UNIT SEVEN
THE MIDDLE EAST
JUDAISM AND ISLAM
INTRODUCTION
It is now time for you to study a little about the Middle East and two other religions that began there. Both of these religions had an impact on the people of Europe in the Middle Ages; however, Islam had more of an impact than Judaism. We will begin with a look at the geography of the Middle East so that you will be able to understand the environment in which these religions developed.
The land of the Middle East is mostly upland plains and mountains. The Middle East contains the world's largest arid (dry) area. Cities and farmland are located along river valleys and on other sites where water is available. The climate in the area ranges from warm and pleasant to hot and dry. Most of the coastal areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea have good winter rains. Because the summers are long, hot and dry, farming in the region is dependent on winter rains and extensive irrigation. People can live in the desert only where there are springs and wells. Water can also be found under dry river beds. Such places are called oases. The desert traveler can suffer from extreme cold as well as extreme heat. This is because the skies are always clear and the air dry; this means that the heat from the day escapes quickly into the air at night. Nights in a desert can be very cold. Remembering this fact about the climate will help you understand the traditional dress of the people of the Middle East. Those clothes protect the people from the strong sun in the day and the cold at night. The head covering protects their scalps from being burned from the intense sun.
It should be obvious to you that all the peoples of the Middle East would want the more fertile areas; areas where there is water and land on which you can grow crops. In the Middle East, these areas surround the Mediterranean Sea. It also ought to be obvious that not everyone can have these fertile areas. For reasons we are about to study, these fertile areas are "holy" to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Before we begin studying these religions, I want you to realize that we are studying them from a historical perspective in this class. It is not a historian's place to put any kind of value judgment on religions; for example, to say that one is any better than another or that one should be believed at the exclusion of the others. We do not, in history, get into long discussions of whether Moses really saw a burning bush, or how it could burn and not leave ashes or make smoke! The Jews believe he saw it, and that God spoke to him from it, and that's what we need to know for this class. The fact that Jews believe this, has, of course, influenced their behavior, and as historians, we are interested in that.
Another observation before we start: you and I are products of Western culture. In our culture, we have mixed and mingled ideas from three different sources, one of which was the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. Our Greek and Roman heritage has taught us to be skeptics and to seek explanations for things. We want to know how and why things happen. If Moses saw a burning bush, what did it look like? Was it really there or was Moses hallucinating? How could God talk out of a bush? Why weren't there any ashes? We ask these things because of our Greek heritage, which teaches us that this kind of knowledge is important information to have. In the days when these religions we are about to study began, it never occurred to the people to ask these questions. They had more of an Eastern mind set. If Moses saw a burning bush, he saw it. No explanation was necessary. Faith without question was a good thing. You will see this religious attitude in Judaism and Islam.
How religion began
Early man was extremely ignorant. He was like a very small child today in what he understood about the world he lived in. He didn't understand what caused natural phenomena like thunderstorms, wind storms, floods and the like. He was totally at the mercy of his physical environment. He wasn't even real sure what was living and what was not, or what had lived, and wasn't living any more. If you will think about it, you will see why. You and I know stones aren't alive because we know what stones are made of, but suppose you're an early man. One day you see this stone, and it's just lying there, but then for some reason it starts to roll; perhaps the wind came up and moved the grass around it, so it moved. If you define life as "something that moves" you will think the stone is alive. You see a dead tree log, and it has moss growing on it. Is it dead or alive? Early man wasn't real sure. One thing for sure was that he was very AFRAID! of his environment. He never knew what to expect. One way he tried to explain the behavior of the forces of nature and other natural phenomena was to say that the various things had spirits inside them. The spirits had a will; that is, like men, they could decide what to do. Thus, if the wind blew , it blew because it wanted to! If it blew the roof of your hut off, then it must have wanted to do that, too! Maybe it was angry at you. So you tried to placate it - that is, try to do something to make it happy! Maybe, then, it wouldn't blow the roof off your hut. Now think what we do to try to please people and you'll see how worship began. Early man began to give the illusive and capricious spirits gifts- things that would make a man happy - food, for example, or something valuable to him. Maybe, if you were good at singing, you would sing to it. Or you might dance for it. You also prayed to it- that is, you asked it to please not blow the roof of your hut. As time went on, there got to be societies, and there were people in the societies whose business it was to know how to placate the various spirits. These people became known as "priests", and they were very important to the society. Also, as time went on, men began to personify some of these spirits; that is, to visualize them as looking like humans, and then men began to make statues of them, so you had a statue of the god of the sun, and a statue of the goddess of the moon, and so on. We call religions that believe there are spirits in things like stones "animistic"; religions that believe in many gods "polytheistic"; some early religions were both animistic and polytheistic. Most early religions were like this. If you will keep this in mind, you will see why the first religion we're going to study was unique at that time.
Judaism
Jewish origins
The Jews first appeared in the Middle East in the area of Mesopotamia. Today this is the area where Iraq is. The area is one of the fertile areas of the Middle East; it has two large rivers draining it, the Tigris and the Euphrates. That it was fertile explains why there were people there. These "Apiru", as they were called in Egyptian texts, were wanderers, or nomads.
The Jews were the first to: believe in one God; to believe this God created the forces of nature but was not the forces of nature; to believe this God was invisible (therefore, you could not make statues or pictures of him); to believe God had a name (YHWH) and was personal; to believe that God cared about people and what they did; that God was fair and just; that God could enter history and change the course of events; that God did not want human sacrifice; that God knew everything, was everywhere at once and was all powerful. They were the first people to keep their history over many centuries and have it history, rather than history and mythology combined. The Hebrew Bible (the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles) is the history of the Jews. It was an oral tradition passed down from father to son, until the days of the Babylonian Captivity, when it began to be written. The Bible is an anthology really; the stories in it come from four different sources, called J, P, E, and D. The stories were just put together, which is why there are sometimes more than one story about the same event. There are 2 creation stories, for example, and three stories of the Exodus.
The Jews believe that God chose them to be his special people, and that God gave them the area now known as Israel; at other times in history, this area has been called Palestine, Canaan or the "Promised Land". Interestingly, this area is one of the few fertile areas of the Middle East! In the Bible, it is referred to as a"land flowing with milk and honey", which is a figure of speech meaning it's fertile. I'm sure you will realize that not everyone accepts the Jewish claim that God gave it to them! The Muslims claim it, too.
