9781422281154

A N O VERVIEW W HO A RE THE M USLIMS

Anbara Wali

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on file at the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-1-4222-3677-2 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4222-8115-4 (ebook)

Understanding Islam series ISBN: 978-1-4222-3670-3

Table of Contents

I NTRODUCTION ............................................................5 D R . Camille Pecastaing, Ph.D. 1. T RADITION AND D IVERSITY ........................................9 2. T HE D EVELOPMENT OF I SLAM ..................................15 3. T HE S PREAD OF I SLAM ..........................................29 4. W HAT M USLIMS B ELIEVE ........................................51 5. I SLAMIC L EGAL S OURCES ........................................67 6. T HE D ISTRIBUTION OF M USLIMS T ODAY ..................75 C HRONOLOGY ..........................................................100 S ERIES G LOSSARY ....................................................103 F URTHER R EADING ..................................................104 I NTERNET R ESOURCES ..............................................105 I NDEX ......................................................................106 C ONTRIBUTORS ........................................................112

Islam: Core Beliefs and Practices Ideas & Daily Life in the MuslimWorld Today Islamism & Fundamentalism in the Modern World The Monotheistic Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Muslim Heroes and Holy Places Muslims in America An Overview: Who are the Muslims? The Struggle for Identity: Islam and the West

Introduction by Camille Pecastaing, Ph.D.

I slam needs no introduction. Everyone around the world old enough is likely to have a formed opinion of Islam and Muslims. The cause of this wide recognition is, sadly, the recur- rent eruptions of violence that have marred the recent—and not so recent—history of the Muslim world. A violence that has also selectively followed Muslim immigrants to foreign lands, and placed Islam at the front and center of global issues. Notoriety is why Islam needs no simple introduction, but far more than that. Islam needs a correction, an exposition, a full dis- cussion of its origins, its principles, its history, and of course of what it means to the 1.5 to 2 billion contemporaries associated with it, whether by origins, tradition, practice or belief. The challenge is that Islam has a long history, spread over fourteen centuries. Its principles have been contested from the beginning, the religion has known schism after schism, and politi- co-theological issues instructed all sorts of violent conflict. The history of Islam is epic, leaving Islam today as a mosaic of diverse sects and practices: Sunnism, Shi’ism, Sufism, Salafism, Wahhabism, and of course, Jihadism. The familiarity of those terms often masks ignorance of the distinctions between them.

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A N O VERVIEW : W HO ARE THE M USLIMS ?

Islam is many things to many people, and while violent radi- cals occupy the headlines, what a Muslim is in the 21st century is practically indefinable. Islam is present on every continent; the religion of billionaires and of the poorest people in the world, the religion of kings and revolutionaries, of illiterate pastoralists and nuclear scientists, of fundamentalist theologians and avant-garde artists. Arabic is the language of Islam, the language of the Qur’an, but most Muslims only speak other tongues. Many Muslims indulge in moderate consumption of alcohol without feeling that they have renounced their faith. Boiled down to its simplest expression, being Muslim in the 21st century is an appre- ciation for one’s origins and a reluctance to eat pork. It is not only non-Muslims who have a partial view of Islam. Muslims, too, have a point of view limited by their own experi- ence. This tunnel vision is often blamed for the radicalization that takes place at the margins of Islam. It is because they do not fully apprehend the diversity and complexity of their faith that some follow the extremist views of preachers of doom and violence. Among those, many are converts, or secularized Muslims who knew and cared little about religion until they embraced radical- ism. Conversely, the foundation of deradicalization programs is education: teaching former militants about the complexity of the Islamic tradition, in particular the respect for the law and toler- ance of diversity that Prophet Muhammad showed when he was the ruler of Medinah. Islam in the 21st century is a political religion. There are four Islamic republics, and other states that have made Islam their offi- cial religion, bringing Islamic law (Shari’a) in varying degrees into their legal systems. Wherever multiparty elections are held, from Morocco to Indonesia, there are parties representing political Islam. Some blame Islam’s political claims for the relative decline of the Muslim world. Once a center of wealth and power and knowledge, it now lags behind its European and East Asian neigh- bors, still struggling to transition from a rural, agrarian way of life to the urban, now post-industrial age. But for others, only Islam

I NTRODUCTION

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will deliver a successful and indigenous modernization. Islam is also an economic actor. Shari’a instructs the practices of what is known as Islamic finance, a sector of the international financial system that oversees two trillion dollars worth of assets. For decades now, Islamist organizations have palliated the defi- ciencies of regional states in the provision of social services, from education to healthcare, counseling, emergency relief, and assis- tance to find employment. It is the reach of Islamist grassroots net- works that has insured the recent electoral success of Islamic par- ties. Where the Arab Spring brought liberalization and democrati- zation, Islam was given more space in society, not less. It should be clear to all by now that modernity, and post- modernity, is not absolute convergence toward a single model— call it the Western, secular, democratic model. Islam is not a lega- cy from a backward past that refuses to die, it is also a claim to shape the future in a new way. Post-communist China is making a similar claim, and there may be others to come, although today none is as forcefully and sometimes as brutally articulated as Islam’s. That only would justify the urgency to learn about Islam, deconstruct simplistic stereotypes and educate oneself to the diver- sity of the world.

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Tradition and Diversity

A Muslim is a follower of Islam , one of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths. The shared religious experience unites Muslims in a worldwide community of believers called the umma . However, the questions “Where do Muslims live?” and “How are Muslims governed?” cannot be answered in a simple way. Today Muslims live in practically every country in the world, and they fol- low a wide variety of cultural practices. Islam Around the World Although Islam is often identified with the place of its birth, the Arabian Peninsula, today it is a global faith practiced throughout the world by more than 1.6 billion people. The Islamic world stretches from Africa to Indonesia and includes more than 50 countries. Throughout this region there are many cultural differences. Islam emerged on the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh cen- tury, and today in most Arab countries 90 to 95 percent of the peo-

Opposite: Islam is a global faith, and most Muslims live outside the Middle East. These women selling fruit on a street in Ampana are among the more than 206 million Muslims who live in Indonesia.

