Emergence of Islam and Historical Context

Okay, hello all. Before starting on today's lecture, I want to make a few announcements about making you aware of wider history community available at UNM and some options. So, if you are new to UNM, I'm talking to you. If you have just transferred or you're first year, I'm talking to you. And also, if you've been here a long time and you're about to graduate or you are a lifelong learner, I'm talking to you as well. Although you need to be in the I'm not talking to you if you're taking it not for a non-credit course. 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So if any of these things appeal to you, studying history in more depth, going to graduate school, come and talk to me. There are lots of options and I am glad to support you in getting connected to them. All right, with that, our topic today is the emergence of Islam. So we've talked about this age of monotheisms, and we've talked about Zoroastrianism and Judaism and Christianity, and now this fourth great monotheism that we're going to talk about is Islam, which today has spread to where about a quarter of the world, world's people subscribe to this faith. Here is a world map today. The dark green shows you where more than 90% of the people are Islamic, and then colors indicate that it has spread far and kind of the percentage of population. So you see that it is massive. Like Christianity, Islam never quite, very much like Christianity. Islam never achieved the doctrinal unity that it aspired to. And so there's different branches. And the two main branches are Sunni and Shia, in some ways historical more than doctrinal, although the differences have evolved over time. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are Sunni. And then Shia accounts for a much smaller portion of the world's Muslims, and the majority of which are in what... what we consider the Persian world, which is now Iran. And also kind of thinking about how ethnicity and religion map onto each other, about 20% of, or sorry, there's about 1.3 million, pardon me, 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and about 20% of those are Arabs. So a great proportion of Arabs are Muslim. And of the Arab population, a very small proportion portion is not Muslim. So that maps pretty closely, but it is not at all an exclusively Arab religion. This next map that I'll show you, and this is really just to illustrate some of the differences rather than ask you to remember these, but in very rough terms, the Sunni faith bifurcated and bifurcated into four major schools, the Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafiya schools. And those are sort of the green and blue shades, and you see kind of the geographical spread of those schools in the world. And then this other map shows the various, the major schools of Shia Islam, and you can get a kind of a quick geographical sense of of Islam in the contemporary world. But with that, today we're going to talk about its origins. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to start talking about history, in some ways leaving where we left, picking up where we left off in the Eastern Roman Empire. We're going to stop and focus on the origins of this faith, have a little theoretical interlude about how to approach matters of faith historically in a productive way perhaps, and then come back to the history of how this religion spreads, fits swiftly and vastly, and some of its implications for the history that we're talking about. So some political context. With this, I want to come back to about the Justinian is perhaps the one of the last Roman empire emperors that I want to mention to you. And he sat in Constantinople. He was quite, he had quite a distinguished reign, a long reign, which is always good for having, getting a lot done on your watch. He, we remember him for codifying Roman laws. in ways that we continue to draw on. Among some of the laws that he did was he outlawed law under Justinian and the reforms, which was in many ways codifying, organizing, eliminating redundancies of existing law. But among this action, one of the laws that did come about was outlawing sex between men. Sex between men under the reign of Justinian, became a crime. And I'll note that same-sex marriage had existed, but it had been outlawed in 342. So in Rome's early Christian, officially Christian decades, or as it's becoming more officially Christian, same-sex marriage got outlawed. Just one premise that historians always bring is whenever there is, whenever something is legislated against, it's pretty good evidence that that sort of thing occurred before. So had there never been any same-sex marriage, we probably wouldn't expect that we would see it at all in legal codes of prohibition against it. Also, Justinian is quite remembered for... leading an extensive reconquest campaign, he made an attempt to reconstitute the Roman Empire. He didn't do it entirely and it didn't last too long, but he had some success in that department. And also even moving, kind of claiming for the Byzantium parts that had been part of Western. Rome that matters a little bit for some maps that I'm going to show you coming up. It was also, so in this time of Justinian, People living in Constantinople still considered themselves Romans. They called themselves Romans, but back in Rome, in Italy, they were starting to call these people Greeks. As they had begun, they had in large part reverted to speaking and writing in Greek in just a few generations, starting in about the 4th century. But nonetheless, in Byzantium, they understood themselves to be Romans that were... recipients of a distinctly Roman tradition. This picture that I have here is the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, sometimes known as Hagia Sophia. And Hagia Sophia is one of the, at the time it was the biggest cathedral in the world, I think, and it still remains one of the largest in the world. It was built on Justinian's watch in the 530s. And It has had a long and multi-confessional history. It was a church. We don't really have the Orthodox Church yet. So in some ways, this slide I've given you here is a bit anachronistic. But it is an Eastern Christian church from 537 to 1204. And then it is a Catholic church. So by 1204, we do have a schism. We do have two churches that distinctly call themselves as... following different doctrines. And that comes about because of the Fourth Crusade. The Crusades were launched when Christians went to make the blood of Saracens run in the Middle East as a pilgrimage project was the founding of the Crusades announced at the end of the 11th century. But the Fourth Crusade instead of going all the way to Islamic lands, they stopped in Christian Constantinople and conquered it. And so we'll talk about that coming up. But from 1204 to 1261, the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia conducted Catholic masses. And then in 1261, it reverted back to being an Orthodox church, which with some interruptions because of... earthquakes and cathedrals cracking and collapsing and needing to be repaired and renovated. It was an Orthodox church until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and they converted this church into a mosque and it was a mosque from 1453 to 1935. Under the modernizing and secular regime of Ataturk, it became a museum. Hagia Sophia was a museum from 1935 to 2020. And in July of 2020, President Erdogan has re-designated it as a mosque. Here is Erdogan signs decree allowing Hagia Sophia to be used as a mosque again. So this is history unfolding right before us. So those are a few words about Justinian's reign and kind of takeaways regarding Justinian, the sixth century Eastern Roman Emperor. His reign resulted in an extensive expansion of Byzantine territory holdings. He consolidated state authority. He made impressive strides in architecture, Hagia Sophia being the cameo example of that. He didn't thoroughly address or heal or resolve many of the religious divisions in the empire. We've talked a little bit about the different types of Christian belief and some of the controversies brewing there. They will continue to brew. So here at the bottom is a map of the... Mediterranean, Middle Eastern world. And this is showing the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire. The Sassanid Empire was essentially a Persian empire. And what I want you to get on your radar screen is that from the 6th to 8th century, Byzantium is constantly rebuffing sieges and attacks. In the north and west, there's Lombards, there's Avars, there's Slavs, there's Volgars. And in the east and south, there's the Sassanid Empire. And then it will deal with... attacks by Muslims. And so one of the most major attacks that military confrontations that I want to put before you, it's not that Byzantine is entirely victim, is a war, the Byzantine-Persian war. And this war gets fought for roughly a couple decades in the early 7th century, about 610-ish to 628, 629. And it's not so important that you know. that it's Emperor Heraclius and Emperor Khosrow on the Sassanid side. But what I do want you to know is that this is a massive conflict between two major powers. Ancient historians call this, in some ways, the World War of Late Antiquity. And over here, this picture I've put in the bottom, is a temple all the way over in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. And it is the remnants of a fire temple. from ancient Persian rites that was destroyed by Romans in the context of this war called Adr-Gushnab. So few archaeological traces remain of this great war, but it was a major, major episode in the late antiquity. And one of the biggest consequences for it is that it weakens both powers. The Sassanids. and the Romans. And so in some ways, what that does is create, power vacuum is probably too extreme of a word, but sort of approaching a power vacuum in the region surrounding, and most particularly for our purposes today, that region of the Arabian Peninsula, where Islam will emerge and spread like wildfire. And when we ask, you know, how did this spread so quickly? Well, it was tied pretty quickly in a warlike, Bedouin, semi-nomadic society to warfare. And that warfare ended up being spectacularly successful. And one of the reasons for that was these great powers, you might say, of Byzantium and the Sassanids, were somewhat exhausted and depleted in the wake of the... their long war. Here is a more close-up of that border between the Sassanid and Roman empires. And you see for much of the border, this is a kind of natural map, and we don't see clear-cut geographical boundaries like a north-south running mountain range and a north-south running rivers or ocean or something that would make that. make it clear where one polity should end and the other begins and that sort of an environment can lend itself to a persistent rivalry and competition for hegemony in a place. And so we need not be surprised that there was this sort of a war here without the natural map is returning to a map with just political colors for giving you a sense of those two big powers. And now as we talk about the emergence of Islam, our story is going to turn down here to the Arabian Peninsula, with the Red Sea and the Persian Sea on either side. And there is a picture of people practicing the Hajj. And here is a picture of the crescent and the star, which has emerged as a central symbol of Islam. But I wanted to point out to you that it wasn't always and only a symbol of Islam. Up here, here's a coin from the second century reign of Hadrian. And we see there the crescent and the star. And here we see a picture of the adoration of the Magi. And up here you see an attendee with a flag bearing the hammer and sickle. And art historians, I'm reporting from art historians here, I would have been quite likely to look at that and say, oh, look, Muslims too attending the birth of Christ. And then I would have had to check myself chronologically and say, wait a second, there was no, Jesus lived centuries before Muhammad. So of course Muslims couldn't have been there. What is going on there? And so we see that we have instead the deployment of this symbol by someone