Islam

Overview

Islam is a monotheistic religion centered on belief in one God, Allah, and on Muhammad as his messenger. It arose in western Arabia during the seventh century and developed into a religious tradition practiced across many societies. Muslims share the Koran as scripture, while differing in theology, law, ritual, political outlook and interpretations of prophetic tradition. The principal historical traditions are Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. Schools of law, devotional movements and local customs add further variety. No single organization speaks for all Muslims.

Muslim religious life commonly includes profession of faith, prayer, fasting during Ramadan, charitable giving and pilgrimage to Mecca. Mosques serve as places of worship and community life. The word halal means permitted by Islamic doctrine and applies beyond food. Muslim communities also differ over dress, education, family practices and the place of religion in public affairs. Hijab usually refers to a headscarf, though the term can refer to veiling more broadly. A niqab covers the face except for the eyes; a chador covers the body and head without covering the face; and a burka covers the body, head and face. Freedom of religion protects women who choose religious dress and women who choose not to wear it.

Islam’s history includes both religious practice and the exercise of political power. Political Islam refers to movements that seek to organize law or government around an Islamic program. That term helps identify specific parties, governments and movements without assigning their positions to Muslims generally. It also permits examination of their stated aims, conduct and interpretations on their own terms.

Origins

Muhammad was born in Mecca into the Quraysh community. Before he began preaching, Khadijah, a respected businesswoman from a powerful Quraysh family, employed him to manage a trading caravan and later proposed marriage. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad received his first revelation in 610, at about age 40. The account places the event in a cave, identifies the messenger as the angel Jibril and associates the first revealed verses with Koran chapter 96. Muhammad then preached in Mecca for roughly thirteen years, calling for worship of one God and gathering a small community of followers.

Opposition in Mecca preceded the hijra, Muhammad’s migration to Medina in 622. The migration became the starting point of the Islamic calendar. In Medina, Muhammad established a political community as well as a religious one. His mosque became a center for worship, consultation and public affairs. The community formed alliances, settled disputes and fought its Meccan opponents. On 13 March 624, during Ramadan, Muhammad led his followers to their first major military victory at the Battle of Badr. The conflict with the Quraysh ended with the Muslim conquest of Mecca around the turn of 629–630.

Relations between Muhammad’s community and Jewish groups in Medina changed during this period and included conflict, expulsion and killing. These events occupy a significant place in later accounts of Muhammad’s life and in debates over Islamic teaching about Jews. They do not determine how every Muslim understands Jews or Islam today. The Center for the Study of Political Islam emphasizes the difference between Muhammad’s Meccan years as a preacher and his Medinan years as a political and military leader. Its numerical classifications of events and passages reflect its own method of reading the foundational texts.

Doctrine

The Koran is Islam’s scripture. Muslims regard it as revelation delivered to Muhammad. Its chapters contain material associated with both Mecca and Medina, though they are not arranged in chronological order. Accounts of Muhammad’s life form the Sira, while Hadith collections preserve reports of his words and actions. The Center for the Study of Political Islam calls these three bodies of material the Islamic Trilogy: the Koran, Sira and Hadith, treated together in its analysis. Their authority is not identical in every Muslim tradition. Scholars assess the transmission of individual hadith reports, and Muslims differ over how prophetic precedent should guide present conduct.

Sharia is the Islamic framework for law and ethical conduct. Jurists draw on scripture and prophetic precedent, while also using methods such as consensus and analogy to address questions that foundational texts do not expressly settle. Sharia reaches beyond criminal penalties into worship, family relations, inheritance, commerce and daily life. Its application differs across legal schools and states. Zakat is an obligatory form of charitable giving in Islamic practice. Jihad means struggle or effort; discussions of armed jihad concern one form of religiously framed struggle and should identify warfare specifically. Terrorism describes a tactic used by some armed groups, not the meaning of jihad as a whole.

Islamic texts and historical legal systems also use categories whose meaning requires context. Kafir is a doctrinal term for a non-Muslim who rejects Islam; it is not a neutral site label for people. Under historical Islamic rule, dhimmi designated a Jew or Christian with subordinate protected status and an obligation to pay jizya (yizia). These categories have been interpreted and applied differently across time and place. Criticism of doctrine, legal rules or political programs can be evidence-based; hostility or discrimination directed at Muslims as people is anti-Muslim bigotry.

The Center for the Study of Political Islam argues that the Medinan material and prophetic accounts give Islamic doctrine an extensive political dimension. Its studies count passages and words it assigns to subjects including warfare, Jews, women and kafir. Those totals depend on the Center’s classifications and should be understood as its analysis, rather than as measurements accepted across Islamic scholarship. Bill Warner likewise reads Muhammad’s Meccan and Medinan careers as distinct phases and emphasizes accounts of armed conflict. Other interpreters place different weight on textual context, transmission and later legal reasoning. These differences help explain why doctrinal arguments cannot be reduced to the conduct of a selected Muslim or organization.

History

Muhammad died in 632 without an uncontested succession accepted in the same form by all his followers. Abu Bakr became the first caliph in the Sunni account of legitimate early leadership. Disagreement over authority and the place of Muhammad’s family developed into the historical division between Sunni and Shia traditions. Shia Muslims hold that Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and his descendants had a distinctive claim to lead the community. The division acquired further religious and political meaning through later conflicts, especially the killing of Ali’s son Husayn at Karbala.

