HISTORY OF
ISLAM
History is a Sign from the
heavens. The Qur’an declares: “I will show you My Signs on the horizon and
within your own souls until you have certainty of faith”. ‘On the horizon’
means history and nature. Thus history and science take on a sacred character
in as much as they are “Signs” from God. This guiding principle separates this
encyclopedia from other works of similar nature.
In the fascinating panorama
of the struggle of man on earth, faith has played a pivotal role. Each of the
major religions of man imbues its followers with a particular vision of the
transcendent and the relationship of the human to the transcendent. That
particular vision governs to a large extent the relationship of each faith with
the world at large. As the globe shrinks under the incessant impact of
technology, men and women of different faiths need to come together to
understand one another and shape a common human destiny.
Islam made its appearance on
the world stage more than fourteen hundred years ago and immediately came into
contact with the Persian and Byzantine worlds. As the Islamic world expanded it
had to come to terms not just with the rationalism of the Greeks but with the
belief systems of the Persians, the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Chinese. The
Muslims learned, absorbed, amalgamated the ideas of the east and the west and
gave to the world the empirical-scientific method, algebra, chemistry,
arabesque, Tasawwuf and the Taj Mahal.
Centuries went by. There
were short periods of conflict followed by long periods of cooperation between
the world of Islam and the worlds of other faiths. The traces of these
interactions have shaped the perceptions of Islam in the modern global
consciousness.
Much of the work on Islamic
history suffers from the limitation of an excessive focus on the Middle East. Islam is a global enterprise. The center of
gravity of the Islamic world is closer to Delhi,
Lahore and Kuala Lumpur
than it is to Cairo and Baghdad. This work seeks to capture the
panorama of Islamic history as it vaults the Afro-Eurasian continent from Morocco to Indonesia.
The encyclopedia is the work
of Dr. Nazeer Ahmed, a scientist, scholar, historian, philanthropist and
legislator. Much of the work first appeared in the Minaret magazine, New York during 1995-97
and was later compiled into a two-volume treatise “Islam in Global History –
from the death of Prophet Muhammed to the First World War”. More articles have
been added recently to capture some of the critical moments in the twentieth
century.
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