Islam: The Straight Path – John L. Esposito [1998] – Chapter 2

Below you will find my notes and random observations from the book indicated by the title of this post. It is hoped that it will be effortless to differentiate between those locations in which I provide information from the book proper and those in which I offer personal observation, illumination or pose further lines of inquiry. Whenever any doubt is evident it should be assumed that anything even remotely factual should be attributed to the author of the book and anything that would be construed as otherwise can be attributed to me personally.


Note: In Chapter 2 our author goes about the daunting task of summing up 1000 years of Muslim history in a couple dozen pages. While I began with the goal of summing up his summary, it became quickly clear that further condensing of already condensed (and dense) material would likely be utterly impossible. Instead I will merely jot down a few conceptual notes.

Links to related posts: (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 [Part 1][Part 2][Part 3])


Like its Christian neighbors, Islam is a religion that seeks actively to promote itself. Unlike Christianity, Islam prides itself on spreading its message with a tolerant rather than a destructive hand. The Quranic mandate is to transform the world, not destroy it. In the early Muslim conquests, the cities in conquered territories were given three choices:

1. Convert to Islam
2. Accept Muslim rule but pay a special tax to the ruling establishment
3. Fight it out and get decimated

In this way Christianity in conquered territories was disestablished officially but not specifically persecuted.

This tolerance left the Muslim world with four distinct social classes:

1. Arab Muslims – natively born Arabs of the Muslim faith
2. Non-Arab converts – those who converted to Islam after conquest of some sort. Quranically speaking, these converts were in fact equal to those who came to the faith by birth, but practices varied. Some divisions of Islam required these converts to pay the special taxes levied on non-Muslims. This proved to be one of the many sources of conflict within the religion.
3. Non-Muslim “People of the Book” – Christians, Jews, and their religious counterparts
4. Slaves – Generally, no Christian or Jew was allowed to be enslaved.

I’ve mentioned that the Muslims of the time were factional and the chapter goes on at some length on a few of the major players in Islamic politics. The Kharijites were strict Quranic literalists. They viewed any act of sin as a traitorous act against Islam. By this definition, every previous leader of Islam was viewed as a traitor on the grounds that they had not properly followed the rules of succession of leadership put forth in the Quran. The Shii, as have been previously described, believed in familial succession to leadership which is their primary point of difference with the Sunni. The Shii are lead by an Imam, a divinely inspired, sinless and infallible embodiment of Allah on Earth. They await the “Hidden Imam” or Mahdi as their savior. In addition, the Shii are also split off into the Ismailis whose primary distinguishing characteristic seems to be that they believe as the Shii do, but they believe themselves to be somehow special and elite from other Muslims. One cannot imagine why this would cause them to come into conflict with their brethren. Most uniquely, we have the Druze, a separatist faction that forbids intermarriage or conversion. Because of this their practices remained localized and untainted by any outside influences. They also differ in that they believe in a form of reincarnation. So with this diverse cast of characters, it is unsurprising that the next millennium of Islamic history was as unsettled as it turned out to be.

Muslim history is tangled and far beyond your blog-writer’s abilities, but I will attempt to summarize in brief. After the death of the prophet , the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” established themselves (632). Caliphs were established by vote among tribal elders. This met perfectly with Sunni expectations, but the Shii factions were unsatisfied that the original bloodline of the prophet was not honored. As a result of this and other internal disagreements, the reigns of the Caliphs tended to be brief and ended at unexpected times in unpleasant ways. In 661, the Umayyad Empire was formed at the end of an unusually bloody period. The ruled until 750 as a military aristocracy and were eventually replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Abbasid are sometimes referred to as the true Flowering of Islam. Under Abbasid rule and patronage, Islam truly came into its own and for once owed much of its success to conquest by trade and cultural domination rather than the sword. It is at this time that we find the formation of the Ulama, or religious professional elite who lead the final formalization of Muslim practice and the translation of the great works of the time into Arabic. It is particularly interesting that centuries later when Europe sought to regain its own lost cultural heritage, it was Arabic source material they found rather than their own relics. Unfortunately, due to the sheer scope of geography being ruled, the Abbasid Caliphate began to undergo significant political decline by 950.

Our author also goes on at length about the Muslim response to the Crusades, specifically in Jerusalem. The Arabs originally took the city in 638 and in so doing left the Christian and Jewish populaces largely unmolested. However, when Constantinople fell to the Arabs in 1071, it became widely feared that the event was only the vanguard of a larger effort that might end in the conquest of the entire Western World by the Arabs. So in response, a Crusade was undertaken in 1095 to retake Jerusalem. When the Crusaders arrived in 1099, they murdered every Muslim in evidence despite promises to the contrary and Muslim buildings were desecrated and converted to serve Christian purposes. In contrast, when Arab forces once again retook Jerusalem in 1187, typical Muslim mercy is displayed and Christian buildings and families are again left untouched. At the close of the Crusades, our author points out, the wars that were intended to unite the Christian faith under a common flag was now more fractured than ever by infighting and theological disagreements. When the Crusades officially ended in 1453 with the final fall of Constantinople, the Muslims, not the Christians, were the ones who stood united.

The rule of the Abbasid Caliphate ended officially with the sack of Baghdad by the Monguls in 1258. The remnants of the once great empire lingered in Egypt and Syria until 1517. By the 16th century, the Muslim world was split into three great Sultanates:

1. The Ottoman Turkish Empire centered in Istanbul covered much of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Europe. This Sultanate remained in one form or another until it was finally dissolved in the fallout from World War I.
2. The Persian Safavid Empire existed until 1736 in what is now Iran. It distinguished itself as having established Shii as its state religion
3. The Mughal Empire had its seat of power in Delhi, India and covered Pakistan, parts of India and Bangladesh. It was finally ousted officially from power by the British in 1857 when India was declared a British Commonwealth though the real transfer of power in the region had started long before.

Thus ends Chapter 2. It should be further noted that it is likely that I’ve just plain gotten something totally wrong in the summation above. Readers who note such inaccuracies should point them out so I can correct them or at the least feel bad about them and then quickly forget.