A Very Brief History of Islam

By Lori Kenschaft

October 2011

All Rights Reserved.

If you wish to use or distribute this text in any way, for any purpose, please contact me first.

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I have given several versions of this talk. I originally prepared it for the adult religious education program in my congregation, the First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Arlington, and this version was presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading. If you would like to discuss my sharing something along these lines with another audience, please contact me.

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I would like to start today by acknowledging the absurdity of this venture. There are something like 1.4 billion Muslim people in this world. They live in about fifty countries that are majority Muslim, from Morocco to Indonesia, as well as in dozens of other countries. And Islam, the religion, has existed for 1400 years. In the next 90 minutes I propose to give you a history of 1.4 billion people over a time span of 14 centuries. That is absurd.

I am also well aware of the old but true adage that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. What I am offering you today is inevitably an interpretation. I have had to make many judgments both about what is true and about what is important. Other people would make different judgments. Indeed, I’m sure that in a couple years I would make some different judgments.

But if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I think ignorance is even more dangerous. My goal is to share with you some information and some ways of thinking that I hope you will find helpful as you try to make sense of the world we live in.

My story has four chapters. First I’m going to talk about Muhammad, his teachings, and the community that formed around him. Second, I’m going to talk about the tumultuous years after Muhammad’s death and the creation of a Muslim community that could survive without him. Third, I’m going to talk about the evolution of the three big traditions within Islam – Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi – during the time of the Muslim empires. Finally, I’m going to talk about Islam in the modern period, which for our purposes today starts in the sixteenth century.

Muhammad was born in Mecca. At the time, the Arabian peninsula was a pretty unruly place, with a lot of competing tribes and no overarching government. These tribes were often at war with each other, and many of them also raided trade caravans to supplement the meager livelihood they could draw from the desert.

Mecca was dominated by a tribe known as the Quraysh. The Quraysh were strong enough to enforce peace not just in Mecca, but also in the surrounding area. Mecca was therefore a trading center, a place where all the tribes came to do business because they knew the Quraysh were strong enough to enforce the truce and keep them from being attacked.

Mecca was also a religious center. The kaba already existed, and according to local tradition it had been built by Abraham, the same Abraham that we know from the Hebrew scriptures. Mecca and the Arabian peninsula were a place of great religious diversity. There were Jews and Christians, though of course they were somewhat different than the types of Jews and Christians we have nowadays. There were also many different types of polytheists.

The Quraysh encouraged everyone to keep totems of their deities at the kaba, and to come there to worship. According to tradition, there were even totems for Jesus and Mary. There were totems inside the kaba, on top of the kaba, around the kaba, and the Quraysh protected the kaba as a holy site for everyone.

Mecca also hosted regular poetry festivals. At the time, almost everyone in the Arabian peninsula was illiterate, but there was a very rich oral culture. Composing and reciting oral poetry was the quintessential art form, and people often gathered to listen to the great poets after a day in the market.

Muhammad was born into this world somewhere around the year 570. He was born into a poor family known as the banu Hashim. Muhammad’s father died before he was born and his mother died when he was six, so he was raised by his grandfather and uncle. He was probably illiterate, like most people of his time.

When Muhammad was about twenty he went to work for a trader named Khadijah, a woman who was significantly older than he was. A few years later Khadijah proposed marriage and Muhammad accepted. By all accounts they had a good relationship. They had four daughters and two sons, but both of the boys died as toddlers and only one of the daughters, Fatima, lived long enough to have children of her own. Khadijah continued to work as a trader and merchant, which enabled Muhammad to spend a lot of his time praying and meditating.

One day when Muhammad was about forty years old, he was meditating in a cave above Mecca and something happened. He told Khadijah that the angel Gabriel had come to him and told him to “Recite!” – to recite words that the angel was bringing to him from God, from Allah. Muhammad wasn’t sure what to make of this experience, but Khadijah believed that it was real, that the angel really had brought him a revelation from God.

Muhammad kept having revelations, and a little community began to form around him. Muhammad preached a very pure form of monotheism. God is One, he said. There is only one God. Do not worship anything other than God.

I think it is very important to understand that Muhammad did not see himself as starting a new religion. Instead, he saw himself as a reformer, bringing people back to the true religion of God, the true religion of Abraham. Muhammad believed that the Jews and Christians of his time had drifted away from monotheism, and he often said that the same religion was revealed in the Torah, the Gospels, and his own revelations.

There were many prophets, he explained, but they all came from the one God. Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Elijah, Jonah – they all brought the same message. Worship the one God. Do not worship anything other than God. Treat each other kindly and generously and with justice. All people are equal in the eyes of God. God is compassionate and merciful, but God will hold us accountable for our actions.

As you might imagine, the leaders of the Quraysh did not like this message. Mecca was wealthy, and the Quraysh were wealthy, because Mecca was a place where all the tribes could come. Jews, Christians, and polytheists mingled in the market, at the poetry festivals, and around the kaba. The peace of Mecca was founded on the principle that all religions are equally good. And here was this upstart proclaiming the supremacy of his one God and denouncing the tribal deities as idols.

Worse yet, he was getting a lot of followers, especially among the rabble. Muhammad preached that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God. He preached that all of us will be judged at the end of time and called to account for the good and evil we have done. He preached against greed and hoarding, and urged rich people to share their good fortune with widows and orphans, poor people and slaves.

This message of spiritual equality and practical compassion appealed to many people, but especially to women, slaves, and the poor. But Muhammad’s followers also included some wealthy merchants and some renowned soldiers, which was disturbing in another way.

It is sort of a truism that the powers-that-be don’t like having a prophet in their own back yard. Not surprisingly, the Quraysh elders decided that they needed to stomp out Muhammad’s movement. They tried to intimidate his followers, and when that didn’t work they got violent. Some of Muhammad’s followers were beaten, and some were tied up and left all day in the Arabian sun. Two were killed.

Eventually some people decided to kill Muhammad himself. When Muhammad learned about this plot he sped up his plans to leave Mecca and move to an oasis town called Yathrib. The people of Yathrib had invited Muhammad to live there and serve as an arbitrator among its various tribes, which were not getting along with each other. Yathrib later became known as Medina, the city of the prophet.

For the next eight years there was constant conflict between Medina and Mecca. Why is a matter of interpretation. The people of Medina said it was because the Quraysh were trying to exterminate them and they were fighting in self-defense. The people of Mecca probably said it was because raiding parties from Medina kept attacking caravans near Mecca. The people of Medina argued that they had to attack the caravans, because they had to do anything they could to weaken the Quraysh.

Besides, the people of Medina might have added, they had always attacked caravans. It was very difficult to live just on what you could grow in an oasis, if you didn’t sometimes take what you could from a caravan. This was part of their tradition. The people of Quraysh probably acknowledged that tradition, but also probably thought that the raids were getting a lot more frequent and audacious since the people of Medina came under the influence of that nuisance Muhammad. As usual when two groups are in conflict, there were more than two sides to this story.

As the years went by, more and more of the Arab tribes affiliated themselves with Medina, swore allegiance to Muhammad, and took on the practices of monotheism. The Quraysh promised peace in and near Mecca, but what Muhammad aspired to was something bigger. He promised peace for everyone who was affiliated with his community, the umma. If you were part of the umma, then you were safe from attack from every other member of the umma, no matter where you went.

This was a pretty appealing vision. It was especially appealing as Muhammad’s forces grew and made it clear that they considered any unaffiliated tribe potentially an ally of the Quraysh. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And you don’t want to be against us.

Finally, in the year 630, the people of Medina conquered Mecca. Or maybe the word “conquer” isn’t the right one. Everyone expected that when a tribe conquered its enemy it would kill the men and enslave the women and children. That’s just what happened. Only it wasn’t what happened in Mecca. There was no slaughter and no enslavement.

