With the help of my friend Tristan from Step Back History, this video is going to give
you a short history of islam.
In 610 CE Muhammad received his first revelations in a cave outside Mecca and in 612 began to
preach.
By 622, he traveled to and consolidated the tribes of Yathrib, becoming the leader (Sayyid)
of this so called supertribe, the Medina.
The powers in Mecca were displeased with Muhammad and his followers, both sides conducted raids
and warfare against one another.
In 624, Muhammad directed his followers to face away from Jerusalem during prayer, and
instead face Mecca.
A move which symbolically distinguished Islam from Christianity and Judaism.
It also displayed to the powers in Mecca that he had his eye on taking the holy city.
In 630, Muhammad marched on Mecca with an army of 10,000.
The city surrendered.
Muhammad died in 632, with many tribes of the Arabian peninsula united under Islam.
The first Caliph of this new Ummah was Abu Bakr, father-in-law of Muhammad.
He succeeded in crushing the rebelling arab tribes and solidifying Islam’s hold on the
peninsula between 632 and 634.
As a means of preventing further infighting, the next Caliph, Umar (634-44) focused the
Ummah’s efforts outwards, leading raids and conquering of neighboring territories
of the Persian and Byzantine Empires.
In 638 Jerusalem was conquered, and by 641 the entirety of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt
were under the Caliph Umar’s control.
The 3rd caliph, Uthman, continued the expansion into North Africa, and Easterly, towards South
Asia and India.
However, under Uthman unrest would lead to conflict.
Historians and different varieties of Muslims debate the real reasons Uthman’s rule came
to rebellion, but at the very least we know that he played favorites by giving members
of his Umayyad family official positions, In 656, rebels assassinated Uthman in his
home.
In the fallout from Uthman’s assassination came 5 years of civil war, known as the 1st
Fitna- the 1st temptation.
Ali, Muhammad’s cousin, was chosen in Medina to be the 4th Caliph.
Ali’s rule was rejected in Syria, where Muawiyah, a member of Uthman’s Umayyad family,
felt obligated to avenge the death of his kinsmen.
Muawiyah declared a rival Caliphate in Damascus, and through skirmish and arbitration, Muawiyah
became the 5th Caliph in 661.
Muawiyah’s ascent to Caliph marked the end of the first four Caliphs, known as the Rashidun,
‘the rightly guided ones’, and began the era of the Umayyad Caliphs.
Umayyad Caliphs behaved much more similar to traditional monarchs, fighting off rebel
groups and Ali loyalists until 691.
In 691, the dome of the rock was completed in Jerusalem, as new schools of Islamic thought
were born.
Muslims were calling for the koran to not merely be the prop of a king to legitimize
his rule.
The time under Caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) was also when Arabic replaced Persian as the
official language of the empire.
Under Caliph Al-Walid I (705-715), the Arab Empire reached its Zenith, stretching from
the border of modern day India, all the way through Spain and the Iberian peninsula.
But during the reign of Umar II (717-720), it was clear that the vast empire was on unstable
footing.
It faced the natural limitations of all expansionist agricultural economies.
Additionally, Umar advocated that so-called dhimmis, the non muslims living in the empire,
convert to Islam.
Those who did so were exempt from the special tax for non-muslims (the jizyah), which meant
government revenues also declined during this time.
The Abbasid family took advantage of the administrative problems under the Umayyads, occupying Kufah
in 749, and toppling the last Umayyad Caliph, Mansur II in 750.
The Abbasids also claimed a closer blood relation to Muhammad, as they descended from his youngest
uncle.
Though seeing a pious member of Muhammad’s family as Caliph was something many in the
empire desired, the Abbasids quickly established themselves as absolute monarchs.
Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809) called himself ‘the shadow of god on earth’, leaving
the administrative work to his Vizier, while he tended to traditional monarchical duties,
such as being a final court of appeals or leading troops into battle.
The Abbasid Caliphate was a time of contradictions.
While the religious of society desired a more egalitarian and pious empire, the Caliph and
other elites lived in luxury.
On the other hand, this was also an era of Islamic economic activity, art, medicine,
math, astronomy, and literature.
But as the year 1000 approached, the Abbasids were unable to administer to the entirety
of the empire, and new organization arrived.
The Abbasid Caliph lost political power, left to be a figurehead, but not a governor.Different
areas of the Ummah decentralized, governed independently.
1st, There were the Fatimids in North Africa, Syria, and Palestine.
2nd, Individual Amirs of the Seljuk Turks controlling city-states in Iraq, Iran, and
central Asia.
Individual muslims in individual states felt part of a greater Islamdom.
But there were two major shocks in store.
In 1099, christian crusaders successfully take Jerusalem, and establish states in Palestine,
Lebanon, and modern day Turkey.
The scattered Amirs were unable to unite well enough to resist.
The second shock came in the form of the mongol horde, which starting in 1219 raged through
islamdom, leaving death and destruction everywhere.
