Part 8. Islam: Revelation, Empire and Divisions

Islam did not arise in a vacuum. In the early seventh century Arabia lay between two exhausted empires, Sasanian Iran and Byzantium, each with an imperial church and each watching an apocalyptic horizon. Inside Arabia, a commercial boom at Mecca…

The prophet who began as a “warner” to his own tribe died as the head of a confederacy covering almost all of Arabia. The library tells his story in sharply different registers: Karen Armstrong’s sympathetic history, Deepak Chopra’s novel, A.…

Islam rests on two textual pillars: the Quran, held to be the literal Word of God recited by Muhammad, and the sunna, the Prophet’s words and deeds transmitted as hadith. How each took shape, and how far either can serve…

Muhammad died in 632 without a successor who was also a prophet. The thirty years that followed (the age of the four rashidun, the “rightly guided” caliphs) were a time of conquest abroad and civil war at home. In Karen…

The Shiat Ali, the “party of Ali”, began as a political faction in the civil wars described in the previous chapter. It became a religious tradition with its own sacred history, its own theory of authority and its own expectation…

Between 661 and 1258 the caliphate went from a tribal chieftaincy in Damascus to a Sasanian-style monarchy in Baghdad, and then to a symbolic office over a mosaic of Turkish, Iranian and Arab military states. The library’s sources agree that…

Between the Abbasid revolution of 750 and the tenth century, Sunni Islam acquired the intellectual architecture it still has today: four recognised schools of law, a dominant theological method (Ash’arism), a philosophical tradition (falsafa) that was pushed out of the…

Twelver Shi’ism withdrew from politics to wait for a Hidden Imam. The “Sevener” line did the opposite. It produced a secret missionary network, a counter-caliphate in Cairo, a mountain state in Iran whose ruler abolished the religious law, a new…

Sufism (tasawwuf) appears in the library’s sources in two forms at once. It is an interior discipline aimed at the annihilation of the ego in God, and it is a social institution of lodges, masters and orders that held Islamic…

Between 1500 and 1700 three Muslim states used firearms and centralised bureaucracies to rule more tightly than any earlier Islamic polity. Karen Armstrong calls the period “Imperial Islam (1500-1700)”. She argues that these empires, unlike the Abbasid court, “all had…

From the eighteenth century onward, Islamic reform movements became political projects: a desert kingdom, a mass brotherhood, a clerical republic and a transnational jihad. The sources for this history differ in kind. Karen Armstrong writes a sympathetic scholarly survey. Kim…

Qur’an 33:40 calls Muhammad khatam an-nabiyyin, the “seal of the prophets”. Most Muslims read the verse as closing revelation. Every movement in this chapter reopened that question in some way: by announcing a “gate” to a hidden Imam, a new…