Instead, Muhammad removed all the tribal deities from the kaba, and prayed there. And he announced that all the people of Mecca were fully members of the umma, with all the rights and privileges of community membership.

Some of his followers protested. After all, these people had been oppressing and killing them for twenty years. Some of these people had even tried to kill Muhammad. But Muhammad was firm. If the people of Mecca said that they believed in the one God, then they belonged to the umma. And now all the people of Mecca said they believed in the one God.

Within just a few weeks, Muhammad started to give people from Mecca positions of authority and responsibility. We all believe in the one God, he said. We are all equal. We are all one people.

You may have noticed that I have not used the words “Muslim” or “Islam” in telling this story. I believe it is anachronistic to refer to people as Muslims during the lifetime of Muhammad. They usually did not call themselves Muslims. They generally called themselves mu’minun, or believers, and they spoke of being members of the umma, or community. The people right around Muhammad, the people who knew him and interacted with him, were called his companions. But the larger circle were simply believers.

Believers in what? The basic answer was the one God, the God of Abraham. As time went on, Muhammad identified five practices and five beliefs as the essence of his teaching. The five practices are now known as the five pillars of Islam.

To be a good believer, you need to pray. Initially Muhammad instructed believers to pray in the direction of Jerusalem, which is what Jews did. Later he distinguished his movement by telling believers to pray in the direction of Mecca, in the direction of the kaba.

To be a good believer, you also need to fast. Muhammad probably learned about fasting from the Jewish community of Mecca, which fasted on Yom Kippur and other holidays. Muhammad told his followers to fast during the holy month of Ramadan, which was when the first revelation came to him.

To be a good believer, you need to give systematically of your wealth to those who are in need – specifically to widows, orphans, and the poor. The Arabic word is zakat, which comes from a root word meaning purity. Zakat is sometimes translated as tax or charity, but those words do not express its religious dimension. In its spirit, zakat is much like the Jewish practice of tzedakah, the religious obligation to share your wealth and good fortune with others. In practice, zakat is usually paid to a central authority, which uses the revenues to help the needy. Typically the zakat might be about two percent of your wealth each year.

To be a good believer, you need to do a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life, if you physically and financially can. Muhammad did his pilgrimage, or hajj, two years after conquering Mecca. He ritually re-enacted important chapters from the life of Abraham. Many of these actions were already familiar to his followers, for they had been among the ritual observances near the kaba since before Muhammad was born. But Muhammad codified them, explained their significance, and set a template that is now followed by nearly three million people each year.

Finally, to be a good believer, you need to say the shahada. You need to say, with intention, the words, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s messenger.” Both the words and the intention behind them are essential. But the creed, if that’s what we want to call it, is very simple.

These five pillars of Islam are all actions. Even the shahada has to be spoken, not just believed. Scholars of religion talk about orthodoxy, which is correct belief, and orthopraxy, which is correct action. Christianity is focused on orthodoxy – you are a Christian if you have the correct beliefs. Judaism is considered a quintessentially orthopraxic religion – you are a Jew if you do the correct rituals. Of course, Christians care a little about what you do, and Jews care a little about what you believe, but the emphasis is decidedly different.

Like Judaism, Islam is on the orthopraxy side of the spectrum. The five pillars of Islam are all actions. If you do these actions, you are a good believer.
Muhammad also, however, identified five basic beliefs.

First and most importantly, believers believe in one God and the oneness of God. This was, of course, a familiar belief for Jews. It also, you may be interested to know, appealed to many Christians in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. Many of the local Christians were rather skeptical of trinitarianism and all the convoluted arguments and doctrinal disputes it created. They tended towards what we might call unitarianism. So when Muhammad said that God is one, not three, unified, not divided, and that Jesus was a prophet but not God, he actually made sense to a lot of the local Christians.

Believers also believe in angels. The angel Gabriel brought the revelations to Muhammad. At the end of time the angels will hold the books that tell each of us what we have done with our lives, and why. An angel wrestled with Jacob, and two angels talked with Abraham. The angel Gabriel also told Mary that she was going to have a child, though she had never been with a man. Angels are part of all three Abrahamic traditions.

Believers believe in the prophets. Not just Muhammad, but also Moses, Jesus, and all the other messengers God has sent to humanity.

Believers believe in the scriptures. Not just the revelations to Muhammad, but also the Torah and the Gospels.

And finally, believers believe in the day of judgment. At the end of time, God will weigh our good actions and our bad actions, and will send people who have done good to a paradise of running waters and people who have done evil to suffer in infernal heat.

That’s it. It’s pretty simple. It’s something you can teach to an illiterate Arab nomad in an evening. It helps if the Arab nomad already has a basic sense of the Judeo-Christian world view, but a lot of them did. Like Muhammad, many people of the area grew up hearing stories about Jesus and Mary, Moses and Abraham, Adam and Noah, and various other scriptural figures. You didn’t have to be a Jew or Christian to hear these stories. And you certainly didn’t have to be able to read. People spent a lot of time telling stories and reciting poetry. The ideas that Muhammad was teaching would not be completely foreign to most of his hearers.

Once the Quraysh of Mecca had joined forces with Muhammad, there was no good reason for the remaining Arab tribes to keep their distance. In the next year, all of the holdouts swore fealty to Muhammad and joined his community of believers.

So by the end of 631 Muhammad had unified the Arabian peninsula. He was the religious, political, and military leader of his community. And many of his revelations now addressed the practical problems of his community. He spent most of his time with his people, talking with them, praying with them, and solving problems large and small.

Muhammad’s followers frequently commented on his compassion, gentleness, and wisdom. He seemed to treat everyone with kindness and respect. Unlike many men of his time, he clearly enjoyed talking with women and took seriously women’s thoughts and opinions. He told his followers that they should greet each other with words of peace, and in his own life he seemed to embody peacefulness much of the time.

I can’t tell you why Muhammad’s movement succeeded. Most people who proclaim themselves a prophet do not start a religion that lasts for more than a millennium. The Quraysh were numerous and powerful, and it seems that they should have been able to stamp out this little rebellious movement. The believers took the fact that their community survived, indeed prospered, as a sign of God’s approval.

I can’t say anything about that, one way or the other. But I do think that in some sense Muhammad was real. Many people found him numinous, filled with a sense of something gentle yet powerful and awe-inspiring. I can’t define what it is that makes someone seem God-touched to their contemporaries. But whatever it is, Muhammad had that quality.

Shortly after returning from the hajj, Muhammad took sick, and then he died.

As you can imagine, his death was a shock for the community he had created. Suddenly they were without their center, the person around whom everything had happened. Muhammad had talked with his followers about many things, but he had not said anything about his successor, and no one had dared to ask him what would happen after he died. They had no plan, no vision, no guidance. And the one they were accustomed to ask for guidance was gone.

There were actually two problems here. One was the problem of religious leadership – who would guide the community spiritually? And the other was the problem of political leadership – who would make decisions about the future of the community, preserve its internal order, and protect it against attack? Muhammad had combined both of these roles in one person, but he was the prophet, and many of his followers suspected that it was not a good idea to give such comprehensive powers to a more ordinary man.

When an Arab tribal leader died, the custom was for the elders of the tribe to gather together in a shura, a collective discussion, and select a new leader. Soon after Muhammad died, therefore, a shura formed and chose someone to be what they called a khalifa, a deputy or successor.

Abu Bakr, the man they chose, was Muhammad’s closest friend, the father of Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, and the man Muhammad had asked to lead prayers when he was too sick to do so. Abu Bakr was also a gentle, wise, and devout man, devoted to the community and unquestionably loyal to Muhammad and his vision. If the community wanted someone who would help them heal from the shock of Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr was a good choice.

One important person, however, was not involved in this choice. Muhammad had no sons who survived childhood, but he did have a cousin, named Ali. Ali’s father, Abu Talib, had adopted Muhammad when he was a young orphan and raised Muhammad and Ali practically as brothers. Ali was now married to Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, and he was the father of Muhammad’s young grandsons, Hasan and Hussayn.

