Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

INTELLECTUAL AND THEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

In addition to those variations delineating Sunnism and Shi‘ism and the numerous sects, there have existed since the beginning of Islamic history, within the mainstream, different theologies and philosophies that have contributed to diversity within the Islamic world, even within a particular school of Law. When one thinks of Islam, it is important to remember that, on the intellectual and theological levels, as well as on the juridical one, Islam is not a monolithic structure, but displays remarkable diversity, the elements of which are bound together by the doctrine of tawhid, or unity. Over the centuries, Islam has created one of the richest intellectual traditions of the world, favorably comparable in its depth and diversity to those of India, China, and the Christian West. In medieval times, in fact, many Jewish and Christian theological and philosophical schools in Europe were created as a result of the influence of and in response to Islamic philosophical and theological teachings.

To discuss in depth all the different theological and philosophical schools or even the most important ones would not be possible here. What is important in the present context is to at least mention the best-known schools and point out that even on some of the most important central religious issues-the meaning of Divine Unity especially in relation to multiplicity, the nature of God’s Names and Qualities, the relation between faith and works in human salvation, predestination and free will, revelation and reason, the relation between God’s Mercy and His Justice, and questions of eschatology, not to mention political philosophy-there have existed numerous views, sometimes opposed to each other.

In theology, which in Islam is called ‘ilm al-kalam or simply kalam, there developed in the Sunni world in the eighth century, first of all, the Mu‘tazilite school, which favored extensive use of reason in the interpretation of religious matters, a position to which certain strict literalist interpreters of the Quran and Sunnah, such as the Hanbalis, were opposed. In fact, the Hanbalis have remained opposed to all forms of kalam until today, as has their Wahhabi offshoot.

To this day the teaching of any form of kalam is forbidden in religious universities in Saudi Arabia.

In the tenth century a new school of kalam called the Ash‘arite arose in Baghdad with the aim of creating a middle ground on many questions, such as the use of reason in religious matters. Ash‘arism, which many orientalists have identified with Islamic theological orthodoxy as such, spread quickly among the Shafi‘is and reached its peak in many ways with al-Ghazzali, who did, however, hold some non-Ash‘arite views, and with Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Gradually Ash‘arism spread among the Hanafis and Malikis as well and became the most widely held school of kalam in the Sunni world until the contemporary period. But there were also other Sunni schools of kalam that held sway in certain localities, such as Maturidism in Khurasan and Central Asia and T. ahawism in Egypt. Since the late nineteenth century, certain Muslim “reformers” such as Muh.ammad ‘Abduh of Egypt have sought to revive Mu‘tazilism, because it

made greater use of reason rather than relying predominately on the tenets of the revelation.

In Shi‘ism also, kalam has had a long history. Isma‘ili kalam, which began to be developed from the eighth century onward, was closely allied to Isma‘ili philosophy and took greater interest in what in the West would be called mystical theology than Sunni schools of kalam. As for Twelve-Imam Shi‘ite kalam, it developed along more intellectual lines than Ash‘arite kalam and received its systematic formulation in the thirteenth century in the hands of Nas.ir al-Din T. usi, who was also one of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers of Islam. The Zaydis adopted more or less Mu‘tazilite kalam, which therefore survived in the Yemen long after it had become eclipsed by Ash‘arism after the eleventh century in the intellectual centers of the heartland of the Islamic world in the Arab East and Persia.

Islamic philosophy was developed by Islamic thinkers rooted in the Quranic revelation and meditating upon translations of Greek and Syriac texts into Arabic. The result was the integration of ideas drawn mostly from Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Stoicism into the Quranic worldview and the creation of new philosophical perspectives.

Various schools were developed, starting with the Peripatetic (mashsha’i) and Isma‘ili from the ninth century onward. This early period produced such famous philosophers as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina(Avicenna) , and Ibn Rushd(Averroës) , whose influence on the medieval West was immense. One cannot conceive of either the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages and such figures as Albert the Great, St. Thomas, and Duns Scotus or medieval Jewish philosophy as represented by such masters as Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides (who wrote his most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, first in Arabic), without consideration of the influence of early Islamic philosophy and to some extent kalam upon them.

