Dictionary:

Islam

  (ĭs-läm', ĭz-, ĭs'läm', ĭz'-)

1. A monotheistic religion characterized by the acceptance of the doctrine of submission to God and to Muhammad as the chief and last prophet of God.
2. 1. The people or nations that practice Islam; the Muslim world.
   2. The civilization developed by the Muslim world.

[Arabic ’islām, submission, from ’aslama, to surrender, resign oneself, from Syriac ’ašlem, to make peace, surrender, derived stem of šlem, to be complete.]

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The word Islam comes from the Arabic root slm meaning a Muslim is a person who submits to the order and peace that is the law of Allah as described in the holy book, the Qur'an. Islam was founded in Arabia by the Prophet Muhammad, the “messenger” of Allah, in the seventh century CE. In 630 CE (AH 8), Muhammad and his followers took control of Mecca, the holy city of the Ka'bah (“cube”) or “House of Allah,” in the eastern corner of which is located the Black Stone. According to one myth this “cornerstone of the House” fell from Heaven or was brought by angels. In theory, the Muslim does not pray to the stone as an idol but to God at the stone. The Ka'bah, however, was considered a sacred place by Arabs even before the rise of Islam and probably was worshipped.

In the Holy Book we are told of five aspects of the faith: belief in Allah (God), angels, the Qur'an, the messengers of God (prophets), and the Day of Judgment. Based on these five beliefs are the “Five Pillars of Islam”: the public expression that “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet”; the obligation of prayer five times a day while facing Mecca; almsgiving; fasting during Ramadan (the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar); and the hajj, or once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the Ka'bah at Mecca. Islam is a religion that is as much or more concerned with social order as with religious ritual or myths. There are, of course, myths of creation (Allah created the world in two days), the afterlife (see Afterlife) and the end of the world, as in the other Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism. And there are myths surrounding the Prophet's life. But the primary concern has always been practical and rational Islamic law in this world. Its very simplicity and directness has always made Islam a religion with great appeal. The religion has traveled easily from continent to continent, including, with special success, to Asia.

By the middle of the eighth century CE, Islam dominated Turkistan, and under the Samanids in the ninth and tenth centuries, Islam made inroads into the domains of the shamanistic (see Shamanism) and Christian peoples of the steppes of Central Asia. Meanwhile, the religion had also made many converts in China. With the invasions of the Mongols and their tolerant attitude toward Muslims in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Muslims became part of the ruling class in China. After the fall of the Mongols, however, Chinese Muslims were tolerated but not particularly welcomed into the mainstream of society.

Muslim traders and settlers came to the Indian subcontinent within a generation of the Prophet's death. By the end of the seventh century CE, Muslims had conquered parts of Afghanistan, and from the tenth century, Muslims began to conquer parts of the North Indian plain. Parts of Bengal, Assam, and Orissa were taken early in the thirteenth century, and parts of Kashmir in the fourteenth. In the early sixteenth century, the Muslim Mughal dynasty was established on the ruins of the Muslim sultanate of Delhi by Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and Gengis Khan. The dynasty would rule Northern India and eventually control most of the south as well until the last Mughal emperor was expelled by the British in 1858. Perhaps the greatest of the Mughals was Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605 and was able, through tolerance and generosity, to win over his Hindu (see Hinduism) subjects. It was Akbar's grandson, Shah Jahnan, who built the Taj Mahal.

Islam remains the dominant religion of Central Asia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and Muslims are a significant minority in India. Muslims are a majority in Indonesia and Malaysia.

There are roughly six million Muslims scattered throughout the United States. By 1992 there were over twenty-three hundred Islamic institutions in North America, including schools, community centers, mosques, publishing houses, and media units. To coordinate activities of this dispersed, growing American Muslim community, Muslims organized conferences, the first of which was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1952. Succeeding conferences were coordinated by the Muslim Students of America (MSA), which held its first conference at the University of Illinois in 1963. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the principal national organization for mainstream (Sunni) American Muslims, started in 1982 as an outgrowth of MSA. In 1993 the first Muslim chaplain began working with Muslims in the U.S. armed forces, who now number in the thousands. Although there are no reliable population figures for the Muslim community in the United States, the consensus is that by 2015 the American Muslim community will be the nation's largest non-Christian religion.

Muslims have been in North America since the sixteenth century. Isfan the Arab was a guide for the Franciscan explorer Marcos de Niza in Arizona in 1539. Nosereddine, an Egyptian, settled in the Catskill Mountains of New York State in the 1500s and was burned at the stake for murdering an Indian princess. As many as 20 percent of the West African slaves brought to the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were Muslims. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first Arab Muslims began to form communities in the United States. One of these Arab Muslims, Haj Ali, assisted the U.S. Army with camel-breeding experiments in the Arizona desert in the 1850s. He is remembered in folk legend as Hi Jolly. By the end of the nineteenth century, large numbers of male Muslim immigrants, mostly from the eastern Mediterranean, had come to the Midwest as migrant workers. Three thousand Polish Muslims and a small community of Circassian (Russian) Muslims settled in New York. The latest wave of Muslim immigrants, one that is continuing, began after the repeal of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965. These immigrants, arriving from a variety of countries, generally are highly educated and have western educations.

Muhammad Alexander Webb, an American consul in Manila, converted to Islam in 1868 and opened a mosque in New York City in 1893. The next mosque was opened in Ross, North Dakota, followed by one in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park in 1919. By 1952 there were twenty mosques joined together by the Federation of Islamic Associations of North America. In 1957 the Islamic Center was dedicated in Washington, D.C., sponsored by fifteen Islamic countries. During the 1970s considerable mosque construction began and continues to the present day.

African Americans, who have been converting to Islam since the 1920s, make up 40 percent of the American Muslim community (with Indo-Pakistanis and Arabs each comprising about 25 percent of the community). In 1913 Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple of America, headquartered in Baltimore. His successor, Wallace D. Fard, probably of Turkish or Iranian descent, began the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America in Detroit in 1930 (in 1995 the Lost-Found Nation had nineteen temples in the United States). He claimed that African Americans were really Muslims who had been denied their heritage. Designated by Fard as the "messenger of God," Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1934. Members stressed education and black-owned businesses, with the goal of a separate black nation. When Elijah died in 1975, there were about seventy NOI temples and 100,000 members in the United States. Since whites were excluded from membership and since Elijah Muhammad was considered a prophet (the last prophet is the seventh-century Muhammad, according to Muslim orthodoxy), in addition to other beliefs unique to NOI, the larger worldwide Muslim community does not consider members of the NOI to be Muslims. The Ansaar Allah and Five Percenters are offshoots of NOI.

