Timeline of Islam

• 570-632 CE Life of Muhammad
• 610 CE First Revelation
• Muslim Community established 622 – 632 CE
• 633 Quran collected in one volume by Abu Bakr
• 661 Ali killed
• 1135-1204 Life of Maimonides
• 1281 – 1924 Ottoman Empire

Overview of Islamic History

This historical overview of Islam is divided into three time periods:

Pre-Islamic Arabia: prehistory – 570 CE

• Jahiliyyah (“age of ignorance”)
• Poetic tradition
• Characteristics of nomadic culture, shaykhs as leaders
• Polytheism and henotheism

Early Islam: 570 – 632 CE

• Life of Muhammad
• Establishing a Muslim Community
• Importance of Mecca and Medina

The spread of Islam: 632 CE – present

• Disputes over successorship of Muhammad
• Branches of Islam: Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi

Pre-Islamic Arabian Culture

There are at least two sources of knowledge of Arabian culture before Islam. One is the poetic tradition of the Bedouin tribes that guided the trading caravans across the desert routes. In this poetic tradition, we learn about their values and attitude toward life and death. The second source is the Quran itself: the record of revelations received by Muhammad. In this text we see a more critical view of this earlier culture. The Quran refers to the pre-Islamic culture of the rural Bedouins as the “Age of Ignorance” (Jahiliyyah).

The poetic tradition was vibrant and highly valued by the desert nomads. Always on the move, they had to rely on portable expressions of their culture such as poetry. A poet was regarded as a person with special knowledge and talent with the power over language to influence others, either through curses against enemies or praise of a leader.

The social organization of the desert tribes begins with the family unit housed inside a single tent. Several tents together form a clan. Each clan has a leader called the shaykh. The members of the clan may not be strictly related by blood. The clan included adopted members. According to poetic tradition, loyalty to the clan can be stronger than to the immediate family. Several clans united together form a tribe.

Preserving the honor of the family was vital. Only men had the quality of honor, and they had to defend it. Injury to honor often came from someone seducing or otherwise interfering with a wife or daughter. Men developed the qualities of courage and generosity to demonstrate their honor and manliness. Raids on other tribes were one way of proving manliness, but they also functioned in the informal economy as a way to support the tribe.

Their poetry also shows that Arabian tribal society was focused on getting as much pleasure as possible in this life. There was no idea about a life after death or an existence in another realm. The tribe would have a god or gods significant to it and its clans. One god would be viewed as more powerful than all the other gods. This pattern is called henotheism: in a situation where there are many gods, one god is viewed as most powerful. The Arabic word for this supreme god was Allah.

The Kabah in the city of Mecca was considered to be a sacred geographical space from ancient times. Annual poetic gatherings met at the Kabah, which contained many images of clan and tribal gods. There were also pictures from biblical stories: Abraham, Jesus, his mother Mary and some of the prophets. The images in the Kabah suggest that religion on the Arabian Peninsula was diverse, particularly in cities such as Mecca where many different people mingled.

There is also some evidence of an Arabian group of monotheists who were neither Jewish nor Christian. The Quran, the holy book of Islam, uses the term hanif to refer to such pre-Islamic monotheists. The tradition of the hanif seems to support the idea that some form of monotheism was brought to Arabia directly by Abraham or some other means in ancient times.

Early Islam: 570-632 CE

Outline of Life of Muhammad (570-632 CE)

Muhammad was born into a family in the powerful Quyarsh tribe that controlled Mecca and the sacred Kabah. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six years old, leaving him in the care of his grandfather who died barely two years later. His uncle, Abu Talib, became his guardian and sent the young Muhammad to live among rural tribes. This was a common practice at the time to develop manliness and knowledge of “pure Arabic” in young boys.

Muhammad became a caravan driver and earned a reputation for honesty. When he was 25 years old, he married a 40 year old widow, Khadija, who owned a caravan business. His strong managerial skills and reliability made the business thrive. Khadija and Muhammad had a successful marriage, and they had six children together.

As Muhammad grew older, he began to spend more time in prayer and meditation. He went for retreats at the caves of Mt. Hira, bringing enough food and water for a few days. It is at the Hira cave that Muhammad experienced the first of many revelations in 610 CE when he was 40 years old. He experienced revelations for most of the rest of his life. We will examine his experience of revelation and its interpretation in the Narrative section below.

The first revelations alarmed Muhammad, and he returned home shaken. But Khadija, his wife, comforted him. Khadija became the first person to believe in his revelations, so Muslims consider her to be the “first convert.” His cousin, Ali, and his father in law, Abu Bakhu soon became converts as well.

As the revelations Muhammad experienced became more compelling, more people in Mecca became convinced of their authenticity. At first, Muhammad was viewed as a talented poet. It was clear, however, that these revelations were about restoring belief in the one God, the God of Abraham, and warned of a final Day of Judgment. This turn towards ethical monotheism would challenge the long practice of polytheism at the sacred shrine of the Kabah.

It soon became clear that the revelations and the teachings of Islam allowed no other gods, not even the goddesses that had long been associated with Allah, the supreme God in Arabia. The refusal to honor these deities angered the people of Mecca. It was not just a religious matter. For the residents of Mecca, the presence of the Kabah meant income through the trade generated by pilgrims. A rejection of popular deities would mean a change in prosperity for certain families.