else. And. moving way forward in time, it was also the crescent and symbol well after Islam had been established was the symbol of a Byzantine, so Christian ruler of Cyprus in the 12th century. So, and that's just more to keep you, just a comment to keep us historically attuned to sometimes the meanings of symbols change and are appropriated by various groups. I talked about this when I talked about the fascis and the use of that symbol and how it's changed over time or become associated over time. And also I could go on, for example, and do a similar thing with the use of the double eagle. a sign of that many dynasties through our time have claimed as their own special symbol. So with that, the emergence and the rise of Islam, its origins, some of its, some a little bit about doctrine and more about how as we as historians can think about doctrine and its political spread. Swift, far, and there was a sumitius split. I'm not going to elaborate too much on details that are in your textbook, but we'll kind of cover our bases in a pretty introductory way. The Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca into the tribe of the Al-Qurash, probably sometime around 570. We think we know the dates of his life, 570 to 632. He was orphaned at a young age, taken care of by his uncle, married an older widow. and became a successful merchant. And around the age he might have been as old as 40, he started having visions. And he understood that he was visited by the angel of Gabriel and that God was speaking to him and sending him messages about how to live. And from these experiences that he started to write down and was supported by friends. and wrote down for him emerged the Quran, which is the sacred text of the Muslim faith. And the Quran is a, the Quran, these revelations get written down as the Quran. And the Quran consists of 114 surah, whether you want to call them chapters or verses, kind of. There are 114 of them. There are 6,861 words. And this is just to say that the sacred text of Islam gets codified and decided upon in a much shorter time period, so much more quickly relative to its emergence, than did the Christian Bible, over which there was more. discussion and various schools of thoughts for a longer period of time. With the Quran, no original copy survives, but by 690, we have a Quran that had been written down by friends and followers of Muhammad. And that text has been remarkably stable, that central sacred text of the Quran. We can't say the same for the hadith, the kind of stories that are written about Muhammad's life and about a number of other issues. Here is a world where the authenticity and the dating, there's a whole lot more controversy about that, but about the contents of the Quran are quite stable and quite solid. Okay, so Muhammad, his earliest converts were among his friends, his immediate family, and slowly he brought in other converts. Now, scholars argue that part of his success was due to the fact that city life in this dry and in many ways forbidding Arabian Peninsula was eroding traditional values and tribal bonds of a semi-nomadic. clannish society. So maybe similarly, as we talked about, what emotional needs did Christianity serve? Are there less tangible, harder to track, but nonetheless important changes in the way society is living that made it receptive to this new faith? And certainly the reception was remarkable. So what was this new faith? Well, Muhammad um preaches that there's five pillars of Islam. And the first is the shahada. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. One must pray every day. At first it's three times, then it's five times a day. Initially, one would face Jerusalem, but as deteriorations and aspirations for bringing Jews on board deteriorated the custom. And now, you know... well-solidified tradition is what is to face towards Mecca. And to be a Muslim, one must give alms to the less fortunate. That's a very important component. One should fast during the holy month of Ramadan. And if one is able, one should make, if not annually, at least once in his or her life, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, where is the famous symbol of the Ka'bah. Here is a picture again of the Hajj, the pilgrimage, and just thousands and thousands of people have done this every year, although in this year of world pandemic it's a tradition that is being for the most part suspended. But anyway pilgrims would be believers and they would go to commemorate Muhammad's hijrah. his flight from Mecca to Medina in the year 622. And that event in his life is extremely important in the calendar of Islam. And it marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. Here is an older picture of the Kaaba. And now the Kaaba, it had been a shrine that held various pagan idols. And one of the things that Muhammad did when he kind of returned triumphantly to the city ultimately was to destroy the pagan idols and rededicate the Kaaba as a Muslim shrine. So Muhammad and his message. According to the first Islamic source materials, it's clear that Muhammad understood himself to be working within the prophetic tradition. And his goal was to preach the authority of one God and one God alone. Early Islamic texts describe Muhammad as a prophet sent to restore the purity of God's covenant with Abraham. So he understood himself to be part of Abrahamic tradition. According to Jewish tradition, God had established a covenant with Abraham, and this covenant establishes a special relationship between God and those who accept his authority. And Abraham's son is understood to be an heir to this covenant. So for Muhammad, he acknowledges the same prophetic tradition of the Old Testament and of Jewish traditions. So like Judaism and Christianity, Islam, it recognizes Adam and prophets like Abraham and Moses and Noah and Jesus as prophets. There's a big departure. Christians saw Jesus as something else, not just one among other prophets, but the Messiah. But for Islam, he is a prophet. And people that adhere to this tradition of... Jews and Christians, Muhammad understood to be people of the book or the dhimi. And we'll talk more about them later. But in short, they're protected. They're protected people, but they're also on a lower status. They have to pay a special tax, the jizya, because they're not Muslim. And while there were ebbs and flows, their treatment was sometimes considerably worse, or at least they weren't supported by the state in ways that historians have said in practical ways, you're much better off being a Muslim on this regime because there's more state support surrounded. And sure enough, that may have been something that did contribute to conversion. So I want to kind of pause on this question of Islam and how it relates to Christianity in Judaism. First, as I just said, Islam accepts the authority of both the Jewish prophets and the authority of Jesus. But the early Islamic texts take issue with Jewish decadence. That is this strict code of laws and regulations. It seemed to be not quite the best way to worship God. And indeed, the five pillars, there's a certain simplicity to it. That seems to have been part of its huge appeal. It's not super complicated. You don't have to go through years and years of Talmudic and other studies in order to understand what the faith is. That's not just, well, if the message for everyone can be quite simple in these five pillars, make no mistake. There is a quite diverse and developed and sophisticated world of Muslim theology that to which there's a huge breadth. I showed you kind of all these different schools that had occurred. And in some ways, it had many of the same challenges that Christianity did, that there's lots of people have different takes on theology and doctrine and different ways of seeing it as they think through these theological problems. Of course, one big difference is that the Roman Catholic Church, the Western Church, it succeeds to a greater extent than even the Orthodox Church of establishing a top-down hierarchy. So there's going to be a struggle under the, like bulldogs fighting under the blanket the whole time, more or less. But we do have a Pope who, his word kind of gets filtered out through a hierarchy and goes. There's no Muslim Pope. So you have Imams and various religious authorities that will weigh in on matters of. of theology and throughout the Islamic world over time we see a real range of doctrine. At any rate, so early Islamic texts praise Jesus and reject the notion, but reject the notion that he is God. There is only one indivisible God according to Islam and that early Islamic texts are very concerned that the Christian faith had become idolatrously obsessed. with images and symbols stressing a fixation on the cross, the Virgin Mary, Christ as intermediary between man and divine. And there was this sense that that just isn't where faith is supposed to be at. We need to kind of purify, distill, and worship God in the way he wants to be worshiped. I'm going to come back to this issue of images, but stay tuned for that. However, for all that disagreement, Islam rejects the persecution of Christian and Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Islamic conquest. Although your book does talk about the incident of Muhammad seeing the execution of many, many Jews in Medina that he understood to be plotting against him. With that, I want to... kind of pull back and have a little bit of a theoretical, or rather a theological interlude. I kind of just did that a little bit, talking about how these five pillars might have had an appeal in their simplicity that wasn't necessarily found in these other traditions. But I want to, what I want to do right now is I want to share a couple of excerpts from the Quran. You'll, and the Bible, and you'll see where I'm going with this in not too much time. I'm trying to get at this lesson. So here's an excerpt from the Quran that says, Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. God does not love aggressors. Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is more... grievous than bloodshed, but do not fight them within the precincts of the holy mosque unless they attack you there. If they attack you, put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded. But if you mend their ways, know that God is forgiving and merciful. So there's a word from this very sacred text. Now I want to show you a word from the Jeremiah, which is a sacred text for Christians, and take a little excerpt out of it. And here it says, go up, my warriors, against the land of Marathime and against the people of Pekod. Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge, pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you, says the Lord. Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction. So... As a historian, I could, as a historian, what do I do with these sorts of things? And also as a person living in the world where not immediately, well, in the wake of 9-11, there was certainly parts of our society that would say to us things like, Islam is a violent religion. It is essentially and always violent. And it must be dealt with. harshly because of that inherent violence in the way it understands itself to be doing good in the world. And so knowing that as a historian, what might we say? And I've selected these two passages to kind of make this one kind of actually now not so much theological, but methodological interlude about how we do history. And when I look at both of those texts, and I think about what I know about the history, that is, events that have happened, the lesson that I would impart to you is that texts are the building blocks of historical knowledge. As a historian, we don't get anywhere without them. We need texts. We can incorporate archaeology and drawings and images and architecture. and use them as sources that we'll sort of read. But historians use texts. We say that human history begins when we start having texts to read that people started writing things down. So texts are fundamentally important to us. And we take texts seriously. You know, what do these words say? What do these words mean? But at the same time, textual evidence does not necessarily tell you the whole story. And speaking from experience, usually it... doesn't tell you the whole story, that historians need to understand the context. So I could read that text from the book of Jeremiah and tell you that Christians are eternally bloodthirsty. Or I could read a text and say, Muslims aren't going to come beat you up. But if you give them a hard time, they're going to rebel. And I could pretend that that was the end of story and I had interpreted it successfully. But that isn't the case at all. We need to look. at the context of particular, of any, of, we need to always try and assess what's the context of this text. It got written down. Who read it? Did anybody read it? Did anybody care? We've got great big long texts. Did everyone pay equal parts of attention to all of the texts throughout all time? Well, in the case of Christianity, I can tell you that no, there are certain moments in history where the apocalyptic visions that are articulated in the Book of Revelation seem to be the things that monks are copying, ergo paying more attention to, than at other centuries in time. And so as a historian, we want to understand that context and yes, read a text, try and understand its meaning, and engage in this simultaneous process of taking a text at its word without taking it at face value, or I don't need to kind of be too sophomoric in the wordplay here. We want to attempt to understand the meaning in and of itself and simultaneously know that we never get all the meaning just from the words written on a certain page. And that's one of the things that makes so tricky and fascinating and enriching trying to study how people have practiced and understood. thing like religion and faith throughout human history. Sort of along those lines, you know, what is just war and what is jihad? Jihad originally gets articulated as kind of struggle, and many Muslims who could tell you struggle within, but it emerges as also having this sense of holy war. And we could put this alongside the... concept of just war. And I won't go into, we don't have time to go deep into death here, but I've just sort of put this up to you to think about, these aren't entirely parallel concepts, but to think about how the acts of violence get tied to or filtered through religion. So Augustine was one of the first Christians to elaborate ideas about just war. When That certainly if one is preaching love and regard for humanity, there's so much of a war that is at odds with that. And so how do you, how do you, how have religion, religious believers tended to thread that needle? And Augustine said, well, you need to have a just authority and a just cause and a right intention. And it should be a last resort. And also when you conduct war, it should be conducted with regard for. proportionality, discrimination, responsibility, that non-combatants should never be targeted, and that the violence must be proportionate. These are some basic ideas. And it turns out that similar constraints have been articulated with respect to jihad, that it needs a legitimate authority to initiate it, that it must be committed in the name of God and only for freedom from tyranny, and also that women children sick and old shouldn't be harmed and also that trees and crops should not be damaged and war should only be fought until the enemy lays down his arms so that idea of um pouring salt in the earth you know biological warfare or tearing um or total and utter destruction um aren't legitimate forms of war i mean i and i say this recognizing that that some people reject war as a legitimate endeavor in any case. And that is a pacifist position. And then, and other positions don't have that same outright rejection of war. So it's a fascinating topic. And since, well, as Plato remarked, only the dead have seen the end of war, war is a part of human history. And so I put this slide up here to think about how different traditions have approached this question of back to the historical stuff. So Muhammad, he has these visions, he begins preaching, he's persecuted for his teachings, very much so from his own tribe, the Quraysh, and he ends up fleeing the city of Mecca. with his followers and goes to the nearby city of Medina. And this journey is called the Hijra, or the Higara, his flight. It happens in 622. And as I mentioned before, it's a super significant date, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. And while in Medina, Muhammad and his followers, they get more organized, and they will end up returning to Mecca, capturing the city. And this essentially begins an Islamic conquest. The rest of his life is spent consolidating his power among the tribes on the Arabian Peninsula. And then we see this expansion, like wildfire. So under Muhammad, he probably captures the, this map shows the dark purple, so maybe half of the Arabian Peninsula. And when he passes, when he passes under the first four caliphs that follow him, the leaders, they'll proceed to conquer all of the Arabian Peninsula and then continue. Questions, historians have said, you know, what do we make of this rapid, rapid expansion? And some of what's been said is that the, as I said before, there's a bit of a power vacuum in the wake of these big Byzantine-Persian wars. And also that this is a culture of where you um warring is part of it many of the um you have kind of oasis trading towns punctuating a pretty harsh environment and so you have bedouin and nomadic communities they live with the herds and and clan loyalty is important and they fight with each other and they're slaves and booty that is um exchanged and so war is is way of being. And so it kind of picks up and rides with that. Now, with this sense of kind of belief and purpose and mission, it seems and then with winning, kind of in some ways, it begets more winning. And so we see this. Massive, massive spread. And here's another map of essentially the same thing. Now, one attraction, so one attraction that historians have also remarked upon is this egalitarian nature of Islam. All believers are equal in the eyes of God. And another attraction is that the raids he starts to lead on Meccans and the Buddis that generates it supports the Ummah. The Ummah, U-M-M-A, is the community of believers. Now, initially, Islam and the coming of Islam, this submission to God, and that's what the meaning of the word Islam, submission to God. women experience a boost in status. They pray together with men around the 8th century. So pretty soon that begins to change. Women begin to pray separately. And so historians have noted here, as in Christianity, where in its first centuries we saw women bishops and women leaders of the church and a kind of equality and worth granted to women that they hadn't known in such a patriarchal society. And then that that goes away where all leadership positions are held by men and there's sort of a reversion to a greater patriarchy. It seems like that happens in Islam as well. Like Christianity, the patriarchy reasserts itself in terms of how this and is integrated into how this egalitarian religion is practiced too. Now, one remark. Jihad was not one of the five pillars. The idea developed early, primarily meaning the idea of an internal struggle to overcome evil, to overcome weakness, to become the best Muslim possible. But over the following years, according to some Muslim thinkers, this idea takes on a resonance and then evolves into an idea of a holy war. which in a contemporary sense, when people say jihad, that is what they mean. Now, so here's a map looking at the Islamic conquest. And in just over a century, this faith under one leadership, although there's a lot of... contention on that front as well, but it spreads to become in about a century an entity larger than the empire of Alexander the Great. So it's a remarkable kind of political accomplishment. And here, let me just say a few quick, quick words about that political story. And so basically, Muhammad dies, and he's followed by the first, there's four caliphs. And this is sometimes these four are referred to as the Rashidun Caliphate. And they have fairly short reigns. Two of them are murdered. And then the final, who was actually the fifth, Hassan, is the son of Ali. And he abdicates to what will become the Umayyad Caliphate. Now, I want to pause just briefly to say that the split. as your textbook explains, between the Sunni and the Shia is a very, very complicated matter. And it's kind of the original seed has to do with who had the right to lead the community of Muslims following the Prophet's passing. And should it be a family member, Ali, or someone who was loyal and emerged as the leader. Now, That is going to kind of be that original kernel of this conflict. But as years go by, much more becomes associated with it. And what some historians also have pointed out as well is that from the day of Ali's death, the split is not massive and it sort of goes underground and isn't important for a period of time and then re-emerges. But without going into... that complicated history. I'll just leave it at that and you can take your textbook at its word. So what happens next? As it's spreading, we have the caliphate of the Umayyads and it gets spelled sometimes 1M2N and vice versa with the Ys. The Umayyad caliphate, it reigns for almost a century, not that not so so long. They have their capital in Damascus. They are Sunni. They begin to write down these sacred documents so that by 690 we have the Quran is written as a text. But on other fronts, historians say, we don't see that maybe this is more about warring and power and booty than it is about the faith. Of course, that can be said in a lot of cases, perhaps. But. By the middle of the 8th century, the Umayyads are overthrown by the Abbasid caliphate. Also, and they have historical roots back to Muhammad himself, and they emerge as a leadership kind of clan that has gotten sufficient support even among Shia to overthrow the Umayyads. They're also Sunni. They found the city of Baghdad and they moved the capital eastward back into, well, not back, but into Mesopotamia, in between the Tigris and the Euphrates, remember from the beginning of civilization of our course. So they move the capital to Baghdad, the city that they founded, and it is moving farther into Persian territory. And it's accompanied... by, they take in much Persian influence. And in contrast to the Umayyad Caliphate, who were very much Arabs, and some people thought, although they did keep some old Roman administrators in place, that they were, that they very much favored Arabs, that the Abbasid Caliphate was more cosmopolitan, and it was more welcoming to people that weren't Arabs to join the Islamic faith, even become a part of. running the administration. And so that was a different vibe. We see them as more cosmopolitan. And since culture in so many ways, and as they're moving east, was so Persian, we see very much, historians say, the Persianization of Islam and a lot of Persian influence, very much along the lines of science, learning, and art. I'll show you a couple pictures related to that. So we have the Abbasid Caliphate, and in some ways, we're going to start to see some quick fragmentation. Again, unity is aspired to, but more often than not, short-lived, whether we're talking about Romans, Christians, Muslims, or Mongols. It seems to be something that is something of a safe-ish generalization in history. And so we're going to see some pretty quick fragmentation, and I won't ask, I don't, I'm not interested that you... kind of learn all the details of this at all. A big one will be the Fatimids and the Umayyads will go into Spain. We'll talk a lot about Spain down the road a little bit where they'll continue to the 11th century. And some Abbasids, even though the caliphate gets over, that unity doesn't last, will also have regions of Abbasids that are continuing to rule for centuries to come. But let me say just a couple words about Abbasid culture. So this cosmopolitan Persianate world engages in a huge translation project. And they are at a crossroads between trade as far as it spreads. So from China to the western edges of the Roman Empire to the north. northern areas of Africa where Augustine of Hippo, another great thinker, is from, they are able to collect texts and translate many texts. Your book talks about the house of wisdom hasn't survived, but it was in, it was, whether you want to call it an academy or library or an archive, scholarly center, it was in Baghdad and seemed and collected quite a bit of art. And we have here, I have some Pictures on the right, you see a map of the world. a map of the world from the early 13th century, pardon me. You also see a, here is a picture from the Materia Medica that was, has influence from Chinese, and here's another translation of, of a text, and so an awful lot of learning is going on from the Chinese. The Abbasid Caliphate imports and begins to produce paper. Here is a 13th century paper. manuscripts. So we see paper in the Abbasid caliphate before we see paper in Europe, and maybe the first paper crosses into Europe in the 13th century, but it's going to be a long time before there's much paper there. Here's a manuscript probably from the 13th century of scholars at an Abbasid library in Baghdad. Here is another ... 