Islam, a New History from Muhammad to the Present (2025)
John Tolan
A book to learn a bit more about one of the World's most important religion.
There sure is a lot of talks about Islam in the West. People sure seem to have a lot of opinions. Loads of ideas about it.
I don’t really have any.
The thing is, I don’t know that much about it.
I consider myself a pretty average person, with a pretty typical culture of a Western European person born in the end of the 20th century. Maybe a bit more curious than the average ? I’ve had some Muslim friends, I have worked with some, I’m following the artistic and academical works of quite a few openly Muslim persons.
Yet I just don’t know that much about Islam, really. And surely not enough to have big, category-creating opinions about large groups of human beings.
So that’s why I read this book. To learn a bit about something that has had, and still has, an enormous importance for nearly 2 billion people of Earth, many of which I’m going to cross roads with.
As I said, I’m a pretty average person, and I think that maybe, if I’m learning something new, maybe I’m not the only one that ought to learn it. I’m saying that, but maybe you already know everything there is to know about Islam. Or maybe we could go on this learning journey together.
That being said, let’s dive in.
These are a few things that I learned. It’s non-exhaustive eh, but I guess you’ll have to read the book yourself for exhaustivity.
John Tolan starts its exploration of Islamic history at the very beginning, the start of Islam as a minority religion in a relatively small city in the Center-West of the Arabian Peninsula called Mecca. The story of the first revelation of some verses of the Quran to Muhammad in year 610 in the Cave of Hira, by Angel Gabriel - Gibril in Arabic.
It tells the story of the first retelling of the story of this revelation from Muhammad to his first wife Khadijah, of her believing him and thus becoming the first Muslim. It tells of the preachings in Mecca, a city at the time dominated by polytheists or pagan tribe called the Quraysh, in a wider region that also had Jewish & Christian as well as pagan traditions.
It explains that the popularity of this preaches started unraveling the people in power in Mecca, and because of this, Muhammad and his first Muslim disciples had to flee to another city further North called Medina, in year 622 - known in the Hijra Calendar as year 1 in the Muslim World (Hijra meaning Exile, Exodus).
It explains that the Quran was revealed to Muhammad piece by piece over a period of 22 years. That the revelations were not chronological but dispersed, and had to be subsequently put in order. Tolan insists on the fact that most revelations in Mecca would be of a different order to the ones later revealed in Medina. As the former speak more of general subjects to convince new believers of the existence and unicity of God and his role in the Creation of man & the World, the latter take a more prescriptive role of practical organization of the day-to-day life of a community.
It also shows how the Quran is a dynamic thing. This can be seen for example in the Medinan verses about alcohol. The verses get stricter with their revelations to the prophet; they evolve from saying that alcoholic beverages have positive and negative sides, even though its negative sides are stronger, to the necessity of being sober while praying, before finally suggesting an interdiction of it, as alcohol would be something impure, product of the devil. This is often read by the ulama (islamic scholars that helps to interpret the messages and inform their respective schools of thought with specialized knowledge of the islamic sciences) as the path towards evolution of a specific society. In other terms, it is contextualized. The city in which Muhammad received the revelations was the Medinan society of the 7th century, and was viewed as a flawed one that the message of the book intended on changing, in specifics here, to bring the believers who had the culture of wine at the time towards a path of abstinence. But reading only from the Quran, one can legitimately get confused, as the messages can be contradictory without further contextualization.
This is why Tolan then explains that the sources in Islam are multiple and complex.
Apart from the Quran, which is believed to be the direct word of Allah - God - most Muslims also refer to the Sunnah, the collection of prophetic traditions, which consists of different hadiths, basically how the Prophet lived and what his views, conversations were. The Quran says that Muslims have to pray, but it doesn’t explicitly describe any gestures to do so. This is found in the Sunnah, in the way Muhammad was teaching others how to pray.
An extra layer of complexity comes from the fact that these hadiths were recorded orally other the course of Muhammad’s life, to a select few, and would be passed down for many generations orally, as it was the custom at the time. They would only be written down a couple of centuries later, and many Islamic researchers have, through the ages, been showing inconsistencies or expressed doubt on the veracity of some of them. Thinkers and Islamic scholars like Gamal al-Banna have been showing doubtfulness in the very practice of referring to the hadiths. In these days, they claim, in the absence of written proof or living witnesses, false hadiths may have been invented or distorted to suit a particular view of Islam, or to gain power in the eyes of the believers. As of today, still divergent are the opinions on which is the Corpus of hadiths to believe and therefore follow. But we'll come back to that.
The book then goes on to explaining the historical schism in the very early stages in Islam's history, one which will eventually cause a number of civil wars, between Sunni & Shia Muslims (and even a 3rd one called the Kharijites but go read the book), a conflict beginning in the dispute over the successor of the Prophet, the Sunni favoring Abu Bakr, a close companion and follower of Muhammad, while the Shia favored his cousin & son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib should have taken the lead as a family member was more indicated.
