ChAPTER 12 Abbasid Decline and the Spread of

• During the winter months, Arab traders sailed dhows like this one to Africa and Asia, returning home during the summer months.
• Small but sturdy, graceful, and highly maneuverable sailing vessels were called dhows.
• They transported traders from the Middle east across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and throughout the Indian Ocean trading system.

• The dhows' hull design contributed to their swiftness and maneuverability, but it was the configuration of their sails that made them one of the most popular and enduring of the world's ships.
• There are triangular sails attached to the fore and fore portions of the ship.

• Although their relatively shallow hull meant that dhows could not match junks or bulkier or yard arms which extended merchant ships in cargo capacity, their slender shape gave them a considerable advantage.

• It was very difficult for square-rigged ships to tack against the wind because of their triangular sails.
• Most of the time, those who sailed dhows followed a seasonal pattern set by the direction of the monsoon winds that alternated between flows to the sea or land according to the time of the year in the India Ocean and adjacent waterways.
• Although galleys like those of Greece and Rome were used by Arabs in the Mediterranean, tens of thousands of dhows were the main carriers of Muslim commerce.
• Along with merchants and their trade goods, many of the same ships conveyed Sufis or Muslim holy men to regions as far flung as India, Java and Malaya.

• Seaworthy ships like the dhows were essential to the spread of the Islamic faith.
• Mass conversions of conquered peoples to the religion of Islam were largely due to the efforts of Sufis and other spiritual leaders, compared to the expansion of Muslim empires which were mostly carried out by Arab armies.
• The missionaries traveled by caravan into central Asia and across the Sahara in sturdy dhows.
• Those who went out to win converts to Islam also spread other Muslim culture.
• Arabic language, advanced technologies, Muslim science, law, and philosophy, and Islamic art and architecture were included.

• Dhows did not make great warships before or after gunpowder was introduced into sea warfare.
• They couldn't provide a firing platform for a cannon because they were too small, and they couldn't carry enough soldiers to overwhelm the enemy ships.
• Most of the ships that sailed the seas of the Middle east, east Africa, and Asia were built for trade and not war.
• The Indian Ocean and adjoining seas had designs for that purpose until the last years of the 15th century.
• With the arrival of the Portuguese fleets after 1498, the dhows and any of the ships in Asia west of the South China Sea could not hold back expansionist Christian warriors and seafarers.
• The wealth, knowledge, and technological prowess of Islamic and Chinese culture zones are far more advanced in most areas of human endeavor than their own.

• The Abbasid empire was collapsing even as Muslim traders and Sufi holymen spread Islam across a great swath of Afro-Euroasia from north Africa in the west to the Philippines in the east.

• Abbasid power was challenged by rival dynasties in many areas newly won to the faith.
• The invasions of nomadic peoples launched by successive waves of Turkish-speakers and the Mongols from central Asia as well as Ber ber jihadists from Saharan Africa threatened the new polities and the Abbasids.
• As the political hold of Muslim rulers weakened, Islamic civilization reached new heights of creativity.

• The Abbasid age was a time of great achievements in the arts and sciences.
• Many of these developments were enriched by the wealth, knowledge, and products exchanged among the many regions of an ever-expanding Muslim world and the non-Muslim peoples contacted in border regions from Europe to China.
• Muslim mystics, traders, and warriors carried the faith of Muhammad across the world from the 10th to the 14th centuries.
• In this chapter, we will look at the process in south and southeast Asia.
• The focus of our inquiry will be north and west Africa and central Asia.

• Between the 9th and 13th centuries, the disintegrated.

• Rival efforts to reconcile the moderates of the Shi'a opposition to Abbasid rule ended in failure.
• The dynasty of nomadic peoples attracted to the end of its days would be affected by the Shi'a revolts and assassination attempts against Abbasid officials.
• The frugal ways of Al-Mahdi's predecessor were abandoned.
• In the brief span of the rich and fertile regions where of his reign, he cultivated a taste for luxury and monumental building and surrounded himself with Muslim urban life and power a multitude of dependent wives, concubines, and courtiers.
• These habits would always be centered.

• The problem of succession was not solved by al-Mahdi.
• Within a year of al-Mahdi's death, his eldest son and successor were poisoned.

• Evidence shows that Harun al-Rashid shared his father's taste for sumptuous living.

• They were sent back to Charlemagne with presents, including an intricate water clock and an elephant, which were worth a king's ransom.

• The plots and maneuvers of the courtesans, eunuchs, and royal ministers are related to another source of weakness.
• Harun became dependent on Persian advisers in the early years of his reign because he was only 23 at the time of his accession to the throne.
• The power of royal advisors at the expense of the caliphs became a trend in succeeding reigns.
• Caliphs were pawns in the power struggles between different groups at the court from the mid-9th century onward.

