate world “an act of God’s mercy.”

All of this arises from a central tenet of Islam: Muhammad’s message is indistinguishable from the message of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the People of Israel, Moses, and Jesus (Qur’an 3:84). As Moses brought the Torah (al-Tawrat), David the Psalms (Al-Zabur), and Jesus the Gospel (Al-Injil), so Muhammad — the Seal of the Prophets — brings the Qur’an. When Jews speak of the Jewish prophets, and when Christians speak of Jesus, Muslims happily honor these forebears of their own religion of Islam.

Muhammad takes special care to align the Ummah with the Jewish people. He first sets the Qibla (the Islamic direction of prayer) toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the same direction as Jewish prayer, then and now. He mandates an Islamic fast to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. He sets the hour of Muslim congregation called “Jummah” at midday Friday — early enough not to interfere with the Jewish Sabbath at sundown. He adopts many of the Jewish dietary and purity laws. And he encourages his followers to marry Jews, as he has done.

However, as Islam develops its own features and traditions, the Qibla is eventually turned to face the Ka’ba in Mecca (as it is now), and the annual fast is moved to Ramadan (Ramazan) — the month in which the Qur’an was first revealed. But the esteem Muhammad placed on the Jewish people never wavers. To this day, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem remains the third holiest city of the Islamic world.

As for the Christians: Muhammad holds Jesus in great esteem. The Qur’an confirms that Jesus was born of a virgin (3:47), performed miracles (3:49), was the promised Messiah (3:45), and will judge humanity at the end of time (4:159).

The principal Islamic theological disagreement is specific to the Christian doctrine of Trinitarianism. As we covered in Sec 2.2, there were centuries-old communities of Christians, in Arabia and elsewhere, who honored Jesus as a holy prophet but not as God. Trinitarianism, by contrast, is the belief that God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God. And this belief in particular — that a flesh-and-blood man could also be God — was anathema to Jews and Muslims alike. The Qur’an’s 112th surah answers it directly:

“Say, ‘He is God the One, God the eternal. He begot no one nor was He begotten. No one is comparable to Him.’” QUR’AN 112:1–4

And yet the Qur’an does not encourage bickering among the three sibling religions:

“People of the Book, let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to Him, and none of us takes others beside God as lords.” QUR’AN 3:64

Allegiances & War

After Badr, the Jews, Christians, Hanifs, and growing Muslim population take sides.

Many flee Mecca and the surrounding region for Medina and join the Ummah. Others, particularly the Hanifs who disagree with the new prophet, head south to the Ka’ba and the Quraysh — seeking the way things used to be.

Amid the great exchange of allegiances, Muhammad comes to suspect that the Jewish Qaynuqa in Medina are in secret contact with the Quraysh in Mecca. Following a two-week siege, Muhammad exiles the Jewish Qaynuqa from Medina (Arab custom demanded their deaths, but Muhammad chose a lighter sentence). Their view was simple: the Quraysh were their primary financial partners, and they did not expect an upstart like Muhammad to win.

History proves them momentarily right. The next fight, the Battle of Uhud, proves an unmitigated disaster. Mid-battle, Muhammad’s undisciplined archers break ranks to take spoils from the field. The break opens his forces to be flanked by the Qurayshi army, and Muhammad barely escapes with his life.

This is all the proof the Jewish-Arab élites of Medina need to prove that Muhammad is unfit to lead. A second Jewish clan attempts to assassinate him. The plot is discovered, and Muhammad once again exiles the conspirators. Many veterans of Uhud are enraged at the mercy of this decision. They want blood — as custom demands.

Two more years of skirmishes follow, and neither side gains ground. So the Quraysh send a 10,000-strong Bedouin army to lay siege to Medina, and Muhammad answers with engineering: he orders a trench to be dug around the city.

The trench protecting Medina holds.
After a month, the besiegers run out of supplies and abandon the fight.