The Patriarchs
Around 1950 B.C., there was a family living near the city of Ur. Ur would now be in Iraq. The head of the family was Abraham, and he had a wife named Sarah. Abraham's family was a tribe like the barbarian tribes you have already read about. Abraham was the first Jew to receive the call of God. God told Abraham to take his family to Canaan (the Promised Land). God also told Abraham he would bless Abraham's family, which means Abraham would have lots of descendants. Abraham, who had no legitimate children because Sarah couldn't have children, wondered about this; God told him that, as a sign of the "Covenant", he and Sarah would have a son.
Abraham's part of this deal was that he and his people were to worship God. God gave Abraham the Promised Land and a child. Abraham and his family moved to Canaan. Sarah and Abraham in due time had the child whom they named Isaac.
However, (and this is important) Abraham had had a son earlier with one of his concubines. A concubine was a woman a man kept, but she was not legally married to him - so any kids they might have would not be legitimate and would get no inheritance. In this particular case, however, since Sarah was not able to have children, it was agreed that Abraham's son by Hagar, the concubine, would be allowed to be Abraham's official son and receive the inheritance. His name was Ishmael. You will want to remember Ishmael. Once Isaac was born, everything changed for Ishmael. Now that Abraham had a legitimate son, he had no more use for Ishmael or his mother. Therefore, he threw them out of his house and told them to get lost. Hagar and Ishmael wandered in the desert until they got to the area of Mecca, which transliterated from Arabic is Makkah. (We will use the transliterated names in this class - that's what the Muslims prefer). There Hagar and Ishmael were given water and food miraculously by God. The reason Hagar and Ishmael are important is that Muslim Arabs believe they are descended from Abraham through Ishmael.
Isaac grew up, got married and had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Their mother preferred Jacob to a fault and conspired with him to cheat Esau out of his inheritance. As a result, Esau was furious and Jacob felt it to be the better part of wisdom to get out of his way! Jacob traveled far away and worked for a man named Laban for many years While he was there, he married twice, and he had 12 sons in all by these wives - we don't know if there were any girls! Also while he was there, God renewed the "Covenant" with him and changed his name to "Israel". The 12 sons are important because they became the 12 tribes of Israel. These tribes were Dan, Bashan, Manasseh, Levi, Benjamin, Issachar, Naphtali, Reuben, Judah, Ephraim, and Joseph. One son, Joseph, was the favorite of his father; his father gave him gifts that he didn't give the other kids and they were jealous. They were so jealous that they took their brother one day and sold him as a slave to a caravan going to Egypt. Then they told their father that a wild animal had killed Joseph. Joseph could "interpret dreams"; this ability brought him to the attention of the pharaoh - the ruler of Egypt ("Pharaoh" is a title, not a name). Because of this ability, Joseph was able to keep Egypt from starving to death during a great famine, and as a result, he was allowed to bring his family to Egypt so that they wouldn't starve during the famine. This is how Jacob's family came to Egypt.
The years passed. Jacob's family multiplied, and the Jews became a problem for the pharaohs. They refused to worship the pharaoh as a god. This created an authority problem for the pharaohs, who couldn't have hundreds of people not worshipping them and manage not to look foolish. The Jews were separated and put into a place called Goshen. The pharaohs decided to make slaves of the Jews in the hopes of killing them off. When this didn't work, one pharaoh decided to kill all babies of one gender so that they could not reproduce. Being a smart pharaoh, he decided to kill all the boys. That way there would be no children, and there would be no males to revolt when they grew up, either. The story goes that one little Jewish boy, through the cleverness of his mother, was saved; this little Jewish boy grew up to be Moses.
We need to pause here for a moment for a little general information. First, the stay in Egypt was the Jews' first experience of persecution. When you persecute someone, you make that person feel very uncomfortable and bothered; you can go so far as to kill the persecuted person; but there can be lots of persecution without killing. In the southern states of the United States the African - Americans were persecuted - they were not allowed to have the same rights as whites and sometimes they were killed for no reason except they were a different race. When you tease and harass a classmate, you are persecuting that person. Why do humans do this sort of thing? Part of it is fear - when people are different from what we expect them to be, we feel uncomfortable around them because we didn't know how to act; rather than admitting what is wrong with us, we say that the awkward situation is all their fault for not being like us. Part of it, also , is the human being's tendency to want to feel superior - to feel our group of people is better than that other group - carry this too far and you will sooner or later have persecution of the group that is considered inferior. The Jews' monotheistic religion made them stand out as being real "different" in a world where polytheistic worship-the-forces-of-nature-type religions were the rule. People didn't understand them and were a little bit afraid of them. Now you need to keep a count, beginning with Egypt, of how many times the Jews have been persecuted. They have been persecuted so much that it is part of their identity as a people. The other thing you need to know is that not all Jews left Egypt with Moses. What is considered truly "Jewish" is going to get smaller all the time.
Moses and the Exodus
To get back to Moses, the Jews believe God sent him to rescue them from slavery in Egypt. They believe God gave Moses this message from a burning bush that was not consumed by the fire - that is, it did not make ashes as it burned or give off any smoke. Moses wasn't particularly thrilled with the assignment but it was clear God wasn't going to let him out of it. It was through this little conversation between God in the bush and Moses that Moses learned God's name - "I am who I am" or, in Hebrew, YHWH. There is no really exact English translation.