Malcolm X, the best-known disciple of Elijah Muhammad, left NOI in 1964 after experiencing the lack of racial and color distinctions during his pilgrimage to Mecca. The issue of joining mainstream Islam or of maintaining a separate African American community created leadership struggles after 1975 when Warith Deen Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad's son, succeeded his father. In 1985 he led most of the NOI members to merge with the larger mainstream Muslim community. Louis Farrakhan became the new leader of the NOI and continued the agenda of Elijah Muhammad, including organizational structure, racist ideology, and the goal of a separate nation. The merger of Warith Deen's community into mainstream Islam did not affect the sixty Clara Muhammad schools, which provide high-quality secular and religious education to elementary and secondary school students.

Ahmadiyya Muslims, believing in the prophethood of the northern Indian Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), began to proselytize in the United States in 1921 and achieved success in the African American community. As of 1992, headquartered in Washington, D.C., they had ten thousand members and active centers in thirty-seven cities. The Tablighi Jama'at, headquartered in Pakistan, has sent Muslim missionaries to the United States since 1952 to preach the creation of separate communities of observant Muslims. Since the 1970s the growth of Islam among New York City's Latin American population has been fostered by PIEDAD (Propagación Islámica para la Educación y Devoción de Ala' el Divino) and in California by ALMA (Asociación Latina de Musalmanes en las Américas). Among Native Americans, Islam is slowly gaining ground, as a mosque on a Navajo reservation demonstrates. Seminoles in Florida claim that escaped Muslim slaves converted Seminoles to Islam during the nineteenth century. Cherokees state that their chief in 1866 was a Muslim named Ramadhan ibn Wati. Shia Muslims, who look for a descendant of the Prophet for leadership and form 10 percent of the Muslim community worldwide, have formed their own national organizations, the Shia Association of North America and the Ismaili Council for the U.S.A. In 1987 there were thirty thousand Nizari Ismailis in seventy-five centers around the United States. Shias usually worship in mosques separate from the mainstream Sunni Muslim community.

Caucasian Muslim converts in the United States often come to Islam through small groups of mystics, or Sufis. Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) of the Indian Chishti lineage came to the United States in 1910 and set up the Sufi Order. Its leadership was continued by his son, Pir Vilayat Khan, who has turned over the leadership of the order in the United States to his son, Zia Khan. One of the largest Sufi communities in the United States is that of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (d. 1986), who came to Philadelphia from Sri Lanka in 1971 and whose tomb is becoming a place of pilgrimage. There are over three thousand people affiliated with this group.

There are clear ethnic, cultural, and theological differences between Muslims living in the United States. Due to the Wahhabi influence (a theological perspective named after an eighteenth-century Arab ideologue, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose followers teamed up with the first king of the Saudi dynasty to create Saudi Arabia), an extreme Arab form of Islam is increasingly becoming normative in the United States. In reaction to the self-declared authoritative Wahhabi stance that does not permit any other way of being a Muslim, ethnic mosques are continually being established. There appears to be minimal social contact between immigrant and African American Muslims—including separate mosques and celebration of holidays. Often African Americans are attracted to Islam by its ideal of genuine racial equality, only to find that the actual practice is far from the stated ideal.

American Islam—specifically MSA, ISNA, and ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America), its mainstream organizations—has received considerable funding from foreign donors who seek to further an Arab Wahhabi theological perspective in the United States. Some African Americans perceive these organizations as catering primarily to the needs of the immigrant community. The ideological, conservative, anti-Sufi stance promoted by these mainstream organizations has been influenced by political ideologues of the Jamaat Islami and Ikhwan al-Musilmin and often has been funded by Saudi Arabia. These groups have managed to control the Islamic symbols and belief systems (i.e., to define Islam) in American Muslim communities, because they have a long-term strategy (political control in majority Islamic countries) and an organization with ample funding. They strongly influence mainstream American Islam—the majority of the mosques in the United States are funded by Saudi Arabia and/or their imams are trained in Saudi Arabia. This Arab version of Islam, already the norm for most American Muslims, contrasts sharply with the actual pluralism of the American Muslim community. To what extent foreign political interests will influence funding of American Muslim activities is unclear, since Persian Gulf nations cut off aid to various American Muslim organizations when many immigrant Muslims did not support Saudi policies during the Gulf War. Clearly, as in other religions, common identity as a Muslim does not guarantee community. In view of the tragic events of 11 September 2001, it remains to be seen whether more moderate American Muslims will prevail over their more vocal and well-funded coreligionists in an ever-evolving mosaic of Islamic diversity in the United States.

Bibliography

Haddad, Yvonne, and John Esposito, eds. Muslims on the Americanization Path? Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998.

———, and Jane Smith, eds. Muslim Communities in North America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Melton, J. Gordon. Encyclopedia of American Religions. 6th ed. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1999.

Smith, Jane I. Islam in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

From the beginning, Rus and its successors have interacted with Muslims as neighbors, rulers, and subjects. Long-distance trade in silver from Muslim lands provided the impetus for the establishment of the first Rus principalities, and Islam arrived in the lands of Rus before Christianity. The rulers of the Volga Bulghar state converted to Islam at the turn of the tenth century, several decades before Vladimir's conversion to Christianity in 988 C.E. The Bulghar state was destroyed between 1236 and 1237 by the Mongols, who then went on to subjugate the principalities of Rus. The conversion to Islam in 1327 of Özbek Khan, the ruler of the Golden Horde, meant that political overlordship of the lands of Rus was in the hands of Muslims for over a century. As the power relationship between Muscovy and the Golden Horde began to shift, Muscovite princes found themselves actively involved in its succession struggles. In 1552 Ivan IV conquered Kazan, the most prominent of the successor states of the Golden Horde, and began a long process of territorial expansion, which brought a diverse group of Muslims under Russian rule by the end of the nineteenth century.

