The religious and cultural tradition of Islam came to be identified as the legacy of Muhammad the son of cAbdallah. Muhammad, as depicted in the Muslim narrative of Islamic origins, was an inhabitant of the western Arabian town of Mecca. According to those sources, in the early decades of the seventh century Muhammad embarked upon a prophetic career, preaching faith in the single God and articulating to his followers God's revelations to him. Having provoked the wrath of the leaders of the pagan society in which he lived, Muhammad and his small band of followers fled to the oasis of Yathrib some 200 miles north of Mecca in the year 622, an event known to the Muslim tradition as the hijra and which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. In Yathrib, also known as Medina (from madinat al-nabi, “the city of the prophet”), Muhammad first established a Muslim umma or “community.” Over the final decade of his life, Muhammad continued to receive revelations which after his death in 632 were collected into the Koran as we now know it, and gradually brought the inhabitants of virtually the whole of the Arabian peninsula to embrace Islam and to acknowledge the political supremacy of his umma.

The Muslim tradition thus clearly situates the origins of the faith in an Arabian context.

Islamic law, both as a general ideal and as a body of concrete guidelines for social behavior, functioned as a powerful “glue” in the Islamic societies of the medieval Near East. The importance of the law was a product of a number of the developments which we have been tracing – for example, the evolution of Islam in a world of multiple faith traditions and through a sometimes tense, sometimes creative dialogue with them, since law was understood to be something which attached to the individual, not from social rank or place of habitation, but through his or her membership in one religious community or another. Even more important was the emergence of the ulama as the principal locus of Muslim religious authority. The political fragmentation of the umma may actually have fostered a fixation on the sharica as a focal point of Muslim identity, since the cosmopolitan ulama constituted the most immediate and visible reminder of the persistently compelling ideal of Muslim unity.

Even so, the changed circumstances of the Middle Period saw significant developments in the social experience of Islamic law. By the beginning of the Middle Period, after several centuries of development, the Sunni madhahib were fairly well established – the four which have survived into modern times (the Shafici, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Maliki), as well as a number of others which petered out at various times.

As we have stressed, the Umayyad caliphs have been treated somewhat unfairly by later Muslim tradition. They were dismissed by some Muslims as impious usurpers, and by the middle of the eighth century, there is evidence of deep-seated dissatisfaction with their rule. The fault lines were many and overlapping. Non-Arab converts, still limited in number but constituting an increasingly large component of Muslim society and the army, resented the social inferiority which they experienced. Some of the dissatisfaction was now effectively local or regional, as Iraqi Arabs, or those settled in more remote provinces, chafed at domination by the Syrian soldiers who had formed the core of Umayyad support. Competition among the Arab elite reached critical proportions, too, as factions identified as one tribal grouping or another contended for power and access to the wealth of the state. In particular, violence between the broad tribal alliances of Qays and Yemen reached endemic proportions, and finally consumed the Umayyad state itself, precipitating the murder of the caliph al-Walid II by a group of Yemenis, and a movement of bloody vengeance on behalf of Qays led by the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II.

Above all, the middle of the eighth century was a period of turmoil in the realm of ideas, values, and expectations, as the inhabitants of the Near East witnessed and participated in a process, inflamed by millenarian dreams, of disruptive struggle over the ordering of their political and religious worlds.

From the perspective of the non-Muslim communities of the Near East, the three centuries which followed the cAbbasid revolution were decisive in two respects. In the first place, it was in this period that the non-Muslims were reduced to minority status in most areas. In the second, with the fuller articulation of Islamic law, the conventions and procedures which would govern relations between the non-Muslim communities and the Islamic state, and which would institutionalize the political and social inferiority of the former, took on a normative shape. Viewed from such a perspective, it is difficult to characterize the period as anything other than one of overall decline. That perspective and that characterization, however, can obscure a more complex reality. In the first place, non-Muslims experienced life under Muslim regimes in different ways: the Jewish experience, for example, was not exactly the same as the Zoroastrian, despite certain common patterns. Moreover, the dhimmi communities were hardly moribund, and in many instances responded vigorously to the challenges posed to them by the new dominant Muslim culture.

