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  • Hi there, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course: World History and today were going

  • to talk about Islam, which like Christianity and Judaism grew up on the east coast of the

  • Mediterranean but unlike Christianity and Judaism is not terribly well understood in

  • the West. For instance, you probably know what this is and what this is, you probably

  • don’t know what that is. Google it.

  • Mr. Green Mr. Green why do you think people know so little about Islamic history?

  • Did you just ask an interesting non-annoying question, me from the past? I think we don’t

  • know about early Islamic history because we don’t learn about it, me from the past,

  • because we don’t learn about it, because were taught that our history is the story

  • of Christianity in Europe, when in fact our history is the story of people on the planet,

  • so let’s try to learn something today.

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  • So in less than 200 years Islam went from not existing to being the religious and political

  • organizing principal of one of the largest empires in the world.

  • And that story begins in the 7th century CE when the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad,

  • a 40-ish guy who made his living as a caravan trader and told him to begin reciting the

  • word of God.

  • Initially, this freaked Muhammad out, as, you know, it wouldbut then his wife and

  • a couple of other people encouraged him and slowly he came to accept the mantle as prophet.

  • A few things to know about the world Islam entered: First, Muhammad’s society was intensely

  • tribal. He was a member of the Quraysh tribe, living in Mecca and tribal ties were extremely

  • important.

  • Also, at the time, the Arabian peninsula was like this crazy religious melting pot. Like

  • most tribal Arabs worshipped gods very similar to the Mesopotamian gods youll remember

  • from episode 3.

  • And by the time of Muhammad, cult statutes of many of those gods had been collected in

  • his hometown of Mecca in this temple-like structure called the Kaaba.

  • But Arabia was also a home for monotheisms like Christianity and Judaism, even a bit

  • of Zoroastrianism. So the message that there was only god wouldn’t have been like as

  • surprising to Muhammad as it was, for instance, to Abraham.

  • Also, and this will become very important, the northern part of Arabia was sandwiched

  • between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Sassanian Empireand youll remember,

  • those guys were always fighting. They were like snowboarders and skiers, or like the

  • Westboro Baptist Church and everyone else.

  • At its core, Islam is what we call a radical reforming religionjust like Jesus and Moses

  • sought to restore Abrahamic monotheism after what they perceived as straying, so too did

  • Muhammad.

  • Muslims believe that God sent Muhammad as the final prophet to bring people back to

  • the one true religion, which involves the worship of, and submission to, a single and

  • all-powerful God.

  • The Quran also acknowledges Abraham and Moses and Jesus among others as prophets, but it’s

  • very different from the Hebrew and Christian bibles:

  • For one thing it’s much less narrative, but also its

  • the written record of the revelations Muhammad receivedwhich means its not written from

  • the point of view of people, it is seen as the actual word of God.

  • The Quran is a really broad-ranging text, but it returns again and again to a couple

  • themes. One is strict monotheism and the other is the importance of taking care of those

  • less fortunate than you. The Quran, says of the good person

  • spends his substancehowever much he himself may cherish itupon his near of kin, and

  • the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the freeing of human

  • beings from bondage.

  • These revelations also radically increased the rights of women and orphans, which was

  • one of the reasons why Mohammad’s tribal leaders weren’t that psyched about them.

  • To talk more about Islamic faith and practice, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

  • The five pillars of Islam are the basic acts considered obligatory, at least by Sunni Muslims.

  • First is the shahada or the profession of the faith:

  • There is no god but god and Muhammad is God’s prophet, which is sometimes translated as

  • There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet”, which tries to make

  • Muslims sound other and ignores the fact that the Arabic word for godwhether you are

  • Christian or Jewish or Muslimis Allah.

  • Second, salat, or ritual prayer five times a dayat dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset,

  • and late eveningwhich are obligatory unless you haven’t hit puberty, are too sick, or

  • are menstruating. Keep it PG, ThoughtBubble.

  • Third, sawm, the month-long fast during the month of Ramadan, in which Muslims do not

  • eat or drink or smoke cigarettes during daylight hours.

  • Since Ramadan is a lunar-calendar month, it moves around the seasons, and obviously it’s

  • most fun during the winter, when days are shorter, and least fun during the summer,

  • when days are both long and hot.

  • Fourth is zakat, or almsgiving, in which non-poor Muslims are required to give a percentage

  • of their income to the poor,

  • and lastly hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims must try to fulfill at least once

  • in their lives, provided they are healthy and have enough money.