Ali was thus Muhammad’s closest male relative, and when the men gathered to discuss the succession Ali was still washing Muhammad’s body and preparing it for burial. He emerged from this sobering ritual to discover that the shura had chosen Abu Bakr to be the community’s new leader, without even consulting with him.

When the news got out, some people felt that Ali had been done wrong. Shouldn’t Ali have inherited Muhammad’s position? Shouldn’t Ali be the khalifa? Apparently Ali and Fatima felt much the same way, since it took them six months to acknowledge Abu Bakr as khalifa.

Many other people, however, felt that Ali should not be the khalifa precisely because he was Muhammad’s closest kin. This community is not a monarchy, they insisted. We are not going to have a dynasty. We will chose our own leaders. The umma was not ever Muhammad’s property, and no one can inherit us. Apparently to prove the point, Abu Bakr disinherited Ali and Fatima from inheriting Muhammad’s worldly estate. The prophet can have no heir, he declared.

Soon Abu Bakr had other problems to contend with. Many of the Arab tribes, when they heard that Muhammad was dead, decided that they no longer owed allegiance to Medina and no longer had to pay zakat, the purifying tax. They had, they believed, sworn fealty to Muhammad as an individual, the same way they might to any Arab sheikh, and Muhammad’s death released them from their oath. Within months, then, the umma began to crumble.

Faced with this existential threat to the community, Abu Bakr declared that secession is treason – once you join the community, you cannot leave it. It was not enough just to believe in the one God. You had to be a member of the one community, the umma. Thus ensued the Riddah Wars, or Apostate Wars, in which the people of Medina quelled the rebellious tribes and re unified the Arabian peninsula.

By this point, the Byzantine empire, with its capital in Constantinople, was beginning to notice that there were some odd things going on down south. The emperor sent a small army to quell this restive territory, but Abu Bakr’s men managed to repel the army and send its remnants home.

Just two years after Abu Bakr became khalifa, he developed a fever and realized he was dying. He had just enough time to say that Umar should be the next khalifa before he died.

Umar was very different from Abu Bakr. A soldier by profession, he was a tall massive man with the heart of a warrior. He had strong opinions and strong emotions, and he often expressed himself in fiery language and dramatic gestures. Umar was uncomfortable with women, and he greatly increased the segregation of the sexes and sought the veiling and seclusion of women.

Umar set himself to strengthening the community in many ways. One of his first priorities was to create a written record of Muhammad’s revelations. Until that point, they had not been written down in any sort of systematic way. Instead, people memorized the revelations and recited them orally, the way Muhammad had.

This approach was not as unreliable in their society as it would be in ours. They had a culture of oral poetry, and people learned from an early age to memorize and recite poetry. Still, Umar realized that if he wanted Muhammad’s revelations to be remembered accurately for centuries, they had better be written down.

Even now, there are people who memorize the Qur’an, and who can trace their verbal lineage, teacher to student, all the way back to Muhammad. But the written Qur’an, the physical book, is also considered an important way to preserve the heritage.

Umar also collected everything that people could remember about Muhammad’s words and actions. Quotes of words that Muhammad had said, in his own voice rather than in a revelation, became the hadith, the sayings. And stories about what Muhammad did became the sunna, the traditions. There are many thousands of hadith and sunna that scholars use to learn about Muhammad and his times and the context in which different parts of the Qur’an were revealed.

In my opinion, this is when it makes sense to start talking about Islam as a religion. The word islam certainly existed before Muhammad was born. Islam meant submission, and its root, s-l-m, was the same root as in the word salaam, or peace. It is also the same root in Hebrew – shalom, peace.

Submitting to God, the word islam implies, brings peace. It brings peace within yourself, in your own soul and spirit, as you let go of the fragmentation and dissonance that can be such a big part of human life. And it brings peace between people, as everyone lives the way God intends us to live.

The word muslim comes from the same root, s-l-m, and it means one who submits. According to Muslim theology, most things in the universe cannot help but submit to God. The trees, the rain, the camels – they can only do what it is in their nature to do. They inevitably follow God’s laws, for God’s laws are nature’s laws.

The same is true of a newborn infant. A baby cannot do anything that is against its nature, and its nature was given to it by God. This is what it means to say that every baby is muslim, every baby does only what God intends.

As we grow older, however, we are given the gift and the burden of free will. We are able to choose what to do. Deep inside us, the Qur’an suggests, we both know what is good and yearn for the good. And yet we are able to choose to do harm to ourselves and to others, sometimes because we are ignorant or misguided, sometimes because we follow our passions rather than our inner wisdom.

Submitting to God means choosing the good. God is infinitely compassionate and merciful, and God wants what is good for humanity. If we all submitted to God’s will, to God’s laws, then we would all have good lives and experience the peace and abundance that God intended us to enjoy.

During Umar’s years, the believers increasingly referred to themselves as Muslims, as people who submit to God. Islam became not just a word, but a proper noun.

Umar also greatly expanded the territory of his community. Indeed, Umar declared that wars of conquest are a form of jihad.

The word jihad literally means “struggle,” and of course there are many kinds of struggle – physical struggles, spiritual struggles, ethical struggles, military struggles. The Qur’an uses the word jihad only rarely, and only to mean fighting in self defense. The people of Medina were at war with the people of Mecca, and the Qur’an urged them to fight in defense of their community.

“Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those who are attacked,” it says. “Had God not defended some people by the might of others, monasteries and churches, synagogues and mosques in which His praise is daily celebrated, would have been utterly destroyed.” (22:39-40)

Notice: Monasteries and churches, synagogues and mosques. This is not just about Islam.

The Qur’an also always holds out the possibility that God will bring peace and good will to former enemies. And it repeatedly tells believers that if their opponents stop fighting, they too must stop. “If they incline to peace, make peace with them, and put your trust in God.” (8:61)

Umar, however, was a warrior, and he took the idea of fighting for the community to another level. The larger the community, the better, he believed.

In the next ten years Umar set siege to the city of Damascus, destroyed the main Byzantine army, and came to rule two-thirds of the Byzantine empire. He conquered the Sassanid empire that had ruled Persia for centuries. He conquered Jerusalem and continued on to Egypt and modern-day Libya. By the time he was done, he ruled more than two million square miles, which was larger than the Roman empire at its peak.

It seems that many people felt that being conquered by Umar was not such a bad thing. His soldiers were highly disciplined, and they did not loot or rape or pillage. Umar insisted that all holy places be treated with respect. When Jerusalem surrendered, Umar gave clear orders:

“… their churches are not to be taken, nor are they to be destroyed, nor are they to be degraded or belittled, neither are their crosses or their money, and they are not to be forced to change their religion, nor is any one of them to be harmed.”

Umar was shocked at the condition of the old Jewish temple, which the Romans had turned into a garbage dump. According to tradition he personally helped clean up the site, with his own hands, and then allowed Jews to worship openly in Jerusalem for the first time since their temple had fallen in 70 C.E.
Wherever the Muslims went, the locals were not required to change their religion or their way of life. If they wanted to convert to Islam, great, and maybe ten percent of the conquered people made that choice. People who were not Muslims were required to pay a special tax, called the jizya, but they did not have to pay the zakat, so that was a financial wash. Generally the jizya was less onerous than the taxes the people had paid to their previous empire.

In return for the jizya, Jews and Christians were exempt from military service and guaranteed both freedom of religion and physical safety. Many Christians considered this a great improvement over the Byzantines, who considered the local forms of Christianity heresy and had periodically tried to enforce their form of orthodoxy on the population. For many reasons, Umar got cooperation from the locals as he challenged the region’s empires.