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ple are Muslims. However, some of the largest countries in the area historically known as the Middle East have large non-Arab Muslim populations, such as Turkey (75 million Muslims) and Iran (75 million Muslims). Asia is actually home to the countries with the largest Muslim populations. Indonesia, for example, is the world’s largest Muslim nation; it claims more than 205 million followers of Islam. There are also large Muslim populations in Pakistan (178 million) and India (172 million). In Central Asia, Afghanistan is home to more than 29 million Muslims, who make up 99 percent of the coun- try’s population. Numerous other countries in that region have significant Muslim populations; many of these had been part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) until it frag- mented in 1991. (The practice of Islam had been prohibited under the strict Communist rule of the Soviet Union.) Today, with over 90 percent of its citizens adherents of Islam, the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan has a Muslim population of about 4.8 million; neighboring Uzbekistan, with a similar proportion of Muslims but a much larger population, has about 27 million Muslims. Islam is also the majority religion in Azerbaijan and in Kazakhstan (which is 70 percent Muslim and 28 percent Orthodox Christian), while Russia itself has a Muslim population estimated at around 15 million. Muslim Arabs conquered northern Africa during the seventh and eighth centuries, bringing their religion and culture with them. Islam remains the dominant religion in North African

Words to Understand in This Chapter

Islam— submission to the will of God. monotheism— belief in and worship of only one God.

Muslim— a follower of the religion of Islam and one who believes that God is the Supreme Being. secular— not controlled by a religious organization, or concerned with spiritual matters.

T RADITION AND D IVERSITY

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countries from Mauritania to Somalia, with more than 90 percent of the people living throughout this region professing the faith. Egypt (80 million) and Algeria (40 million) have the largest Muslim populations in this region. The Islamic religion spread throughout eastern and sub- Saharan Africa primarily through trade and missionary work. Today, about 30 percent of all people living in sub-Saharan Africa are Muslims. Nigeria has the continent’s second-largest Muslim population (after Egypt) at about 76 million. Ethiopia, in East Africa, is home to about 24 million Muslims. Although Muslims represent only a small percentage of the total population of western Europe, they may be found in fairly large numbers in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Each of these European countries controlled colonies in the Islamic world during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and they permit- ted Muslims to immigrate. Some Muslims went to Europe in search of work, while others sought to escape persecution in their native countries. However, Muslim immigrants were sometimes permitted only as temporary guest workers in the European coun- tries. The greatest difficulty for the Muslim minority has been to fit in with Europe’s predominantly Christian and secular societies while retaining their own religious identities and Islamic values. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists during 2015 and 2016 in places like Brussels and Paris, as well as a wave of refugees fleeing the violence of the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, have led some Europeans to question whether their countries should admit fewer Muslim immigrants. The percentage of Muslims living in South America is small. But there are significant communities of believers in Guyana (about 55,000) and in Suriname (about 85,000). While the United States does not maintain official statistics on religious affiliation, the US Muslim population is widely estimated at between three and eight million. A large percentage of US Muslims are African Americans who have converted to Islam since the 1960s. While Muslims live in every state of the Union, the

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A N O VERVIEW : W HO ARE THE M USLIMS ?

Muslims can be found in almost every community in the United States. This mosque is located in a suburb of Detroit.

largest Muslim populations may be found in New York, Michigan, and California. To the north of the United States, Canada is home to about a million Muslims. Diversity of Practices Muslims believe that their religion transcends nationality and that all Muslims are bound together by their faith. However, while the religious practices of Muslims may be similar, their lifestyles and customs often vary according to where they live; radically differ- ent political and cultural settings all but guarantee some differ- ences in the daily lives of Muslims around the world. The most obvious differences among Muslims who live in different countries are the ways in which they dress and their customs regarding events such as marriage and childbirth. For instance, when it

T RADITION AND D IVERSITY

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comes to daily activities, Bosnian Muslims have more in common with Bosnian Christians than with Muslims who live in Pakistan. In other cases Islamic practices have been influenced by their set- tings. In Indonesia, for example, aspects of Asian culture have been integrated into Islamic rituals and ceremonies. In some countries, local traditions show the desire of Muslims to set themselves apart from neighboring non-Muslim cultures. One notable example of this practice occurs in India, where Muslims tend to eat specific foods and to avoid using certain col- ors and decorations in their wedding ceremonies in order to dis- tinguish themselves from Hindus. In India, Muslims form only 14 percent of the population, and many feel it is important that their religious practices be unique and separate from those of the major- ity Hindus. The Islamic world today is highly diverse, with Muslims in dif- ferent places claiming different ethnic backgrounds and national identities, occupying a range of socioeconomic statuses, speaking different languages, and holding divergent attitudes toward the modern world. The purpose of this book is to provide demograph- ic information about how the worldwide Muslim population is dis- tributed. In preparation, earlier chapters provide basic information about the religious beliefs of Muslims, a background about the his- tory of Islamic government, and the basis for Islamic law.

Text-Dependent Questions 1. What are three European countries where Muslims may be found in fairly large numbers? 2. In what US states are the largest Muslim populations found?

Research Project Two of the most important religious holidays in Islam are Eid al-Fitr, which occurs at the end of the sacred month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, the last day of the hajj period. Choose one of these festivals, and do some research to find out more about why that particular festival is important to Muslims and how it is traditionally celebrated. Write a two-page report on the festival.