Islam: religion and empire

Map of the Spread of Islam -
From the 'Rightly Guided' Caliphs, and the Umayyad & Abbasid Expansion,
to the Empires of the Safavids, the Mughuls and the Ottoman

map source: http://ds.dial.pipex.com/suttonlink/340ismap.html

The founding of a new religion by Muhammad united the Arabs and created the basis for territorial conquest. The secular struggle between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Sassanid Empire had concurred to enfeeble both. Byzantium would loose its territories, allied territories and possessions in the Middle East and North Africa to Islamic forces, and be permanently confronted by Islam in struggles for hegemony and survival. The Sassanid Empire would not recover from the assaults of the new conquerors. 

From its origin, the salvationist (1) religious ideology of Islam had a type of “double” center, uniting in specific ways the religious and the political, transcendence and material survival, the individual fate and the fate of the community considered as one.

We can perhaps say that in Islam, the historical community and the ideal community mirror each other in complex relationships that may account for some of the challenges of its various historical embodiments through the centuries.

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

 

(1) as defined by Darcy Ribeiro in his typology of civilizations and empires.

See Darcy Ribeiro - The civilizational process, 1971