Early Muslim rulers expanded beyond Arabia into territories long governed by the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Egypt and Syria came under Muslim rule within decades of Muhammad’s death. Islamic civilization subsequently developed major centers of scholarship, trade, law and art across the Middle East and beyond. Under the third caliph, Uthman, disputes about Koran readings prompted a committee to prepare a standard text. Accounts of the process say that other copies were ordered destroyed after the standard version was distributed. Over subsequent centuries, Muslim societies developed different institutions and forms of religious authority rather than a single enduring political system.

Places sacred in Islamic history and devotion include Mecca and Medina. Jerusalem is also holy to Islam: Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock stand on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s ancient Temple site. The Cave of the Patriarchs is significant to Muslims as well as Jews, while Najaf is especially important in Shia tradition. These overlapping associations are part of the religious history of the Land of Israel and the wider region.

Modern Islamic movements arose in different settings. Wahhabism developed in Arabia as a reform movement emphasizing its understanding of early Islamic practice. Other movements formed in response to colonial rule, state centralization and social change. Their approaches ranged from religious education and electoral politics to revolution and armed campaigns. Muslim political participation itself does not establish support for any one program of religious government.

Political role

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, became a major organization of political Islam. It combined religious preaching, social services and political organization. Later Brotherhood thinkers, including Sayyid Qutb, argued that modern societies had entered a new age of ignorance, or jahiliyyah, and called for Islamic leadership to replace prevailing political systems. Brotherhood-linked movements have varied by country and period. Formal separation from the organization does not, by itself, establish a change in a movement’s ideas; each organization’s writings and conduct require separate examination.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 produced a distinct Shia state project. Under Ruhollah Khomeini, the new Islamic Republic of Iran made clerical authority central to government and law. Its institutions joined religious doctrine to state power, while its leaders supported armed partners abroad. The Iranian model and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood emerged from different histories and theological traditions. Neither represents Muslim communities as a whole.

The regional uprisings that began in 2011 opened new opportunities and exposed deep divisions among movements of political Islam. Brotherhood candidates gained power in Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but Mohamed Morsi’s presidency ended with the military’s removal of his government in 2013. Elsewhere, civil wars and state collapse enabled armed jihadist movements to expand. Studies of the period distinguish the Brotherhood, established Sunni religious institutions, Salafi-jihadist groups and Shia political movements because they pursued different goals and responded differently to the upheaval.

On 29 June 2014, the terrorist organization Islamic State declared a caliphate in territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria, naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi caliph. Its fighters committed atrocities against Yazidis, Shia Muslims and Christians, among others. Muslim scholars and leaders rejected its claim to authority and condemned its actions. Its rise also sharpened competition among jihadist organizations, including Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The United States and its partners launched military operations against the group in 2014.

Political Islam also includes lawful organizations working through charities, advocacy, schools and elections. Such activity differs from armed violence, although an organization’s legal status alone cannot settle questions about its ideology or associations. Muslim communities in Western democracies encompass many sects, schools of law, cultures and political views. Advocacy groups may be influential without representing all those communities. Public debate is clearer when it identifies a particular organization, its program and its evidence rather than assigning collective responsibility to Muslims.

Relationship to Israel and the Jewish people

Islam and Judaism share figures, narratives and places of religious importance, while differing over revelation and Muhammad’s prophetic status. Jewish communities lived under numerous Muslim rulers and experienced changing conditions across regions and centuries. The historical dhimmi system gave Jews a subordinate legal position and imposed jizya. Periods of coexistence, cultural exchange and scholarship did not erase episodes of coercion, expulsion or violence. Modern Jewish history also includes the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world.

Hamas is a terrorist organization rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Its 1988 covenant sets out an Islamic political program, calls for Israel’s destruction and expresses hatred of Jews. Its hostility must be described as the organization’s position and conduct, not attributed to Muslims generally. Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in 2007. Its attacks on Israeli civilians, including the October 7 attacks of 2023, demonstrate the consequences of its program in action. Islamic Jihad is another terrorist organization that has attacked Israel.

Analysts of Islamist antisemitism have examined how hostility to Jews and Israel circulates through organizations, propaganda and political alliances. Accurate analysis distinguishes criticism of a government from hatred of Jews, and distinguishes Muslim citizens and communities from groups advocating violence. Israel is the sovereign state in the Jewish people’s historic homeland. Zionism is the Jewish national movement for self-determination and return to that homeland. Support for Israel’s continued existence is not evidence of hostility toward Islam or Muslims.

Present day

Islam is practiced across many countries and by communities with different languages, institutions and relationships to government. Sunni and Shia traditions remain important distinctions, but neither is internally uniform. Muslims disagree about religious authority, women’s dress, the reach of Sharia, political participation and the legitimacy of armed movements. Surveys by Gallup and Pew have contributed to the study of these differences. Their findings should be read by country, question and date rather than treated as a single measure of what Muslims believe.

Debates in democratic societies concern both religious freedom and the limits of state or institutional accommodation. Prayer space, school schedules, dress, halal provision and finance can involve practical questions about equal access and shared rules. Compulsory religious dress, by contrast, takes away individual choice. Criticism of a doctrine or political ideology belongs in public debate, while threats against worshippers, exclusion of Muslims and collective blame violate the same principles of liberty and equal protection.

Islam’s contemporary political significance therefore depends on precise distinctions. Religious worship, scholarly interpretation, advocacy, state rule and armed jihadist activity are different forms of action, even when participants invoke the same tradition. The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran’s regime, Hamas and the Islamic State have identifiable programs and histories that can be examined directly. Their claims to Islamic authority do not make them representatives of every Muslim. Understanding Islam requires attention to its texts and history alongside the diversity of people and institutions that interpret them.