Transcript for:
The Role of Dar al-Islam in Religion

all right let's talk about Dar all Islam which one being translated means the house of Islam or everywhere Islam was the majority religion around 1200 and a quote an imminent historian of this period that's a big old honking house so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked well let's get to it again I need to tell you about three of the major religions that interacted with one another during that time Judaism Christianity and Islam you're gonna need to know something about the core beliefs of each of these and how these beliefs affected the Societies in which they were practical oh by the way if you want note guys to follow along with this video and cram all of its contents into your brain folds then check the link below so Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jews and it originated in the Middle East probably the most important thing you need to remember about this religion is that it was monotheistic which is to say they worshiped one God and not many God that's the important piece because Judaism was the soil out of which the other two monotheistic faiths grew so Christianity was established by a Jewish Prophet namely Jesus Christ maybe you've heard of it now Jesus claimed to be the Messiah or the Savior that the Jews had long been waiting for and after his crucifixion at the hands of Roman authorities his followers began to spread his message of salvation by grace all the earliest Christians Were A persecuted minority eventually the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and that began the most significant influence of Christianity upon Society in fact entire States in Europe and Africa were organized and influenced by a growing hierarchy of popes and Bishops and Cardinals considered the third major monotheistic religion you need to know namely Islam and it was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century right here on the Arabian Peninsula Muhammad claimed to be the final prophet in the line of God's Messengers and stretched all the way back through Jewish and Christian scripture and he taught his followers that salvation would be found in righteous actions like alms giving him prayer and fasting now after the death of Muhammad in 632 the faith that he established began spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East North and sub-Saharan Africa into Europe and all the way down to South Asia and this is what we call Dar al-islam or the house of Islam and Islam deeply affected the societies where it was practiced but perhaps no effect was more important than the trading connections that existed between the various places within darallas just so happened that before he was a revelatory prophet of Allah Muhammad was a merchant so he was all about the tradesies and so were his followers compare that to Jesus teachings on accumulating wealth which can be summed up in about one word don't and so it's not hard to understand why Islamic States in general became far more prosperous than Christian States prior to 1200. now in addition to the Islamic faith facilitating trade throughout afro-eurasia it also facilitated the rise of giant honking Empires as well and for our purposes let's begin with the Abbasid caliphate which was founded in the 8th century and you're like core starts in 1200 why are you talking about the 700s you don't well my dear pupils first of all 1200 is kind of a squishy date like the course starts around 1200 but secondly in order to really understand the new developments going on in daral Islam from 1200 to 1450 you have to know what came before so back to the abbasids and there are two things you really need to remember about first they were ethnically error second the abbasids were empowered during what became known as the Golden Age of Islam during that time there were metric butt loads of Innovations and advancements in Science and Mathematics and literature and Technology all of which we'll talk about later but by 1200 well baby it ain't the Golden Age anymore because the Abbasid Empire was fragmenting and beginning to lose its place of ascendancy as the center of the Islamic world and I'll throw on a third thing to know just for funds as I mentioned a second ago the abbasage rose to power around the mid 8th Century replacing the umayyad caliphate and the abbasids engaged in lots of battles against the umaya to get there but you want to know how they finished the job I know you do after they had squarely whipped the umaya the abbasids invited about 80 members of the umayyad court to a nice dinner and then hacked their crap to pieces and that's how you do it anyways the power of the abbases began to wane right before the beginning of our period this is the important part listen several new Islamic Empires began to rise in its place here's the spicy part those new Islamic Empires were largely made up of turkic peoples not Arab people why are you not falling out of your seat right now that's a huge development look from the time of Muhammad to the fall of the Abbasid caliphate Islamic empire for a run by Era but not now the turkic Muslims are coming in and setting up new rival Empires out of the crumbling edifice of the Abbasid Empire and let me tell you about three of them first was the seljuk