That being said, Tolan insists on two things :
Firstly, that the differences between the two main faiths were not only about names but were revealing of different visions of Islam, as basically, the Sunni favored someone to lead thanks to their competency and always according to the example that the Prophet gave (which is the origin of the Sunni branch, from the Sunnah, the traditions) ; the Shia wanting a leader of the family of the Prophet to become a new leader, a new guide, an Imam, as Muhammad was.
Secondly, that the differences between the two main faiths were not only about names but were revealing of concrete situations of power. By favoring certain persons, you could rally certain clans of people behind you. These divisions were also political ones, as well as religious.
All of that to say that Islam is many things, but certainly not homogenous. It shouldn't be surprising, as many movements exist everywhere, within Christianism as well, and so do they in any major Philosophical framework.
We've spoken about the role of hadiths, that not every movement within Islam decides to follow or interpret in the same way. There is the fundamental schism.
But there also are many schools of thought concerning the sources of Islamic law (Fiqh): how are the Quran and the Sunnah to be interpreted when some messages seem contradictory (as we've seen before with the question of alcohol, for example) ? What if a new situation arises which has not been spoken about within the books ?
It would require more than a few lines to describe them all, and this is not the goal, this is not a theological article, but we'll go through some big lines anyway, to give you an idea. You'll see, they vary greatly from one another.
Hanafism, for example, searches the source of Islamic law in the Motives behind the texts. It reasons with Qiyas (Analogies) For example, the interdiction of wine in the Quran was to prevent drunkenness and the negative impacts of it on society. Therefore, for hanafists, the sources of drunkenness, what can cause a person to loose its sobriety are to be proscribed. This movement is quite influential in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Central Asia as well as the Muslim regions of China.
Malikism gives a big space to common law, as well as the practices of the people of Medina, and by implication gives a lot of space to the personal judgment of the believers. This form of Islam is primarily found in the Maghreb and in West Africa, as well as some Gulf states like the EAU or Bahrain.
Then you have Shafism, which focuses on the consensus of the Muslim community (Umma), and you have Hanbalism. This school of jurisprudence is the most conservative one, as it is a literalist one. It affirms basing its judgments on the Quran & the Sunnah, in a literal way, as they reject both personal judgment of the Muslim, and the analogy reasoning of Hanafism. It is in minority in the Muslim World, even though it is the doctrine of both Qatar & Saudi Arabia.
Tolan mentions that the people today claiming this heritage would sometimes also call themselves Salafis (from the word Salafs, the first generations of Muslims), and claim to want to go back to the fundamentals of Islam.
On this note, it seems to be a good time to clarify that the word "Shari'ah", if it is sometimes (often) (always) translated to "Islamic law", doesn't really mean that for Muslims. The "Shari'ah" can be translated into "the path", or "the way", and it has a much more spiritual meaning than a simple "Islamic code of law", which, we've seen, the Muslim World is not reaching a consensus about either anyway.
This "way" to go can, sure, incorporate legal dimensions, but it is larger than that. It covers the practices of worshipping, but also the ethics of the person, the relationship one has with themselves, their family, their surroundings, the universe and their relationship with God. It is the path to transcendence.
This gives me a good transition to speak about Sufism. Sufis are found in both Sunni as well as Shia traditions. This is not so much a school of law as it is a specific version of the "Shari'ah", understood as the path to transcendence.
The Sufis are what we could call Mystics. For them, practicing Islam cannot be simply understood as acting the fundamental rites - Shahada (declaration of faith), the Prayers, the Ramadan, the Pilgrimage to Mecca, the Zakat (tax for the needy).
Sufis emphasize the introspective, inner dimensions of Islam. One has to feel his connection with God. This goes through spiritual practices, asceticism, but also often poetry and music (oh, we'll talk about Sufi music, do not worry), sometimes dances, spiritual guidance of Sufi masters, meditation.
While some Muslim movements have condemn these practices as contrary to the Spirit of Islam, mostly the more traditionalists like Salafis & Wahhabis, many more have embraced and regarded with respect their devotion to their Faiths.
To go back to History (it is a History book after all), as to underline the role religion played in power dynamics, we can go back in time to the battle of succession to the Prophet.
Around 30 years of infighting, basically. Abu Bakr succeeded to Muhammad, followed by Umar I, for about ten years, until his assassination by a partisan of Ali. But Umar I, in his dying breath, designated 6 people to succeed him, and Uthman was chosen, installing the beginning of what would be known as the premise of the Umayyad dynasty.
