Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places (the Hajj), Mysticism 101, Rumi and Ibn Arabi in Most Influential Mystics, and If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia.

In 2013 a doctoral student named Alba Fedeli was studying a few pages of an old Qur'an in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. They had been bound in with leaves from a different, later manuscript. When the two leaves were separated and their parchment was sent to a laboratory in Oxford, the result came back in 2015: the animal whose skin they were written on had died, with 95.4 percent probability, between 568 and 645 CE. The man who brought the Qur'an to the world is generally thought to have lived from about 570 to 632.

Many Muslims heard confirmation of what they already believed: the Qur'an in their hands is the text the Prophet recited. Some historians were more cautious: radiocarbon dates the skin, not the ink. Both were looking at the same two pages of Suras 18 to 20, in a script an Arabic reader can still follow.

That double vision runs through this piece. Islam has its own account of its origins, told for fourteen centuries in its scripture, its biographies of the Prophet and the collections of his words. Historians ask in another way, using manuscripts, coins, inscriptions and outsiders' writings. This long read tells both, side by side, and labels which is which.

A note on names and courtesy. Muslims usually follow the Prophet's name with a blessing, ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, "God bless him and grant him peace", often written ﷺ or "PBUH" in English. Many say "peace be upon him" after other prophets' names too. This piece follows reference-work practice and writes simply "Muhammad"; no disrespect is meant. Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arab Christians as well. Scripture is quoted from the public-domain English translations of Marmaduke Pickthall (1930) and Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934), cited by sura and verse (so 2:256 means Sura 2, verse 256).

In this long read

1. Arabia before Islam (to 610)
2. Muhammad's life as Muslims tell it (c. 570–632)
3. Muhammad as historians reconstruct him
4. The Qur'an: revelation, recitation, compilation
5. Hadith: the Prophet's words, and how scholars weighed them
6. What Muslims believe and do: a day, a week, a year
7. Who should lead? The succession, Karbala and the Sunni–Shia divide (632–680 and after)
8. Caliphs, conquest and the slow pace of conversion (632–1258)
9. Law, theology and philosophy: sharia, fiqh, kalam and falsafa
10. Sufism and the three great empires (1250–1800)
11. Colonialism, reform and the end of the caliphate (1750–1924)
12. Political Islam and jihadism (1928 to today)
13. Islam today: two billion people
14. How to understand Islam today

Part 1 — Arabia before Islam (to 610)

Picture the Arabian Peninsula around the year 600. It is not an empty desert at the edge of history. To the north, two superpowers, the Christian Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire of Persia, have been fighting each other on and off for centuries, and both pay Arab tribes as buffers and allies: the Christian Ghassanids for Rome, the Lakhmids of al-Hira for Persia. To the south, Yemen has been home to kingdoms with dams, terraced fields and their own script for more than a thousand years.

Religion in this world was mixed. Most Arabs were polytheists, honouring gods and goddesses at shrines, sacred stones and trees. The Qur'an itself names three goddesses whom Meccans revered: "Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?" (53:19–20, Pickthall). But Judaism and Christianity were also part of the landscape. In the late fourth century the ruling elite of Himyar in Yemen adopted Judaism. In the 520s a Himyarite king, Dhu Nuwas, massacred Christians at Najran, and the Christian kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia invaded and took over Yemen in response. Jewish tribes farmed the oases of the Hejaz, including Yathrib, the town that would become Medina.

Mecca itself sat in a barren valley in the Hejaz, the western strip of the peninsula. Its importance came from a cube-shaped shrine, the Kaaba, which Muslim tradition says Abraham and his son Ishmael built for the worship of the one God, and which by the sixth century was surrounded by idols (later Muslim writers put their number at 360, with Hubal as the chief). Tribes came on pilgrimage in sacred months when fighting was forbidden. The dominant tribe of Mecca, the Quraysh, were guardians of the shrine and traders. A short sura remembers their caravans "in winter and summer" (106:2, Pickthall).

Muslim tradition calls this period the Jahiliyya, usually translated "the age of ignorance": not a lack of intelligence but a time before revelation, marked, in the tradition's telling, by idol worship, tribal feuding, drinking, gambling and the burying alive of unwanted infant daughters, which the Qur'an condemns (81:8–9).

Historians add a different texture. Inscriptions from northwestern Arabia, studied by scholars such as Ahmad Al-Jallad and Hythem Sidky, show older divine names like al-Lat and al-'Uzza giving way in the sixth century to prayers addressed to Allah or al-Ilah, "the God". They read this as Arabia being drawn into the monotheism of the late antique world around it, without a wholesale conversion to Judaism or Christianity. Arabic, too, was changing: the script that would carry the Qur'an was developing out of Nabataean writing in these same centuries. In other words, the world Muhammad was born into already knew about prophets, scripture, angels and a final judgment. That does not decide anything about where his message came from. It does mean his first listeners understood its vocabulary.

Muslims see pre-Islamic Arabia as a world waiting for a prophet. Historians see a world already full of talk about one God. Both pictures help explain how fast the new message travelled.

Part 2 — Muhammad's life as Muslims tell it (c. 570–632)

What follows is the story as the Muslim tradition tells it, drawn from the Qur'an, the early biographies (sira) and the hadith. Part 3 looks at how historians weigh these sources.

Orphan and merchant. Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca around 570, by tradition in the "Year of the Elephant", when the Ethiopian general Abraha is said to have marched on Mecca with war elephants and been turned back. He belonged to the Banu Hashim, a respected but not wealthy clan of the Quraysh. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was about six; he was raised by his grandfather and then his uncle Abu Talib. He worked in the caravan trade and was nicknamed al-Amin, "the trustworthy". Around 595 he married Khadija, an older, widowed merchant who had employed him; she was his only wife until her death and is honoured as the first person to believe in his message.

The cave. In his late thirties Muhammad took to retreating to a cave on Mount Hira, outside Mecca, to pray and reflect. Tradition dates the first revelation to 610, in the month of Ramadan. A report from his later wife Aisha, preserved in the hadith collection of al-Bukhari (no. 3), describes an angel seizing him and commanding him to "read" or "recite". He protested, "I do not know how to read," and the angel pressed him three times before giving him the first words, now the opening of Sura 96:

"Read: In the name of thy Lord Who createth, createth man from a clot. Read: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous, Who teacheth by the pen, teacheth man that which he knew not." (96:1–5, Pickthall)

He went home shaking to Khadija, who comforted him; her Christian cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal recognised the visitor as the angel who had come to Moses, Gabriel (Jibril). Revelations continued for the rest of Muhammad's life, about 23 years.

Preaching in Mecca (610–622). The early message was simple and urgent: God is one; the idols are nothing; a day of judgment is coming when every soul will answer for how it treated the poor, the orphan and the weak. The first believers included Khadija, his young cousin Ali, his freed slave Zayd, and his friend Abu Bakr. Quraysh leaders saw a threat to their gods, their pilgrimage trade and their authority. Converts without tribal protection were tortured: tradition remembers the Ethiopian slave Bilal, later the first to give the call to prayer, pinned under a hot boulder and repeating "One, One". Around 615 a group of Muslims took refuge with the Christian king of Aksum. The Quraysh imposed a boycott on Muhammad's clan. In 619, the "year of sorrow", both Khadija and Abu Talib, his protector, died.