• The first civil wars over succession were caused by Harun al-Rashid's death.

• The precedent set by the struggle for the throne was damaging.
• It had an additional consequence that would end the real power of the caliphs.
• The first civil war convinced the sons of al-Ma'mun to build personal armies in anticipation of the fight for the throne that would break out when their father died.
• The victor in the next round of succession struggles recruited a "bodyguard" of 4,000 slaves, mostly from central Asia.
• He increased this mercenary to more than 70,000 when he became caliph.

• The army soon became a power center.
• The reigning caliph was murdered by slave mercenaries and one of his sons was placed on the throne.
• Four more caliphs were poisoned or assassinated in the next decade.
• The leaders of the slave mercenary armies were the real power behind the Abbasid throne and were involved in the struggles for control of the capital and empire.
• The mercenar ies were involved in violent social unrest.
• They were often the cause of food riots in Baghdad and other urban centers when the price of everyday groceries rose too much.

• The slave armies were brought under control by the dynasty in the last decades of the 9th century.
• The treasury was drained by constant civil vio lence.
• A new strain was placed on the empire's dwindling revenues by the caliphs' attempts to escape the turmoil of Baghdad by establishing new capitals near the original one.
• The construction of palaces, mosques, and public works for each of these new imperial centers added to the already high costs of maintaining the court and imperial administration.

• The peasants of the central provinces of the empire were the ones who paid the most for the expense.
• Revenue demands on the peasantry increased as a result of the need to support growing numbers of mercenary troops.

• In the richest provinces of the empire, taxation and pillaging led to the abandonment of many villages.

• The irrigation works that had been essential to cultural production in the fertile Tigris-Euphrates basin fell into disre pair.
• Some peasants perished through flood, famine, or violent assault, while others fled to wilderness areas beyond the reach of the Abbasid tax collectors.
• The crowds of vagabonds camped in the towns of the imperial heartland and formed bandit gangs.
• The various Shi'a sects instigated peasant uprisings.
• Shi'a participation meant that the movements wanted to destroy the dynasty, not only to correct official abuses, but also to destroy them.

• In the Abbasid era, the harem and veil became the twin emblems of women's increasing in the Abbasid age and later eras are wonderfully captured in this subjugation to men and confinement to the home.

• The seclusion of women had been practiced.
• The miniature painting gives us a bird's-eye view of a typical Eastern peoples since ancient times, the harem was a creation of the night in one of the great palaces of Baghdad.
• The wives and the concubines of the Abbasid caliphs captured the bustle and high artistry of the beautifully decorated quarters of the imperial palace.
• A group of musicians serenading a man who was a slave, who could win their freedom and gain is presumably the lord of the mansion, and kitchen servants buying food power by bearing healthy sons for the rulers.
• The wealth is being prepared to be served to the lord and his guests.

• The Harvard Art Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum were once found in Baghdad and other large cities.

• One of the 10th-century caliphs is said to have had 11,000 eunuchs among his slave corps, while another is said to have kept 4,000 slave concubines.

• The Balkans, central Asia, and Sudanic Africa were where most of the slaves were captured or purchased.
• All of the larger towns of the Abbasid realm had slave markets.
• Both male and female slaves were prized for their intelligence.
• The best educated men and women in the empire were slaves.
• Caliphs and high officials spent more time with their clever and talented slave concubines than with their less educated wives.
• Slave concubines and servants had more freedom than freeborn wives.
• Slave women didn't have to wear the veils and robes that were required for free women in public places when they went to the market.

• Women from the lower classes were allowed to help support their families, but rich women were not allowed to work outside the home.

• Women who were raised to devote their lives to running a household and serving their husbands were often married at puberty.
• The Postclassical Period, 600-1450: New Faith and New Commerce plotted with eunuchs and royal advisors to advance the interests of their sons and win for them the ruler's backing for succession to the throne.
• By the end of the Abbasid era, the freedom and influence that women had enjoyed in the first centuries of Islamic expansion had been severely curbed.

• The caliphs and their advisors were powerless to prevent the loss of territory in the outer reaches of the empire due to the struggles in the capital and central provinces.
• Areas as close to the capital as Egypt and Syria broke away from Abbasid rule were added.
• The kingdoms that formed in areas that were once provinces of the empire were moving to become lords of the Islamic world.
• From this point onward, the caliphs were little more than puppets of the Buyid dynasty.

• The Abbasid empire was ruled by the Buyid's but they could not prevent the disinte under the title of sultan.
• The control over the caliphate was broken in just over a century.