Then comes the darkest episode of the Medina years. It turns out that during the siege, a third Jewish-Arab clan — the Banu Qurayza — had been supplying the Bedouin army. For the Ummah, this is the last straw. They again plead with Muhammad to have the conspirators killed. Muhammad recuses himself, asking another Hakam to render the final judgment. The decision sides with ancient Arab custom: the men are killed, the women and children are enslaved, and their property is divided.

Aslan figures this involves about 1% of Medina’s Jewish population, alongside hundreds of fellow Arabs; after which, thousands of Jews continued to live peacefully with Muhammad in Medina throughout his life. To be clear, the Banu Qurayza were killed for their wartime alliance with a besieging army — not because they were Jews. It is later, under the caliph Umar (after Muhammad’s death), that the Jews of Medina are collectively exiled* from the Hijaz.

*It should be noted here that from the time of Umar until the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to thrive in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and other Muslim regions.

Return to Mecca

Which brings us, at last, back to Mecca.

In the midst of a protracted war with the Quraysh, Muhammad makes a surprising announcement: he and 1,000 followers plan to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He will enter the holy city unarmed. And he will circumambulate the Ka’ba.

This decision confounds everyone. Just before his arrival, the Quraysh sign the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with Muhammad, offering him and the Ummah an empty sanctuary the following season. He agrees. And when the Ummah return the next year as peaceful pilgrims, the people of Mecca see their character with their own eyes.

The treaty also lets other tribes across Arabia ally with either side without joining the war themselves — and it's this clause that ends up breaking the peace. Some ally with Muhammad while others choose the Quraysh. Two years later, a rival tribe attacks one of Muhammad's allies — with Qurayshi backing, chasing survivors into Mecca's own sacred sanctuary, where violence is supposed to be forbidden. It's a direct violation of the treaty: an attack on Muhammad's ally is an attack on Muhammad. The attacked tribe sends word to Medina pleading for help. The Quraysh, realizing what they've done, send their chief, Abu Sufyan, to Medina to try to salvage the peace, but Muhammad refuses to see him. Instead, the Ummah marches on Mecca with 10,000 warriors. Moreover, the people of Mecca have seen the quality of Muhammad's character first-hand. They know the truth about him, his message, and his community. And the people of Mecca accept Muhammad with open arms.

There are no forced conversions.
In total, only 10 Meccans are put to death.
Contrary to Arab custom, a general amnesty is declared for the whole city.
Even the slaves are freed.

At the city center, Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali approach the Ka’ba. One by one, Muhammad removes the pagan idols, raising them over his head, and smashes them to shards before a cheering crowd. The tradition recounts that the only image he spares is a Christian icon of Jesus and Mother Mary.

The last idol to go is the great Syrian god Hubal — in whose name so many of Muhammad’s enemies had hunted the Ummah. For Hubal, Muhammad draws his sword and hacks the idol to pieces. The shards are then refashioned as a doorstep to the Ka’ba. One now steps on Hubal to pray to Allah.

On the day Muhammad emptied the Ka’ba of Mecca, a new universal faith was declared, Islam. Today, two billion Muslims — roughly a quarter of our species — now celebrate the Ka’ba as the holy House of God.

North of Mecca, in the city of Medina, the small mosque that was once Muhammad’s home has grown over the centuries into the mighty al-Masjid an-Nabawi — the Prophet’s Mosque — raised over the site of that first structure and Muhammad’s tomb. It is the second holiest site in the Islamic world, after the Great Mosque of Mecca, and it draws millions of visitors each year.

And, to think, all of this started with a prophet on the run and a few dozen followers.