The Jews left Egypt in about 1250 B.C. The Jews believe God acted in history to save them at this point. God sent the 10 plagues to convince the pharaoh to let the Jews go. Depending on which of the stories you read the plagues are different, except for the last plague. In the last plague, the pharaoh was told that an "angel of death" would pass over each home and kill the oldest son in the family. This would happen to everybody living in Egypt; the Jews were told to kill a lamb and put its blood on the door of their houses, and that way their families would escape the "angel of death". The Jews were also told to get ready to leave, but before they left, they were to eat a special meal. This meal consisted of lamb, egg, bitter herbs, charoses (which is a mixture of chopped apples, nuts, and cinnamon mixed with a little wine), karpas (which is parsley, celery, lettuce, onion or potatoes), and unleavened bread (which is bread made without yeast). The bread was made without yeast because of the hurry - they could not wait to let bread rise. They also had wine. When they killed the lamb to prepare it, they took the blood and smeared it on the front door of their home as they had been told to, and the "angel of death "passed over" it. For this reason, the night the Jews celebrate this event is called "Passover". After the meal, the Jews left in a hurry with Moses. The fact that the "angel of death" had killed the pharaoh's oldest son gave the Jews time to get a head start out of Egypt, because, of course, as soon as he got over the shock of the death of his son, the pharaoh noticed the Jews had left and he wanted his slaves back. The pharaoh decided to chase the Jews and try to get them back. He almost did, too! The Jews had reached the Red Sea, and pharaoh was closing in on them fast. In the nick of time, they were saved. The Jews believe God parted the Red Sea and they walked across on dry land. When pharaoh attempted to cross after the Jews, the water returned to normal and the Egyptians drowned! The Jews call this entire event, from the Passover to the crossing of the Red Sea, the EXODUS, which means "exit". To them , it is the central saving act of God and the most important event in their history. They date their calendar from it. Every year the Jews celebrate this event with a holiday called Passover. They eat the special meal in remembrance of the night they left Egypt. This meal is called the Seder. At the Seder, the table is arranged so that the oldest male faces the youngest male in the family. The youngest male asks "the four questions" and the oldest male retells the story of the Exodus as he answers the questions. For those of you who are Christian, if you will look again at what the Jews ate for Passover, you will notice that two of the items are the same as what a Christian receives for Communion. This is no coincidence. On the Thursday before he was killed, Jesus, who was Jewish in case you never knew that, was having the Passover meal with the disciples. He took those two items, bread and wine, and told the disciples to eat the bread and drink the wine in remembrance of him.
After the Exodus, the Jews wandered in the direction of Canaan. They stopped at Mount Sinai where Moses was given the 10 Commandments and the Covenant was renewed a third time. This is the third time that the Jews were promised Canaan. The Jews continued their journey, and eventually reached Canaan. They had to fight their way into Canaan, because it had people living in it, people who thought they had just as much reason to be there as Jews. Moses did not make it into Canaan; he died before they got in. The new leader was Joshua. The Jews tried to live as a tribal confederation with religious leaders as "judges"; however, this did not work out too well. They could not defend themselves against their enemies.
The last "judge" was Samuel; to him the people gave the responsibility of finding a king. Samuel did not want to do this, but he followed the peoples' wishes. The Jews believe God guided his selection. The first king of Israel was Saul. Saul was o.k. until he got older and started having spells of madness. He became paranoid - thought everybody was after him. It's hard to say in today's language what was wrong with him; people then believed God had left him. This meant that a new king was needed so Samuel, who was still alive, went to look for another. He finally found a young boy named David. David was barely old enough to be king! Samuel believed God told him to pick David, so David went back to the capital with Samuel. Saul had a son about the same age as David, and the two became good friends. David was gifted musically and soon he was called upon to play for Saul; music seemed to help him. Then David killed the "giant" Philistine, Goliath, and this made him very popular with the people - a hero. This made Saul very jealous and angry and he plotted to kill David. More than once David only narrowly escaped the traps set for him. Saul's son Jonathan helped David escape more than once, at the risk of his own life. Finally, Saul was killed in battle, and David became the king. David was the Jews' favorite king. He was brave, reckless at times, handsome, successful in war, and certainly not a "goody two shoes"! He was "one of the guys"! In darker days, the Jews looked back to the days of David with longing. When they first heard the prophecies of a "Messiah" who was going to come to save them, the first person they thought of was David. The "Messiah" would be a resurrected King David! (This is one reason the Jews did not think Jesus was the Messiah. He was not at all like King David!) There was one more king after David. His name was Solomon. Solomon had ideas of living in luxury, and he also took on the huge project of building a temple to God in Jerusalem. To pay for all this, Solomon had to charge heavy taxes, and the people were mad at him. After Solomon died, the kingdom of Israel split into two parts: the northern kingdom, Israel and the southern kingdom, Judah. This happened in 922 B.C. The kingdoms were no match for their enemies in their split up state, and they were soon conquered. Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and Judah to the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Babylonians carried the Jews from Judah off into slavery in Babylon. The Jews called this "the Babylonian Captivity" and this is a second experience of persecution for them. Notice the similarity between Judah and the word Jew. This is when the Jews first stated to be called that, and from this time on, "Jew" will refer to those Jews who went through the Captivity experience only. Several things happened while the Jews were in captivity: they began to write their history, they began the first synagogues, which at that time were places for instruction and worship, but they were not considered to take the place of the real Temple in Jerusalem, and they began to think long and hard about why they were persecuted so much. For the Jews, who believed that God loved them, the persecutions posed a problem: why would a God that loved them allow them to be persecuted? Their answer to this question was that they must have sinned - done something terribly wrong - and that God was punishing them. They decided the sin had been to be too easily tempted to copy the religious practices of their neighbors. Their neighbors were all polytheists who worshipped the forces of nature, especially those that made plants grow. Such gods were referred to as Baal or fertility gods. These were usually pictured as women - ancient people made the connection between women being the ones who gave birth and the fact that the land in a sense also "gave birth" to the crops. Ancient people worshipped their gods in ways that the Jews were not supposed to worship their God. There was human sacrifice, for example. Ancient people also thought that if they had sex in front of the gods, the gods would get the idea and make the ground fertile. Again, the Jews had very strict ideas about who you had sex with and where - having it with just anyone simple to have it was forbidden. That was why the Jews thought they had sinned - because they had been tempted to do some of these things and had often given into temptation and done them. They decided if they ever got back home, they would never, ever do those things again; to see to it that they didn't, they decided not to have anything to do with "Gentiles" - that is, non-Jews. To get back to the Captivity, the Jews wrote some of their most beautiful psalms and literature while they were there. Here is one of the psalms that was written when they were there:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept
when we remembered you, O Zion.
As for our harps, we hung them up
on the trees in the midst of that land.
For those who led us away captive asked us for a song
and our oppressors called for mirth:
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
How shall we sing the Lord's song
in an alien land?
Psalm 137
In 538 B.C., Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon, and he released the Jews to return to their own land. They returned to Judah and rebuilt their nation and their temple. They were then ruled by priests until the next enemies showed up. These were the Seleucids under Antiochus. The Seleucids ruled in Israel from 198 B.C. until 63 B.C. Under Antiochus IV, a persecution of the Jews was started. As usual, the basis of this persecution was the Jews' differentness because of their monotheistic religion and the fact that they would not worship any other gods, including human emperors who thought they were gods! As part of the persecution, Antiochus IV had pigs sacrificed in the Temple. In the Jewish faith, pigs are considered unclean animals: Jews don't eat the meat of the pig; to sacrifice pigs in the Temple defiled it. This set off a revolt on the part of a Jewish leader named Judas Maccabeus and his followers, who were called Maccabees. The revolt was successful and the Jews cleansed their Temple. They celebrate this event with a holiday called Hanukkah.