The Tsarist State and Its Muslim Population

Muscovy acquired its first Muslim subjects as early as 1392, when the so-called Mishar Tatars, who inhabited what is now Nizhny Novgorod province, entered the service of Muscovite princes. The khans of Kasymov, a dynasty that lost out in the succession struggles of the Golden Horde, came under Muscovite protection in the mid-fifteenth century and became a privileged service elite. Nevertheless, the conquest of Kazan was a turning point, for it opened up the steppe to gradual Muscovite expansion. Over the next two centuries Muscovy acquired numerous Muslim subjects as it asserted suzerainty over the Bashkir and Kazakh steppes. In 1783 Catherine II annexed Crimea, the last of the successors of the Golden Horde, and late-eighteenth-century expansion brought Russia to the Caucasus. While the annexation of the Transcaucasian principalities (including present-day Azerbaijan) was accomplished with relative ease, the conquest of the Caucasus consumed Russian energies for the first half of the nineteenth century. The final subjugation of Caucasian tribes was complete only with the capture of their military and spiritual leader, Shamil, in 1859. Finally, in the last major territorial expansion of its history, Russia subjugated the Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand in a series of military campaigns between 1864 and 1876. Kokand was abolished entirely, and large parts of the territory of Khiva and Bukhara were also annexed to form the province of Turkestan. The remaining territories of Khiva and Bukhara were turned into Russian protectorates in which traditional rulers enjoyed wide-ranging autonomy in internal affairs, but where external economic and political relations were under the control of Russia. The conquest of Central Asia dramatically increased the size of the empire's Muslim population, which stood at more than fourteen million at the time of the census of 1897.

The Russian state's interaction with Islam and Muslims varied greatly over time and place, and it is fair to say that no single policy toward Islam may be discerned. In the immediate aftermath of the conquest of Kazan, the state followed a policy of harsh repression. Repression was renewed in the early eighteenth century, when Peter and his successors began to see religious uniformity as a desirable goal. In 1730 the Church opened its Office of New Converts and initiated a campaign of conversion in the Volga region. While its primary target were the animists inhabiting the region, the Office also destroyed many mosques. As many as 7,000 Tatars may have converted to Orthodoxy, thus laying the foundation of the Kräshen community of Christian Tatars. For much of the rest of the imperial period, however, the state's attitude is best characterized as one of "pragmatic flexibility" (Kappeler). Service to the state was the ultimate measure of loyalty and the source of privilege. Those Tatar landlords who survived the dispossession of the sixteenth century were allowed to keep their land and were even able to own Orthodox serfs.

The reign of Catherine II (1762 - 1796) marks a turning point in the state's relationship with its Muslim subjects. She made religious tolerance an official policy and set about creating a basis for loyalty to the Russian state in the Tatar lands. She affirmed the rights of Muslim nobles and even sought to induct the Muslim clerisy in this endeavor. In 1788, she established a "spiritual assembly" at Orenburg. The Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly was an attempt, unique in the Muslim world, by the state to impose an organizational structure on Islam. Islam was for Catherine a higher form of religion than shamanism, and she hoped that the Kazakhs would gradually be brought into the fold of Islam through the efforts of the Tatars. This was of course intertwined with the goal of bringing the Kazakh steppe under closer Russian control and outflanking Ottoman diplomacy there. Headed by a mufti appointed by the state, the assembly was responsible for appointing and licensing imams as teachers throughout the territory under its purview, and overseeing the operation of mosques.

While the policies enacted by Catherine survived until 1917 in their broad outline, her enthusiasm for Islam did not. The Enlightenment had also brought to Russia the concept of fanaticism, and it tended to dominate Russian thinking about Islam in the nineteenth century. Islam was now deemed to be inherently fanatical, and the question now became one of curbing or containing this fanaticism. If Catherine had hoped for the Islamization of the Kazakhs as a mode of progress, nineteenth century administrators sought to protect the "natural" religion of the Kazakhs from the "fanatical" Islam of the Tatars or the Central Asians.

Conquered in the second half of the nineteenth century and having a relatively dense population, Central Asia came closer than any other part of the Russian empire to being a colony. The Russian presence was thinner, and the local population not incorporated into empire-wide social classifications. Not only was there was no Central Asian nobility, but the vast majority (99.8%) of the local population were defined solely as inorodtsy (alien, i.e., non-Russian, peoples). The region was ruled by a governor-general possessing wide-ranging powers and answerable directly to the tsar. The first governor-general, Konstantin Kaufman (in office 1867 - 1881), laid the foundations of Russian policies in the region. For Kaufman, Islam was irredeemably connected with fanaticism, which could be provoked by thoughtless policies. Such fanaticism could be lessened by ignoring Islam and depriving it of all state support, while the long-term goal of assimilating the region into the Russian empire was to be achieved through a policy of encouraging trade and enlightenment. Kaufman therefore did not allow the Orenburg Muslim Assembly to extend its jurisdiction into Turkestan. The policy of ignoring Islam completely was modified after Kaufman's death, but the Russian presence was much more lightly felt in Central Asia than in other Muslim areas of the empire.

Islam Under Russian Rule

Islam is an internally diverse religious system in which many traditions and ways of belonging to the community of Muslims coexist. As Devin DeWeese has shown, Islam became a central aspect of the communal identities of Muslims in the Golden Horde. Conversion was remembered in sacralized narratives that defined conversion as the moment that the community was constituted. Shrines of saints served to Islamize the very territory on which Muslims lived. Until the articulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of modern national identities among the various Muslim communities of the Russian empire, communal identities were a composite of ethnic, genealogical, and religious identities, inextricably intertwined.

The practice of Islam, its reproduction, and its transmission to future generations took place in largely autonomous local communities. Each community was centered around a mosque and (especially in Central Asia) a shrine. The servants of the mosques were selected by the community, and the funding provided by local notables or through endowed property (waqf). Each community also maintained a maktab, an elementary school in which children acquired basic knowledge of Islamic ritual and belief. Higher religious education took place in madrasas, both locally and in neighboring Muslim countries. Unlike the Christian clergy, Muslim scholars, the ulama, were a self-regulating group. Entry into the ranks of the ulama was contingent upon education and insertion into chains of discipleship. Islamic religious practice required neither the institutional framework nor the property of a church. This loose structure meant that the fortunes of Islam and its carriers were not directly tied to the vicissitudes of Muslim states.