Although the influence of Islamic philosophy upon the West came more or less to an end in the thirteenth century with the translation of Averroës and earlier Islamic philosophers into Latin, Islamic philosophy itself not only did not come to an end, but was revived in the eastern lands of Islam and especially Persia. In the twelfth century Suhrawardi founded a new school of philosophy called the School of Illumination(ishraq) and in the seventeenth century S. adr al-Din Shirazi created a major synthesis of philosophy, doctrinal Sufism or gnosis in the sense of illuminative and unitive knowledge (‘irfan), and theology in a new school he called “the transcendent theosophy” (al-h. ikmat al-muta‘aliyah). Both of these schools are still very much alive and have played a major role in the intellectual life of Persia, India, and as far as the school of ishraq is concerned, to some extent, Ottoman Turkey.

Another major school that developed in the later history of Islam is doctrinal Sufism, or gnosis, associated with, more than anyone else, the name of the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi Muh. yi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi, the most influential intellectual figure in Islam during the past seven centuries.

His teachings spread from Sumatra and China to Mali and Mauritania, and his school produced numerous major thinkers and poets in nearly every Islamic land.

All of these schools of kalam, philosophy, and gnosis along with the philosophy of law, methods of Quranic commentary, and the study of other transmitted sciences with which we cannot deal here, as well as various schools of the sciences from medicine to astronomy, all of which are so important for both Islam and the development of science in the West, had both their adherents and opponents, and all of them must be seen as so many strands in the total tapestry of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Although they were all concerned with either the intellectual aspects of the religion, the cosmos in light of the truths of revelation, or purely theoretical knowledge, they often also exercised either direct or indirect influence on the popular level. In any case, their diversity must be considered when studying the spectrum of Islam in its totality. Their very existence also demonstrates the remarkably open universe of intellectual discourse within the framework of the Islamic tradition, an openness that marked many periods of Islamic history yet did not lead to rebellion against the sacred framework established by Islam, as was to happen in Christianity in the West after the Middle Ages.

THE QUESTION OF ORhTHODOXY AND HETERODOXY

The question of orthodoxy in any religion is of the utmost importance, for the very word means “correctness of belief or doctrine.” If there is truth, there is also error, and if nothing is false, then there is no truth. As the Quran says, “The truth has come and falsehood has perished” (17:81).

Orthodoxy means possession of religious truth, and orthopraxy, the correct manner of practicing and reaching the truth. In the context of the totality of the Islamic tradition and in light of what has been said of the spectrum of Islam, orthodoxy and orthopraxy can be understood as the state of being on the “straight path” (al-s.irat. al-mustaqim); Islam itself is sometimes called the “religion of the straight path.”

There is no magisterium in Islam, as there is in Catholicism, to determine the correctness of doctrine, and on the level of belief and doctrine Islam has been less stringent than Catholicism in determining what is orthodox. Usually acceptance of the testifications of faith, that is, “There is no god but God” and “Muh.ammad is His Messenger,” has sufficed, even if opposition has been made to other beliefs and interpretations of a particular person or group. Like Judaism, Islam has insisted more on the importance of orthopraxy than orthodoxy. Although it has been lenient on the level of orthodoxy as long as the principle of tawhid and the messengership of the Prophet have been accepted, it has been more stringent on the level of practice of the daily prayers, fasting, pilgrimage, and so forth; in observing dietary laws such as abstention from pork and alcoholic drinks; and in following moral laws dealing with sexual relations, theft, murder, and so on.

As to what plays the role of the magisterium in Islam, the best response is the ummah, or the Islamic community itself, and for Shi‘ism the guidance of the Imam. Throughout Islamic history, the consensus of the community has decided in the long run what new interpretations of the Quran andSunnah on the level of both thought and action are permissible and what is to be rejected. But this action by the community must always remain subservient to the teachings of God’s Word and those of His Prophet. At that level any innovation (bid‘ah) has always been seen as a major sin and deviation from the “straight path,” but the strong rejection of bid‘ah in its technical religious sense has never meant opposition to adaptation and application of the immutable principles of Islam to new conditions and situations, as has happened often throughout Islamic history.

With these definitions in mind, we can now turn to the spectrum of Islam and pose the question “What constitutes orthodox Islam?” In most Western studies, orthodoxy is limited to its exoteric aspect, and when Islam is considered, the four Sunni schools of Law alone are considered orthodox.

But this appraisal is totally inadequate. There is an exoteric orthodoxy and orthopraxy and there is an esoteric orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Traditional and orthodox Sufism is not only part of Islamic orthodoxy, but is its heart and must not be seen as analogous to various mystical and occult manifestations in postmedieval Christianity that are called heterodox. Sufism is as much a part of Islamic orthodoxy as Franciscan or Dominican spirituality was part of Catholic orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.