After the revolt, Judah was ruled by the descendants of Judas Maccabeus. These people were called the Hasmoneans. During these years, the Jews were tempted in a new way to copy their neighbors. This wasn't religious practices; this new temptation was more subtle. It was a way of looking at the world that was entirely different from the Jewish way. These were the years when the Greeks ruled much of the Mediterranean world, and their influence spread far and wide. To the Greek, man was the most wonderful thing that existed - man and his mind and his ability to reason. To the Greek, everything had an explanation! If it didn't, it wasn't worth worrying about. Man was to spend his time asking thoughtful, scientific method type questions so he could find the explanations that were waiting to be found for things. Man was here to learn. Blind belief in something was considered mental laziness! The Greeks had great confidence that man could solve his own problems and find his own explanations for things - he didn't need help! The Greeks had a religion, but they didn't take it very seriously; we can tell this when we think of some of the stories they told about their gods. Their gods acted like humans. The gods looked like humans. They got crushes on people and chased them around: the king of gods cheated on his wife; a major war was started because three goddesses each bribed a human to say they were the prettiest. The only differences between god and men were that gods lived forever and the gods had special powers - the king of the gods turned his girlfriend into a bull so his wife wouldn't catch on that he was seeing somebody other than she; one goddess who didn't want her son to grow up had a spell put on him so he'd stay a baby forever. Most of this is pretty funny, actually. (If you have not read Greek mythology, I highly recommend it. You'll find all the examples mentioned so far). Certainly these gods weren't setting any examples for humans to follow! The Greeks could NOT understand these serious Jews. Who ever heard of taking a god seriously? or expecting anyone to have absolute faith in a god? The Jews, on the other hand, considered the Greeks' glorification of man and man's abilities to be blasphemy - major breaking of the commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods but me". However, it was hard to resist the Greek habit of questioning everything and wanting proof of things. And, of course, for the Jew, persecuted as he had been over and over, the question of God's existence and his love for them were the main questions. Now for a Jew to doubt God is major sin! Many Jews fell by the wayside - they became "Hellenized" Jews. The word "Hellenized" comes from "Hellas" - the Greek word for Greece.
Some Jews, however, stayed true to their beliefs and tried to keep other Jews on the straight and narrow path; these Jews were called the Assideaens. The Assideaens have continued to exist; in Jesus' time, they were called "Pharisees"; in more recent times, they are called the "Hasidim". They are the very orthodox and very strict Jews. If you have seen movies about the Holocaust or read books about it, you have probably seen the Hasidic Jews – the men are the ones wearing the prayer shawls and the round hat on the head; they also wear beards and long sideburns, curled, called earlocks.
The Romans come
In 63 B.C., the Romans conquered Palestine and the Jews. For their day and age, the Romans were very forward thinking conquerors. For example, they made no attempt to change the cultures of the people they conquered, and they didn't interfere with the peoples' religious practices. They demanded only that their conquered provinces pay taxes, refrain from revolting, do service in the military if you were a young man, and that they worship the emperor as a god. The Romans were good to the Jews at first; they didn't demand the emperor-worship, they allowed the Jews to have special money that didn't have Caesar's face on it, they didn't make the Jews do military service, and they allowed the Jews to have their own court system. The Romans didn't understand the Jews, though, and thought they were rather odd. The Jews, for their part, would have nothing to do with the Romans because the Romans weren't Jews. This situation did not improve the relationship between the two groups. Secret Jewish guerrilla bands planned for the day of revolt, and they hid up in the hills, and practiced hit and run warfare against the Romans. At the time of Jesus, there were the following groups of Jews in Palestine: the Pharisees that have already been mentioned; the Sadducees, who wanted to "cooperate" with the Romans; the Zealots, who were guerrilla fighters, and the Essenes, who withdrew from the whole thing and lived in caves in poverty. You will remember from your study of the Christian religion that Jesus managed to make all these groups either angry with, or disappointed in, him.
The Jews revolt against Rome
In 70AD, 110 AD and again in 135 AD the Jews revolted against Rome. After the revolt in 70AD, the Romans destroyed their Temple in Jerusalem. This marked the end of Judea as a separate Jewish state. Many Jews were caught by Romans and sold as slaves; some committed suicide, but the larger number of them fled to other places. After 135, Jews were effectively kicked out of Palestine, and there was no Jewish state again until 1948. This time when the Jews fled and/or were kicked out of Palestine is known in their history as the Diaspora – the Dispersion or scattering. The Jews fled to many places: Persia, Egypt, North Africa and Europe.
The destruction of the Second Temple was a catastrophe equal to the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile earlier. The priestly leadership was discredited since they hadn’t been able to prevent the destruction. Leadership of the Jewish people passed to rabbis (teachers). Rabbis were schooled in the Bible and other Jewish writings. They taught that salvation came from strict observance of the Bible, the Law, and other rabbinic traditions. The synagogues replaced the destroyed Temple as the place of worship and study.
Judaism in the Middle Ages in Europe
In Europe, medieval Judaism developed two distinctive cultures: the Sephardic in Spain and the Ashkenazic in Central and Eastern Europe. The two were different in what they believed was most important – to codify the law (Sephardic) or to concentrate on the oral teachings known as the Talmud (Ashkenazic). They were also different in customs and in language.
Wherever he was, the medieval Jew in Europe was likely to be persecuted. The Christian Church taught that the Jews had killed Jesus, and were, therefore, very bad people. Add to this the fact that the Jews tended to segregate themselves voluntarily so they could keep their culture alive; rarely did they marry outside the faith, and that they were usually pretty successful financially, and you begin to see why medieval Christians began to hate Jews. Christians interpreted their behavior in living in their own communities as snobbish, misunderstanding the reason for it. Often Christians were in debt to Jews, since Jews of ten were merchants, bankers and moneylenders. The Christian "forgot" that the reason the Jew was a merchant was because of Christian restrictions against them! Jews, for example, could not be part of the feudal system since they were not Christian, were taxed more heavily than other people and were likely at any moment to be chased off their property. Also, Jews were not allowed to hire Christians to work for them, and their religion forbade them to have Jewish slave labor so having a big estate was not practical. Jews found that being merchants was probably the safest and easiest thing for them to do; it was harder to track them down that way, and they didn’t have the labor problem. Persecution took the form of harassment, restrictions on marriage between Christian and Jew, discrimination as to what kind of work a Jewish person could get, having to wear distinguishing colors on their clothes and sometimes outright murder of thousands of Jews at a time. In spite of the persecution and harassment, however, the Jewish community did not die out, and still exists in Europe today.
