Name: __________________________    Date: _____________

Key Terms
1. Abbasid caliphate

2. Andalus, al-

3. Anatolia

4. Battle of Talas River

5. Bedouins

6. dhimmis

7. Ghazali, al-

8. hadiths

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9. hajj

10. hijra

11. House of Wisdom

12. Ibn Battuta

13. Ibn Sina

14. Iimms

15. jihad

16. jizya

17. Kaaba

18. madrassas

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19. Mecca

20. Mozarabs

21. Muhammad Ibn Abdullah

22. Muslim

23. Pillars of Islam

24. Polo, Marco

25. Rightly Guided Caliphs

26. Qur’an (Koran)

27. sharia

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 28. shaykhs

29. Sikhism

30. Sufis

31. Sultanate of Delhi

32. Timbuktu

33. ulama

34. Umayyad caliphate

Answer each question in three or four sentences.

1. What are the Five Pillars of Islam? You may list them.

2. Explain the difference between the greater and lesser forms of jihad.

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 3. What key elements identified a Shia follower of Islam?

4. In what ways did the experience of Islam in West Africa differ from its experience in
Anatolia?

Answer each of the following questions in two or more sentences.

5. In what ways did the early history of Islam reflect its Arabian origins?

6. How does the core message of Islam compare with that of Judaism and Christianity?

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 7. In what ways was the rise of Islam revolutionary, both in theory and in practice?

8. Why were Arabs able to construct such a huge empire so quickly?

9. What accounts for the widespread conversion to Islam?

10. What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam?

11. In what ways were Sufi Muslims critical of mainstream Islam?

12. How did the rise of Islam change the lives of women?

13. What similarities and differences can you identify in the spread of Islam to India,
Anatolia, West Africa, and Spain?

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 14. Why was Anatolia so much more thoroughly Islamized than India?

15. What makes it possible to speak of the Islamic world as a distinct and coherent
civilization?

16. In what ways was the world of Islam a "cosmopolitan civilization"?

Answer each of the following questions in two or more sentences.

17. What distinguished the first centuries of Islamic history from the early history of
Christianity and Buddhism? What similarities and differences characterized their
religious outlooks?

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18. How might you account for the immense religious and political/military success of
Islam in its early centuries?

19. In what ways might Islamic civilization be described as cosmopolitan, international, or

20. "Islam was simultaneously both a single world of shared meaning and interaction and a
series of separate and distinct communities, often in conflict with one another." What
evidence could you provide to support both sides of this argument?

21. What changes did Islamic expansion generate in those societies that encountered it, and
how was Islam itself transformed by those encounters?

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Answer Key

1. A good answer should include all of the following.

• The Five Pillars of Islam summarize the core message of the Quran as a set of
requirements for believers.
• The first pillar affirms the central tenets of Islam in a basic profession of faith:
"There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God."
• The second pillar is prayer, preferably five times a day at prescribed times and
performed while facing toward Mecca.
• The third pillar requires believers to give generously of their wealth to maintain
the community and to help the needy.
• The fourth pillar calls for a month of fasting during Ramadan.
• The fifth pillar urges a pilgrimage to Mecca.
• A very good answer might note that jihad is often regarded as the sixth pillar.
2. A good answer should include the following points.

• The greater jihad was the personal effort of each Muslim against greed and
selfishness, a spiritual striving toward living a God-conscious life.
• The lesser jihad, or the "jihad of the sword," referred to armed struggle against
the forces of unbelief and evil as a means of establishing Muslim rule and of
defending the umma from the threats of infidel aggressors.
• A really good answer will note that the understanding and use of the concept of
jihad varied widely in the history of Islam and remains a matter of controversy in
the twenty-first century.
3. A good answer should include the following points.

• The Shia held that leadership in the Islamic world should derive from the line of
Ali and his son Husayn, blood relatives of Muhammad, while the Sunnis held that
the caliphs were rightful political and military leaders, selected by the Islamic
community.
• Shia Muslims invested their leaders, known as imams, with a religious authority
that the caliphs lacked, allowing them alone to reveal the true meaning of the
Quran and the wishes of Allah. Meanwhile, for Sunni Muslims, religious
authority in general emerged from the larger community, particularly from the
religious scholars known as ulama.
• The Shia tradition developed a messianic element that the Sunni tradition largely
lacked.
4. A good answer should include the following points.