• The Shi'a officials who had risen to via Persia were quickly purge by the Seljuks because they were Sunnis and ruled in power under the Buyids.
• The Seljuk military machine was able to restore political initiative in the mid-11th century.

• The threat of conquest by the rival Shi'a dynasty was ended by Seljuk victories.
• The Byzantines hoped to take advantage of Muslim divisions to regain some of their lost lands.
• The defeat of the Byzantines opened the way for the settlement of Asia Minor, or Anatolia, by nomadic peoples of Turkic origins.

• The Seljuks faced a different challenge after seizing power in the Christian Crusades.
• Knights from western Europe were determined to capture portions of the Islamic world that made up the Holy Land of biblical times.
• The first of the Crusader assaults, between 1096 and 1099, was the most successful because of the Muslim politi cal divisions.
• The Holy Land was divided into Christian kingdoms.
• The main objective of the Crusade, Jerusalem, was taken by the Christian Knights and the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred.

• The military held onto their hold on the eastern Mediterranean region.
• The Muslim princes' disregard for the Christians was seen as a sign of weakness by the western Christians, who continued to argue despite the invaders' aggression.

• Saladin's death in 1123 gave the remaining Chris other purposes such as commercial wars and the eradication of heresy.

• Acre was the last of the kingdoms to fall.

• The Muslim people had to fight them off.
• The Muslim kingdoms outposts for Islam and the trade between western Europe and the Islamic world reconquered most of the Crusader in the 12th century.

• One sign of the Europeans' interest in the superior scientific learning of Muslim peoples is Richard the Lionheart's preference for Muslim over Christian physicians.

• Muslims and Jews in Spain, Sicily, Egypt, and the Middle East helped the Europeans recover much of the Greek learning that had been lost to northern Europe during the waves of nomadic invasions after the fall of Rome.
• The concept of dynasties of nomadic conquerors having classes in Renaissance and early modern paintings was developed by the Oriental rugs and tapestries that adorned the homes of the European upper rian.

• The cloth was produced and sold in Muslim cities.

• The taste for group feeling has been lost due to the fact that they are an Islamic civilization that was dominated by force.
• Among them, luxury reaches its peak.
• He was one of the greatest historians because he was given a life of prosperity and ease.

• They become dependent on the dynasty and are like women and the Islamic world, he served as a political advisor at several children who need to be defended.
• The support of feeling is gone.
• People forget to protect and a royal patron wrote a universal history that began defend themselves and to press their claims.

• The causes of the people were one of the subjects he treated.
• The dynasties are more timid than women.
• Abbasids and earlier Muslim regimes were able to inform his attempts to not repel him because he knew well in his native north Africa.
• The ruler needs other brave people for his support.
• He has many clients and followers.
• They help find persistent patterns in the political history of the dynasty until God allows it to be destroyed.
• The following passages are from one of the most well-known.

• The duration of a dynasty's life does not affect it.
• When senility becomes preponderant, it extends beyond three generations.
• If there should be one, the first generation of a dynasty will retain the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert sav, but there will be no claim for power.
• They are brave and rapacious if the time is up.
• The dynasty cannot be postponed for a single hour because the strength of group feeling cannot be accelerated.

• People submit to them.

• The group feeling is broken.

• People are used to lowliness.

• The elite and popular cultures of western Europe were affected by Muslim influences.
• Persian and Arabic words, chess, chivalric ideals and troubadour ballads, as well as foods such as dates, coffee, and yogurt were included.
• The songs of the troubadours can be traced back to contacts made in the Holy Land.
• Most of them were part of a process of exchange that lasted over centuries.
• Muslim peoples in this era did not show much interest in the learning or institutions of the West.
• The Italian merchant communities, which remained after the political and military power of the crusaders had been extinguished in the Middle East, contributed more to these ongoing interchanges than all the Christian knights.

• Discuss the major advances in the arts and sciences that occurred in the Islamic world during the Abbasid period.

• Although town life became more dangerous, the rapid growth and increasing prosperity that char entered into a phase of renewed acterized the first centuries of Muslim expansion continued until late in the Abbasid era.

• Muslim, Jewish, and Christian entrepreneurs were great for supplying the cities of the empire with essentials such as cotton and woolen textiles for clothing, and luxury items such as precious gems and sugar cane.

• The long-distance trade between the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe and between coastal India and southeast Asia flourished during the Abbasid era.

• The artists and artisans of the Umayyad period were among the beneficiaries of the sustained urban prosperity.
• Mosques and palaces were larger and more ornate in most parts of the empire.
• Muslim engineers and architects created some of the greatest treasures of all time.
• The tapestries and rugs of Muslim peoples were in high demand from Europe to China.
• Muslim rugs are usually not matched for their designs, their vivid colors, or the skill with which they are woven.
• Superb ceramics and fine bronzes were produced by Muslim artisans.

