Reddit reviews Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam
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Oh my yes. I preface this by saying that this is by no means negative, many great societies spread early through conquest.
Early Islamic Civilization was spread by an active and fully endorsed series of conquests, which were then carried on by his successors. The original title of Muhammad's successors was even al-Mu'minin, Commander of the Believers, it was an interesting combination of religion and militaristic action.. If a city or group just surrendered, they would be happily absorbed by the growing nation
Though shortly after his immediate successors (about 100 years after Muhammad's death) it became more politically motivated, and though conquest was the most common way the religion was spread, it was really used as an excuse for rulers to stake a claim (like Christianity)
For further info, check out Muhammad and the Believers by Fred Donner
The history of Islamic Civilization is both extremely fascinating and confusing, its good stuff.
Actually the archaeological evidence is the opposite. Most cities were taken without much fighting or destruction. Prof Donner of U Chicago discusses this at length.
http://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Believers-At-Origins-Islam/dp/0674064143
http://www.amazon.com/Islamic-Conquests-History-Project-Reprints/dp/1597404586/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374340788&sr=8-1&keywords=donner+islamic+conquests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RFK5u5lkhA
The believers were able to take the cities without much fighting because they absorbed the jews, Christians and zoroastrians and did not force them to convert. The islam of the quran is an inclusive religion.
The initial conquests were not at all like the later destructive ones.
I think you can find his book on bookos.org
Fred Donner's new book Muhammad and the Believers goes to some lengths to answer this question. While I'm not an expert in this time period, I can tell you that it takes a few centuries, even as late as the 14th century before you have something close to a majority Muslim population in the Arab territories, Persia and Anatolia. Even then, by the time the Ottoman Empire reached its height in the 16th century, it probably ruled over more Christians than Muslims.
Some factors that you could consider as increasing the Muslim quotient in this part of the world include the legal incentives you mention and also things like slavery, which resulted in non-Muslims being enslaved, converted and eventually released. Aside from legal incentives, there were also social incentives such as access to schooling, which in many areas meant an Islamic school of one stripe or another, and access to other social services.
For your bonus question, the two are tied pretty closely. This is due to the fact that Arabic as the pure language of God is given a paramount place in the religion. Education in the Islamic system begins with the learning of Arabic, so its vernacularization inevitably came along with conversion.
>How did Islam spread so wide so quickly?
It didn't. This is a huge myth. I'll elaborate on this further down.
>There must be a significant number of early adopters of Islam that genuinely believe in Mo's message.
How did Mo convince them? If it was coercion, I doubt it will last. I am surprised that after his death, only a handful of apostate tribes rebelled. I would expect the whole of arabia would return to their pre-Islamic days, if indeed most of the conversions were half-hearted. But as you can see, that motley crew in medina grew to become 1.7 billion.
Muhammad preached Islam for 13 years in Mecca. Do you know how many followers he got? 150. This is supposedly the best version of Islam too, the most tolerant as much of it wasn't abrogated by later actions in Medina.
Muhammad conquered Arabia by force, and he converted tribes by force. You say only a handful of tribes rebelled, but that's false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridda_wars
Majority rebelled, except those around Mecca & Medina. We can see Islam was not as popular with Arabs as the PR claims.
>It's the youngest abrahamic religion and yet had the fastest growth. No other major religions come close.
>We could probably dismiss the whole of sirah as a fabrication, but they are substantiated by hadiths, and as u know, hadiths are kinda hard to fake, unless a grand conspiracy is going on, but that would take the entire first and second generation muslims to agree to it. FYI, I'm more inclined towards this explanation, even though it's highly unlikely. It's still possible.
You've answered the question yourself. Much of Islamic history we know was written hundreds of years after Muhammad. Nothing is verifiable, Hadith are faked all the time. Even a few Muslims believe the Hadith compilations like Bukhari, Muslim etc were canonized for political reasons.
You can read Fred M. Donner's Muhammad and the Believers if you want to get an idea of how the actual Muhammad might have been (Donner is one of the most foremost Western scholars of Islam). https://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Believers-At-Origins-Islam/dp/0674064143
It posits that Islam wasn't even defined as a religion until much later than originally thought. Many similar theories exist too, some saying Islam was only formalized by the early empire for legitimacy reasons (as neighbor empires like Persians and Romans had their own state religions). There is heaps of evidence for this.
He even says the early Muslim armies were multiethnic and mutlireligious, with Christians and Jews among them.
>So what is Islam's secret? There must be some proper explanation other than "divine intervention". Something far sinister perhaps?
It's way more mundane than you think. It boils down to Islam coming along in the right place at the right time. Let me list some factors and facts:
There's nothing really miraculous about this stuff.