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 • Islam arrived in West Africa through commercial contact; Islam was brought to
Anatolia by invading Arab or Turkic armies.
• In West Africa, Islam was adopted primarily by political rulers and the urban
elite; in Anatolia, nearly all of the population converted.
• The arrival of Islam in West Africa did not coincide with a change in the political
structure of the region; such a change did occur in Anatolia, however, with the
imposition of a Turkic elite, who were followers of Islam, over the region and the
settlement of a large Turkic population.
• The arrival of Islam in West Africa did not lead to a collapse in the leadership of
preexisting religions; it did in Anatolia.
• The arrival of Islam in West Africa had a less profound impact on the social and
cultural traditions of the region than did the arrival of Islam in Anatolia.
• Sufis played less of a role in West Africa than in Anatolia.
5. • Islam drew on an older Arab identification of Allah with Yahweh, the Jewish
High God, and Arab self-identification as children of Abraham.
• The Quran denounced the prevailing social practices of an increasingly
prosperous Mecca and sought a return to the older values of Arab tribal life.
• The message of the Quran also rejected the Arab tribal and clan structure, which
was prone to war, feuding, and violence. Instead, the Quran sought to replace this
structure with the umma, the community of all believers.
6. • Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is monotheistic. Allah is the only God, the
all-powerful Creator.
• As "the Messenger of God," Muhammad presented himself in the tradition of
earlier prophets like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.
• Like the Jewish prophets and Jesus, Muhammad demanded social justice and laid
out a prescription for its implementation.
7. • The Islamic community, or umma, broke with the previous tribal structure defined
by family and clan in Arabia, replacing it with a system in which membership was
a matter of belief rather than birth.
• The early Islamic community found itself constituted as a state at the very
beginning of its history.
• Muhammad was not only a religious figure but also a political and military leader
able to implement his vision of an ideal Islamic society.
• Islam possessed no separate religious organization, although tension between
religious and political goals frequently generated conflict.
• No professional clergy mediating between God and humankind emerged within
Islam.
• No distinction between religious and civil law existed in the Islamic world.
8. • For the first time, a shared faith in Islam allowed the newly organized state to
mobilize the military potential of the entire Arab population.