The Islamic societies of the Near East in this period were deeply multicultural, and so there were plenty of opportunities for significant contact and exchange across the sectarian divide. The Islamic world-view, in which Islam was simply one (albeit the final and most perfect) of many distinct faith traditions, perhaps inherently raised the question of what a conversation with those other traditions would produce.

Judaism

The religion of the people of Israel played a critical role in the religious matrix of late antiquity. Jews constituted a significant minority of the population in many Mediterranean towns, and Judaism had an impact on the religious lives of many non-Jews as well. It was out of Judaism that Christianity first arose, and at least partly through a bitter dispute with its mother faith that the new religion defined itself. As we shall see, the relationship between Judaism and Islam was just as close. Nor were the older pagan traditions immune from the influence of the first of the major monotheistic faiths. Nonetheless, reconstructing the history of Judaism in the Near East in the centuries before and after the rise of Islam is difficult, given the nature of the surviving historical record; much of the story has to be pieced together from sources hostile to the Jews and their faith.

The God of Israel was known throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, thanks to the widespread dispersal of his worshipers. In part their dispersion resulted from the successive deportations of Jews from Palestine, under the Assyrians and Babylonians and, in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE, the Romans. By the rise of Islam, for example, the Jewish community of Babylonia was well over one thousand years old.

The murder of cAli in 661 and the establishment of the caliphate of his rival Mucawiya, cousin of cUthman and Arab governor of Syria, is generally taken to mark the advent of the Umayyad dynasty, the first Islamic state built explicitly on the claims of one family (the Banu Umayya) to the right to rule. Mucawiya was succeeded in 680 by his son, Yazid, and then by members of collateral branches of the Umayyad family. In fact, however, the political situation was more complex, and its complexity reflects and is central to the process through which Islam emerged. The third caliph cUthman had appointed many members of his own clan to important administrative posts, provoking considerable opposition among Muslims who resented the favors granted to the family, particularly as many members of the Banu Umayya had been late and reluctant converts to Islam. cUthman's policy may have extended to efforts to ensure that he was succeeded as caliph by one of his sons. If that is the case, then the dynastic policies of the Umayyads could be regarded as having commenced earlier than the reign of Mucawiya, with the regime of cAli constituting a mere interregnum. On the other hand, no Umayyad “state” was firmly established and widely recognized for some time.

This book constitutes an attempt to describe and understand the slow emergence of a distinctively Islamic tradition over the centuries which followed the death of that tradition's founder, Muhammad ibn cAbdallah, in 632 CE. It is not a narrative history, although its analytical approach is (I hope) historical. I have cast the central questions as those of religious identity and authority. The question of what it means to be a Muslim requires, I believe, a dynamic answer. Had the question been posed to Muhammad, his answer (if indeed he would have understood the question) would have been quite different than that of a jurist in Baghdad in the ninth century, or of a Sufi mystic in Cairo in the fifteenth. From a historical perspective, no answer is better than any other, and none has any value except against the background of the larger historical factors that produced it. In the multicultural Near East, those factors have always included faith traditions other than Islam, and so I have tried throughout to give some account of the complex ties which, from the very first, have bound Muslim identities to those of Jews, Christians, and others.

The target audience for this book is quite broad, and therefore the target is, paradoxically, perhaps more difficult to strike squarely than with, say, a scholarly monograph of the usual sort, or a conventional introduction to “Islam”.

With the full development of sectarian movements within the Islamic umma, the stage was set for the crystallization of a specifically Sunni Muslim identity, which took shape largely in response to the threat of sectarian fragmentation. Khariji Islam survived in peripheral areas of the Islamic world, but in the central Near East in this period posed little threat. It did play some role in the revolt of African slaves (the “Zanj”) in southern Iraq in the late ninth century. This rebellion was driven by the appalling conditions in which slaves worked harvesting natron in the region's extensive and virtually impenetrable marshes, but it also relied heavily on its charismatic instigator, an enigmatic figure named Muhammad ibn cAli. The Khariji slogan la hukma illa lillah, “judgment is God's alone,” appeared on Muhammad's banners and coins which were minted in his name. But Muhammad was an opportunist, drawing on support wherever he could find it – at one point he claimed cAlid descent, and unsuccessfully sought an alliance with the Ismacili leader Hamdan Qarmat, whose name survived in that of the Qarmatians. As a result, the ideological orientation of the Zanj rebellion is somewhat confused. From hindsight, perhaps the most important aspect of the Zanj revolt was simply its timing, in the late ninth century, at just the moment that an active Ismacili movement appeared, the Imams most widely recognized by the Shica were disappearing, and the fragmentation of effective political authority called into question the precise significance of the cAbbasid caliphate.