Umar’s days came to an abrupt end, however, when he was stabbed by a Persian slave. Someone suggested that Umar’s son should be the next khalifa, but Umar rejected that idea vehemently because it smacked of dynasty. Instead Umar gathered six men, told them to choose his successor, and died.

The choice soon narrowed to two candidates. One was Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. The other was Uthman, a wealthy merchant who was one of the richest men in Arabia. Uthman was a member of the Umayyad family and the Quraysh tribe, but he was an early convert who had married two of Muhammad’s daughters. He was well known for his piety, wealth, asceticism, and generous charity.

Ali and Uthman were asked two questions. First, if you were khalifa, would you rule according to the principles of the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad? Both men of course said yes. Second, would you strictly follow the precedents set by the previous two khalifas? Uthman said yes, but Ali said no. He would answer only to God and his own judgment. With that answer, Uthman became the next khalifa.

Once in office, Uthman continued to be a very good business man. He took no payment for his services, and he lived on bread and water much of the time, but he turned his business skills to building the glory of the empire.

Uthman constructed a beautiful palace and more than five thousand new mosques, and transformed Medina into an imposing capital city. He also built and improved the practical infrastructure of empire: canals, highways, ports, markets, irrigation systems, wells, and water works. He established an effective treasury and greatly increased revenues from far-flung areas, which was necessary for all of this to happen.

Uthman appointed people he knew and trusted, both relatives and friends, to important offices throughout the empire, and he rewarded them abundantly. Umar had not allowed Muslims to purchase land in conquered territories. Uthman did not just remove this restriction, but also allowed eminent Muslims to borrow money from the imperial treasury to purchase land. Soon Uthman’s friends and relatives were very wealthy indeed.

These policies created a lot of resentment among people who saw a small elite as concentrating their wealth and power at everybody else’s expense. What had happened to Muhammad’s egalitarian vision? Revolts broke out in many places, and in 656 Uthman was beaten to death by rioters, who rampaged through Medina for four days.

After Uthman’s horrible death, no one wanted to be khalifa. Finally, though, Ali let himself be talked into it.

Ever since Muhammad had died, some people had thought that Ali should be the khalifa. These people came to be known as the partisans of Ali, or Shi’ites. In these early years the Shi’ites were a political grouping, not yet a religious movement. But they did not share the general wariness of combining political leadership and religious leadership in one person.

They believed that Ali was truly Muhammad’s heir. Ali was not a prophet – the Qur’an stated clearly that Muhammad was the last prophet. But some people felt that Ali had a special spiritual quality similar to what they had felt coming from Muhammad. They called this spiritual light baraka, which means blessing or grace. Our president’s first name, Barack, comes from the same root, as does the Hebrew word baruch. Baruch ata adonai. Ali, his followers felt, was blessed, and could be trusted to provide both spiritual and political leadership.

Indeed, there was a small group of Muslims who had come to believe that religious and political leadership must be combined. This group was known as the kharijites, and they argued that whoever demonstrates the purest devotion to Islam is the true khalifa. A khalifa loses his right to power, however, if he compromises his religious purity. Indeed, the kharijites argued that anyone who disobeys any of the Qur’anic prescriptions or violates the example of the prophet Muhammad, in any way, is a kafir, or unbeliever, and should be expelled from the umma and if possible killed.

Very few people shared this extreme position. For most people, you were a Muslim if you said you were. But the kharijites for the first time tried to exclude people from the community, rather than trying to bring as many people as possible into the umma.

As you can tell, Ali had a lot of problems to deal with. The first thing he tried to do was to root out corruption. He fired all of the governors that Uthman had appointed, and sent new men to replace them. With one exception, however, the governors refused to step down. The exception was the governor of Yemen, who left his office but took all of the money in Yemen’s treasury with him.

Ali’s next problem was Aisha, who was Muhammad’s favorite wife and the daughter of Abu Bakr. Aisha charged Ali with complicity in the assassination of Uthman. One thing led to another, and pretty soon both Ali and Aisha had called for jihad against the other. Things had come a long way from Muhammad’s promise that everyone in the umma would be at peace.

At the last minute, Ali and Aisha pulled back from civil war and agreed that they would together seek justice for Uthman’s murderers. Both of their armies, however, included people who had been in that mob, and they did not want Ali and Aisha to join forces. Someone started an attack, and ten thousand Muslims died in the ensuing Battle of the Camel, so called because Aisha led her men into battle from the back of her camel.

Ali won, but he was heart-broken at the sight of Muslims killing Muslims. Aisha soon returned to Medina and spent the rest of her life recording the sayings of Muhammad and writing commentaries on them. She gained much respect as a scholar, but Ali warned her to stay out of politics.

Soon Ali was engaged in a second civil war. Uthman’s cousin Mu’awiya was the powerful governor of Damascus, and he declared that he himself was khalifa. The result was the battle of Siffin, where according to tradition sixty five thousand Muslims died. When Mu’awiya surrendered, Ali agreed to arbitration of their differences.

Ali’s willingness to negotiate with Mu’awiya infuriated the kharijites. Ali, they thought, should have meted out God’s punishment on the rebels. Ali’s willingness to compromise, they believed, showed that he was a kafir, an unbeliever. One morning, as Ali entered a mosque to pray, he was greeted by a man shouting, “Judgment belongs to God, Ali, not to you.” The man struck Ali with a poisoned sword and two days later Ali was dead.

Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali are often called the “rightly guided khalifas.” I don’t think that anyone who knows their history believes that they made no mistakes. That’s not what rightly guided means. But all four men, in their different ways, were trying to live out the implications of Muhammad’s revelations. They felt a responsibility to promote and protect their community. But they also felt a responsibility to God, and to Muhammad, whom they had all known well and loved.

After Ali died, there were no more leaders who had known Muhammad personally. Mu’awiya declared himself khalifa, and when he died his son Yazid followed him and the Umayyad dynasty was established. The Muslim experiment with political self-determination was over. From now on, political power would be inherited and fought over, much as it is in most human societies.

I am not going to say much about the Muslim empires. But I do want to remind us about the nature of empire.

Empires rise, and empires fall. Empires have winners and losers, insiders and outsiders. Empires allow a concentration of wealth that supports art and architecture, libraries and scholarship. Their major cities are cultural centers, with a degree of civilization that is extraordinary for their time. Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid empire, was the first city in the world with more than a million people. It had artwork and literature and people from every part of the known world – China, India, Africa, Greece, Spain.

But the wealth of the center requires that wealth keep coming in from the periphery. So empires have many workers who create more than they get to keep. Empires also have standing armies, to keep the trade routes open, defend and expand the borders, and squelch any thought of rebellion.

In time, though, empires weaken. They tend to overstretch financially and get themselves involved in military adventures that they cannot win. It is difficult to govern a large territory well, so they tend to suffer from internal corruption and political paralysis. Eventually, something happens and the empire falls.
All of this has nothing to do with Islam. It’s just the nature of empire.

But for hundreds of years, people born near the centers of the Muslim empires felt that they were living near the center of civilization. Their mosques and government buildings were the most magnificent in the world. Their traders went everywhere and brought home things of beauty and usefulness from every direction. Their libraries were full of scrolls and other treasures from every society they were aware of, and their scholars and scientists synthesized the world’s knowledge into new discoveries in every generation. Their art was vivid, their poetry unsurpassed, and their science and technology the best in the world. Their hospitals actually healed people. Their universities were renowned for preserving the wisdom of antiquity while giving generation after generation of students the best education the world could offer.

All of this was compatible with Islam, but I would argue that it was not caused by Islam. It was caused by the material and political structures of empire, by the fertility of the land, and by the ubiquity of trade. The Muslim empires were full of artisans who made their living by crafting useful and beautiful objects, selling them in markets, and trading them for food and objects that came from other parts of the empire. Some people, of course, herded sheep and cultivated grapes and wheat and other necessities. But more than in most places, the masses of people could think about things other than food.