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 • The Byzantine and Persian empires were weakened by decades of war with each
other and by internal revolts. They also underestimated the Arab threat.
• Merchant leaders of the new Islamic community wanted to capture profitable
trade routes and wealthy agricultural regions.
• Individual Arabs found in military expansion a route to wealth and social
promotion.
• Expansion provided a common task for the Arab community, which reinforced
the fragile unity of the umma.
• Arabs were motivated by a religious dimension, as many viewed the mission of
empire in terms of jihad, bringing righteous government to the peoples they
conquered.
9. • Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians could find familiar elements of their own faiths
in Islam.
• From the start, Islam was associated with the sponsorship of a powerful state.
• Conquest called into question the power of old gods, while the growing prestige
of the Arab Empire attracted many to Allah.
• Although forced conversion was rare, living in an Islamic-governed state
provided a variety of incentives for claiming Muslim identity.
• In Islam, merchants found a religion friendly to commerce, and in the Arab
Empire they enjoyed a huge and secure arena for trade.
• People aspiring to official positions found conversion to Islam an aid to social
mobility.
10. • Sunnis held that the caliphs were rightful political and military leaders, selected
by the Islamic community, while the Shia held that leadership in the Islamic
world should derive from the line of Ali and his son Husayn, blood relatives of
Muhammad.
• For Sunni Muslims, religious authority in general emerged from the larger
community, particularly from the religious scholars known as ulama. Meanwhile,
the Shia invested their leaders, known as imams, with a religious authority that
the caliphs lacked, allowing them alone to reveal the true meaning of the Quran
and the wishes of Allah.
• The Shia tradition included a messianic element that the Sunni tradition largely
lacked.
11. • Sufism was sharply critical of the more scholarly and legalistic practitioners of
the sharia; to Sufis, establishment teachings about the law and correct behavior
did little to bring the believer into the presence of God.
• Sufis held that many of the ulama of mainstream Islam had been compromised by
their association with worldly and corrupt governments.
12. • The Quran included a mix of rights, restrictions, and protections for women. It
banned female infanticide, gave women the right to own property and granted
them rights of inheritance, defined marriage as a contract between consenting
parties, granted the right to sue for divorce under certain circumstances, and
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 • In practice, as the Arab Empire grew in size, the position of women became more
limited. Women started to pray at home instead of in the mosque, and veiling and
seclusion of women became standard practice among the upper and ruling
classes, with special areas within the home becoming the only place where
women could appear unveiled. Such seclusion was less practicable for lower-class
women. These new practices derived far more from established traditions of
Middle Eastern cultures than from the Quran, but they soon gained a religious
rationale in the writings of Muslim thinkers.
• Other signs of tightening patriarchy, such as "honor killing" of women by their
male relatives for violating sexual taboos and, in some places, clitorectomy
(female circumcision), likewise derived from local cultures, with no sanction in
the Quran or Islamic law. But where they were practiced, such customs often
came to be seen as Islamic.
• Negative views of women, presenting them variously as weak, deficient, and a
sexually charged threat to men and social stability, emerged in the hadiths,
traditions about the sayings or actions of Muhammad, which became an important
source of Islamic law.
• Islam also offered new outlets for women in religious life. The Sufi practice of
mystical union with God allowed a greater role for women than did mainstream
Islam. Some Sufi orders had parallel groups for women, and a few welcomed
women as equal members.
• In Shia Islam, women teachers of the faith were termed mullahs, the same as their
male counterparts.
• Islamic education, either in the home or in Quranic schools, allowed some women
to become literate and a few to achieve higher levels of learning.
• Visits to the tombs of major Islamic figures as well as the ritual of the public bath
provided some opportunity for women to interact with other women beyond their
own family circle.
13. • Islam spread to India, Anatolia, and Spain in part through force of arms of Islamic
armies, while Islam arrived in West Africa with Muslim traders.
• Sufis facilitated conversions by accommodating local traditions, especially in
India and Anatolia, but played little role in West Africa until at least the
eighteenth century.
• In India, West Africa, and Spain, Islam became one of several faiths within the
wider culture, while in Anatolia it became the dominant faith.
14. • The demographic balance made a difference. Unlike India, far more Turkic-
speaking peoples settled in Anatolia. This, coupled with the much smaller
population of Anatolia and the massacres, enslavement, famine, and flight that
occurred during the conquest, gave Turks a much more important position in
Anatolia.

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 • Anatolian society was more centralized than India, and the Christian Church and
Byzantine imperial infrastructure in Anatolia were fatally weakened during the
Turkic invasion. India's more decentralized civilization was better able to absorb
the shock of external invasion.
• The Turkish rulers of Anatolia built a new society that welcomed converts, and
the cultural barriers to conversion were arguably less severe there than in India.
15. • At the core of that civilization was a common commitment to Islam.
• No group was more important in the transmission of Islamic beliefs and practices
than the ulama, an "international elite" who created a system of education that
served to bind together an immense and diverse civilization.   
• The Sufi religious orders established an educational network and organized in a
variety of larger associations, some of which included chapters throughout the
Islamic world.
• The pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj) drew many thousands of Muslims to Mecca
each year from all over the Islamic world.
• The Islamic world also cohered as an immense arena of exchange in which goods,
technologies, food products, and ideas circulated widely.
16. • The Islamic world valued commerce and fostered vibrant networks of exchange.
Muslim merchants plied the Silk Roads, Sea Roads, and Sand Roads of the Afro-
Eurasian world, and the Islamic world promoted long-distance economic
relationships by actively supporting a prosperous, highly developed, "capitalist"
economy.
• Islamic civilization also facilitated a substantial exchange of agricultural products
and practices. Rice, new strains of sorghum, hard wheat, bananas, lemons, limes,
watermelons, coconut palms, spinach, artichokes, sugarcane, and cotton came to
the Middle East from India. Sugarcane and cotton also came with knowledge of
complex production processes. Some of these Indian crops subsequently found
their way to Africa and Europe from the Middle East.
• Technology also diffused widely within the Islamic world. Ancient Persian
techniques for obtaining water by drilling into the sides of hills spread to North
Africa. Muslim technicians made improvements on rockets developed in China.
Techniques for manufacturing paper also arrived in the Middle East from China
and later spread from the Middle East to India and Europe.
• Ideas also spread, with Jewish and Christian precedents influencing Islamic
thinkers; Persian bureaucratic practice, court ritual, and poetry influencing the
elite in particular; and Greek and Indian scientific, medical, and philosophical
texts being systematically translated into Arabic and studied throughout the
Islamic world.

