Know about Islam and the Arabs?

[Coyote]

[Starship Troopers] "Would you like to know more..?" [/Starship Troopers]

I'm hoping that anyone out there with information about Islam and the Arabs would be willing to help me post stuff here to answer any questions people may have about this part of the world. I'm sure Marina can be particularly helpful.

Islam technically started in the year 622 of the Common Era. It was started by a dude named Mohommed who lived among the Quraysh tribe of Arabic peoples in the town of Medina (Saudi Arabia). Christianity and Judaism was known to them but many people still clung to pagan beliefs. This was known as the time of the "jahaliyya", or "pre-enlightened barbarism".

Mohommed began having "contacs with God (Allah)" in which he basically began speaking of philosophical and political changes that were to take place. These early prophesies were somewhat unfocused and general, yet created a stir in the area. He was run out of town for being something of a rabble-rouser. He fled to the city of Mecca. This pilgrimage to Mecca with his band of followers was the first "Hijra".

In Mecca, Mohommed's prophesies became more clear and focused. He insisted that society should be run in strict orders and that the family was the basis of moral upbringing rather than warlordism. He became something of a militia general and helped fight back marauding bandits that threatened the city many times. He later returned to Medina leading a large force and triumphantly marched into the city.

Mohommed had a wife, Aisha, who was older than he and was at one time his employer (women were allowed business and property rigths, more so than European women). Aisha was frequently visited by people seeking advice and wisdom due to her relationship with Mohommed. People began to wonder if visitors really sought advice or were just comming to hang out with the wife of Mohommed, so it wass decided that she would sit behind a curtain and talk with people, dispensing advice unseen. Thus was born the tradition of the veil as an Islamic feature, although veils had been used in Arabic society before that.

By 633 Mohommed died and there was a conflict in leadership. Two groups disputed who was to lead the "umma", or the "body of the faithful". One group believed that the leadership should go to whoever was the most pious believer in the community, this group was caled "Sunni"; others felt that only a blood relative of Mohommed could lead them: the "Shia'a" or "partisans".

The Sunni voted Abu Bakr as leader. The Shia'a champion, Ali (Mohommed's cousin and the man that married Mohommed's daughter Fatima), would run again three more times and be voted in on the fourth run for office. These religious leaders or "Caliphs" are called the "Rashidun", or the righteously-guided caliphs due to their personal connections to Mohommed.

Things fell apart when Ali was run out of the community for supposedly having murdered the governor of Syria in order to ascend to leadership. The Shia'a were running away when they were attacked by Sunni forces at Karbala, in Iraq. The town became a holy place of martyrdom for the Shia'a everywhere, for Ali (and possibly Fatima) were both killed there. For the Shia'a, Karbala is a city of status close to that of Mecca itself.

The Sunni continued to spread ander various dynasties, first the Umayyid and later Abbasid dynasties based in Baghdad and Damascus. The Shia'a spread through Persia (Iran). In Sunni tradition, the "umma" (faithful people) are expected to read the Qur'an for themselves while the Shia'a believe that it is the job of the Ayatollahs and Mullahs (all of which can supposedly trace their lineage back to Mohommed) to read the Qur'an and interpret it for the people.

The Qur'an, the collected writings of Mohommed's prophesies, contain the supposed words of Allah that Mohommed transcribed. Theya re arranged in chapters or "Surats" from the shortest (one page) to the longest. They are not in any chronological order or related to one another, and the Mecca prophesies are more rambling while the Medina prophesies are more focused. So the book frequently seems to be a bit schitzophrenic.

Also held in esteem are the sayings of the Prophet, or "hadith". These are not words from Allah but thoughts of Mohommed as a man. They are seen as good as holy writ, so long as they do not contradict anything in the Qur'an itself. In Shia'a tradition, the sayings of Fatima and Ali are also seen in this light.

After Islam spread it began to slow down and the courts of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties were hotbeds of corruption. Various schools of thought emerged, putting local spin on certain practices and interpreting things in new ways. Religious leaders, called "ulama", began to question and criticize the Hadiths of Mohommed and interpret them in many ways when issuing Fatwas (religious decrees) based on these interpretations.

When the European/Christian West attacked in the Crusades of 1095 (and the sack of Jerusalem in 1099) the Islamic world began to come together as a cohesive unit (it took awhile). European Christians eventually kicked the Muslims out of Spain, but in Constantinople (Turkey) the Turkish Muslims were besieging the last outpost of the Byzantine Empire. By the mid-late 1400's, the Islamic world was more or less onfined to the borders we recognize now.

Much of the area was ruled by the Ottoman Turks, who were seen as the leaders of Islam. A "caliphate" or council of religious leaders was in Istanbul (not Constantinople! ) which kept religious philosophy on one sheet of music for the world's Muslims. After World War 1 this was dissolved, along with the Ottoman Empure, and various colonial powers which had been usurping Ottoman territory for generations openly took over the re-drawing of the Arabic world's boundaries, creating the fine mess we have today.

[Coyote]

Islamic History in a Nutshell, continued....