Islam
Its Beginnings: Muhammad's Life
Islam is the third of the great monotheistic religions to appear. It began officially in Saudi Arabia, which is in the Middle East, in 613 A.D. It was founded by Muhammad, who is known as the "Prophet". The word Islam means "surrender to the will of Allah" and the word "Muslim", which is what the followers are called, means "one who submits". Today, Islam, like Christianity, is a very large religion - almost all Arabs are Muslim, numbers of Africans are Muslim, some Iranians are Muslims and the Pakistanis are Muslim. The majority of Muslims, however, live in the Middle East.
As we learned earlier, the climate of most of the Middle East is hot and dry. Certainly, Saudi Arabia, where this religion got its start, is hot and dry in the daytime and cold at night. Desert stretches for miles in all directions. The sand is fine; so fine that it feels like talcum powder and it is very hard to get it off your skin. Big sandstorms come up every so often. If a person was to be caught in one, he could easily be entirely covered over by blowing and drifting sand. There aren't many landmarks in a desert either, so it's easy to get lost. Few plants grow - maybe cacti or a short grasses. Such a climate requires a different kind of culture from a culture where rain is plentiful and crops will grow well. The people of the desert got along by constantly wandering from one oasis ( a fertile spot in a desert where there would be some grass for their herds) to another -we say they were(and many still are) nomads. Arabs organized their society in tribes or clans. We have seen this before with the ancient Jews and the barbarians. Arab tribes moved across the desert as a tribe. This is because no one ventured out on the desert alone. It was (and is) unsafe. The Arabs who live in tribes like this and travel constantly call themselves Bedouin, which means "Arab nomad". The Bedouin have lived in the deserts of the Middle East for hundreds of years, and only in this century have any numbers of Arabs given up the Bedouin life style. Each tribe has its own place in the desert where it may wander; that gives all the tribes a chance to get something to eat. They have, however, been known to fight over this.
Arabs have always done a lot of trading with their neighbors. They are in a great spot for trading, as they are in the middle of the Far East and Europe. Because of the danger mentioned above from sandstorms and from outlaws, Arabs trade by taking huge caravans across the desert. They were (and are)good businessmen. They carried goods from Africa, India, and China. While crossing the desert, the caravans stopped at fertile spots in the desert. Towns grew up at these spots and became rich from trade. One of these towns was Makkah (Mecca).
Before Islam, the Arabs had two polytheistic religions. One was very simplistic. It involved the worship of trees, wells and stones. It is interesting to note that these three things are very scarce in the Middle East! The Arabs thought these things had spirits in them. One stone was very, very special! It had fallen straight from heaven! It was a black stone. It was probably a meteorite. Anyway, the Arabs built a temple to house it in the city of Makkah (Mecca). This temple is shaped like a cube, and it is called the Ka'bah (which means "cube" in Arabic). It is very much still there. The Arabs also worshipped statues, which were also housed in the Ka'bah. Their favorite statue was the one they called Allah. Arabs made pilgrimages from miles away to worship in the Ka'bah.
Muhammad was born about 570 A.D. As with Jesus and Christians, Muslims also say that miraculous things happened at Muhammad's birth. He was a member of the tribe of Kuraish, who were, according to the faith, descendants of Abraham and Ishmael. The family was well respected, but it was not particularly rich. His own parents died when he was quite young (about 7), so his uncle raised him. When he was about 15, his uncle put him to work on a caravan. His boss was a wealthy lady, older than himself, named Kadija. Muhammad's caravan work was important in his life and in what happened later. First, in his travels, he met Jews and Christians and heard of their belief in one God. Second, he eventually married Kadija. She liked him. This was fortunate for Muhammad because it set him up financially for the rest of his life. Since Arabs were allowed more than one wife, it didn't matter much about her age!
Muhammad's life went along uneventfully until he was about 40 years old. He was in the habit of going off into the desert to a cave to meditate once a year - this was not seen as unusual in that culture, many people did it - and this time, when he went to the cave, he later said that the angel Gabriel (same angel Gabriel who visited Mary, Jesus' mother) came to him and told him that he was to be Allah's prophet, the last and final prophet, and he was to go and share what would be revealed to him with others. Other visitations followed this first one. Muhammad had had a conversion experience, similar to the ones we have studied before. He returned to Makkah (Mecca) where he lived, and he began to preach the new religion. He was not well received. The people did not want to give up the old religion. In addition, Muhammad tore down the statues of the other gods in the Ka'bah, and by doing so, dried up the business of some of the elders of Makkah (Mecca) who made money selling sacrificial animals to pilgrims. He became so unpopular that his life was in danger. The elders plotted to kill him. Fortunately for Muhammad there was a place for him to go. He was asked to come to Madinah (Medina) to preach there and to set up a government there. So, in the year 622 A.D., Muhammad and a few friends fled from Makkah to Madinah. This flight of Muhammad from Makkah to Madinah is called the Hij'rah (Hegira) which means "flight". This event saved Muhammad's life and the religion, so to Muslims this is the central saving act of God, like Exodus is to the Jews and Resurrection is to the Christians. They date their calendar from the Hij'rah.
In Madinah (Medina), Muhammad set up the first Muslim community. In this community, he was both its political leader and its religious leader, setting a pattern still followed by some Muslim countries today. In Madinah he organized the religion. He preached to the inhabitants of the city, being careful to always include the Jews and Christians, whose religions he thought he'd been sent to reform. He was disappointed and hurt by their response because they were not at all eager to convert, and they didn't agree that he was "the last and final prophet of God". Instead they pointed to the many similarities between certain Muslim teachings and Christian and Jewish ones, and accused Muhammad of being unoriginal and of copying them. This made Muhammad angry as well as hurt, and he never liked Jews and Christians too much after that, and they certainly did not like him! Muhammad also organized a fighting force, and after 10 years in Madinah (Medina) , Muhammad went back to Makkah (Mecca) in 632 A.D. and conquered it. Two years later, in 634 A.D., he died.
The Beliefs of Islam
Like Jews and Christians, Muslims believe in one God. That God is Allah and Allah is the same God as the Jewish and Christian God. Where Jews stress the justice of God, and Christians stress the mercy of God, Muslims stress his omnipotence - his power to do anything he might choose to do. A Muslim's response to God is to surrender to "the will of God".
