Islam

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Islam is the monotheistic religion that takes its bearings from the Qurʾān, the scripture Muslims hold to be the direct speech of God delivered to the prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. The Arabic word names the central act it asks for — submission, the surrender of the human will to the one God, Allāh — and a Muslim is one who makes that surrender. It stands with Judaism and Christianity in the Abrahamic line, claiming not to begin a new faith but to restore the original one preached by a long succession of prophets from Adam through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, of whom Muhammad is held to be the last.

The historical outline is firm. Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and, by the tradition’s account, began receiving revelations near 610; his migration to Medina in 622 marks year one of the Islamic calendar. Within a century of his death in 632, Arab armies carrying the new faith had reached Spain in the west and Central Asia in the east. The Qurʾān was gathered into its received written form within a generation; alongside it the community preserved the ḥadīth, reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds, which together with the Qurʾān ground the sharīʿa, the elaborated law of practice. The familiar frame of obligation is the five pillars: the profession of faith, the five daily prayers, almsgiving, the Ramadan fast, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The revelation and the Prophet

The seventh-century Ḥijāz into which Muhammad was born was not a religious void. Late-antique Arabia held a dense matrix of cults — the Meccan high-god Allāh and the goddesses named in the Qurʾān as al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā, and Manāt; the cube-shaped sanctuary of the Kaʿba with its custodial Quraysh; the pilgrimage and the sacred months — set within a wider late-antique world of Arabian Judaism, Syriac and Aksumite Christianity, and a South Arabian monotheism (the inscriptions invoke a single Raḥmānān, the Merciful) that the Qurʾān’s own divine epithet al-Raḥmān answers. The tradition also preserves a memory of indigenous seekers, the ḥunafāʾ, who are said to have rejected idols for the bare religion of Ibrāhīm. Into this setting the Qurʾān’s first word, by tradition, falls as a command: iqraʾ, recite. Muhammad receives the recitations over some twenty-two years, first at Mecca, where the sūras are short, urgent, and eschatological, and then at Medina after the hijra of 622, where they grow longer and turn to law and the ordering of a community. The Medinan years make him not only a prophet but the head of a polity; by his death in 632 most of the Arabian peninsula has entered the new dispensation.

The Qurʾān is, for the tradition, not a book about God but the uncreated speech of God, recited in Arabic, inimitable in its eloquence — a doctrine of inimitability (iʿjāz) that makes the text itself the standing miracle of Muhammad’s mission. After his death the dispersed recitations were gathered; the caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–656) is credited with establishing the canonical written codex around 650 and dispatching standard copies to the garrison cities, a recension that has remained the received text. Around the scripture there grew a second body of authority, the Sunna — the Prophet’s normative practice, transmitted in ḥadīth reports each authenticated by a chain of transmitters (isnād). The great Sunni collections were compiled in the ninth century, above all the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī (d. 870) and the Ṣaḥīḥ of Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 875), which with four further works came to form the six books of canonical ḥadīth.

The world the Qurʾān describes is ordered between a single creating, sustaining God and the creatures answerable to him. God is one, without partner or likeness, the merciful and the just; he sends prophets — a chain of messengers to every people, of whom Muhammad is the seal — and he sends, alongside the human race, the angels and the unseen jinn. History runs from creation toward a fixed end: the Day of Resurrection, when the dead are raised and each soul is weighed for its deeds, and an afterlife of the Garden or the Fire. This eschatological horizon is not a marginal doctrine but the gravitational center of the earliest, Meccan revelation, which presses again and again the nearness of the reckoning. Within that frame the whole of conduct acquires its weight; the surrender the religion asks is the soul’s preparation for the judgment it cannot avoid.

The pillars and the law

The architecture of practice rests on five pillars (arkān). The first is the shahāda, the testimony that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God — two clauses that contain the whole creed, an uncompromising monotheism (tawḥīd, the affirmation of God’s oneness) joined to the acknowledgment of prophecy. The remaining four are acts: the five daily prayers (ṣalāt) turned toward Mecca; the purifying alms (zakāt) owed on wealth; the fast of the month of Ramadan; and the pilgrimage (ḥajj) to Mecca, which every able Muslim makes once if able, and at whose center stands the circumambulation of the Kaʿba. The pillars hold the everyday life of submission in a fixed rhythm; they are the form the surrender takes.

From the Qurʾān and the Sunna the scholars elaborated the sharīʿa, the divinely grounded path of conduct, through the discipline of jurisprudence (fiqh). By the ninth and tenth centuries the Sunni world had consolidated around four enduring schools of law (madhhab), each tracing itself to a founding jurist: the Ḥanafī, after Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 767); the Mālikī, after Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795); the Shāfiʿī, after al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820); and the Ḥanbalī, after Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855). The schools differ in method and in the weight they give to analogy and to scholarly consensus, but Sunnism came to regard all four as valid roads to the same law. Alongside law ran theology (kalām, literally speech, the discipline of reasoned argument about doctrine). The rationalist Muʿtazila — who held the Qurʾān created rather than eternal and made divine justice and human freedom cardinal — dominated early speculation; against them the schools of al-Ashʿarī (d. 936) and, in the east, al-Māturīdī (d. 944) framed the positions that became Sunni orthodoxy, reconciling reason with the affirmation of the divine attributes and the uncreated word.

