7.1 — The Rise of Islam

In 610 CE a merchant in Mecca, about forty years old, began telling people he had received revelations. By his death in 632 he had united most of Arabia. Within a century of his death, armies fighting under his religion's banner controlled territory from Spain to the Indus.

No comparable expansion had happened before and none has happened since at that speed. This chapter is about how, and about what the new religion actually taught — treated as history, with the theology described accurately and its truth left to Volume VII.

Arabia before

The Arabian peninsula in 600 CE was mostly desert, populated by nomadic tribes and by settled communities around oases and trade routes.

Politically it was a vacuum between two exhausted empires. The Byzantine and Sasanian Persian empires had been fighting each other, on and off, for centuries, and had just concluded the most destructive of all their wars — from 602 to 628 — which left both bankrupt, plague-ravaged and militarily spent. Neither had the capacity to respond to what happened next, and this is the most underrated fact in the story.

Mecca was a trading town and a religious centre. The Kaaba housed idols of many tribal deities, and an annual pilgrimage brought tribes together under a truce, which made it a natural market. The Quraysh tribe controlled it and profited from it.

Religiously the peninsula was mixed. Polytheism was dominant; there were substantial Jewish communities, particularly in Yathrib and Yemen; Christianity was present in the north and south; and there were hanifs, individuals who rejected idols and held to a monotheism they associated with Abraham.

Socially it was organised by tribe and by blood. Security came from your kin group; a killing was answered by the victim's tribe; there was no state, no law above the tribe, and no protection for anyone outside a kin network — which meant orphans, widows and the poor had none.

Muhammad

Born in Mecca around 570, of the Quraysh but of a minor branch, orphaned young, raised by his grandfather and then his uncle. He worked in trade and married Khadijah, a merchant widow who was his employer, older than him, and who was his only wife until her death.

The first revelation, by tradition in 610, in a cave outside Mecca. He was frightened and told Khadijah, who was the first to believe him.

The early message in Mecca was simple and it was social as much as theological: there is one God; idols are nothing; there will be a judgement; and therefore the way you treat the poor, the orphan and the slave matters more than your tribe or your wealth.

Opposition in Mecca was economic as well as religious. A message attacking idols threatened the pilgrimage trade the Quraysh lived on, and one attacking wealth and tribal pride threatened its leaders. Early converts were disproportionately the young, the poor and slaves, and they were persecuted.

The hijra, 622. Facing worsening pressure and after the deaths of both Khadijah and his protective uncle, Muhammad accepted an invitation from Yathrib — a town torn by feuds between its Arab tribes — to come and arbitrate. The migration there is year one of the Islamic calendar, which tells you what Muslims regard as the founding event: not the revelation, but the formation of a community.

Yathrib was renamed Medina, the city.

And in Medina he was not only a prophet but a head of state. He legislated, judged, taxed, made treaties and led armies. The so-called Constitution of Medina, whose text is preserved in early sources, defined a single community including the Jewish tribes of the city as a distinct people alongside the Muslims, with mutual defence obligations.

The wars with Mecca — Badr, Uhud, the Trench — ran for years, and Medina's Jewish tribes were successively expelled or, in the case of the Banu Qurayza after the Trench, subjected to the killing of the men and enslavement of the women and children after a judgement by an arbitrator the tribe itself had accepted. This is recorded in the earliest Muslim sources and it is not contested as an event; its interpretation is.

Mecca surrendered in 630, and the surrender was notably lenient. The idols in the Kaaba were destroyed and the building was retained as the direction of prayer and the focus of pilgrimage — an existing sacred structure repurposed rather than replaced.

He died in 632 having named no successor, which is the origin of the division in the next section.

What Islam teaches

The core is the shahada: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger. Strict monotheism, with an absolute rejection of any partner, image or intermediary — which is the theological root of Islamic iconoclasm and of the absence of figurative religious art.

The five pillars: the declaration of faith; prayer five times daily facing Mecca; zakat, an obligatory annual payment of a proportion of accumulated wealth for the poor — which is a tax rather than a voluntary charity; fasting from dawn to sunset through the month of Ramadan; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those able.

The Qur'an is held to be the direct speech of God in Arabic, revealed over 23 years. It was compiled into a standard text within about two decades of the Prophet's death under the third caliph Uthman, and the Arabic text has been transmitted with remarkable stability since — early manuscript finds, including the Birmingham folios radiocarbon dated to the seventh century, are consistent with the standard text.

The hadith are reports of the Prophet's sayings and actions, collected and sifted from the eighth century onward by scholars who developed a rigorous discipline of authentication based on chains of transmitters. This is a genuine methodological achievement — an entire scholarly apparatus for evaluating the reliability of oral testimony, developed centuries before anything comparable in Europe.

Sharia means the path, and it is the body of law derived from Qur'an, hadith, analogy and scholarly consensus. It is not one code; there are four major Sunni schools and Shia schools, differing on real questions, and the idea that it is a single fixed text is a modern misunderstanding shared by its enemies and by some of its advocates.