The Arab/Muslim worlds had been overrun by European colonial powers-- people whom the Arabs had once kicked around. The once-inferior Europeans were now the masters and this sparked a great deal of criticism and anger in the umma and ulama. They could not imagine how Islam had failed to guide them and they were now under the boot of a bunch of heathen.

A movement started called "salafiyya" and it was an effort to guide the Muslim people back to the era of righteousness of the original Rashidun, or righteous caliphs. The religious college of Al-Azhar, in Cairo, became a sort of replacement Caliphate in all but name. The perception was that Allah allowed the Muslim people to be dominated because they had lost their true faith. One school of thought to emerge from this was the Wahabbi school, a strict and fundamentalist sect that guides the Saudi Arabian religious discourse.

The lands of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq are areas ruled by the Hashemite clan. In the past, the rulers of these families were related, hence a preponderance of "Hussein; Hussayn; Hossain" type names that seem confusing. The British busted up these territories and parceled them out to various squabbling family members in order to settle the house of Saud into power in Saudi Arabia.

Jordan was once called "the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan" and included what is now Palestine and Israel. In 1917 sections of that area were promised to the Jewish people for a homeland and various governments and organizations argued over size and territory and borders for decades. It wasn't until 1948 that the nation of Israel was founded by UN vote.

This was a real kick in the teeth for the Islamic faithful, who saw themselves as being punished further for losing faith in true Islam. The militant Wahabbists became more radical and active, and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood began acting as charity and welfare organizations within the Muslim world, and also as missionaries of reinforcement to a more strict adherence to Islam.

The Muslims ignored the East-West Cold War, seeing Capitalism and Communism as essentially the same thing (an argument over how to distribute goods rather than a moral or ethical belief). They played the sides off against each other (in their opinion) and tried to rekindle that old-fashioned spirit of fierce raiders charging across the desert on swift mounts and spreading a pure, fiery faith once again. Conflict in the world provided groups opportunities to obtain weapons and battle training to put backbone in the salafiyya jihad.

Revolutions in the 1960's and 70's put folks like Nasser, Khadaffi, Assad and Hussein in power in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq respectively. Saddam Hussein came to power in a coup in 1968, ten years after an earlier failed coup left him wounded and on the border with Syria. He worked for the Ba'ath political movement, which had started out as an underground organization that was courting German help in World War Two to help get rid of British colonial power.

Arabic nations tried to unite and form a massive Arab Nation in the 1970's. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were technically part of the United Arab Republic, hence their modern flags all look essentially the same but with a different number of stars within them. The Republic broke apart after the 1973 war with Israel as the sides argued over the cause of the defeat and leadership arguments surfaced between Syria and Egypt.

Saddam engaged in many bloody purges within his own nation and carried out numerous attacks against Iran, a neighbor with whom the Iraqis have always shared border conflicts as well as Sunni/Shia'a ideological tensions. The Arab-Sunni Iraqis have always been fearful of the huge Sunni-Persian population, which is close to half the population of the country, and suspected of being more sympathetic to Iran.

The 1979 Revolution in Iran gave Saddam a chance to attack Iran with the US's blessing, since the first thing the religious fundamentalists of Iran did was take numerous hostages at the US embassy and hold them for 444 days. As a wave of religious fundamentalist revolution swept over the MidEast, Iraq seemed to be the best of a stew of bad choices to counterbalance the medieval regime of the Ayatollahs.

Saddam was awed by the fanatical devotion of the Iranians. Soldiers, children, even those armed only with sticks, would charge across minefields and shrugging of Iraqi military fire shouting "Allahu Ackbar" to attack Iraqis. Saddam tried to capitalize on this himself and began making public displayes of piety (being seen praying on TV) and having the words "Allah Ackbar" inscribed on the Iraqi flag. He also orderd extensive use of gas and bio warfare againstt he Iranians, primarily through artillery shells and in some applications, aerial spraying.

The 1991 invasion of Kuwait was justified by Iraq as "erasing old Colonialist borders". Iraq saw Kuwait as an arbitrary an dartificial nation, created to limit Iraq's ability to control a major seaport on the Persian Gulf. They based their border claims on old Ottoman Turkish imperial maps, shrugging off the fact that the Ottomans were also an imperial power that had manufactured borders as well. The 1991 Gulf War forced the Iraqis out of Kuwait, the original coalition goal.

The Shia'a and Kurds of the north attempte dto attack Saddam in his weakened state and expected the help of the US to do this. American help did not materialize and Saddam-- cruel and ruthless even before this-- violently suppressed the uprisings through extensive use of gas (and some say germ) warfare. Saddam ended hostilities with the coalition by signing a treaty explicitly promising that he would abandon weapons of mass production research and deployment and that he would open his borders to inspectors for precisely this purpose.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[Wicked Pilot]

He insisted that society should be run in strict orders and that the family was the basis of moral upbringing rather than warlordism.

And with 20/20 hindsight, we have seen where this brought people to. We can learn a lot from history.

[Darth Gojira]

Most impressive

BTW, around the beginning of the expansion of the Islamic Empire, they began progressively more intolerant acts towards "pagans". This started the bloodfued between Hinduism and Islam.