• Persian became the primary language of the Abbasid court after the 10th century, as Persian wives, concubines, advisors, bureaucrats, and (after the mid 10th century) Persian caliphs came to play central roles in imperial politics.
• Arabic was the language of religion, law, and the natural sciences.
• Persian was favored by Arabs, Turks, and Muslims of Persian descent for its literary expression, administration, and scholarship.
• In Baghdad and major cities throughout the Abbasid empire, Persian was the main language of "high culture," the language of polite exchanges between courtiers as well as of history, poetic musings and mystical revelations.

• The Persian of the Abbasid age, written in a modified Arabic script and drawing on Arabic vocabulary, was a beautiful language to read aloud.
• Other writers from this period had better style and thought than Khayyam.
• The history of Persia is related from the beginning of time to the Islamic conquests in the late 10th and early 11th centuries.
• Firdawsi's Persian has been praised for it's role in the Islamic conquests.

• Firdawsi's epic history is one of the most exquisite works of Islamic art.

• In addition to historical epics, Persian writers in the Abbasid era wrote on many subjects, from doomed love affairs and statecraft to accounts of distant travels and mystical quest for communion with the divine.

• The blend of mystical and commonplace was popular in the literature of this period.

• The commitment to learning and refined aesthetic in scientific discoveries, new techniques of investigation, and new technologies was captured by the meditative figures with scholarly books before them, surrounded by grass and trees, much of the period of Abbasid rule.

• The objectives experiment and al-Razi's scheme of classifying all material substances into three catagories were two of the fundamental discoveries in chemistry.
• Orthodox religious scholars say that in the 11th century, al-Biruni was able to calculate the specific weight of 18 major miner within Islam.
• Their astronomy tables and maps of the stars were in high demand among other scholars.

• Many of the Muslims' work in scientific investigation had very practical applications.
• In other fields, this bent was even greater.
• Some of the best hospitals in the world can be found in Greek lim cities such as Cairo.
• Doctors and Qur'anic traditions did not have to follow a regular course of study and pass a formal exam before they could be accepted by Ulama.

• Muslim scientists worked on bladder ailments.

• Islam spread to south, and southeast and Central Asia, Asia Minor and the Balkans, and Sudanic Africa.

• Patterns of religious development were strongly reflected in the conflicting trends in Islamic civilization, which resulted in the death of Abbasid caliph.

• The death of Kabul Khan was promoted by the Crusades.
• The Ulama associated Muslim borrowing from ancient Greek learning with the aggressiveness of Christian Europe.
• Many scholars believed that the questioning that characterized the Greek tradition would undermine the authority of the Qur'an.
• They said that the Qur'an was the final, perfect, and complete Abbasid regions and died in 1227.

• The Sufist of Chinggis Khan was responsible for the capture and destruction of the Baghdad movement in the later Abbasid period.
• Sufism was in various guises, including both Sunni and Shi'a.

• In some Sufist teachings, Allah seemed to compromise his transcen dent status.

• Some Sufis gained reputations as great healers and workers of miracles, while others led militant bands that tried to spread Islam to unbelievers.
• Some Sufis used asceticism or bodily denial to find Allah, while others used meditation, songs, drugs, or ecstatic dancing to find Allah.
• Sufis wrote major works on ethics and political philosophy.
• The movement as a whole was a central part of the expansion of the Muslim religion and Islamic civilization in the later centuries of the Abbasid caliphate.

• In the 10th and 11th centuries, the Abbasid domain was divided by growing numbers of rival states.
• The Abbasid capi tal at Baghdad was sacked in 1258 after it was taken by the Mongols.
• European ruled Egypt.

• Muslim slave warriors were conquerors from Central Asia.
• Baghdad went from being one of the great cities of the world to a provincial backwater.
• After Ain Jalut, it was defeated by Cairo to the west and then Istanbul to the north.

• The advance of the Mongol was halted.

• When a succession of civilizations from Harappa to the brahmanic empire of migrants carried the Islamic faith the Guptas developed in south Asia, foreigners had entered India in waves of nomadic invaders.
• There are Muslim bands of people who have been displaced.
• Invariably, those who chose to remain were assimilated conquests and conversions into the civilizations they encountered in the lowland areas.
• They converted to the Hindu or Buddhist religion, found a place in the caste hierarchy, and adopted the dress, foods, and lifestyles of the farming responses and attempts by some and city-dwel ing peoples of the many regions of the subcontinent.
• The ability to absorb peoples followers of both religions came from the strength and flexibility of India's civilization.

