A.

ARTICLE 1

A Brief Overview of the Islam History

The origin of Islam is placed around 610 CE when Muhammad, a highly spiritual and
religious man who spent months in praying and self contemplation in a secluded cave near the
town of Mecca, is thought to have received divine messages. The story is that one morning
Muhammad heard the voice of the angel Gabriel and, through him, Allah spoke words of
wisdom. The words were first recited by Muhammad, later his disciples, and then recorded as
text which came to known as the Holy Qur’an. Thus followers of Islam consider the Qur’an not
the work of Muhammad but as direct revelations from Allah.
Islam, which literally means “submission,” was founded on the teachings of the Prophet
Muhammad as an expression of surrender to the will of Allah. The Qur’an, the sacred text of
Islam, contains the teachings of the Prophet that were revealed to him from Allah. Traditional
Muslims believe that Allah is the one true God with no partner or equal and that the inspiration
of this belief system comes straight from God and the vehicle chosen by him to deliver these
teaching to the general population, the Prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad is said to have returned from the cave a changed man. The first person he
preached to on his return was his wife Khadija, who became the first disciple of this new
religion. Muhammad, encouraged by this, began to preach the revelations to the public at large
through his sermons. Many people were impressed by verses of the Qur’an and converted to
Islam out of their free will. However, since the growing popularity of Islam jeopardized
Muhammad’s and his disciples lives, the entire community moved from Mecca to Medina circa
622 CE.
This move became a crucial event in the history of Islam and came to be known as Hijra.
The Muslim calendar begins with the day of this migration. The people of Medina accepted
Islam with and the spread of this new religion gained momentum. Later with well-organized
finances and a vast army, Muhammad conquered and converted Mecca as well. He did not stop
here but sent numerous emissaries to different parts of Arabia.
B. ARTICLE 2

The Islamic Understanding of the Role

The term in Arabic that corresponds most closely to “religion” is al-dīn. Whereas
“religion” comes from the Latin root religare, meaning “to bind” and therefore by implica- tion
that which binds us to God, al-dīn is said by some Ara- bic grammarians and Quranic
commentators to derive from al-dayn, which means “debt.” Al-dīn, therefore, means the repaying
of our debt to God and involves the whole of our life, because we are indebted to God not only
for individual gifts, but most of all for the gift of existence itself. For the Muslim mind, it is the
most obvious of facts and greatest of certitudes that by ourselves we are nothing and God is
everything, that we own nothing by ourselves and that all belongs to God according to the
Quranic verse: “God is the rich (ghaniy) and ye are the poor (fuqar<’)” (47:38).
We are poor in our very essence; we are poor not necessarily in an economic, social, or
even physical sense, but in an ontological one. Therefore, all that we are and all that we have
belongs to God, for which we are indebted to Him and for whose gifts we must give thanks
(shukr). Religion, or al-dīn, which is inseparable from the sense of the reality of this “debt,”
therefore, embraces the whole of life and is inseparable from life itself.
In the Islamic perspective, religion is not seen as a part of life or a special kind of activity
like art, thought, commerce, social discourse, or politics. Rather, it is the matrix and worldview
within which these and all other human activities, efforts, creations, and thoughts take place or
should take place. It is the very sap of the tree of life as well as the total environment in which
this tree grows. As has been said so often, Islam is not only a religion, in the modern sense of the
term as it has been redefined in a secularized world in which the religious life occupies at best a
small part of the daily activities of most people.
 C. ARTICLE 3