The young community of believers was profoundly fragmented. Some resented the caliph for favoring members of his Umayyad clan, those who had fought Muhammad for decades, over the prophet’s own companions. Some refused to recognize the legitimacy of Uthman’s election, affirming that the title of caliph should have gone to Ali. Revolt finally broke out in Iraq and Egypt. Egyptian rebels went to Medina, laid siege to Uthman’s house, and finally assassinated him on 17 June 656. The next day, 18 June 656, at the mosque of the prophet, in an atmosphere of chaos and crisis, and in the presence of rebels who had murdered Uthman, there was a meeting to elect a new caliph. This time Ali was chosen in an election that would subsequently be contested by the Umayyad clan, whose leader was now Muawiya, Uthman’s cousin and the powerful governor of Syria. Some of the prophet’s companions also rejected Ali’s election, in particular Talhah ibn Ubayd-Allah, Zubayr ibn al-Awam, and Aisha, the prophet’s widow. They were outraged that Ali had not punished Uthman’s assassins and accused him of complicity in their crime.
I'm sure you can guess where this is going. Ali was assassinated in 661, and to him followed a certain Muawiya, proper founder of the Umayyad dynasty, which will rule over the Caliphate for nearly a hundred years, extending it immensely from the Middle East all the way to the Pyrenées in the North-West, the Atlantic Ocean in what would later be called Morocco, and in the East to the Hindus River and the great plains of Central Asia.
Not to misunderstand something, it doesn't mean that all of a sudden, all the people from these regions magically became Muslims. First of all, religious minorities were protected under the Muslim Caliphates, they had a special status called dhimmi, with a certain tax associated that would vary with the era. Secondly, the new people in power were Muslims, but didn't seek to convert all their new subjects.
Students of the Umayyad Empire too often forget that Muslims were a numerical minority during the whole Umayyad era (and well beyond). In Syria, the center of the dynasty’s power, the majority of the inhabitants were Christian. The caliphs themselves, as we have seen, forged close ties to Christian administrators and to Arab Christians (...). Often their mothers and wives were Christian. How could it have been otherwise, when we know that the conquering troops from Arabia had probably numbered fewer than 400,000 and the population of the territories they conquered was 25 or 30 million?
To talk about how many of these places got profoundly influenced by Islam, we should fast forward a bit and look at the Emirate of Cordoba. Fleeing the Abbasid revolts and the massacres of the Umayyad dynasty, Abd al-Rahman, last survivor amongst the Umayyads, managed to arrive to the Iberian Peninsula, where he would rule the rest of the Umayyad Caliphate, now relegated to a less important role of Emirate, title it would keep for centuries, until Abd al-Rahman III would declare it a Caliphate in 929. But let's take a step back, and look in Spain how many places got influenced by Islam : they mixed.
Cordoba was becoming an important capital of the Muslim World, even if it was only a pale reflection of the opulent and cosmopolitan cities in the East, such as Damascus and Bagdhad. The great grandson of Abd al-Rahman I, Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), made Cordoba a showpiece of Arab culture : he built a sumptuous new palace and patronized artists, poets, and musicians, the most famous of whom, Ziryab, immigrated from Bagdhad and became the cultural icon of the capital. Young Cordobans imitated his dress, speech, and manners. Christian writer Paul Alvarus noted with alarm that young Christians could no longer read and write correct Latin, but that they were all capable of writing sophisticated poems in Arabic. A little over a century after the Muslim conquest, Spain had become culturally and linguistically Arab: Arabic was now the preferred language of communication between people of different cultures and religions. A century later, virtually no Christians in Al-Andalus were writing in Latin, and various books of the Bible were translated into Arabic. An ecclesiastical council in Cordoba in 839 was alarmed by the large number of marriages between Christians and infidels.
There is evidence of shared festivals that show fraternization between the relatively new muslim leaders and the Pagans, Christian & Jews living there already. The point is that, if the Reconquista that took Cordoba in 1492, 7 centuries later (!) and especially the violent forced conversion to Catholicism that followed, albeit a couple of centuries later, as well as the mass expulsions of Muslim converts and Jews in the 16th century, many of which who would find refuge in the Northern Coasts of Africa, meant that Spain reaffirmed its Catholic identity, many other regions of the World, and the people inhabiting them, will stick to Islam.
Take the Amazigh people of the Maghreb. After the Umayyad conquests of the 7th century, and despite rebellion episodes, they adopted Islam, and their culture was influenced deeply by the one the Arabs brought with them, to this day. Also, conversions to Islam were often made for very good and practical reasons.
Many people had good reasons to convert to Islam: a man who wished to marry a Muslim woman; a woman who sought to escape from an arranged marriage; youth at odds with their family; someone who did not want to pay jizya and kharaj. Umar II ruled that if dhimmis converted to Islam on the day on which they owed their jizya, they would be dispensed from paying it. These taxes could be quite costly, particularly for the poor.
There would be so much to speak about referring to the Abbasid dynasty, its history is so vast. I'll just mention that Sufism has its roots in this period, and I'll also mention that what is commonly referred as the "Golden age of Islam" is contemporary to this period. Caliph al-Mansur would for example be open and tolerant towards other cultures, notably Hellenic civilization and heritage, would patron poets and scientists, and therefore bring an age when sciences, arts and architecture would flourish in the Arab World, and later on the rest of the World.
