Sublime

Perhaps because of the distinctive ecology of the Near and Middle East, where agrarian society played second fiddle to long-distance trade, Islam was strikingly cosmopolitan. Muslims were first of all members of the umma, the great body of Islamic faithful, and only secondly subjects of their territorial ruler.

Islamic law and theology, and the cultural aspirations of rulers in Egypt, Iran and the Fertile Crescent, had permitted a remarkable flowering of literature, art (especially architecture), science and philosophy. Islam’s cosmopolitan individualism and the wide dissemination of its legal traditions also favoured the growth of a far-flung commercial

because it did not empower a priesthood as the intermediary between the faithful and their god, Islam did not bind the individual so tightly into an ordered religious community. Its clerical elite, the ulama, were teachers, judges and scholars, not priests. Sufis and pirs, or holy men, exerted spiritual leadership, not religious authority.

The year is 632 C.E. Two years have passed since Muhammad walked triumphantly into Mecca and cleansed the Ka‘ba in the name of the one God. At that time, he was a robust man at the peak of his political and spiritual power, unquestionably the most dominant leader in Arabia. Ironically, the movement that had begun as an attempt to reclaim the tribal

As unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately trying