Muslims Today

The “Islamic World” is a bit more complicated still than the Middle East or the Arab world but it also exists in some sense as a relevant identity (and perhaps region) and it is worth considering what our ideas are before we begin to study a history. The Islamic World can be said to exist today both within and outside the Middle East. However, even Middle Eastern states tend to have a diversity of external orientations according to their geopolitical interests rather than the interest of either Arab or Islamic unity.

Islam is a form of theism and a system of other beliefs derived from the interpretation of and attempt to ‘live out’ the requirements of a set of scriptures. Early on, various Islamic thinkers also developed Islamic legal philosophy which remains important to Islam today and in politics. And it has a politics (and a culture or, more precisely, cultures but, note, many histories, too).

There have been two significant large ‘Islamic’ Empires covering large parts of the Middle East for extended periods: the 'Arab' Caliphate or Caliphates (including even parts of Western Europe for part of its life/their lives) from around 700 CE to around 1,300 CE and a Turkish Empire more recently (which included parts of Eastern but not Western Europe). You will notice that I need to use inverted commas often to hopefully make clear in the long run that any unified understanding of this history may risk oversimplification. Beyond the Middle East there have also been a variety of Islamic Empires and polities.

The Middle East (and beyond) experienced much variety in these Islamic histories but we should also note that most of the Islamic world was ruled in some form by capitalist European colonialists in the 19th and early 20th Centuries (towards the end of the period of the Turkish Ottoman Empire). And that the Islamic world also has exportable oil.

The Islamic World extends, as I've said, far beyond the Middle East. It extends to much of Africa, to Central Asia as far as China and Russia (and including parts of those states), to South East Asia and to various communities (both Arab and non-Arab and both Diaspora and indigenous) throughout the world including in Europe, Australia and the USA.

In some cases, even in minority communities there are huge numbers of Muslims. For example, there are around 200 million Muslims in Hindu India; roughly as many as there are in the entire Arab World. And what makes a Muslim? We need to consider the phenomenon of the ‘nominal’ Muslim as we do the nominal Christian. If we do, there may actually be many more ‘true’ Indian Muslims than there are ‘true’ Muslims in the Arab World.

There are several sub-regions that I will later find convenient to separate for the purposes of discussion of their regional Islamic histories, that have had both an Islamic and Arab influence for many centuries in West Asia and Africa. They are Arabia, the Near East of West Asia (including the 'Fertile Crescent'), Egypt, Nilotic Sudan, the Maghreb (North African states other than Egypt), Central Sudan and Western Sudan. These last two are both to the West of the modern state of Sudan.

This 'central' Islamic group of distinct zones circles and crosses the Sahara and abuts the Mediterranean and Arabia and the Ethiopic and Swahili regions of East Africa bordering the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

I will discuss the development of Islam in these regions in some depth in later posts.

Now let’s begin to concern ourselves with the whys and wherefores of the origins of the Islam we may fear. Islam had a setting that informs it as surely as any set of ideas and its environment engage in a dialogue to arrive at a final compatible mutual synthesis. For our purposes, let’s begin by considering (in the following posts) the nature of the Arabia that Islam came to infuse with itself and in turn be infused with.