His tomb in Baqi cemetery in Medina, venerated by many Muslims around the World, will be destroyed in 1926 by the Wahhabis.
The Wahhabi movement originated in Arabia, in the minds of Muhammad ibn Saud & Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab in 1740. Al-Wahhab destroyed the tomb of Zayn ibn al-Katthab, a companion of the prophet which died in battle in 632 and considered a martyr.
But, for Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the respect shown to the tombs of the companions of the prophet was « shirk », and the object of this inappropriate veneration must be destroyed »
This was not left unnoticed by their Muslim contemporaries.
Suleyman ibn Shays, qadi and mufti of Riyadh, denounced the new Wahhabi sect in a letter he sent between 1740 and 1745 to the « ulama of Islam and the servants of the sharia of our master Muhammad » : "An innovator has appeared in our country, an ignoramus, a misguided person, without knowledge and without piety: he has committed formidable crimes, some of which have already spread, and others still limited to our country. I want to inform the ulama, heirs of the prophets, so that they can put an end to his error and his ignorance. He destroyed tombs and burned popular prayer books; he clams that, if he could, he would destroy the Black Stone of the Kaaba; he considers that people for six hundred years have been in ignorance… But where does he get this knowledge from ? Did he receive the revelation ? Or did the devil whisper to him ? I beg you ! Let the poor people he has reduced by these artifices know, and deal with the most urgent needs before it is too late !"
It was in the name of this new Wahhabi doctrine, presented as the purest of Islam, that the Saudi dynasty waged jihad against other Muslims. (…) In Medina, the Wahhabis razed al-Baqi cemetery, founded by Muhammad himself, with its numerous tombs and mausoleums, one of the sacred places visited by millions of pilgrims since the seventh century. In Mecca, they destroyed the tomb of Khadijah, Muhammad’s first wife, and other tombs in the al-Maalla cemetery, as well as domes and other structures adjoining the Kaaba. This massive destruction of sacred Muslim sites sent shock waves throughout the Muslim World.
If there was more need to convince you of the diversity of thoughts within Islam.
This story resolves itself with Egypt, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, two Muslim nations, sending its army to recapture Medina & Mecca in 1811. In 1818, they captured Wahhabi leaders and had them executed for destruction of holy sites.
The Wahhabis will nonetheless for the next century (and still today) try to influence the doctrines in other Muslim countries :
Few were receptive to his calls, but Moroccan sultan Mawlay Sulaiman (1792-1822) responded favorably and tried to shut down several Sufi orders and abolish the traditional practices including veneration tombs of saints and the practice of dancing and playing music during religious festivals. Yet Moroccans were having none of this : an insurrection, in which Sufis joined Amazigh rebels, captured the sultan and forced him to abdicate.
Throughout the 20th century, Wahhabism gradually went from a small, decried sect in opposition to both Shiism and Sunnis to a new Sunni orthodoxy exported across the globe.»
Oh because yes, if the name « Saud » tells you something, it’s because the dynasty kind of got back in the aftermath of decolonization of the Middle East, as they got promised a huge part of the Arabian peninsula by the British in the treaty of Jedda, for their help against the Ottoman Empire. They are still reigning over what is today called Saudi Arabia, home to both Mecca and Medina, the two most important cities for Muslims.
The thing is, the Saudis have a lot of powerful allies in their fundamentalist battle. For instance, Europe and the United States, that export them loads of weapons, and imports them loads of oil making them super rich and influential. I’m paraphrasing a bit.
On 14 of February 1945, following the Yalta summit, which attempted to organize the postwar world order, President Franklin Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud aboard the Quincy in the Suez Canal. The two men made a secret agreement: the US would provide Saudi Arabia with protection and military assistance and would open a military base in the kingdom; the Saudis would supply oil to their new ally. Like the British before them, the US chose the Saudi strategic alliance, consolidating the power of the most autocratic of Arab governments. This helped their new ally disseminate its fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology on a global level, especially since the oil windfall could finance Wahhabi mission, paying for the construction of mosques and madrasas, granting scholarships to young Muslims from all other the World to come study in the kingdom.
Oh, I wasn’t paraphrasing that much in the end. I’m sure everything will go just fine.
Saudi Arabia was struck in 1979 by an internal enemy : a new movement of Wahhabi brothers around the 'Mahdi' Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani and his son-in-law Juhayman al-Utaybi. Proclaiming the illegitimacy of the « infidel » Saudi regime, they advocated a rejection of Western values, the expulsion of Non-Muslim from Arabia, the abolition of television, and respect for sharia law. On 20 November 1979, five hundred armed brothers invaded the great mosque of Mecca and took hundreds of worshippers hostage.
