Islamic /is lam"ik, -lah"mik, iz-/, Islamitic /is'leuh mit"ik, iz'-/, adj.
/is lahm", iz-, is"leuhm, iz"-/, n.
2. the whole body of Muslim believers, their civilization, and the countries in which theirs is the dominant religion. Also called Muhammadanism.
[1605-15; < Ar islam lit., submission (to God)]

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The Arabic word islam means "submission"
(as used in expressions)
Islam Pillars of

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      major world religion belonging to the Semitic family; it was promulgated by the Prophet Muḥammad (Muhammad) in Arabia in the 7th century AD. The Arabic term islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental religious idea of Islām—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of islām) accepts “surrender to the will of Allāh (Arabic: God).” Allāh is viewed as the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allāh, to which man must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures, the Qurʾān (Koran), which Allāh revealed to his messenger, Muḥammad. In Islām Muḥammad is considered the last of a series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and others), and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the “revelations” attributed to earlier prophets.

      Retaining its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism and a strict adherence to certain essential religious practices, the religion taught by Muḥammad to a small group of followers spread rapidly through the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay Peninsula, and China. Although many sectarian movements have arisen within Islām, all Muslims are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community.

      This article deals with the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islām and with the connection of religion and society in the Islāmic world. The history of the various peoples who embraced Islām is covered in the article Islāmic world.

The foundations of Islām

The legacy of Muḥammad
      From the very beginning of Islām, Muḥammad had inculcated a sense of brotherhood and a bond of faith among his followers, both of which helped to develop among them a feeling of close relationship that was accentuated by their experiences of persecution as a nascent community in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the Qurʾānic revelation and the conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islāmic religious practices cemented this bond of faith. In AD 622, when the Prophet migrated to Medina, his preaching was soon accepted, and the community-state of Islām emerged. During this early period, Islām acquired its characteristic ethos as a religion uniting in itself both the spiritual and temporal aspects of life and seeking to regulate not only the individual's relationship to God (through his conscience) but human relationships in a social setting as well. Thus, there is not only an Islāmic religious institution but also an Islāmic law, state, and other institutions governing society. Not until the 20th century were the religious (private) and the secular (public) distinguished by some Muslim thinkers and separated formally in certain places such as Turkey.

      This dual religious and social character of Islām, expressing itself in one way as a religious community commissioned by God to bring its own value system to the world through the jihād (“exertion,” commonly translated as “holy war” or “holy struggle”), explains the astonishing success of the early generations of Muslims. Within a century after the Prophet's death in AD 632, they had brought a large part of the globe—from Spain across Central Asia to India—under a new Arab Muslim empire.

      The period of Islāmic conquests and empire building marks the first phase of the expansion of Islām as a religion. Islām's essential egalitarianism within the community of the faithful and its official discrimination against the followers of other religions won rapid converts. Jews and Christians were assigned a special status as communities possessing scriptures and were called the “people of the Book” ( Ahl al-Kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious autonomy. They were, however, required to pay a per capita tax called jizyah (jizya), as opposed to pagans, who were required to either accept Islām or die. The same status of the “people of the Book” was later extended to Zoroastrians (Zoroastrianism) and Hindus (Hinduism), but many “people of the Book” joined Islām in order to escape the disability of the jizyah. A much more massive expansion of Islām after the 12th century was inaugurated by the Ṣūfīs (Ṣūfism) (Muslim mystics), who were mainly responsible for the spread of Islām in India, Central Asia, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa (see below).

      Besides the jihād and Ṣūfī missionary activity, another factor in the spread of Islām was the far-ranging influence of Muslim traders, who not only introduced Islām quite early to the Indian east coast and South India but also proved to be the main catalytic agents (besides the Ṣūfīs) in converting people to Islām in Indonesia, Malaya, and China. Islām was introduced to Indonesia in the 14th century, hardly having time to consolidate itself there politically before coming under Dutch colonial domination.

      The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islām (estimated total 1.1 to 1.2 billion persons worldwide) has produced important internal differences. All segments of Muslim society, however, are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community. With the loss of political power during the period of Western colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of the Islāmic community (ummah), instead of weakening, became stronger. The faith of Islām helped various Muslim peoples in their struggle to gain political freedom in the mid-20th century, and the unity of Islām contributed to later political solidarity.

Sources of Islāmic doctrinal and social views
      Islāmic doctrine, law, and thinking in general are based upon four sources, or fundamental principles (uṣūl (uṣūl al-fiqh)): (1) the Qurʾān, (2) the sunnah (“traditions”), (3) ijmāʿ (“consensus”), and (4) ijtihād (“individual thought”).

      The Qurʾān (literally, “Reading” or “Recitation”) is regarded as the verbatim word, or speech, of God delivered to Muḥammad by the angel Gabriel. Divided into 114 sūrahs (chapters) of unequal length, it is the fundamental source of Islāmic teaching. The sūrahs revealed at Mecca during the earliest part of Muḥammad's career are concerned mostly with ethical and spiritual teachings and the Day of Judgment. The sūrahs revealed at Medina at a later period in the career of the Prophet are concerned for the most part with social legislation and the politico-moral principles for constituting and ordering the community. Sunnah (sunna) (“a well-trodden path”) was used by pre-Islāmic Arabs to denote their tribal or common law; in Islām it came to mean the example of the Prophet—i.e., his words and deeds as recorded in compilations known as Ḥadīth.

      Ḥadīth (literally, “Report”; a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet) provide the written documentation of the Prophet's words and deeds. Six of these collections, compiled in the 3rd century AH (9th century AD), came to be regarded as especially authoritative by the largest group in Islām, the Sunnites. Another large group, the Shīʾah, has its own Ḥadīth contained in four canonical collections.

      The doctrine of ijmāʿ, or consensus, was introduced in the 2nd century AH (8th century AD) in order to standardize legal theory and practice and to overcome individual and regional differences of opinion. Though conceived as a “consensus of scholars,” ijmāʿ was in actual practice a more fundamental operative factor. From the 3rd century AH ijmāʿ has amounted to a principle of stability in thinking; points on which consensus was reached in practice were considered closed and further substantial questioning of them prohibited. Accepted interpretations of the Qurʾān and the actual content of the sunnah (i.e., Ḥadīth and theology) all rest finally on the ijmāʿ in the sense of the acceptance of the authority of their community.

       ijtihād, meaning “to endeavour” or “to exert effort,” was required to find the legal or doctrinal solution to a new problem. In the early period of Islām, because ijtihād took the form of individual opinion (raʾy), there was a wealth of conflicting and chaotic opinions. In the 2nd century AH ijtihād was replaced by qiyās (qiyas) (reasoning by strict analogy), a formal procedure of deduction based on the texts of the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth. The transformation of ijmāʿ into a conservative mechanism and the acceptance of a definitive body of Ḥadīth virtually closed the “gate of ijtihād” in Sunni Islam while ijtihād continued in Shiʿism. Nevertheless, certain outstanding Muslim thinkers (e.g., al-Ghazālī (Ghazālī, al-) in the 11th–12th century) continued to claim the right of new ijtihād for themselves, and reformers in the 18th to 20th centuries, because of modern influences, have caused this principle once more to receive wider acceptance.

      The Qurʾān and Ḥadīth are discussed below. The significance of ijmāʿ and ijtihād are discussed below in the contexts of Islāmic theology, philosophy, and law.

Doctrines of the Qurʾān

      This picture of God—wherein the attributes of power, justice, and mercy interpenetrate—is related to the Judeo-Christian tradition and also differs radically from the concepts of pagan Arabia, to which it provided an effective answer. The pagan Arabs believed in a blind and inexorable fate over which man had no control. For this powerful but insensible fate the Qurʾān substituted a powerful but provident and merciful God. The Qurʾān carried through its uncompromising monotheism by rejecting all forms of idolatry and eliminating all gods and divinities that the Arabs worshipped in their sanctuaries (ḥarams), the most prominent of which was the Kaʿbah sanctuary in Mecca itself.

The universe

      According to the Qurʾān, God created two apparently parallel species of creatures, man and jinn (jinni), the one from clay and the other from fire. About the jinn, however, the Qurʾān says little, although it is implied that the jinn are endowed with reason and responsibility but are more prone to evil than man. It is with man that the Qurʾān, which describes itself as a guide for the human race, is centrally concerned. The Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Adam (Adam and Eve) (the first man) is accepted, but the Qurʾān states that God forgave Adam his act of disobedience, which is not viewed in the Qurʾān as original sin in the Christian sense of the term.

      In the story of man's creation, the angel Iblīs, or Satan, who protested to God against the creation of man, who “would sow mischief on earth,” lost in the competition of knowledge against Adam. The Qurʾān, therefore, declares man to be the noblest of all creation, the created being who bore the trust (of responsibility) that the rest of creation refused to accept. The Qurʾān thus reiterates that all nature has been made subservient to man seen as God's vice-regent on earth: nothing in all creation has been made without a purpose, and man himself has not been created “in sport,” his purpose being service and obedience to God's will.

      Despite this lofty station, however, the Qurʾān describes human nature as frail and faltering. Whereas everything in the universe has a limited nature and every creature recognizes its limitation and insufficiency, man is viewed as having been given freedom and is therefore prone to rebelliousness and pride, with the tendency to arrogate to himself the attributes of self-sufficiency. Pride, thus, is viewed as the cardinal sin of man, because, by not recognizing in himself his essential creaturely limitations, he becomes guilty of ascribing to himself partnership with God ( shirk: associating a creature with the Creator) and of violating the unity of God. True faith (īmān), thus, consists of belief in the immaculate Divine Unity and Islām in one's submission to the Divine Will.

      In order to communicate the truth of Divine Unity, God has sent messengers or prophets to men, whose weakness of nature makes them ever prone to forget or even willfully to reject Divine Unity under the promptings of Satan. According to the Qurʾānic teaching, the being who became Satan (Shayṭān (shaitan) or Iblīs) had previously occupied a high station but fell from divine grace by his act of disobedience in refusing to honour Adam when he, along with other angels, was ordered to do so. Since then his work has been to beguile man into error and sin. Satan is, therefore, the contemporary of man, and Satan's own act of disobedience is construed by the Qurʾān as the sin of pride. Satan's machinations will cease only on the Last Day.

