When islam appeared

Sharia law requires men and women to dress modestly. It also outlines marriage guidelines and other moral principles for Muslims. If crimes are committed, Sharia law is known for its harsh punishments. Adultery can carry the penalty of death by stoning. However, many Muslims do not support such extreme measures. The prophet Muhammad is credited with building the first mosque in the courtyard of his house in Medina.

Mosques today follow some of the same principles he established in A. Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.

Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions. In addition to hosting prayers, mosques often function as public gathering places and social centers. While some Muslims use their faith to justify terrorism, the vast majority do not. In fact, Muslims are frequently victims of violence themselves. Recent surveys have found that in countries with high Muslim populations, the majority of Muslims have overwhelmingly negative views of terrorist groups like ISIS.

While Muslims aim to clear up misconceptions about their faith, the religion continues to spread rapidly. Experts predict Islam will surpass Christianity as the largest religion by the end of the century. Islam, BBC. What is Sharia Law and How is it Applied? Pew Research Center. The Islamic Calendar: TimeandDate.

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Without Islam, the peoples of the Middle East would have remained as they were at the birth of Islam — mostly adherents of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Eastern Orthodox Christians never forgot or forgave the sacking of Christian Constantinople by Western Crusaders in Nearly years later, in , Pope John Paul II sought to take a few small steps to heal the breach in the first visit of a Catholic pope to the Orthodox world in a thousand years.

It was a start, but friction between East and West in a Christian Middle East would have remained much as it is today. Take Greece, for example: The Orthodox cause has been a powerful driver behind nationalism and anti-Western feeling there, and anti-Western passions in Greek politics as little as a decade ago echoed the same suspicions and virulent views of the West that we hear from many Islamist leaders today.

The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the "corrupted" and imperial character of the West.

Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War.

Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West. Today, the U. The United States did not overthrow Saddam Hussein, an intensely nationalist and secular leader, because he was Muslim.

Other Arab peoples would still have supported the Iraqi Arabs in their trauma of occupation. Nowhere do people welcome foreign occupation and the killing of their citizens at the hands of foreign troops. Indeed, groups threatened by such outside forces invariably cast about for appropriate ideologies to justify and glorify their resistance struggle. Religion is one such ideology.

This, then, is the portrait of a putative "world without Islam. Still riven by major ethnic and even sectarian differences, it possesses a fierce sense of historical consciousness and grievance against the West.

It has been invaded repeatedly by Western imperialist armies; its resources commandeered; borders redrawn by Western fiat in conformity with its various interests; and regimes established that are compliant with Western dictates. Palestine would still burn. Iran would still be intensely nationalistic. It would, in many respects, perpetuate an East-West divide. It is, of course, absurd to argue that the existence of Islam has had no independent impact on the Middle East or East-West relations.

Islam has been a unifying force of a high order across a wide region. As a global universal faith, it has created a broad civilization that shares many common principles of philosophy, the arts, and society; a vision of the moral life; a sense of justice, jurisprudence, and good governance — all in a deeply rooted high culture. As a cultural and moral force, Islam has helped bridge ethnic differences among diverse Muslim peoples, encouraging them to feel part of a broader Muslim civilizational project.

That alone furnishes it with great weight. Islam affected political geography as well: If there had been no Islam, the Muslim countries of South Asia and Southeast Asia today — particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia — would be rooted instead in the Hindu world. Islamic civilization provided a common ideal to which all Muslims could appeal in the name of resistance against Western encroachment.

Even if that appeal failed to stem the Western imperial tide, it created a cultural memory of a commonly shared fate that did not go away. Europeans were able to divide and conquer numerous African, Asian, and Latin American peoples who then fell singly before Western power.

A united, transnational resistance among those peoples was hard to achieve in the absence of any common ethnic or cultural symbol of resistance. In a world without Islam, Western imperialism would have found the task of dividing, conquering, and dominating the Middle East and Asia much easier.

There would not have remained a shared cultural memory of humiliation and defeat across a vast area. That is a key reason why the United States now finds itself breaking its teeth in the Muslim world.

Today, global intercommunications and shared satellite images have created a strong self-consciousness among Muslims and a sense of a broader Western imperial siege against a common Islamic culture. This siege is not about modernity; it is about the unceasing Western quest for domination of the strategic space, resources, and even culture of the Muslim world — the drive to create a "pro-American" Middle East. Unfortunately, the United States naively assumes that Islam is all that stands between it and the prize.

But what of terrorism — the most urgent issue the West most immediately associates with Islam today? If the grievances of the Middle East, rooted in years of political and emotional anger at U.

To the al Qaeda hijackers, Islam functioned as a magnifying glass in the sun, collecting these widespread shared common grievances and focusing them into an intense ray, a moment of clarity of action against the foreign invader. Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil "Tigers" invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings — including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada, and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I.

Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American "anarchists," sowing collective fear. The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the s, Mau Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya — the list goes on.

According to Europol, terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in Of these, were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only 1 was carried out by Islamists. To be sure, there were a number of foiled attempts in a highly surveilled Muslim community. But these figures reveal the broad ideological range of potential terrorists in the world.

As radical groups articulate grievances in our globalized age, why should we not expect them to carry their struggle into the heart of the West? Approximately 30 percent of Africans forced into slavery in the United States are Muslim. Muslim immigrants from the Arab world voluntarily come to the United States until the Asian Exclusion Act is passed in World War I ends with the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which was the last of the Islamic empires.

Many regions populated by Muslims in Africa and Asia are colonized by Europeans. Traditional religious ways of life are threatened and, in some cases, destroyed.

The Nation of Islam is created in the U. It is based on some Islamic ideas, but contains innovations, such as the appointment or declaration of Elijah Muhammad as a prophet. The state of Israel is created.

Muslim students come to the U. Wallace D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad, takes over leadership of the Nation of Islam after his father's death and brings most of his followers into mainstream Islam.

He later creates the Muslim American Society, which attracts many members, most of whom are African-American. The Iranian Revolution results in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the first attempt at an Islamic state in the modern era. Discussion and Activities. Beliefs and Daily Lives of Muslims. Islam Timeline.