Now, you want to see an example of a religion that really was impressive in how it spread? Look at Manichaeism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
This faith started in Iran and ended up spreading as far away as China and Britain - all without military conquest but purely through trade.
Now that's a fucking miracle! It even rivaled Christianity at one point, and in an alternate history could have easily replaced it had some things gone differently.
Shame it was persecuted heavily by pretty much everyone, from Zoroastrians to Muslims.
It's been a while since I read the book, but at the time I had strong feelings against the book, and this hasn't changed in the year since. First of all, it has to be said that Holland is a very engaging writer and I enjoyed his other books thoroughly, though perhaps it was because I'm not so familiar with other periods of history. At the very least, he writes excellent popular history and though his arguments in this book is controversial, it in my opinion brought more public attention to a very exciting and interesting field, which is no bad thing! This is also a flaw though, since he can get a bit too into his rhetoric, which is great for the reader, but obscures the complexities of the problems he deals with.
The key element of Holland's argument, that Islamic sources are not reliable, is not contested in modern Western scholarship, but the problem is that some historians, such as Patricia Crone, go too far and argue that they should be dismissed altogether. Holland unfortunately followed this approach blindly even though he's not an expert in this field. The book Hagarism by Crone and Michael Cook is the most obvious example of the views of these ultra-sceptics. It is a fascinating read, suggesting that based on contemporary non-Islamic sources, Islam was a Jewish splinter sect (with Samaritan influences) that became its own religious force in the reign of Abdul al-Malik in the late seventh century; Muhammad was a secular leader who got turned into a prophet by his successors when they realised that they need an alternative form of legitimacy after their ties with Judaism became strained. However, even though Islamic sources were written down at least a century after the events they described and some were obvious forgeries, I still think that SOME facts about Muhammad's life were passed down orally. Hagarism also used a shoddy methodology and its main argument about Islam being a Jewish sect relies on three sources: a contemporary Armenian history, a Byzantine anti-semitic pamphlet and a Jewish apocalyptic work. The first two would obviously cast Islam as a brand of Judaism, because contemporaries were unbelievably anti-semitic and Jews were the obvious scapegoat for any Byzantine misfortune, whilst the last source is hardly a reliable one. As far as I'm concerned, I'm willing to concede that Muhammad's early followers formed some kind of an ecumenical group that included Jews and Christians (as Fred Donner argued) since there are plenty of evidence for inter-faith co-operation and influence, but Islam being a Jewish sect or Muhammad not claiming to be a prophet? They don't mesh well with our sources at all.
Most modern historians are aware of the flaws of Islamic sources and always take care to compare these sources with other contemporary writings. Two historians who used this approach recently, James Howard-Johnston and Robert Hoyland, both came to the conclusion that Islamic traditions are generally accurate, though some dates/events were fudged to suit the religious/political sensibilities of the chroniclers, which is hardly surprising. A few others still use these sources uncritically (such as Hugh Kennedy, whose book on the Islamic conquests is excellent, but I still cringe a bit at the uncritical approach to sources he used), but generally, I get the impression that the consensus is somewhere in the middle, with historians using Islamic sources carefully to reconstruct early Islam, rather than following blindly or dismissing them altogether.
There are still some exciting theories floating around, but they are based on hard evidence. Most recently, Stephen Shoemaker's Death of a Prophet argued that Muhammad led an ecumenical movement of followers of various Abrahamic religions and was involved in early attacks on Palestine (rather than dying in Medina before the Islamic conquest as conventional accounts have it) - controversial, but there are contemporary sources that suggest Muhammad did just that. Holland on the other hand did not argue from sources (part of the nature of writing a non-academic book) and was trying to summarise complex theories into one exciting argument. The impression I got was that he was basically re-phrasing Crone's argument by positing an alternate home-city for Islam and de-emphasising the role of Muhammad as a prophet, but it was an argument that has generally been dismissed in academia - even though Hagarism was an exciting book to read and was really important in changing historians' perception of early Islam, it had a flawed methodology and I much prefer Crone's later works, which were still sceptical, but were more nuanced and actually looked at more than three sources.
Just noted this part of your reply.
>it's his claim that compared with Jesus, the amount of genuine scholarship on the historicity of Mohammed is woefully lacking.
What are you talking about? There are scholars for the revisionist theory, albeit outdated. John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Joseph Schacht, Michael Cook. The ones that I'm fond of and they all have impeccable credentials (the number of degrees, and where you obtained them from actually do matter) Fred Donner, Harald Motzki, Jonathon Brown, and Andreas Goerke.