1200 early 13th century manuscript with an image of the human eye. And here's a picture of Avicenna who lived in the late 10th early 11th century. And he actually, you know, he is, this is kind of during the golden age of Islam, the Abbasid age, but he is born in, he is born in near Bukhara, so what's now Uzbekistan and dies in Iran. And Just has a remarkable over in terms of where, in terms of medical knowledge, writes many, many treatises, seems to, he's a big student of Aristotle and worked hard to understand what Aristotle wrote in metaphysics, such that when he started studying the human body, he was like, hey, compared to philosophy and metaphysics, this stuff is easy. And he observed people and learned much about the human body and the Western tradition was much. to the survival and studying from treatises that he wrote about medicine. So this period, which by the way Western typically has called the Dark Ages, saw a tremendous amount of flourishing in terms of writing and literature, mathematics, they bring us zero, scientific observation, engineering as well, they do a lot to perfect the Osterlieb and There's all kinds of crazy fascinating diagrams as well. If we wanted to look into the history of science, look at the history of the golden age of Islam from a history of science perspective. So with that, I wanted to come back. So here we can look at some maps and see this tremendous expansion. We're a little early to get there. We don't want to pay too much attention to that map yet. here we'll start to see already a fragmented world by the 11th century. But I want to come back to this idea of Byzantine besieged and talk about one cultural consequence of that as sort of the last little bit and story that I will leave you with today. And what I want to talk about is the iconoclasm. In the Christian book of Exodus, it says, quote, you shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. So there from the sacred Christian text, sacred Jewish text, there's, it would seem to be a pretty clear directive to not draw. graven images, images of living things. But here up in the corner, you see icons. And if you know anything about Christianity, you know that Christianity is writ large with icons and representations. Every church you can walk into will have an image of a cross with the crucifix, a cross with Jesus on it, the representation, the figurative representation of Jesus. In the Eastern Orthodox world, there's even more. um use of images every church has an iconostasis kind of five tiers of various icons and scenes from from the image also back to western churches they have you'll see the stations of the cross you know enacted jesus's walk to his death on the crucifix um all kinds of image so representation happens all the time kind of one more one more way in which back to that lesson is texts are important But don't necessarily take text at their word because that isn't necessarily the way things play out. Now, so... Christians have lots of images. It's said that Muslims in Islam, there was a prohibition of having figurative and representational images that really was followed. Now here we start to get into a much murkier history. So the Quran, which we see as the earliest exist in the mid-7th century, and certainly exists by 1690, the Quran barely mentions representations, and it certainly does not make any categorical statement about the rightness or wrongness of literary or visual imagery. But the hadith, these stories that emerge about the life of Muhammad and elaborate on the faith, the various versions of which are extremely difficult to date with any precision, they do address the issue of visual representation. And they condemned pictures. And they especially condemned the makers of pictures. So the Hadith include various statements of this tenor, including one that's, here's a kind of truncated quote, but quote, those who will be most severely punished on the day of judgment are the murderer of the prophet, and maker of images or pictures. Now, despite, so that's a pretty strong statement against having images or making images. We don't see a whole, the record is really not all that clear, but we do know that one leader, Yazid, who lived in around the 720s, he launched a campaign against images. attacked images, destroyed statues, and it's mentioned in various sources almost as an unusual event. So we think it might be either the first or one-off of a real campaign against this, or at least this is one of the first times that the issue shows it up as an issue. Now, to be sure, one thing we know about the life of Muhammad is that he went back to the Kaaba and he cleared it out of... pagan symbols, many of which were figurines of this or that sort. But one of the questions historians have made was it, and argued, the historian Leslie Brubaker, who I'm drawing on here, what she argues is that we can't be so sure that it was necessarily just that it was a figurative representation of a living thing, so much as it was the doctrinal issue that it was something in idle. for what Muhammad understood to be a wrong faith, something people shouldn't be venerating or directing their images to. So to kind of parse what is doctrinal and what is really just about prohibition against representational figures is tricky and murky. It's not as easy as it might seem to parse. And so, for example, here's an image. from the great mosque, which was in Damascus, the Umayyad capital, and we see a mosaic of a river landscape in a mosque, one of the holiest places that exists. And we do see trees, living things growing. We don't see people. And what Brubaker has noticed in her work is that this prohibition against having living things seems to obtain in sacred places. Although she's even found examples of where at the far edges of mosques you might see representations of human figures. But for the most part, you don't see people or animals represented in mosques, but you do see them in other places. And here is a famous mosaic taken from a bath in Jericho on the West Bank and where there's a lion attacking. gazelles and so they're very much we see representation of images i the manuscripts that i showed you above now they're more what we'd call medieval and later but they're um from a medieval tradition at least you see people represent represented um so it's it's a murkier question the um and one thing that brubaker also suggests is that to be sure we see in islamic art in tradition these tremendous geometric geometric designs um here are two well these are both actually floor mosaics and to to editorialize they're amazing pieces of art, kind of the color and the balance and the geometric knowledge that's deployed in making these images, for me, make them art to be admired and enjoyed. And so, and Brubaker asked this question, to what extent is it an aesthetic choice of the region, of the place? I won't answer that question entirely, just kind of put it before you. But so to come back to this issue of iconoclism, So in the Islamic tradition, can there be representational images or not? It's a bit murky. And in Christianity, well, we've got at least one. The Book of Exodus tells us don't do that. But we have a Christian tradition just bursting with representational art. But in the 8th century, we have this episode of iconoclasm. You've probably all heard the word iconoclast. Maybe in some teenage years you've... called yourself or been called an iconoclast. An iconoclast is someone that bucks tradition and rejects kind of the traditional way of doing things or the majority type of thought that really wants to do things differently. And that word derives from this eighth century episode in which Christians smashed the icons. Now, iconoclasts, what happened? Well, back to, I'll just remind you here, we have all these, on this frontier between the Sassanids and the Byzantines. They're fighting wars. And again, the Byzantines, before they fought Muslims, they had to fight the Sassanids. But then from the late 7th century and then the early 8th century, these Western Byzantine frontiers are surrounding, they are working to rebuff Muslim armies. And. It's said that these Christian soldiers, they are noticing that sometimes we're losing these battles, and we're losing to people that refuse to have graven images, and we're carrying banners with icons and whatnot. And so they get in their head that maybe that's part of the problem, and maybe we're losing because we are flouting God's intentions in having graven images. And so they very much lobby the Byzantine emperor Leo II, and, oh, sorry, Leo III. Leo III is the emperor who rules from 1717 to 741. And he is persuaded by this lobbying, and maybe he also felt like he really needed that contingent support. At any rate, he orders all icons destroyed. We are not going to practice faith anymore. And he puts in place a ban in 726. In 726, that lasts until 787. Icons are banned in the Byzantine Empire. Elaborate mosaics of the Last Supper and other imagery from Christ's life are whitewashed throughout churches. It's quite controversial. Many don't come on board at all. For example, John of Damascus, who is actually living under Umayyad power, writes a treatise in which he writes, quote, I do not draw an image of the immortal Godhead. I paint the visible flesh of God, for it is impossible to represent a spirit. How much more God who gives breath to the spirit. And he elaborates on this text, but basically what he's trying to say is that, you know, God is God and maybe unseeable, but God gave me, gave us with our eyes, these flesh images that we can see. And it is okay and good that we draw and represent those in icons. So that was kind of one argument for images. At any rate, it's an example of a move that doesn't. that doesn't take like prohibition soon like prohibition in america soon icons are back there is a modified band that's reinstated um in the 9th century from 815 to 843 they they try it again maybe you know maybe god doesn't want us to have these images but that too doesn't stick and to this day if you walk um into any christian church you can't you can't not see um some sort of images from the crucifix to the last supper to the stations of the cross and certainly you in an Eastern Orthodox Church to the iconostasis with so peopled, quite literally, with icons, you'll see many, many images. So I think that that I wanted to leave you with that example. And in conclusion, just some final thoughts on the emergence of Islam. I want to leave you with this. The Islamic conquest was absolutely unprecedented in its swiftness by the end of the 7th century, or 1st century in the Islamic calendar, but by the end of the 7th century, forces are at the gates of Constantinople. communities in the region are stunned. And by the 8th and 9th centuries, both Islamic and surrounding communities try to make sense of this conquest. And Islamic texts concerning the nature of the prophet begin to contextualize what has transpired. And so that's all I'll say right now about the emergence of Islam. And the next time, we will turn our attention to European barbarians. Thanks for listening.

