South of the Roman and Sassanid Persian states lived desert nomads, Arab and North African bedouins. Although their cultural background was slightly more sophisticated than that of the northern "barbarians," they were nonetheless quite primitive by the standards of Rome or Persia. The Arabians worshiped a large number of gods and spirits. Each tribe had its own god, and there was constant rivalry among them. They had been touched to some degree by the religions of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity as well.
Muhammad, the most influential Arab in history, was born in A.D. 570 at Mecca. During a lifetime that ended in A.D. 632, he developed religious ideas that are contained in the Koran and that gave rise to the religion of Islam. These ideas brought political and cultural lessons to diverse peoples living as far west as Morocco and as far east as the borders of China. Islam has joined Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism as one of the major religions of the world.
An understanding of the major tenets of Islam can help us understand the conflict between Muslims and Jews in the modern world, as well as the conflicts within the greater Islamic world itself. At the same time, we need to recognize the contributions this international culture has made to the mainstream of world civilization. As an assimilator, commentator, and expander of the knowledge of classical antiquity, and as a conduit through which ideas of the Indian subcontinent passed westward to Europe, Islam's role has been major.
Islam has provided meaning to countless millions of people who have sought to understand their relationship to God. From approximately A.D. 900 until about A.D. 1300, the Islamic civilization rivaled those of Byzantium and China for supremacy. And for centuries thereafter, interaction between the Islamic world and that of the West produced a tension that helped transform the West into a world power.
As you read the materials assigned for Islam, look for those theological elements that helped teach these diverse peoples; look too for evidence that Islam was at first a vigorous, dynamic culture that thrived on the assimilation of others' ideas. We can see once again here the remarkable transformation that took place when ideas that originated in Greece, Rome, or Persia passed through the minds of the Arabs.
Some historians have seen the victory of Islam over much of what had been the empires of Alexander the Great and the Romans as the final response of the East (Asia) to the West (Europe). It is interesting to see how many of the cultural traditions of the Middle East (going clear back to the Sumerians) have been preserved in Islamic culture: the fatalism that one reads in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh survives in the Islamic belief that all that happens is "the will of Allah"; the ziggurats of Mesopotamia find modern-day extensions in the minarets of the Muslim world; the uncompromising monotheism of Islam has antecedents in the monotheism of Persian Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic/Jewish Yahwism.
A History of World Societies, Chapter 9