Empire which was established in the 11th century in Central Asia now the Celtics were a pastoral people from Central Asia who were brought in irony of ironies by the abbasids as a professional military very Force both to expand their empire and to culturally integrate their empire by force but by the 1200s those seljuk Warriors began to claim more and more power for themselves and in the end the Abbasid caliphs were still in power and claimed to speak for all of Islam but the seljuks had most of the political power because you know when you're really good at killing large swaths of people it's relatively easy to gain power okay second was the mamluk sultanate over in Egypt and it's kind of the same story over here now prior to the mamluk Takeover the ayubid sultanate ruled Egypt under the leadership of Saladin otherwise known as he of the pointy turbine I'm kidding don't write that down anyway in order to advance the goals of his State Saladin needed more labor so what did he do well Saladin went ahead and enslaved a group of fierce turkic Warriors who were known as mam looks which just means enslaved person so Saladin dies in The Sultans who followed him were pretty incompetent and so what happened well the turkic man looks went ahead and seized power giving rise to yet another turkic Muslim state so what's the lesson here well if you're ruling over a Muslim empire in the post-classical period and want to stay in power don't bring in the turkic Warriors because eventually they're going to take all your crap over see who said that world history wasn't practical to your anyway the third turkic Muslims stay to arise during this period was the Delhi sultanate over here in South Asia here the invading Turks established a Muslim state in the north and ruled over the Indian population for about 300 years now they had all kinds of problems as well but we're going to say that for the next video but the main point here is that as Arab Muslim empires like the Abbasid declined new Muslim empires made up of turkic peoples were on the rise that was a big change however these new Muslim states also resembled the former Arab empires in several ways for example in these new states it was mostly the military which was in charge of administration additionally they retained the Islamic practice of implementing Sharia law which was a code of laws established in the Quran okay now during this period Islam continued to expand in places all across afro-eurasia and that spread was carried out in basically three ways first military expansion and we already saw how that worked with the establishment of the Delhi Sultan second Islam expanded through Merchant activity which is to say trade for example much of North Africa was ruled by Muslims and that reality stimulated trade and movement of merchants throughout Africa further south the Empire of Mali gradually converted to Islam for many reasons but Chief among them was the increased access to trade among our all Islam and then third Islam expanded due to the efforts of Muslim missionaries a large branch of which was known as the Sufi during this period Sufism was a new and emerging form of Islam that emphasized mystical experience furthermore it emphasized that those spiritual experiences were available to anyone regardless of class or gender and although the Islamic scholar class poo Pooh this Innovation but with its lack of theological rigor it became a significant Force for the spread of Islam across the world okay now the last thing you need to know is that all across Daryl Islam there were an awful lot of thinky-thinky kinds of people and their developments were kind of astonishing first of all there were Innovations in mathematics and for this let me introduce you to my boy Nasir al-din Altus I mean this guy invented trigonometry so you know noise the whole reason he developed it was so he could better understand how planets and stars move through the sky and look if you believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around then you have altusi to think because later Nicholas Copernicus used altusi's Matthew stuff to develop the heliocentric theory of the universe not the universe the Galaxy no what's sun is at the center additionally during the Golden Age of Islam under the Abbasid caliphate the House of Wisdom was established in Baghdad this was a massive and world famous library to which Scholars from all over the dang world came to study religion in the Natural Sciences and even spicier Scholars at the house of wisdom were responsible for preserving the great works of Greek moral and natural Philosophy by folks like Plato and Aristotle they translated them into Arabic and made extensive commentaries on them and without that effort those Works would likely have been lost forever but they weren't and instead those Arabic translations of classical texts were transferred to Europe where they became the basis for the Renaissance and all the cultural flowering that resulted all right click here to watch my other videos on unit one and click here to grab my video note guys to follow along with these videos if that's the kind of thing you're into if you're having trouble reading your textbook and you still wanted a then these puppies are for you all right I'll catch you on the flip-flop I'm Laurent