To understand the position of Shi‘ism within the Islamic tradition, one must compare it not to Protestantism, which arose many centuries after the foundation of Christianity as a protest against Catholicism, but to Eastern Orthodoxy, which has been there from the beginning. Although Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been at odds with each other for nearly one thousand years, both belong to the totality of Christian orthodoxy. The same holds true for Sunnism and mainstream Shi‘ism of the Twelve-Imam School. One might say that in the middle of the spectrum of Islam as far as orthodoxy and heterodoxy are concerned stand Sunnism and Twelve-Imam Shi‘ism. On the side of Sunnism leaning in the direction of extremism stand the Khawarij and similar groups, and on the side of Shi‘ism after the Zaydis and moderate Isma‘ilis stand those called Shi‘ite extremists(ghulat) , including eclectic forms of Isma‘ilism and the various sects described above. Certainly on the formal and exoteric level all the four schools of Sunni Law, Twelve-Imam Shi‘ism, Zaydiism, as well as those at the two sides of the central bands of the spectrum, whether they be Isma‘ilis or ‘Ibadis, as long as they practice theShari‘ah , belong to the category of Islamic orthodoxy, as does of course all normative Sufism that bases itself on the practice of Shari‘ite injunctions. In fact, because of the centrality of orthopraxy one could say that Muslims who practice theShari‘ah belong also to Islamic orthodoxy as long as they do not flout the major doctrines of the faith such as the Prophet being the seal of prophecy, as do the Ah. madiyyah.

The use of such terms as “heterodox” and “sect” must be weighed closely in light of the nature and structure of the Islamic tradition. One should never refer to Shi‘ism as a whole as a sect, any more than one would call the Greek Orthodox Church a sect. Nor should one call Sufism heterodox, unless one is pointing to a particular figure or group which has adopted either beliefs or practices that are indeed heterodox as judged by the consensus, or ijma‘, of the mainstream community on the basis of the Quran and the Sunnah, but such a phenomenon pales into insignificance when compared with the vast reality of Sufism.

Authentic esoterism, far from being heterodox, lies at the heart of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in their most universal sense.

CULTURAL ZONES IN ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

People often speak of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish Islam as if they were three Islams. In reality there is only one Islam, but with local coloring related to the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural traits of the different peoples who became part of the Islamic community. Wherever Islam went, it did not seek to level the existing cultural structures to the ground, but to preserve and transform them as long as they did not oppose the spirit and form of the Islamic revelation. The result was the creation of a single Islamic identity. The vast area of the “Abode of Islam” (dar al-islam ) therefore came to display remarkable diversity on the human plane while reflecting everywhere the one message of the Quran revealed through the Prophet. This cultural and ethnic diversification must therefore be added to all of the factors already mentioned to make clearer the patterns that, superimposed upon each other, have created the great diversity in unity found in Islam.

The first cultural zone in the Islamic world is the Arabic zone, which stretches from Iraq and the Persian Gulf to Mauritania and before 1492 into the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Needless to say, in contrast to what many in the West think, the Arab world is not by any means synonymous with the Islamic world. In fact, Arab Muslims constitute less than a fifth of all Muslims, being around 220 million in number, but since the Quran was revealed to the Arab Prophet of Islam and the first Islamic society was established in Arabia, the Arabic zone of the “Abode of Islam” is the oldest part of the Islamic community and remains central to it. One of the great mysteries of early Islamic history is that as the Arab armies came out of Arabia, the lands that they conquered to the north and the west became both Islamicized and Arabized. The word “Arab” is a linguistic and not an ethnic term when used in a phrase like “the Arab world.” There was also much Arab migration into this world, but what made it decisively Arab was the adoption of the Arabic language from Morocco to Iraq. Even a country with such an unparalleled ancient past as Egypt became Arab and in fact remains to this day the center of Arabic culture. In contrast, the people of the Persian Empire under the Sassanids, who were conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, became Muslim, but they did not adopt the Arabic language. Rather, they developed Persian on the basis of earlier Iranian languages and retained a distinct cultural zone of their own. Iraq was the only exception. Although the seat of the Sassanid capital, it became Arab and in fact the center of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, but it always retained strong Persian elements.

It is interesting to compare this development with the spread of Christianity into Europe. Through becoming Christian, Europe also became to some extent a part of the Abrahamic world, but remained less Semiticized than the non-Arab Muslims who embraced Islam, because through St. Paul Christianity itself had already become less “Semitic” before spreading into Europe. That is why the Christianization of Europe was not accompanied by the spread of Aramaic or some other Semitic language in the same way that Arabic spread in the Near East and Africa and also among Persians and Indians, who belonged to the same linguistic and racial stock as the Europeans.