What it changed in Arabia, concretely. It replaced tribe with a community defined by belief. It gave women defined inheritance rights and the right to own property and to consent to marriage — a substantial improvement on Arabian custom, and rights that European women largely did not have for another twelve centuries, alongside provisions such as unequal inheritance shares and testimony rules that are the subject of extensive modern argument. It restricted, regulated and encouraged the manumission of slavery without abolishing it. It prohibited female infanticide, which was practised. And it set limits on blood feud.

The succession, and the Sunni-Shia division

The Prophet died without a designated successor, or with one, depending on whom you ask, and the entire division follows.

The Sunni position: the community should choose its leader. Abu Bakr, an early convert and close companion, was chosen by an assembly, followed by Umar, Uthman and Ali — the four "rightly guided" caliphs.

The Shia position: leadership belonged to the Prophet's family, and specifically to Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, whom they hold was designated. Shia is short for shiat Ali, the party of Ali.

The conflict became violent. Uthman was murdered; Ali became caliph and faced civil war; Ali was assassinated in 661, and the caliphate passed to the Umayyad family.

Karbala, 680, is the defining event for Shia Islam. Husayn, Ali's son and the Prophet's grandson, marched with about seventy followers against the Umayyad caliph Yazid, was surrounded at Karbala in Iraq, cut off from water, and killed with almost all his companions. The annual commemoration of Ashura, with its processions and mourning, is the central Shia observance, and it is a religion shaped around a defeat and a martyrdom.

Today roughly 85 to 90 percent of Muslims are Sunni, with Shia majorities in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain and large minorities elsewhere. The division is theological, legal and — for most of history — political, and Chapter 12.5 shows what happens when it is weaponised by states.

How the expansion actually happened

The speed is the thing that requires explanation.

By 651 the Sasanian Persian empire had been destroyed entirely. By 642 Byzantine Egypt and Syria were gone. By 711 Muslim forces were in Spain and at the Indus.

Five factors, and none is sufficient alone.

The two empires were exhausted. The Byzantine-Sasanian war of 602–628 had bled both white, and the Plague of Justinian had recurred repeatedly through the region since 541.

Byzantine religious policy had alienated its own subjects. Egypt and Syria were largely Miaphysite Christian, at odds with Constantinople's Chalcedonian orthodoxy and taxed and persecuted for it (Chapter 5.8). Many local Christians regarded the new rulers as an improvement, and contemporary Syriac and Coptic sources say so.

The terms offered were tolerable. Christians and Jews as "People of the Book" retained their religion and their communal law in exchange for the jizya and a subordinate legal status. Compared with Byzantine religious persecution or Sasanian taxation, this was frequently a better deal, and it explains why cities repeatedly surrendered by treaty rather than being stormed.

Conversion was gradual, not immediate. Egypt, Syria and Iran had Muslim majorities only after two to four centuries, and the Umayyad state initially discouraged conversion because converts stopped paying the jizya, which was the treasury's main revenue. Mass conversion by force is not what the demographic record shows.

And the Arab armies were fast, mobile and cohesive, with a religious motivation, a share in the plunder, and — crucially — a political structure that turned tribal energies outward instead of against each other.

The caliphates

The Umayyads, 661–750, ruled from Damascus. An Arab-dominated empire in which non-Arab converts were second-class, which generated the resentment that destroyed them.

The Abbasids, 750–1258, moved the capital to a new city — Baghdad, founded 762 — and opened the administration to Persians and other non-Arabs. This is the shift from an Arab empire to an Islamic one, and it is what makes Chapter 7.2 possible.

And the empire fragmented almost immediately in political terms. An Umayyad survivor established a separate state in Spain; the Fatimids took Egypt and claimed their own caliphate; Persian and then Turkish dynasties took effective power in the east while nominally acknowledging the Abbasid caliph. By the tenth century the caliph in Baghdad was a religious figurehead under the control of whichever military dynasty held the city — the same pattern as the late Mughal emperor in Chapter 6.12.

Where this shows up in your life

About 1.9 billion people, roughly a quarter of humanity, are Muslim, and the largest Muslim populations are in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — not in the Arab world, which is about 20 percent of the total.

The Islamic calendar is strictly lunar with twelve months of 29 or 30 days, giving a year about 11 days shorter than the solar year, which is why Ramadan moves through the seasons over a 33-year cycle (Chapter 15.1).

And the word Islam means submission, from the same root as salaam, peace, and Muslim means one who submits — which is worth knowing simply because so much public argument about the religion is conducted by people who do not know what its name means.

What the next page covers

Baghdad in the ninth century was probably the largest city in the world, and its rulers were paying scholars to translate every book they could find into Arabic. Chapter 7.2 covers the Islamic golden age — what was actually achieved in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry and optics; how Greek learning was preserved, corrected and extended before returning to Europe; who the individual scholars were; and the honest question of why the tradition that produced algebra and the first hospitals stopped leading the world.