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Islam: Early Islam
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Islam is an internally diverse religious system in which many traditions and ways of belonging to the community of Muslims coexist. As Devin DeWeese has shown, Islam became a central aspect of the communal identities of Muslims in the Golden Horde. Conversion was remembered in sacralized narratives that defined conversion as the moment that the community was constituted. Shrines of saints served to Islamize the very territory on which Muslims lived. Until the articulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of modern national identities among the various Muslim communities of the Russian empire, communal identities were a composite of ethnic, genealogical, and religious identities, inextricably intertwined.
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In Islam there is only one god, although there are other supernatural beings, like Satan and angels. The religion is defined by the Koran, believed to be the word of God, and a large collection of striptures from the hand of humans. To the latter group belongs especially the hadiths (acts and sayings of Muhammad and other early Muslims), early theological works, law scriptures (Sharia) and commentatory scriptures which are still being produced.
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Arabic identity, nationalism and Islam - The spread of Islam necessarily spread Arabic culture, language and customs. The Qur'an is written in Arabic and may not be translated for religious practice, so that knowledge of Arabic is important for all Muslims. As the empire spread, the Arabic language became the medium of local pre-existing cultures. In particular, early Arab culture and poetry owes a great debt to Persian. The term "Arab" became associated with speakers of Arabic rather than being confined only to the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, though today it is sometimes used with reference to the Bedouin of Arabia and and at other times used to refer to all Arab-speaking peoples. The Arab empire was in many ways dependent on foreigners, who were integrated into it to varying degrees.
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Islamization usually involved an increasing familiarity with the basic texts and teachings of Islam and an awareness of being part of a larger community of believers. In contrast to early expansion in the Middle East, where monotheistic faiths like Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism were well established, much of this later growth was in areas where faith traditions were polytheistic or naturalistic. As Muslim teachers and merchants interacted with local rulers, they helped transform political systems that had been based on divine rule or rulers with special naturalistic powers and obligations. In the courts of Java and West Africa, as well as among the shamans of Central Asia, the coming of Islam changed both political structures and popular faith. Often this involved incorporating local beliefs and customs that created distinctive local Muslim communities within the intercontinental community of believers.
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The dual ethics of Islam are not as simple as a separate set of ethics for the non-Muslim. What makes political Islam so effective is that it has two stages of ethics for the non-Muslim. It has the ethics of the Meccan Koran (early, religious text), and the ethics of the Medinan Koran (later, political text). Islam can treat the non-Muslim well, but as an inferior (Koran of Mecca), or treat him as an enemy of Allah (Koran of Medina). Both actions are sanctioned as sacred in the Koran. Islamic apologists always refer to the Meccan ethics.
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As a historical phenomenon, Islam originated in Arabia in the early 7th century.[21] Islamic texts depict Judaism and Christianity as prophetic successor traditions to the teachings of Abraham. The Qur'an calls Jews and Christians "People of the Book" (ahl al-kitāb), and distinguishes them from polytheists. Muslims believe that parts of the previously revealed scriptures, the Tawrat (Torah) and the Injil (Gospels), had become distorted—either in interpretation, in text, or both.[7]
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Early Islam