The process of Islamization continued after the Russian conquest of the steppe and was at times even supported by the Russian state. The state settled Muslim peasants in the trans-Volga region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the main agent of the Islamization of the steppe was the Tatar mercantile diaspora. As communities of Tatar merchants appeared throughout the steppe beginning in the late eighteenth century, Tobolsk, Orenburg, and Troitsk became major centers of Islamic learning. Tatar merchants began sending their sons to study in Central Asia, and Sufi linkages with Central Asia and the lands beyond were strengthened.

Varieties of Reform

In the early nineteenth century, reform began to emerge as a major issue among Tatar ulama. The initial issues, as articulated by figures such as Abdunnasir al-Qursavi (1776 - 1812) and Qayyum Nasiri (1825 - 1902), related to the value of the tradition of interpretation of texts as it had been practiced in Central Asia and in the Tatar lands since Mongol times. Qursavi, Nasiri, and their followers questioned the authority of traditional Islamic theology and argued for creative reinterpretation through recourse to the original scriptural sources of Islam. This religious conception of reform was connected to developments in the wider Muslim world through networks of education and travel. By the turn of the twentieth century, Tatar scholars such as Musa Jarullah Bigi, Alimjan Barudi, and Rizaetdin Fakhretdin were prominent well beyond the boundaries of the Russian empire.

A different form of reform arose around the reform of Muslim education. Its initial constituency was the urban mercantile population of the Volga region and the Crimea, and its origins are connected with the tireless efforts of the Crimean Tatar noble Ismail Bey Gaspirali (1851 - 1914). Gaspirali had been educated at a military academy but became involved in education early on in his career. Muslims, he felt, lacked many skills important to full participation in the mainstream of imperial life. The fault lay with the maktab, which not only did not inculcate useful knowledge, such as arithmetic, geography, or Russian, but failed, moreover, in the task of equipping students with basic literacy or even a proper understanding of Islam itself. Gaspirali articulated a modernist critique of the maktab, emanating from a new understanding of the purposes of elementary education. The solution was a new method (usul-i jadid) of education, in which children were taught the Arabic alphabet using the phonetic method of instruction and the elementary school was to have a standardized curriculum encompassing composition, arithmetic, history, hygiene, and Russian. Gaspirali's method found acceptance among the Muslim communities of the Crimea, the Volga, and Siberia, and eventually appeared in all parts of the Russian empire inhabited by Muslims. New-method schools quickly became the flagship of a multifaceted movement of cultural reform, which came to be called "Jadidism" after them.

Jadidism was an unabashedly modernist discourse of cultural reform directed at Muslim society itself. Its basic themes were enlightenment, progress, and the awakening of the nation, so that the latter could take its own place in the modern, civilized world. Given the lack of political sovereignty, however, it was up to society to lift itself up by its bootstraps through education and disciplined effort. Jadid rhetoric was usually sharply critical of the present state of Muslim society, which the Jadids contrasted unfavorably to a glorious past of their own society and the present of the civilized countries of Europe. The single most important term in the Jadid lexicon was taraqqi, progress. Progress and civilization were universal phenomena for the Jadids, accessible to all societies on the sole condition of disciplined effort and enlightenment. There was nothing in Islam that prevented Muslims from joining the modern world; indeed, the Jadids argued that only a modern person equipped with knowledge "according to the needs of the age" could be a good Muslim. In this, Jadidism differed sharply from other currents of reform among the ulama. The debate between the Jadids and their traditionalist opponents was the defining feature of the last decades of the Tsarist period.

In Central Asia, the distinct social and political context imparted Jadidism a distinct flavor. The ulama retained much greater influence in Central Asia, while the new mercantile class was weaker. Central Asian Jadids, therefore, tended to be more strongly rooted in Islamic education than their counterparts elsewhere. Nevertheless, they faced resolute opposition from within their own society, as well as from a Russian state always suspicious of unofficial initiatives.

The "muslim Question" in Late Imperial Politics

For the Jadids, the nation was an integral part of modernity, and they set out to define the parameters of their nation. The new identity was not foreordained, however, for the nation could be defined along any of several different axes of solidarity. For some, all Muslims of the Russian empire constituted a single national community. Gaspirali argued that the Muslims needed "unity in language, thought, and deeds," and his newspaper sought to show this through example. In 1905 a number of Tatar and Azerbaijani activists organized an All-Russian conference for Muslim representatives to work out a common plan of action. The conference established the Ittifaq-i Müslimin (Union of Muslims) as a quasi-political organization. Delegates resolved to work for greater political, religious, and cultural rights for their constituency. During the elections to the Duma, the Ittifaq aligned itself with the Kadets. Two further conferences were held in 1905 and 1906, but Muslim political activity was curbed after the Stolypin coup of 1907, which reduced the representation of Muslims and denied the Ittifaq permission to register a political party.

Muslim unity was threatened by regional and ethnic solidarities. The discovery of romantic notions of identity by the Jadids led them to articulate the identity of their community along ethnonational lines. Here too, visions of a broad Turkic unity coexisted with narrower forms of identity, such as Tatar or Kazakh. The appeal of local ethnic identities proved too strong for broader Islamic or Turkic identities to surmount. This was the case in 1917, when the All-Russian Muslim movement was briefly resurrected and Tatar leaders organized a conference in Moscow to discuss a common political strategy for Muslims. Divisions between representatives from different regions quickly appeared, and the various groups of Muslims went their separate ways.

Although Muslim activists continually professed their loyalty to the state, their activity aroused suspicion both in the state and among the Russian public, which construed it as pan-Islamism and connected it with alleged Ottoman intrigues to destabilize the Russian state. The rise of ethnic self-awareness was likewise seen as pan-Turkism and also connected to outside influences. Russian administrators had hoped that enlightenment would be the antidote to fanaticism. Now the fear of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, both articulated by modern-educated Muslims, led to a reappraisal. The fanaticism of modernist Islam was deemed much more dangerous than that of the traditional Islam, since it led to political demands. This perception led the state to intensify its support for traditional Islam.

