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In AD 610, at the age of 40, a trader-turned-prophet from the town of Mecca, in Arabia, claimed he had seen visions of the Angel Gabriel while sleeping in a cave. Gabriel, he claimed, had told him to preach monotheism to the polytheistic Arab desert tribes.28 The existing religions of Christianity and Judaism, with which Muhammad had come into contact as a trader, also preached monotheism - the worship of one God.
Muhammad’s simple message of the oneness of God, social justice, charity, good works and the equality of all before God resonated with the poor. However, it angered the powerful merchant class in Mecca, who rejected his teachings and became actively hostile, since much of their revenue depended on the city’s pagan shrine, the Kaaba. An attack on the existing polytheistic Arab religion meant an attack on Mecca’s prosperity.
In AD 622, Muhammad was forced to leave Mecca and led an exodus of his followers to the town of Yathrib, which accepted his teachings and took on a new name, Madinat al-Nabi, the ‘town of the Prophet’, which is now shortened to Medina. Henceforth this exodus became known as theHijra, or flight, and can be compared to the Exodus of the Hebrew tribes from Egypt under Moses as a turning point in the history of the Islamic religion. Eight years later, Muhammad marched on Mecca and subdued it and a large number of Arabian desert tribes turned to the new religion which they called Islam, or ‘submission to the will of God’.
When Muhammad died in AD 632, he left behind the nascent religion among a few tribes in the Arabian desert. Within a hundred years Muslim armies controlled territory from Spain in the west and Africa in the south, to Persia in the east, and had managed to subdue entire empires. Common explanations for the success of the Muslim armies include plague and war.
The plague that had ravaged both Sassanid Persia and Byzantium in the 6th century seems to have bypassed much of Arabia, possibly thanks to its deserts and lack of cities which gave less room for contagion. Muhammad had also introduced hygienic reforms to great effect. As for war, Persia and Byzantium had been so weakened by incessant battles with each other that they were unable to withstand conquering armies that were driven by religious zeal and attracted by the promise of a share in the spoils of war. Finally, many communities had become fed up with the corruption and taxes of the existing regimes and welcomed the invaders with open arms as a result.
However, the speed of the Islamic success hid underlying problems within the community: the failure of Muhammad to appoint a successor, or even establish a procedure by which a new leader might be chosen, resulted in differences of opinion as to who should succeed him. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, was passed over in favour of one of Muhammad’s closest friends, Abu Bakr, partly because Ali was considered too young to take on the role. This decision would later prove to be a major source of division across the Islamic community; one group became Ahl Al-Sunna, those who followed the Sunna, or way of the Prophet, while the followers of Ali launched Shi’at’Ali, or the party of Ali, thereafter known as the Shiites.
Upon Muhammad’s death Abu Bakr became caliph, or righteous heir, and determined that all Arabs in the Arabian peninsula acknowledge the leadership of the Muslim community, even if this should come about by force. He achieved his goal in an incredibly rapid two years. Having brought the tribes together, he directed them against outside enemies, and so began a bold series of campaigns from Dar al-Islam, or the ‘House of Islam’ into Dar al-Harb, or the ‘House of War’.
The Arab armies offered comparatively easy terms to those they defeated, especially to Jews and Christians, whom they termed ‘people of the Book’ and whom they permitted to worship freely. They also did not demand that people convert to Islam; Muslims were not required to pay taxes so this meant that a larger number of converts equalled less tax revenue, not more. Essentially, as long as people accepted the sovereignty of the Arabs and paid taxes, they could continue to govern themselves. Many of the conquered had also been oppressed by their previous rulers which meant that in many instances the invading armies were welcomed with open arms.
When the third caliph, Uthman, was murdered 22 years after the death of Muhammad, the followers of Ali saw this as a chance to proclaim Ali as caliph. However, Ali was assassinated and his son, Hasan, was persuaded by the existing Umayyad line to renounce his claims to the leadership. Having done so, Hasan was poisoned. His brother, Husayn, set out to seek power – an act that subsequently ended in his murder and the massacre of his followers, and exacerbated the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
Over the next hundred or so years, Damascus, in present-day Syria, became the Islamic world’s capital, presided over by the Umayyad clan, under whose leadership Muslims conquered vast tracts of land. To the east, Muslim armies successfully invaded Sassanid Persia and Central Asia, and gradually gained followers as far as India. To the west, in AD 711, a small army of northern African Berbers under Arab leadership and motivated by the promise of booty, invaded the Visigoth territory of Spain and went on to conquer most of the Iberian peninsula within a decade. From that point on Spain became known as Al-Andalus – a peculiar hybrid of barbarian, Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture. The top of the Rock of Gibraltar, known then by its Latin name, Mons Calpe, was renamed after the Moor general, Tariq, as ‘Jabl Tariq’ (the Hill of Tariq), from where we get the name Gibraltar. It would take seven centuries for the Muslims to be driven off the peninsula entirely.
For many years the Islamic armies seemed unstoppable. A turning point in their expansion into north-west Europe came only in AD 732, when the king of the Franks, Charles Martel, otherwise known as ‘Charles the Hammer’, and a coalition of troops under his leadership, defeated an Umayyad invading army near Poitiers in France. While there is disagreement as to the size of this invading army, world history may have turned out very differently indeed had it not been defeated.