Islam

What it is

The religion of islām — submission to God — founded on the revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad and recorded in the Qurʾān, followed by around 1.9 billion people.

Its central affirmation is tawḥīd, the absolute oneness of God: God is one, without partner, without image, and not divided into persons. This is the doctrine everything else follows from, and it is the point on which Islam differs most sharply from Christianity.

The five pillars:

• Shahāda — the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger
• Ṣalāt — prescribed prayer five times daily
• Zakāt — obligatory almsgiving, a fixed proportion of accumulated wealth
• Ṣawm — the fast of Ramadan
• Ḥajj — pilgrimage to Mecca, once in a lifetime for those able

Where it came from

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE. From about 610 he received revelations over roughly twenty-three years, delivered orally, memorised and later compiled as the Qurʾān. In 622 he and his followers migrated to Medina — the hijra, from which the Islamic calendar counts.

The succession dispute shaped everything after. On Muhammad's death in 632, the community divided over who should lead. The majority accepted Abū Bakr and the line of caliphs; a minority held that leadership belonged to ʿAlī, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, and his descendants.

That is the origin of Sunni (roughly 85–90 per cent) and Shīʿa (roughly 10–15 per cent), which developed into distinct traditions of law, authority and devotion. The main Shīʿa branches are Twelver, Ismāʿīlī and Zaydī; Ibāḍī Islam, distinct from both, predominates in Oman.

The intellectual flowering of roughly the eighth to fourteenth centuries deserves more space than it usually gets in Western accounts. The translation movement in Baghdad preserved and extended Greek learning. Al-Khwārizmī gave his name to the algorithm and his book's title to algebra. Ibn al-Haytham produced a theory of optics grounded in systematic experiment that has a strong claim to be the first modern scientific method. Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd shaped European philosophy so thoroughly that Aquinas argues with them by name. Hospitals with wards, pharmacies and teaching functions were established; al-Qarawiyyīn in Fez, founded in 859 by Fāṭima al-Fihrī, has a claim to be the oldest continuously operating degree-granting institution in the world.

How it is practised

Through the five pillars, and through sharīʿa — the path — as worked out in fiqh, jurisprudence. Sunni Islam has four principal schools of law: Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī; Twelver Shīʿas follow the Jaʿfarī school. They differ on real questions and regard one another as legitimate.

Sources of law: the Qurʾān; the hadith, reports of the Prophet's words and actions, assessed for reliability through chains of transmission; consensus; and analogical reasoning.

The mystical dimension, Sufism, is treated under Sufi dhikr, and its position within Islam — inward practice as the fulfilment of the law rather than an alternative to it — is set out there.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the demographic assumption is wrong. Most Muslims are not Arab, and Arabs are a minority of Muslims. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country, followed by Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. South and Southeast Asia together hold well over half the world's Muslims. An account of Islam framed around the Middle East is describing a minority.

We can say the internal diversity is comparable to that of any tradition here — legal schools, theological currents including the rationalist Muʿtazila and the Ashʿarī and Māturīdī positions that displaced them, Sufi orders, and regional practice from Senegal to Java.

We can say Muslims are the principal victims of Islamist violence, which Western coverage frequently obscures. Groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda have killed vastly more Muslims than non-Muslims, and Sufi congregations, Shīʿa communities and ordinary Sunni civilians have borne the overwhelming share.

We can also say the tradition contains the same arguments about scripture, authority, modernity and violence that every tradition here contains, conducted by Muslims, at length, and mostly ignored outside.

We can say Islam has been the subject of sustained Western misrepresentation, and that the erasure of Islam from Rūmī — the best-selling poet in America — is a small and precise example of how it works.

We cannot summarise a tradition of this scale in an article, and this one should be read as a door rather than a description.

Further reading

• Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (2000).
• Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (3 vols., 1974) — the major scholarly history.
• Jonathan A.C. Brown, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and his Hadith (2009) on how the tradition assesses its own sources.