If you have just transferred or you're first year, I'm talking to you. And also, if you've been here a long time and you're about to graduate or you are a lifelong learner, I'm talking to you as well. Although you need to be in the I'm not talking to you if you're taking it not for a non-credit course.

At any rate, if you are interested in history honors, writing a thesis, which is a process that takes. more than a year actually because there's a couple of required courses and you spend a semester doing some independent reading and then you spend devote a semester writing and so it's a very involved project and a really wonderful experience um if this is something that interests you that you're mildly curious about or you know you want to do it i encourage you to come to drop in hours and talk to me more about it um you If you are already enrolled in history honors and you're certain about what to do next, but still want to know what it takes to win a prize or you're thinking about trying to go to graduate school, please, I'm talking to you as well. And basically, if you answered yes to any of these questions, I'm encouraging you to come in to drop in hours and talk to me. And I'm glad to... explore these options in more detail with you.

And also, if you are feeling like you just need more history in your life, I invite you to consider joining the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, and I posted an announcement about that. So be aware of that. Also, specifically, if you are interested in going to graduate school and you want to get paid to conduct research, I encourage you to...

come talk to me or look into or you can email the McNair program. The McNair program accepts applications. It's especially geared towards first generation, low income, and or underrepresented students that have at least 60 credits and three plus semesters left until you need to graduate.

So there's a number of requirements that you need to be eligible. But if you are, it's a fantastic opportunity to learn about research and develop your history profile and get paid money doing it at the same time and plug into all kinds of support there. So if any of these things appeal to you, studying history in more depth, going to graduate school, come and talk to me. There are lots of options and I am glad to support you in getting connected to them. All right, with that, our topic today is the emergence of Islam.

So we've talked about this age of monotheisms, and we've talked about Zoroastrianism and Judaism and Christianity, and now this fourth great monotheism that we're going to talk about is Islam, which today has spread to where about a quarter of the world, world's people subscribe to this faith. Here is a world map today. The dark green shows you where more than 90% of the people are Islamic, and then colors indicate that it has spread far and kind of the percentage of population.

So you see that it is massive. Like Christianity, Islam never quite, very much like Christianity. Islam never achieved the doctrinal unity that it aspired to.

And so there's different branches. And the two main branches are Sunni and Shia, in some ways historical more than doctrinal, although the differences have evolved over time. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are Sunni. And then Shia accounts for a much smaller portion of the world's Muslims, and the majority of which are in what... what we consider the Persian world, which is now Iran.

And also kind of thinking about how ethnicity and religion map onto each other, about 20% of, or sorry, there's about 1.3 million, pardon me, 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and about 20% of those are Arabs. So a great proportion of Arabs are Muslim. And of the Arab population, a very small proportion portion is not Muslim.

So that maps pretty closely, but it is not at all an exclusively Arab religion. This next map that I'll show you, and this is really just to illustrate some of the differences rather than ask you to remember these, but in very rough terms, the Sunni faith bifurcated and bifurcated into four major schools, the Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafiya schools. And those are sort of the green and blue shades, and you see kind of the geographical spread of those schools in the world. And then this other map shows the various, the major schools of Shia Islam, and you can get a kind of a quick geographical sense of of Islam in the contemporary world. But with that, today we're going to talk about its origins.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to start talking about history, in some ways leaving where we left, picking up where we left off in the Eastern Roman Empire. We're going to stop and focus on the origins of this faith, have a little theoretical interlude about how to approach matters of faith historically in a productive way perhaps, and then come back to the history of how this religion spreads, fits swiftly and vastly, and some of its implications for the history that we're talking about. So some political context. With this, I want to come back to about the Justinian is perhaps the one of the last Roman empire emperors that I want to mention to you.

And he sat in Constantinople. He was quite, he had quite a distinguished reign, a long reign, which is always good for having, getting a lot done on your watch. He, we remember him for codifying Roman laws. in ways that we continue to draw on. Among some of the laws that he did was he outlawed law under Justinian and the reforms, which was in many ways codifying, organizing, eliminating redundancies of existing law.

But among this action, one of the laws that did come about was outlawing sex between men. Sex between men under the reign of Justinian, became a crime. And I'll note that same-sex marriage had existed, but it had been outlawed in 342. So in Rome's early Christian, officially Christian decades, or as it's becoming more officially Christian, same-sex marriage got outlawed.

Just one premise that historians always bring is whenever there is, whenever something is legislated against, it's pretty good evidence that that sort of thing occurred before. So had there never been any same-sex marriage, we probably wouldn't expect that we would see it at all in legal codes of prohibition against it. Also, Justinian is quite remembered for...

leading an extensive reconquest campaign, he made an attempt to reconstitute the Roman Empire. He didn't do it entirely and it didn't last too long, but he had some success in that department. And also even moving, kind of claiming for the Byzantium parts that had been part of Western.

Rome that matters a little bit for some maps that I'm going to show you coming up. It was also, so in this time of Justinian, People living in Constantinople still considered themselves Romans. They called themselves Romans, but back in Rome, in Italy, they were starting to call these people Greeks. As they had begun, they had in large part reverted to speaking and writing in Greek in just a few generations, starting in about the 4th century. But nonetheless, in Byzantium, they understood themselves to be Romans that were...

recipients of a distinctly Roman tradition. This picture that I have here is the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, sometimes known as Hagia Sophia. And Hagia Sophia is one of the, at the time it was the biggest cathedral in the world, I think, and it still remains one of the largest in the world. It was built on Justinian's watch in the 530s.

And It has had a long and multi-confessional history. It was a church. We don't really have the Orthodox Church yet. So in some ways, this slide I've given you here is a bit anachronistic.

But it is an Eastern Christian church from 537 to 1204. And then it is a Catholic church. So by 1204, we do have a schism. We do have two churches that distinctly call themselves as... following different doctrines. And that comes about because of the Fourth Crusade.

The Crusades were launched when Christians went to make the blood of Saracens run in the Middle East as a pilgrimage project was the founding of the Crusades announced at the end of the 11th century. But the Fourth Crusade instead of going all the way to Islamic lands, they stopped in Christian Constantinople and conquered it. And so we'll talk about that coming up. But from 1204 to 1261, the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia conducted Catholic masses.

And then in 1261, it reverted back to being an Orthodox church, which with some interruptions because of... earthquakes and cathedrals cracking and collapsing and needing to be repaired and renovated. It was an Orthodox church until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and they converted this church into a mosque and it was a mosque from 1453 to 1935. Under the modernizing and secular regime of Ataturk, it became a museum. Hagia Sophia was a museum from 1935 to 2020. And in July of 2020, President Erdogan has re-designated it as a mosque.

Here is Erdogan signs decree allowing Hagia Sophia to be used as a mosque again. So this is history unfolding right before us. So those are a few words about Justinian's reign and kind of takeaways regarding Justinian, the sixth century Eastern Roman Emperor.

His reign resulted in an extensive expansion of Byzantine territory holdings. He consolidated state authority. He made impressive strides in architecture, Hagia Sophia being the cameo example of that.

He didn't thoroughly address or heal or resolve many of the religious divisions in the empire. We've talked a little bit about the different types of Christian belief and some of the controversies brewing there. They will continue to brew. So here at the bottom is a map of the...

Mediterranean, Middle Eastern world. And this is showing the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire. The Sassanid Empire was essentially a Persian empire.

And what I want you to get on your radar screen is that from the 6th to 8th century, Byzantium is constantly rebuffing sieges and attacks. In the north and west, there's Lombards, there's Avars, there's Slavs, there's Volgars. And in the east and south, there's the Sassanid Empire. And then it will deal with... attacks by Muslims.

And so one of the most major attacks that military confrontations that I want to put before you, it's not that Byzantine is entirely victim, is a war, the Byzantine-Persian war. And this war gets fought for roughly a couple decades in the early 7th century, about 610-ish to 628, 629. And it's not so important that you know. that it's Emperor Heraclius and Emperor Khosrow on the Sassanid side.

But what I do want you to know is that this is a massive conflict between two major powers. Ancient historians call this, in some ways, the World War of Late Antiquity. And over here, this picture I've put in the bottom, is a temple all the way over in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea.

And it is the remnants of a fire temple. from ancient Persian rites that was destroyed by Romans in the context of this war called Adr-Gushnab. So few archaeological traces remain of this great war, but it was a major, major episode in the late antiquity.

And one of the biggest consequences for it is that it weakens both powers. The Sassanids. and the Romans.

And so in some ways, what that does is create, power vacuum is probably too extreme of a word, but sort of approaching a power vacuum in the region surrounding, and most particularly for our purposes today, that region of the Arabian Peninsula, where Islam will emerge and spread like wildfire. And when we ask, you know, how did this spread so quickly? Well, it was tied pretty quickly in a warlike, Bedouin, semi-nomadic society to warfare. And that warfare ended up being spectacularly successful. And one of the reasons for that was these great powers, you might say, of Byzantium and the Sassanids, were somewhat exhausted and depleted in the wake of the...

their long war. Here is a more close-up of that border between the Sassanid and Roman empires. And you see for much of the border, this is a kind of natural map, and we don't see clear-cut geographical boundaries like a north-south running mountain range and a north-south running rivers or ocean or something that would make that. make it clear where one polity should end and the other begins and that sort of an environment can lend itself to a persistent rivalry and competition for hegemony in a place. And so we need not be surprised that there was this sort of a war here without the natural map is returning to a map with just political colors for giving you a sense of those two big powers.

And now as we talk about the emergence of Islam, our story is going to turn down here to the Arabian Peninsula, with the Red Sea and the Persian Sea on either side. And there is a picture of people practicing the Hajj. And here is a picture of the crescent and the star, which has emerged as a central symbol of Islam. But I wanted to point out to you that it wasn't always and only a symbol of Islam.

Up here, here's a coin from the second century reign of Hadrian. And we see there the crescent and the star. And here we see a picture of the adoration of the Magi.

And up here you see an attendee with a flag bearing the hammer and sickle. And art historians, I'm reporting from art historians here, I would have been quite likely to look at that and say, oh, look, Muslims too attending the birth of Christ. And then I would have had to check myself chronologically and say, wait a second, there was no, Jesus lived centuries before Muhammad.