The Soviet Period

The Russian revolution utterly transformed the political and social landscape in which Islam existed in the Russian empire. The new regime was radically different from its predecessor in that it actively sought to intervene in society and to reshape not just the economy, but also the cultures of its citizens. It was hostile to religion, perceiving it as both an alternate source of loyalty and a form of cultural backwardness. As policies regarding Soviet nationalities emerged in the 1920s, the struggle for progress acquired a prominent role, especially among nationalities deemed backward (and all Muslim groups were so classified). Campaigns for cultural revolution began with the reform of education, language, and the position of women, but quickly extended to religion. The antireligious campaign eventually led to the closure of large numbers of mosques (many were destroyed, others given over to "more socially productive" uses, such as youth clubs, museums of atheism, or warehouses). Waqf properties were confiscated, madrasas closed, and large numbers of ulama arrested and deported to labor camps or executed. The only Muslim institution to survive was the spiritual assembly, now stationed in Ufa.

The campaign was effective in its destructiveness. Islam did not disappear, but the infrastructure which reproduced Islamic religious and cultural knowledge was badly damaged and links with the outside Muslim world cut off. Islam was forced into isolation. The most important consequence of this isolation was that "Islam" was rendered synonymous with "tradition". Official channels of socialization, such as the school system and the army, which reached very deep into society, were not just secular, but atheistic. With maktabs and madrasas abolished, the ranks of the carriers of Islamic knowledge denuded, and continuity with the past made difficult by changes in script, religious knowledge was vastly circumscribed and the site of its reproduction pushed into private or covert realms. The public sphere were stripped of all references to Islam.

During World War II, as the state's hostility to religion abated briefly, it sought to permit limited practice of religion under close supervision. To this end, it created three new Muslim spiritual administrations in addition to the one at Ufa to oversee the practice of Islam. Of the four, the one based in Tashkent and responsible for Central Asia soon emerged as the most significant. The spiritual assemblies had to tread a thin line between satisfying the requirements of the state and ensuring a space in which Islamic institutions could exist officially. A great deal of religious activity existed beyond the control of the assemblies, but it was at home in a specifically Soviet context. Islam in the postwar decades was subordinated to powerful national identities formed for the most part in the Soviet period. Islam and its rituals were celebrated as part of one's national heritage even as Islamic knowledge shrunk greatly.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has become more prominent in public life as Muslims have engaged in a recovery of their national and cultural heritage. Mosques have been reopened or rebuilt and contacts with Muslims abroad established, and a there has been a general increase in personal piety. Nevertheless, the Soviet-era connections between Islam and national heritage remain intact, and as post-Soviet regimes undertake nation-building, Islam retains its strong cultural definitions.

Bibliography

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Carrère d'Encausse, Hélène. (1988). Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia, tr. Quintin Hoare. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Frank, Alan J. (1998). Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

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Geraci, Robert. (2001). Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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—ADEEB KHALID

A strictly monotheistic faith, Islam is the religion of more than 1.2 billion people, or a fifth of the world population. Muslims can be found mostly in Western and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Only about 350 million live in the Arab world.

Pre-Islamic Arabia and the Rise of Islam

Islam appeared in the seventh century at a time of social and religious decay in the Arabian Peninsula. Arabian society was essentially tribal and the supremacy of tribal law encouraged warfare, raiding, and vendettas. Usurious economic practices led to the impoverishment and enslavement of a number of weaker tribes, and social ills such as alcoholism and prostitution were rampant. Associationism (or shirk, as the pre-Islamic religious tradition was referred to at the time) was the main faith, and it acknowledged a number of intercessory gods associated with the Creator, Allah. The representations of these gods were housed in an important shrine (the Kaʿba) in Mecca and attracted most Arabian tribes at the time of the annual pilgrimage (hajj). But Associationism was losing its appeal, as can be seen from the spread of Judaism, Christianity, and especially Hanifism, a local monotheism that took Abraham as its central figure and maintained a simple ethical doctrine and the inevitability of a Day of Judgment.

Islam arose claiming to be the embodiment of Hanifism and the continuation of earlier monotheistic traditions. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, started preaching in Mecca in 611 C.E. and quickly gained a strong following. Worried that it might lose its profitable control over the pilgrimage, the leadership of Mecca launched a merciless war on the new faith, forcing the Prophet to seek refuge in 622 C.E. in a neighboring town, Medina, in an event known as hijra (migration) that marks the beginning of the lunar calendar of Islam. Having prohibited alcohol, gambling, prostitution, raiding, and usury, and prescribed zakah (alms-tax) to restore economic equality, replaced the tribal bond with the bond of faith, and instituted Islamic law as the sole reference in settling disputes, Islam spread rapidly throughout Arabia, despite the continuing hostility of Mecca. But since half of Mecca's population had already converted to the new faith, the surrender of the city was only a matter of time, and when the Prophet died in 632 C.E., most of Arabia was Muslim.

Under the first four rashidun (rightly guided) caliphs, the Islamic state spread quickly in the Near East, where it was welcomed by a local Semitic and Arab population that was only too pleased to be rid of the ethnically foreign and abusive rule of the Byzantines, as well as in Persia, where the Sassanid Empire had already started to crumble. Later, the Umayyad dynasty (661 - 750), which followed the rashidun caliphs, spread the frontiers of the new empire from Spain to India.

Theology and Beliefs

Tawhid, the concept of the absolute unity and transcendence of God, forms the cornerstone of Islamic theology as expressed in the Qurʾan, the holy book of Islam, which the Muslims believe to be the verbatim word of God, revealed to the Prophet in successive revelations over the span of his prophetic career. Tawhid forms the content of the shahada (literally, "witnessing," the profession of faith that states that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His messenger) which therefore constitutes the only requirement for conversion to Islam. The shahada and the four main rituals compulsory on the faithful (worshipping salah five times a day, fasting from dawn to sunset through the month of Ramadan, performing the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime, and paying the zakah, or alms-tax, annually) eventually became known as the five pillars of Islam.