Oh no things are not fine ! Who could have guessed ? The Saudis had to call the French army for help with the situation, which ended with a death toll of 244.
The year before,
In April 1978, a coup in Kabul (Afghanistan) overthrew the autocrat Mohammad Daoud Khan and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The communist government introduced a series of reforms that were generally supported by Afghans, including universal eduction and equal rights for women. But soon the communist coalition fractured, and several party members were sacked, expelled, or killed. (…) The Red Army intervened on 24 December 1979 and installed Babrak Karmal, loyal to the Soviet Union, a president. (…) In January 1980, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation called for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. The Afghan Mujahidin received reinforcements and funding from various Muslim countries (including Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, and the Gulf monarchies) and funding and logistical assistance from the United States and the UK. One of the Saudis who joined the Afghan Mujahidin was a 22 year old man by the name of Osama bin Laden.
You know the rest of the story I suppose. Bin Laden would eventually follow the same ideology of the Wahhabis that denounced association of their not-Wahhabi-enough government.
Lot of death, lot of misery, with a background of games of power and regional destabilizations. Sounds familiar ?
Colonization and it's aftermath, placing certain people in power for political allies of former colonizers, not to mention the creation in the Middle East of the colonial State of Israël on a land promised by the British to both Arabs & re-settling Jews following the horrors committed during the Holocaust (that itself has to be inscribed in the broader antisemitic context of most of the Europe & the US of the past... millennia ?), had a tremendous destabilization impact of Muslim societies.
The creation of Israel sent a shock wave through the newly independent Arab countries. At the time of decolonization, when they had finally succeeded in getting the French and the British to leave, other Europeans arrived who, by force of arms, took Palestine. At least that is how many Arab observers saw the creation of the State of Israel: a new European colony on Arab land. The failure of the Palestinians and their Arab allies was bitter: it provoked a wave of indignation in Muslim countries. This also resulted in violence against Jews in Arab countries, notably Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt, causing emigration of Jews to Europe, the United States, and Israel. In the decade following the creation of Israel, most Arab Jews, several hundred thousand women, men, and children, left their countries of origin.
New state divisions were created, others were erased, alliances with outsiders, in the context of a proxy-war between the Soviet Union and the United States, add to that the Boom in Oil demands and prices, and you can begin to imagine the atmosphere in the Arab World in the end of the 20th Century.
In the midst of all this.. chaos, frankly, with the conjoined factors of the growing of conservative movements within Islam like Wahhabism we talked about, pushed by a specific agenda for certain people in the region, as well as the void of clear power structures left by foreign destabilization, and a certain public resentment for the US and its allies for their involvement in Wars & political interference, grew a number of terrorist organizations, the most well known being Al-Qaeda, and then later Daesh (ISIS) or Boko Haram.
If it is true Islamist terrorism has been hitting the West very hard, in horrendous ways - I mean I'm French and the 2015 Paris terror attacks are in our collective trauma and quite understandably so - we also have to remember that, as Tolan states,
The vast majority of victims of Islamist terrorism are Muslims, residents of countries where these groups are based: in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, of course, but also in Pakistan (with the Pakistani Taliban), in Nigeria (Boko Haram), and in Libya, Mali, and many other countries. Sometimes the news of a terrorist attack causes turmoil in the international community, for example, in April 2014 when Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 high school girls, most of them Christian, in Chibok, in the northeast of Nigeria: several were married by force to jihadists. Non-Muslims in these countries may be prime targets, but under the principle of takfir, any Muslim who does not support their criminal net- works is easily declared to be an infidel worthy of death.
In the West, however, this wave of terror attacks revived the Islamophobia that was dormant since the time of Decolonization. It never disappeared, but the aftermath of 9/11 or the Bataclan attacks cannot be understated, as it gave a new angle to attack Muslim communities living in the West.
Islam is, for many, seen as a foreign religion, which was tolerated as long as it was invisible.
Tolan remembers us that there is an Occidental Islam, it is part of the Western World, and has been for a while. This Islam has its own codes and practices, proper to its context - often it is the religion of minority groups that emigrated under Colonization, into very different countries.
Islam in Western countries is diverse. Each government has its own way of managing religious institutions. In certain countries Muslim religious education is integrated into public schools; some mosques are state-funded. In other countries, subsidies are prohibited and mosque construction projects must be financed by worshipers or by foreign organizations or governments. In France, a 1905 law prohibits the direct financing of places of worship and the remuneration of the clergy (...) Significant subsidies come from countries from which a large part of France’s Muslim population originates, especially Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey, and more recently Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. Many imams are trained in these countries. What is often called the “Muslim community” in the United States and Europe is in fact extremely diverse, with very different beliefs, practices, and customs. Among practicing Muslims, immigrants have tended to group around their compatriots; as a result, there are mosques bringing together the faithful mainly from Bengali immigration for some, Moroccan for others, or Turkish, Pakistani, Senegalese, and so on. These mosques sometimes receive funding (and imams) from the countries of origin. Other Muslims in the West embrace a globalized Salafi version of Islam. Other European and American Muslims emphasize personal understanding of religious texts and doctrines and in general tolerate great diversity in practice, for example concerning wearing or not wearing headscarves.