So of course Muslims couldn't have been there. What is going on there? And so we see that we have instead the deployment of this symbol by someone else. And.

moving way forward in time, it was also the crescent and symbol well after Islam had been established was the symbol of a Byzantine, so Christian ruler of Cyprus in the 12th century. So, and that's just more to keep you, just a comment to keep us historically attuned to sometimes the meanings of symbols change and are appropriated by various groups. I talked about this when I talked about the fascis and the use of that symbol and how it's changed over time or become associated over time. And also I could go on, for example, and do a similar thing with the use of the double eagle.

a sign of that many dynasties through our time have claimed as their own special symbol. So with that, the emergence and the rise of Islam, its origins, some of its, some a little bit about doctrine and more about how as we as historians can think about doctrine and its political spread. Swift, far, and there was a sumitius split.

I'm not going to elaborate too much on details that are in your textbook, but we'll kind of cover our bases in a pretty introductory way. The Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca into the tribe of the Al-Qurash, probably sometime around 570. We think we know the dates of his life, 570 to 632. He was orphaned at a young age, taken care of by his uncle, married an older widow. and became a successful merchant.

And around the age he might have been as old as 40, he started having visions. And he understood that he was visited by the angel of Gabriel and that God was speaking to him and sending him messages about how to live. And from these experiences that he started to write down and was supported by friends. and wrote down for him emerged the Quran, which is the sacred text of the Muslim faith.

And the Quran is a, the Quran, these revelations get written down as the Quran. And the Quran consists of 114 surah, whether you want to call them chapters or verses, kind of. There are 114 of them.

There are 6,861 words. And this is just to say that the sacred text of Islam gets codified and decided upon in a much shorter time period, so much more quickly relative to its emergence, than did the Christian Bible, over which there was more. discussion and various schools of thoughts for a longer period of time.

With the Quran, no original copy survives, but by 690, we have a Quran that had been written down by friends and followers of Muhammad. And that text has been remarkably stable, that central sacred text of the Quran. We can't say the same for the hadith, the kind of stories that are written about Muhammad's life and about a number of other issues. Here is a world where the authenticity and the dating, there's a whole lot more controversy about that, but about the contents of the Quran are quite stable and quite solid.

Okay, so Muhammad, his earliest converts were among his friends, his immediate family, and slowly he brought in other converts. Now, scholars argue that part of his success was due to the fact that city life in this dry and in many ways forbidding Arabian Peninsula was eroding traditional values and tribal bonds of a semi-nomadic. clannish society.

So maybe similarly, as we talked about, what emotional needs did Christianity serve? Are there less tangible, harder to track, but nonetheless important changes in the way society is living that made it receptive to this new faith? And certainly the reception was remarkable.

So what was this new faith? Well, Muhammad um preaches that there's five pillars of Islam. And the first is the shahada. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. One must pray every day.

At first it's three times, then it's five times a day. Initially, one would face Jerusalem, but as deteriorations and aspirations for bringing Jews on board deteriorated the custom. And now, you know...

well-solidified tradition is what is to face towards Mecca. And to be a Muslim, one must give alms to the less fortunate. That's a very important component.

One should fast during the holy month of Ramadan. And if one is able, one should make, if not annually, at least once in his or her life, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, where is the famous symbol of the Ka'bah. Here is a picture again of the Hajj, the pilgrimage, and just thousands and thousands of people have done this every year, although in this year of world pandemic it's a tradition that is being for the most part suspended. But anyway pilgrims would be believers and they would go to commemorate Muhammad's hijrah. his flight from Mecca to Medina in the year 622. And that event in his life is extremely important in the calendar of Islam.

And it marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. Here is an older picture of the Kaaba. And now the Kaaba, it had been a shrine that held various pagan idols. And one of the things that Muhammad did when he kind of returned triumphantly to the city ultimately was to destroy the pagan idols and rededicate the Kaaba as a Muslim shrine.

So Muhammad and his message. According to the first Islamic source materials, it's clear that Muhammad understood himself to be working within the prophetic tradition. And his goal was to preach the authority of one God and one God alone.

Early Islamic texts describe Muhammad as a prophet sent to restore the purity of God's covenant with Abraham. So he understood himself to be part of Abrahamic tradition. According to Jewish tradition, God had established a covenant with Abraham, and this covenant establishes a special relationship between God and those who accept his authority. And Abraham's son is understood to be an heir to this covenant. So for Muhammad, he acknowledges the same prophetic tradition of the Old Testament and of Jewish traditions.

So like Judaism and Christianity, Islam, it recognizes Adam and prophets like Abraham and Moses and Noah and Jesus as prophets. There's a big departure. Christians saw Jesus as something else, not just one among other prophets, but the Messiah. But for Islam, he is a prophet. And people that adhere to this tradition of...

Jews and Christians, Muhammad understood to be people of the book or the dhimi. And we'll talk more about them later. But in short, they're protected.

They're protected people, but they're also on a lower status. They have to pay a special tax, the jizya, because they're not Muslim. And while there were ebbs and flows, their treatment was sometimes considerably worse, or at least they weren't supported by the state in ways that historians have said in practical ways, you're much better off being a Muslim on this regime because there's more state support surrounded. And sure enough, that may have been something that did contribute to conversion.

So I want to kind of pause on this question of Islam and how it relates to Christianity in Judaism. First, as I just said, Islam accepts the authority of both the Jewish prophets and the authority of Jesus. But the early Islamic texts take issue with Jewish decadence. That is this strict code of laws and regulations. It seemed to be not quite the best way to worship God.

And indeed, the five pillars, there's a certain simplicity to it. That seems to have been part of its huge appeal. It's not super complicated. You don't have to go through years and years of Talmudic and other studies in order to understand what the faith is.

That's not just, well, if the message for everyone can be quite simple in these five pillars, make no mistake. There is a quite diverse and developed and sophisticated world of Muslim theology that to which there's a huge breadth. I showed you kind of all these different schools that had occurred.

And in some ways, it had many of the same challenges that Christianity did, that there's lots of people have different takes on theology and doctrine and different ways of seeing it as they think through these theological problems. Of course, one big difference is that the Roman Catholic Church, the Western Church, it succeeds to a greater extent than even the Orthodox Church of establishing a top-down hierarchy. So there's going to be a struggle under the, like bulldogs fighting under the blanket the whole time, more or less.

But we do have a Pope who, his word kind of gets filtered out through a hierarchy and goes. There's no Muslim Pope. So you have Imams and various religious authorities that will weigh in on matters of. of theology and throughout the Islamic world over time we see a real range of doctrine.

At any rate, so early Islamic texts praise Jesus and reject the notion, but reject the notion that he is God. There is only one indivisible God according to Islam and that early Islamic texts are very concerned that the Christian faith had become idolatrously obsessed. with images and symbols stressing a fixation on the cross, the Virgin Mary, Christ as intermediary between man and divine. And there was this sense that that just isn't where faith is supposed to be at. We need to kind of purify, distill, and worship God in the way he wants to be worshiped.

I'm going to come back to this issue of images, but stay tuned for that. However, for all that disagreement, Islam rejects the persecution of Christian and Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Islamic conquest. Although your book does talk about the incident of Muhammad seeing the execution of many, many Jews in Medina that he understood to be plotting against him. With that, I want to... kind of pull back and have a little bit of a theoretical, or rather a theological interlude.

I kind of just did that a little bit, talking about how these five pillars might have had an appeal in their simplicity that wasn't necessarily found in these other traditions. But I want to, what I want to do right now is I want to share a couple of excerpts from the Quran. You'll, and the Bible, and you'll see where I'm going with this in not too much time.

I'm trying to get at this lesson. So here's an excerpt from the Quran that says, Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. God does not love aggressors. Slay them wherever you find them.

Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is more... grievous than bloodshed, but do not fight them within the precincts of the holy mosque unless they attack you there.

If they attack you, put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded. But if you mend their ways, know that God is forgiving and merciful.

So there's a word from this very sacred text. Now I want to show you a word from the Jeremiah, which is a sacred text for Christians, and take a little excerpt out of it. And here it says, go up, my warriors, against the land of Marathime and against the people of Pekod. Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge, pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you, says the Lord. Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.

So... As a historian, I could, as a historian, what do I do with these sorts of things? And also as a person living in the world where not immediately, well, in the wake of 9-11, there was certainly parts of our society that would say to us things like, Islam is a violent religion.

It is essentially and always violent. And it must be dealt with. harshly because of that inherent violence in the way it understands itself to be doing good in the world.

And so knowing that as a historian, what might we say? And I've selected these two passages to kind of make this one kind of actually now not so much theological, but methodological interlude about how we do history. And when I look at both of those texts, and I think about what I know about the history, that is, events that have happened, the lesson that I would impart to you is that texts are the building blocks of historical knowledge. As a historian, we don't get anywhere without them.

We need texts. We can incorporate archaeology and drawings and images and architecture. and use them as sources that we'll sort of read.

But historians use texts. We say that human history begins when we start having texts to read that people started writing things down. So texts are fundamentally important to us.

And we take texts seriously. You know, what do these words say? What do these words mean? But at the same time, textual evidence does not necessarily tell you the whole story.

And speaking from experience, usually it... doesn't tell you the whole story, that historians need to understand the context. So I could read that text from the book of Jeremiah and tell you that Christians are eternally bloodthirsty. Or I could read a text and say, Muslims aren't going to come beat you up.