The Qurʾan represents God as an omnipotent, all-powerful Creator, Master of the Day of Judgment. All of creation is created to worship God; humanity, which received lordship over creation when it accepted God's vice-regency (khilafa) on earth, is to account on the Day of Judgment for "what [they] did with the boon of life" (Qurʾan 102:8). All human beings are under the same obligation to obey the divine law ("Noblest among you is the most righteous" Qurʾan 49:13), and this equality is further expressed in the universality of the messages that God sends to His creatures throughout time and place, starting with Adam and concluding with Muhammad ("There is not one community wherein a warner has not been sent" Qurʾan 35:24). Other religions are therefore considered to be based on divine revelations that had been somewhat altered by oral transmission over time, but their followers (the People of the Book) can be ensured reward in paradise given belief in God and good deeds: "The Muslims, the Sabeans, the Christians, the Jews, anyone who believes in God . . . and does good deeds shall find their reward with God and will not come to fear or grief" (Qurʾan 2:62). Although the Qurʾan only mentions Semitic prophets (including Jesus, whom it celebrates as a human messenger of God, and local Arabian prophets), the designation of "the People of the Book" was later extended by the Muslims to all other main religious traditions they encountered, on the basis of the Qurʾanic affirmation
of the universality of prophecy. Muslims and followers of other traditions are exhorted to cooperate in establishing a moral society and prohibiting evil and mischief.

Ethics

The Qurʾan exhibits a firmly actionalist system of ethics based on individual responsibility in the realization of the optimal social, economic, and political structure of the umma, the universal community of believers. Mutual consultation (shura) for the ideal political system, just and fair business practices in the economic system, and financial and moral responsibility to one's extended family members in the social system are to be supplemented by various safety nets for the more vulnerable segments of society, such as zakah (poor-tax) and mahr (the inalienable
dowry due the bride). Though no self-denial is advocated, the individual is urged to exercise restraint over his and her natural appetites and to show rahma (compassion, forgiveness) in all dealings with one's fellow human beings. Pride and greed are especially condemned, as they lead to injustice to others and hence to oneself (zulm al-nafs), ultimately leading to the path of self-destruction. There is no concept of sinful nature, but recurrent sin leads to the hardening of the soul and the eventual silencing of one's conscience. The partial rewards and opportunities provided in this life are considered to be just as much a test to the individual as the difficulties and hardships, and one is exhorted to exercise sabr (steadfastness) in the face of life's challenges.

The difficulty of the task is acknowledged by the Qurʾan, which expresses faith in humanity's ultimate success in carrying out God's trusteeship. The individual is urged to remain focused on his or her relationship with God and to never fail to seek Him, for He "hears the prayers of everyone who calls on Him" (Qurʾan 2:186). This intensely personal and spiritual relationship, which the Qurʾan tries to integrate in the individual's life through the five daily prayers, also expresses the human need for the presence and support of one's Creator and Sustainer, for only "with the remembrance of God do human hearts find peace and come to rest" (Qurʾan 13:30). Thus the Qurʾan postulates a direct and intimate relationship between the individual and God (hence the absence of clergy in Islam) and God is said to be closer to His creatures than their jugular vein.

Paradise and Hell are in the Qurʾanic view the consummation of the individual's life on earth. What is to come is therefore not "another world," but the response to what one has done in this life. This world is to be recreated in a different form at
the end of its time span, ushering in the Day of Judgment that will inaugurate punishment and reward; these are set along an absolute scale of justice tempered only by God's infinite mercy, which is assured to all those who genuinely seek it.

Political and Cultural Developments

Islam as a faith spread first in the Near East and Egypt, where in the first few centuries Arab Islamic civilization flourished. The caliphate split after the Abbassid takeover of the Near East and Egypt, while Spain remained under Umayyad rule until 1492. The Abbassid dynasty ruled until 1258, though in the latter part of their rule only nominal allegiance was given to the caliphs in Baghdad by the amirs and sultans who, in effect, governed the various provinces of the empire and fought each other over territory. The internecine war, partly caused by Sunni-Shiʿite conflict, allowed the invading Crusaders (eleventh through thirteenth centuries) to establish a state in Palestine. It was not until Salah al-Din (Saladin, d. 1193) that Egypt and the Near East were united under Sunni rule, which in turn helped to defeat the Crusaders and later to repulse the Mongols who had sacked Baghdad in 1258. But as the Arab world fell into decline, the Sunni Ottoman Turks swept through Byzantium and extended their rule over the Near East and most of North Africa, ushering in Ottoman Islamic civilization. In the East, the Shiʿite Safavid dynasty took over Iran at the end of the sixteenth century, helping to spread a highly sophisticated Persian culture throughout Central Asia and into Northern India, where a brilliant Indian Islamic civilization climaxed under the Great Moghuls between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

During this period Islamic arts, science, and technology flourished throughout the Muslim world, with contributions in astronomy (al-Biruni, d. 1048; Ibn al-Shatir, d. 1375), algebra and trigonometry (al-Khawarizmi, d. 850; Umar al-Khayyam, d. 1131; Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi, d. 1213), physics and chemistry (Ibn Hayyan, d. 815; Ibn al-Haytham, d. 1250), and biology and medicine (Abu Bakr al-Razi, d. 925; Ibn Sina, d. 1037, also known as Avicenna, whose Canon of Medicine remained the definitive reference book in the field until the seventeenth century in both East and West.)

Islamic Law

The emphasis on submitting to the divine will (the literal meaning of Islam) and fulfilling the main Qurʾanic injunction, "to enjoin the good and prohibit evil" led to the rapid development of Islamic law (fiqh). In terms of legal sources, the Qurʾan was the first and absolute reference; and since it had mandated obedience to the Prophet, his sunna (ex-ample), which was provided in the reports of his sayings and deeds, naturally came second. Much of the law, however, had to be inferred, and the jurists turned to their own intellectual effort (ijtihad) expressed in the methodology of qiyas ("analogical reasoning," that is, finding a ratio legis parallel to one already identified in the Qurʾan or sunna). Such individual opinions, however, did not become binding until they submitted to ijma, or consensus of the schools of law, though all parties acknowledged to the others the right to dissent (ikhtilaf). Eventually, the schools of law coalesced into four main schools. The processes by which laws may be derived became the subject of an extensive and separate discipline, usul al-fiqh (literally, the principles of fiqh). Islamic law developed rapidly into an extensive field in the first few centuries of Muslim history, but innovation subsided considerably as a result of the reliance on precedents and past consensus.