Around 620, tradition places the Night Journey and Ascension (al-Isra' wa-l-Mi'raj): Muhammad was carried by night to Jerusalem and from there up through the heavens, meeting earlier prophets and receiving the command of daily prayer, which was set at five times a day.

The hijra (622). Two feuding Arab tribes of Yathrib, the Aws and the Khazraj, invited Muhammad to come as an arbiter. His followers slipped away in small groups; learning of a plot to kill him, he left with Abu Bakr, hiding three days in a cave on Mount Thawr while Ali slept in his bed as a decoy. This migration, the hijra, is so central that the Muslim calendar counts its years from it: year 1 of the Hijri era began on 16 July 622 in the Julian calendar. Yathrib became Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet", or simply Medina.

Medina (622–632). In Medina the community became a polity. A document known as the Constitution of Medina set out the duties of the emigrants, the Medinan helpers (Ansar) and the town's Jewish tribes as one community for defence. The direction of prayer, which had been toward Jerusalem, was changed to the Kaaba in Mecca (2:144). Fasting in Ramadan and the giving of alms were prescribed. Then came war with Mecca:

The relationship with Medina's Jewish tribes ended badly, and it is one of the most debated parts of the story. The sources describe two tribes, the Qaynuqa' and the Nadir, being expelled after disputes. After the siege of 627, the third, the Qurayza, accused of conspiring with the besieging Meccans, surrendered; an arbiter from their former allies sentenced the men to death and the women and children to captivity. The later sources put the number executed at several hundred, with figures up to about 900. Muslim tradition presents it as a wartime judgment for treason; critics, medieval and modern, call it a massacre; and some historians doubt the scale described in sources written more than a century later. All three views have serious defenders.

When Mecca surrendered in 630, Muhammad pardoned most of his former enemies, and tribes across Arabia sent delegations to submit. In 632 he led the pilgrimage that set the rites of the Hajj, with a sermon remembered for its words on equality: an Arab has no merit over a non-Arab except in piety. A few months later he fell ill and died in Medina, at about 62, and was buried where he died, in Aisha's house, now under the green dome of the Prophet's Mosque.

For Muslims, Muhammad is not divine and is not worshipped. He is a human being, the final messenger in a line that includes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus: "the messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets" (33:40, Pickthall). He is also the model of a whole life: husband, father, merchant, judge, statesman and man of prayer, whose example, the sunna, Muslims try to follow in matters as large as justice and as small as how to greet a guest.

Part 3 — Muhammad as historians reconstruct him

Historians approach the same life with one basic question: how close in time is each source to the events it describes?

The outside witnesses. A Greek Christian text called the Doctrina Jacobi, generally dated to 634 or soon after, mentions a prophet who has appeared among the Saracens. A Syriac chronicle attributed to Thomas the Presbyter, from about 640, records a battle in February 634 "between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad" near Gaza. That is one of the earliest datable mentions of Muhammad by name, written by people who did not believe in him. A bilingual Greek–Arabic tax receipt from Egypt, known as PERF 558, is dated "year 22", that is, 643 CE: the Hijri calendar was already in official use. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691–692 under the caliph Abd al-Malik, carries the earliest surviving monumental inscriptions proclaiming Islam and Muhammad as God's messenger, including Qur'anic verses about Jesus.

The problem of the gap. The detailed narrative of Muhammad's life, with its dialogues and dates, comes mostly from works written down 130 to 250 years after his death. Muslim scholars have always known this and built a whole science (Part 5) to sort reliable reports from unreliable ones. Western scholars have argued for more than a century about how much the system could filter out. Ibn Hisham himself says in his preface that he left out material that might "distress" people.

The scholarly positions fall roughly into three groups:

1. The traditional view. The sources, critically handled, preserve a broadly accurate history. Most Muslim scholars hold this, as do many Western historians, such as W. Montgomery Watt in his biographies of the 1950s.
2. The sceptical or "revisionist" view. In the 1970s John Wansbrough argued that the Qur'an took its final shape over a long period, and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, in Hagarism (1977), tried to reconstruct early Islam from non-Muslim sources alone, arriving at a very different picture. Most scholars came to regard Hagarism's specific thesis as too speculative and too dependent on hostile sources, but the questions it raised about source criticism remain.
3. The current middle ground. Many historians today, such as Fred Donner (Muhammad and the Believers, 2010), accept that Muhammad lived and led a movement in western Arabia in the early seventh century, that the Qur'an goes back to that movement, and that the main outline of the story (Mecca, the hijra, Medina, war and victory, death in 632) is sound. They are more cautious about specific episodes, dialogues and numbers. Donner suggests the early movement saw itself as a community of "Believers", open at first to pious Jews and Christians, before it defined itself sharply as "Islam".

New evidence keeps arriving, and most of it has pushed toward an early date for the Qur'an (Part 4). The oldest manuscripts, datable papyri and inscriptions fit a movement that existed and had a scripture within decades of 632, which is consistent with the tradition's basic outline.

Historians can tell you that the Arabs of Muhammad fought near Gaza in 634. They cannot tell you whether an angel spoke in a cave. Those are different kinds of question, and honest scholarship knows the difference.

Two points matter for fairness. Scepticism about sources is not hostility to Islam: the sceptics were mostly applying methods first used on the Bible. And Muslim scholars such as Jonathan A. C. Brown have engaged this scholarship in detail, arguing that it often underrates the rigour of the classical Muslim critics.

Part 4 — The Qur'an: revelation, recitation, compilation

What it is, in Muslims' own terms. For Muslims the Qur'an is not a book about God; it is God's own speech, revealed in Arabic to Muhammad through Gabriel, word for word. The word Qur'an means "recitation". Translations are treated as interpretations of its meaning, not the Qur'an itself, which is why bilingual editions keep the Arabic beside the English. Muslims believe the text is divinely protected: "Lo! We, even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian" (15:9, Pickthall). Its beauty is itself held to be a miracle (i'jaz, "inimitability"); one verse challenges doubters to "produce a surah of the like thereof" (2:23, Pickthall).

How it is built. The Qur'an has 114 suras (chapters) and 6,236 verses (ayat, "signs") in the most common count, which does not number the opening formula. The suras are not arranged in the order they were revealed. After the short opening prayer, al-Fatiha, they run roughly from longest to shortest, so a newcomer who starts at the front meets the long, legal Medinan suras first. The short, rhythmic, early Meccan suras, about God, creation and judgment, are mostly at the back. For reading through in a month, the text is divided into 30 equal parts (juz'), which is why many Muslims finish one juz' a night in Ramadan.

Its themes. God's oneness (tawhid) is the centre. The briefest statement is Sura 112, which many Muslims know by heart: "Say: He is Allah, the One! Allah, the eternally Besought of all! He begetteth not nor was begotten. And there is none comparable unto Him" (112:1–4, Pickthall). Around that centre: the signs of God in nature, the stories of earlier prophets (Moses is named about 136 times, more than anyone else, while Muhammad is named only four times; Mary, the only woman named in the Qur'an, has a sura named after her), the day of judgment, paradise and hell, God's mercy (every sura but one opens "In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"), and, mostly in the Medinan suras, rules for a community: prayer, fasting, marriage, inheritance, trade, war and peace.