      Judging from the accounts of the Qurʾān, the record of man's accepting the prophets' messages has been far from perfect. The whole universe is replete with signs of God. The human soul itself is viewed as a witness of the unity and grace of God. The messengers of God have, throughout history, been calling man back to God. Yet not all men have accepted the truth; many of them have rejected it and become disbelievers (kāfir, plural kuffār: literally “concealing”—i.e., the blessings of God), and, when man becomes so obdurate, his heart is sealed by God. Nevertheless, it is always possible for a sinner to repent (tawbah) and redeem himself by a genuine conversion to the truth. There is no point of no return, and God is forever merciful and always willing and ready to pardon. Genuine repentance has the effect of removing all sins and restoring a person to the state of sinlessness with which he started his life.

      Prophets are men specially elected by God to be his messengers. Prophethood is indivisible, and the Qurʾān requires recognition of all prophets as such without discrimination. Yet they are not all equal, some of them being particularly outstanding in qualities of steadfastness and patience under trial. Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus (Jesus Christ) were such great prophets. As vindication of the truth of their mission, God often vests them with miracles (miracle): Abraham was saved from fire, Noah from the Deluge, and Moses from the pharaoh. Not only was Jesus born from the Virgin Mary, but God also saved him from crucifixion at the hands of the Jews. The conviction that God's messengers are ultimately vindicated and saved is an integral part of the Qurʾānic doctrine.

      All prophets are human and never part of divinity: they are the most perfect of humans who are recipients of revelation from God. When God wishes to speak to a human, he sends an angel messenger to him or makes him hear a voice or inspires him. Muḥammad is accepted as the last prophet in this series and its greatest member, for in him all the messages of earlier prophets were consummated. The angel Gabriel brought the Qurʾān down to the Prophet's “heart.” Gabriel is represented by the Qurʾān as a spirit whom the Prophet could sometimes see and hear. According to early traditions, the Prophet's revelations occurred in a state of trance when his normal consciousness was transformed. This state was accompanied by heavy sweating. The Qurʾān itself makes it clear that the revelations brought with them a sense of extraordinary weight: “If we were to send this Qurʾān down on a mountain, you would see it split asunder out of fear of God.”

      Some Islāmic schools deny the possibility of human intercession but most accept it, and in any case God himself, in his mercy, may forgive certain sinners. Those condemned will burn in hellfire (hell), and those who are saved will enjoy the abiding joys of paradise. Hell and heaven are both spiritual and corporeal. Besides suffering in physical fire, the damned will also experience fire “in their hearts”; similarly, the blessed, besides corporeal enjoyment, will experience the greatest happiness of divine pleasure.

      Because the purpose of the existence of man, as of every other creature, is submission to the Divine Will, God's role in relation to man is that of the commander. Whereas the rest of nature obeys God automatically, man alone possesses the choice to obey or disobey. With the deep-seated belief in Satan's existence, man's fundamental role becomes one of moral struggle, which constitutes the essence of human endeavour. Recognition of the unity of God does not simply rest in the intellect but entails consequences in terms of the moral struggle, which consists primarily in freeing oneself of narrowness of mind and smallness of heart. One must go out of oneself and expend one's possessions for the sake of others.

      Because the mission of the community is to “enjoin good and forbid evil” so that “there is no mischief and corruption” on earth, the doctrine of jihād (jihad) is the logical outcome. For the early community it was a basic religious concept. The lesser jihād, or holy striving, means an active struggle using armed force whenever necessary. The object of jihād is not the conversion of individuals to Islām but rather the gaining of political control over the collective affairs of societies to run them in accordance with the principles of Islām. Individual conversions occur as a by-product of this process when the power structure passes into the hands of the Muslim community. In fact, according to strict Muslim doctrine, conversions “by force” are forbidden, because after the revelation of the Qurʾān “good and evil have become distinct,” so that one may follow whichever one may prefer (Qurʾān), and it is also strictly prohibited to wage wars for the sake of acquiring worldly glory, power, and rule. With the establishment of the Muslim empire, however, the doctrine of the lesser jihād was modified by the leaders of the community. Their main concern had become the consolidation of the empire and its administration, and thus they interpreted the teaching in a defensive rather than in an expansive sense. The Khārijite sect, which held that “decision belongs to God alone,” insisted on continuous and relentless jihād, but its followers were virtually destroyed during the internecine wars in the 8th century.

      Besides a measure of economic justice and the creation of a strong idea of community, the Prophet Muḥammad effected a general reform of Arab society, in particular protecting its weaker segments—the poor, the orphans, women, and slaves. slavery was not legally abolished, but emancipation of slaves was religiously encouraged as an act of merit. Slaves were given legal rights, including the right of acquiring their freedom in return for payment, in installments, of a sum agreed upon by the slave and his master out of his earnings. A slave woman who bore a child by her master became automatically free after her master's death. The infanticide of girls that was practiced among certain tribes in pre-Islāmic Arabia—out of fear of poverty or a sense of shame—was forbidden.

      Distinction and privileges based on tribal rank or race were repudiated in the Qurʾān and in the celebrated “Farewell Pilgrimage Address” of the Prophet shortly before his death. All men are therein declared to be “equal children of Adam,” and the only distinction recognized in the sight of God is to be based on piety and good acts. The age-old Arab institution of intertribal revenge (called thaʾr)—whereby it was not necessarily the killer who was executed but a person equal in rank to the slain person—was abolished. The pre-Islāmic ethical ideal of manliness was modified and replaced by a more humane ideal of moral virtue and piety.

Fundamental practices and institutions of Islām
The five pillars
      During the earliest decades after the death of the Prophet, certain basic features (worship) of the religio-social organization of Islām were singled out to serve as anchoring points of the community's life and formulated as the “Pillars of Islām (Islam, Pillars of).” To these five, the Khawārij sect added a sixth pillar, the jihād, which, however, was not accepted by the general community.

The shahādah, or profession of faith
      The first pillar is the profession of faith (confession of faith): “There is no deity but God, and Muḥammad is the messenger of God,” upon which depends membership in the community. The profession of faith must be recited at least once in one's lifetime, aloud, correctly, and purposively, with an understanding of its meaning and with an assent from the heart. From this fundamental belief are derived beliefs in (1) angels (particularly Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation), (2) the revealed Books (the Qurʾān and the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity), (3) a series of prophets (among whom figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition are particularly eminent, although it is believed that God has sent messengers to every nation), and (4) the Last Day (Day of Judgment).

      Before a prayer, ablutions, including the washing of hands, face, and feet, are performed. The muezzin (one who gives the call for prayer) chants aloud from a raised place (such as a tower) in the mosque. When prayer starts, the imām, or leader (of the prayer), stands in the front facing in the direction of Mecca, and the congregation stands behind him in rows, following him in various postures. Each prayer consists of two to four genuflection units (rakʿah); each unit consists of a standing posture (during which verses from the Qurʾān are recited—in certain prayers aloud, in others silently), as well as a genuflection and two prostrations. At every change in posture, “God is great” is recited. Tradition has fixed the materials to be recited in each posture.

      Although not ordained as an obligatory duty, nocturnal prayers (called tahajjud) are encouraged, particularly during the latter half of the night. During the month of Ramaḍān (see below Fasting), lengthy prayers, called tarāwīḥ, are offered congregationally before retiring.

The zakāt (zakat)
      The third pillar is the obligatory tax called zakāt (“purification,” indicating that such a payment makes the rest of one's wealth religiously and legally pure). This is the only permanent tax levied by the Qurʾān and is payable annually on food grains, cattle, and cash after one year's possession. The amount varies for different categories. Thus, on grains and fruits it is 10 percent if land is watered by rain, 5 percent if land is watered artificially. On cash and precious metals it is 21/2 percent. Zakāt is collectable by the state and is to be used primarily for the poor, but the Qurʾān mentions other purposes: ransoming Muslim war captives, redeeming chronic debts, paying tax collectors' fees, jihād (and by extension, according to Qurʾān commentators, education and health), and creating facilities for travellers.

      Fasting during the month of Ramaḍān (ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar), laid down in the Qurʾān (2:183–185), is the fourth pillar of the faith. Fasting begins at daybreak and ends at sunset, and during the day eating, drinking, and smoking are forbidden. The Qurʾān (2:185) states that it was in the month of Ramaḍān that the Qurʾān was revealed. Another verse of the Qurʾān (97:1) states that it was revealed “on the Night of Power,” which Muslims generally observe on the night of 26–27 Ramaḍān. For a person who is sick or on a journey, fasting may be postponed until “another equal number of days.” The elderly and the incurably sick are exempted through the daily feeding of one poor person if they have the means.

The ḥajj (hajj)
      The fifth pillar is the annual pilgrimage (ḥajj) to Mecca prescribed for every Muslim once in a lifetime—“provided one can afford it” and provided a person has enough provisions to leave for his family in his absence. A special service is held in the Sacred Mosque on the 7th of the month of Dhū al-Ḥijjah (last in the Muslim year). Pilgrimage activities begin by the 8th and conclude on the 12th or 13th. All worshippers enter the state of iḥrām (ihram); they wear two seamless garments and avoid sexual intercourse, the cutting of hair and nails, and certain other activities. Pilgrims from outside Mecca assume iḥrām at specified points en route to the city. The principal activities consist of walking seven times around the Kaʿbah, a shrine within the mosque; the kissing and touching of the Black Stone (Black Stone of Mecca) (Ḥajar al-Aswad); and the ascent of and running between Mount Ṣafā and Mount Marwah (which are now, however, mere elevations) seven times. At the second stage of the ritual, the pilgrim proceeds from Mecca to Minā, a few miles away; from there he goes to ʿArafāt, where it is essential to hear a sermon and to spend one afternoon. The last rites consist of spending the night at Muzdalifah (between ʿArafāt and Minā) and offering sacrifice on the last day of iḥrām, which is the ʿīd (Īd al-Aḍḥāʿ) (“festival”) of sacrifice.

      Many countries have imposed restrictions on the number of outgoing pilgrims because of foreign-exchange difficulties. Because of the improvement of communications, however, the total number of visitors has greatly increased in recent years. By the early 1990s the number of visitors was estimated to be about two million, approximately half of them from non-Arab countries. All Muslim countries send official delegations on the occasion, which is being increasingly used for religio-political congresses. At other times in the year, it is considered meritorious to perform the lesser pilgrimage ( umrahʿ), which is not, however, a substitute for the ḥajj pilgrimage.