One thing that was caused by Islam was religious tolerance. The Qur’an said that Jews and Christians were People of the Book and should be treated with respect. The Qur’an also repeatedly warned believers not to argue about religion. In the Muslim empires, Jews and Christians were not allowed to have positions of political or military leadership, but they were generally allowed to practice their religion, earn a living, and live in peace.

For most of the last 1400 years, if you were going to be born a Jew, it was far better to be born in the Muslim world than the Christian world. I’m not saying that nothing ugly ever happened. But it was Christians who had pogroms, and it was Christians who had the Holocaust. Intense Muslim animosity towards Jews generally did not exist before 1948, when the nation of Israel was founded.

The Qur’an’s version of religious tolerance extended only to monotheists, but as Islam spread east it seems that most Muslims were able to include both polytheistic Hindus and nontheistic Buddhists under the monotheistic umbrella. I don’t want to suggest that there was never any conflict between groups. That’s not the way human beings are. But Muslim rulers generally had a pretty live and let live attitude towards religious minorities, as long as they followed the Qur’anic injunction not to argue about religion.

If you are going to submit to God’s will, you need to know what God’s will is. Starting in the time of Umar, some people devoted themselves to trying to understand God’s intentions for humanity. The first generation of scholars collected not just the Qur’an, but also the hadith and sunna, the sayings and traditions.

The scholars recognized that not all stories about Muhammad were necessarily true, so they paid careful attention to the chain of transmission. How many people told this story? Were they believed to be trustworthy? Were they there when it happened, or did they hear it from someone else? With these and other questions, the scholars carefully tested and evaluated every claim about Muhammad’s words and actions.

Over time, these scholars came to be known as the ulama, or learned ones. Their goal was to discern the shari’a, which is usually translated as Islamic law or divine law but literally means “the path to water.”

Shari’a is much larger than formal laws as Westerners understand the law. It’s more God’s intentions as a whole, the pattern of the universe. Submitting to God means following God’s intentions, God’s path, God’s shari’a.

In one sense, shari’a is natural law, including such things as gravity and mathematics and how the constellations turn in the heavens. The desire to understand natural law, shari’a, inspired the great achievements of the medieval Muslim scientists and scholars.

Shari’a can also mean divine law as in moral law – principles of right and wrong, and how they are implemented in our complicated and messy world. Many Muslim scholars devoted their lives to studying, debating, and commenting on religious texts. They created a literature very much like the Jewish Talmud, full of detail and nuance and differences of opinion.

More than thirty different approaches to shari’a developed in the first couple centuries of Islam. By the beginning of the eleventh century, however, things had settled down into four major Sunni schools and a separate Shi’ite tradition. All of these schools recognized each other as legitimate, though of course practitioners of each school considered theirs the best.

Because of their knowledge, the ulama became very powerful. The ulama defined the law and made judgments not just about individual cases, but also about broad social questions. Wealthy Muslims often endowed charitable foundations, which ran mosques, schools, universities, hospitals, and orphanages. These foundations competed for prestige by trying to hire the most respected members of the ulama to run them.

For about a thousand years these charitable foundations provided a framework for civil society, but many of them had their assets confiscated by governments during the colonial and postcolonial years. Many of these foundations no longer exist, or now have to depend on government subsidies and approval.

The ulama also gave legitimacy to the secular rulers. They did not have any formal role in deciding who would rule and who would be deposed. But the Muslim empires did not follow the simple rules of primogeniture that the European monarchs came to favor, so whenever a ruler died there were multiple contestants for his position. It was very difficult for a claimant to consolidate his power without the tacit consent of the ulama.

And if an incumbent came into too much disfavor from the ulama, it probably would not be very long until someone tried to depose him. The ulama did not participate in such things overtly, but they didn’t have to. Just through their influence, they served as a check and balance on the power of the secular rulers.

The ulama were completely self-selected and self-reproducing. You became a member of the ulama by gaining the respect of the existing ulama. Long years of study were required to learn all the texts, all the history, all the doctrine. The ulama were thus an intrinsically conservative institution. Anyone of a dissenting or rebellious spirit did not make it through the training process.

The ulama recognized four techniques for discerning God’s intentions. Sometimes instructions in the Qur’an or sunna were clear, so you just followed the instructions. Sometimes scholars had to reason by analogy between Muhammad’s situation and their own. If there were no good analogies, scholars had to rely on the consensus of the ulama.

Finally, when neither analogy or consensus worked, the early ulama allowed individual scholars to issue a legal ruling, known as a fatwa, that was based on their own legal reasoning. Because a fatwa came from an individual, not the ulama as a whole, it could be either accepted or rejected by the community.

The ulama were always wary of individual thinking, however, and they much preferred to rely on previous precedents than on individual reason. Over time, the ulama concluded that they had already addressed all of the important questions. At the end of the tenth century, therefore, many of the ulama rejected legal reasoning as a legitimate process. This decision came to be called “closing the gates of reason.” It was a statement that human reason is no longer necessary. Everything that needs to be known is already known.

Most ordinary Muslims, of course, were not scholars. Most people raised a family, made a living, celebrated the holidays, prayed when they could, and lived ordinary lives.

Over time most of the people in the Muslim empires converted to Islam, but they often brought with them a variety of local traditions and customs that were entwined with their ancestors’ religious practices. Zoroastrians, for example, celebrated the spring equinox as the start of their new year. This Zoroastrian holiday of Nowruz became the Persian holiday of Nowruz, and it is still celebrated by many Muslims around the world.

Many Muslims also visited shrines, places where someone of religious import had been buried. The ulama warned them that there is no god but God, but the common people often found beauty and comfort in connecting with someone a little more human than Allah. They prayed, brought gifts, sought healing for various injuries of body and soul, asked for a child, asked for relief from pain.

The big shrines were for well-known people like Muhammad, Fatima, and Ali, but many communities had little shrines where people came when they felt the need or desire. Some of these shrines predated the arrival of Islam, but they were easily incorporated into the ordinary piety of ordinary Muslims.
The common English word for the people buried in these shrines is “saint,” but I think we need to be careful not to let our use of this word make us assume that a Muslim saint is exactly the same as a Christian saint. Personal devotional worship is one of the places where the texture of religious experience gets subtle and hard to talk about.

So this is the context in which the three major currents within Islam evolved.

In the year 680, the people of the city of Kufa, which is in what we now call Iraq, were planning to revolt against the Umayyad khalifa Yasid, who they considered both illegitimate and corrupt. The people of Kufa asked Ali’s younger son, Hussayn, to come lead them in this revolt. Yasid heard of these plans and decided to have Hussayn killed.

Hussayn knew well the strength of Yasid’s armies, but he also agreed that Yasid was an illegitimate and oppressive ruler. And he felt a special responsibility, as the grandson of the Prophet, to stand up for justice and against oppression. So Hussayn decided to challenge Yasid. He brought with him a group of 72 relatives and other followers, most of whom were women, old men, and children.

Yasid’s army caught up with this tiny band in the desert just south of Karbala. Hussayn’s people were cut off from any source of water, and within a few days the old people started to die of thirst. Hussayn and a few other fighting men went out to confront Yasid’s troops. The horses trampled Hussayn and then he was beheaded. The soldiers triumphantly sent Hussayn’s head back to Yasid to display to the crowds, while the bodies of Hussayn and his followers lay unburied in the desert sun.

Four years later, a small group of people from Kufa gathered at the site of the massacre outside Karbala. They tore their clothes and blackened their faces to mourn the death of Hussayn and his family, but also to atone for their failure to come to his aid when he was facing the Umayyad forces. This experience of collective mourning and atonement was the beginning of Shi’ism as a religious tradition.

For Shi’ites, Hussayn became the archetypal religious figure. Hussayn willingly suffered and sacrificed his life for the sake of his ideals – for the vision of a just and good community. He knew that the odds were hopelessly against his success in any worldly terms, but he went forward anyway and put his body and spirit on the line for what he believed in.

