The contemporary history of Muslim peoples in the Indian subcontinent has its origins in the breakup of the Mughal Empire and the imposition of British rule in India. The change of regimes set in motion forces that would alter the religious practices and sociopolitical structures of the subcontinent’s Muslim populations and lead eventually to the formation of three national states – two predominantly Muslim, and one in which there is a substantial Muslim minority. Historically, Afghanistan was a boundary territory, part of Central Asia and part of the Indian subcontinent. Its recent history is closely linked to that of Pakistan.

From the Mughal Empire to the partition of the Indian subcontinent

On the eve of its modern transformation, the Mughal Empire was a patrimonial regime, like the Ottoman and Safavid empires, that strongly emphasized its Persianate cosmopolitan and its Indian identities. Muslim religious life in the subcontinent was highly pluralistic and not under state control. The long century of Mughal decline, from 1730 to 1857, favored the consolidation of a provincial Muslim gentry. A shared literary culture, similar religious practices, and noble (sharif) status defined the Muslim communities, which were clustered around the mosques, schools, tombs, and gentry residences in the Muslim quarters and small towns (qasbahs) of North India.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Muslims in Africa expanded their activities as traders, missionaries, and warriors. In the Sudanic region, Islamic regimes were consolidated and new populations converted to Islam. From the Sudan, Muslims penetrated the Guinean forest and coastal territories of West Africa. Large numbers of people in Nigeria and Senegal were Islamized. In East Africa Gallas, Somalis, and other peoples were converted to Islam.

Between 1882 and 1900, the militant expansion of Islam was brought to a halt by European conquests. The establishment of colonial rule, however, did not stop the spread of Islam by peaceful means. In fact, colonial rule facilitated the diffusion of Islam by providing political security and expanded commercial opportunities, and by stimulating urbanization, the education of intelligentsias, and the migration of merchants and workers.

The rapid diffusion of Islam had important consequences for Islamic beliefs, communal organization, and the relation of Muslims to states and national societies. While the principal goal of many nineteenth-century Islamic movements was to establish Islamic states and a comprehensive Islamic society, colonial rule led instead to the consolidation of secular national states. Only where there are substantial Arab populations or claims to Arab identity – as in Mauritania, northern Sudan, and Somalia – is national identity expressed in Islamic terms. Only Sudan has declared itself an Islamic state. In Nigeria, Muslim identity has been integrated into the national political system, and Islamic communal organizations and concepts of justice play an important role in the internal struggle for political and social power. Elsewhere, secular elites treat their Muslim populations, however large or small, as communal constituencies. All African Muslim populations are organized as communal groups seeking state protection and patronage for their economic, educational, and foreign policy interests.

What we now classify as a Middle Eastern Islamic civilization is actually the by-product of a process that occupied six hundred years, from the beginning of the seventh to the beginning of the thirteenth centuries. However innovative, Islamic civilization was constructed on a framework of institutions and cultures inherited from the ancient Middle East. On the eve of the Islamic era, Middle Eastern societies were organized on several levels. At the base, there were numerous local, parochial communities built around factional, lineage, tribal, and village groups. These communities were integrated by market exchanges and by great religious associations – Jewish, Christian, or Zoroastrian. The larger-scale economic networks and religious associations were in turn under the rule of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. On the cultural level, the ancient heritage included the monotheistic religions, imperial arts and literatures, and philosophy and science. This complex institutional and cultural heritage was carried over into the Islamic era. Despite the rise and fall of empires and shifts in economic activity, the fundamental aspects of technology, modes of production, and the relation of human communities to the natural environment continued unaltered. Also, the basic modes of state organization and family and religious association remained the same. The characteristic changes of the Islamic era were the formation of new political and social identities, the organization of new religious communities, and the generation, out of the elements of the past, of a new cultural style.

New political and religious identities for Middle Eastern societies began in Arabia. While under the influence of Byzantine and Sasanian civilizations, Arabia was not fully integrated into the rest of the region. It was basically a lineage society in which the conflicts of lineage and commercial communities and the religious and cultural influences emanating from the rest of the Middle East made possible the emergence of a new prophet, Muhammad, and the revelation of a new religion, Islam. To Muhammad, God revealed a new monotheism, which differed in its specific teachings, eschatological consciousness, and literary qualities from Judaism and Christianity. The Prophet also organized a new community parallel in form to Jewish and Christian religious associations.

In the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, foreign wars interacted with domestic political and economic problems to bring about profound changes in the Ottoman system. The pressures of war, internal social and demographic crises, and the commercialization and monetization of the economy led to new political institutions.