Not only were the Gospels written in Greek and not Aramaic, which Christ spoke, but also the Bible itself was translated early into Latin as the Vulgate and became linguistically severed from its origin. Latin became the closest in its role as the language of religion and learning in the West to what Arabic was in the Islamic world, with the major difference that Arabic is the sacred language of Islam as Hebrew is that of Judaism, whereas Latin is a liturgical language of Christianity along with several other liturgical languages such as Greek and Slavonic. The Arabization of what is now the Arab world and the significance of Arabic among non-Arab Muslims cannot therefore be equated with the Christianization of Europe and the role of Latin in the medieval West, although there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the two worlds.

The Arabic zone, characterized by the use of Arabic as not only the language of religion, which is common to all Muslims, but also as the language of daily life, is further divided into an eastern and a western part, with the line of demarcation being in the middle of Libya. The western lands, called in classical Arabic al-Maghrib, that is, “the West,” are further divided into the “near West,” including western Libya, Tunisia, and most of Algeria, and “the far West,” including western Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and in earlier periods of Islamic history al-Andalus, or Muslim Iberia. Also within the western zone are important non-Arab groups, the most important being the Berber, who inhabit mostly the Atlas Mountains and who have their own distinct language.

The second zone of Islamic culture, whose people were the second ethnic group to embrace Islam and to participate with the Arabs in building classical Islamic civilization, is the Persian zone, consisting of present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan (with certain cities in Uzbekistan).

The dominant language of the people of all these countries is Persian, known locally by three different names, Farsi, Dari, and Tajik, all of which are the same language; the differences between them are no greater than differences between the English of Australia, England, and Texas. This zone also included southern Caucasia, the old Khorasan, Transoxiana, and parts of what is today Pakistan before the migration south of Turkic people from the tenth and eleventh centuries and subsequent ethnic and geopolitical changes. The people of this zone are predominantly of the Iranian race, which is a branch of the Aryan or Indo-Iranian-European peoples, and Persian is related to the Indo-European languages as are other Iranian languages spoken in this zone, such as Kurdish, Baluchi, and Pashtu.

This zone has a population of some 100 million people, but its influence is felt strongly beyond its borders in other zones of Islamic culture in Asia from the Turkic and the Indian to the Chinese.

The first Persian to embrace Islam was Salman-i Farsi, a slave whom the Prophet caused to become free, making him a member of his “Household.” From the beginning the Persians were deeply respectful of the “Family of the Prophet” and many of the descendants of the Prophet, including the eighth Imam, ‘Ali al-Rid.a, are buried in Persia.

But it would be false to think that the Persians were always Shi‘ites and the Arabs Sunnis. Shi‘ism began among Arabs and in the tenth century

much of the Arab east was Shi‘ite, while Khorasan, a major Persian province, was the seat of Sunni thought. It is only after the establishment of the Safavids that Persia became predominantly Shi‘ite and this majority increased when Afghanistan, a part of Baluchistan, and much of Central Asia, which were predominantly Sunni, were separated from Persia, and Iran in its present form was created. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, during the Safavid period until the eighteenth century it was part of Persia. Then the leader of the Afghan tribes defeated the Safavids and killed the last Safavid king.

Shortly thereafter Nadir Shah, the last oriental conqueror, recaptured lands all the way to Delhi, including what is today Afghanistan. After his death, however, eastern Afghanistan became independent, and in the nineteenth century finally, under British pressure, Persia relinquished its claim on Herat and western Afghanistan, and thereafter Afghanistan as we now know it came into being.

The third zone of Islamic culture is that of Black Africa.

Among the entourage of the Prophet, in addition to Salman, there was another famous companion who was not Arab. He was Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi, the muezzin or caller to prayer of the Prophet, who was a Black African.

His presence symbolized the rapid spread of Islam among the Blacks and the creation of the Black African zone of Islamic culture, encompassing a vast area from the highlands of Ethiopia, where Islam spread already in the seventh century, to Mali and Senegal. The descendants of Bilal are said to have migrated to Mali, forming the Mandinka clan Keita, which helped create the Mali Empire. Some of the companions of the Prophet also migrated to Chad and established Islam there a generation after the Prophet.