How it is recited. The Qur'an was oral before it was written and it still lives mainly as sound. Recitation follows detailed rules called tajwid, which govern pronunciation, lengthening of vowels and pauses. Great reciters are famous, and memorising the whole text makes one a hafiz (for a woman, hafiza). There are several canonical "readings" (qira'at), transmitted from early teachers with small differences in vowels and wording. Today most printed copies follow the reading of Hafs from 'Asim of Kufa, used in the influential Cairo edition of 1924; the reading of Warsh is common in North and West Africa.

How the book was gathered: the tradition's account

According to Sunni tradition, preserved in al-Bukhari's collection (nos. 4986 and 4987), the revelations were memorised by many companions and written on whatever was to hand. After the battle of Yamama in 632–633 killed many men who knew the Qur'an by heart, the caliph Abu Bakr, urged by Umar, asked Muhammad's scribe Zayd ibn Thabit to collect it. Zayd described searching for it "from palm stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart", and said moving a mountain would have been lighter. The resulting sheets passed to Umar's daughter Hafsa, one of the Prophet's widows.

Around 650 the third caliph, Uthman, was told that soldiers from Syria and Iraq were quarrelling over different ways of reciting. He had Zayd and three others prepare master copies from Hafsa's sheets, sent one to each main province, and ordered other written copies destroyed. This is the Uthmanic codex, the consonantal skeleton (rasm) of every Qur'an today. Tradition also remembers that some companions, notably Ibn Mas'ud, had their own copies with a different order of suras and some variant readings. Shia Muslims recite the same text, though Shia tradition holds that Ali also compiled a copy and gives less weight to Uthman's role. Some Shia writers, early and later, claimed that verses about Ali had been suppressed, but the mainstream Shia position, from the Imams onward in Shia belief, has been that the Qur'an is complete and unaltered.

What the manuscripts show

The Sana'a palimpsest is the most important find for scholars of the text. In 1972 workers restoring the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana'a found a cache of old manuscript fragments. One codex, identified as a palimpsest in 1981, had been scraped clean and rewritten. Ultraviolet and X-ray imaging later recovered the lower text. Behnam Sadeghi and his co-authors, publishing in 2010 and 2012, argued that the lower text is a companion-era codex outside the Uthmanic line: its variants are mostly small (word order, extra or missing words and phrases, spelling), and its suras sometimes run in a different order, yet it rarely changes the meaning. In their reading, the evidence fits the traditional picture of an early standardisation under Uthman, while showing that other versions did circulate before it. Other scholars, such as Asma Hilali, who published the legible folios in 2017, read the palimpsest differently, arguing that both layers look like scribal school exercises rather than a rival edition of the Qur'an; the debate continues.

The Birmingham leaves were the headline of 2015, and the debate about them is worth knowing. Scholars have since recognised that they belong to the same manuscript as sixteen leaves in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (BnF Arabe 328c). The university's own scholars said they could take us "back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam", and noted that blank parchment could be stored, so the writing might date from the Uthmanic copying of about 650. Some Saudi specialists argued the opposite way, that features such as chapter separators and verse markings looked too developed for the Prophet's lifetime. A few Western writers, such as the popular historian Tom Holland, suggested the date might unsettle the traditional story. Most specialists read it more modestly: radiocarbon ranges are wide, and a seventh-century copy matching the standard text is what the tradition would lead you to expect.

The most surprising thing about the earliest Qur'an manuscripts is how unsurprising their text is. The arguments are about decades, not centuries.

Part 5 — Hadith: the Prophet's words, and how scholars weighed them

The Qur'an tells Muslims to pray, but not exactly how. It commands alms, but does not give the rate. To fill in the details, Muslims turn to the sunna, the example of the Prophet, known through hadith: reports of what he said, did, or approved. Many of Islam's most familiar teachings come from hadith rather than the Qur'an, including the list of five pillars (al-Bukhari no. 8) and the famous opening of al-Bukhari's collection: "The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions" (no. 1).

Every hadith has two parts. The isnad is the chain of transmitters: "A told me that B told him that C heard the Prophet say…". The matn is the text itself. From the eighth century onward, Muslim scholars built a vast discipline to test the chains. They compiled biographical dictionaries of thousands of transmitters, recording when each lived, whom they could have met, how good their memory was, and whether they were honest or partisan. On that basis they graded reports:

Grading is not a museum exercise. Take a famous line, "Seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim". It is quoted everywhere, but the full version in the collection of Ibn Majah (no. 224), which goes on to compare teaching the undeserving to hanging jewels on swine, is graded weak or very weak by modern editors such as al-Albani. By contrast, "The best of you are those who are best to your women" in al-Tirmidhi's collection (no. 1162) is graded hasan sahih. Ordinary Muslims today can look up a hadith's grade on their phones, and arguments about Islam often turn on exactly such grades.

The canonical collections. In the ninth century, six collections came to be regarded by Sunnis as the most authoritative: those of al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875), called the two Sahihs ("sound"), and the Sunan of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i and Ibn Majah. Al-Bukhari's has about 7,500 reports, or around 2,600 without repetitions; tradition says he selected them from hundreds of thousands. Shia Muslims rely on their own collections, which pass through the Prophet's family and the Imams, above all the "Four Books", the first and most important being al-Kafi of al-Kulayni (d. 941). Shia collections are not held to be infallible: Shia scholars grade them too.

The modern debate. In 1890 the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher argued that many hadith reflect the disputes of the first two Islamic centuries more than the Prophet's own time, and in 1950 Joseph Schacht argued that most legal hadith were put into circulation later, with chains "improved" backward. Muslim scholars such as M. M. Azami replied in detail, and later Western scholars such as Harald Motzki showed that some material can be traced to the late seventh or early eighth century. Today the field is less polarised: few scholars think the hadith are wholly reliable as a record of Muhammad's words, few think they are wholly invented, and the classical Muslim critics are widely respected for having asked many of the same questions first.

Muslims did not wait for modern historians to worry about fake quotations. They spent a thousand years building tools to catch them.

Part 6 — What Muslims believe and do: a day, a week, a year

A hadith recorded by both al-Bukhari (no. 50) and Muslim (Book of Faith, no. 1) tells of a stranger in brilliant white clothes who sat knee to knee with the Prophet and asked: what is islam, what is iman, what is ihsan? Afterwards the Prophet told his companions it had been Gabriel, "who came to teach the people their religion". The three answers are still the standard map of the faith.

Iman (faith): the six articles. In Muslim's version, faith is to believe in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, and in God's decree (qadar), its good and its bad. The books include the Torah given to Moses, the Psalms to David and the Gospel to Jesus; Muslims believe these were genuine revelations whose texts were later altered, with the Qur'an as the final and preserved one. Shia theology frames the core a little differently, as five "roots of religion": God's oneness, God's justice, prophethood, the imamate, and the resurrection.

Islam (submission): the five pillars. Islam means "submission" or "surrender" to God, and a Muslim is "one who submits".

The fast is meant to teach self-restraint: "Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) self-restraint" (2:183, Yusuf Ali). The sick, travellers, pregnant and nursing women and others may postpone or be excused.

Ihsan (excellence). The third answer: "To worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you cannot achieve this state of devotion then you must consider that He is looking at you" (al-Bukhari no. 50). This is the root that Sufism (Part 10) grows from.

An ordinary day

Imagine a teacher in Kuala Lumpur, a taxi driver in Cairo or a nurse in Birmingham. The day is framed by five prayers: Fajr before dawn, Dhuhr after midday, Asr in the afternoon, Maghrib just after sunset, Isha at night. Before each comes wudu, washing hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, head and feet. The prayer itself is a sequence of standing, bowing, prostrating with the forehead on the ground, and sitting, with recitation in Arabic, beginning always with the Fatiha: "Thee (alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help. Show us the straight path" (1:5–6, Pickthall). It takes five to ten minutes; many pray at work on a small mat, with a phone app showing the direction of Mecca.

Small formulas run through the day: bismillah ("in the name of God") before eating, alhamdulillah ("praise be to God") for good news, insha'Allah ("if God wills") about the future. Food is halal ("permitted"): no pork, no alcohol, and meat from animals slaughtered in God's name.

An ordinary week

Friday (Jum'a) is the day of congregational prayer at midday, with a sermon (khutba). It is obligatory for adult men; women may attend, and practice varies greatly by country (Pew found that in parts of Central and South Asia most women never attend mosque, while women are about as likely as men to read the Qur'an daily). Friday is not a sabbath: work may resume afterwards, although many Muslim-majority countries make Friday part of the weekend.

The mosque (masjid, "place of prostration") is a simple idea: a clean space facing Mecca. A niche (mihrab) marks the direction, a pulpit (minbar) is used for the sermon, and a minaret, where there is one, carries the call to prayer (adhan). There are no priests and no sacraments: an imam is simply whoever leads the prayer, usually someone learned. Mosques are also schools, community centres and places to break the fast in Ramadan.

An ordinary year

The Islamic calendar is lunar: twelve months of 29 or 30 days, 354 or 355 days a year. So Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier each solar year and travels through every season over roughly 33 years. Months traditionally begin with the sighting of the new crescent, so dates can differ by a day between countries. Year 1448 AH began around 16 June 2026. Ramadan 1447 ran from about 18 February to 19 March 2026, and Ramadan 1448 is expected to begin around 8 February 2027.

Life's passages have their rites too: marriage is a contract with a gift (mahr) from groom to bride, and the dead are buried quickly, wrapped in white cloth, facing Mecca.

Part 7 — Who should lead? The succession, Karbala and the Sunni–Shia divide (632–680 and after)

Muhammad died without a son, and, in the view of the majority, without naming a successor. Within hours of his death, leaders of the Medinan Ansar met at a meeting hall, the Saqifa, to choose a leader. Abu Bakr, Umar and others hurried there, and after a heated debate Abu Bakr was acclaimed as khalifat rasul Allah, "successor of the Messenger of God", from which English gets caliph. Meanwhile Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, married to his daughter Fatima, was preparing the Prophet's body for burial.

Here the community's memory divides, and it is worth giving both accounts in the words their holders would use.

The Sunni account. The Prophet left the choice to the community. The companions chose the most senior and trusted among them, Abu Bakr, his closest friend and the father of his wife Aisha, who had led the prayers during his last illness. Then came Umar (r. 634–644), Uthman (r. 644–656) and Ali (r. 656–661). All four are honoured as the Rashidun, "the rightly guided caliphs", and the companions as a whole are regarded as upright transmitters of the faith. Sunnis take their name from ahl al-sunna wa-l-jama'a, "the people of the Prophet's way and of the community": authority rests in the Qur'an, the sunna and the consensus of the community and its scholars. They love and revere Ali and the Prophet's family too.

The Shia account. The Prophet did name a successor. On the way back from his farewell pilgrimage, at a pool called Ghadir Khumm, he took Ali's hand before the gathered pilgrims and said, "For whomever I am his mawla (master, patron), Ali is his mawla." For Shia Muslims this was a clear appointment, and passing over Ali was a grave wrong. Leadership belongs to the Imams, divinely guided and protected from sin, descended from Muhammad through Ali and Fatima. The name Shia comes from shi'at Ali, "the party of Ali". (Sunnis accept that Muhammad praised Ali at Ghadir Khumm, but read mawla as "friend" and the words as an endorsement, not an appointment.)

The tensions turned violent in the generation after. Uthman was killed by rebels in 656. Ali became caliph, but faced the First Fitna (civil war): the Battle of the Camel against a party including Aisha, and the Battle of Siffin (657) against Mu'awiya, Uthman's kinsman and governor of Syria. When Ali agreed to arbitration at Siffin, a group of his own soldiers rejected it ("judgment belongs to God alone") and broke away; they became known as the Kharijites, "those who went out". One of them assassinated Ali in 661. Mu'awiya founded the Umayyad dynasty.

Karbala. In 680 Mu'awiya died and his son Yazid succeeded him, the first dynastic succession in Islam, which many Muslims of every later school considered illegitimate. Ali's younger son Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, refused to pledge allegiance and set out from Mecca toward Kufa in Iraq, whose people had invited him. On the plain of Karbala, he and a small band of family and followers, with women and children, were surrounded by a far larger Umayyad army, cut off from the river, and on the 10th of Muharram, 61 AH (10 October 680), killed. Husayn's head was carried to Yazid in Damascus.

For Shia Muslims, Karbala is not just a battle: it is the pattern of history, the righteous few standing against tyranny and paying with their lives.

Sunnis mourn Husayn as well; he is a revered member of the Prophet's family, and Sunni scholars have long condemned his killing. But for Shia Muslims, Karbala became the heart of religious life. Each year during the first ten days of Muharram, they gather in mourning assemblies to hear the story retold, recite elegies, and process in the streets. Forty days after Ashura, the Arbaeen pilgrimage draws vast crowds, many walking for days, to Husayn's shrine at Karbala. The themes of martyrdom, injustice and redemptive suffering run deep in Shia piety and, in modern times, in Shia politics.

The branches today

Pew Research Center estimated in 2009 that Shia Muslims are 10–13% of all Muslims, with most of the rest Sunni. It noted that its sectarian figures are less precise than its overall counts. Most Shia live in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. Shia are majorities in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, and large communities in Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf.

The Nizari Ismailis were led for 67 years by Karim Aga Khan IV, the 49th Imam, who died in 2025; his son succeeded him as Aga Khan V. The Alevis of Turkey and the Alawites of Syria are often counted as Shia-derived, though their practice differs greatly from Twelver Shi'ism. The Ahmadiyya movement, founded in British India in 1889, regards itself as Muslim; most Sunni and Shia authorities do not, and Pakistan's 1974 constitutional amendment declaring Ahmadis non-Muslims has been followed by legal discrimination and violence.

How deep is the division today? It depends where you look. Pew's 2012 survey found that in most Middle Eastern countries surveyed, at least 40% of Sunnis did not accept Shia as fellow Muslims, a view shaped by modern politics as much as theology; but in Lebanon and Iraq, where the two live side by side, large majorities did. In Indonesia only 26% called themselves Sunni and 56% "just a Muslim". In 2005 about 200 scholars meeting in Amman, later endorsed by hundreds more, formally recognised the eight schools of Sunni, Shia and Ibadi law as valid Islam (Part 12).

Part 8 — Caliphs, conquest and the slow pace of conversion (632–1258)

Within a century of Muhammad's death, rulers who called themselves his successors governed from the Atlantic to the borders of China. This is one of the fastest expansions in history, and it is often misunderstood in two opposite ways: as a holy war that converted peoples at sword-point, or as a peaceful spread of faith. The evidence supports neither.

Conquest. The Arab armies struck two empires exhausted by a generation of war with each other and by plague. The Byzantines lost Syria after the battle of Yarmuk (636) and Egypt by 642. The Sasanian Empire collapsed entirely; its last king was killed in 651. Under the Umayyads, armies crossed into Spain in 711 and into Sindh (in modern Pakistan) at about the same time, and reached Central Asia. These were real wars of conquest, with sieges, battles and captives, and rulers justified them in religious terms. A Frankish victory near Tours in 732 and the failure of the Arab sieges of Constantinople marked the limits in the west.

Conversion. But conquest did not mean conversion, at least not quickly. The conquerors at first lived apart in garrison towns such as Kufa, Basra and Fustat (Old Cairo); non-Muslims paid a poll tax, so rulers had little fiscal reason to seek converts, and under the Umayyads converts were often treated as second-class "clients". The historian Richard Bulliet (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, 1979) used the spread of Muslim names in family trees to estimate a "conversion curve": perhaps a tenth of Iran's population was Muslim by the end of the Umayyad era, with the great surge in the ninth and tenth centuries. Other estimates put a Muslim majority in Egypt only around the tenth century, and parts of Syria may have stayed mostly Christian until the 1200s. The figures are debated; the direction is not. The Middle East became mostly Muslim over three to six centuries, through trade, intermarriage, social advantage, the appeal of the faith and, at times, pressure.

Beyond the reach of armies, Islam spread mostly by trade and preaching: across the Sahara into West Africa, down the East African coast, and along the sea routes to India, Malaysia and Indonesia, where today's largest Muslim populations live (Part 13).

Dhimmi status: protection and inequality. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others living under Muslim rule were known as dhimmis, "protected people". The status rests in part on the Qur'an (9:29), which commands fighting certain People of the Book "until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (Yusuf Ali). It meant two things at once, and a fair account must keep both:

• Protection. Dhimmis kept their lives, property and places of worship, and their communities ran their own religious and family law under their own leaders. They were not forced to convert. Christians and Jews served as physicians, scribes, bankers and officials, and many of the translators of Greek works into Arabic were Christians. For much of history, this was more tolerance than minorities received in Christian Europe.
• Inequality. Dhimmis paid the jizya poll tax, could not usually bear arms or testify against Muslims in some matters, and could face rules (codified in documents attributed to Umar, probably written later) on distinctive dress, not building new churches, and not riding horses. Enforcement varied hugely by ruler and era, from relaxed to harsh, with outbreaks of persecution.

Medieval al-Andalus is a good test case for the two caricatures. It produced a real culture of shared learning, with Jewish poets writing in Hebrew on Arabic models and scholars like the Jewish philosopher Maimonides writing in Arabic. It also saw episodes of persecution, such as under the Almohads in the twelfth century, which drove Maimonides' family into exile. "Golden age of tolerance" and "dark age of oppression" are both too simple.

The Abbasid revolution. In 750 a movement drawing on Persian converts' resentment and loyalty to the Prophet's family overthrew the Umayyads. The Abbasids, descended from Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas, founded Baghdad in 762, one of the largest cities in the world, and under them being Muslim mattered more than being Arab. From the 900s real power passed to regional dynasties and commanders, while the caliph kept a symbolic authority. The Mongols sacked Baghdad and killed the caliph in 1258; "shadow caliphs" lived on in Cairo until the Ottoman conquest of 1517.

Part 9 — Law, theology and philosophy: sharia, fiqh, kalam and falsafa

Sharia and fiqh

Few words are as misunderstood in English as sharia. Literally "the path to the watering place", it means God's guidance for the whole of life, as Muslims believe it to be: worship, ethics, family, trade, crime and government. Fiqh ("understanding") is the human effort to work out what that guidance requires. Pew's definition is a good one: sharia refers to the ethical principles in the Qur'an and the sunna, and fiqh to the jurisprudence that comes from humans interpreting them. Muslim scholars still debate where the boundary lies. The distinction matters: sharia is believed to be perfect and divine; fiqh is human, plural and fallible, which is why for many centuries several legal schools, with different rulings, have all been considered valid.

Classical Sunni jurisprudence used four main sources, in rough order: the Qur'an, the sunna, the consensus (ijma') of qualified scholars, and analogical reasoning (qiyas) from known cases to new ones. Most of fiqh is not criminal law at all. It is about how to pray, fast, marry, divorce, inherit, buy and sell. Rulings are graded on a five-part scale: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged and forbidden. Most of life falls in "permitted".

Ijtihad is independent legal reasoning by a qualified scholar. Western scholars once claimed that from about the tenth century Sunnis declared "the gate of ijtihad closed", so that law froze. The legal historian Wael Hallaq showed in a famous 1984 article, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?", that this was largely a myth: jurists kept reasoning and issuing new rulings in every century, even while many debated how much independence was allowed. Twelver Shia law, in its dominant Usuli school, gives living senior scholars, the mujtahids, an especially strong role, and ordinary believers follow (taqlid) one of them.

How much of this law do states apply today? It varies enormously. A few countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, claim to base their legal systems on sharia; many apply Islamic law mainly to family matters such as marriage and inheritance; others, like Turkey, abolished sharia courts in the 1920s. Pew's 2013 survey found support for making sharia official law ranged from 99% of Muslims in Afghanistan to 8% in Azerbaijan, and that most supporters thought it should apply only to Muslims. Severe criminal punishments drew less support than religious courts for family disputes.

Kalam: arguing about God

Muslims also argued, intensely, about theology. The discipline was called kalam ("speech" or "discussion").

• The Mu'tazila, flourishing in eighth- and ninth-century Basra and Baghdad, put reason and God's justice first. Because God is just, humans must be truly free to choose, or punishment would be unfair. Because God is one, His attributes cannot be separate eternal beings, and so the Qur'an, God's speech, must be created in time rather than eternal. In 833 the caliph al-Ma'mun made the createdness of the Qur'an official doctrine and had scholars interrogated in an inquisition known as the mihna. Ahmad ibn Hanbal refused to agree, was flogged and imprisoned, and became a hero. The policy was abandoned around 848–851, and with it the caliphs' claim to decide doctrine. Religious authority passed to the scholars.
• Al-Ash'ari (d. 935/6), a former Mu'tazili, founded the school that became the main Sunni theology, using reason to defend positions closer to the hadith scholars: the Qur'an is God's uncreated speech; God's will is all-powerful, so that even the link between cause and effect is His continuing act; the Qur'an's descriptions of God are accepted "without asking how". The Maturidi school (al-Maturidi, d. 944), dominant among Hanafis in Central Asia and Turkey, gives more room to human reason and choice. A third current, the Athari or traditionalist, distrusted kalam altogether; it is the forerunner of much modern Salafi theology.
• Twelver Shia theology absorbed much Mu'tazili thinking about God's justice and human freedom, and the Zaydis even more.

Falsafa and the translation movement

Between the mid-eighth and the late tenth century, under Abbasid patronage, a translation movement rendered much of Greek philosophy, medicine, mathematics and astronomy into Arabic, often via Syriac, along with Persian and Indian works. Many translators were Christians, such as the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873). A caution: the famous House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) in Baghdad was a palace library, not the grand state academy of popular history; as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, it "cannot be viewed as an institutional center for the translations". A wide circle of patrons, physicians, officials and scholars drove the movement.

Out of this came falsafa, philosophy in the Greek tradition, written in Arabic:

Al-Ghazali's attack was precise. Of twenty philosophical positions he examined, he judged three to be not just wrong but incompatible with Islam: that the world has no beginning in time, that God knows only universals and not individual things, and that souls do not return to bodies at the resurrection. In 1095, at the height of his fame as a professor in Baghdad, he had a personal crisis, gave up his post, and became a wandering seeker; his Revival of the Religious Sciences made Sufism respectable in mainstream Sunni learning.

Science, without the hype. Muslim-ruled lands were for several centuries the world's leading centres of science. Al-Khwarizmi's book on "completion and balancing" (al-jabr), in the early ninth century, gave algebra its name, and his own name gave us "algorithm". Ibn al-Haytham (d. c. 1040) in Cairo wrote a Book of Optics built on careful experiment. Physicians wrote encyclopedias of medicine; astronomers built observatories, such as the one at Maragha in Iran (founded 1259). Two cautions apply. First, these scholars built openly on Greek, Persian and Indian work, as they themselves said, and Christians, Jews and others took part. Second, the old story that Islamic science "declined" after al-Ghazali or after 1258 is now widely questioned: important astronomy continued at Maragha, Damascus and Samarkand into the fifteenth century. Claims that Muslims "invented" everything are as wrong as claims that they merely kept the Greeks on ice.

The scholars of Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba did not hold the Greeks in storage for Europe. They argued with them, corrected them and went on.

Part 10 — Sufism and the three great empires (1250–1800)

Sufism

Sufism (tasawwuf) is the inward, mystical dimension of Islam: the practice of ihsan, worshipping God as if you see Him. This library already has pieces on two of its giants, Rumi and Ibn Arabi, and Mysticism 101 places Sufism among the world's mystical traditions, so here is only the outline.

Early ascetics and mystics, such as the woman saint Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya of Basra (d. 801), taught love of God for His own sake, not for fear of hell or hope of paradise. Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910) taught a "sober" Sufism rooted in the law; al-Hallaj, who cried "I am the Truth", was executed in Baghdad in 922. After al-Ghazali, Sufism became part of mainstream Sunni life. From the twelfth century, Sufis organised into orders (tariqas), each tracing a chain of teachers back to the Prophet: the Qadiriyya, the Naqshbandiyya, the Chishtiyya of South Asia, the Shadhiliyya of North Africa, Rumi's Mevlevis and many more. Their central practice is dhikr, remembrance of God through the repetition of His names or short phrases, alone or in groups, sometimes with music and movement. "Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest!" (13:28, Pickthall). Sufi lodges, and the tombs of their saints, became centres of devotion, and Sufi teachers were central to the spread of Islam in South Asia, Central Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Sufism has always had critics inside Islam. The fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya attacked practices such as asking saints for intercession at their tombs. Modern Salafis go further, and in recent decades militants in several countries have destroyed Sufi shrines. Pew's 2012 survey found Sufis widely accepted as Muslims in South Asia but less known or accepted elsewhere.

Sunni, Shia and Sufi: what each emphasises

Sufism is not a third sect. There are Sunni Sufis (the large majority) and Shia mystics, and many Muslims who belong to no order still read Rumi. The table compares emphases, not exclusive boxes:

The three empires

From the 1300s to the 1700s, three great Muslim empires dominated much of the Old World. Historians sometimes call them "gunpowder empires", because cannon and muskets helped them build large centralised states.

• The Ottomans (c. 1300–1922), a Turkish dynasty from north-western Anatolia, conquered Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire, and made it their capital, Istanbul. Selim I took Syria, Egypt and the guardianship of Mecca and Medina in 1516–17, and the Ottoman sultans increasingly styled themselves caliphs. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566) the empire reached from Hungary to Yemen and Algeria. Its official law was Hanafi, its religious scholars were organised in a state hierarchy, and Christian and Jewish communities were governed through their own religious leaders in the so-called millet system.
• The Safavids (1501–1736, with real power ending in the 1720s) began as a Sufi order in north-western Iran. Shah Ismail I, taking power in 1501, made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion of a then mostly Sunni country and invited Shia scholars from Jabal Amil in Lebanon. The conversion that followed over two centuries is why Iran is the Shia heartland today. Isfahan, under Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629), became one of the world's most beautiful cities, and Ottoman–Safavid wars gave the Sunni–Shia divide a geopolitical edge.
• The Mughals (1526–1857), descendants of Timur and Genghis Khan, ruled most of the Indian subcontinent over a mostly Hindu population. Akbar (r. 1556–1605) abolished the jizya and hosted debates among Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars; Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) ruled more strictly by Hanafi law and reimposed the jizya in 1679. They left the Taj Mahal and a Persianate culture that shaped Urdu. The British deposed the last emperor after the rebellion of 1857.

Beyond these empires, Islam kept spreading mainly through traders, scholars and Sufis: in the Sahel, where Mali's ruler Mansa Musa made a famously lavish pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 and Timbuktu became a centre of learning; along the Swahili coast; and across the Malay world, where coastal rulers converted from the 1200s onward.

Part 11 — Colonialism, reform and the end of the caliphate (1750–1924)

By 1900 most Muslims lived under European rule or influence: the British in India, Egypt, Malaya and much of Africa; the French in North and West Africa; the Dutch in Indonesia; the Russians in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The question many Muslims asked was urgent and painful: how had a civilisation that once led the world come to this, and what should be done?

There were several answers, and they still shape Islam today.

Revival by purification: Wahhabism and Salafism. In central Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) preached a return to strict monotheism and condemned practices he saw as compromising it: venerating saints and tombs, seeking intercession from the dead. In 1744 he made a pact with a local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud, joining religious reform to political power. The alliance founded the first Saudi state and, after collapses and revivals, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Its followers usually reject the name "Wahhabi" and call themselves muwahhidun (monotheists) or Salafis. Critics, Sunni and Shia, point to its early wars against other Muslims, including the sack of Karbala in 1802, and to its destruction of shrines. Supporters see it as a necessary return to the faith of the first generations.

Salafism more broadly takes its name from the salaf, "the pious predecessors", the first three generations of Muslims, whose understanding is treated as the standard. Modern Salafism is diverse: most Salafis are quietist, focused on correct belief and practice and avoiding politics; some are political activists; a small minority, discussed in Part 12, are jihadists.

Reform by reason: the modernists. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838/39–1897), a restless activist, urged Muslims to unite against European imperialism and to embrace reason and science, which he insisted were not foreign to Islam. His student Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), later Grand Mufti of Egypt, argued that true Islam was rational, that blind imitation of past jurists (taqlid) must give way to fresh ijtihad, and that education must be reformed. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded the college at Aligarh (1875), and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) called for a "reconstruction of religious thought in Islam". Confusingly, Abduh's circle also called its return to the early sources "salafi", in a modernising spirit; his student Rashid Rida later moved in a more conservative direction.

Reform by the state. Ottoman reformers in the nineteenth century reorganised law, schools and the army on European lines. After the empire's defeat in the First World War, the new Turkish republic of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) went much further: it abolished the sultanate in 1922, and on 3 March 1924 the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate itself. The last caliph, Abdulmejid II, was sent into exile. In India, Muslims had campaigned to defend the caliphate in the Khilafat movement; its abolition left a symbolic gap that many Muslims felt deeply and that some movements, very differently, have tried to fill ever since.

In 1924, for the first time since 632, there was no one whom most Sunni Muslims could point to as caliph. Movements as different as the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS were, in part, answers to that absence.

Part 12 — Political Islam and jihadism (1928 to today)

Political Islam

In 1928, four years after the caliphate's end, a schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt, teaching that Islam is "a complete way of life" and that society should be renewed from below, through preaching, schools, clinics and charity, and eventually an Islamic state. It became a mass movement across the Arab world. Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949. Under Nasser the Brotherhood was banned; its thinker Sayyid Qutb wrote in prison that Muslim societies had fallen back into jahiliyya and needed a vanguard to restore God's sovereignty. He was executed in 1966, and his Milestones (1964) later inspired radicals. In South Asia, Abul A'la Mawdudi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 with a similar vision.

Political Islam, or "Islamism", is a broad family. At one end are parties that compete in elections, such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, Tunisia's Ennahda and various Brotherhood parties; in Egypt the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2012 and was overthrown by the army in 2013. Supporters say these movements bring Islamic ethics, social welfare and accountable government to societies long ruled by secular dictators. Critics, including many Muslims, worry about religious coercion, the treatment of women and minorities, and whether such parties accept losing power.

The Iranian Revolution (1979) brought a Shia version to power. Mass protests, many organised around Shia mourning rituals, toppled the Shah in February 1979, and a referendum that spring made Iran an Islamic Republic. Its constitution was built around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of velayat-e faqih, "guardianship of the jurist": in the Twelfth Imam's absence, a senior jurist should hold supreme authority. Many senior Shia scholars, notably in Najaf, Iraq, have not accepted this theory, which shows that it is one Shia position, not the Shia position.

Jihadism

Jihad means "striving" or "struggle". In Muslim tradition it covers the inner struggle against one's own ego (which many Sufis call the greater jihad) as well as armed warfare, which classical law regulated: it had to be declared by legitimate authority, and forbade killing women, children, the elderly and non-combatants. The Qur'an speaks of fighting those who fight you, "but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors" (2:190, Pickthall).

Jihadism in the modern sense is the belief of small armed groups that violence, including against civilians and against other Muslims they declare apostates, is a religious duty. Its main organisations:

• Al-Qaeda, founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and others out of the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, which killed nearly 3,000 people, and many attacks elsewhere.
• The Islamic State (ISIS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and on 29 June 2014 declared a "caliphate". It committed massacres and enslavement, notably of the Yazidis, before losing its last territory at Baghuz in Syria in March 2019. Its affiliates remain active: the Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace in 2026, ranked IS and its affiliates as the deadliest terrorist organisation in 2025, while recording that terrorism deaths worldwide fell 28% to 5,582, the lowest since 2007.

These groups are a very small minority, and they are condemned by the great majority of Muslims and their scholars. The evidence for that comes in several forms:

• Opinion surveys. Pew's 2013 survey of 39 countries found that in most countries roughly three-quarters or more of Muslims rejected suicide bombing and other violence against civilians. It also found substantial minorities who thought such violence could sometimes be justified in a few places, such as the Palestinian territories (40%) and Afghanistan (39%), and a fair account should not hide that. In 2015 Pew found that in no country surveyed did more than 15% view ISIS favourably; in Lebanon, 99% of those surveyed were very unfavourable.
• Scholarly condemnation. In September 2014 more than a hundred Muslim scholars from around the world published an Open Letter to al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, refuting his theology point by point in classical Arabic legal terms: killing emissaries and innocents, forced conversion, enslavement and declaring a caliphate without the consent of Muslims are all forbidden. Al-Azhar, the most prestigious Sunni university, and senior Shia authorities such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf condemned ISIS too. The Amman Message (2004–2006) forbade declaring other Muslims apostates, the very move jihadists rely on.
• The victims. Most of the people killed by jihadist groups are Muslims. The Global Terrorism Index for 2025 found the Sahel region of Africa accounted for over half of all terrorism deaths, and Pakistan was the most affected single country, places where most victims are Muslim.

"Whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind." (5:32, Pickthall). Muslims quote this verse more than almost any other when condemning terrorism.

Part 13 — Islam today: two billion people

How many, and where? Pew Research Center's 2025 report, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020, counted about 2.0 billion Muslims in 2020, 25.6% of humanity, up from 1.7 billion in 2010. Muslims grew by 347 million in that decade, more than all other religions combined, and were the fastest-growing major religious group. Pew attributes this mainly to Muslims' young age structure (in 2020, 33% of Muslims were under 15) and relatively high fertility, not to conversion: religious switching into and out of Islam is relatively uncommon and roughly balances out.

Most Muslims are not Arabs. In 2020, 59% of the world's Muslims lived in the Asia-Pacific region and 18% in sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East and North Africa, where Muslims are 94% of the population, held about 414 million, roughly one Muslim in five, and that region also includes Iranians, Turks, Kurds and Berbers, who are not Arabs either.

(Computed from Pew's 2025 country table; country totals are rounded.) In 2020 Muslims were the majority in 53 countries and territories. India, where they are a minority, has one of the three largest Muslim populations on Earth. Europe's Muslims were about 6% of its population, and North America's, 5.9 million, grew fastest of any region in percentage terms.

The future. Pew's 2015 projections, made before the 2025 revision, estimated that if trends continued, Muslims (2.8 billion) and Christians (2.9 billion) would be at near parity by 2050, and Muslims would become the largest group around 2070. Projections are not prophecies; they depend on fertility rates, which are falling quickly in many Muslim-majority countries.

Indonesia. The largest Muslim country is a useful corrective to stereotypes. Its two great Muslim organisations are among the biggest in the world: Nahdlatul Ulama (founded 1926), traditionalist and rooted in rural boarding schools and Sufi-influenced piety, and Muhammadiyah (founded 1912), reformist and famous for its schools, universities and hospitals. Indonesia is a democracy whose state officially recognises six religions, and Islam there has long mixed with Javanese and Malay culture.

Diversity of practice. Pew's 2012 survey of 39 countries found Muslims united on the core and divided on much else. Belief in God and the Prophet was nearly universal and fasting widespread, but praying several times a day ranged from most Muslims in Southeast Asia to fewer than one in ten in Albania and Kazakhstan, places shaped by communist secularism. A Muslim in Dakar, one in Istanbul and one in Jakarta may keep the same prayers and the same Ramadan and still live very different religious lives.

Women in Islam: many voices

No subject about Islam is more argued over, and Muslim women themselves take every position in the argument.

• The texts that frame the debate. The Qur'an addresses men and women as spiritual equals: "Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe… Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward" (33:35, Pickthall). It gave women rights to inheritance, to own property and to consent in marriage, which many historians see as gains over pre-Islamic custom. It also gives daughters half a son's inheritance (4:11), allows men up to four wives under conditions (4:3), and contains a verse on marital authority, 4:34, whose meaning is one of the most debated passages in the whole text.
• Traditionalist and conservative women argue that Islam gives men and women different but complementary roles, with rights and duties balanced across the family, and that modest dress, including the headscarf (hijab), is an act of worship freely chosen. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety (2005) studied women's mosque movements in Cairo whose members sought, through study and discipline, to become more devout, and argued that Western feminism often fails to understand such women on their own terms.
• Reformist and feminist Muslim scholars, such as the American scholar Amina Wadud (Qur'an and Woman, 1992 and 1999), the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite), and the Egyptian-American historian Leila Ahmed (Women and Gender in Islam), argue that the Qur'an's egalitarian principles were narrowed by male interpreters in patriarchal societies, and that re-reading the sources can restore them. In 2005 Wadud led a mixed congregation of about 100 men and women in Friday prayer in New York, which many Muslim scholars condemned and others defended. Groups such as Musawah work for equality in Muslim family law.
• Secular Muslim women in many countries argue that religion and law should be kept apart altogether.

Surveys show the same range. Pew's 2013 survey found majorities in most regions saying a woman should decide for herself whether to wear a veil, while large majorities also said a wife should always obey her husband, with sharp disagreement over divorce and equal inheritance. In practice, the lives of Muslim women vary enormously by country, class and law, from Saudi Arabia, where women could not legally drive until 2018, to Pakistan, which in 1988 elected Benazir Bhutto, the first woman head of government in a Muslim-majority country, followed by women leaders in Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia. In the 2026 Hajj, 813,905 of the 1.7 million pilgrims were women.

Islamophobia, converts and diaspora

Islamophobia, a term made widely known by a 1997 report of the British Runnymede Trust, means prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Muslims. The term itself is debated: some critics argue it can be used to shut down legitimate criticism of religious ideas, and supporters reply that hostility toward people, not debate about ideas, is the point. The evidence of discrimination is substantial. The European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency found in its 2024 report Being Muslim in the EU, based on almost 10,000 Muslims in 13 countries surveyed in 2022, that 47% had experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years, up from 39% in 2016. In 2022 the UN General Assembly designated 15 March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, and in 2025 the UN appointed its first Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia.

Converts. Among US Muslims, Pew found in 2017 that 21% were converts, most formerly Christian, and that two-thirds of American-born Black Muslims were converts, heirs to a long African American Muslim history that runs from enslaved West African Muslims through the Nation of Islam to Malcolm X, who left it for Sunni Islam in 1964 and made the pilgrimage to Mecca that year.

Diaspora. Migration since the 1950s has created large Muslim communities in Western Europe, North America and Australia: Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, South Asians in Britain. Their children are building new forms of Muslim life and debating what a European or American Islam should look like.

Part 14 — How to understand Islam today

Key dates

Who's who

Five debates alive inside Islam today

1. Who speaks for Islam? Islam has no pope. Authority lies with scholars, schools and institutions such as al-Azhar or the seminaries of Najaf and Qom, but anyone with a phone can now issue an opinion. Many Muslims worry that the collapse of traditional learning has opened the door to both extremists and self-taught literalists.
2. Tradition and reform. Should Muslims follow the established schools of law (taqlid), return directly to the Qur'an and sunna (the Salafi answer), or reinterpret the sources in the light of modern ethics (the reformist answer)? Each side accuses the others of distorting Islam.
3. Religion and the state. Should a Muslim-majority state enforce Islamic law, be religiously neutral, or something in between? The answers range from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Turkey's and Indonesia's very different arrangements and the many Muslim minorities living in secular democracies.
4. Women, family and sexuality. Debates over family law, dress, mosque leadership and gender roles (Part 13) are among the most heated, and they run between Muslims, not just between Muslims and outsiders.
5. Sunni and Shia. Sectarian hostility, sharpened by rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and by the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, coexists with millions of mixed families and scholars working for mutual recognition, as in the Amman Message.

Two billion people do not agree about everything. What unites them is a book, a prophet, a direction of prayer, and a month of fasting they keep together.

The takeaway

Islam began in the early seventh century with Muhammad, a Meccan merchant who, in Muslim belief, received God's final revelation, the Qur'an, over 23 years. Muslims and historians tell the story differently: the tradition through the Qur'an, the sira and the hadith, the historians through manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and outsiders' notices, which on the whole support an early origin for the Qur'an and the main outline of the traditional account. A dispute over who should lead after 632, sealed in blood at Karbala in 680, produced the Sunni and Shia traditions. Caliphs and empires spread Muslim rule from Spain to India, but most conquered peoples converted slowly, over centuries, and much of the faith's spread came through traders and Sufis. Muslims built rich traditions of law, theology, philosophy, science and mysticism, debated among themselves across a dozen schools. Colonialism, the end of the caliphate in 1924 and modern states produced revivalists, reformers, Islamist movements and a small but deadly jihadist fringe that mainstream scholars condemn. Today about two billion people, mostly in Asia and Africa, keep the same prayers and the same Ramadan and argue about almost everything else.

Try this: read Sura 1, al-Fatiha (seven short verses), and Sura 112 (four verses) in a bilingual edition, and listen to each recited aloud by a reciter; quran.com has both side by side. Then, if there is a mosque near you, look at its website: many hold open days, and in Ramadan many welcome guests to break the fast at sunset. Go, sit, and eat a date with the people there. Ask someone what Ramadan means to them.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025): main report, chapter 3 on Muslims and chapter 12 on the Middle East and North Africa; country figures computed from its Appendix B table. Also Pew's Mapping the Global Muslim Population (2009; Shia 10–13%), The Future of World Religions (2015; projections), The World's Muslims surveys (2012, 2013), its 2015 report on views of ISIS, and U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society (2017).
- Qur'an: Pickthall (1930) and Yusuf Ali (1934) translations, via quran.com. Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari nos. 1, 3, 8, 50, 4986, 4987; Sahih Muslim, Book of Faith no. 1; Ibn Majah no. 224 and al-Tirmidhi no. 1162 with modern gradings, from sunnah.com's English editions.
- University of Birmingham press release on its Qur'an manuscript (22 July 2015); B. Sadeghi and U. Bergmann, Arabica 57 (2010); B. Sadeghi and M. Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān", Der Islam 87 (2012); A. Hilali, The Sanaa Palimpsest (2017).
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, and "Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy".
- R. G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), for the early non-Muslim sources; R. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979); W. Hallaq, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" (1984); F. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (2010).
- Reference entries via encyclopedia.com (Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, Encyclopaedia Judaica, New Catholic Encyclopedia), World History Encyclopedia and BBC Religion, for dates of persons, dynasties and events; Wikipedia for leads only.
- Saudi General Authority for Statistics, Hajj 2026 figures (May 2026); ammanmessage.com; Open Letter to al-Baghdadi (September 2014); Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index key findings (2025, 2026); EU Fundamental Rights Agency, Being Muslim in the EU (2024); United Nations, International Day to Combat Islamophobia.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford World's Classics; clear modern English, the best place for a newcomer to start reading)
- 📘 The Study Quran — Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.) (translation with verse-by-verse commentary from the classical Sunni and Shia traditions; for readers who want to know how Muslims have read each verse)
- 📘 Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings (the traditional biography, beautifully told from the sira, as many Muslims love it)
- 📘 Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam — Fred M. Donner (a respected historian's reconstruction; the best short guide to the scholarly debate)
- 📘 Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World — Jonathan A. C. Brown (how hadith criticism works, from a Muslim scholar who knows the Western debate)
- 📘 Women and Gender in Islam — Leila Ahmed (a history of the debate, from the Middle East's ancient past to the present)
- 🌐 Quran.com (the Arabic text with many translations and recitations, verse by verse)
- 🌐 Pew Research Center: Muslim population change, 2010–2020 (the current numbers, with charts by country and region)