Islam

Overview

"Islam" means submission to the will of God (Allah). Muslims believe Muhammad is the last in a line of prophets that includes Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and that the Quran is the word of God as revealed to him. The faith rests on the Five Pillars:

• The shahada: the declaration of faith.
• Prayer five times a day.
• Almsgiving (zakat).
• Fasting during Ramadan.
• Pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj), for those who are able.

Sharia, religious law, governs many areas of life. It is interpreted in different ways in different communities and countries.

Origins and History

According to tradition, Muhammad received his first revelation in 610 in the cave of Hira near Mecca. Facing opposition from the Quraysh, the tribe that ruled Mecca, he migrated with his followers to Medina in 622. This migration, the hijra, marks the start of the Islamic calendar. In Medina Muhammad built a community (umma) that was both religious and political. By his death in 632 most Arabian tribes had united under Islam.

Development and Branches

After the Prophet's death a dispute over who should lead the community produced the Sunni–Shia split:

• Sunnis accepted the elected caliphs.
• Shia held that leadership belonged to Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, and his descendants.

Within Sunni Islam four main schools of law took shape. Alongside the legal schools, Sufi mysticism developed. In the modern era both reform movements and Salafi movements, which seek to return to the Islam of the first generations, have emerged.

How It Spread and Grew

🗺️ Maps of how the five largest religions spread →

• Rapid conquests: within Islam's first century the caliphates conquered huge territories from Spain to Central Asia. Conversion was gradual: non-Muslims ("protected peoples", dhimmis) could keep their religion in exchange for a special tax (jizya), and many converted over centuries, partly to improve their status.
• Trade: Muslim merchants brought the faith to Indonesia, Malaysia and East and West Africa without military conquest. Indonesia today has the world's largest Muslim population.
• Sufi orders spread Islam in India, Africa and Central Asia.
• Today: growth comes mainly from a young population with high birth rates.

Influence on the World

The Islamic Golden Age (8th–13th centuries) produced advances in mathematics (algebra; the numerals that originated in India and reached Europe through the Muslim world, which is why they are called "Arabic" there), astronomy, medicine (Ibn Sina) and philosophy (Ibn Rushd). Scholars in the Muslim world, including Christians and Jews, preserved and translated Greek works, and these translations influenced science and philosophy in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Islamic architecture, calligraphy and poetry are a central part of humanity's cultural heritage.

What Draws Believers (Strengths)

• A simple, clear belief in one God, with no intermediaries.
• A clear daily framework of prayer, fasting and charity.
• A sense of equality and brotherhood, especially visible at the hajj, where all the men wear the same simple white garments (ihram).
• A strong emphasis on family, community and charity.

Criticism and Challenges

• Rights of women and minorities: critics point out that where sharia is state law, women, non-Muslims and LGBTQ people are harmed: restrictions on women, death sentences for apostasy or blasphemy, and discrimination against minorities.
• Internal debate: many Muslims themselves reject these interpretations and stress that they reflect local customs and political regimes rather than the religion.
• Internal conflict: the Sunni–Shia divide today has a geopolitical dimension, for example between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Human Life, War and Peace – What It Teaches

• "Whoever kills a soul... it is as if he had killed all of mankind, and whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved all of mankind" (Quran 5:32, echoing the Mishnah).
• War: classical Islamic law permits war, but with rules: no harming women, children, the elderly or clergy, and no destruction of trees and crops.
• Suicide attacks: Islam forbids suicide. Most religious scholars have rejected the extremists' justification of suicide attacks.
• Punishments: classical sharia includes corporal and capital punishments (hudud). How to apply them is disputed and varies by country.
• Compared with other religions: Sanctity of Life Across Religions

Religion, Power and Violence

Expansion by force and violence in the name of religion:

• Conquests: Islam's early expansion was largely by military conquest.
• Jihad: the word means "striving". In classical Islamic law the concept deals mainly with warfare, which the law restricted with rules, such as the ban on harming women and children. A widespread tradition, especially in Sufism, distinguishes the "greater jihad", an inner moral struggle, from the "lesser jihad", warfare. Scholars, Muslim scholars among them, note that the hadith it rests on is considered weak and does not appear in the authoritative collections.
• Historical episodes: history also includes forced conversions and persecution of minorities, for example under the Almohads in Spain and North Africa.
• Modern terrorism: groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS interpreted jihad as a licence for terror. Most of their victims were Muslims, and ISIS also committed genocide against the Yazidis.

When Muslims were the victims:

• When the First Crusade took Jerusalem (1099), the crusaders massacred the city's inhabitants, Muslims and Jews.
• In Srebrenica, Bosnia, about 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered in July 1995. International courts ruled it a genocide.
• In Myanmar, since 2017 more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh after a military operation. UN investigators described it as ethnic cleansing.
• In Xinjiang, China, according to human rights organisations and researchers, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been held in detention camps (by some estimates, more than a million). China denies this and calls them training centres.
• In 2019 a far-right terrorist murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The other side:

• Governments and leading clerics across the Muslim world condemned these groups as contrary to Islam, for example in the "Open Letter to al-Baghdadi" of September 2014, initially signed by 122 Muslim scholars.
• Muslim Spain saw long periods of coexistence with Jews and Christians, although historians debate how harmonious it was.
• The Quran states: "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256).