CHAPTER 9

The Worlds of Islam

Afro-Eurasian Connections 600–1500

Hassan Kargbo, a citizen of the small West African country of Sierra Leone, is a “ChrisMus,” which in local parlance is a person who identifies with both Christianity and Islam. “I see it as the same religion,” he stated. Interviewed in early 2014, he acknowledged going to church every Sunday, wearing a Jesus bracelet, and praying at a mosque every day. Kelfala Conteh, the caretaker of an ancient mosque in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown, reported, “Of course [Christians] come here. We have both Christians and Muslims praying side by side.” Wurie Bah, another Muslim from Freetown, said, “We all believe in God. If my friends invite me to church, of course I will go.” On one of the colorfully decorated minibuses that carry passengers around the city is the declaration that “God loves Allah.”1

In the world of the early twenty-first century, where headlines often highlight violence among Muslims and violent conflict with Christians or Jews, it is perhaps useful to recall places such as Sierra Leone where religious tolerance is both practiced and celebrated. Nor is it alone. Indonesia, the most heavily populated Muslim country in the world, has inscribed freedom of religion in its constitution; has officially recognized Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist holidays as well as those of Islam; and has generally maintained peace among its various religious communities. Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Spring, adopted a new constitution in early 2014 that represented a compromise between advocates of a secular state and those committed to a more Islamic regime. It commits the country to democracy, freedom of conscience, and gender equality.

The many faces of contemporary Islam echo the earlier history of this newest of humankind’s major religions. During the first Muslim millennium (600–1600), the Islamic world found expression in various forms, some displaying a broad acceptance for diversity and others engaged in serious and at times violent conflict with those of a different religious outlook. Furthermore, both then and now, the world of Islam occupied a central position in the larger international arena, interacting with most of the other civilizations.

As in China, Muslim societies over much of the past century have been seeking to overcome several hundred years of humiliating European intrusion and to find their place in the modern world. In doing so, many Muslims have found inspiration and encouragement in the early history of their civilization and their faith. For a thousand years (roughly 600–1600), peoples claiming allegiance to Islam represented a highly successful, prosperous, and expansive civilization, encompassing parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While Chinese culture and Buddhism provided the cultural anchor for East Asia during the third-wave millennium and Christianity did the same for Europe, the realm of Islam touched on both of them and decisively shaped the history of the entire Afro-Eurasian world.

The significance of a burgeoning Islamic world during the third-wave era was enormous. It thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history, for it was among them and in their language that the newest of the world’s major religions was born. The sudden emergence and rapid spread of that religion in the seventh century C.E. was accompanied by the creation of a huge empire that stretched from Spain to India. Both within that empire and beyond it, a new and innovative civilization took shape, drawing on Arab, Persian, Turkish, Greco-Roman, South Asian, and African cultures. It was clearly the largest and most influential of the new third-wave civilizations. Finally, the broad reach of Islam generated many of the great cultural encounters of this age of accelerating connections, as Islamic civilization challenged and provoked Christendom, penetrated and was transformed by African cultures, and also took root in India, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. The spread of Islam continued in the modern era so that by 2013 some 1.6 billion people, or 23 percent of the world’s population, identified as Muslims. It was second only to Christianity as the world’s most widely practiced religion, and it extended far beyond the Arab lands where it had originated.