Sacred places and days
      The most sacred place for Muslims is the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca, the object of the annual pilgrimage. It is much more than a mosque; it is believed to be the place where the heavenly bliss and power touches the earth directly. According to Muslim tradition, the Kaʿbah was built by Abraham. The Prophet's mosque in Medina is the next in sanctity. Jerusalem follows in third place in sanctity as the first qiblah (i.e., direction in which the Muslims offered prayers at first, before the qiblah was changed to the Kaʿbah) and as the place from where Muḥammad, according to tradition, made his ascent ( Miʿrāj) to heaven. For the Shīʿah, Karbalāʾ in Iraq (the place of martyrdom of ʿAlī's son, Ḥusayn) and Meshed in Iran (where Imām ʿAlī ar-Riḍā is buried) constitute places of special veneration where the Shīʿah make pilgrimages.

Shrines of Ṣūfī saints
      For the Muslim masses in general, shrines of Ṣūfī saints are particular objects of reverence and even veneration. In Baghdad the tomb of the greatest saint of all, Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānīʿ, is visited every year by large numbers of pilgrims from all over the Muslim world.

      By the late 20th century, the Ṣūfī shrines, which were managed privately in earlier periods, were almost entirely owned by governments and were managed by departments of awqāf (plural of waqf, a religious endowment). The official appointed to care for a shrine is usually called a mutawallī. In Turkey, where such endowments formerly constituted a very considerable portion of the national wealth, all endowments were confiscated by the regime of Atatürk (Atatürk, Kemal) (president 1928–38).

The mosque

Holy days
      The Muslim calendar (based on the lunar year) dates from the emigration (hijrah) of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. The two festive days in the year are the ʿīds, Īd al-Fiṭrʿ celebrating the end of the month of Ramaḍān and ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā (the feast of sacrifice) marking the end of the pilgrimage. Because of the crowds, ʿīd prayers are offered either in very large mosques or on specially consecrated grounds. Other sacred times include the “Night of Power” (believed to be the night in which God makes decisions about the destiny of individuals and the world as a whole) and the night of the ascension of the Prophet to heaven. The Shīʿah celebrate the 10th of Muḥarram (the first month of the Muslim year) to mark the day of the martyrdom of Ḥusayn. The Muslim masses also celebrate the death anniversaries of various saints in a ceremony called ʿurs (literally, “nuptial ceremony”). The saints, far from dying, are believed to reach the zenith of their spiritual life on this occasion.

Fazlur Rahman Ed.

Islāmic (Arabic philosophy) thought

Origins, nature, and significance of Islāmic theology
Early developments

The Hellenistic legacy

Muhsin S. Mahdi Ed.

theology and sectarianism
      Despite the notion of a unified and consolidated community, as taught by the Prophet, serious differences arose within the Muslim community immediately after his death. According to the Sunnah, or traditionalist faction—who now constitute the majority of Islām—the Prophet had designated no successor. Thus the Muslims at Medina decided to elect a separate chief. Because he would not have been accepted by the Quraysh, the ummah, or Muslim community, would have disintegrated. Therefore, two of Muḥammad's fathers-in-law, who were highly respected early converts as well as trusted lieutenants, prevailed upon the Medinans to elect a single leader, and the choice fell upon Abū Bakr, father of the Prophet's favoured wife, ʿĀʾishah. All of this occurred before the Prophet's burial (under the floor of ʿĀʾishah's hut, alongside the courtyard of the mosque).

      According to the Shīʿah, or “Partisans” of ʿAlī, the Prophet had designated as his successor his son-in-law ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, husband of his daughter Fāṭimah and father of his only surviving grandsons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. His preference was general knowledge; yet, while ʿAlī and the Prophet's closest kinsmen were preparing the body for burial, Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and Abū ʿUbaydah from Muḥammad's Companions in the Quraysh tribe, met with the leaders of the Medinans and agreed to elect the aging Abū Bakr as the successor (khalīfah, hence “caliph”) of the Prophet. ʿAlī and his kinsmen were dismayed but agreed for the sake of unity to accept the fait accompli because ʿAlī was still young

The Khawārij (Khārijite)

      Because the Khawārij believed that the basis of rule was righteous character and piety alone, any Muslim, irrespective of race, colour, and sex, could, in their view, become ruler—provided he or she satisfied the conditions of piety. This was in contrast to the claims of the Shīʿah (the party of Muḥammad's son-in-law, ʿAlī) that the ruler must belong to the family of the Prophet and to the doctrine of the Sunnah (followers of the Prophet's way) that the head of state must belong to the Prophet's tribe, i.e., the Quraysh.

      The question of whether works are an integral part of faith or independent of it, as raised by the Khawārij, led to another important theological question: are human acts the result of a free human choice (free will), or are they predetermined (determinism) by God (predestination)? This question brought with it a whole series of questions about the nature of God and of man. Although the initial impetus to theological thought, in the case of the Khawārij, had come from within Islām, full-scale religious speculation resulted from the contact and confrontation of Muslims with other cultures and systems of thought.

      When, in the early 9th century, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn (Maʾmūn, al-) raised Muʿtazilism to the status of the state creed, the Muʿtazilite rationalists showed themselves to be illiberal and persecuted their opponents. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855), an eminent orthodox figure and founder of one of the four orthodox schools of Islāmic law, was subjected to flogging and imprisonment for his refusal to subscribe to the doctrine that the Qurʾān, the word of God, was created in time.

The Sunnah
      In the 10th century a reaction began against the Muʿtazilah that culminated in the formulation and subsequent general acceptance of another set of theological propositions, which became Sunnī (Sunnite), or “orthodox” theology.

The way of the majority

Tolerance of diversity

      On the question of free will, Sunnī orthodoxy attempted a synthesis between man's responsibility and God's omnipotence. The champions of orthodoxy accused the Muʿtazilah of quasi-Magian Dualism (Zoroastrianism) insofar as the Muʿtazilah admitted two independent and original actors in the universe: God and man. To the orthodox it seemed blasphemous to hold that man could act wholly outside the sphere of divine omnipotence, which had been so vividly portrayed by the Qurʾān but which the Muʿtazilah had endeavoured to explain away in order to make room for man's free and independent action.

Influence of al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī
      The Sunnī formulation, however, as presented by al-Ashʿarī (Ashʿarī, Abū al-Ḥasan al-) and al-Māturīdī (Māturīdī, Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad al-), Sunnī's two main representatives in the 10th century, shows palpable differences despite basic uniformity. Al-Ashʿarī taught that human acts were created by God and acquired by man and that human responsibility depended on this acquisition. He denied, however, that man could be described as an actor in a real sense. Al-Māturīdī, on the other hand, held that although God is the sole Creator of everything, including human acts, nevertheless, man is an actor in the real sense, for acting and creating were two different types of activity involving different aspects of the same human act.

The Shīʿah (Shīʿite)
      The Shīʿah are the only important surviving sect in Islām. As noted above, they owe their origin to the hostility between ʿAlī (the fourth caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet) and the Umayyad Dynasty (661–750). After ʿAlī's death, the Shīʿah (Party; i.e., of ʿAlī) demanded the restoration of rule to ʿAlī's family, and from that demand developed the Shīʿite legitimism, or the divine right of the holy family to rule. In the early stages, the Shīʿah used this legitimism to cover the protest against the Arab hegemony under the Umayyads and to agitate for social reform.

      Gradually, however, Shīʿism developed a theological content for its political stand. Probably under Gnostic (esoteric, dualistic, and speculative) and old Iranian (dualistic) influences, the figure of the political ruler, the imām (imam) (exemplary “leader”), was transformed into a metaphysical being, a manifestation of God and the primordial light that sustains the universe and bestows true knowledge on man. Through the imām alone the hidden and true meaning of the Qurʾānic revelation can be known, because the imām alone is infallible. The Shīʿah thus developed a doctrine of esoteric knowledge that was adopted also, in a modified form, by the Ṣūfīs, or Islāmic mystics (see Ṣūfism). The orthodox Shīʿah recognize 12 such imām (Ithnā ʿAsharīyah)s, the last (Muḥammad) having disappeared in the 9th century. Since that time, the mujtahids (i.e., the Shīʿī divines) have been able to interpret law and doctrine under the putative guidance of the imām (messiah), who will return toward the end of time to fill the world with truth and justice.

      From a spiritual point of view, perhaps the greatest difference between Shīʿism and Sunnism is the former's introduction into Islām of the passion motive, which is conspicuously absent from Sunnī Islām. The violent death (in 680) of ʿAlī's son, Ḥusayn (Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, al-), at the hands of the Umayyad troops is celebrated with moving orations, passion plays, and processions in which the participants, in a state of emotional frenzy, beat their breasts with heavy chains and sharp instruments, inflicting wounds on their bodies. This passion motive has also influenced the Sunnī masses in Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, who participate in passion plays (Passion play) called taʿziyahs. Such celebrations are, however, absent from Egypt and North Africa.

      Although the Shīʿah number only about 40,000,000 (Shīʿism has been the official religion in Iran since the 16th century), Shīʿism has exerted a great influence on Sunnī Islām in several ways. The veneration in which all Muslims hold ʿAlī and his family and the respect shown to ʿAlī's descendants (who are called sayyids (sayyid) in the East and sharīfs (sharif) in North Africa) are obvious evidence of this influence.

      Besides the main body of Twelver (Ithnā ʿAsharīyah) Shīʿah, Shīʿism has produced a variety of more or less extremist sects, the most important of them being the Ismāʿīlī. Instead of recognizing Mūsā as the seventh imām, as did the main body of the Shīʿah, the Ismāʿīlīs upheld the claims of his elder brother Ismāʿīl. One group of Ismāʿīlīs (Ismāʿīlīte), called Seveners (Sabʿīyah), considered Ismāʿīl the seventh and last of the imāms. The majority of Ismāʿīlīs, however, believed that the imamate continued in the line of Ismāʿīl's descendants. The Ismāʿīlī teaching spread during the 9th century from North Africa to Sind, in India, and the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimid Dynasty succeeded in establishing a prosperous empire in Egypt. Ismāʿīlīs are subdivided into two groups—the Nizārīs, headed by the Aga Khan, and the Mustaʿlīs in Bombay, with their own spiritual head. The Ismāʿīlīs are to be found mainly in East Africa, Pakistan, India, and Yemen.

Related sects
      Several other sects arose out of the general Shīʿite movement—e.g., the Nuṣayrīs, the Yazīdīs, and the Druzes (Druze)—which are sometimes considered as independent from Islām. The Druzes arose in the 11th century out of a cult of deification of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim. (Ḥākim, al-)

      During a 19th-century anticlerical movement in Iran, a certain ʿAlī Moḥammad of Shīrāz appeared, declaring himself to be the Bāb (Bāb, the) (“Gate”; i.e., to God). At that time the climate in Iran was generally favourable to messianic ideas. He was, however, bitterly opposed by the Shīʿah ʿulamāʾ (council of learned men) and was executed in 1850. After his death, his two disciples, Ṣobḥ-e Azal and Bahāʾ UllāḤ (Bahāʾ Ullāh), broke and went in different directions. Bahāʾ Ullāh eventually declared his religion—stressing a humanitarian pacificism and universalism—to be an independent religion outside Islām. The Bahāʾī faith won a considerable number of converts in North America during the early 20th century (see also Druze and Bahāʾī faith).

The ṢūfīĨ

Other groups

The “Black Muslims” (Nation of Islam)

Fazlur Rahman Ed.

Islāmic philosophy

The Eastern philosophers

Background and scope of philosophical interest in Islām

Relation to the Muʿtazilah and interpretation of theological issues

The teachings of al-Kindī

The teachings of Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī

The teachings of al-Fārābī (Fārābī, al-)

Political philosophy and the study of religion

Interpretation of Plato and Aristotle
      Behind this public, or exoteric, aspect of al-Fārābī's work stood a massive body of more properly philosophic or scientific inquiries, which established his reputation among Muslims as the greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle, a great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and a master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome, and intricate questions of philosophy. Continuing the tradition of the Hellenistic masters of the Athenian and Alexandrian philosophical schools, al-Fārābī broadened the range of philosophical inquiry and fixed its form. He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic (logic, history of). In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle's logical works, he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and nonscientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as an indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry. His writings on natural science exposed the foundation and assumptions of Aristotle's physics and dealt with the arguments of Aristotle's opponents, both philosophers and scientists, pagan, Christian, and Muslim.

The analogy of religion and philosophy

Impact on Ismāʿīlī theology

The teachings of Avicenna

The “Oriental Philosophy”

Distinction between essence and existence and the doctrine of creation

The immortality of individual souls

The Western philosophers

Background and characteristics of the Western Muslim philosophical tradition

The teachings of Ibn Bājjah (Avempace)

Theoretical science and intuitive knowledge

Unconcern of philosophy with reform
      Ibn Bājjah's cryptic style and the unfinished form in which he left most of his writings tend to highlight his departures from al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Unlike al-Fārābī, he is silent about the philosopher's duty to return to the cave and partake of the life of the city. He appears to argue that the aim of philosophy is attainable independently from the philosopher's concern with the best city and is to be achieved in solitude or, at most, in comradeship with philosophic souls. Unlike Avicenna, who prepared the way for him by clearly distinguishing between theoretical and practical science, Ibn Bājjah is concerned with practical science only insofar as it is relevant to the life of the philosopher. He is contemptuous of allegories and imaginative representations of philosophic knowledge, silent about theology, and shows no concern with improving the multitude's opinions and way of life.

The teachings of Ibn Ṭufayl

The philosopher as a solitary individual

Concern for reform

The hidden secret of Avicenna's “Oriental Philosophy”
      The hidden secret of Avicenna's “Oriental Philosophy” appears, then, to be that the philosopher must return to the cave, educate himself in the ways of nonphilosophers, and understand the incompatibility between philosophical life and the life of the multitude, which must be governed by religion and divine laws. Otherwise, his ignorance will lead him to actions dangerous to the well-being of both the community and philosophy. Because Ibn Ṭufayl's hero had grown up as a solitary human being, he lacks the kind of wisdom that could have enabled him to pursue philosophy in a religious community and be useful to such a community. Neither the conversion of the community to philosophy nor the philosopher's solitary life is a viable alternative.

The teachings of Averroës

The divine law

The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and mysticism
Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom

Traditionalism and the new wisdom

Characteristic features of the new wisdom

Critiques of Aristotle in Islāmic theology

Synthesis of philosophy and mysticism

Primary teachers of the new wisdom

The teachings of as-Suhrawardī (Suhrawardī, as-)

The teachings of Ibn al-ʿArabī

The teachings of Twelver Shīʿism and the school of Eṣfahān (Eṣfahān school)

The teachings of Mīr Dāmāẖ

The teachings of Mullā Ṣadrā

      Mullā Ṣadrā considered his unique contribution to Islāmic philosophy to be his doctrine of nature (nature, philosophy of), which enabled him to assert that everything other than God and his knowledge—i.e., the entire corporeal world, including the heavenly bodies—is originated “eternally” as well as “temporally.” This doctrine of nature is an elaboration of the last manifestation of Ibn al-ʿArabī'Ĩ “nature” or prime “matter,” articulated on philosophic grounds and within the general framework of Aristotelian natural science and defended against every possible philosophic and theological objection.

Impact of modernism

      The wholesale rejection of the new wisdom in the name of simple, robust, and more practical piety (which had been initiated by Ibn Taymīyah and which continued to find exponents among jurists) made little impression on its devotees. To be taken seriously, reform had to come from their own ranks and be espoused by such thinkers as the eminent theologian and mystic of Muslim India Aḥmad Sirhindī (Aḥmad Sirhindī, Shaykh) (flourished 16th–17th centuries)—a reformer who spoke their language and attacked Ibn al-ʿArabī's “unity of being” only to defend an older, presumably more orthodox form of mysticism. Despite some impact, however, attempts of this kind remained isolated and were either ignored or reintegrated into the mainstream, until the coming of the modern reformers. The 19th- and 20th-century reformers Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh (Abduh, Muḥammadʿ), and Muḥammad Iqbāl (Iqbāl, Sir Muḥammad) were initially educated in this tradition, but they rebelled against it and advocated radical reforms.

      None of the reformers was a great political philosopher. They were concerned with reviving their nations' latent energies, urging them to free themselves from foreign domination, and impressing on them the need to reform their social and educational institutions. They also saw that all this required a total reorientation, which could not take place so long as the new wisdom remained not only the highest aim of a few solitary individuals but also a social and popular ideal as well. Yet, as late as 1917, Iqbāl found that “the present-day Muslim prefers to roam about aimlessly in the valley of Hellenic-Persian mysticism (Ṣūfism), which teaches us to shut our eyes to the hard reality around, and to fix our gaze on what is described as ‘illumination.' ” His reaction was harsh: “To me this self-mystification, this nihilism, i.e., seeking reality where it does not exist, is a physiological symptom, giving me a clue to the decadence of the Muslim world.”

      To arrest the decadence and infuse new vitality in a society in which they were convinced religion must remain the focal point, the modern reformers advocated a return to the movements and masters of Islāmic theology and philosophy antedating the new wisdom. They argued that these, rather than the “Persian incrustation of Islām,” represented Islām's original and creative impulse. The modernists were attracted, in particular, to the views of the Muʿtazilah: affirmation of God's unity and denial of all similarity between him and created things; reliance on human reason; emphasis on man's freedom; faith in man's ability to distinguish between good and bad; and insistence on man's responsibility to do good and fight against evil in private and public places. They were also impressed by the traditionalists' devotion to the original, uncomplicated forms of Islām and by their fighting spirit, and by the Ashʿarīs' view of faith as an affair of the heart and their spirited defense of the Muslim community. In viewing the scientific and philosophic tradition of eastern and western Islām prior to the Tatar and Mongol invasions, they saw an irrefutable proof that true Islām stands for the liberation of man's spirit, promotes critical thought, and provides both the impetus to grapple with the temporal and the demonstration of how to set it in order. These ideas initiated what was to become a vast effort to recover, edit, and translate into the Muslim national languages works of earlier theologians and philosophers, which had been long neglected or known only indirectly through later accounts.

Muhsin S. Mahdi Ed.

Social and ethical principles
Family life
      A basic social teaching of Islām is the encouragement of marriage, and the Qurʾān regards celibacy definitely as something exceptional—to be resorted to only under economic stringency. Thus, monasticism (rahbānīyah) as a way of life was severely criticized by the Qurʾān. With the appearance of Ṣūfism, however, many Ṣūfīs preferred celibacy, and some even regarded women as an evil distraction from piety, although marriage remained the normal practice also with Ṣūfīs.

       polygamy, which was practiced in pre-Islāmic Arabia, was permitted by the Qurʾān, which, however, limited the number of simultaneous wives to four, and this permission was made dependent upon the condition that justice be done among co-wives. The Qurʾān even suggests that “You shall never be able to do justice among women, no matter how much you desire.” Medieval law and society, however, regarded this “justice” to be primarily a private matter between a husband and his wives, although the law did provide redress in cases of gross neglect of a wife. Right of divorce was also vested basically in the husband, who could unilaterally repudiate his wife, although the woman could also sue her husband for divorce before a court on certain grounds.

      The virtue of chastity is regarded as of prime importance by Islām. The Qurʾān advanced its universal recommendation of marriage as a means to ensure a state of chastity (iḥṣān), which is held to be induced by a single free wife. The Qurʾān states that those guilty of adultery are to be severely punished with 100 lashes. Tradition has intensified this injunction and has prescribed this punishment for unmarried persons, but married adulterers are to be stoned to death. A false accusation of adultery is punishable by 80 lashes.

      The general ethic of the Qurʾān considers the marital bond to rest on “mutual love and mercy,” and the spouses are said to be “each other's garments.” The detailed laws (family law) of inheritance prescribed by the Qurʾān also tend to confirm the idea of a central family—husband, wife, and children, along with the husband's parents. Easy access to polygamy (although the normal practice in Islāmic society has always been that of monogamy) and easy divorce on the part of the husband led, however, to frequent abuses in the family. In recent times, most Muslim countries have enacted legislation to tighten up marital relationships.

      Rights of parents in terms of good treatment are stressed in Islām, and the Qurʾān extols filial piety, particularly tenderness to the mother, as an important virtue. A murderer of his father is automatically disinherited. The tendency of the Islāmic ethic to strengthen the immediate family on the one hand and the community on the other at the expense of the extended family or tribe did not succeed, however. Muslim society, until the encroachments upon it of modernizing influences, has remained basically one composed of tribes or quasi-tribes. Despite urbanization, tribal affiliations offer the greatest resistance to change and development of a modern polity. So strong, indeed, has been the tribal ethos that, in most Muslim societies, daughters are not given their inheritance share prescribed by the sacred law in order to prevent disintegration of the joint family's patrimony.

The state
      Because Islām draws no distinction between the religious and the temporal spheres of life, the Muslim state is by definition religious. The main differences between the Sunnī, Khawārij, and Shīʿī concepts of rulership have already been pointed out above. It should be noted that, although the office of the Sunnī caliph (khalīfah, one who is successor to the Prophet in rulership) is religious, this does not imply any functions comparable to those of the pope. The caliph has no authority either to define dogma or, indeed, even to legislate. He is the chief executive of a religious community, and his primary function is to implement the sacred law and work in the general interests of the community. He himself is not above the law and if necessary can even be deposed, at least in theory.

      Sunnī political theory is essentially a product of circumstance—an after-the-fact rationalization of historical developments. Thus, between the Shīʿah legitimism that restricts rule to ʿAlī's family and the Khawārij democratism that allowed rulership to anyone, even to “an Ethiopian slave,” Sunnism held the position that “rule belonged to the Quraysh” (the Prophet's tribe)—the condition that actually existed. Again, in view of the extremes represented by the Khawārij, who demanded rebellion against what they considered to be unjust or impious rule, and Shīʿites, who raised the imām to a metaphysical plane of infallibility, Sunnites took the position that a ruler has to satisfy certain qualifications but that rule cannot be upset on small issues. Indeed, under the impact of civil wars started by the Khawārij, Sunnism drifted to more and more conformism and actual toleration of injustice.

      The first step taken in this direction by the Sunnites was the enunciation that “one day of lawlessness is worse than 30 years of tyranny.” This was followed by the principle that “Muslims must obey even a tyrannical ruler.” Soon, however, the sultan (ruler) was declared to be “shadow of God on earth.” No doubt, the principle was also adopted—and insisted upon—that “there can be no obedience to the ruler in disobedience of God”; but there is no denying the fact that the Sunnī doctrine came more and more to be heavily weighted on the side of political conformism. This change is also reflected in the principles of legitimacy. Whereas early Islām had confirmed the pre-Islāmic democratic Arab principle of rule by consultation ( shūrā) and some form of democratic election of the leader, those practices soon gave way to dynastic rule with the advent of the Umayyads. The shūrā was not developed into any institutionalized form and was, indeed, soon discarded. Soon the principle of “might is right” came into being, and later theorists frankly acknowledged that actual possession of effective power is one method of the legitimization of power.

      In spite of this development, the ruler could not become absolute because a basic restraint was placed upon him by the Sharīʿah law under which he held his authority and which he dutifully was bound to execute and defend. When, in the latter half of the 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar in India wanted to arrogate to himself the right of administrative–legal absolutism, the strong reaction of the orthodox thwarted his attempt. In general, the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) jealously upheld the sovereign position of the Sharīʿah against the political authority.

      The effective shift of power from the caliph to the sultan was, again, reflected in the redefinition of the functions of the caliph. It was conceded that, if the caliph administered through wazīrs (viziers (vizier) or ministers) or subordinate rulers (amīrs (emir)), it was not necessary for him to embody all the physical, moral, and intellectual virtues theoretically insisted upon earlier. In practice, however, the caliph was no more than a titular head from the middle of the 10th century onward, when real power passed to self-made and adventurous amīrs and sultans, who merely used the caliph's name for legitimacy.

      Muslim educational activity began in the 8th century, primarily in order to disseminate the teaching of the Qurʾān and the sunnah of the Prophet. The first task in this endeavor was to record the oral traditions and collect the written manuscripts. This information was systematically organized in the 2nd century AH, and in the following century a sound corpus was agreed upon. This vast activity of “seeking knowledge” (ṭalab al-ʿilm) resulted in the creation of specifically Arab sciences of tradition, history, and literature.

      When the introduction of the Greek sciences—philosophy, medicine, and mathematics—created a formidable body of lay knowledge, a creative reaction on the traditional religious base resulted in the rationalist theological movement of the Muʿtazilah. Based on that Greek legacy, from the 9th to the 12th century AD a brilliant philosophical movement flowered and presented a challenge to orthodoxy on the issues of the eternity of the world, the doctrine of revelation, and the status of the Sharīʿah.

      The orthodox met the challenges positively by formulating the religious dogma. At the same time, however, for fear of heresies, they began to draw a sharp distinction between religious and secular sciences. The custodians of the Sharīʿah developed an unsympathetic attitude toward the secular disciplines and excluded them from the curriculum of the madrasah (college) system.

      Their exclusion from the Sunnī system of education proved fatal, not only for those disciplines but, in the long run, for religious thought in general because of the lack of intellectual challenge and stimulation. A typical madrasah curriculum included logic (which was considered necessary as an “instrumental” science for the formal correctness of thinking procedure), Arabic literature, law, Ḥadīth, Qurʾān commentary, and theology. Despite sporadic criticism from certain quarters, the madrasah system remained impervious to change.

      One important feature of Muslim education was that primary education (elementary education) (which consisted of Qurʾān reading, writing, and rudimentary arithmetic) did not feed candidates to institutions of higher education, and the two remained separate. In higher education, emphasis was on books rather than on subjects and on commentaries rather than on original works. This, coupled with the habit of learning by rote (which was developed from the basically traditional character of knowledge that encouraged learning more than thinking), impoverished intellectual creativity still further.

      Despite these grave shortcomings, however, the madrasah produced one important advantage. Through the uniformity of its religio-legal content, it gave the ʿulamāʾ the opportunity to effect that overall cohesiveness and unity of thought and purpose that, despite great variations in local Muslim cultures, has become a palpable feature of the world Muslim community. This uniformity has withstood even the serious tension created against the seats of formal learning by Ṣūfism through its peculiar discipline and its own centres.

      In contrast to the Sunnī attitude toward it, philosophy continued to be seriously cultivated among the Shīʿah, even though it developed a strong religious character. Indeed, philosophy has enjoyed an unbroken tradition in Persia down to the present and has produced some highly original thinkers. Both the Sunnī and the Shīʿah medieval systems of learning, however, have come face to face with the greatest challenge of all—the impact of modern education and thought.

      Organization of education developed naturally in the course of time. Evidence exists of small schools already established in the first century of Islām that were devoted to reading, writing, and instruction in the Qurʾān. These schools of “primary” education were called kuttābs (maktab). The well-known governor of Iraq at the beginning of the 8th century, the ruthless al-Ḥajjāj (Ḥajjāj, al-), had been a schoolteacher in his early career. When higher learning in the form of tradition grew in the 8th and 9th centuries, it was centred around learned men to whom students travelled from far and near and from whom they obtained a certificate (ijāzah) to teach what they had learned. Through the munificence of rulers and princes, large private and public libraries were built, and schools and colleges arose. In the early 9th century a significant incentive to learning came from the translations made of scientific and philosophical works from the Greek (and partly Sanskrit) at the famous bayt al-ḥikmah (“house of wisdom”) at Baghdad, which was officially sponsored by the caliph al-Maʾmūn. The Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim set up a dār alḥikmah (“hall of wisdom”) in Cairo in the 10th–11th centuries. With the advent of the Seljuq Turks, the famous vizier Niẓām al-Mulk created an important college at Baghdad, devoted to Sunnī learning, in the latter half of the 11th century. One of the world's oldest surviving universities, al-Azhar (Azhar University, al-) at Cairo, was originally established by the Fāṭimids, but Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), after ousting the Fāṭimids, consecrated it to Sunnī learning in the 12th century. Throughout subsequent centuries, colleges and quasi-universities (called madrasah or dār al-ʿulūm (Deoband school)) arose throughout the Muslim world from Spain (whence philosophy and science were transmitted to the Latin West) across Central Asia to India.

      In Turkey a new style of madrasah came into existence; it had four wings, for the teaching of the four schools of Sunnī law. Professorial chairs were endowed in large colleges by princes and governments, and residential students were supported by college endowment funds. A myriad of smaller centres of learning were endowed by private donations.

Cultural diversity
      Underneath the legal and creedal unity, the world of Islām harbours a tremendous diversity of cultures, particularly in the outlying regions. The expansion of Islām can be divided into two broad periods. In the first period of the Arab conquests, the assimilative activity of the conquering religion was far-reaching. Although Persia resurrected its own language and a measure of its national culture after the first three centuries of Islām, its culture and language had come under heavy Arab influence. Only after Ṣafavid (Ṣafavid Dynasty) rule installed Shīʿism as a distinctive creed in the 16th century did Persia regain a kind of religious autonomy. The language of religion and thought, however, continued to be Arabic.

      In the second period, the spread of Islām was not conducted by the state with ʿulamāʾ influence but was largely the work of Ṣūfī missionaries. The Ṣūfīs, because of their latitudinarianism, compromised (religious syncretism) with local customs and beliefs and left a great deal of the pre-Islāmic legacy in every region intact. Thus, among the Central Asian Turks, shamanistic practices were absorbed, while in Africa the holy man and his barakah (an influence supposedly causing material and spiritual well-being) are survivors from the older cults. In India there are large areas geographically distant from the Muslim religio-political centre of power in which customs are still Hindu (Hinduism) and even pre-Hindu and in which people worship a motley of saints and deities in common with the Hindus. The custom of satī (suttee), under which a widow burned herself alive along with her dead husband, persisted in India even among some Muslims until late into the Mughal period. The 18th- and 19th-century reform movements exerted themselves to “purify” Islām of these accretions and superstitions.

      Indonesia affords a striking example of this phenomenon. Because Islām reached there late and soon thereafter came under European colonialism, the Indonesian society has retained its pre-Islāmic world view beneath an overlay of Islāmic practices. It keeps its customary law (called adat) at the expense of the Sharīʿah; many of its tribes are still matriarchal; and culturally the Hindu epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata hold a high position in national life. Since the 19th century, however, orthodox Islām has gained steadily in strength because of fresh contacts with the Middle East.

      Apart from regional diversity, the main internal division within Islāmic society is brought about by urban and village life. Islām originally grew up in the two cities of Mecca and Medina, and as it expanded, its peculiar ethos appears to have developed in urban areas. Culturally, it came under a heavy Persian influence in Iraq, where the Arabs learned the ways and style of life of their conquered people, who were culturally superior to them. The custom of veiling women (which originally arose as a sign of aristocracy but later served the purpose of segregating women from men—the pardah (purdah)), for example, was acquired in Iraq.

      Another social trait derived from outside cultures was the disdain for agriculture and manual labour in general. Because the people of the town of Medina were mainly agriculturists, this disdain could not have been initially present. In general, Islām came to appropriate a strong feudal ethic from the peoples it conquered. Also, because the Muslims generally represented the administrative and military aristocracy and because the learned class (the ʿulamāʾ) was an essential arm of the state, the higher culture of Islām became urban based.

      This city orientation explains and also underlines the traditional cleavage between the orthodox Islām of the ʿulamāʾ and the folk Islām espoused by the Ṣūfī orders of the countryside. In the modern period, the advent of education and rapid industrialization threatened to make this cleavage still wider. With the rise of a strong and widespread fundamentalist movement in the second half of the 20th century, this dichotomy has decreased.

Religion and the arts
The visual arts
      The Arabs (Arabic literature) before Islām (Islamic arts) had hardly any art except poetry, which had been developed to full maturity and in which they took great pride. As with other forms of culture, the Muslim Arabs borrowed their art from Persia and Byzantium. Whatever elements the Arabs borrowed, however, they Islāmized in a manner that fused them into a homogeneous spiritual-aesthetic complex. The most important principle governing art was aniconism; (aniconism) i.e., the religious prohibition of figurization and representation of living creatures. Underlying this prohibition is the assumption that God is the sole author of life and that a person who produces a likeness of a living being seeks to rival God. The tradition ascribed to the Prophet that a person who makes a picture of a living thing will be asked on the Day of Judgment to infuse life into it, whether historically genuine or not, doubtless represents the original attitude of Islām. In the Qurʾān (3:49, 5:113), reflecting an account in a New Testament apocryphal work, it is counted among the miracles of Jesus that he made likenesses of birds from clay “by God's order,” and, when he breathed into them, they became real birds, again, “by God's order.”

      Hence, in Islāmic aniconism two considerations are fused together: (1) rejection of such images that might become idols (these may be images of anything) and (2) rejection of figures of living things. Plato and Plotinus, Greek philosophers, had also dismissed representative art as an “imitation of nature”; i.e., as something removed from reality. The Islāmic attitude is more or less the same, with the added element of attributing to the artist a violation of the sanctity of the principle of life. The same explanation holds for the Qurʾānic criticism of a certain kind of poetry, namely, free indulgence in extravagant image mongering: “They [poets] recklessly wander in every valley” (26:225).

 This basic principle has, however, undergone modifications. First, pictures were tolerated if they were confined to private apartments and harems of palaces. This was the case with some members of the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid dynasties, Turks, and Persians—in particular with the Shīʿah, who have produced an abundance of pictorial representations of the holy family and of the Prophet himself. Second, in the field of pictorial representation (iconography), animal and human figures are combined with other ornamental designs such as fillets and arabesques—stressing their ornamental nature rather than representative function. Third, for the same reason, in plastic art they appear in low relief. In other regions of the Muslim world—in North Africa, Egypt, and India (except for Mughal palaces)—representational art was strictly forbidden. Even in paintings, the figures have little representational value and are mostly decorative and sometimes symbolic. This explains why plastic art is one of the most limited areas of Islāmic art. The only full-fledged plastic figures are those of animals and a few human figures that the Seljuqs brought from eastern Turkistan.

      Much more important than plastic art were paintings (painting), particularly frescoes (fresco painting) and later Persian and Perso-Indian miniatures (miniature painting). Frescoes are found in the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid palaces and in Spain, Iran, and in the harem quarters of the Mughal palaces in India. Miniature paintings, introduced in Persia, assumed much greater importance in the later period in Mughal India and Turkey. Miniature painting was closely associated with the art of book illumination (illuminated manuscript), and this technique of decorating the pages of the books was patronized by princes and other patrons from the upper classes. (Miniature painting is also discussed below; see Illustration of myth and legend (Islām).)

      Instrumental music was forbidden by the orthodox in the formative stages of Islām. As for vocal music, its place was largely taken by a sophisticated and artistic form of the recitation of the Qurʾān known as tajwīd. Nevertheless, the Muslim princely courts generously patronized and cultivated music. Arab music was influenced by Persian and Greek music. Al-Fārābī (Fārābī, al-), a 10th-century philosopher, is credited with having constructed a musical instrument called the arghanūn (organ). In India, Amīr Khosrow, a 14th-century poet and mystic, produced a synthesis of Indian and Persian music and influenced the development of later Indian music.

      Among the religious circles, the Ṣūfīs introduced both vocal and instrumental music as part of their spiritual practices. The samāʿ, as this music was called, was opposed by the orthodox at the beginning, but the Ṣūfīs persisted in this practice, which slowly won general recognition. The great Ṣūfī poet Jalāl ad-Dīn ar-Rūmī (Rūmī) (died 1273)—revered equally by the orthodox and the Ṣūfīs—heard the divine voice in his stringed musical instrument when he said “Its head, its veins (strings) and its skin are all dry and dead; whence comes to me the voice of the Friend?”

      In literature, drama and pure fiction were not allowed—drama because it was a representational art and fiction because it was akin to lying. Similar constraints operated against the elaboration of mythology (see below Islāmic myth and legend). Story literature was tolerated, and the great story works of Indian origin—The Thousand and One Nights (Thousand and One Nights, The) and Kalīlah wa Dimnah—were translated from the Persian, introducing secular prose into Arabic. Didactic and pious stories were used and even invented by popular preachers. Much of this folklore found its way back into enlarged editions of The Thousand and One Nights and, through it, has even influenced later history writing. Because of the ban on fictional literature, there grew a strong tendency in later literary compositions—in both poetry and prose—toward hyperbole (mubālaghah), a literary device to satisfy the need of getting away from what is starkly real without committing literal falsehood, thus often resulting in the caricature and the grotesque. Poetry lent itself particularly well to this device, which was freely used in panegyrics, satires, and lyrics. As a form of effective expression, poetry is eminently characteristic of the East. The Arab genius is almost natively poetical with its strong and vivid imagination not easily amenable to the rigorous order that reason imposes upon the mind. This borderline attitude between the real and the unreal was particularly favourable to the development, in all medieval Islāmic literatures of the Middle East, of the lyric and panegyric forms of poetry wherein every line is a self-contained unit. Much more importantly, it afforded a specially suitable vehicle for a type of mystic poetry in which it is sometimes impossible to determine whether the poet is talking of earthly love or spiritual love. For the same reason, poetry proved an effective haven for thinly veiled deviations from and even attacks on the literalist religion of the orthodox.

      Architecture is by far the most important expression of Islāmic art, particularly the architecture of mosques. It illustrates both the diversity of cultures that participated in the Islāmic civilization and the unifying force of Islāmic monotheism represented by the spacious expanse of the mosque—a veritable externalization of the all-enveloping divine unity, heightened by the sense of infinity of the arabesque design. The arabesque, though ornately decorative, spiritually represents the infinite vastness of God.

      Among the earliest monuments are the mosque of ʿAmr (Amr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, Mosque ofʿ) built in Egypt in 641–642 and the famous Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem (finished in 691), which, however, is not a mosque but a monument, a concentric-circular structure consisting of a wooden dome set on a high drum and resting on four tiers and 12 columns. The Umayyad ruler al-Walīd (Walīd, al-) (died 715) built the great mosque at Damascus (Damascus, Great Mosque of) and al-Aqṣā Mosque at Jerusalem with two tiers of arcades in order to heighten the ceiling. The early Syro-Egyptian mosque is a heavily columned structure with a prayer niche (miḥrāb) oriented toward the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca.

      In Spanish and North African architecture these features are combined with Roman-Byzantine characteristics, the masterpieces of Spanish architecture being the famous Alhambra Palace at Granada and the Great Mosque of Córdoba (Córdoba, Mosque-Cathedral of). In the famous Persian mosques, the characteristic Persian elements are the tapered brick pillars, the arches (each supported by several pillars), the huge arcades, and the four sides called eyvāns. With the advent of the Seljuqs in the 11th century, faience decoration (glazed earthenware) of an exquisite beauty was introduced, and it gained further prominence under the Timurids (14th–16th centuries).

      In the number and greatness of mosques, Turkey has the pride of first place in the Muslim world. Turkey began with a Persian influence and then later Syrian in the 13th and 14th centuries, but Turkey developed its own cupola domes and monumental entrances. The Turkish architects accomplished symmetry by means of one large dome, four semidomes, and four small domes among them. In the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, Muslim architecture first employed Hindu architectural features (e.g., horizontal rather than arcuate, or bowlike, arches and Hindu ornamentation), but later the Persian style predominated.

Fazlur Rahman Ed.

Islāmic (Islām) myth and legend
      The strict monotheism of Islām does not allow for much mythological embellishment, and only reluctantly were the scriptural revelations of the Qurʾan (Qurʾān) elaborated and enlarged by commentators and popular preachers. Thus, in the first three centuries, a number of ideas from the ancient Near East, from Hellenistic and especially from Judeo-Christian traditions were absorbed into Islām and given at least partial sanction by the theologians. At the same time, legends were woven around the Prophet Muḥammad and the members of his family. Though inconsistent with historical reality, these legends formed for the masses the main sources of inspiration about the famous figures of the past.

      Since early times Islāmic theologians have sought to disregard the Qurʾānic interpretation of both storytellers and mystics. The quṣṣāṣ, or storytellers, made the Qurʾānic revelation more understandable to the masses by filling in the short texts with detailed descriptions that were not found in scripture. Though the mystics tried to maintain the purity of the divine word, they also attempted a spiritualization of both the Qurʾān and the popular legends that developed around it. Their way of giving to the Qurʾānic words a deeper meaning, however, and discovering layer after layer of meaning in them, sometimes led to new quasi-mythological forms. Later Islāmic mystical thinkers built up closed systems that can be called almost mythological (e.g., the angelology—theory of angels—of Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl, executed 1191). An interesting development is visible in poetry, especially in the Persian-speaking areas, where mythological figures and pious legend often were turned into secular images that might awaken in the reader a reminiscence of their religious origin. Such images contribute to the iridescent and ambiguous character of Persian poetry.

Sources and variations

The Qurʾān and non-Islāmic influences
      The sources of Islāmic mythology are first of all the Qurʾānic revelations. Since, for the Muslims, the Qurʾān is the uncreated word of God (the text revealed to Muḥammad considered an earthly manifestation of the eternal and uncreated original in heaven), it contains every truth, and whatever is said in it has been the object of meditation and explanation through the centuries. Thus, since the 9th century, commentators on the Qurʾān have been by far the most important witnesses for Islāmic “mythology.” They wove into their explanations various strands of Persian and ancient oriental lore and relied heavily on Jewish tradition. For example, the Jewish convert, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār brought much of the Isrāʾīliyāt (things Jewish) into Islāmic tradition. Later on, the mystics' commentaries expressed some gnostic (a dualistic viewpoint in which spirit is viewed as good and matter as evil) and Hellenistic concepts, of which the Hellenistic idea of the Perfect Man—personified in Muḥammad—was to gain greatest prominence. Commentaries written in the border areas of Islāmic countries now and then accepted a few popular traditions from their respective areas; however, the formative period was finished quite early. Traditions about the life and sayings of the Prophet grew larger and larger and are interesting for the study of the adoption of foreign mythological material. A valuable source for Islāmic legends are the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ—stories of the prophets, such as those by Thaʿālibī (born 1035) and Kisāʾī (11th century)—traditions concerning the prophets of yore in which a large number of pre-Islāmic and non-Islāmic ideas were incorporated.

      While the classical mythology of Islām, as far as it can be properly called so, is spread over the whole area of Islām, the miracles (miracle) and legends around a particular Muslim saint are found chiefly in the area of his special influence (especially where his order is most popular). Even if the names of the saints differ, the legends woven around them are very similar to each other and almost interchangeable. In the area where Persian was read—from Ottoman Turkey to India—the mythological concepts of Ferdowsī's Shāh-nāmeh are found side by side with the legends taken from ʿAṭṭār's and Rūmī's works.

The mystics
      From the 11th century onward, the biographies of the mystics often show interesting migrations of legendary motifs from one culture to another. For the Persian-speaking countries the Taẓkerat ol-Owlīyāʾ (“Memoirs of the Saints”) of Farīd od-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīnʿ) (died c. 1220) has become the storehouse of legendary material about the early Ṣūfī mystics. ʿAṭṭār's Persian epics (especially his Manṭeq ot-ṭḥyr, the “Birds' Conversation”) also contain much material that was used by almost every writer after him. The Manavī (a sort of poetic encyclopaedia of mystical thought in 26,000 couplets) of Jalāl od-Dīn Rūmī (Rūmī) (died 1273) is another important source for legends of saints and prophets. For the Iranian world view, Ferdowsī's (Ferdowsī) (died c. 1020) Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”) gave a poetical account of the mythology of old Iran, and its heroes became models for many poets and writers. The whole mythological and legendary heritage is condensed in allusions found in lyrical and panegyrical poetry. The Persian poet Ebrāhim ebn ʿAlī Khāqānī's (c. 1121–c. 1199) works, qaṣīdahs (“Odes”), are typical. The close connection of the Ṣūfī orders with the artisans' lodges and guilds was instrumental in the dissemination of legendary material, especially about the alleged founder, or patron, of the guild (such as Ḥallāj as patron of cottoncarders and Idrīs as patron of the tailors).

      Muslim historians interested in world history often began their works with mythological tales; central Asian traditions were added in Iran during the Il-Khanid period (AD 1256–1335). Folk poetry, in the different languages spoken by Muslims, provides a popular representation of traditional material, be it in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, the Indian and Pakistani languages (Urdu, Bengali, Sindhi, Panjabi, Baluchi, etc.), or the African languages; in all of them allusions to myth and legend are found down to the level of riddles and lullabies. Typical of the legendary tradition of the Shīʿah are the taʿziyas (“passion-plays”) in Iran, commemorating the death of Husayn ibn ʿAlī in Karbalāʾ (680) and the marīyehs (threnodies or elegies for the dead), which form an important branch of the Urdu poetry of India and Pakistan. A proper study of the distribution of most aspects of mythology in the various Muslim areas has not been undertaken, since much of the popular material is rarely available in print or is written in less-known languages—a good example is the extremely rich collections of legends and popular pious works in the Pakistani language, Sindhi.

Types of myth and legend

Cosmogony and eschatology
      The world was created by God's word kun (“Be”) out of nothing; after the creation (creation myth) of the angelic (angel and demon) beings from light, Adam was formed from clay and destined to be God's vicegerent, khalīfah. All of the angels obeyed God's order to prostrate themselves before Adam (Adam and Eve), except Iblīs (Satan (devil)), who refused and was cursed; due to Iblīs' instigation Adam ate the forbidden fruit (or grain) and was driven out of paradise. Questions of original sin or of Eve's role do not arise in the Muslim version of creation. Satan's disobedience has been explained by the mystics as actually an expression of his obedience to the divine will that does not allow worship of any but the Lord and that conflicted with the order that Satan prostrate himself before Adam.

      Before the creation, God addressed the posterity of Adam: “Am I not your Lord,” alastu birabbikum, and they answered “Yes” (Qurʾān, sūrah 7:172). This pre-eternal covenant is the favourite topic of mystical poetry, especially in the Persian-speaking areas for expressing pre-eternal love between God and man, or the unchangeable fate that was accepted that very day, the Yesterday as contrasted to the Tomorrow of resurrection. Angels and jinns (genies) are living powers that become visible in human life; they are accepted as fully real.

      Every destiny is written on the “well-preserved tablet,” and now “the pen has dried up”—a change in destiny is not possible. Later mystics have relied on an extra-Qurʾānic revelation in which God attests: “I was a hidden treasure” and have seen the reason for creation in God's yearning to be known and loved. For them, creation is the projection of divine names and qualities onto the world of matter.

      The central event of Islām is death and resurrection. The dead will be questioned by two terrible angels (that is why the profession of faith is recited to the dying); only the souls of martyrs go straight to heaven where they remain in the crops of green birds around the divine throne (green is always connected with heavenly bliss). The end of the world will be announced by the coming of the mahdī (literally, “the directed or guided one”)—a messianic figure who will appear in the last days and is not found in the Qurʾān but developed out of Shīʿah speculations and sometimes identified with Jesus. The mahdī will slay the Dajjāl, the one-eyed evil spirit, and combat the dangerous enemies, Yājūj and Mājūj, who will come from the north of the earth. The trumpet of Isrāfīl, one of the four archangels (archangel), will awaken the dead for the day of resurrection, which is many thousands of years long and the name of which has come to designate a state of complete confusion and turmoil.

      The eschatological inventory as described in the Qurʾān was elaborated by the commentators: the scales on which the books or deeds are weighed (an old Egyptian idea), the book in which the two recording angels have noted down man's deeds, and the narrow bridge that is said to be sharper than a sword and thinner than a hair and leads over hell (an Iranian idea). The dreadful angels of hell and the horrors of that place are as thoroughly described by theologians as the pleasures of paradise, with its waters and gardens and the houris who are permanent virgins. Pious tradition promises space in heavenly mansions, filled with everything beautiful, to those who repeat certain prayer formulas a certain number of times, or for similar rewarding deeds, whereas the mystic longs not “for houris some thousand years old” but for the vision of God, who will be visible like the full moon. In the concept of the sidrah tree as the noblest place in paradise a remnant may be found of the old tree of life. God's throne is on the waters (Qurʾān, sūrah 11:9) in the highest world, surrounded by worshipping angels. The created world, the earth, is surrounded by the mountain Qāf and enclosed by two oceans that are separated by a barrier. Mecca is the navel of the earth, created 2,000 years before everything else, and the deluge did not reach to proto-Kaʿbah. Often the world is conceived as a succession of seven heavens and seven earths, and a popular tradition says that the earth is on water, on a rock, on the back of a bull, on a kamkam (meaning unknown), on a fish, on water, on wind, on the veil of darkness—hence the Persian expression az māh tā māhī, from the moon to the fish; i.e., throughout the whole world.

Tales and legends concerning religious figures
      The majority of popular legends concern the leading personalities of Islām.

      Muḥammad, whose only miracle, according to his own words, was the bringing of the Qurʾān, is credited with innumerable miracles and associated with a variety of miraculous occurrences: his finger split the moon, the cooked poisoned meat warned him not to touch it, the palm trunk sighed, the gazelle spoke for him; he cast no shadow; from his perspiration the rose was created, etc. His ascension to heaven (miʿrāj) is still celebrated: he rode the winged horse Burāq in the company of the angel Gabriel through the seven spheres, meeting the other prophets there, until he reached the divine presence, alone, even without the angel of inspiration. Muḥammad-mysticism proper was developed in the late 9th century; he is shown as the one who precedes creation, his light is pre-eternal, and he is the reason for and goal of creation. He becomes the perfect man, uniting the divine and the human sphere as dawn is between night and day. His birth was surrounded by miracles, and his birthday (12. Rabīʾ I) became a popular holiday on which numerous poems were written to praise his achievements. The hope for him who has been sent as “mercy for the worlds” and will intercede for his community on Doomsday is extremely strong, especially among the masses, where these legends have completely overshadowed his historical figure.

Other Qurʾānic figures
      In addition to Muḥammad himself, his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī, the Shīʿah hero, has been surrounded by legends concerning his bravery, his miraculous sword, Dhūaʾl-fiqār, and his wisdom. ʿAlī's son, Ḥusayn, is the subject of innumerable poems that concern the day of his final fight in Karbalāʾ.

      Almost every figure mentioned in the Qurʾān has become the centre of a circle of legends, be it Yūsuf, the symbol of overwhelming beauty, or Jesus with the life-giving breath, the model of poverty and asceticism. Of special interest is Khiḍr (Khiḍr, al-), identified with the unnamed companion of Moses (Qurʾān, sūrah 20). He is the patron saint of the wayfarers, connected with green, the colour of heavenly bliss, appearing whenever a pious person is in need, and immortal since he drank from the fountain of life, which is hidden in the darkness. In many respects, he is the Islāmic counterpart of Elijah. Strong influences of the Alexander romances (a widely distributed literary genre dealing with the adventures of Alexander the Great) are visible in his figure.

Mystics and other later figures
      The great religious personalities have become legendary, especially the martyr-mystic Ḥallāj (Ḥallāj, al-) (executed in Bagdad, 922). His word anā al-Ḥaqq, “I am the Creative Truth,” became the motto of many later mystics. His death on the gallows is the model for the suffering of lovers, and allusions to his fate are frequent in Islāmic literature. An earlier mystic, Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (died 874), was the first to speak about the ascension of the mystic to heaven, which is a metaphor for higher unitive, mystical experience. A variation of the Buddha legend has been transferred onto the person of the first Ṣūfī (mystic) who practiced absolute poverty and trust in God, the Central Asian Ibrāhīm ibn Adham (died c. 780). The founders of mystical orders were credited by their followers with a variety of miracles (miracle), such as riding on lions, healing the sick, walking on water, being present at two places at the same time, and cardiognosia (which is the knowledge of what is in another's heart, or thought reading). Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānīʿ (died 1166), the founder of the widespread Qādirīyah order of mystics, and many others have attracted upon themselves a large number of popular stories that formerly had been told about pre-Islāmic saints or about some divinities, and these motifs can easily be transferred from one person to the other. In this sphere the survival of pre-Islāmic customs and legends is most visible. The idea of the hierarchy of saints, culminating in the quṭb, the pole or axis, thanks to whose activities the world keeps going, belongs to the mythology of Ṣūfism (Islāmic mysticism).

