Religion - Middle East - Islam: Beginnings And Basic Teachings, Islam: Sunnis, Kharijites, And Shiites, Islamic Law, Theology, And Philosophy
seventh god century
This surveys the religious traditions of the Middle East from the seventh century C.E., with limited attention to earlier developments. By the seventh century the Middle East had largely accepted monotheism in its Jewish, Christian, or Iranian form. This involved the worship of one God, who has created and sustains the universe but is separate from it, and a more or less forceful rejection of other gods. This God is symbolized in male terms and is very much concerned with human moral activities, which he will reward or punish in the afterlife.
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The Arabian peninsula was one of the last places to accept monotheism, and it did so in a distinctive form that was to dominate the Middle East thereafter. From about 610 until 632 Muhammad, a caravan merchant in Mecca, received verbal messages that he and his followers understood to come from God and that were collected together to form the Koran, the Muslim scripture. The Koran is considered to …
The main divisions among Muslims are based on differing views of the political succession to Muhammad. In the Sunni view the first four caliphs (successors) were legitimately chosen by the community and were the best rulers the community has ever had. With the coming of the Umayyad dynasty, the moral level declined and rulers were sometimes corrupt, but they were usually to be accepted since the d…
The primary concern of Muslim religious thinking has been the elaboration of the rules for living, including social and political life. The key concept here has been shari'a, the "path" God has laid out for believers to follow, involving the moral evaluation of actions as "obligatory," "recommended," "permitted," "discouraged,&#…
There are a number of smaller groups, many derived from Shiism, whose teachings and practices are quite distinctive, whose full doctrines are often known only to an elite, and who are quite tightly organized and often do not accept converts. They are often considered non-Muslims by others and have often suffered persecution. The Druze believe that God is beyond description and that the Ismaili rul…
The Manichaean movement was founded by Mani (216–277?) and has an extremely dualistic view in which the material world is the realm of evil and darkness. Particles from the world of light have been captured and imprisoned in matter, and knowledge (gnosis) and highly ascetic practices are designed to free them and return them to their heavenly home. The movement spread widely and was strong …
By the seventh century most Jews lived outside the land of Israel, a situation experienced as galut (exile, alienation) and one that was to be ended only with the advent of the Messiah. In the meantime, they were to live by Torah, a term that in its narrowest sense refers to the first five books of the Bible but in its broadest sense to all authoritative teaching, and in particular by halakah, the…
By the seventh century much of the Middle East was ruled by the Christian Byzantine Empire, Armenia was Christian, and there were many Christians in Iran and central Asia. Most of these Christians came under Muslim rule in the seventh century, although the Byzantine Empire did not finally succumb until the fifteenth century. These areas eventually became predominantly Muslim, but Christian communi…
European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has had a considerable effect on religion as on other aspects of life in the Middle East. For Muslims it has created a crisis that is at once spiritual and political. Muslims have tended to assume that since they had the true religion, God would grant their community material and moral success, and for a thousand years history largely …
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