Paradoxically, Muslims in Western countries have sometimes embraced a stricter or more conservative view of Islam than in Muslim countries.
Religion acts sometimes as an identifier in an otherwise hostile "host country". Remember on this point that we are speaking about people that are born there, and that this view as "foreigners" with "outsiders' practices" are misguided, to speak with euphemisms. Islam exists in Europe. It simply does. And sometimes, reclaiming the religion of your heritage can be viewed for Muslims in the West as a cultural marker. They identify with Islam, as a marker of Identity, sometimes without practicing, or practicing some rites but in a looser way than their contemporaries in Muslim countries - for example limiting their practices to not eating Pork, or going to the Mosque only once in a while.
When we speak about contemporary Islam, this particular point can be a bit counterintuitive, but it is fundamental to understand if we want to get some movements happening within Muslim communities in the West. People are not homogenous, and they evolve in different contexts. Taking the example of the veil, and after reminding the reader that
Of course, the veil is not only Islamic; we find in the history of Judaism and Christianity, in particular, references to women who cover their heads for reasons of modesty. Various Church Fathers asserted that women should cover their heads when praying. The veil is widespread in the Muslim world, where it takes the most diverse forms: scarf, turban, chador, niqab (full veil covering the face, leaving only the eyes visible), burqa (full veil covering the entire head with a grid in front of the eyes). The wearing of veils varies enormously from one country to another and has never been universal in Islam: already in the fourteenth century, as we have seen, Ibn Battuta relates that in some places women wear a full veil, while in others they go bareheaded (and even topless, for Maldivian women). The styles, shapes, and colors of the veils have varied enormously.
He states,
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen two trends: the abandonment of the traditional veil in many countries, then a return of the veil in several countries, including among Muslim women in Europe and North America. For many Muslim women in the twentieth century, unveiling was tantamount to modernization and liberation. In Turkey, Atatürk encouraged Turkish women to unveil and prohibited veiled women from attending universities and obtaining administrative positions; women had the right to vote in 1930 (before many European women), and in 1935 women were elected to the Turkish parliament. In 1922, Egyptian feminist Huda Sharawi removed her veil, inspiring a movement of unveiling among Egyptian women. (…) But not all Muslim women shed their veils. In some countries, liberation has affected only a small minority of women, the educated and Westernized elites. Other countries remained deaf to calls for respect for women’s rights: such as Saudi Arabia, which ended up granting women the right to vote in 2015 and the right to drive a car in 2017. Veiling was made mandatory in 1979, in reaction to the fundamentalist at- tack on the Meccan holy sites; the obligation was abolished in 2018. The Saudi state has harassed feminist activists, such as Loujain al-Hathloul, imprisoned from 2018 to 2021. Elsewhere, at the end of the twentieth century, the veil was back. Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran compelled women to wear veils. Since the election of hardline president Ebrahim Raisi in 2021, the government has cracked down on what it considers lax morals, targeting in particular unveiled or improperly veiled women. Many women have been arrested and often treated violently. On 13 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old student, was arrested by Iranian police for not properly veiling. Beaten and tortured, she died three days later. Her death provoked mass protests in which Iranian girls, women, and men have taken to the streets and shed their veils, chanting “Woman, life, freedom.” The movement spread throughout the country and has still in 2024 not been completely quelled, despite brutal repression by the Iranian regime. (…)
The return of the veil has accompanied the flourishing of Wahhabi and Salafist fundamentalism. For these Muslims, unveiling and other manifestations of feminism are signs of a betrayal of supposedly immutable Muslim values, of the “corruption” caused by imitation of the West. For some Muslim feminists, the right not to wear a veil is an integral part of their fight for equality. Others, on the contrary, demand the right to wear the veil for religious reasons, a practice that does not compromise their fight for equality. Wearing the veil has become for some a sign of identity.
If the links between Islam & Europe and its former colonies (or present colonies, we think for example of France and its relationship to the East African island of Mayotte, in the Comoros archipelago) is quite clear, there is a common misconception that Islam would be a recent thing in the US. As a matter of fact, Islam has been in North America for a long time, as it was brought there with some Muslim slaves, beginning in the 16th century.
