Faith, Community and Politics · Part 2

preach that Allah alone should be worshipped. The worship involved simple rituals, such as daily prayers ( salat ), and moral principles, such as distributing alms and abstaining from theft. Muhammad was to found a community of believers ( umma ) bound by a common set of religious beliefs. The community would bear witness ( shahada ) to the existence of the religion before God as well as before members of other religious communities. Muhammad’s message particularly appealed to those Meccans who felt deprived of the gains from trade and religion and were looking for a new community identity. Those who accepted the doctrine were called Muslims. They were promised salvation on the Day of Judgement ( qiyama ) and a share of the resources of the community while on earth. The Muslims soon faced considerable opposition from affluent Meccans who took offence to the rejection of their deities and found the new religion a threat to the status and prosperity of Mecca. In , Muhammad was forced to migrate with his followers to Medina. Muhammad’s journey from Mecca ( hijra ) was a turning point in the history of Islam, with the year of his arrival in Medina marking the beginning of the Muslim calendar. *Tribes are societies organised on the basis of blood relationships. The Arab tribes were made up of clans or combinations of large families. Unrelated clans also merged to make a tribe stronger. Non-Arab individuals (mawali) became members through the patronage of prominent tribesmen. Even after converting to Islam, the mawali were never treated as equals by the Arab Muslims and had to pray in separate mosques. T HE C ENTRAL I SLAMIC L ANDS Medival painting of Archangel Gabriel (Jibril) who brought messages to Muhammad. The first word he spoke was ‘recite’ (iqra) from which has come the word Quran. In Islamic cosmology, angels are one of the three intelligent forms of life in the Universe. The other two are humans and jinns. T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY