Sonn - Islam: history, religion, and politics

1. Maps
2. Chapter 02
3. Chapter 03
4. Chapter 04
5. Chapter 05

This series offers brief, accessible, and lively accounts of key topics within theology and religion. Each volume presents both academic and general readers with a selected history of topics which have had a profound effect on religious and cultural life. The word history is, therefore, understood in its broadest cultural and social sense. The volumes are based on serious scholarship but they are written engagingly and in terms readily understood by general readers.

Other topics in the series:

Third Edition

Tamara Sonn

This edition first published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sonn, Tamara.
Islam : history, religion, and politics / Tamara Sonn. Third edition.
pages cm. (Wiley Blackwell brief histories of religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-97230-4 (paperback)
1.IslamHistory. 2.IslamEssence, genius, nature. I.Title.
BP50.S65 2016
297dc23

2015025659

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Interior of mosque, Casablanca, Morocco. Maciej Tomczak/phototramp.com/Alamy Limited

To our loving family.

Since the publication of Tamara Sonns A Brief History of Islam in 2004 the babble of noises around Islam and the violence by and against Muslims has continued to grow exponentially. The daily news cycle invariably has a gruesome Muslim storya beheading here, a suicide bomber there, a sectarian massacre in one country, and violent demonstrations in another.

The problem is not that there is not sufficient material on Islam; the problem is that there is too much. We suffer a bombardment of opinions on Islam through round-the-clock information networks, which now include social media with its Twitter, Facebook, etc. We are thus privileged to glimpse the innermost thoughts of just about everyone on the subject of Islam.

That is why we yearn to hear the calm, authoritative voice of the scholar whose task is to study history, its events and actors, the origin and development of ideas, and on the basis of reflection and analysis throw light on contemporary society. Professor Sonn is that voice.

Since her Brief History of Islam was published a decade ago, Sonn has consolidated her reputation as a major public intellectual, successfully balancing her scholarship with the need to explain complicated issues in clear and accessible terms. This new volume not only updates her Brief History but also adds substantial material to it. There is a new final chapter, Contemporary Islam, which gives brief but detailed insights into several key Muslim nations including Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia. In addition there is fresh material on the Arab Spring and its consequences for the world. In the violence since the War on Terror began, Sonn points out that well more than a million lives have been lost in the main theaters of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. The overwhelming numbers of those who have been killed are Muslim.

Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University claims in his Clash of Civilizations proposition, which was published just two decades ago, that Islam and the West are doomed to be locked in a long-running confrontation and that has had a global impact. After 9/11, commentators looking around for an answer to the question, Why do they hate us? found it in the idea of the Clash of Civilizations. Huntingtons notion, indeed even the phrase, was borrowed from Professor Bernard Lewis at Princeton University. The idea of a perpetual clash between Western and Islamic civilizations is a powerful one and is reflected in history if it is seen from a certain angle. But it is also reductive and simplistic in the extreme. Take an example from the earliest encounter between the West and Islam in which alliances cut across religious lines. Charlemagne, the dominant Christian ruler of Europe, allied with the Caliph in Baghdad against their common enemy, the Muslim ruler of Andalusia. Examples such as this can be found throughout history to challenge the idea of a Clash of Civilizations.