For more than 1300 years, Shi’ites have celebrated Hussayn’s spirit and mourned his death. They commemorate his martyrdom during the first ten days of the month of Muharran, culminating on the anniversary of his death, which is known as Ashura, The story of Hussayn’s courageous sacrifice is told in poetry and dramatized in passion plays, while mourners shed both tears and blood not just to honor his sacrifice, but also to symbolically stand with him at Karbala.

Shi’ites believe that Hussayn carried within him the same divine energy, the same baraka, that had filled Muhammad. At any time, they believe, only one person carries this divine light. When that person dies, the baraka transfers to another individual, his son or another close relative.

Shi’ites call such a person an Imam, and they believe that he serves as a portal between God and the human realm. God reaches out to us through the Imam. God sometimes provides guidance through the Imam, and God always offers a soul-saving grace, a warmth and light that fills the world.

We, on our side, need the intercession of Muhammad and the Imams in order to achieve salvation. Hussayn’s martyrdom gained him a place at the side of God. Anyone who believes in Hussayn and embraces him fully will be forgiven all of their sins and go to paradise when they die.

There is, however, no Imam visible on the earth now, and there has been no Imam for many centuries, no one who seems to carry the divine energy, the baraka. And yet God would not leave us without that portal, that stream of divine grace entering the world.

Shi’ite doctrine therefore teaches that the last Imam did not die, but instead was taken up by God and lives in a hidden state that Shi’ites call occultation. This Hidden Imam is still guiding us and interceding for us, though we cannot see him. At the end of time the Hidden Imam will return as the mahdi, the expected one, and usher in the day of judgment.

Most Muslims found these images quite disturbing. They considered Muhammad a messenger, and what was most important was his message, the way of life that God intended us to live. There is no god but God, and most Muslims were very careful not to do anything that reeked of worshipping Muhammad or any other human being.

Everyone is equal in the sight of God, they insisted, and no one carries more divine energy than anyone else. Your local imam is a teacher and a leader of prayer. He is respected for his knowledge, his wisdom, and his virtue, but he is a human being, just like anyone else. His role is much like that of a Jewish rabbi. No one, most Muslims believe, can intercede between God and the individual human soul. We are all directly accountable to God.

About 90% of Muslims, both historically and now, call themselves Sunni, which means “traditional.” By using the word Sunni, they suggest that they are traditional and conventional and correct, while Shi’ites are unwarranted innovators. There is a lot of variety within the Sunni world, and a lot of diversity in belief and practice. But basically what Sunni means is not Shi’ite. There would be no need for the word Sunni if Shi’ism did not exist.

No one really knows where the word Sufi comes from. It may be related to the word suf, which means wool, and refer to the rough woolen garments worn by ascetics, but that is uncertain.

What we do know is that mystical traditions appear in all religions. There are always some people who seek an immediate experience of the divine. It is possible that the scholarly legalism of the ulama, with their focus on law and correct behavior, created an even greater need for direct and emotional experience of God. Perhaps so, perhaps not. But there began to appear wandering holy men, and sometimes holy women, who sought intimate knowledge of God.

As these darvishes, or mendicants, grew in numbers, there began to be boarding houses where they could gather and share their experiences. By the eleventh century some of these boarding houses had evolved into more permanent structures, we can call them monasteries or schools. These schools generally centered around a spiritual master, someone who had sought purification and enlightenment, and who attracted students who felt inspired by their presence and practice.

It is impossible to define Sufism. The Sufi teachers drew on all the religious traditions of the eastern hemisphere, blending together what they found most valuable in Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek philosophy, Central Asian shamanism, and anything else they encountered. Mostly they drew on their own experiences of the divine, and on what they had learned from individual teachers whom they felt to be divinely inspired. Different Sufi orders developed techniques of chanting, meditation, dance, prayer, music, and trance – all intended to draw participants into direct, immediate experience of God.

One of the key Sufi words is jihad. According to a hadith, one day Muhammad remarked, as his army returned home from a battle, that the people were now turning from the lesser jihad – meaning the struggle against external enemies – to the greater jihad – meaning the struggle to live a good life and to be in right relationship with God. Sufis have long focused on this greater jihad, which they see as the struggle to renounce egotism, love God with all one’s heart, and act in the world for peace and justice and love.

If there is one central theme in Sufism, it is the power of love. The Sufi mystics sought a perfect love of God, the sort of all-absorbing love that transforms the lover and the beloved into a unity, with no separation between them. Rabia, one of the best-known female Sufi masters, wrote passionately about her relationship with God, whom she addressed as her Love:

You are my breath,
My hope,
My companion,
My craving,
My abundant wealth.
Without You – my Life, my Love –
I would never have wandered across these endless countries …
I look everywhere for Your love –
Then I am suddenly filled with it.
O Captain of my Heart,
Radiant Eye of Yearning in my breast,
I will never be free from You
As long as I live.
Be satisfied with me, Love,
And I am satisfied.

Another poet, Attar, focused on the condition of the lover:

Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,
Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send
A hundred worlds towards their blazing end,
Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,
Who has no time for doubt or certainty,
To whom both good and evil are the same,
And who is neither, but a living flame.

“Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy … To whom both good and evil are the same.” These are not the sorts of words that the ulama wanted to hear. The secular rulers could also feel threatened by these teachers who gathered a disturbing number of students by proclaiming that the love of God is more important than anything else. At times the Sufis were persecuted, and some were killed in an attempt to destroy their movement.

And yet they kept appearing. These mystics, these holy men and women, these people who sought to lose themselves in the love of God. As the centuries went by, mainstream Islam had to make space for the Sufis. Their yearning for direct experience of God proved impossible to eradicate.

So – Shi’ia, Sunni, and Sufi. The three big currents within Islam.

It is easy to describe these traditions as separate things. I have outlined the differences in their core ideas, practices, and emotions. And there were times when these different groups were very much at odds with each other.

The Sunnis tried without success to eliminate both the Shi’ites and the Sufis. Most Persians were Shi’ite while most Arabs were Sunni, so these religious differences became entangled with ancient ethnic rivalries that long predated Muhammad’s birth. The Sufis presented an even more fundamental challenge to the concept of social order. Holy men and women do not tend to be conformists.

But from other perspectives these traditions are not so distinct. All three currents teach that suffering comes from distance from God, and try to erase that distance. The traditional Sunni way of reciting the Qur’an has a tone of sadness and yearning, which is supposed to express the human sadness at separation from God and yearning for union with God. Shi’ites emphasize the sadness, as they mourn not just for Hussayn but for the brokenness of the world. Sufis emphasize the yearning for union, as they reach for direct experience of divine love.

And ordinary Muslims blurred even these distinctions. Many ordinary people venerated the local holy man and found beauty and spiritual power in Sufi practices, and then went home to raise the kids, earn a living, and go to prayers with the imam at the local mosque. They were Sunni and Sufi, or Shi’ite and Sufi.

Shi’ite people varied greatly in how much they venerated Hussayn and his martyrdom. And Sunni people could certainly thrill to stories of Muhammad’s spiritual power, Hussayn’s courage and sacrifice, and the special quality of Muhammad’s family. In some times and places, Sunni and Shi’ite people intermingled and even intermarried. Do not argue about religion, Muhammad had said, and many of his followers obeyed that injunction.

Why did the Muslim empires come to an end? There is never one answer to such a big question.

Some people believe that the key issue is the nature of empire. Empires rise and empires fall. Other people point to the ulama, or scholars, who resisted change, and even more so after they declared the gates of reason closed. Other people say that the real question is why did Europe rise, and talk about seafaring skills or the ready availability of wood and water, coal and iron ore. Other people point to details of the shari’a, such as its failure to develop a corporate structure that could survive the death of a business partner. Other people talk about environmental degradation caused by deforestation, salination, and overpopulation.