Muhammad was protected from persecution by his powerful uncle, Abu Talib. However, many of his followers were from poorer ranks of society, so they were not protected from persecution. Some even emigrated to Abyssinia in Africa, across the Red Sea.

As the persecutions continued, Muhammad decided to send some of his followers to the small city of Yathrib (later called Medina), north of Mecca in 622 CE. The residents there, many of them Jewish, had invited the Muslims. Muslims use the term hijra (flight) for this migration. This event marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar because it is in Medina that Islam developed a community or umma.

Establishing a Community (umma) (622-632 CE)

The word umma means community of believers. Although it can be applied narrowly to mean a specific group of Muslims, it mainly applies to all those throughout the world who submit to the one God. Umma is therefore a broad term that goes beyond class, gender, national identity, and cultural differences. It provides a sense of community based on the principles of Islam.

The umma developed at Medina where Muslims were free to create their own society based on the revelations of the Quran and the rulings of Muhammad on how to live.

Muhammad and his followers were in Medina for six years, from 622 – 628 CE. In Mecca, Muslims had developed a few practices such as group praying while reciting the Quran. In Medina, however, they were free to develop an Islamic way of life that included political, social, and religious matters. Muhammad took a leadership role, deciding cases that were brought to him by the people. In the Medina years, Islam became a way of life, not simply a matter of belief in the revelations of Muhammad that were recorded in the Quran. Even the Quranic revelations from this period in Medina reflected this shift towards developing a sense of community and accountability to each other.

The message of Islam spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Converts to Islam came partly through political agreements. As tribes saw the growing power of Muslims, they were anxious to make agreements. Some converts also came through success in battle. Not everyone converted, notably Christians and Jews. Muslims, however, viewed these two faith groups as “people of the book”. Muslims allowed Christians and Jews to live and worship according to their own traditions as long as they followed rules, paid their taxes and obeyed Muslim authority.

To support themselves, the Medina Muslims carried out raids on caravans bound for Mecca. As explained above, raids on caravans were part of the economic structure of Arabia at the time. These raids, however, kept alive the animosity of Meccan merchants against the Muslims. In 624 CE Mecca sent a force of 900 warriors to protect a caravan from a planned raid at Badr. The Muslims, numbering only 300, defeated the Meccan force. Their success in this battle was interpreted as a sign of God’s approval, and Muhammad’s reputation as a leader grew. In 627 CE Mecca again amassed an army, this time numbering to 10,000 troops to confront the Medina Muslims in what came to be called the “Battle of the Trench,” using a method of siege warfare. Within 2 weeks the Meccans had retreated in frustration. This victory established Muhammad as the single most important person in Arabia with whom to make treaties and trade agreements.

By 630 CE the Muslims were strong enough to be able to negotiate with the Meccans. Muhammad led his followers back to Mecca where the residents surrendered to his overwhelming force. Muhammad allowed the Meccans to go free if they converted to Islam. Muhammad and his followers destroyed the polytheistic images at the Kabah and declared this sacred shrine for Islam, rededicating it to the one God, Allah. Mecca became a Muslim city and was ruled according to Islamic codes established earlier in Medina.

Muhammad lived two more years. His last sermon was given at the plain of Arafat near the city of Mecca. This location is now part of the annual pilgrimage called the Hajj.

The spread of Islam: 632 CE to present

The thirty years after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE is called the period of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs.” After the death of Muhammad there was a dispute over the leadership. Many Muslims thought that the successor should be chosen by consensus from those who were closest to Muhammad. This would include people that did not have a blood relationship with him, but were some of his earliest converts. This group favored Abu Bakr, father-in-law of Muhammad who was one of the first converts. Others believed that Muhammad had chosen his cousin Ali to take over the leadership of the Muslims. Those who supported Ali as caliph felt that it was more important to have a blood relationship to the prophet, than to have political consensus.

This dispute was not a small matter. The death of a founder of a religion usually creates some kind of crisis unless firm procedures for succession have been put in place. In the case of Islam, this succession dispute solidified into the two main branches of Islam that we have today: the Sunni and the Shia. The Sunni group favored the selection of a leader through consensus and without consideration of blood relationship to the prophet Muhammad. Their choice, Abu Bakr, became the first caliph. The caliph was a leader of both the religious and political aspects of Islam.

The first three caliphs dealt with two problems. First, some of the groups who had allied themselves with the Muslims because of the charismatic leadership of Muhammad were uncertain about continuing the alliance after his death. Second, as Islam expanded into non-Arabic speaking countries the caliphs had to interpret Islam for a more diverse community that did not share the same language or culture. After the first three caliphs, Ali became caliph. His leadership lasted barely five years when he was killed in 661 CE by an offshoot group of his own followers.

The death of Ali and the disputes between different groups continued, but over the next six hundred years, Islamic leadership managed to spread the message of Islam west throughout the Mediterranean and eastward to Asia. Islam developed religiously, but Muslim leaders also promoted scholarship in science, philosophy and medicine, using Greek and Persian knowledge. In this way, Islam knitted together several cultural and knowledge centers throughout their vast geographical reach.

Phases of Islamic Conquest

This map shows the early Islamic conquests. The area in dark red represents Islamic expansion under Muhammad c. 622-632 CE. The areas in orange represent the expansion of the Rashidun Calipate (632-661 CE), and those in yellow represent the expansion of the Umayad Caliphate (661-750). Thus, by the eighth century of the Common Era, Islam had firmly established itself as a world religion.