Altogether Islam spread in Black Africa mostly through trade, and such tribes as the Sanhaja, who themselves embraced Islam early, became intermediaries between Arab Muslims to the north and Black Africans. By the eleventh century a powerful Islamic kingdom was established in Ghana, and by the fourteenth century the Mali Empire, which was Muslim, was one of the richest in the world; its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, one of the most notable rulers in the whole of the Islamic world.

In East Africa, which received Islam earlier than West Africa, the process of Islamization took a different path and was influenced greatly by the migration of both Arabs and Persians into the coastal areas of West Africa. By the twelfth century a Swahili kingdom was established with its capital in Kilwa, and from the mixture of Arabic, Persian, and Bantu the new Swahili language, perhaps the most important Islamic language of Muslim Black Africa, was born.

But in contrast to the Arab and Persian worlds, where one language dominates, the Black African zone of Islamic culture consists of many subzones with very distinct languages ranging from Hausa and Fulani to Somali. Some of these languages are also spoken by Christians and are culturally signficant for African Christianity.

Although the north of the African continent was already Arab a century after the rise of Islam, the area called classically the Sudan, which included

the steppes and the grasslands from present-day Sudan to Senegal, also became to a large extent Muslim over a millennium ago. It is, however, only since the nineteenth century that Islam has begun to penetrate inland into the forest regions south of the classical Sudan. There are of course also intermediate regions between the Arabic north and Black Africa where the two zones become intermingled, such as present-day Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. The zone of Black African Islamic culture with a population of well over 150 million people is bewilderingly diverse and presents a remarkable panorama of ethnic and cultural diversity within the local unity of Black African culture and the universal unity of Islam itself.

The fourth zone of Islamic culture is the Turkic zone, embracing all the people who speak one of the Altaic languages, of which the most important is Turkish, but which also include Adhari(Azeri) , Chechen, Uighur, Uzbek, Kirghiz, and Turkeman. The Turkic people, who were originally nomadic, migrated south from the Altai Mountains to conquer Central Asia from the Persians, changing its ethnic nature but remaining culturally very close to the Persian world. By the time they had entered the Persia of that historical period, they had already embraced Islam and in fact became its great champions. Not only did they defeat local Persian rulers such as the Samanids, but they soon pushed westward toward Anatolia, defeating the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt in Turkish) in 1071. This was one of the pivotal battles of Islamic history. It opened the Anatolian pasturelands to the Turkic nomads and led to the Turkification of Anatolia, the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, and finally to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The Turks were powerful militarily and ruled over many Muslim lands, including Persia and Egypt, and their role in later Islamic history can hardly be exaggerated. Today the Turkic peoples, composed of more than 150 million people, are spread from Macedonia to Siberia and all the way to Vladivostok and are geographically the most widespread ethnic and cultural group within the Islamic world. There are notable Turkic groups also within other areas that are not majority Turkic, including Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Russia, which has important Turkic minorities who are remnants of people conquered during the expansion of the Russian Empire under the czars.

The fifth major zone of Islamic culture is that of the Indian subcontinent. Already in the first decade of the eighth century, the army of Muh.ammad ibn Qasim had conquered Sindh, and thus began the penetration of Islam into the subcontinent during the next few centuries, but Islam spread throughout India mostly through Sufi orders.

There were also invasions by various Turkic rulers into India, and from the eleventh century onward and until the British colonization of India Muslim rulers dominated over much of India, especially the north, where the Moghuls established a major empire in the sixteenth century. Indian Islam is ethnically mostly homogeneous, with some Persian and Turkic elements added to the local Indian population, but it is culturally and linguistically very diverse. For nearly a thousand years the intellectual and literary language of Indian Muslims was Persian, but several local languages, such as Sindhi, Gujrati, Punjabi, and Bengali, also gained some

prominence as Islamic languages. Gradually, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new language was born of the wedding of the Indian languages and Persian with Turkic elements added and became known as Urdu.

Written in the Arabic-Persian script, Urdu became, like Swahili, Ottoman Turkish, and several other Islamic languages, a major language of Islamic discourse and was later adopted as the official language of Pakistan. The Indian zone of Islamic culture includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, Muslims of India and Nepal, and the deeply rooted Islamic community of Sri Lanka. There are some 400 million Muslims in this region, more than in any other. The reason for this vast population is the rapid rise of the general population in all of India since the nineteenth century, including both Hindus and Muslims, and the fact that more than one-fourth of Indians had embraced Islam, which was able to provide providentially a path of salvation for those who could no longer function within the world of traditional Hinduism. They have created some of the greatest works of Islamic art and culture, and although ruled often by Turkic dynasties, they have been very close in cultural matters to the Persian world until modern times.