I think there is truth in all of these answers, and more.

The internal weakness was already apparent by the time of the Crusades. The Crusades were unimaginably bloody. European sources talk about cannibalism and roasting people on a spit. When the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, they held it under siege for forty days. Finally they promised the people of Jerusalem that if they opened the gates and surrendered, no harm would come to them. The city opened the gates, and the Crusaders set about killing everyone they could.

Bodies piled up in the streets and in some places the blood rose as high as the knees of a man on horseback. The Jews took refuge in their synagogue and prayed for deliverance, but the Crusaders barricaded all of the doors and windows and set fire to the building. Pretty much all of the city’s Jews and Muslims died that day. Many of the local Christians died too. The Crusaders considered their forms of Christianity heretical, so some they killed, while others they confiscated all their property and sent into exile.

This sort of thing happened in city after city, but the Muslim world was sufficiently fractured that it did not manage to unify against the invaders. Indeed, many people had no idea what was happening just one or two hundred miles away. The Crusaders’ attacks were deep but narrow, and they did not affect most Muslims at the time. Only in memory, in history and folklore, did most Muslims comprehend the brutality of the Crusaders.

Many more Muslims experienced first-hand the brutality of the Mongols. The Mongols came from the east, and they swept across the land, burning fields, tearing up irrigation systems, and destroying cities. Before the Mongol invasion western Iran and northern Afghanistan were fertile because of a network of canals. Since then they have been deserts. When the Mongols reached Baghdad, they pretty much obliterated the city. All the libraries and schools and hospitals, all the archives and precious artwork, everything was burned to the ground. And nearly all of the residents of the city were killed. Only a few stragglers survived.

The Mongols soon converted to Islam and ruled as Muslims, but the damage they had done remained.

The Mongol catastrophe also had philosophical implications. Muslims had long believed that their worldly success was a sign of divine approval. If success proves that Muhammad’s revelations were true, what does disaster mean?

One possible answer was that Muslims had lost their way and earned God’s punishment. Ibn Taymiyah, a Syrian member of the ulama, argued that his contemporaries were no longer practicing true Islam. They must, he insisted, go back to the Qur’an and purge Islam of all new ideas and interpretations.
They must also, he argued, practice jihad against not just non Muslims, but also against bad Muslims – against heretics, apostates, and anyone else who offended God by interpreting the Qur’an and hadith rather than following their literal instructions. Ibn Taymiyah insisted that a good Muslim must simply do what the Qur’an says, without interpretation. He didn’t realize that he himself was interpreting the Qur’an.

In his own day Ibn Taymiyah did not have many followers. Among other things, he punished ordinary Muslims for visiting shrines and other long-standing folk practices, which did not add to his popularity.

But his teachings eventually became known as salafism, which is now the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda. Salaf means original or predecessor, and it refers to the original generation that knew Muhammad. According to the salafis, Muslims should live as the original generation lived and spurn everything else as innovation.

The third big invasion had a very different quality. Around the beginning of the 16th century, sea faring Europeans began to arrive in various places and politely ask permission to set up shop as traders. They were usually welcomed by the local rulers. The Muslim empires were based on trade, and they welcomed people from all over the world.

In time, however, the Europeans generally discovered that they preferred one set of local rulers to another. They often sold advanced weapons to their allies and provided military advisors who knew how to use those weapons. As a result, local rulers increasingly depended on European suppliers and advisors to keep them in power.

Meanwhile, the Europeans found gold in the Americas and used this gold to buy valuable commodities, such as wool, leather, metals, and meat. Rising prices made it harder for local artisans to get the resources they needed for their own production, so many of them went out of business. Within just a few generations, important skills were lost. When local authorities responded by banning the export of commodities, they created a lucrative black market.

The influx of gold also reduced the value of fixed salaries, such as government salaries. To keep up their standard of living, government officials had to find other ways to bring in income. European gold thus exacerbated the tendency towards corruption that appears in any empire. As the artisan class withered, more and more people lived in poverty. Those with good connections, however, sometimes grew fantastically wealthy.

Rising inequality led to social unrest, as it always does. More repression was needed to keep order, which meant more need for European weapons and military advisors. The local people often saw Europeans as propping up corrupt and exploitative regimes that oppressed the ordinary people.

By 1850, Europeans controlled almost every part of the Muslim world. They lived as an upper class, controlled resources and policies, and either ruled directly or decided who should rule. The exceptions were some parts of Afghanistan, which have never submitted to rule from Kabul, and the inland deserts of Arabia, which no Europeans thought were worth the bother. They did not know or care about the oil beneath the sand. The rest of the Muslim world was either ruled by Europeans or ruled by Muslim authorities who were backed by European weapons and needed to please their sponsors.

In 1901 the first big Middle Eastern oil field was found in Iran. The king of Iran sold the rights to all the country’s oil to a British prospector for a very modest sum. The king didn’t realize that oil was going to be valuable.

After World War I, England and France divided up the territory of the collapsed Ottoman empire. Muslims, they claimed, were incapable of governing themselves, so they must be under European mandates. Besides, there was oil and the Suez Canal.

After World War II, the remaining European Jews desperately wanted a homeland where they could feel safe. The European powers gave them a strip of land along the eastern Mediterranean. The Muslim and Christian Palestinians who were already living in what became Israel deeply resented losing their homes and livelihoods in order to atone for European anti Semitism and what the Nazis had done.

In 1953 the people of Iran had a democratic election in which they enthusiastically voted for a secular modernizer named Mohammad Mosaddeq. During the campaign, Mosaddeq had argued that Iran would never be able to develop as a country as long as British Petroleum continued to control all of its oil. He promised to nationalize the oil industry if he were elected prime minister, and once he was in office he kept his promise.

The American CIA organized and funded a coup that left thousands of people dead in Tehran. Mosaddeq was kept in prison and house arrest until he died. The CIA restored the monarchy and put on the throne Reza Shah Pahlavi, the son of a previous unpopular king. The Shah promptly signed a treaty with the United States that gave control of Iran’s oil to a consortium of oil companies.

I am curious – How many of you already knew this story about Mosaddeq?

If you were in the Muslim world, and you paid any attention to world events, you would probably know this story. And you would know that the United States’ commitment to democracy can be very thin.

I could go on, but I think you get the basic idea. People in the Muslim world today have plenty of reasons for unhappiness that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money and power, economics and politics. They see the United States as continuing a 500 year old European tradition of exploiting Muslim people and supporting local rulers who care more about lining their own pockets than protecting and promoting their people.

Until 1948, most Muslims who paid attention to world politics admired the United States for its democracy and egalitarian ideals. Since then, however, the United States has been seen not just as the protector of Israel, but as a superpower that is just as ruthless as any other empire in pursuing its interests. Many Muslims still admire American science and technology, and enjoy American arts and consumer culture, but they doubt that Americans care much about democracy for other people. And they are tired of the United States trying to control their rulers, their economies, and their lives.

So I believe that most of the tension between the Muslim world and the United States has little or nothing to do with religion.

But politics does affect religion.

Most obviously, any big religious tradition has many dimensions, and if you go looking for something that supports your existing political beliefs, you can find it. If, for example, you have decided that your circumstances require violent revolution, then you can find plenty of verses in the Qur’an or the Bible that preach the importance of fighting against oppression. If, however, you are a pacifist, then you can find plenty of verses in the Qur’an or the Bible preaching peace.

This is how, for example, both northerners and southerners in the American Civil War concluded that God was on their side. In every time, in every place, people tend to find what they are looking for in their religious traditions.

But the connections are also more subtle than that. Religion deals with big questions – questions like “Why is the world the way it is?” and “How should I act in this world?” When the world changes, religion changes. And the world has been changing a lot.