In various interviews conducted through the initiative of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, grandchildren of Muslim slaves related how their grandparents had, in their dress, diet, prayer, and other rituals, continued to practice Islam. Some Muslims in the Americas wore amulets inscribed with Quranic verses. Many read and wrote Arabic: a manuscript now in the University of Georgia library contains a nineteenth-century legal treatise compiled by Bilali Muhammad, who had been born and educated in Guinea before being captured and taken to Georgia. One of the most interesting testimonies from this period is the Arabic autobiography of Omar ibn Said (ca. 1770–1864). He describes his youth along the Senegal River, his training in Quran and in Islamic law. He tells of how as a young man he was captured by a Bambara army and sold to slavers who took him to South Carolina. Abused by a cruel master, he managed to escape to North Carolina, where he was caught, imprisoned, and sold to James Owen, a planter who was impressed with his learning and culture and who treated him with respect. Ibn Said authored fourteen manuscripts in Arabic including his autobiography.
There are a few pages dedicated to the different new forms of religiosity that emerged in the United States in the early 20th century - like Mormonism, for instance - with some form of reference to Islam. One of them, probably the better known, is called Nation of Islam. It doesn’t really have much to do with Islam.
Black Americans, Elijah Muhammad {second leader of Nation of Islam} taught, were descendants of the Meccan tribe of the Shabazz. Allah had been a Black God who created man Black and established him in his homeland, which stretched from Egypt to Mecca. After seventy-six trillion years of peaceful coexistence of Black humanity, a Black Meccan named Yakub decided to undertake a project of genetic engineering. He went to an island and cross-bred light-skinned Blacks, until he got offspring that was brown. For six hundred years, he cross-bred humans, selecting the lightest-skinned of each generation and killing the others, until he had created a race of “white devils.” Yakub’s new creature “could, with the knowledge of tricks and lies, rule the original black man.” For a generation of Black Americans who had fled the South (where many of them, including Elijah Muhammad, had witnessed lynchings of Black men) only to find racism in the new ghettos of the cities of the North, this was a powerful message. Like the members of the Moorish Science Temple of America {an earlier sect based off a vague notion of Islam}, those of the Nation of Islam were conspicuous in their rigor, their promulgation of a strict moral code (a patriarchal one, to be sure), and their discipline. They exuded pride and purpose, qualities that made them attractive to thousands of Black Americans. Allah was justice, and his justice would prevail. The time of reckoning was near, and the apocalyptic scenario was elaborated in detail. Among other things, Allah would build a “mother plane” in Japan that would unleash firebombs on the United States, provoking a fire that would last 390 years, followed by a cooling-off period of 610 years, then a period of a thousand years in which Black Americans, all of whom having healthy and unaging sixteen-year-old bodies, would live in peace and bliss for a thousand years.
Presented like this, it sure seems... interesting. But placing this in the context of post-slavery, racially segregated America, this Temple proposed a narrative with descendants of Black slave at its center. This was attractive for many structurally uneducated black men. Amongst them, a certain Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X, will do its first classes as a public speaker and organizer, before becoming one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. The more you know.
At the end of the book, Tolan develops a few of the contemporary debates currently happening throughout the Muslim World.
Criticism of certain doctrines made by Muslim thinkers, theologian, professors in Islamic sciences, such as Gamal al-Banna, criticizing the importance given to the hadiths, prophetic traditions we talked about earlier, which were compiled in the 9th century, al-Banna would argue some invented to suit the needs of the people in power at this time and place. :
Gamal al-Banna gives the example of four hadiths that have had a particularly deleterious efect on Muslim societies. First, one orders the killing of apostates, without any basis in the Quran; on the contrary, for al-Banna, this is completely contrary to the spirit of Islam at the time of Muhammad and the first caliphs. But this hadith is very useful to Muslim autocrats who wish to impose a reign of fear and silence opposition. It is a major obstacle to intellectual activity and progress in Muslim societies. Another retrograde hadith states that the political leadership of Islam must be exercised by the Quraysh tribe; this hadith was invented to justify the autocratic rule of Umayyad, Abbasid, and Alid (Shia) caliphs. The third disastrous hadith is the worst; it declares, “A people who entrust their affairs to a woman will not succeed.” “This hadith,” says al-Banna, “has excluded women from action within society, in such a way that geniuses have been lost among them. By harming them, who form half of society, this hadith deprived them of their rights.” Finally, another hadith enjoins one to obey the ruler “even if your back is flogged and your wealth is snatched, you should listen and obey.” This hadith reinforces the power of autocrats, delegitimizes any opposition, even peaceful ones, and makes Muslims “a people of slaves.” If hadiths were invented in the ninth century to allow Muslims to adapt to the new societies around them, blind devotion to these same hadiths is a major obstacle to the advancement of current Muslim societies, he asserts: « This Tribe has imposed on the Muslim a typical personality harmful to himself, which projects his gaze backwards towards the past and not forwards towards the future. Broken, he walks with his head lowered so as not to be accused of having fantasies or of having looked at women. . . . He finds nothing, in the words of the Tribe of “It has been reported to us,” on the acquisition of new skills, the way of obtaining of knowledge or of encouraging people to help neighbors who are in the need. He doesn’t hear anything about his role as a citizen, about how he should treat his wife and train his children to stand on their own two feet. . . . In other words, this Tribe has condemned Muslims to moral, professional and societal death by depriving them of all the means that allow them to participate in the life of their time. »
The same chapter talks extensively about the feminist work of African American imam Amina Wadud, which "proposes a « female inclusive reading » of the Quran as part of a « gender jihad ».
