The Formation of Islam Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800

The millenium or so before the rise of Islam in the early seventh century CE was a period of enormously rich social and cultural development in the lands that form the subject of this book. So much is probably true of any thousand-year interval of human history, but this particular epoch was of special importance in that it saw the crystallization of the religious traditions which have survived into the modern era, and which formed the backdrop to the emergence of the new religion which traces its origins to the preaching of Muhammad in western Arabia.

Marshall Hodgson, in his monumental history of The Venture of Islam, identified the period between 800 and 200 BCE, which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers had referred to as the “Axial Age,” as decisive in creating the world out of which Islam eventually emerged. Throughout the Eurasian landmass, the Axial Age saw the coalescence of a number of distinct cultures, regionally-based but linked by both trading networks and a common core of principles: the Graeco-Roman or Mediterranean, the Indian, the Chinese. This was an era of leading religious figures and of the production of foundational religious texts in all of these regions: the teaching of Lao-Tzu, Buddha, the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the compilation of the Upanishads in India.