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 • Those traditions mixed and blended to generate a distinctive Islamic civilization
that made many original contributions to the world of learning—including the
development of algebra as a novel mathematical discipline, original work in
astronomy and optics, and medicine and pharmacology.
17. • Islam differed sharply from Christianity and Buddhism because its founder was
not only a religious figure but also a political and military leader.
• Moreover, from the start the Islamic community found itself constituted as a state.
Because of this, Islam did not develop as clearly defined a separation between
church and state as did both Christianity and Buddhism.
• There were some similarities in their religious outlooks: all three religions were
founded by single historical figures who had powerful religious experiences, all
three provide a clear path to salvation, and all three proclaim the equality of all
believers.
• However, Islam's conception of monotheism was stronger than that of
Christianity, and each religion was shaped in part by the cultural traditions in
which it emerged.
18. • For the first time a shared faith in Islam allowed the newly organized state to
mobilize the military potential of the entire Arab population.
• The Byzantine and Persian empires were weakened by decades of war with each
other and by internal revolts. The two empires also underestimated the Arab
threat.
• Merchant leaders of the new Islamic community wanted to capture profitable
trade routes and wealthy agricultural regions.
• Individual Arabs found in military expansion a route to wealth and social
promotion.
• Expansion provided a common task for the Arab community, which reinforced
the fragile unity of the Islamic umma.
• Arabs were motivated by a religious dimension, as many viewed the mission of
empire in terms of jihad, bringing righteous government to the peoples they
conquered.
• Islam experienced success in attracting converts: Muhammad's religious message
was attractive to many potential converts, while Jews, Christians, and
Zoroastrians could find familiar elements of their own faiths in Islam.
• Conquests called into question the power of old gods, while the growing prestige
of the Arab Empire attracted many to Allah.
• Although forced conversions were rare, living in an Islamic-governed state
provided a variety of incentives for claiming Muslim identity. Merchants found in
Islam a religion friendly to commerce and in the Arab Empire a huge and secure
arena for trade, while people aspiring to official positions found conversion to
Islam an aid to social mobility.
19. • The Islamic civilization embraced at least parts of virtually every other
civilization in the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere.
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 • It fostered a network of commerce and exchange that facilitated the spread of
crops, technologies, and ideas.
• The common commitment to Islam created an identity that transcended more
local political and cultural identities in the Islamic world.
20. • At the core of a single Islamic world was a common commitment to Islam. The
ulama through education and Sufis through their associations served to bind the
Islamic world together. It also cohered as an immense arena of exchange in which
goods, technologies, crops, and ideas circulated widely.
• However, Islam was separate and distinct in that it was politically fragmented. It
included numerous distinct and sometimes hostile religious traditions, including
Sunni/Shia and ulama/Sufi splits. It embraced distinctive cultural traditions from
sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia that resulted in different attitudes toward
social and cultural norms, such as those concerning women.
21. • The populations of many regions converted wholly or partly to the Islamic faith.
• Regions of the Islamic world were tied more closely together through trade and
the exchange of technologies, crops, and ideas.
• Older religious and political traditions were at times swept away or at least
altered.
• Islam was transformed through these encounters, especially when the norms of
those societies that converted had an impact on the social and cultural
implications of the faith.
• The Islamic world and the understanding of Islam itself were shaped by contact
with intellectual and cultural traditions like Greek philosophy.

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