Mythologization of secular tales
      A feature of Islāmic mythology is the transformation of unreligious stories into vehicles of religious experience. The old hero of romantic love in Arabic literature, Majnūn, “the demented one,” became a symbol of the soul longing for identification with God, and in the Indus Valley the tales of Sassui or Sohnī, the girls who perish for their love, and other romantic figures, have been understood as symbols of the soul longing for union with God through suffering and death.

Tales and beliefs about numbers and letters
      Many Muslim tales, legends, and traditional sayings are built upon the mystical value of numbers (numerology), such as the threefold or sevenfold repetition of a certain rite. This is largely explained by examples from the life of a saintly or pious person, often the Prophet himself, who used to repeat this or that formula so and so many times. The number 40, found in the Qurʾān (as also in the Bible) as the length of a period of repentance, suffering, preparation, and steadfastness, plays the same role in Islām where it is connected, for example, with the 40 days' preparation and meditation, or fasting, of the novice in the mystical brotherhood. To each number, as well as to each day of the week, special qualities are attributed through the authority of both actual and alleged statements of the Prophet. Many pre-Islāmic customs were thus justified. The importance given to the letters of the Arabic alphabet is peculiar to Muslim pious thought. Letters of the alphabet were assigned numerical values: the straight alif (numerical value one), the first letter of the alphabet, becomes a symbol of the uniqueness and unity of Allāh; the b (numerical value two), the first letter of the Qurʾān, represents to many mystics the creative power by which everything came into existence; the h (numerical value five) is the symbol of huwa, He, the formula for God's absolute transcendence; the m (numerical value 40) is the “shawl of humanity” by which God, the One (al-Aḥad), is separated from Aḥmad (Muḥammad). M is the letter of human nature and hints at the 40 degrees between man and God. The sect of the Ḥurūfīs developed these cabalistic interpretations of letters, but they are quite common in the whole Islāmic world and form almost a substitute for mythology.

Illustration of myth and legend
      Since the art of representation is opposed in Islām, illustrations of mythological and legendary subjects are rarely found. miniature painting developed only in the Persian and, later on, in the Turkish and Indo-Muslim areas. Books such as Zakarīyāʾ ebn Moḥammad al-Qazvīnī's Cosmography contain in some manuscripts a few pictures of angels, like Isrāfīl with the trumpet, and histories of the world or histories of the prophets, written in Iran or Turkey, also contain in rare manuscripts representations of angels or of scenes as told in the Qurʾān, especially the story of Yūsuf and Zalīkhā, which inspired many poems. The Shāh-nāmeh has been fairly frequently illustrated. When the Prophet of Islām is shown at all, his face is usually covered and in several cases his companions or his family members are also shown with veiled faces.

      The only subject from the legends surrounding Muḥammad that has been treated by miniaturists several times is his ascension to heaven. There are a number of splendid Persian miniatures depicting this. In poetical manuscripts that contain allusions to legends of the saints, these topics were also sometimes illustrated (e.g., Jonah and the great fish or scenes from the wanderings of Khiḍr). Several miniatures deal with the execution of the mystic al-Ḥallāj. Mythological themes proper are found almost exclusively in the paintings of Mughal India; especially in the period of Jahāngīr, in which the eschatological peace of lion and lamb lying together is illustrated as well as the myth of the earth resting on the bull, on the fish, etc. But by that time European influence was also already visible in Mughal art.

Significance and modern interpretations
      Mythology proper has only a very small place in official Islām and is mostly an expression of popular traditions through which pre-Islāmic influences seeped into Islām. Reformers tried to purge Islām of all non-Qurʾānic ideas and picturesque elaborations of the texts, whereas the mystics tried to spiritualize them as far as possible. Modern Muslim exegesis attempts to interpret many of the mythological strands of the Qurʾān in the light of modern science, as psychological factors, like Muḥammad's ascension to heaven, and especially deprives the eschatological parts of the Qurʾān of their religious significance. Cosmic events are interpreted as predictions of modern scientific research. To some interpreters, jinns and angels are spiritual forces; to others, jinns are microbes or the like. Thus the religious text is confused with a textbook of science. Popular legends surrounding the Prophet and the saints are still found among the masses but are tending to disappear under the influence of historical research, though many of them have formed models for the behaviour and spiritual life of the Muslim believer.

Annemarie Schimmel

Additional Reading

General works
Cambridge History of Islam, (1970, vol. 2, pt. 8; reissued 1977, vol. 2B), an excellent survey; Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vol. (1974), a major and influential study of the religion and civilization; R.M. Savory (ed.), Introduction to Islamic Civilization (1976), a collection of scholarly articles on Islāmic history, religion, literature, language, and other topics; Bernard Lewis (ed.), The World of Islam: Faith, People, Culture (U.S. title, Islam and the Arab World, 1976), a collection of articles on various aspects of Islāmic culture, and Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, 2 vol. (1974), a history composed of translations of original sources; W. Montgomery Watt, The Majesty That Was Islam: The Islamic World, 661–1100 (1974), a concise introductory history of the rise and decline of the Islāmic Empire; Hamilton A.R. Gibb, Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. (1953, reissued with revisions 1969), a penetrating and concise account of the development of Islām; Louis Gardet, Mohammedanism, trans. by William Burridge (1961), a systematic presentation of Islām, with religious insight; Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd ed. (1979), a historical and systematic interpretation of Islām, and Islamic Methodology in History (1965), a critical appraisal of the development of sunnah, ijmāʿ, and ijtihād; Reubin Levy, An Introduction to the Sociology of Islam (1930– ), useful account of the development of Islāmic society and institutions. John W. Bagnole, Cultures of the Islamic Middle East (1978), an annotated guide to 402 English-language readings for the nonspecialist.

Arthur S. Tritton, Materials on Muslim Education in the Middle Ages (1957), an informative, useful compilation; Bayard Dodge, Muslim Education in Medieval Times (1962), a useful sketch.

Political theory and institutions
Erwin I.J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam (1958), a good general survey of the subject.

Islāmic arts
In view of the wealth of descriptive treatments, rather than theory, it is difficult to point to a single source. K.A.C. Creswell, A Bibliography of the Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam to 1st Jan. 1960 (1961), and Supplement, Jan. 1960 to Jan. 1972 (1973), contain all the necessary references. See also his Early Muslim Architecture, 2nd ed. (1969), and American University at Cairo, Center for Arabic Studies, Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Professor K.A.C. Creswell (1965); Hamilton A.R. Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (1974), a probing survey of 1,500 years of literature; Salih J. Altoma, Modern Arabic Literature (1975), a bibliography of 850 general and scholarly works covering 1800–1970.

Theology and philosophy
Franz Rosenthal (ed.), The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. from the German by Emile Marmorstein and Jenny Marmorstein (1975); and Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (1962, reissued 1970), deal with the Greek and Hellenistic background and its appropriation. Parviz Morewedge (ed.), Islamic Philosophical Theology (1979), is a major contribution by nine internationally known authorities written for advanced students; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (1973), is a study of the evolution of theological thought in the 300 years after Muḥammad's death, and his Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam (1948, reissued 1972), is an excellent treatment of the formative period of Islāmic theology; Asaf A.A. Fyzee (ed. and trans.), . . . a Shiʿite Creed (1942), is an annotated translation of a standard Shīʿite creed by Ibn Bābawayh; Louis Gardet and M.-M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 2nd ed. (1970), is a comprehensive handbook on Sunnī theology; and A.J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed (1932, reprinted 1965), discusses the background and development of Sunnī doctrines. The theology of the Shīʿah is given a prominent place in Henry Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964– ); and its early development is discussed by Wilferd Madelung in both Der Imam al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm und die Glaubenslehre der Zaiditen (1965), and “Imamism and Muʿtazilite Theology,” in Le Shîʿisme imâmite, pp. 13–30 (1970). M.M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vol. (1963–66), is a comprehensive collective work on the history of Islāmic philosophy and related subjects; it is especially useful for the later medieval and modern periods. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (1970), is a general history. Fazlur Rahman discusses the development of the later synthesis between mysticism and philosophy in “Dream, Imagination, and ʿĀlam al-Mithāl,” Islamic Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 167–180 (June 1964), in the introduction to Selected Letters of Shaikh Aḥmad Sirhindī (1968), and in “The Eternity of the World and the Heavenly Bodies in Post-Avicennan Philosophy,” in George F. Hourani (ed.), Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science (1975), a collection representing recent trends in interpreting Islāmic philosophy.

Islāmic myth and legend
Tor Andrae, Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde (1917), on the development of Muḥammad-mysticism; Israel Friedländer, Die Chadhirlegende und der Alexander-Roman (1913), on the relation between the Alexander romance and the figure of Khiḍr; Max J.H. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt der gebildeten Muslime in heutigen Islam (1916), an account of popular Islām, and Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam, 2 pt. (1917–18), an account of the ideas of educated people in Islām; A.J. Wensinck, “The Ocean in the Literature of the Western Semites,” Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, vol. 19, no. 2 (1918), and “The Ideas of the Western Semites Concerning the Navel of the Earth,” ibid., vol. 17, no. 1 (1916); Seyyed H. Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (1964, reissued 1976), an account of the theories of Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl and Ibn ʿArabī; Joseph Horowitz, “The Growth of the Mohammed Legend,” Moslem World, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 49–58 (January 1920), stresses the haggadic influences; Walther Eickmann, Angelologie und Dämonologie des Korans . . . (1908), a study of the Qurʾānic concepts of angels and demons; Ernst A. Zbinden, Die Djinn des Islam und der altorientalische Geisterglaube (1953), a study of the different types of spirits in Islāmic folklore and tradition; Rudolf Kriss and Hubert Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam, 2 vol. (1960–62), useful studies in Islāmic folklore, with extensive bibliographies; Taufic Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927), on Palestinian folklore; articles in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam (1953), an authoritative collection of information, each article furnished with an extensive bibliography.

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Universalium. 2010.

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