Back in 1703, a man named Muhammad al-Wahhab was born in the middle of the Arabian desert. When he was a young man, he spent a few years in Basra, which at the time was a center of Sufi and Shi’ite civilization. He was appalled by Sufi and Shi’ite practices, and he returned home determined to strip Islam of all such innovations and restore it to Arab purity.

al-Wahhab formed an alliance with an Arab sheik named Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they launched a holy war against anyone who they believed diverged from the practices of the salaf, the originals. They conquered Mecca and Medina, destroyed the tombs of Muhammad and his companions, and set fire to every book they could find, other than the Qur’an. Then they went to Karbala, where in 1802 the Wahhabis massacred two thousand Shi’ite worshippers as they celebrated Ashura and destroyed the tombs of Ali, Fatima, Hussayn, and the Shi’ite Imams.

The Ottoman empire intervened and sent them back to the desert, where the Wahhabis lived for a hundred years, until the British decided during World War I to give them weapons and help them rise up against the Ottomans. Abd Al-Aziz al-Saud re-conquered Mecca and Medina, executed something like forty thousand people, and established salafism as the official religion of Saudi Arabia.

After oil was discovered, the Saudi family grew rich. They used this money to spread Wahhab’s ideas, which the regime considers the only true Islam, throughout the Muslim world. They support publishing houses and schools, teachers and clergy, and have had an enormous intellectual impact on both Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Saudi form of Islam, however, is very different not just from Sufism and Shi’ism, which originally shocked al-Wahhab, but also from most of the local forms of Islam that have been practiced for centuries in mosques and homes and shrines. People who have been educated by the salafists generally see those local traditions as non-Muslim, but for many people these local traditions are the Islam that they learned from their parents.

So one of the things we are seeing in the Muslim world is a great internal debate over what Islam “really” is and who gets to define what Islam “really” is.

In 1904, a man named Hasan al-Banna was born in Egypt. As a young man he joined a Sufi order and was influenced by its mystical teachings, but he was at least as influenced by what he saw in the world around him. He was horrified by the brutal social, economic, and racial inequalities of Egyptian society. He was also appalled by the brutality of the recent world war, which he attributed to nationalism.

al-Banna concluded that the solution to the world’s problems in general, and Egypt’s problems in particular, would come from really living Muslim values in a modern context. Muslim independence and self-empowerment, he argued, will come not from rejecting the modern world, as the salafists yearn to, but by reaffirming Muslim values, such as social equality and caring for the poor, and putting these values into action. Three values at the heart of Islam, he taught, are serving other people, pursuing social justice, and loving God.

al-Banna started an organization that tried to improve the lives of ordinary Muslims by organizing social services of every kind, from food pantries to schools. This quickly earned him a lot of loyalty from the common people and a lot of suspicion from the Egyptian authorities. He also preached, in Sufi fashion, the importance of reforming the self and loving God.

al-Banna often said, “We are brothers in the service of Islam, hence we are the Muslim Brothers.” Soon his organization was known as the Muslim Brotherhood, and people sympathetic to his vision became known as Islamists. The Islamist movement spread quickly not just in Egypt, but throughout the Mideast. The Muslim Brotherhood provided an essential social safety net that the Arab governments were not providing. It also provided a moral standard against which authoritarian governments could be measured and found lacking. The Arab governments saw al-Banna as a political threat and he was assassinated in 1949.

As I’m sure you know, Islamists continue to be a major political force in the Mideast. What many Westerners don’t quite realize, however, is how much diversity there is among people who are called “Islamist.”

One of the key questions debated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the middle of the twentieth century was whether armed revolution against dictatorships is permitted or required. If one of the core values of Islam is pursuing social justice, and you are living under a government that recognizes no moral values and oppresses the vast majority of its people, how do you respond?

In the 1970s the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence as a means for achieving political goals. They still preached the importance of social justice, but they argued that it should be achieved non-violently, through such means as education, community organizing, and political activism.

Not everyone agreed with them, however, and some people broke away to create militant groups. These groups were and are small, but they are far more likely to make the news than the peaceful Islamist mainstream. In addition, Arab rulers found it strategic to foster fear of the Muslim Brotherhood in the western world. If Americans feared the Muslim Brothers, they would be more likely to give political and military support to the existing government, no matter how undemocratic it was.

Over time, some Islamists became influenced by salafist teachings. Some came to see Saudi Arabia as a model country, and some considered Saudi Arabia too impure and joined al Qaeda.

Most Islamists, however, are not salafists and do not endorse or practice violence. They vary widely in their beliefs and practices. Some are very politically active. Some turn away from politics and focus on helping the poor directly. Some focus on personal piety and family life. Some build mosques and schools. Some think it is more important to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Many of the women wear a hijab as a symbol of their faith. Some of the women believe they can be faithful without covering their hair. There’s a lot of diversity here.

But when people equate “Islamist” with “violent,” that’s simply incorrect. Of course, anyone’s pacifism can be tested if someone is firing guns or tear gas at them. But the decisions that individuals make in the heat of a riot or a revolution have many causes, and certainly should not be attributed solely to their religious beliefs.

In the last few decades, many Islamists, and indeed many Muslims who are not Islamists, have turned towards the concept of shari’a, divine law, as a way to critique practices that they consider oppressive, immoral, or evil.

Some salafists believe that shari’a can be read right out of the Qur’an, without any of the protections and procedures that Muslim scholars developed over the centuries. That form of shari’a can be brutal.

Many Muslims, however, see corporal punishments as belonging to another era, an era when modern courts and judicial systems did not exist and there was no better way to keep social order. They do not want to cut off the hand of a thief, but nor do they want to give up on the idea that God has intentions for humanity and that human happiness comes from following God’s intentions.

Indeed, many Muslims see shari’a as a way to protect fundamental human rights. Especially in a dictatorship, the world can seem like a “might makes right” sort of place. The idea of shari’a, of divine law, says no – there are limits on what people can do, and there are aspirations that should be universal. For example, shari’a says that society should be just, so an unjust society is counter to God’s will. It’s rather like a famous line written by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Governments that believe they are doing the will of God can be very ruthless. But governments that recognize no higher values, no deeper purpose, can also be very ruthless.

When Muslims nowadays call for a return to shari’a, some of them are salafists and hope to recreate the world of Muhammad and his companions. But more of them, I believe, are trying to resurrect the ideas that a ruler’s authority is not unlimited, that all people are equal in the eyes of God, that there is a basic order to the universe, and that we should all strive to create a community of peace and justice.

Reza Aslan, the author of No god but God, has suggested that the Muslim world is now experiencing a reformation not unlike the Christian reformation in Europe a few centuries ago.

The Christian reformation was sparked in part by the printing press and by the rise of mass literacy, which for the first time allowed ordinary people to read the Bible for themselves. It included a Puritan movement that tried to strip away everything it considered unbiblical. It produced several centuries of violence in Europe, with religious clashes that always had economic and political underpinnings.

In the 20th century, the Qur’an was for the first time translated into many vernacular languages, and for the first time literacy became widespread in the Muslim world. The salafists are the new Puritans, trying to strip away everything they consider unscriptural. Their focus on social control, especially on the control of women, is quite reminiscent of the Puritans who settled Massachusetts. And yes, we are seeing a lot of upheaval in the Muslim world, some of it violent. The clashes sometimes appear religious, and religious beliefs are relevant. But religious and ethnic differences are often aligned, and power and money are always in the background.

Add to this mix a world full of inequalities, where many people are very poor and some people are very rich. Add the destruction of so many charitable foundations and traditional Muslim centers of learning. Add authoritarian governments. Add authoritarian governments that try to impose secularism, so that practicing one’s religion becomes a form of political resistance. Add instant global communications and a global economy. Add international travel, so that Muslims are far more aware of diversity within the umma than they ever could have been in the past.

No wonder this is a time of ferment within the Muslim world.