The patriarchal vision of sharia, which imposes inferiority on women, is found not in the Quran, she asserts, but in the successive layers of exegesis and traditions imposed by generations of men. As a pious Muslim, she believes that the Quran is the word of God and hence is universal in scope and meaning. Islam, for Wadud, is “a haven in these times of global crisis and chaos”. Had the spirit of the Quran been properly understood “Islam would have been a global motivating force for women’s empowerment”. Nevertheless, it was revealed to a particular culture at a particular time, and much of the specific regulations concerning marriage, slavery, and other issues were meant to regulate and mitigate the rigors of the unequal patriarchal society of seventh-century Arabia, rather than to radically change or abolish the patriarchal social order. It enjoined masters to treat their slaves with kindness and magnanimity; it expanded rights and protections given to women within what remained “marriages of subjugation.” It would be aberrant for Muslims in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries to seek to reestablish slavery or the patriarchal society of seventh-century Arabia. Rather, they should attempt to respect the spirit of the Quran, which for Wadud is a constant imperative to work toward social justice and fight inequalities. In 2005, she led Friday prayers for a community of worshipers in New York, saying that nothing in Muslim law prevents women from serving as imams. She could not find a mosque that would open its doors to them, but the group was welcomed into an Anglican church. Women imams have led prayers before mixed congregations in China, South Africa, India, and several European countries. Faced with those who cry scandal, these imams argue that nothing in the Quran prohibits women from leading prayers.
Speaking about researching the « spirit of the Quran » being, as we’ve seen, Hanafism, one of the many schools of thought and source of law in Islamic philosophy.
One school of thought in complete opposition with others - namely the more literalist traditions.
This is, once again, why speaking about what « Islam » is, from a Western perspective, is ignorant at best. Euphemisms, you know.
That’s going to be it for this non-exhaustive list of things I learned.
A lot of citations on this one, right ? I tried to make it cohesive, but it is extremely dense in information and chains of consequences. Give it a go, this book deserves your time.
And I didn’t mention the whole chapter on Ibn Battuta’s travels through the whole Muslim World, probably the greatest traveler of his time. More than 115 000km from his Andalusian Tangier origins, during a voyage that lasted about 30 years, from 1325 to 1354. Incredible. He would give detailed descriptions of the Medieval Islamic World, places as far as China, Northern India, the Maldives or even Sumatra in the East, and Timbuktu in the South. He would even go to places like Mogadishu and the Malabar Coast of East Africa. To the North, he will be received in Turkey and will even go to Muslim provinces of the Russian Plains. (Mostly) Everywhere he will be received in great honors as not only a pilgrim, but a conveyor of Islamic knowledge. Moreover, he was seen as a rare commodity: an Arabic speaking & reading Islamic jurist and theologian.
There are also smaller episodes that can make you think in uchronia.
How do you want to read this passage about the « Ibadat Khana » (house of Worship) and not marvel at a different timeline ?
Babur’s grand-son Akbar (1556–1605), ruling from Delhi, expanded the empire by conquering significant parts of what is now northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Emperor of a vast territory with multiple languages, cultures, and religions, he made the opposite choice of his distant predecessor in Delhi, Muhammad ibn Tughluq: Akbar decided to abolish the jizya, the tax imposed on non-Muslims; he married a Hindu princess, recruited Hindus in his administration and his army, and established an alliance with Hindu kings. In 1571, Akbar established a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri and built the Ibadat Khana (“house of worship”), which hosted Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Christian philosophers, Sufis, theologians, and poets (including a Portuguese Jesuit). Akbar amassed a library of twenty-four thousand volumes in several languages. From the debates at the Ibadat Khana, Akbar concluded that no religion had a monopoly on the truth. He proclaimed himself the supreme authority and arbiter of religious affairs and established the Din-i Ilahi (“religion of God”), made up of elements from different religions, supposed to overcome their divisions. Akbar was undoubtedly motivated by political considerations but also by strong millenarian speculation as the year 1000 AH (1591) approached.
As well as glimpses into the complex history of Islamic civilization, religion and people, Tolan dives into the historical problems that were posed or resolved by theologians, it is quite fascinating to read.
And I mean, there's so much more we could have talked about, the Arab Springs, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood, the whole trading and cultural exchange aspects that the "Muslim World" had in a Global context, nor did we talk about the Ottoman Empire and its influence on Eastern Europe! And we barely spoke about Egypt at all !
I guess these are stories for another time.
Give it a go, you’ll learn something. Salam.