After centuries of conquests, the Ottomans reached a stalemate with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean. The Austrian war of 1593–1606 showed that further Ottoman expansion was blocked. As the Ottomans reached farther into central and northern Europe, logistical difficulties hampered their campaigns. A new premium was being placed on infantry armed with gunpowder weapons, muskets, and cannons, fighting from entrenched positions. As firearms and organized infantry became ever more important, the Ottoman cavalry (sipahis) could no longer resist German riflemen. Western economies could better afford the costs of war. Moreover, from the 1680s to the 1730s, the Ottomans became dependent on Albanian, Bosnian, Kurdish, Cossack, Tatar, Georgian, and Circassian auxiliaries who were not as well disciplined, trained, and armed as the traditional Ottoman forces.

The life of the Prophet

Prophecy is a rare phenomenon, and all the more extraordinary is the prophet whose influence permanently transforms the lives of his people and leaves as a legacy one of the world’s great religions. Thus the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam have to be understood in terms of both religious vision and worldly impact. In this chapter, I outline the Prophet’s biography as reported in the earliest Muslim sources and review critical themes in the scholarly interpretation of Muhammad’s life.

Compared with those of the founders of other great religions, the sources of our knowledge of the Prophet’s life are abundant. The life of Muhammad is reported in sira (biographical narratives of the Prophet), maghazi (campaign and battle narratives of the early Muslim community), and hadith (narratives of the Prophet’s words and deeds). They were first transmitted as quasi-oral, quasi-written materials, some of which can be traced back to the students of Muhammad’s companions or the companions themselves. ʿAbdallah ibn Abi Bakr (d. 747–48 or 752–53) was the first to put them in chronological order. The earliest surviving biography, the sira of Ibn Ishaq (d. 768–69) dates to the middle of the eighth century. Ibn Ishaq located Muhammad in Near Eastern prophetic history and emphasized the religious and miraculous aspects of his life. Al-Waqidi (d. 822) highlighted the political and military dimensions of the early Muslim community. Ibn Hisham (d. 833–34) edited the work of Ibn Ishaq, leaving out biblical history from Adam to Abraham and poetry and stories in which the Prophet was not involved. Much of the material rejected by Ibn Hisham is found in the later work of al-Tabari and others.

The decline of the central government

The very processes that led to the rise of the early Islamic empire, its elites, and its cultural forms resulted in its collapse and transformation. The decline of the ʿAbbasid Empire began even in the midst of consolidation. While the regime was strengthening its military and administrative institutions and encouraging a flourishing economy and culture, other forces were set in motion that would eventually unravel the ʿAbbasid Empire.

As early as Harun al-Rashid’s reign (786–809), the problems of succession had become critical. Harun bequeathed the caliphate to his elder son, al-Amin, and the governorship of Khurasan and the right to succeed his brother to his younger son, al-Maʾmun. The independence of Khurasan under al-Maʾmun was probably set up by Harun to satisfy the demands of the eastern Iranian warlords. With the death of Harun, al-Amin attempted to displace his brother in favor of his own son. Civil war resulted. Al-Amin was backed by the Baghdadi population (the abnaʾ). These forces may have included the descendants of the original ʿAbbasid forces from Khurasan but most likely were forces rallied for the civil war on the basis of royal patronage and not on any abiding ethnic or historical loyalty. Al-Maʾmun turned to Arab forces in Khurasan and to the independent Khurasanian warlords. In a bitter civil war, al-Maʾmun defeated his brother and in 813 assumed the caliphate. With Maʾmun’s conquest of Baghdad, the empire was dominated by Khurasanians.

From the origins of the Islamic era to the nineteenth century, the history of North African society turned on two essential motifs: state formation and Islamization. The Arab conquests gave new impetus to state formation and to the organization of North African society into Muslim communities. Tunisia in the eighth century, Morocco in the eleventh, and Algeria in the sixteenth acquired territorial identity and state regimes. The conquests also led to the institutionalization of Islam for the masses of the population. From the eighth century, the Maliki school of law became rooted throughout North Africa and remained the mainstay of legal administration, education, and state legitimization until the nineteenth century. From about the twelfth century, Sufis became the chieftains of rural communities in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco and the leaders of tribal coalitions, in parallel with and in opposition to states. Much of the history of North Africa from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries may be defined in terms of the relations between state and Sufi forces. Finally, the Arab conquests also gave North Africa an Arab identity due to successive waves of Arab migration, and Arab dominance of states. Large parts of southern Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, however, were primarily Berber. Only in the twentieth century would Arabic become the universal language of societies that had been Muslim since the Almohad era.

The Arab Middle East can be divided into two zones: the Fertile Crescent countries including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine; and the Arabian Peninsula countries of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the smaller Gulf states. The Arabian Peninsula and Arab North Africa will be considered in the following chapters.