• The Muslims arrived in the last years of the 7th century.

• For the first time, the people of India encountered a large-scale influx of outsiders as sophisticated as their own.
• They were confronted by a religious system that was very different from the ones they had nurtured.
• Hinduism, the main Indian religion at that time, was open, tolerant, and inclusive of many different forms of religious devotion, from idol worship to meditation in search of union with the spiritual source of all creation.
• Islam was committed to the exclusive worship of a single god.

Is this distribution in line with what you would have expected, or is it different?

• The popular notion that Islam was to compare the patterns of Islamization in different areas, answer historically a militant religion spread primarily by forcible questions that follow.

• Islam proclaimed all believers equal in the sight of God.
• The caste hierarchy was supported by Hindu beliefs.
• Acceptance of inborn differences between individuals and groups and the widely varying levels of material wealth, status, and religious purity were believed to produce these differences.
• The faith of the invaders was more rigid than that of the locals.
• The caste-based social system of India was more closed than the society of the Muslim invaders, with their emphasis on mobility and the community of believers.

• Growing numbers of Muslim warriors, traders, Sufi mystics, and ordinary farmers and herders entered south Asia and settled there, which led to extensive interaction between invaders and the indigenous peoples.
• Conflict, often violent, was the main feature of the Muslim influx.
• There was a lot of trade between them.
• Peaceful interaction became the norm as time went on.
• The region and the Hindu and Muslim mystics tried to find areas of agreement between their faiths.
• Tensions remained and occasionally they erupted into communal rioting or warfare between the empire.

• The trading network stretched from Italy in the Mediterranean to the South China Sea.

• There were raids into the valley in the 8th century.
• The Arab Muslim armies invaded and established a succession of dynasties centered on Delhi in north overlords decided to treat both Hindus and central India.

• Most of the local officials and notables retained their positions, which helped reconcile them to Muslim rule.
• The status and privileges of the brahman castes were respected.
• Most of the Arabs lived in cities or special garrison towns.
• The peoples of the conquered areas were mostly Hindu or Buddhist.

• The impact of Islam on the Indian subcontinent in this period was limited, but the Arab foothold in Sind provided contacts which Indian learning was transmitted to the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East.
• Islamic civilization was enriched by the skills and discoveries of another civilization.
• The Greeks were the most advanced of the ancient world, but Indian scientific learning was more advanced.
• The Abbasids came to power in the 8th century and Hindu mathematicians traveled to Baghdad.
• Their works on geometry were translated into Arabic and their instruments for observation were improved.

• Hindu scholars had come up with the numer as far back as the 12th century, and Arab scholars began to use it in their work.
• The system of numerical notation has been central to two scientific revolutions because of the linkages between civilized centers established by the spread of Islam.
• In this chapter, the first in the Middle East was discussed.
• The second happened in Europe some centuries later.
• It has brought fundamental changes to Europe and the rest of the world from the 16th century to the present.

• In addition to science and mathematics, Indian treatises on medicine, music, and other sub jects were translated and studied by Arab scholars.
• The well-endowed hospitals in Baghdad were a source of wonder and envy for the Christians.
• Indian doctors were able to cure Arab rulers and officials who had been pronounced dead by Greek doctors.
• The Indian game of chess became a favorite of both royalty and ordinary townsfolk as Indian musical instruments and melodies made their way into Arab performers.

• Indian building styles and artistic motifs were adopted by the conquerors.
• Additional Arab colonies were established in other coastal areas, such as Bengal in the east and Malabar to the south.
• The staging areas for Islam were provided by these trading enclaves.

• The territory of northwestern Pakistan was added to the Muslim foothold on the subcontinent after the initial conquests of Muhammad ibn Qasim's armies.
• There are disagreements between the Arabs and their artistic motifs in the blend of Islamic and hindu architectural forms.

• The Hindu rulers reconquested parts of the lower Indus valley.
• The Turkish slave dynasty in Afghanistan, legendary wealth of the subcontinent and zeal to spread the Muslim faith led to the invasions of northern India by Mahmud.
• He defeated one confederation that had sacked one of the wealthiest Hindu princes, and then drove deeper and deeper into the subcontinent in the quest of hindu temples in northern ever richer temples to loot.

• The raids mounted by Mahmud of Ghazni and his successors gave way in the last decades of aggression and intolerance.

• In the 12th century, campaigns were waged to seize political control in north India.

• After barely surviving several severe defeats at the hands of Hindu rulers, Muhammad put together a group of people who ruled small mountain and began control of Afghanistan.
• In the following years, Muhammad's conquests were extended along the Gangetic plain as a process of conquest to establish far as Bengal and into west and central India.