It is conventional to speak of a “Sunni revival” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. According to this view, militantly Sunni regimes such as that of the Saljuqs responded to the challenge of the “Shici century,” that period between the mid-tenth and mid-eleventh centuries when much of the central Muslim world was dominated by Shici regimes (the Fatimids, the Buyids) of varying stripes, by vigorously re-asserting – reviving – Sunni identity and claims to dominance. Like many grand historical themes, this one is perhaps a bit too neat and simple. On a political level, for example, the Saljuq seizure of power in Baghdad was not a restoration of a pre-Buyid political patterns. It is true that the Buyid amirs, whom the Saljuqs replaced, were Shicis, but their power had been in decline for some time previously. Moreover, relations between them and the cAbbasid caliphs, still the symbol of Sunni legitimacy, were often cordial; indeed, as the Saljuq armies approached Baghdad in 1055, the caliph intervened with the Saljuq leader, Toghril Beg, seeking protection for the Buyid amir al-Malik al-Rahim. Relations between the Saljuq leader and the cAbbasid caliph were hardly warm at the outset: Toghril Beg had been in Baghdad for thirteen months before he met the caliph.

If the notion of a Sunni “revival” is in some ways misleading, there were nonetheless extremely important developments at work that shaped the character that Sunni Islam would carry into the modern period.

Religious knowledge (cilm) was perhaps the central cultural lynchpin of the Islamic tradition and of the social patterns in which that tradition was experienced in the Middle Period. This knowledge was embedded in the rich and inter-related body of texts – principally the Koran, collections of hadith, legal treatises and textbooks, and commentaries on them – which formed the substantive basis for the training of those scholars who were known as the ulama. Our principal concern here, however, is less with the intellectual parameters of this cilm than with the social uses to which it was put, and with the way in which these uses helped to define Muslim identities and the nature of the ulama's authority.

For the ulama, it was the active process of transmitting religious knowledge that was critical. As we have seen, the ulama were in fact socially quite diverse, and the only thing that marked them as a distinctive group was their command of these highly valued texts, and their control of access to them. In part this was simply a matter of education, that is, of transmitting to students a familiarity with essential texts which was necessary to the proper discharge of the responsibilities they might incur upon appointment to a range of offices – for example, that of the qadi, or that of professor (mudarris) in the myriad religious institutions which sprang up in medieval Islamic cities.

Virtually all accounts of the rise of an Islamic state and then empire in the seventh century stress its extraordinary character, the suddenness of the appearance on the scene of the Muslim Arabs and the wholly unexpected nature of their success – what Marshall Hodgson referred to as “a breach in cultural continuity unparalleled among the great civilizations.” Explanatory models for the Muslim success – at least those which do not focus upon the Arabs themselves, on the demographic, economic, or religious factors propelling them forward – tend to look for causes in the chaotic developments in the Near East in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In this, of course, there lies the danger of an easy retrospective teleology, of the assumption that the Near Eastern civilizations experienced on the eve of the Muslim conquests a crisis which weakened them fatally, and so rendered those conquests (or something like them) virtually inevitable. The cautious historian should eschew such a dramatic viewpoint, tempting as it may be. On the other hand, conditions in the Near East in the early seventh century were indeed highly charged and unstable. From a broader perspective, they demonstrate, not the inevitability of the Muslim conquests, but the degree to which those events marked a stage in a longer-term process by which the Arabs were drawn into the cultural orbit of the Fertile Crescent and surrounding territories and, in their Muslim guise, contributed to its evolution.