Lands

Lands AS we enter the twenty-first century, there are over billion Muslims living in all parts of the world. They are citizens of different nations, speak different languages, and dress differently. The processes by which they became Muslims were varied, and so were the circumstances in which they went their separate ways. Yet, the Islamic community has its roots in a more unified past which unfolded roughly , years ago in the Arabian peninsula. In this chapter we are going to read about the rise of Islam and its expansion over a vast territory extending from Egypt to Afghanistan, the core area of Islamic civilisation from to . In these centuries, Islamic society exhibited multiple political and cultural patterns. The term Islamic is used here not only in its purely religious sense but also for the overall society and culture historically associated with Islam. In this society not everything that was happening originated directly from religion, but it took place in a society where Muslims and their faith were recognised as socially dominant. Non-Muslims always formed an integral, if subordinate, part of this society as did Jews in Christendom. Our understanding of the history of the central Islamic lands between and is based on chronicles or tawarikh (which narrate events in order of time) and semi-historical works, such as biographies ( sira ), records of the sayings and doings of the Prophet ( hadith ) and commentaries on the Quran ( tafsir ). The material from which these works were produced was a large collection of eyewitness reports ( akhbar ) transmitted over a period of time either orally or on paper. The authenticity of each report ( khabar ) was tested by a critical method which traced the chain of transmission ( isnad ) and established the reliability of the narrator. Although the method was not foolproof, medieval Muslim writers were more careful in selecting their information and understanding the motives of their informants than were their contemporaries in other parts of the world. On controversial issues, they reproduced different versions of the same event, as they found in their sources, leaving the task of judgement to their readers. Their description of events closer to their own times is more systematic and analytical and less of a collection of akhbar . Most of the chronicles and semi-historical works are