The sixth zone of Islamic culture embraces the Malay world in Southeast Asia. Islamicized by Arab traders from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea and also by merchants and Sufis from India from the thirteenth century onward, Malay Islam displays again much ethnic homogeneity and possesses local traits all its own. Influenced deeply from the beginning by Sufism, which played a major role in the spread of Islam into that world, Malay Islam has usually reflected a mild and gentle aspect also in conformity with the predominant ethnic characteristics of the people. Dominated by Malay and Javanese languages, Malay Islam embraces Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and sizable minorities in Thailand as well as the Philippines and smaller minorities in Cambodia and Vietnam. Altogether there are over 220 million Muslims in this zone, and although this part of the Islamic world is a relative newcomer to the “Abode of Islam,” its adherents are known for their close attachment to Mecca and Medina and love for the Prophetic traditions.

As is the case with Africa and India, Malay Islam is highly influenced and colored operatively and intellectually by Sufism.

Besides these six major zones of Islamic culture, a few smaller ones must also be mentioned. One is Chinese Islam, whose origin goes back to the seventh century, when soon after the advent of Islam Muslim merchants settled in Chinese ports such as Canton. There has been a continuous presence of Islam in China since that time, but mostly in Sinkiang, which Muslim geographers call Eastern Turkistan.

The Islamic population of China includes both people of Turkic origin, such as the Uigurs, and native Chinese called Hui. Even among the Hans there are some Muslims. The number of Muslims in China remains a great mystery and figures from 25 to 100 million have been mentioned. There is a distinct Chinese Islamic architecture and calligraphy as well as a whole intellectual tradition closely allied to Persian Sufism. The Islamic

intellectual tradition in China began to express itself in classical Chinese rather than Persian and Arabic only from the seventeenth century onward.

Then there are the European Muslims-not Turkish enclaves found in Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia, but European ethnic groups-that have been Muslims for half a millennium. The most important among these groups are the Albanians, found throughout Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, and Bosnians, found mostly in Bosnia but to some extent also in Croatia and Serbia. These groups are ethnically of European stock, and the understanding of their culture is important for a better comprehension of both the spectrum of Islam in its totality and the rapport between Islam and the West in today’s Europe.

Finally, there are the new Islamic communities in Europe and America, including both immigrants and converts (or what many Muslims prefer to call reverts, that is, those who have gone back or reverted to the primordial religion, which is identified here with Islam). These include several million North Africans in France, some 3 million Turks and a sizable number of Kurds in Germany, some 2 million mostly from the Indian subcontinent in Great Britain, and smaller but nevertheless sizable populations in other European countries. In America there are both immigrants, mostly from the Arab East, Iran, and the subcontinent, and converts, primarily among African Americans but also some among whites. The spread of Islam among African Americans began with Elijah Muhammad, who created the Nation of Islam, which espouses reverse racism against whites. This movement later split into two groups and most of its members, along with other African American Muslims, soon joined the mainstream of Islam.

In this process the role of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, was of particular significance. There are some 25 million Muslims in Europe, some 6 million (although some have claimed other figures ranging from 5 to 7 million) in America, half a million in Canada, and perhaps over 2 million in South America. To view the spectrum of Islam globally, it is necessary to consider also these Islamic communities in the West, especially since they play such an important role as a bridge between the “Abode of Islam” (dar al-islam ), from which they come, and the West, which is their home.

These zones of Islamic culture described briefly here display a bewildering array of ethnicities, languages, forms of

art and music, and differing habitats for human life. Islam is practiced from the jungles of Borneo to the Hindu Kush mountains to the deserts of Mauritania. It includes whites, blacks, yellow-skinned people, and practically every intermediary type. Its followers have black as well as blond hair, brown as well as blue eyes. But within this remarkable diversity there reigns the unity created by Islam, a unity that can be seen in the recitation of the Quran in Arabic from east to west, in the daily prayers in the direction of Mecca, in the emulation of the single model of the Prophet, in the following of theShari‘ah , in the spiritual perfume of the Sufi orders, in the universal patterns and rhythms of Islamic art, and in many other factors. Unity in Islam has never meant uniformity and has always embraced diversity. To understand both this unity and this diversity within unity is to grasp the way in which Islam has been able to encompass so many human collectivities, to respect God-given differences and yet create a vast civilization unified and dominated by the principle of tawhid, or unity.