The Life of Muhammad

Orphaned at 6, Muhammad was saved from a life of slavery by his uncle who gave him a
job in his successful caravan business. Married to a successful businesswoman in her own right,
Muhammad saw firsthand how the leading families of the Quraysh lived. They were arrogant,
reckless, ungenerous and egotistical, believed only in riches, and took no responsibility for
people outside their immediate, elite circle. Muhammad saw this decline in traditional values as a
threat to the very existence of his tribe. He was sure that social reform had to be based on a new
spiritual foundation, though before the revelations, he had no idea that his destiny would be to
implement these changes.
Tradition tells that Abraha, the Abyssinian Christian ruler of Yemen, attacked Mecca with
a herd of elephants imported from Africa. Abraha’s goal was to destroy the Ka’ba and make the
Christian church at Sana’ the new religious center of the Arab world. The terrified Quraysh had
never seen an elephant, much less a whole herd, so they ran to the mountains to escape, leaving
the Ka’ba with no defense. But just as it was about to be attacked, the sky went dark as a flock of
birds, each carrying a stone in its beak, rained down on the invading army which was forced to
retreat.
Many stories surround his childhood and birth, which was announced in a tale similar to
the Christian story of Mary: Muhammad’s mother, a widow named Amina, one day heard a voice
say to her: “You carry in your womb the lord of this people, and when he is born, say: ‘I place
him beneath the protection of the One, from the evil of every envious person’, then name him
Muhammad.”
But by the time he was eight years old, his grandfather, too, had died. Fortunately, his
Uncle Abu Talib saved the young Muhammad from a life of slavery or indebtedness experienced
by so many orphans at the time. He employed him in his successful caravan business. In a story
that resembles that of Samuel in the Old Testament and others of that genre, it was on a trading
expedition to Syria, when Muhammad was only nine years old, that a Christian monk named
Bahira recognized him as “the Messenger of the Lord of the Worlds.”
 D. ARTICLE 4

History of Islam as a Culture and Polity

The history of Islam concerns the political, social, economic, military, and cultural
developments of the Islamic civilization. Most historians believe that Islam originated with
Muhammad's mission in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE, although Muslims
regard this time as a return to the original faith passed down by the Abrahamic prophets, such as
Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, with the submission (Islām) to the
will of God.
According to the traditional account, the Islamic prophet Muhammad began receiving
what Muslims consider to be divine revelations in 610 CE, calling for submission to the one
God, preparation for the imminent Last Judgement, and charity for the poor and needy. As
Muhammad’s message began to attract followers (the ṣaḥāba) he also met with increasing
hostility and persecution from Meccan elites. In 622 CE Muhammad fled to the city of Yathrib
(now known as Medina), where he began to unify the tribes of Arabia under Islam, returning to
Mecca to take control in 630 and order the destruction of all pagan idols. By the time he died in
about 11 AH (632 CE), almost all the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam, but
disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community during
the Rāshidūn Caliphate.
The early Muslim conquests were responsible for the spread of Islam. By the 8th century
CE, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from Muslim Iberia in the west to the Indus River in the
east. Polities such as those ruled by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (in the Middle East and
later in Spain and Southern Italy), the Fatimids, Seljuks, Ayyubids, and Mamluks were among
the most influential powers in the world. Highly Persianized empires built by the Samanids,
Ghaznavids, and Ghurids significantly contributed to technological and administrative
developments. The Islamic Golden Age gave rise to many centers of culture and science and
produced notable polymaths, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers during
the Middle Ages.
By the early 13th century, the Delhi Sultanate conquered the northern Indian
subcontinent, while Turkic dynasties like the Sultanate of Rum and Artuqids conquered much of
Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. In the 13th and 14th
centuries, destructive Mongol invasions and those of Tamerlane (Timur) from the east, along
with the loss of population due to the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centers of
the Muslim world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, but saw the emergence of the Timurid
Renaissance and major global economic powers such as the Mali Empire in West Africa and the
Bengal Sultanate in South Asia. Following the deportation and enslavement of the Muslim
Moors from the Emirate of Sicily and other Italian territories, the Islamic Iberia was gradually
conquered by Christian forces during the Reconquista. Nonetheless, in the early modern period,
the states of the Age of the Islamic Gunpowders—Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Safavid
Iran—emerged as world powers.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the Muslim world fell under the
influence or direct control of the European Great Powers. Some of their efforts to win
independence and build modern nation-states over the course of the last two centuries continue to
reverberate to the present day, as well as fuel conflict-zones in regions such as Israel/Palestine,
Kashmir, Xinjiang, Chechnya, Central Africa, Bosnia, and Myanmar. The oil boom stabilized the
Arab States of the Gulf Cooperation Council (comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), making them the world's largest oil producers and
exporters, which focus on capitalism, free trade, and tourism.