Religious Schisms

The most important schism in the Muslim community occurred over a political split in the early community. After the Prophet's death, most Muslims supported the election of Abu Bakr and later of Umar ibn al-Khattab, the Prophet's closest companions. However, a small number known as the Shiʿat Ali (the party of Ali), insisted on keeping the caliphate within the Prophet's family and championed his cousin Ali. Eventually, the Shiʿa became a religious movement, basing their position on the claim that God would not leave His community without guidance, and justifying it through prophetic sayings and esoteric interpretation of the Qurʾan. The belief in the authority of the imams (the leaders who were entitled to rule) was made part of the Islamic creed and gave rise to a clerical structure in Shiʿite Islam. In all other matters of fiqh and dogma, the Shiʿa are similar to the Sunnis, though this applies only to the Ithnaʿashariyya ("Twelvers," who believe in a line of twelve imams), and the Zaydis (who recognize only five imams) and not to the other groups (the Ismaʿilis, the Alawis, the Druze, etc.) that split from them and whose beliefs ran contrary to the doctrines of tawhid and the finality of Muhammad's prophecy. Thus the main difference between the Sunnis and the Shiʿa lies more in the political issue of the community leadership (with the beliefs and practices that the latter entails) than in doctrinal difference of dogma.

Philosophical Developments

The philosophical developments in the Muslim world expressed the tension between the Islamic (Semitic) worldview and the Hellenistic heritage, which to some extent had become part of the Near East's cultural makeup. At one end stood the heirs of Hellenistic thought (called falasifa) such as al-Kindi (d. 870), al-Farabi (d. 950), and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198, also known as Averroes) who used Greek logic and incorporated into their works Greek notions such as the eternity of the world, the distinction between essence and existence, and Hellenistic angelology.

At the other end stood the traditionists, staunch defenders of Islamic dogma and method, generally represented by the Hanbalis. Their greatest proponent was Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who delivered devastating blows to the Greek logic used by the falasifa in his al-Radd ala al-Mantiqiyyin. In between the two groups were two theological Kalam schools; the earlier one, known as the Muʿtazila, was closer to the philosophers and upheld the independence of reason from revelation, the necessity for God to abide by justice, and the creation of the Qurʾan; such views prompted the rise of the later school, the Ashʿariyya, which restored the pre-eminence of revelation, the absolute omnipotence of God, and the uncreated nature of the word of God (making use of a somewhat revised Greek logic). Their greatest representative was Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), who used his incisive analysis of causality to undermine the philosophers.

Mysticism

Mystical thought, which had a basis in the spiritual worldview of the Qurʾan and the simple and intense piety of early Muslims, became more formalized through the gradual absorption of Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian thought, and became known as Sufism. The main architect of the Sufi theosophy was Ibn Arabi (d. 1240). Sufi poetical expression of the divine love, articulated by Rabiʿa al-Adawiyya (d. 801) and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (d. 1273), became very popular throughout the Muslim world. But its foreign elements led to opposition by the orthodox jurists and theologians, especially those whose strictly legalistic and ritualistic interpretation of the faith found no place for spiritual expression. Ironically, their opposition encouraged the spread of Sufism as a reaction to their impoverished representation of the personal relationship to God - as did the increase in worldliness and materialism spreading in the Muslim world as the empire expanded. However, most great theologians and jurists (e.g., alGhazzali, who silenced the critics of Sufism; Ibn Taymiyya; Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) defended and indeed practiced the Sufi way, though all of them condemned in strong terms the philosophical expression of Sufism, which advocated a form of pantheism (wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being) and extreme asceticism. But Sufism spread widely, and the tariqas (Sufi orders, such as the Qadiriyya in the Near East, the Mawlawiyya (Mev levis and the Naqshbandiyya in Central Asia and Turkey, and the Shadhiliyya in North Africa) were the main impetus behind the spread of Islam in Africa and East Asia.

Reform Movements

The insistence on the importance of spiritualism over and above the law led on one hand to asceticism and withdrawal but also, on the other, to libertarianism, a trend that was accentuated in popular religion by the belief in miracles, superstition, and cultic practices into which the veneration of Sufi saints had slowly degenerated. In North Africa and India, the Sufi movements had also absorbed the cultural and religious heritage of their new converts, a syncretism that included at times non-Islamic beliefs and practices. Meanwhile, the law had become more and more reified as the need for innovation subsided and taqlid (imitation or reliance on past tradition) became the norm. The jurists' inability to respond to new needs became a problem as new challenges arose with the industrialization of Europe, which forced the Ottomans to adopt Western laws and institutions. All these problems set the stage for the reform movements of the eighteenth century.

The reform movements rejected consensus as a source of law as it had become a hindrance to change, and they advocated ijtihad instead. At the same time, they emphasized a strict interpretation of tawhid and repudiated the syncretic beliefs adopted by the Sufi movements as well as the morally lax social practices and the popular beliefs in magic, superstition, and saints' intercession. Building on the philosophical and political thought of Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) started in Arabia the reform movement of Wahhabism, which then spread in the Near East as the Salafiyya movement. At same time, separate but similar movements spread in Africa under the leadership of Ibn Idris (d.1837) and al-Sanusi order (d. 1859), and in India under Sirhindi (d. 1624). These were Sufi masters who criticized the former excesses of the Sufi movements and used the tariqas to restore orthodoxy of belief and practice and to purge the movements of syncretic accretions.

However, the colonial ambitions of the European powers quickly changed the Muslim scene from one of reform to one of confrontation with a greater power that soon overcame most of the Muslim world and won from the ailing Ottoman Empire significant concessions. Instead of internal social change, the reform movements turned to armed resistance, and instead of focusing on doctrinal purity and legal tools, the new discourse centered on the necessity of resisting the West and on apologetics for Islam, for the defeat of the Muslims was contemptuously blamed by Western Orientalists on the backwardness and inferiority of Islam.