As Karen Armstrong describes in her book, ‘Islam, A Short History’, “corpses filled
the streets, and refugees fled to Syria, Egypt or India.”
Great cities like Bukhara and Baghdad were pillaged.
The Seljuk Turks submitted immediately to the Mongols.
Around 1260, the world looked a bit like this, as the mongols conquered or raided massive
swaths of the world.
Mongol government fascinated the muslims, especially because the Mongols themselves
brought no spirituality with them.
In fact, by the beginning of the 1300’s, 3 of the 4 divided Mongol Khanates embraced
Islam.
As the Mongol Empire dwindled, the taken areas of the Byzantine Empire were administered
as small Ghazi states.
One of the Ghazi families was Osmanli, better known as the Ottomans.
And by 1400, they controlled much of what was formerly Byzantium.
In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople on behalf of the Ottomans.
In 1492, reconquista christians retake South Eastern Iberia and Grenada, fully ejecting
the muslims from Spain.
As the dust of a tumultuous half millennia settled, three islamic empires came into view
by 1600.
1st, as mentioned before, the Ottomans in modern day Turkey, Syria, North Africa, and
the Arabian Peninsula.
2nd, the Moghul Empire in India 3rd, the Safavid Empire in Iran
In the Safavid Empire, the ruler Ismail set out to eliminate Sunni Islam in Iran, an effort
that left Iran mostly Shii, and has lasted into the modern day.
1520-1560 The Ottoman Empire, for a brief moment, was the most powerful on earth.
But through the 1600’s, it became clear that the agricultural empire was struggling
with modernity, and a new threat from the west.
Europe’s encroachment into the Islamic world began with the Moghul’s decline India in
the early 18th century.
Between 1789 and 1818 The East India Company under the auspices of the a british monarch
imposed itself in India.
Both these left Muslims out of power and as a religious minority.
Colonization made its way into Africa.
France took Algeria in 1830, And Tunisia in 1881,
The British controlled Egypt in 1882 And Sudan by 1899
In 1912 Italy imposed itself in Libya And France did the same in morocco.
In 1915, Britain and France, in anticipation of victory in the first world war, agreed
to divide the territories of the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with the Germans.
After the war ended, they established ‘protectorates’ and a mandate system in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine,
Iraq, and Jordan.
In doing so, they stuffed different peoples of different ethnic and religious backgrounds
into arbitrary borders.
One wondering why the Middle East is constantly full of violence should start here in their
search for answers.
Turks in Anatolia fought against post war partitioning, and formed an independent Turkey
in 1923.
In 1947, the British leave India, partitioning majority Hindu India and majority Muslim Pakistan
as two separate states.
1948.
Arabs in Palestine lose the space to the nation of Israel with the support of the UN.
The 1948 9 month Israeli-Arab left around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs exiled, and solidified
the state of Israel.
Israel would have further brief battles with the Arabs and Palestinians throughout the
20th century.
Egypt, Syria, and Turkey organized mostly secular governments, naturally with varying
degrees of authoritarianism.
Others, most notably Saudi Arabia, based their administration on fundamentalist Sunni Islam,
better known as Wahhabism.
The iranian revolution in 1979 took Iran from a constitutional monarchy to an Shia Islamic
Republic with the Ayatollah as the Supreme Leader.
Now to finish the last leg of our journey, here’s my friend Tristan from Step Back
History.
From 1979 until 1989, the Soviet Union fought against Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan.
Osama Bin Laden, one of the Mujahideens, would later declare war against the US and its allies,
seeking to remove all foreign troops from what they called ‘Islamic lands’.
The culmination of his efforts arrived in 2001.
The US invaded his refuge in Afghanistan quickly thereafter.
In 2003, the US toppled the secular Baathist government in Iraq, creating a Sunni insurgency
in the West of Iraq.
2010-- a series of revolutions toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, with
similar protests in many other countries.
The results of these uprisings were mixed.
They came to be known as the Arab Spring.
One of those countries with protests was Syria, where civil war broke out in 2011.
This was right next door to Iraq, where the US was withdrawing its remaining combat troops.
The culmination of these two events created the power vacuum necessary for the rise of
ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which took major swaths of territory in 2014
and launched terror attacks worldwide- whose leader, Islamic Scholar Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi,
proclaimed a new Caliphate, and bestowed himself the same name as the first Caliph after the
death of Muhammad.
One of the things I couldn’t cover in this video is the vast diversity of the muslim
world.
It’s not just the middle east, where about 20% of muslims live, about 13% of all muslims
live in Indonesia alone.
And as the world’s fastest growing religion, there are major splits in opinion on theology.
Shii/Sunni differences obviously, but within Sunnism, there’s Wahabis in Saudi Arabia,
and the savage ideology of ISIS.
So, If you’d like to examine some of the theology of ISIS, maybe some of the things
they get wrong, check out the companion video to this one on Tristan’s channel Step Back
History by clicking here.
He does great work and deserves your subscription.
Don’t forget to subscribe here as well!
Later guys.