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.
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Nominal... would that be someone who labels themself as a Christian/Muslim, but they're not religious? I'm a nominal Jew, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI think the term Muslim is often confused with Arab. I usually say Middle Eastern when I'm talking about the culture and certain geographical area. I sometimes hesitate saying "Arab" because I'm not sure if countries like Iran would count. Are they Arabs, or Persian? Or are those the same?
Thank you for being my first commenter, Dina.
ReplyDeleteA nominal follower of a religion as I loosely intend it (not being a sociologist of religion) is the type that would say on a census form even if it was completely confidential that they belonged to that faith yet don't actually strongly believe in its tenets (if at all) or participate in many if any of the group activities usually associated with that religion. There are probably much more meaningful ways of defining it but that's mine for now. It may be an Australian usage. So I am guessing you may fit that definition but it's a bit less clear with Judaism because when you say you're a Jew I think you could mean you belong either to that ethnic group or to that religion (or both, of course).
It's a bit like what Hinduism used to be like when Hindu in English could refer to the followers of one of the Indian religions (except for Buddhism or Jainism probably and maybe some others special cases) or an ethnic Indian (now we just call them Indians and Hindus separately depending on whether we are talking ethnicity or religion). By the way, the Arabic for roughly modern India is traditionally Hind and for roughly modern Pakistan is Sind (the corresponding adjectives are Hindi and Sindi). Arabs are traditionally fond of rhyming things, I think, so they often pair these two more or less contiguous regions as Hind wa Sind ("India and Pakistan" doesn't sound nearly as romantic). There are therefore many Arabs surnamed al-Sindi in southern Iraq after their ancestors who were traders from roughly modern Pakistan that settled there when Baghdad to the north was the centre of the modern trading world (think Sindbad from the Arabian Nights (or in Arabic "1000 Nights and a Night (Alf Layla wa Layla)").
I think it's analogous with those 'died in the wool' supporters of a political party that if you get right down to it actually only follow that party because their parents always did (i.e. it's how they were 'raised').
I think I need to put maps and other pictures in my blog more so I'll probably do that. I have some in the 300 pages that this blog is serialised from. Generally, in Iraq they speak Arabic with a minority speaking Farsi (Persian), especially in the South and East, and next door to the east in Iran it's the opposite. There are also large minorities in both countries that speak thinks like Kurdish and Turkmen (similar to Turkish).
To me an Arab is someone whose first language is Arabic so it's a linguistic concept (but also with a cultural element). Arabs can therefore be anything (even Jewish, both in the ethnic and religious sense). So there are also Arab Iranians (that minority whose first language is Arabic) and also a large number of Persian speaking Jews, just to further complicate the issue. That said, most Arabs are at least nominally Muslim.
I never thought about it in a linguistic way. That makes sense. Sorry for the short comment...kind of in a rush now ; )
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