• The capital of the new Muslim empire was at Delhi along the Jumna River.

• A succession of dynasties ruled the north and central India for the next 300 years.
• They fought India.

• Although the Muslims fought their way into India, their interaction with the indigenous peoples soon came to be dominated by accommodation and peaceful exchanges.
• Muslim communities developed in different parts of the world when the north was ruled by dynasties.
• The largest of these were in Bengal to the east and in the northwestern part of India, where most of the Muslim people who migrated into India did so.

• Most of the converts were not forcibly won.
• Merchants played a growing role in both coastal and inland trade, but were the main carriers of the new faith.

• Both style and message were shared by the latter.
• Belief in the Sufis' healing powers increased their stature.
• The mosques and schools were often centers of regional power.
• Sufis organized their devotees in militias to fight off bandits, oversaw the clearing of forests for farming, and welcomed low-caste and outcaste Hindu groups into Islam.
• The tombs of Sufi mystics became objects of veneration for Hindus and Buddhists after their deaths.

• The majority of the Muslims in India are from specific regions and social groups.
• Surprisingly small numbers of converts were found in the centers of Muslim political power, a fact that suggests the very limited importance of forced conversions.
• The majority of Indians who converted to Islam were from low caste groups.
• In areas such as western India and Bengal, where Buddhism had survived as a popular religion until the Muslim invasions, eschatological rituals and corrupt practices had debased Buddhist teachings, the monastic orders were undermined.

• The decline was accelerated by Muslim raids on Buddhist temples and monasteries.
• Local congregations went further into orgies and experiments with magic without supervision.
• The Buddha's social concerns and religious message were opposed by all of these trends.
• The new religion the Muslim invaders carried into the sub continent was no match for Indian Buddhism.
• The Sufi mystics had the charisma and organizing skills of those who were spreading the new faith.

• The majority of Indians who converted to Islam were Buddhists.
• Untouchables and low-caste Hindus, as well as tribal peoples who were animists worshiping spirits found in the natural world, were attracted to the more equitable social arrangements promoted by the new faith.
• Group conversions were necessary because those who remained in the Hindu caste system would have little to do with those who had changed religions.
• The Muslim rulers levied a head tax on unbelievers, so some Hindus or Buddhists decided to convert.
• Intermarriage between local peoples and Muslim migrants was the reason for them.
• The Islamic community in the subcon tinent is large.
• In times of crisis in central Asia, this was true.
• In the 13th and 14th centuries, theTurkic, Persian, and Afghan peoples retreated to India in the face of theTimurid conquests, which are examined in detail in Chapter 19.

• Islam did not make much of a difference on the Hindu population as a whole.
• Despite military reverses and Muslim political rule over large areas of the subcontinent, high-caste Hindus saw the invaders as the bearers of an upstart religion.
• The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, and no religion like theirs, which is why Al-Biruni complained openly about the Indian disdain for the newcomers.
• They are self-conceited and stolid.

• Many Hindus were willing to take positions as administrators in Muslim overlords or as soldiers in their armies in order to trade with Muslim merchants.
• They were not close to their conquerors.
• There were separate living quarters for Muslims.
• Sexual liaisons between members of high-caste groups and Muslims were very rare.

• The Hindus were convinced that the Muslims would be absorbed by the superior religions and more sophisticated cultures of India during the early centuries of the Muslim influx.
• There were many signs pointing to that outcome.
• The armies of the Mus lim rulers were staffed by Hindus.
• Muslim princes adopted Hindu-inspired styles and practices that were contrary to the Qur'an.
• Some Muslim rulers have declared themselves to be of divine descent, and others have decorated their coins with Hindu images such as the bull associated with Shiva.

• Muslim communities were socially divided along caste lines.
• Muslims who arrived recently were on top of the hierarchy, but they were divided depending on whether they were Arab, Turk, or Persian.
• High-caste Hindu converts followed by "clean" artisan and merchant groups.
• At the bottom of the social hierarchy were lower-caste and untouchable converts.
• The original thrust of Islam may have led to fewer conversions in these groups.

• Muslim and Hindu women were affected by the Muslim influx.
• The practice of marrying women at the earlier ages favored by the Hindus and the prohibitions against remarriage of widows were adopted by the invaders.

• The Hindus realized that Islam was difficult to understand and that they were confronted with a religion that was very popular with large segments of the Indian population.

• Although not all great civilizations have produced world preaching and organizational skills of Sufis, the two tend to be closely associated throughout human capacity for accommodation.
• The new religion history is being adopted by some.
• World religions that spread across many cultures did not do so because they were pressured or forced to convert but they did bring civi because they saw Islam as a way to enhance their lifestyles.