  • And there’s also more to understanding Islam than just knowing the Quran. Like Judaism

  • with its Talmud, and Christianity with its lives of saints and writings of Church fathers,

  • Islam has supplementary sacred texts, chief among which is the hadith, a collection of

  • sayings and stories about the Prophet.

  • Thanks ThoughtBubble. Oh, it’s time for the open letter? [rolls to velvet throne]

  • Magic.

  • An Open Letter to the 72 Virgins. Oh, but first let’s check what’s in the Secret

  • Compartment. Huh, it’s Andre the Giant. Did you know that Andre the Giant died a virgin-

  • is a fact that I made up?

  • Dear 72 Virgins,

  • Hey there, it’s me, John Green. Did you know that not all hadiths were created equal?

  • Some sayings of the Prophet are really well sourced. like for instance, a good friend

  • or a relative heard the Prophet say something and then it ended up as a hadith.

  • But some hadiths are terribly sourced like, not to be irreverent, but some of it is like

  • middle school gossip; like Rachel told Rebekah that her sister’s brother’s friend kissed

  • Justin Bieber on the face.

  • And the vast majority of Muslims don’t treat terribly sourced hadiths as scripture.

  • And the idea that you go to heaven and get 72 virgins is not in the Quran; it’s in

  • a terribly sourced hadith so it is my great regret to inform you, 72 Virgins, that in

  • the eyes of almost all Muslims you do not exist.

  • Best wishes, John Green

  • One more thing about Islam: Like Christianity and Judaism, it has a body of law. You might

  • have heard of it - it’s called sharia.

  • Although we tend to think of sharia as this single set of laws that all Muslims follow,

  • that’s ridiculous; there are numerous competing interpretations of sharia, just as there are

  • within any legal tradition.

  • So people who embraced this worldview were called Muslims, because they submitted to

  • the will of God, and they became part of the umma, or community of believers.

  • This would be a good moment for an Uma Thurman joke, but sadly she is no longer famous. I’m

  • sorry if youre watching this, Uma Thurman.

  • Being part of the umma trumped all other ties, including tribal ties, which got Muhammad

  • into some trouble and brings us, at last, back to history.

  • So as Muhammad’s following in Mecca grew, the umma aroused the suspicion of the most

  • powerful tribe, the Quraysh.

  • And it didn’t matter that Muhammad himself was born into the Quraysh tribe because he

  • wouldn’t shut up about how there was only one God, which was really bad news to the

  • Quraysh tribe because they managed the pilgrimage trade in Mecca, and if all those gods were

  • false, it would be a disaster economically.

  • although come to think of it, in the end the Meccan pilgrimage business turned out

  • just fine.

  • So the Quraysh forced Muhammad and his followers out of Mecca in 622 CE, and they headed to

  • Yithrab, also known as Medina.

  • This journey, also know as the hijra, is so important that it marks year 0 in the Islamic

  • calendar.

  • In Medina, Muhammad severed the religion’s ties to Judaism, turning the focus of prayer

  • away from Jerusalem to Mecca.

  • Also in Medina, the Islamic community started to look a lot more like a small empire than

  • like a church. Like, Jesus never had a country to run.

  • But Muhammad did almost from the beginning. And in addition to being an important prophet,

  • he was a good general and in 630, the Islamic community took back Mecca.

  • They destroyed the idols in the kabaa, and soon Islam was as powerful a political force

  • in the region as it was a religious one.

  • And it’s because the political and religious coexisted from the beginning, that there’s

  • no separate tradition of civic and religious law like there is in Christianity and Judaism.

  • Also, vitally, Islam was available to everyone from the moment of its founding, making it

  • very different from Judaism and even from Christianitywhich youll remember debated

  • for generations whether to be inclusive.

  • and more importantly than separating Islam from other monotheisms, that really separated

  • Islam from the tribalism in Arabia.

  • So then when Muhammad died in 632 CE, there wasn’t a religious vacuum left behind: Muhammad

  • was the final prophet, the revelation of the Quran would continue to guide the umma throughout

  • their lives.

  • But the community did need a political leader, a caliph. And the first caliph was Abu Bakr,

  • Muhammad’s father-in-law, who was not without his opponents:

  • Many people wanted Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, to lead the community. And although he did

  • become the fourth caliph, that initial disagreementto radically oversimplify because we only have

  • ten minutesbegan the divide between the two of the major sects of Islam: Suuni and

  • Shi’a.

  • And even today, Sunnis Muslims believe Abu Bakr was rightly elected the first caliph

  • and Shi’a Muslims believe it shouldve been Ali.