Muslims believe Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah, the last and final prophet, and the completion of the revelation begun in the Jewish Bible and continued in Christianity. Muslims accept all the Jewish prophets and Jesus as prophets, but none are so special as Muhammad. To Muslims, Jesus is not the Son of God. Muslims make no claims of divinity for Muhammad, either. There is no Resurrection in Islam.
Muslims believe that they are descended from Abraham through Ishmael, the illegitimate son of Abraham and the concubine Hagar. They believe the black stone in the Ka'bah in Makkah (Mecca) was a gift from God to Abraham.
Palestine is holy to Muslims as it is to Christians and Jews because they accept the Bible prophets. Muhammad is said to have ascended into heaven from Jerusalem, also, making this city holy to Muslims as well as to Christians and Jews.
Muslims believe that Allah has planned out a person's life for him, and that there is nothing that he should do about it. They believe the person should surrender to the will of Allah. They call this belief that the things that happen to them in life are fated to happen Kismet. The closest English translation to Kismet is fate.
Muslims believe they should live their lives in accordance with the Five Pillars of Islam, a set of rules somewhat like the Ten Commandments. The first Pillar is also reminiscent of Christian creeds. The Five Pillars of Islam are:
a. Shahadah: (The Act of Faith): Each Muslim must say that he/she believes in
to prayer. Everywhere, Muslims stop what they are doing, wash their hands, face
and feet, face Makkah (Mecca) and pray. When a Muslim prays he kneels with
his head touched to the ground.
d. Zakat (Charity): All Muslims must give to the poor. In Muslim countries, this
is usually done by paying a state poor tax.
Muslim who visits Makkah (Mecca) will reenact the scene of Hagar and Ishmael
in the wilderness when God miraculously gave the two of them food and water.
Additional rules for living a good Muslim life are in the Qur'an (Koran). Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel dictated the Qur'an to Muhammed when he was in the cave, and that he memorized it. He wrote the revelations down as they had been said, so Muslims believe that the Qur'an is the exact word of God. Therefore they will not change it, not one character of one word. It is the same today as it was in the 7th century. Practicing Muslims must read the Qur'an in Arabic; they may not read a translation even though there are translations for non Muslims to read if they want to. This fact means that all practicing Muslims at least know enough Arabic to read the Qur'an, which is something they all have in common and which is a bond between them. This is different from the Jewish and Christian Bible. The Bible is, for one thing, a collection of stories instead of a continuous revelation. The Bible is not thought of as God's exact words. Where it is God's words, that will be indicated somehow to the reader. Most of the Bible is peoples' interpretations of what they thought God meant. The Bible has been translated many times.
The Qur'an covers all aspects of a Muslim's daily life. It tells him what he may eat and what he may drink. It tells him how many wives he can have. It tells him how to get a divorce. It tells him how to do business, forbidding him to cheat. It tells him how to dress (this is why in the Middle East, some Muslim women still wear the veil. The Qur'an says to do so). It tells him how to treat slaves. In this way, it is reminiscent of the Jewish Bible.
Muslims also believe in something called the jihad, or "holy war". A jihad is a war fought "for Allah" against the "enemies of Allah". "Enemies of Allah" include all non Muslims, especially if those persons have been preached to and didn't convert, like the Jews and Christians. Muslims believe that Allah wants them to fight against the "enemies of Allah", and that such a war is justified. The idea of jihad started when Muhammad wanted to unite the Arab tribes and stop them from fighting each other. Instead, they could fight a common enemy. The new faith gave all Muslims a common cause. Also, Arabs always needed things, which could be taken from the people they attacked. There was heavenly reward for a person killed in a jihad; that person went straight to Paradise, no matter how many sins he might have committed here on earth. There was earthly reward for those who lived through the jihad: they got to split up the booty that was taken from the defeated enemy.
Muslims believe in life after death and in a judgment just as Christians do. Interestingly, the Muslim Paradise is a garden with flowing water and lots of flowers! Muslim Jahannam or hell, was the opposite of Paradise; it was an abyss filled with hot flames. The damned were also tortured, just as in the Christian views of hell at this time in history.
The Spread of Islam
Fired up and enthusiastic about their new religion, the Muslim Arabs now went about a program of conquest that would eventually build them an empire almost as big as Rome's. Historians differ on why they actually started this program; most agree that there were getting to be too many Arabs for the land that was available, and conquest of more land would give them more land to move to. That they were extremely successful, there is no doubt. Within 100 years after Muhammad's death (from 634-732) they had conquered Saudi Arabia, Syria, Persia, Northern Africa, Egypt and Spain, where they were called the Moors. They were finally stopped in Spain at the Battle of Tours in what is now France in 732. The only things they did not have that Rome had had were Italy, the Balkan Peninsula, and what is today Turkey. In time, they would add Turkey and the Balkan Peninsula to their empire, also.
There were several reasons why they were so successful. The Arabs were filled with the righteousness of their cause, and their desert life had made them tough and disciplined fighters. Their belief in Kismet made then fight recklessly at times because they figured if this was their day to die they'd die anyway, no matter what they did, and if it wasn't their day to die, they'd live no matter what they did. Muhammad's promise of heavenly reward if they'd died was an incentive to fight hard, as was the promise of earthly wealth (from booty) if they lived. Their enemies were not up to them. Lastly, they soon got a reputation. Many potential enemies surrendered without even putting up a fight, especially when the Muslims said all they wanted was for the people to convert and pay tribute.
Dynastic Split in Islam
There was a break in the wars of conquest for awhile in the middle of the seventh century as Islam was involved in a bitter dynastic war. When Muhammad died, he had designated no successor, and he had had no sons, only a daughter, who could not succeed. The first person to succeed Muhammad as Khalifa (caliph) (successor to the Prophet)was his best friend and co-worker, Abu Bekr. When Abu Bekr died, the problems came up again, as he had no sons either. Muhammad's daughter, Fatima, had married a man named Ali, and a whole group of Muslims backed him for khalifa, because he did have some relationship to Muhammad, even if he wasn't a direct descendent. Another, larger, group said that it did not matter if the successor were related to Muhammad or not. What should matter was how "holy" the person was. For about 30 years the Muslims fought off and on about this, and the result was a permanent split in Islam. The group that had supported Ali became known as Shi'ites, and the other group, which, remember, was larger, became known as Sunnites. The two groups still exist today. The Shi'ite group is more orthodox and less flexible than the Sunnites.
In 661 A.D., the Ummayad dynasty was founded and it ruled from 661-750 A.D. Their capital was Damascus. In 750, that dynasty ran out and a new one was founded, the Abbassids. The Abbassids moved the capital to Baghdad, the old capital of the Persian Empire. During the Abbasid dynasty, the Muslim civilization reached it height culturally. However, the Abbasids could not hold the Muslim world together - bits and pieces began to slip away. In 1055 A.D., a new people made their appearance in the Muslim world, the Turks. The Turks converted to Islam, and went on a conquering spree. They took over the Middle East, and after 1258 A.D., they were the leaders of the Muslim world. This would be true until 1918, when their empire, the Ottoman Empire, would be defeated in war.
What the Muslims learned from other cultures
As the Muslims conquered the different areas they picked up ideas from the other cultures they encountered. Most of the people that the Arabs conquered had a better lifestyle and had more knowledge than the Arabs and they were impressed. The Arabs were anxious to learn. They felt a need to be able to defend and justify their faith; their encounters with more learned men than they convinced them they needed a lot more content in their explanations as well as the ability to argue logically; also, the Muslim religion at that time did not, as did Christianity at that time, denigrate (put down) earthly knowledge. They were particularly impressed with the Persians. We now need to see what they learned from the other cultures they conquered and encountered. We will begin with Persia.
In Persia, they found a much more civilized life style than they had seen before. People in Persia wore comfortable clothes; they kept themselves clean; they ate much better food; their emperor lived in luxury and kept at his court artists and scholars and had huge libraries of books. The Arabs were very impressed with the books and created libraries of their own. In keeping the books, the Arabs unwittingly did Western Europe a great service. When the Europeans were ready for the books again, the books were there to find. Arab rulers had the books translated into Arabic. This was important. Arabic, like the original Greek that a lot of the books were written in, is a very precise language. (English, by contrast, is not. The Greeks have 4 words for "love", depending on what kind of love you're talking about; English has one) That meant that the translations were much more accurate than they might have been otherwise. When the West (Europe) was ready for the books again, it was easy to translate them back into Greek, and from there into Latin so Western scholars could read them. Arabs , especially wealthy ones, copied the Persian life style, creating a demand for the goods that contributed to that.
The Muslims rejected Greek art, history, and literature. In terms of the art, the reason for the rejection was religious; Muslims are forbidden by the Qur'an to recreate in art anything that is in nature. They believe that a person who might try this "would be acting like Allah" as only Allah can create, and this is considered sin. However, they took a major interest in Greek philosophy and science. They studied Aristotle; Galen and Hippocrates on medicine, Euclid and Archimedes on geometry and Ptolemy.
From the Syrians, the Muslims learned to make steel. From this steel, they learned to make fine knives and weapons. They also learned to make glass. They also learned about a fine cloth called muslin. From the Chinese, through trading with them, the Muslims learned how to make paper, porcelain, and gunpowder. They learned about the clock, and about the astrolabe, a navigational instrument. From the Indians of India, they learned about arithmetic, algebra and the Indian numeral system.
What The Muslims Contributed Themselves To Knowledge
The Muslims did not just copy knowledge, they built upon what they learned and actually added some totally new things. Aristotle was not only translated; the works were edited and commented upon by Muslims. Muslims extended their investigations of the known world and taught the results of these investigations using globes. They invented a quasi-science called alchemy, in which they tried to turn base metals, like lead, into gold; obviously, they never succeeded with that project, but they kept records of what substances they had tried, and they set up the experiments in such a way that they could tell something from them; thus, they were the first to really use anything like the scientific method. In their experiments, they found such substances as alkalis, arsenous oxide, salt peter (used in making gunpowder), sulphuric acid, and so on. They progressed far beyond the Greeks in medicine; they had some idea that dirt and disease were related because they always built their hospitals in the spot where a piece of meat would take the longest to rot, the cleaner places, you might say. They learned to operate on the human body. The Muslims improved clocks by adding a pendulum to regulate the clock; they improved the astrolabe, and they began experiments on a compass. In the area of math, the Muslims added zero to the Indian number system, adopted it and renamed it "Arabic". These are the numerals you use all the time in math. Without the zero the Arabs added and the concept of place value they developed, you would not be able to do the complex calculations you do every day. They created algebra and trigonometry as separate sciences. They also made criticisms of Ptolemy's concept of the universe that had the earth as the unmoving center of the universe with everything revolving around it. Mathematically it doesn't work out for the earth to be the center, and they pointed this out.
What these people knew becomes remarkable when we compare this with what Europeans of the same time knew. The church frowned on too much earthly knowledge at this time and it wanted people to concentrate on religion and going to heaven when they died. For this reason, and the fact that the barbarians did not value education and knowledge, didn't know the value of it, the majority of Europeans were, at this time, illiterate and ignorant. Europeans at this time thought disease was the result of sinful living, or maybe it was possession of the devil. They were not at all careful about where they put the garbage and the sewage; they didn't realize, even in the 14th century A.D., that there was any connection between the garbage and sewage that they dumped in the street and the fact that people kept getting the plague! They would only begin to question the Ptolemaic system in the 15th century. Galileo would be silenced by the church as late as the 1600's for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe. Europeans would learn Muslim knowledge of math in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. As you can see, the Muslims were much more advanced than the Europeans. We will study, at the end of this chapter, why the Europeans didn't copy all this knowledge and technology(see next section)
Muslim Trading and Goods Traded
The empire the Muslims created made one big trading area. The fact that all Muslims knew Arabic facilitated trade. Muslim merchants traveled in caravans from one end of the empire to the other. When they stopped in a city, they would go to its town square and set up booths where they would display their wares. In doing business, Arab merchants and their customers bargained. No merchant ever expected the customer to pay the first price asked. The customer and the merchant would hassle about it until a reasonable price was reached. They called this assortment of booths a bazaar. This is an Arabic word that has come into our language.