• Before the rise of Islam, religions with these characteristics appeared to improve the quality of their social interaction.
• Hinduism, which spread to parts of southeast world, was one of the two faiths that India alone produced.

• At the other end of the Eastern Hemisphere, converted people had a lot to say about how much of their own Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean region before their cultures would change.

• The religious conversion affects were subject toreinterpretation.

• The most power potential converts were Allah.
• At the same time, its core beliefs and practices ful supernatural force, but people continued to make offerings to allow them to maintain to spirits that could heal, bring fertility, protect their homes, or a clear sense of common identity despite their great differences punish their enemies.
• The veneration of ancestral spirits was a key part of these beliefs and practices to convince potential converts that their cultures can be enriched and their lives improved.
• In India, people adopt the new religion.

• In Islamic southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan globe and in the diversity of peoples and cultures that identified Africa, the position of women remained a good deal stronger.
• The Middle East and India have elaborate rituals and principles of monotheism that are very different from that of the United States.
• Islam's success at winning converts from different cultures is surprising in both regions.
• If it is compared with the more flexible and Persian cultures of ancient Middle Eastern, it is clear that this is true.
• As Islam was adapted beliefs and ceremonial patterns of earlier world religions such as to societies where women had traditionally enjoyed more influencing Buddhism and Hinduism.
• Both within the extended family and in occupations such as that Islamic beliefs and social practices, are written in the Qur'an.
• India's caste system and interpretation by the Ulama proved to be quite flexible and adaptable, which in principle is against the strong egalitarian when the religion was introduced into new, non-Islamic cultures.

• Beyond basic forms of social organization and interaction, Islam accommodated diverse aspects of the societies into which it revival has been a notable feature of nearly all Islamic soci spread.
• The African solar calendar was on the fringes of the Islamic world.
• The planting cycle and even these movements were built around the insistence of the Muslim lunar calendar.
• Hindu-Buddhist symbols of that the Muslim faith had been corrupted by alien ideas were appropriated by Muslim rulers and acknowledged by both their Hindu and Muslim subjects.

• The Hindus placed greater emphasis on the devotional cults of gods and goddesses that earlier had proved so effective in neutralizing the challenge of Buddhism.

• Saints from low-caste origins were revered by many people.
• All faiths can provide a path to spiritual fulfillment, according to Kabir, who played down the significance of religious differences.

• I am not in yoga or renunciation.

• Many songs and poems, such as those by Mira Bai and Kabir, were written in regional languages and became popular expressions of popular culture in many areas.

• The importance of a strong emotional bond between the god and the devotees was stressed by Bhakti mystics.
• Drugs and Chants were used to reach the state of spiritual intoxication that was the key to individual salvation.
• Once one had achieved the state of ecstasy that came through intense emotional attachment to a god or goddess, all past sins were removed and caste distinctions were meaningless.

• There is a miniature painting of milkmaids.
• By increasing popular involvement in Hindu worship god Krishna reflects the highly personalized devotional worship that was and was enriching and extending the modes of prayer and ritual.
• The eroticism in the milkmaids' songs may have helped stem the flow of praise of Krishna's great beauty.

• The attempts of mystics to make the difference between Hindu and Islamic beliefs seem smaller won over a small group of followers of either faith.
• The object of their venera was repudiated by the guardians of orthodoxy in each religious community.
• Shiva and Vishnu were the most popular gods.

• The celebrated writer of religious poetry set out to convince Indian Muslims to abandon Islam in favor of Hinduism.

• Muslim Ulama, or religious experts, became more aware of the dangers of Hin duism for Islam.
• One was no longer Islam if one played down the teachings of the Qur'an, prayer, and pilgrimage.

• The teachings of Islam that separated it from Hinduism were stressed by some Sufi saints.
• They worked to promote unity within the Indian Muslim community and to strengthen its contacts with Muslims in neighboring lands and the Middle Eastern centers of the faith.

• A large Muslim community was established after centuries of invasion and migration.
• The area had won converts, political control had been established, and strong links had been forged with Muslims in other lands.
• Hindus remained the overwhelming majority of the population of the vast and diverse lands south of the Himalayas.
• Most Indians showed little inclination to convert to the religion of the Muslim conquerors, unlike the Zoroastrians in Persia or the animistic peoples of north Africa and the Sudan.
• After centuries of Muslim political dominance and missionary activity, south Asia remained one of the least converted and integrated of all the areas Muhammad's message had reached.

