Second Thoughts

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What’s the Significance?

Quran, 415–16

umma, 416

Pillars of Islam, 416

hijra, 417

sharia, 418

jizya, 420

ulama, 423, 437

Umayyad caliphate, 423–24

Abbasid caliphate, 424

Sufism, 424–25

al-Ghazali, 425

Sikhism, 430

Ibn Battuta, 432–33

Timbuktu, 433

Mansa Musa, 434–35

al-Andalus, 434–36

madrassas, 437

House of Wisdom, 440

Ibn Sina, 440–41

Big Picture Questions

  1. Question

    How might you account for the immense religious and political/military success of Islam in its early centuries?

  2. Question

    In what ways might Islamic civilization be described as cosmopolitan, international, or global?

  3. Question

    “Islam was simultaneously a single world of shared meaning and interaction and a series of separate, distinct, and conflicting communities.” What evidence could you provide to support both sides of this argument?

  4. Question

    What changes did Islamic expansion generate in those societies that encountered it, and how was Islam itself transformed by those encounters?

  5. Question

    Looking Back: What distinguished the early centuries of Islamic history from a similar phase in the history of Christianity and Buddhism?

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Next Steps: For Further Study

Reza Aslan, No God but God (2005). A well-written and popular history of Islam by an Iranian immigrant to the United States.

Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (2010). An innovative account of the first century of Islam by a leading scholar of that era.

Richard Eaton, Islamic History as Global History (1990). A short account by a major scholar that examines Islam in a global framework.

John Esposito, ed., The Oxford History of Islam (1999). Up-to-date essays on various periods and themes in Islamic history. Beautifully illustrated.

Francis Robinson, ed., Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (1996). A series of essays by major scholars, with lovely pictures and maps.

Judith Tucker, Gender and Islamic History (1994). A brief overview of the changing lives of Islamic women.

“The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Virtual Tour with the Fourteenth Century Traveler,” http://fms-sfusd-ca.schoolloop.com/Battuta. A beautifully illustrated journey across the Islamic world in the early 1300s.

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