Islamic world

• 1. Introduction

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  The Islamic world is home to more than 1.8 billion people, a community spanning nearly every continent and speaking hundreds of languages. That single number, more than 25% of the entire human population, raises an immediate question: what actually holds the Islamic world together, and where did the idea of it come from?

  The answer reaches back roughly 1,400 years, to a single man in Mecca. Around 610 CE, the prophet Muhammad began to preach, and within two decades the community he founded had grown from a small circle of followers in one city to a movement reshaping the Arabian Peninsula. After his death in 632, his successors pushed that movement across three continents. Today the territory they first opened spans from West Africa to Southeast Asia, from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula.

  But the Islamic world is not a single state or a uniform culture. It is home to secular republics and Islamic states, to dynasties long gone and nations still forming their identities. It produced the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars gathered the knowledge of ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, and China. It gave the world One Thousand and One Nights, the philosophical novel, and the first credible theory of pulmonary circulation. It also gave the world a term that remains contested to this day. What does it mean to speak of a single Muslim world? That question will run through every chapter of this documentary.

• 2. A Term Under Dispute

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  The phrase "Muslim world" was documented in print as early as 1912, when a correspondent described Pan-Islamism as a movement with power, importance, and cohesion, one born in Paris, where Turks, Arabs, and Persians had congregated. The article's focus was India, and it weighed the position of the Amir, the effect of the Tripoli Campaign, Anglo-Russian action in Persia, and what it called "Afghan Ambitions."

  That origin matters. The term didn't begin as a neutral geographic label. It emerged from the anxieties of empire. Imperialists used it in the nineteenth century to emphasize civilizational differences between east and west. In response, some Muslims adopted it themselves, seeking a unified front against western colonialism. Each side was using the same phrase for opposite purposes.

  Scholars today call the term "simplistic" and "binary." No state in the world has a religiously homogeneous population. Egypt, often cited as a core Muslim-majority country, has a Christian population that is roughly 10% of its citizens. In absolute numbers, there are sometimes more Muslims living in countries where they are a minority than in countries where they form a majority. The preferred alternative in academic literature is the more precise phrase "Muslim-majority countries," though even that term carries no agreed criteria for inclusion. The only widely supported rule of thumb is a Muslim population of more than 50%, a threshold that itself can shift over time, as Nigeria's recent demographic shift to Muslim-majority status demonstrates.

• 3. From Mecca to Three Continents

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  In 622 CE, facing opposition in Mecca, Muhammad and his followers migrated to Yathrib, the city now called Medina. He had been invited to establish a new constitution there under his leadership. That migration, the Hijra, became the first year of the Islamic calendar, a measure of the weight Muslims would attach to the founding moment.

  By the time Muhammad died in 632, he had become the political and spiritual leader not only of Medina and Mecca but of the surrounding region and numerous tribes across Arabia. His successors, the first four Caliphs, considered by the majority of Muslims to be "rightly guided," pushed Islamic rule across the Arabian Peninsula and far beyond. The Rashidun Caliphate stretched from northwest India across Central Asia, the Near East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees.

  The expansion was not without fracture. The killing of Caliph Uthman in 656 triggered a succession crisis that has never been fully resolved. The First, Second, and Third Fitnas tore through the community, and the Abbasid Revolution of 746-750 definitively ended the political unity of Muslims. Two rival understandings of legitimate succession had crystallized: Sunnis, who believed the political successor of Muhammad should be chosen by consultation, and Shia, who believed Muhammad had designated his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib. That fault line has shaped the geography of the Muslim world ever since.

  Qutb ud-Din Aibak conquered Delhi in 1206 and began the Delhi Sultanate, a succession of dynasties that synthesized Indian civilization with the wider commercial and cultural networks of Africa and Eurasia. One of those dynasties elevated Razia Sultana, one of the few female Muslim rulers in recorded history.

• 4. The House of Wisdom

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  The Islamic Golden Age is traditionally held to have begun with the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809) and the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Scholars from across the known world came to translate and gather all available knowledge into Arabic. The Abbasids drew motivation from the Quran and its accompanying traditions, including the saying attributed to the Prophet: "the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr."

  Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba became the leading intellectual centers for science, philosophy, medicine, and education. The Persian scholar Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, had more than 450 books attributed to him. His medical textbook, The Canon of Medicine, was used as the standard text in European universities for centuries. His other major work, The Book of Healing, was an influential scientific and philosophical encyclopedia.

  Ibn al-Haytham, a figure Jim Al-Khalili described in 2009 as often referred to as the world's first true scientist, provided the empirical proof of the intromission theory of light and became the founding figure of optics. Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, also known as Abulcasis, produced a medical encyclopedia called Kitab al-Tasrif, later translated to Latin and used in European and Muslim medical schools for centuries. Egyptian physician Ibn al-Nafis proposed the theory of pulmonary circulation.

