Big Picture Questions

1. How might you account for the immense religious and political/military success of Islam in its early centuries?
2. In what ways might Islamic civilization be described as cosmopolitan, international, or global?
3. “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. What changes did Islamic expansion generate in those societies that encountered it, and how was Islam itself transformed by those encounters?
5. Looking Back: What distinguished the early centuries of Islamic history from a similar phase in the history of Christianity and Buddhism?