Islamic Modernist Movements

Islamic modern thought is considered to start with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), a man with encyclopedic knowledge of both Western and Eastern disciplines who traveled throughout the Muslim world in hope of uniting it in the fight against Western colonization. He advocated reform of education and law and was followed in Egypt by one of his most famous students, Muhammad Abduh (d.1905), a jurist who became the head of the famed al-Azhar fiqh university. But few practical solutions were offered, and the problem was compounded by the call by some of his students like Rashid Rida (d. 1935) for compromise with Western institutions, such as interest and the creation of national entities separate from the Islamic Ottoman rule. In India, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) called for a return to the original ethos of Islam and the establishment of the independent state of Pakistan, while Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) called for more drastic changes in Islamic thought and cooperation with the British colonial power. The compromises advocated by some led then to an attitude of general rejection of change on the part of most jurists and theologians, and although all had agreed on the necessity of reforming law and education and of adopting Western advances in science and technology, the discourse remained general and did not offer specific and coherent suggestions. In effect, the colonial powers, which by now had also taken over the Near East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, had imposed their legal, political, and educational systems on their colonies. After independence, the local governments maintained the Western institutions they had inherited, leading to the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and giving rise, throughout the Muslim world, to opposition movements (such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, the Jamiʿat-e Islami in Pakistan, the Front Islamique du Salut in Algeria and the Rafah Party in Turkey) that called for the restoration of Islamic law and fought the adoption by Muslim elites of the Western ideologies of secularism, socialism, and nationalism. These ideological conflicts, which have led to tensions or all-out civil war in many countries, are exacerbated by the policies of autocratic regimes that do not tolerate opposition or democratic rule and by Western intervention (directly or in support of such regimes) to preserve Western interests in oil and to protect Israel. These interventions have become the focus of Muslim resentment and radicalism throughout the Muslim world.

Bibliography

Arnold, Thomas W. The Preaching of Islam: A History of thePropagation of the Muslim Faith, 2d edition. Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1961.

Al Faruqi, Lois. Islam and Art. Islamabad: National Hijra Council, 1985.

Gardet, Louis. L'Islam. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967.

Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence. Cambridge, U.K.: Islamic Texts Society, 1991.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Three Muslim Sages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Rahman, Fazlur. Islam, 2d edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Qurʾan. Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamic, 1980.

Saliba, George, and King, David A. From Deferent to Equant:A Volume of Studies in the History of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East in Honor of E. S. Kennedy. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1987.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Islam in Modern History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

— TAYEB EL-HIBRI
UPDATED BY MAYSAM J. AL FARUQI

Islam has, from its inception, placed a high premium on education and has enjoyed a long and rich intellectual tradition. Knowledge ('ilm) occupies a significant position within Islam, as evidenced by the more than 800 references to it in Islam's most revered book, the Koran. The importance of education is repeatedly emphasized in the Koran with frequent injunctions, such as "God will exalt those of you who believe and those who have knowledge to high degrees" (58:11), "O my Lord! Increase me in knowledge" (20:114), and "As God has taught him, so let him write" (2:282). Such verses provide a forceful stimulus for the Islamic community to strive for education and learning.

Islamic education is uniquely different from other types of educational theory and practice largely because of the all-encompassing influence of the Koran. The Koran serves as a comprehensive blueprint for both the individual and society and as the primary source of knowledge. The advent of the Koran in the seventh century was quite revolutionary for the predominantly illiterate Arabian society. Arab society had enjoyed a rich oral tradition, but the Koran was considered the word of God and needed to be organically interacted with by means of reading and reciting its words. Hence, reading and writing for the purpose of accessing the full blessings of the Koran was an aspiration for most Muslims. Thus, education in Islam unequivocally derived its origins from a symbiotic relationship with religious instruction.

History of Islamic Education

Thus, in this way, Islamic education began. Pious and learned Muslims (mu' allim or mudarris), dedicated to making the teachings of the Koran more accessible to the Islamic community, taught the faithful in what came to be known as the kuttāb (plural, katātīb). The kuttāb could be located in a variety of venues: mosques, private homes, shops, tents, or even out in the open. Historians are uncertain as to when the katātīb were first established, but with the widespread desire of the faithful to study the Koran, katātīb could be found in virtually every part of the Islamic empire by the middle of the eighth century. The kuttāb served a vital social function as the only vehicle for formal public instruction for primary-age children and continued so until Western models of education were introduced in the modern period. Even at present, it has exhibited remarkable durability and continues to be an important means of religious instruction in many Islamic countries.

The curriculum of the kuttāb was primarily directed to young male children, beginning as early as age four, and was centered on Koranic studies and on religious obligations such as ritual ablutions, fasting, and prayer. The focus during the early history of Islam on the education of youth reflected the belief that raising children with correct principles was a holy obligation for parents and society. As Abdul Tibawi wrote in 1972, the mind of the child was believed to be "like a white clean paper, once anything is written on it, right or wrong, it will be difficult to erase it or superimpose new writing upon it" (p. 38). The approach to teaching children was strict, and the conditions in which young students learned could be quite harsh. Corporal punishment was often used to correct laziness or imprecision. Memorization of the Koran was central to the curriculum of the kuttāb, but little or no attempt was made to analyze and discuss the meaning of the text. Once students had memorized the greater part of the Koran, they could advance to higher stages of education, with increased complexity of instruction. Western analysts of the kuttāb system usually criticize two areas of its pedagogy: the limited range of subjects taught and the exclusive reliance on memorization. The contemporary kuttāb system still emphasizes memorization and recitation as important means of learning. The value placed on memorization during students' early religious training directly influences their approaches to learning when they enter formal education offered by the modern state. A common frustration of modern educators in the Islamic world is that while their students can memorize copious volumes of notes and textbook pages, they often lack competence in critical analysis and independent thinking.

During the golden age of the Islamic empire (usually defined as a period between the tenth and thirteenth centuries), when western Europe was intellectually backward and stagnant, Islamic scholarship flourished with an impressive openness to the rational sciences, art, and even literature. It was during this period that the Islamic world made most of its contributions to the scientific and artistic world. Ironically, Islamic scholars preserved much of the knowledge of the Greeks that had been prohibited by the Christian world. Other outstanding contributions were made in are