• Southeast Asia had been a middle ground from a world history perspective.
• The zone where the Chinese segment of the Euro-Asian trading complex met the Indian Ocean teachings and rituals was generally peaceful.
• Goods from China were transferred from east Asian vessels to Arab or Indian ships at ports on the coast of the Malayan peninsula.
• In and Buddhist religions long established in Malaya, Java, and these same ports, products from as far west as Rome were loaded into the emptied Chinese ships to be other areas.

• In the 7th and 8th centuries, sailors and ships from Sumatra and Malaya became active in the seaborne trade of the region.

• Asian products have become important exports to China, India, and the Mediterranean region.

• The aromatic woods from the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra and the spices from the far end of the Indonesian archi pelago were luxury items.
• The expansion of Islam in southeast Asia was more important than the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism because of these trading links.

• The coastal trade of India came to be controlled by Muslims from western India and parts of south India in the 8th century.
• Islamic culture began to trickle into island southeast Asia.
• Indian traders, Muslim or otherwise, were welcome to trade in the chain of ports controlled Sumatra.

• The fall opened up numbers of merchants and sailors from India because of the Buddhist government's resistance to incentive for the traders and sailors of southeast Asian ports to convert to Islam.
• Efforts to preach the faith to the coastal peoples increased with the fall of Shrivijaya, as incentives increased up southeastern Asia to Muslim for the establishment of Muslim trading centers.

• The spread of Islam throughout island southeast Asia was the work of traders and Islamic mystics.

• Peaceful contacts and voluntary conversion were more important than conquest and force in spreading the faith in southeast Asia.
• The way for conversion was paved by trading contacts.
• The local people were impressed by how much of the known world had already been changed by the new faith of Muslim merchants and sailors.
• In India, Muslim ships carried Sufis to various parts of southeast Asia, where they played an important role in conversion.
• Several small port centers on the northern coast of Sumatra were the first areas to be won over to Islam.
• The religion spread across the Strait of Malacca to Malaya from these ports.

• The Portuguese factory had replaced the fallen Shrivijaya.

• The most powerful of the islands are in the eastern archipelago and in the southern Philippines.

• The trading links were important.

• The merchants and ports of India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean were linked by conversion to Islam.

• The spread of Islam was slow in areas where Hindu-Buddhist dynasties were present.
• The Sufis exploited the openings for mass conver sions to Islam that were left by the earlier conversion to these Indian religions.
• The island of Bali, where Hinduism had taken root at the popular level, was largely impervious to the spread of Islam.
• The same was true of most of mainland southeast Asia, where centuries before the coming of Islam, Buddhism had spread from India to win the hearts and minds of both the ruling elites and the peasants.

• Islam was often infused with mystical strains and incorporated animist, Hindu, and Buddhist elements because it was spread in many areas by Sufis from South Asia.
• The Sufis who spread Islam in southeast Asia were similar to the ones in the Middle East and India.

• Sufis traveled to neighboring regions to preach the faith and were believed to have magical powers by those who followed them.

• In winning converts, the Sufis were willing to allow the inhabitants of island southeast Asia to keep their pre-Islamic beliefs and practices.
• Pre-Islamic customary law was more important in regulating social interaction than Islamic law was.
• Women in the Middle East and India had a different position within the family and society.

• Small-scale female buyers and sellers dominated trading in local and regional markets.
• Despite its tendency to promote male dominance and descent, the female line continued to be traced through western Sumatra after the coming of Islam.
• Pre- Muslim religious beliefs and rituals were incorporated into Muslim ceremonies.
• The brilliant Javanese puppet shadow plays that were based on the Indian epics of the brahmanic age were refined and became even more central to popular and elite beliefs and practices than they had been in the pre- Muslim era.

• The rise, extension, and transformation of civilization in the Afro-Asian world can be traced back to the spread of Islam.

• The Muslim peoples would be put at a disadvantage as the Arab trading networks expanded into new areas.

• It enriched the lives of nomadic peoples, from the lim divisions left openings for political expansion that the Turks and Mongols of central Asia would eagerly exploit, beginning with the island southeast and the camel herders of the savanna.

• The Asian part of the Islamic world moved across India.

• As civilized life became more refined, the orthodoxy and intolerance of many of the Ulama increased.
• From its great cities as the Muslim belief that the vast Islamic world contained al require and universities and the generated accomplishments in the fine arts, caused Muslim peoples to grow less recep sciences and literature.
• Islam pioneered patterns of organization and thinking when their Christian affect the development of human societies in major ways for their rivals were entering a period of unprecedented curiosity.

• For the role of the Sufis in Islamic conversion, see R.M.

• There were major reasons for the Sunni-Shi'a split.