We need now to see what kinds of items were available for sale. In some cases, you will need to know the uses of these goods since they are not used in the same way today. Some of the goods were necessities then, but now they're more luxury items. We will begin with Persia. From Persia, Arabs brought sweet smelling oils (scents), satins, brocades, rugs, tapestries, and incense. The sweet smelling oils were at that time fairly necessary. People did not have running water, and a daily bath was unheard of. The oils were used to clean and perfume your body. They were also used to embalm the dead. From India, the Arabs brought tea, spices, jewels, jade, and fine cotton cloth. The spices in those days were necessary to preserve food; there were no refrigerators. From China came porcelain, clocks, silk cloth, the astrolabe, the compass, paper, and gunpowder. From Africa, the Arabs brought salt, gold, ivory, pepper, and vegetable oils. Salt was a necessity then for two reasons. First, it could be used as an antiseptic. Second, it also was used in the preservation of food. Gold was used for jewelry and also for making coins. (In those times, nobody ever heard of paper money) Ivory was used for decorations and also much the way we might use hard plastic today - for dishes and things like that. From Syria, the Arabs brought glass, fine knives made of steel and muslin, another cloth. From Syria, Palestine and the Nile Delta, the Arabs brought fruits such as oranges, lemons and peaches.
Why The Europeans didn't copy the knowledge and technology
One would have thought that the Europeans would have immediately jumped on all this knowledge and technology and brought it home to Europe. However, they did not and the majority of this knowledge would not be passed to the Europeans until the time of the Crusades, which began in the 11th century. There were several reasons for this. First, the Christian church had decided that it did not like Muslims at all. Muslims were considered heretics, and Christians were discouraged from having anything to do with them. The Muslims, for their part, since the Christians had rejected Muhammad's teachings, had decided they didn't like Christians very much either. Muslims weren't told they couldn't have anything to do with Christians, but Christians were considered "enemies of Allah" so contact wasn't encouraged! Second, the Christian church told pious Christians of that time to concentrate on their afterlife, and that earthly knowledge was pagan and unnecessary. You weren't supposed to desire comforts in this life, either. Living an ascetic life proved you loved God! Third, Europe was in no condition in the early Middle Ages to use the information or the goods. There was continuous fighting; trade, the normal means of passing a lot of this kind of knowledge (especially the technology) on, had fallen off to practically nothing because of the fighting. There were few literate people who could have read the books, even if they'd had them; education, too, had fallen off because of the fighting. Fourth, people weren't really interested at that time in either the learning or the technology. Because of the constant war, their minds were more on defense and staying alive, where's my next meal coming from, survival, things like that, than they were on acquiring knowledge or goods. Fifth, the feudal system, which was developed for the purposes of defense and survival, as you will learn in the next chapter, isolated people, so they didn't hear much news and information could not be passed easily. Because of all these factors, Europe would not learn Muslim information, or have the goods, until well after the 11th century. A later chapter will show you how the Europeans learned about what the Muslims knew and had, and their response to that.
Chapter Questions and Outline
Three Religions (title of outline)
Judaism
What were the Jews called?
The word ‘Apiru’ means ‘nomad’. What is a nomad?
What were the Jews the first to believe?
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
Abraham also had a son called Ishmael. Why is he important?
Why did Jacob have to travel far away?
Why are Jacob and his 12 sons important?
How did Joseph get into Egypt?
How did Joseph’s family get into Egypt?
How did the Jews, descendents of Joseph’s family, become a problem for the pharoahs?
First, the pharaohs segregated, or separated, the Jews from everyone else. Jews had to live in _______.
What was the second way the pharaohs tried to get rid of Jews?
Which Jewish boy survived this?
Why does persecution occur?
b.
When did the Jews leave Egypt?
What do the Jews believe about God’s role in their being saved from slavery?
What was the last plague? Why did this plague give the Jews a little ‘window of time’ in which to escape?
What Jewish holiday celebrates the night of the last plague?
What do the Jews call the series of events from the last plague to the crossing of the Red Sea?
What do Jews believe about this event? How can we tell they believe this about it?
Where did the Jews head after leaving Egypt?
Why did the Jews stop at Mount Sinai? What happened there?
Who was the second king of Israel? How did the Jews feel about him? Why was their feeling about this person important?
What was the last king of Israel’s name?
How did this king make the people mad at him?
Name the two new nations that were formed as a result.
What happened to the two new nations very soon?
What happened to the Jews of Judah when they were defeated by the Babylonians?
What things happened while the Jews were in captivity? 3 things
a.
b.
c.
Why were the many persecutions a problem for the Jews considering what they thought about God?
What answer did the Jews come up with as the reason they were persecuted so much?
What did the Jews resolve (promise ) to do if they ever got back home again?
Who was the next persecutor of the Jews?
What did these people do that incited (caused) the Jews to revolt?
Who led this revolt?
How is this successful revolt celebrated today?
What was the new temptation during these years?
How was this new temptation different from the others?
How was the Greek way of looking at the world different from the Jewish way?
Why was the Greek way of looking at the world sinful from a Jewish point of view?
Which group of Jews remained true to Jewish beliefs and tried to keep other Jews from doubting their faith?
What demands did the Romans make of their conquered provinces?
How were the Romans good to the Jews at first? 4 things
What 4 groups of Jews were there in Palestine at the time of Jesus?
What did the Romans do to the Jewish Temple?
What did the Jews then do?
What was the "Diaspora"?
What places did the Jews go?
Judaism in the Middle Ages in Europe
What were the differences between them?
What did the Christian church of the Middle Ages teach about the Jews?
What other reasons were there for the beginning of Christian prejudice against Jews?
What forms did persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages take?
Who was its founder?
What does the word Islam mean?
What are the followers of the religion called? What does this mean?
Where do the majority of Muslims live?
How do Arabs organize their society?
What is the Arab name for a nomad?
Why have Arabs always done a lot of trading with their neighbors?
Where did cities grow up?
Where did Arabs travel to get goods?
What was the Arabs’ animistic religion about?
What was so special about the big black stone?
Where is this stone?
What is its name (and the building that houses it)?
What did Arabs do in order to see the Kabah?
When was Muhammad born?
Of what tribe was he a member?
Why was Muhammad’s caravan work important?
Why was it fortunate that he married Kadija?
What happened to Muhammad when he was about 40?
What did Muhammad do after his conversion?
Why was Muhammad not well received? 2 reasons
What is the flight of Muhammad from Makkah to Madinah called?
What is the significance of the Hij’rah?
What did Muhammad do in Madinah? 2 things
Why did Muhammad always include Jews and Christians in the people to whom he preached?
What did Christians and Jews think about Muhammad?
What was Muhammad’s response to this?
When did Muhammad return to Makkah?
When did Muhammad die?
2. What quality of God do they stress?
them an empire like Romes?
2. What did the Arabs conquer?
3. Why were the Arabs so successful? Explain
a.
b
c
d
e.
China
Syria
Africa
Syria, Palestine and the Nile Delta:
b.
c
d.
e.
Extra Credit Projects and Questions