The division: Sunni and Shia

Islam is not one settled thing. The fault that runs deepest opened at the very moment of the Prophet’s death in 632, over who should lead the community after him. The majority — those who became the Sunnis, the people of the Sunna and the collective — held that no successor had been designated and that the Companions were right to elect Abū Bakr, the first of four caliphs (632–661) whom Sunnism remembers as the al-Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidūn, the rightly-guided successors: Abū Bakr (r. 632–634), ʿUmar (r. 634–644), ʿUthmān (r. 644–656), and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (r. 656–661), the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. Under them, in a single generation, the armies of the new faith broke the Sasanian empire and stripped the Byzantine east of Syria and Egypt. The party of ʿAlī — the shīʿat ʿAlī, from which the Shia take their name — held instead that leadership belonged by right to ʿAlī and his house, the Prophet’s blood, as divinely sanctioned imāms. The dispute that began as a question of succession hardened, after the killing of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn at Karbala in 680, into a lasting division of communion, ritual, and law, with its own theology of the imamate and its own remembrance of martyrdom.

Within Shiism the principal branches divide over the line of imāms: the Twelvers, the largest, who hold that the twelfth imām entered a hidden state from which he will return; and the Ismāʿīlīs, who follow a separate line after the imām Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765) and who developed an elaborate esotericism of the inner sense (bāṭin) of scripture — the matrix from which sprang the Fāṭimid state, the philosophy of the Brethren of Purity, and the Nizārī and Ṭayyibī communities. Sunnism and Shiism share the Qurʾān, the pillars, and the basic creed; they differ over authority, over the status of the imāms, and over the law derived from them.

The spread and the caliphates

The political history of the faith is the history of its great caliphates. The rightly-guided period closed with ʿAlī’s death; from his rival Muʿāwiya the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) built the first hereditary empire, ruling from Damascus over a realm that by the early eighth century stretched from the Iberian peninsula to the frontier of the Indus and Central Asia — the swiftest large-scale conquest of the late-antique world. Their fall to the ʿAbbāsids (750–1258) moved the center of gravity eastward to a new capital at Baghdad, and the early ʿAbbāsid century was the high season of the Golden Age: the patronage of translation, the flowering of law and theology, the building of the great congregational mosques. As the central caliphate weakened, rival claimants arose — the Shia Fāṭimids in Egypt (909–1171), whose Cairo became a second metropolis, and the Umayyad remnant in al-Andalus, whose great mosque of Córdoba stands as the western monument of the civilization. The Crusades and then the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 ended the ʿAbbāsid caliphate as a power, but the faith long outran its first empires: carried by merchants, scholars, and above all the Sufi orders, it spread through Anatolia and the Balkans under the Ottomans, across Iran and India, into Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Malay archipelago, until it became the religion of a fifth of humanity, no longer Arab in its center of mass but a world community held together by a single scripture, a single direction of prayer, and a single pilgrimage.

The Golden Age: philosophy, science, and the schools

The conquests carried the faith into the inheritance of Hellenistic and Iranian learning, and from the eighth century the ʿAbbāsid translation movement turned Baghdad into a workshop where Greek philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine were rendered into Arabic. Out of this came the Islamic Golden Age and its two great intellectual currents: falsafa, the Arabic continuation of Greek philosophy, and kalam, the indigenous discipline of theological argument. The philosophers — al-Kindī (d. c. 873), the philosopher of the Arabs; al-Fārābī (d. 950), who fused Aristotle with the political vision of Plato; and above all Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), whose synthesis of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics shaped not only the Islamicate east but, in Latin translation, the schools of medieval Europe — built a metaphysics of the necessary being, the emanation of the intellects, and the immortality of the soul. Their work was answered from within the law by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), whose critique of the philosophers and whose own great reconciliation of law, theology, and inwardness became one of the most consequential bodies of writing in the tradition; and it flowered again in the west in Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), and in the east in the later Iranian schools of illumination and of Mullā Ṣadrā’s transcendent theosophy. The same culture produced the astrology, alchemy, and astral magic of the technical sciences and the occult disciplines — the alchemy of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, the science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), and the talismanic arts — that traveled westward alongside the philosophy.

The Islamicate Hermes

One transmission belongs especially to this site’s concern. In Arabic letters between roughly 750 and 1300, the figure of Hermes Trismegistus was reconstituted as an antediluvian sage and prophet, identified with the Qurʾānic Idrīs and through him with the biblical Enoch. The astrologer Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (787–886) fixed a doxography of three Hermeses — antediluvian, Babylonian, and Egyptian — that gave the figure prophetic antiquity and credited him with the invention of writing and the technical sciences. This Islamicate Hermes is the matrix of the Arabic Hermetica: the alchemical Sirr al-khalīqa and the Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Tablet) that derives from it, the astral-magical Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (the Latin Picatrix), and the astrological Liber Hermetis. Their late-antique custodians were the Sabians of Ḥarrān, a pagan community whose accommodation to the Qurʾānic category of al-Ṣābiʾūn won them protected status under the early ʿAbbāsids. The crucial point is that this was no passive pipeline: the Arabic Hermes was a structural reformation, antediluvian and prophetic, who reached Renaissance Europe — and Marsilio Ficino’s prisca theologia — already bearing the names Idrīs and Akhnūkh, a full three centuries before Ficino’s 1463 Latin Pimander.