But if you give them a hard time, they're going to rebel. And I could pretend that that was the end of story and I had interpreted it successfully. But that isn't the case at all. We need to look. at the context of particular, of any, of, we need to always try and assess what's the context of this text.

It got written down. Who read it? Did anybody read it?

Did anybody care? We've got great big long texts. Did everyone pay equal parts of attention to all of the texts throughout all time?

Well, in the case of Christianity, I can tell you that no, there are certain moments in history where the apocalyptic visions that are articulated in the Book of Revelation seem to be the things that monks are copying, ergo paying more attention to, than at other centuries in time. And so as a historian, we want to understand that context and yes, read a text, try and understand its meaning, and engage in this simultaneous process of taking a text at its word without taking it at face value, or I don't need to kind of be too sophomoric in the wordplay here. We want to attempt to understand the meaning in and of itself and simultaneously know that we never get all the meaning just from the words written on a certain page. And that's one of the things that makes so tricky and fascinating and enriching trying to study how people have practiced and understood.

thing like religion and faith throughout human history. Sort of along those lines, you know, what is just war and what is jihad? Jihad originally gets articulated as kind of struggle, and many Muslims who could tell you struggle within, but it emerges as also having this sense of holy war.

And we could put this alongside the... concept of just war. And I won't go into, we don't have time to go deep into death here, but I've just sort of put this up to you to think about, these aren't entirely parallel concepts, but to think about how the acts of violence get tied to or filtered through religion. So Augustine was one of the first Christians to elaborate ideas about just war. When That certainly if one is preaching love and regard for humanity, there's so much of a war that is at odds with that.

And so how do you, how do you, how have religion, religious believers tended to thread that needle? And Augustine said, well, you need to have a just authority and a just cause and a right intention. And it should be a last resort.

And also when you conduct war, it should be conducted with regard for. proportionality, discrimination, responsibility, that non-combatants should never be targeted, and that the violence must be proportionate. These are some basic ideas.

And it turns out that similar constraints have been articulated with respect to jihad, that it needs a legitimate authority to initiate it, that it must be committed in the name of God and only for freedom from tyranny, and also that women children sick and old shouldn't be harmed and also that trees and crops should not be damaged and war should only be fought until the enemy lays down his arms so that idea of um pouring salt in the earth you know biological warfare or tearing um or total and utter destruction um aren't legitimate forms of war i mean i and i say this recognizing that that some people reject war as a legitimate endeavor in any case. And that is a pacifist position. And then, and other positions don't have that same outright rejection of war.

So it's a fascinating topic. And since, well, as Plato remarked, only the dead have seen the end of war, war is a part of human history. And so I put this slide up here to think about how different traditions have approached this question of back to the historical stuff. So Muhammad, he has these visions, he begins preaching, he's persecuted for his teachings, very much so from his own tribe, the Quraysh, and he ends up fleeing the city of Mecca. with his followers and goes to the nearby city of Medina.

And this journey is called the Hijra, or the Higara, his flight. It happens in 622. And as I mentioned before, it's a super significant date, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. And while in Medina, Muhammad and his followers, they get more organized, and they will end up returning to Mecca, capturing the city.

And this essentially begins an Islamic conquest. The rest of his life is spent consolidating his power among the tribes on the Arabian Peninsula. And then we see this expansion, like wildfire.

So under Muhammad, he probably captures the, this map shows the dark purple, so maybe half of the Arabian Peninsula. And when he passes, when he passes under the first four caliphs that follow him, the leaders, they'll proceed to conquer all of the Arabian Peninsula and then continue. Questions, historians have said, you know, what do we make of this rapid, rapid expansion? And some of what's been said is that the, as I said before, there's a bit of a power vacuum in the wake of these big Byzantine-Persian wars. And also that this is a culture of where you um warring is part of it many of the um you have kind of oasis trading towns punctuating a pretty harsh environment and so you have bedouin and nomadic communities they live with the herds and and clan loyalty is important and they fight with each other and they're slaves and booty that is um exchanged and so war is is way of being.

And so it kind of picks up and rides with that. Now, with this sense of kind of belief and purpose and mission, it seems and then with winning, kind of in some ways, it begets more winning. And so we see this.

Massive, massive spread. And here's another map of essentially the same thing. Now, one attraction, so one attraction that historians have also remarked upon is this egalitarian nature of Islam.

All believers are equal in the eyes of God. And another attraction is that the raids he starts to lead on Meccans and the Buddis that generates it supports the Ummah. The Ummah, U-M-M-A, is the community of believers. Now, initially, Islam and the coming of Islam, this submission to God, and that's what the meaning of the word Islam, submission to God.

women experience a boost in status. They pray together with men around the 8th century. So pretty soon that begins to change.

Women begin to pray separately. And so historians have noted here, as in Christianity, where in its first centuries we saw women bishops and women leaders of the church and a kind of equality and worth granted to women that they hadn't known in such a patriarchal society. And then that that goes away where all leadership positions are held by men and there's sort of a reversion to a greater patriarchy.

It seems like that happens in Islam as well. Like Christianity, the patriarchy reasserts itself in terms of how this and is integrated into how this egalitarian religion is practiced too. Now, one remark.

Jihad was not one of the five pillars. The idea developed early, primarily meaning the idea of an internal struggle to overcome evil, to overcome weakness, to become the best Muslim possible. But over the following years, according to some Muslim thinkers, this idea takes on a resonance and then evolves into an idea of a holy war. which in a contemporary sense, when people say jihad, that is what they mean. Now, so here's a map looking at the Islamic conquest.

And in just over a century, this faith under one leadership, although there's a lot of... contention on that front as well, but it spreads to become in about a century an entity larger than the empire of Alexander the Great. So it's a remarkable kind of political accomplishment. And here, let me just say a few quick, quick words about that political story. And so basically, Muhammad dies, and he's followed by the first, there's four caliphs.

And this is sometimes these four are referred to as the Rashidun Caliphate. And they have fairly short reigns. Two of them are murdered. And then the final, who was actually the fifth, Hassan, is the son of Ali.

And he abdicates to what will become the Umayyad Caliphate. Now, I want to pause just briefly to say that the split. as your textbook explains, between the Sunni and the Shia is a very, very complicated matter.

And it's kind of the original seed has to do with who had the right to lead the community of Muslims following the Prophet's passing. And should it be a family member, Ali, or someone who was loyal and emerged as the leader. Now, That is going to kind of be that original kernel of this conflict. But as years go by, much more becomes associated with it.

And what some historians also have pointed out as well is that from the day of Ali's death, the split is not massive and it sort of goes underground and isn't important for a period of time and then re-emerges. But without going into... that complicated history. I'll just leave it at that and you can take your textbook at its word. So what happens next?

As it's spreading, we have the caliphate of the Umayyads and it gets spelled sometimes 1M2N and vice versa with the Ys. The Umayyad caliphate, it reigns for almost a century, not that not so so long. They have their capital in Damascus. They are Sunni. They begin to write down these sacred documents so that by 690 we have the Quran is written as a text.

But on other fronts, historians say, we don't see that maybe this is more about warring and power and booty than it is about the faith. Of course, that can be said in a lot of cases, perhaps. But.

By the middle of the 8th century, the Umayyads are overthrown by the Abbasid caliphate. Also, and they have historical roots back to Muhammad himself, and they emerge as a leadership kind of clan that has gotten sufficient support even among Shia to overthrow the Umayyads. They're also Sunni.

They found the city of Baghdad and they moved the capital eastward back into, well, not back, but into Mesopotamia, in between the Tigris and the Euphrates, remember from the beginning of civilization of our course. So they move the capital to Baghdad, the city that they founded, and it is moving farther into Persian territory. And it's accompanied...

by, they take in much Persian influence. And in contrast to the Umayyad Caliphate, who were very much Arabs, and some people thought, although they did keep some old Roman administrators in place, that they were, that they very much favored Arabs, that the Abbasid Caliphate was more cosmopolitan, and it was more welcoming to people that weren't Arabs to join the Islamic faith, even become a part of. running the administration. And so that was a different vibe. We see them as more cosmopolitan.

And since culture in so many ways, and as they're moving east, was so Persian, we see very much, historians say, the Persianization of Islam and a lot of Persian influence, very much along the lines of science, learning, and art. I'll show you a couple pictures related to that. So we have the Abbasid Caliphate, and in some ways, we're going to start to see some quick fragmentation. Again, unity is aspired to, but more often than not, short-lived, whether we're talking about Romans, Christians, Muslims, or Mongols.

It seems to be something that is something of a safe-ish generalization in history. And so we're going to see some pretty quick fragmentation, and I won't ask, I don't, I'm not interested that you... kind of learn all the details of this at all.

A big one will be the Fatimids and the Umayyads will go into Spain. We'll talk a lot about Spain down the road a little bit where they'll continue to the 11th century. And some Abbasids, even though the caliphate gets over, that unity doesn't last, will also have regions of Abbasids that are continuing to rule for centuries to come.