  • To Sunnis, the first four caliphsAbu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Aliare known as the

  • Rightly Guided Caliphs, and many of the conservative movements in the Islamic world today are all

  • about trying to restore the Islamic world to those glory days, whichlike most glory

  • dayswere not unambiguously glorious.

  • Abu Bakr stabilized the community after Muhammad’s death, and began the process of recording

  • the Quran in writing,

  • And started the military campaigns against the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires that within

  • 116 years would allow the Islamic Empire to go from this to this.

  • His successor Umar was both an uncommonly good general and a brilliant administrator

  • but like so many other great men, he proved terrible at avoiding assassination.

  • Which led to the caliphate of Uthman, who standardized the Quran and continued both

  • his predecessor’s tradition of conquest and his predecessor’s tradition of getting

  • assassinated.

  • Then Ali finally got his turn at caliph, but his ascension was very controversial, and

  • it ultimately led to a civil war.

  • Which eventually led to the emergence of Uthman’s tribe, the Umayyads, as the dynasty ruling

  • over an ever-expanding Islamic Empire for more than a hundred years.

  • It’s common to hear that in these early years Islam quote spread by the sword, and

  • that’s partly true, unless you arewait for it

  • the Mongols.

  • Actually, as usual, the truth is more complicated:Many people, including the Mongols but also including

  • lots of people in Central and East Asia, embraced Islam without any military campaigns.

  • And in fact, the Quran says that religion must not be an act of compulsion, but this

  • much is true: The early Islamic empire was really good at winning wars.

  • And situated as they were between two very wealthy empiresthe Byzantines and the Sassaniansthere

  • was plenty to fight for.

  • First to fall was the Sassanians, the last non-Muslim successor to the Persian Empire.

  • They were relatively easy pickings because they’d been fighting the Byzantines for

  • like 300 years and were super tired. Also they’d been recently struck by plague.

  • Plague, man, I’m telling you; It’s like the red tortoise shell of history.

  • But in those early days they did pry away some valuable territory like Egypt and the

  • holy land and eventually they got into Spain.

  • Where various Muslim dynasties would entrench themselves until being expelled in 1492.

  • But as a good as they were at making war, it’s still tempting to chalk up the Arabs

  • success to, you know, the will of God.

  • And certainly a lot of the people they conquered felt that way. Wars in this part of the world

  • didn’t just pit people against each other, they also pitted their gods against each other.

  • So while the Islamic Empire didn’t require its subjects to convert to Islam, their stunning

  • successes certainly convinced a lot of people that this monotheism thing was legit.

  • Once again, John Green proving super hip to the slang of today’s youngns.

  • Also, you paid lower taxes if you converted, and just as taxes on cigarettes lead to people

  • not wanting to smoke, taxes on worshipping your idols lead to people not wanting to worship

  • them anymore.

  • So in a period of time that was, historically speaking, both remarkably recent and remarkably

  • short, a small group of people from an area of the world with no natural resources managed

  • to create one of the great empires of the world and also one of its great religions.

  • And that very fact may be why people of Western European descent remain largely ignorant about

  • this period.

  • Not only were the Muslims great conquerors, they spawned an explosion of trade and learning

  • that lasted hundreds of years.

  • They saved many of the classical texts that form the basis of theWestern Canon

  • while Europe was ignoring them and they paved the way for the Renaissance.

  • While it’s important to remember that much of the world between Spain and the Indus River

  • wasn’t Arabized, most of it was so thoroughly Islamized that these days we can’t think

  • of the world we now call the Middle East without thinking of it as Islamic.

  • Perhaps the greatest testimony to Islam’s power to organize peoples lives and their

  • communities is that, in Egypt, 5 times a day millions of people turn away from the Pyramids

  • and toward Mecca.

  • Egypt, birthplace to one of the longest continuous cultures the world has ever known, is now

  • the largest Arab country in the world.

  • Next week well talk about the Dark Ages. Spoiler alert: they were darkest in the evening.

  • Thanks for watching and well see you next time.

  • Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.

  • The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself and our graphics

  • team is ThoughtBubble.

  • Last week’s Phrase of the Week wasThey Might Be Giants”. If you want to guess this

  • week’s Phrase of the Week or suggest future ones you can do so in Comments where you can

  • also ask questions about today’s video that our team of historians will endeavor to answer.

  • Thank you so much for watching and as they say in my hometown, don’t forget to be coleslaw.

Hi there, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course: World History and today were going

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