Last Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & the Prophet
This Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
Next Section: After Muhammad

Pictured: Allat, Pre-Islamic Goddess of Arabia (2nd century)

Overview

This section introduces the world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born and the first thirteen years of his prophetic career. We situate the Ka'ba and the town of Mecca within the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia (the Jahiliyyah) and trace the monotheistic currents already moving through the peninsula: Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Arab seekers called hanifs. We then trace Muhammad's early life, his wife Khadija, the revelation of 610 CE, the earliest Qur'anic verses, and the conflict with the Quraysh elite that ends with the Companions’ flight from Mecca.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 1–2

Key Terms for this Section
Ka'ba · Jahiliyyah · Allah · Quraysh ·
Muhammad · Khadija · Abu Bakr · The Shahadah

2.1 | The Ka’ba & the Age of Jahiliyyah

The Sanctuary City

1400 years ago, the Arabian town of Mecca was an ancient, dusty settlement in the desert interior — its value marked less by what it produced than by what it protected. At its center stood a single cube of stone, the Ka’ba, the only masonry structure in a town of mud and straw. The shrine housed a copy of every idol worshipped across Arabia — some 360 of them, a god for every tribe that came to trade. Among the images, Aslan notes, were figures of Jesus and his mother Mary, standing next to the gods of the Arabian desert.

Pilgrims came from across the peninsula to walk the tawaf — the sevenfold circling of the shrine, a rite whose rhythm some scholars connect to the wheeling of the stars overhead. The Meccan leadership could boast that each visitor to their town could find, somewhere in that crowd of idols, the god of his own tribe, and so each had reason to come and safely trade. Beside the Ka'ba lay the well of Zamzam, whose waters Islamic tradition binds to the Jewish story of Hagar and her son Ismail (the Ishmael of Genesis), who were cast into the wilderness, the boy near death from thirst, until, as Genesis tells it, God opened Hagar's eyes to a well of water that saved them both (Gen. 21:19). The well made Mecca livable. Its shrine made it sacred. Together, these two pillars provided the inner circle of Mecca with tremendous wealth. Tradition held that the Ka’ba’s foundations reached back to the very beginning of the Genesis narrative. In Islamic tradition, Adam raised the Ka’ba first, Noah knew of it, and Abraham rebuilt it with Ishmael at his side. Now, a word of scholarly caution: these are stories meant to convey what the Ka’ba means, not a historical record of where it came from — the sacred biography of a place is not its archaeology. As scholars, we can describe what the tradition holds without passing judgment on whether it happened.

What is certain, however, is that custody of 7th-century Mecca was the most valuable office in all of Arabia.

Tradition credits a figure named Qusayy with gathering the scattered clans of the region, seizing the guardianship of the shrine, and settling his people around it, becoming the “Keeper of the Keys” — the one who held the right to open the Ka’ba, water the pilgrims, and take a share of the trade that flowed through the sacred precinct. His descendants would inherit that right, and one branch of that group would become the Quraysh. The whole arrangement rested on a fragile and ingenious custom: the sacred months. For part of each year, raiding and blood feud were suspended by common agreement, so that caravans could move in safety and old enemies could meet at the pilgrimage fairs without violence. In a land governed by feuds, those months of truce were the closest thing to desert law. They allowed a great market to gather in the shadow of the shrine — and whoever controlled the shrine controlled the market. That is how a well and a stone cube in a barren valley became a town worth protecting and fighting for.

The Jahiliyyah

The word Jahiliyyah is usually translated as the “Age of Ignorance” in Arab and Islamicate history. It is not a neutral historical label but the tradition's own retrospective theological name for the pre-Muhammadan era. It does not mean the pre-Islamic Arabs were uncultured or stupid — they had poetry, genealogy, law, and a rich spiritual imagination. In the Islamic reading, what their forebears lacked was divine guidance: they were living in the time before Muhammad’s message came.

Religious life in the Jahiliyyah was split along the same line that divided Arabian society itself: on one side was a barren desert, on the other side were the scattered Arabian towns. For the nomadic Bedouin, religion traveled light. What mattered was the tribe, its ancestors, and the code that kept both alive; the gods were local, portable, and consulted as needed. The settled tribes of the towns and oases lived differently — anchored to shrines, sacred stones, and fixed holy places, with cults that could accumulate wealth, custodians, and prestige. Mecca, built around the most successful shrine of them all, was the settled pattern at its logical zenith.