The Arab Fertile Crescent countries, like Turkey, had their origins in the Ottoman Empire, but they developed in a different way. In the case of Turkey, with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the state elites absorbed European influences and assumed control of the construction of a Turkish national state and society. In the Arab Fertile Crescent, there were no organized states, no continuing governing elite, and only the beginnings of national political movements. There was no widely accepted concept of an Arab nation. In this chapter, we will discuss Arab elites and Arab nationalism in the late Ottoman era, the formation of colonial states after World War I, the emergence of independent states after World War II, and their history to the present. With independence, authoritarian military and family regimes came to dominate most countries, and the new states were replete with unresolved conflicts among national, ethnic, and religious sectarian identities. The new states attempted to control Islamist activities, but since the 1970s, Islamic opposition movements have generated profound political and cultural changes.

The death of Muhammad and the Arab-Muslim conquests opened a new era in Middle Eastern civilizations. The Arab-Muslim conquests initiated the long historical process that culminated in the amalgamation of Arabia, the Sasanian Empire, and the eastern regions of the Byzantine Empire within an Islamic empire; in the eventual conversion of the majority of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian peoples to Islam; and in the formation of an Islamic society and culture.

On Muhammad’s death, many of his followers decided on the appointment of a caliph or executor of the Prophet’s legacy. The first four caliphs – Abu Bakr (632–34), ʿUmar (634–44), ʿUthman (644–56), and ʿAli (656–61) – ruled by virtue of their personal connections with Muhammad and Arabian ideas of authority. They were later called the Rashidun, the Rightly Guided Caliphs. These caliphs, in part following the precedents set by Muhammad, launched a great wave of military campaigns and a migration of Arabian peoples leading to the conquest of all the lands of the former Sasanian Empire and the Near Eastern and North African provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were conquered by 641; Iran by 654. North Africa was conquered between 643 and 711; Spain between 711 and 759. In the east, the region of Inner Asia between the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers, Transoxania, was fully conquered by 751. Thus, the “Middle East,” North Africa, Spain, and Transoxania were incorporated into a single empire. The Islamic religion and related cultures and an Islamic sociopolitical identity would be formed in this region.

From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, Arab and Berber Muslim traders made their way into and across the Sahara, established colonies in the Sudan, and inspired the adoption of Islam by a succession of local rulers. Then, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, African-Muslim traders, scholars, and communities settled in Mauritania, Senegambia, and the Guinean regions. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, some of these Muslim communities launched jihads and created new Muslim states. At the same time they were faced with European competition, colonization, and empire formation.

The kingdoms of the western Sudan

The Arab conquests opened the way to contacts among Muslim Arabs and Berbers and Saharan and Sudanic peoples. (See Map 21.) North African Berbers had been converted to Khariji Islam in the seventh century; in the eighth century Tahert, Sijilmassa, and other Moroccan towns were centers of Ibadi Kharijism. Mauritanian Berbers were converted to Islam in the ninth century. By the tenth century, Muslim traders from North Africa were established in Awdaghust and Tadmekka. By the late tenth and eleventh centuries most of the Sudanese trading towns had a Muslim quarter, and Muslims were important as advisors and functionaries at the courts of local rulers.

The Press Syndicate originally commissioned Ira M. Lapidus to write A History of Islamic Societies as a supplement to The Cambridge History of Islam, which was published in 1970 in two volumes. His would be a unique enterprise, a monumental work with the status of a Cambridge History, but by one hand and integrated by one coherent vision. Since its publication in 1988, it has surpassed all expectations. The book has become a classic work of history. This volume brings a revised version of this definitive and best-selling book to a new generation of readers.

Baghdad

The first venture of the new regime was the creation of a new capital. From ancient times, Middle Eastern rulers had built new cities as headquarters for their armies and administrative staffs and as symbols of the advent of a new order. The rulers of the Assyrian Empire created the famous cities of Nineveh and Nimrud; the Sasanians founded Ctesiphon. In a strategic location on the main routes between Iraq, Iran, and Syria – in one of the most fertile parts of Iraq with ready access to the Tigris-Euphrates water system – the ʿAbbasids built Baghdad to be their palace and administrative base. (See Map 3.)

Like its predecessors, Baghdad rapidly transcended the intentions of its founders and grew from a military and administrative center into a major city. The very decision to build the administrative center – called the City of Peace (Madinat al-Salam) – generated two large settlements in the vicinity. One was the extensive camp of the ʿAbbasid army in the districts to the north of the palace complex (al-Harbiya), and the other, to the south (al-Karkh), was inhabited by thousands of construction workers brought from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Here were markets to provision the workers and their families and workshops to produce their clothes, as well as utensils, tools, and factories to supply the building materials for the construction project. The original Baghdad, then, was a three-part complex – the troop settlement in al-Harbiya, the working populations in al-Karkh, and the administrative city itself, Madinat al-Salam. No sooner was the City of Peace completed than the decisions of the caliphs to build additional palace residences and administrative complexes in the immediate vicinity stimulated the growth of additional quarters. Across the Tigris, the new palace district of al-Rusafa also promoted urban development.