Islam spreads outside the Middle East

The “spread” of Islam brings two thoughts to mind: one is the spread of Muslim people and Islamic influence and rule, and the other is the spread of the faith of Islam by men and women converting to become Muslims. I want to look at both aspects here. Only a minority of Muslims in the world today live in what Europeans call the “Middle East.” There are more Indonesian Muslims in the world than all the Arabs combined. How did this come about? How did a way of life that grew out of the Semitic heartlands come to influence the lives of some 20% of the world’s population today?

We have seen the way in which Muslim rule spread at a phenomenal pace, until one-hundred-and-twenty years after the death of Muhammad Muslims ruled from Spain and Morocco in the west, to Samarqand and the River Indus in the east, from Armenia and Azerbaijan in the north, to Yemen in the south. Like all other political empires in the world, this had been spread by force of arms and negotiated takes-over. What about the people who lived in these territories and now found themselves under Muslim rule? The “protected people”

The majority of those people who came under Muslim rule during the first century were Christians, with Zoroastrians in Persia and Jewish communities in Spain and elsewhere. The Qur’an has a special name for these communities; they are the Ahl al- Kitab, the People of the Book. This term is applied to four communities in the Qur’an [Q. 2:62; 5:69; 22:17]: the Jews and Christians are named explicitly, then the group called the “Magians” is held to be the monotheistic Zoroastrians of Persia, and finally the “Sabeans,” which is generally held to be a reference to the Mandaeans, the ancient followers of John the Baptist (the Prophet Yahya), who were to be found mainly in Iraq. This is a recognition that these communities were founded by true Prophets of God, who, in the case of Jews and Christians explicitly, had been given earlier revelations and had established ways of living them out (shari’a). Thus, they may be thought of as “the People of the Earlier Revelations.” By extension, at periods of Muslim rule in India under the Mughals, those Hindus who followed the Vedas were accorded the same status. The Ahl al-Kitab living under Muslim rule in the historic Islamic empires had certain rights and privileges. They had the right to continue in the practice of their faith “in private,” namely in their homes and places of worship, but not “in public.” They had the right to hand on their religion to their children but not to seek converts. They could keep and maintain their existing religious buildings but not build new ones. They could be employed in the administration of the Empire but they could not be part of the decision-making executive. They could be servants to Muslims but not have a Muslim servant. They were to be protected by the Muslim army, indeed they were called “the protected people” (dhimmi) and were to pay a military tax (jizya) to help support it. The army was the extension of the Muslim executive and therefore the Ahl al-Kitab were not allowed to serve in it; this had serious consequences at times of expansion because only the soldiers and the rulers were allowed a share of the booty (spoils of war), which was a major source of income for the period of the Umayyad Empire.