But let me say just a couple words about Abbasid culture. So this cosmopolitan Persianate world engages in a huge translation project. And they are at a crossroads between trade as far as it spreads. So from China to the western edges of the Roman Empire to the north.

northern areas of Africa where Augustine of Hippo, another great thinker, is from, they are able to collect texts and translate many texts. Your book talks about the house of wisdom hasn't survived, but it was in, it was, whether you want to call it an academy or library or an archive, scholarly center, it was in Baghdad and seemed and collected quite a bit of art. And we have here, I have some Pictures on the right, you see a map of the world.

a map of the world from the early 13th century, pardon me. You also see a, here is a picture from the Materia Medica that was, has influence from Chinese, and here's another translation of, of a text, and so an awful lot of learning is going on from the Chinese. The Abbasid Caliphate imports and begins to produce paper. Here is a 13th century paper.

manuscripts. So we see paper in the Abbasid caliphate before we see paper in Europe, and maybe the first paper crosses into Europe in the 13th century, but it's going to be a long time before there's much paper there. Here's a manuscript probably from the 13th century of scholars at an Abbasid library in Baghdad. Here is another ...

1200 early 13th century manuscript with an image of the human eye. And here's a picture of Avicenna who lived in the late 10th early 11th century. And he actually, you know, he is, this is kind of during the golden age of Islam, the Abbasid age, but he is born in, he is born in near Bukhara, so what's now Uzbekistan and dies in Iran.

And Just has a remarkable over in terms of where, in terms of medical knowledge, writes many, many treatises, seems to, he's a big student of Aristotle and worked hard to understand what Aristotle wrote in metaphysics, such that when he started studying the human body, he was like, hey, compared to philosophy and metaphysics, this stuff is easy. And he observed people and learned much about the human body and the Western tradition was much. to the survival and studying from treatises that he wrote about medicine. So this period, which by the way Western typically has called the Dark Ages, saw a tremendous amount of flourishing in terms of writing and literature, mathematics, they bring us zero, scientific observation, engineering as well, they do a lot to perfect the Osterlieb and There's all kinds of crazy fascinating diagrams as well.

If we wanted to look into the history of science, look at the history of the golden age of Islam from a history of science perspective. So with that, I wanted to come back. So here we can look at some maps and see this tremendous expansion. We're a little early to get there. We don't want to pay too much attention to that map yet.

here we'll start to see already a fragmented world by the 11th century. But I want to come back to this idea of Byzantine besieged and talk about one cultural consequence of that as sort of the last little bit and story that I will leave you with today. And what I want to talk about is the iconoclasm.

In the Christian book of Exodus, it says, quote, you shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. So there from the sacred Christian text, sacred Jewish text, there's, it would seem to be a pretty clear directive to not draw. graven images, images of living things.

But here up in the corner, you see icons. And if you know anything about Christianity, you know that Christianity is writ large with icons and representations. Every church you can walk into will have an image of a cross with the crucifix, a cross with Jesus on it, the representation, the figurative representation of Jesus. In the Eastern Orthodox world, there's even more. um use of images every church has an iconostasis kind of five tiers of various icons and scenes from from the image also back to western churches they have you'll see the stations of the cross you know enacted jesus's walk to his death on the crucifix um all kinds of image so representation happens all the time kind of one more one more way in which back to that lesson is texts are important But don't necessarily take text at their word because that isn't necessarily the way things play out.

Now, so... Christians have lots of images. It's said that Muslims in Islam, there was a prohibition of having figurative and representational images that really was followed. Now here we start to get into a much murkier history. So the Quran, which we see as the earliest exist in the mid-7th century, and certainly exists by 1690, the Quran barely mentions representations, and it certainly does not make any categorical statement about the rightness or wrongness of literary or visual imagery.

But the hadith, these stories that emerge about the life of Muhammad and elaborate on the faith, the various versions of which are extremely difficult to date with any precision, they do address the issue of visual representation. And they condemned pictures. And they especially condemned the makers of pictures. So the Hadith include various statements of this tenor, including one that's, here's a kind of truncated quote, but quote, those who will be most severely punished on the day of judgment are the murderer of the prophet, and maker of images or pictures. Now, despite, so that's a pretty strong statement against having images or making images.

We don't see a whole, the record is really not all that clear, but we do know that one leader, Yazid, who lived in around the 720s, he launched a campaign against images. attacked images, destroyed statues, and it's mentioned in various sources almost as an unusual event. So we think it might be either the first or one-off of a real campaign against this, or at least this is one of the first times that the issue shows it up as an issue. Now, to be sure, one thing we know about the life of Muhammad is that he went back to the Kaaba and he cleared it out of...

pagan symbols, many of which were figurines of this or that sort. But one of the questions historians have made was it, and argued, the historian Leslie Brubaker, who I'm drawing on here, what she argues is that we can't be so sure that it was necessarily just that it was a figurative representation of a living thing, so much as it was the doctrinal issue that it was something in idle. for what Muhammad understood to be a wrong faith, something people shouldn't be venerating or directing their images to. So to kind of parse what is doctrinal and what is really just about prohibition against representational figures is tricky and murky. It's not as easy as it might seem to parse.

And so, for example, here's an image. from the great mosque, which was in Damascus, the Umayyad capital, and we see a mosaic of a river landscape in a mosque, one of the holiest places that exists. And we do see trees, living things growing. We don't see people.

And what Brubaker has noticed in her work is that this prohibition against having living things seems to obtain in sacred places. Although she's even found examples of where at the far edges of mosques you might see representations of human figures. But for the most part, you don't see people or animals represented in mosques, but you do see them in other places. And here is a famous mosaic taken from a bath in Jericho on the West Bank and where there's a lion attacking.

gazelles and so they're very much we see representation of images i the manuscripts that i showed you above now they're more what we'd call medieval and later but they're um from a medieval tradition at least you see people represent represented um so it's it's a murkier question the um and one thing that brubaker also suggests is that to be sure we see in islamic art in tradition these tremendous geometric geometric designs um here are two well these are both actually floor mosaics and to to editorialize they're amazing pieces of art, kind of the color and the balance and the geometric knowledge that's deployed in making these images, for me, make them art to be admired and enjoyed. And so, and Brubaker asked this question, to what extent is it an aesthetic choice of the region, of the place? I won't answer that question entirely, just kind of put it before you.

But so to come back to this issue of iconoclism, So in the Islamic tradition, can there be representational images or not? It's a bit murky. And in Christianity, well, we've got at least one. The Book of Exodus tells us don't do that. But we have a Christian tradition just bursting with representational art.

But in the 8th century, we have this episode of iconoclasm. You've probably all heard the word iconoclast. Maybe in some teenage years you've...

called yourself or been called an iconoclast. An iconoclast is someone that bucks tradition and rejects kind of the traditional way of doing things or the majority type of thought that really wants to do things differently. And that word derives from this eighth century episode in which Christians smashed the icons. Now, iconoclasts, what happened?

Well, back to, I'll just remind you here, we have all these, on this frontier between the Sassanids and the Byzantines. They're fighting wars. And again, the Byzantines, before they fought Muslims, they had to fight the Sassanids.

But then from the late 7th century and then the early 8th century, these Western Byzantine frontiers are surrounding, they are working to rebuff Muslim armies. And. It's said that these Christian soldiers, they are noticing that sometimes we're losing these battles, and we're losing to people that refuse to have graven images, and we're carrying banners with icons and whatnot. And so they get in their head that maybe that's part of the problem, and maybe we're losing because we are flouting God's intentions in having graven images.

And so they very much lobby the Byzantine emperor Leo II, and, oh, sorry, Leo III. Leo III is the emperor who rules from 1717 to 741. And he is persuaded by this lobbying, and maybe he also felt like he really needed that contingent support. At any rate, he orders all icons destroyed. We are not going to practice faith anymore. And he puts in place a ban in 726. In 726, that lasts until 787. Icons are banned in the Byzantine Empire.

Elaborate mosaics of the Last Supper and other imagery from Christ's life are whitewashed throughout churches. It's quite controversial. Many don't come on board at all.

For example, John of Damascus, who is actually living under Umayyad power, writes a treatise in which he writes, quote, I do not draw an image of the immortal Godhead. I paint the visible flesh of God, for it is impossible to represent a spirit. How much more God who gives breath to the spirit.

And he elaborates on this text, but basically what he's trying to say is that, you know, God is God and maybe unseeable, but God gave me, gave us with our eyes, these flesh images that we can see. And it is okay and good that we draw and represent those in icons. So that was kind of one argument for images. At any rate, it's an example of a move that doesn't.

that doesn't take like prohibition soon like prohibition in america soon icons are back there is a modified band that's reinstated um in the 9th century from 815 to 843 they they try it again maybe you know maybe god doesn't want us to have these images but that too doesn't stick and to this day if you walk um into any christian church you can't you can't not see um some sort of images from the crucifix to the last supper to the stations of the cross and certainly you in an Eastern Orthodox Church to the iconostasis with so peopled, quite literally, with icons, you'll see many, many images. So I think that that I wanted to leave you with that example. And in conclusion, just some final thoughts on the emergence of Islam.

I want to leave you with this. The Islamic conquest was absolutely unprecedented in its swiftness by the end of the 7th century, or 1st century in the Islamic calendar, but by the end of the 7th century, forces are at the gates of Constantinople. communities in the region are stunned.

And by the 8th and 9th centuries, both Islamic and surrounding communities try to make sense of this conquest. And Islamic texts concerning the nature of the prophet begin to contextualize what has transpired. And so that's all I'll say right now about the emergence of Islam. And the next time, we will turn our attention to European barbarians. Thanks for listening.

Transcript for:Emergence of Islam and Historical Context

Transcript for:
Emergence of Islam and Historical Context