The mystical current: Sufism

One strand in particular bears marking out: Sufism, the religion’s mystical and inward dimension. Sufis sought not merely obedience but maʿrifa — a direct, experiential knowledge of God — and built around it a discipline of poverty, remembrance, and stages of the soul’s ascent. The current took shape in the first centuries among ascetics who pressed the Qurʾānic call to dhikr, the remembrance of God, toward an intensity beyond ordinary observance; out of their circles came a developed vocabulary of the inner life and, from the twelfth century, the institutional orders (ṭuruq) — the Mevlevi, the Chishtī, the Naqshbandī — that carried Islam across Asia and Africa. The great figures of that tradition — al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Rūmī — wrote some of the most searching religious literature in any language, and it is largely through them that Islam enters the comparative study of mysticism. Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine of the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) became the speculative summit of the tradition, debated for centuries after him.

The Sufi path runs at the deep end of the same monotheism the pillars hold at the surface, and it presses the affirmation of God’s oneness toward an apophatic extremity — the recognition that to know God is, at the highest station, to know that He is unknown. This is the language of the early masters al-Junayd and al-Bisṭāmī and of the martyr al-Ḥallāj; it is codified in al-Hujwīrī’s eleventh-century manual and in al-Qushayrī’s Risāla, and it reaches its poetic summit in the Persian masters. Where Shia Ismāʿīlism developed its esotericism of the inner text, Sufism developed an esotericism of the inner experience; the two are distinct, but both turn on the conviction that the revelation has a depth beneath its surface.

The comparative question

That comparative pull is worth marking as such. The Sufi maʿrifa, the gnosis of the Hellenistic schools, and the contemplative knowing of the Christian mystics are often set side by side, and the family resemblance is genuine — each names a knowledge meant to transform rather than merely inform. They are not interchangeable. Sufism is a development internal to Islam, disciplined by the Qurʾān and the law even where it presses past them, and its language of union is spoken within a strict monotheism that the comparison can blur. What the wider tradition holds in common is the first claim: that there is one God, and that the whole of a life is the answer given to him.

The textual and scholarly record

The primary literature of Islam is the Qurʾān itself and, around it, the canonical ḥadīth collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim and the four other books, the historical and biographical tradition (the sīra of the Prophet preserved by Ibn Hishām from the lost work of Ibn Isḥāq; the universal history of al-Ṭabarī, d. 923), the tafsīr or commentary tradition, and the vast corpora of law, theology, philosophy, and Sufism. Much of the late-antique Arabian background that the Qurʾān addresses survives only in epigraphy and in the early books of idols, of which Hishām ibn al-Kalbī’s Kitāb al-Aṣnām is the unique exemplar; the modern reconstruction of that background, anchored by the work of Robert Hoyland and Christian Robin and the epigraphic studies of Ahmad Al-Jallad, has reframed the study of Islam’s origins around the late-antique Near East rather than an isolated Arabia.

For the Sufi tradition the indispensable English entry points are the public-domain editions and translations of Reynold A. Nicholson — among them his edition of al-Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-Maḥjūb (1911), his Tarjumán al-Ashwáq of Ibn ʿArabī (1911), his monumental Persian-and-English edition of the Mathnawí of Rūmī (Gibb Memorial Series, 1925–40), and his survey The Mystics of Islam (1914) — together with W. H. T. Gairdner’s translation of al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār (1924) and Claud Field’s Confessions of al-Ghazzali (1909). The scholarly synthesis is crowned by Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 1975) and, for the civilization entire, by Marshall Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974). For the Islamicate Hermes the modern landmark is Kevin van Bladel’s The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford University Press, 2009); the verbatim primary attestation of the Idrīs–Hermes–Enoch identification stands in C. Edward Sachau’s translation of al-Bīrūnī’s Chronology of Ancient Nations (1879). The standing reference for the field as a whole is the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill, 1st and 2nd editions), whose early articles on the pre-Islamic deities and on the Kaʿba remain points of departure.

→ In the library: Al-Hujwiri — Kashf al-Mahjub (Nicholson, 1911) · The Confessions of al-Ghazali (Field, 1909) · Al-Ghazali — Mishkat al-Anwar / The Niche for Lights (Gairdner, 1924) · Ibn al-ʿArabi — Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (Nicholson, 1911)

→ Related: Qur An · Kaaba · Abraham · Christianity · Gnosis · Sufism · Twelver Shi Ism · Isma Ili Shi Ism · Islamic Golden Age · Arabic Falsafa Islamic Philosophy · Avicenna · Arabic Hermetica · Enochic Idris Prophetology · Mahdi