I usually recommend these two books to anyone that's interested in the history of Muhammad and Islam, they're critical of the traditional narrative among others.
Muhammad And The believers: At The Origins of Islam by Fred Donner
Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathon Brown
You are correct. Of course Sunnis follow Abu Bakr because they believe Prophet chose him to be the successor. What I am suggesting above, is a distinction between the type of needs the earliest Muslims had in their expectations of the leadership.
I have shared a reference to a scholarly book which sheds complete insight into this matter. For a quick and easier read, Donner[1] and Hazleton[2] have also written on the same subject. Madelung's[3] is concise and indepth.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Believers-At-Origins-Islam/dp/0674064143
[2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594632308
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/religion/comments/2cbzui/are_there_any_real_differences_between_shias_and/cje7wg7
Edit: If you are not a Muslim yourself (or you may be a convert) then you are better off reading external scholarly sources instead of reading from Muslims themselves.
> The schools of thought, which you decided to use the arabic name for and spelled wrong (it's maddhab, plural madhahib), have no central source for information. I would love to see where you got what you got.
Seriously? They all have clear stipulations on punishments and rules of all kinds.
Let me ask you, what do you think the madhabs say about apostasy?
>No it's not ironic. What god teaches in the qur'an goes for everyone.
Not in this case. You're just using convenient excuses, if I pull up a violent verse for instance you will just say it isn't for everyone but those specific people at that specific time.
Very cliche mental gymnastics that Muslims do.
>I admit, that that was an assumption. It is a good assumption, as no one has labeled christians or jews after the ummayed caliphate. literally no country, other than nazi germany.
So no source? You just made shit up and hoped you wouldn't get called out on it? Muslims seem to do this a lot, you seem to think because Westerners aren't familiar with Islam you can just lie through your teeth.
>Islam was NOT formed after the prophet died.
Yes it was. The Quran was written down under shady cricumstances and standardized by Uthman, he burned the other copies.
4/5 Pillars are from the Hadith, and these were only codified 200 years after Mo's death.
There were wars and conflict immediately after Muhammad died.
All the Arabian tribes left Islam, were forced to come back by Abu Bakr though war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridda_wars
The Muslims fought amongst each other for control of the religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Fitna
How do you know the Shi'a aren't right? How do you know Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman weren't treacherous?
Unbiased account of what we REALLY know about Muhammad from real sources: https://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp
Professor Fred M. Donner on why Early Islam was completely different from what traditional scholars say: https://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Believers-At-Origins-Islam/dp/0674064143
>Paying the jizya, which is just tax to be honest, is part of the religion yes. However, no where in that quote does it say TO WEAR A YELLOW STAR AND IDENTIFYING CLOTHING. NO. WHERE. Jesus christ are you slow?
I think you're the slow one (I mean you believe in genies after all).
ibn Kathir clearly lays out why dhimmitude is meant to be a humiliation, do you seriously have ZERO response for that?
Sharia doesn't SAY you need to put the Yellow Star on Jews, but it doesn't say you can't without violating their rights either. Because they have less rights - DUH.
>Also, why would you want to fight in a military in the name of a religion you don't worship? The caliphate is literally the Islamic state. If you were really itching to fight and you were a christian, the byzantine empire is always open.
Do you not understand how society back then worked? Serving in the military was a prestigious thing, by banning non-Muslims they were making them second class.
You really don't know anything, do you?
>Mohammed signed treaties with the qurayza tribe, which they broke, so the muslims attacked them. keeping the peace. The constitution of medina was fair and honourable, and treated everyone equally. it was secular.
I love these lies!
There is no proof the Banu Qurayza broke anything, and even if they did, why was it OK to slaughter ALL the men and boys, and take the women + children as slaves to be sold?
Do you understand what collective punishment is? It's what Israel does to Palestine right now. Do you support that?
Muhammad was also finished fighting when he received a "message" from "Gabriel" to go attack the Banu Qurayza. I wonder why? Gabriel obviously doesn't exist so Muhammad just had an ulterior motive. Maybe he wanted spoils of war that he was denied since the Meccans never fought him?
>This is retaliation. The meccans under abou soufyan has attacked the muslims (and jews) in medina multiple times so they had to retaliate somehow. Peaceful, not pacifist. Fun fact about Soufyan, he later accepted islam at the conflict's end.
It was the opposite, the Muslims attacked the Meccans in the sacred month of Rajm. This led to the Battle of Badr.
Fun fact: Sufyan likely converted just to gain power, as we can see from how his family treated Muhammad's family later on.
Muhammad was raiding caravans because he was a thief. He was exiled from Mecca,he had no right to any property whatsoever. He was just a bandit hungry for power.