• 5. Literature and Philosophical Fiction

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  One Thousand and One Nights, the best known work of fiction from the Islamic world, reached its final form by the 14th century. Its roots are older still, drawing on Sanskrit and Persian folk tales, including a pre-Islamic Persian prototype called Hezar Afsan, or Thousand Fables. When the collection was first translated into a European language in the 18th century, by Antoine Galland, it became widely influential in the West. Characters like Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba became cultural icons far beyond the Islamic world.

  A less well-known strand of Islamic literature gave rise to the philosophical novel. Ibn Tufayl wrote the first Arabic novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, as a response to Al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Arabian polymath Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288) then wrote Theologus Autodidactus as a response to Ibn Tufayl's work. Both novels feature autodidactic protagonists, feral children living in isolation on a desert island. Ibn al-Nafis took the form further: his story of Kamil extended beyond the island and developed into what scholars recognize as the earliest known coming-of-age plot and the first example of a science fiction novel. Theologus Autodidactus addressed spontaneous generation, futurology, the end of the world, resurrection, and the afterlife, explaining all of these through biology, astronomy, cosmology, and geology rather than through supernatural causes.

  Translations of Ibn Tufayl's Philosophus Autodidactus appeared in Latin in 1671 and in English in 1708. European scholars influenced by the novel included John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christiaan Huygens. Scholars suggest the same translations may have later inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

• 6. Industry, Trade, and Technology

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  By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had industrial mills in operation, from al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. The list of mill types is striking: fulling mills, gristmills, paper mills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, sugar mills, tide mills, and windmills. Muslim engineers also invented crankshafts and water turbines, used gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as sources of water power. Industrial uses of watermills in the Islamic world date back to the 7th century.

  The movement of goods matched the movement of knowledge. Arab merchants dominated trade in the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century, with Hormuz serving as a central node in that network. The Silk Road crossing Central Asia ran through Islamic states connecting China and Europe. Crops including almonds and citrus fruit reached Europe through al-Andalus, and sugar cultivation spread to European farmers through the same channels.

  The Bengal Sultanate in particular earned a reputation among European traders as the richest country to trade with. The transfer of industrial technologies from the Islamic world to medieval Europe, especially from Mughal Bengal and Tipu Sultan's Kingdom, had a traceable influence on what later became the Industrial Revolution.

• 7. Colonialism and Its Aftermath

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  Beginning in the 15th century, European colonial powers moved into Muslim-majority societies across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Great Divergence, the widening gap in military and economic power between European states and established Oriental powers, is the reason scholars give for why empires like the Mughal Empire, starting from the wealthy Bengal Subah, and the Ottoman Empire fell to European conquest.

  The only Muslim-majority regions not colonized by Europeans were Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Turkey itself had been one of the earliest colonial powers in the world, with the Ottoman Empire ruling several states for more than six centuries. Its defeat after the First World War led to a transformation of a different kind: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk played an instrumental role in ending the Ottoman sultanate and replacing it with the Republic of Turkey, a modern secular democracy. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 separated religion from the state in a way that had no precedent in Islamic political history.

  Azerbaijan became the first secular republic in the Muslim world, between 1918 and 1920, before it was absorbed into the Soviet Union. The 1979 Iranian Revolution moved in the opposite direction, replacing a monarchical semi-secular regime with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Across the postcolonial Muslim world, nation states drew on Islamic traditions to varying degrees, working through questions of compatibility between Islam and secularism, nationalism, socialism, democracy, and liberalism that remain active today.

• 8. Demographics and Diversity

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  Between 87 and 90% of the world's Muslims are Sunni; Shia and other groups make up the remaining 10-13%. The countries with the highest concentrations of Shia populations include Iran at 89%, Azerbaijan at 65%, Iraq at 60%, and Bahrain at 60%. Ibadi Muslims, less widely discussed, hold about 75% of the population in Oman.

  Indonesia, with about 13% of all Muslims worldwide, is the largest Muslim-majority country. South Asia holds the largest total Muslim population. India, not a Muslim-majority country, has the largest Muslim-minority population in the world, representing about 11% of all Muslims globally. The city of Karachi has the largest Muslim population of any city in the world.

  Literacy across the Muslim world varies sharply. Iran, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan have literacy rates above 97%. Mali, Afghanistan, and Chad have some of the lowest rates. Indonesia has a 99% youth literacy rate. Iraq's youth literacy rate fell from 85% to 57% during the American-led war and subsequent occupation. A 2011 Pew Research Center study found that about 36% of all Muslims had no formal schooling at the time, with Muslim women averaging 4.9 years of schooling compared to 6.4 years for Muslim men. The Amman Message, endorsed in 2005 by prominent Islamic scholars around the world, formally recognized eight schools of Islamic jurisprudence, a gesture toward the breadth of legal and theological tradition within a community that contains, by one estimate, more than a billion and a half people who have never been a single state.