Spread of islam : the History you want to know!

 The start of Islam is marked in the year 610, following the first revelation to the prophet Muhammad at the age of 40. Muhammad and his followers spread the teachings of Islam throughout the Arabian peninsula. Soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad, there were military expeditions, called "futuhat," or literally "openings," into what is now Egypt and other parts of North Africa. In other parts of the world, Islam spread through trade and commerce. The following is a brief timeline that highlights some of the major occurrences in Islam's development, as well as the geographical spread of Islam to some of the countries featured in the film. To get more details please visit - Spread of islam map

• Islam spread through military conquest, trade, pilgrimage, and missionaries.
• Arab Muslim forces conquered vast territories and built imperial structures over time.
• Most of the significant expansion occurred during the reign of the Rashidun from 632 to 661 CE, which was the reign of the first four successors of Muhammad.
• The caliphate—a new Islamic political structure—evolved and became more sophisticated during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.

Conversions To Islam

Historians distinguish between two separate strands of converts of the time. One is animists and polytheists of tribal societies of the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile crescent; the other is the monotheistic populations of the Middle Eastern agrarian and urbanized societies.

For the polytheistic and pagan societies, apart from the religious and spiritual reasons each individual may have had, conversion to Islam “represented the response of a tribal, pastoral population to the need for a larger framework for political and economic integration, a more stable state, and a more imaginative and encompassing moral vision to cope with the problems of a tumultuous society.” In contrast, for sedentary and often already monotheistic societies, “Islam was substituted for a Byzantine or Sassanian political identity and for a Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian religious affiliation.” Initially, conversion was neither required nor necessarily wished for: “[The Arab conquerors] did not require the conversion as much as the subordination of non-Muslim peoples. At the outset, they were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs.”

Only in subsequent centuries, with the development of the religious doctrine of Islam and with that the understanding of the Muslim Ummah, did mass conversion take place. The new understanding by the religious and political leadership led in many cases to a weakening or breakdown of the social and religious structures of parallel religious communities such as Christians and Jews. With the weakening of many churches, for example, and with the favoring of Islam and the migration of substantial Muslim Turkish populations into the areas of Anatolia and the Balkans, the “social and cultural relevance of Islam” were enhanced and a large number of peoples were converted.

The widespread adoption of Islam beyond the Arab peninsula is recorded in some older histories as starting as early as the mid-seventh century, but in fact, this probably did not occur until at least a century later. Richard C. Foltz suggests that the reason for this confusion is due to misinterpretation of the word islam ("submission"), used in Muslim histories to indicate the submission of one clan to the authority of another, and not the spread of the Islamic faith proper.1 In fact, it was the great success of the early Muslim clans in acquiring the submission of other Arab groups that eventually led to the spread of the religion beyond the Arabian peninsula. Foltz argues that the act of submission generated defacto non-aggression pacts between Muslim Arabs and their neighbors. Most of the clans of the Arab peninsula had submitted and professed their loyalty to the Muslim clans by the year 630, forcing them to find more targets for raids beyond the Arabian peninsula in Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, lands held by Byzantium and Sassanian Persia. Expanding into these areas, the Muslim clans had little trouble expelling the Sassanian and Byzantine leadership and their armies; some villages, Foltz notes, opened their gates to the Muslim Arabs and welcomed them as liberators.2

The Muslims set up Islamic governments in the regions they conquered, and by the 660s an Islamic dynasty, the Umayyads, was established in Damascus. By 750, other kingdoms ruled by Arab and non-Arab Muslim dynasties would come to control all lands from Spain in the west, throughout northern Africa, over all of Persia and the entire Middle East, spreading as far to the east as the edge of the Tang Empire in the Tarim Basin, and crossing the Indus river into Indian sub-continent. Sometime referred to as the "Islamic Empire," it was not a true empire since there was no central authority governing all of these lands. Rather, they were united by similar governments structured around the interpretation of Islamic law.

The true Islamization of the Silk Routes did not begin until around the beginning of the eight century. Initially, Muslims referred to their faith as "the Arab religion" (al-din al-'arab), and did not attempt to win converts. Though early Islam tried to transcend both class and racial distinctions, this goal was abandoned once the conquest of territories beyond the peninsula began in earnest.3  Keeping distinctions between ruling Muslims and conquered non-Muslims made for simpler governance, and guaranteed a privileged status for Muslims under the laws of the various Islamic states.