11.1
According to Islamic tradition, _______________ was the first person to settle in what later became the city of Mecca.
Who is Abraham, called Ibrahim?
Abraham arrived there with his servant and concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael.
The __________ in the Old City in Jerusalem is one of Islam’s holiest sites constructed using a hexagonal shape and is very unusual, but it had a precedent in nearby Byzantine Christian churches.
What is the Dome of the Rock mosque?
The _______________-is a legal document detailing the rights and responsibilities of Christians living under early Islamic rule.
What is the “Pact of Umar”?
__________ holds an important place as a common ancestor in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions.
Who is Abraham?
Many modern scholars of religion thus refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the Abrahamic faiths.
Perhaps no prophetic figure is quite as central in all three faiths as the prophet Abraham (Figure 11.1). Abraham was a patriarch of the Israelites in Jewish and Christian tradition.
From the perspective of most Muslims, Islam is the same faith as Judaism and Christianity, with adherents of all three traditions worshipping the same God and recognizing divine intercession in humanity through the leadership of the prophets. Muslims also recognize the holy scriptures of Judaism and Christianity as having been given to humans by God but then corrupted over time.
At the center of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam shared traditions is ___________
What is monotheism/the worship of one god?
Islam, a word meaning “submission [to the one God]
Even to Muslims today, Allah is not considered to be a god separate from the God of Judaism and Christianity; Allah is simply the Arabic word meaning “the one God.” In fact, Christians who live in the Middle East and speak Arabic today refer to the God of the Christian Bible by using the word “Allah” in their own worship.
The descendants of Ishmael, the Arabs began to worship idols, entering a period of ________________ .
What is the period of ignorance known as the jahiliyyah.
There they remained until God sent a new prophet, Muhammad, to correct their religious practices and deliver them from ignorance and disbelief. This lapse and deliverance, according to the faithful, is the story of Islam.
Shortly after winning several skirmishes and capturing the Syrian city of Damascus, the Arab-Muslims bested the Byzantine army at the ______________.
What is the Battle of Yarmuk (in 636)?
---Unable to defend the remaining cities of the region, the Byzantines then abandoned Greater Syria, consisting of what are today Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.
______________ became a prominent center of trade and culture, and the city sprawled outward along the banks of the river and into the fertile farmland that surrounded it and overtook traditional Mediterranean cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Damascus, and Jerusalem in prominence, the center of trade moved further east along the Silk Roads that connected with the Indian Ocean world and a continually growing China.
What is Baghdad?
The great Byzantine and Persian Empires to the immediate north had a history of expansion and conflict. Despite their strength, however, neither desired to dominate _______________.
What is Arabia?
The Bedouin were migratory Arab tribes that largely subsisted on animal herding and, in some instances, on the raiding of trade caravans and settled communities. Many Bedouin and other seminomadic Arabs practiced________.
What is polytheism?
The worship of many gods and goddesses who were often considered patrons of certain tribes or residents of certain place/location.
Many communities in the __________________were divided along tribal lines while vying with one another for power, prestige, influence, and available resources.
What is Arabian Peninsula?
_____________ was chosen to be the first successor to Muhammad.
Who was Abu Bakr?
---a friend and confidant of Muhammad’s named Abu Bakr contrast, was one of the elders of the community, well respected and popularly chosen. Both had been among the first to convert to Islam.
The ______________presided over what was arguably the end of antiquity in the Middle East and its transition to the Middle Ages, becoming one of the most important powers of their time.
Who are the Abbasids?
--The revolutionary group championed the right of the family of Muhammad to hold the position of caliph and its members supported the claims of the descendants of Ibn Abbas, a first cousin of Muhammad, and thus came to be known as the Abbasids
--They also faced the fracturing of their authority over the outlying provinces, and the growth within Islam of distinct sects with different theological beliefs and goals.
To combat this aggression by northern Arabia (they regularly engaged in harassing the trade caravans that brought goods to and from the urban imperial centers), both the Byzantines and the Persians opted to employ certain _____confederations to create a buffer between the settled peoples and the raiders from the south.
Who are Arab confederations?
The relationship between the Byzantines and the Sasanian Persians was very often tense, however. Both empires had ambitions to expand their influence, and they regularly skirmished with one another and attempted to meddle in each other’s politics, including by supporting rival claimants to the throne. Their combative relationship was not unique in late antiquity, as conflict between those two sides occurred regularly.
The decision by the Himyarite rulers to convert to _________ in the late fourth century CE made _________more prominent in the region.
What is
-Judaism
-monotheism
?
___________ controlled some of the most fertile lands in the region. They built their state on agricultural produce, on luxury goods such as frankincense and myrrh, and on their role as intermediaries in both East African and Indian Ocean trade.
Who are the Himyarites?
In the very south of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is Yemen today, was a kingdom known as Himyar.
In the very south of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is Yemen today, was a kingdom known as Himyar. They played significant roles in long-distance trade, using camel caravans along the western coast of Arabia to bring goods from Africa and Asia to the markets in places such as Alexandria, Damascus, Jerusalem, and beyond.
The crucial early years of Islamic expansion were overseen by the first four caliphs, a group of rulers who came to be called ______________.
Who were the “rightly guided” or Rashidun?
The catalyst for the formation of denominations within Islam was a growing divide between the groups now known as _______________ the two primary “umbrella sects” within Islam.
Who are the Sunni and the Shia (sometimes written as Shi‘ite)?
-- The Sunni take their name from the sunna or customs of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
-- The Shia derive their name from the Arabic phrase Shiat Ali or “the followers of Ali,” who eventually became the fourth caliph.
According to Muslim belief, in the year 610 the middle-aged Muhammad, who had traveled to a cave just outside ______ for contemplation, received contact from God through the intermediary of the angel Gabriel (Jabrīl in Arabic).
Where is Mecca?
In 622, Muhammad’s twelfth year of prophecy, his community fled persecution and increasing aggression by the polytheist Meccans. They were invited to join another community of Arabs in a city called Yathrib, later known as Medina or _______________. There they were welcomed among other Arab tribes, including some practicing Judaism.
What is “the city” or more specifically “the prophet’s city”?
In the year 602 the conflict exploded. The Byzantine emperor Maurice, who had helped the Sasanian ruler Khosrow II regain the throne of Persia and brought peace between the two sides, was murdered by his own troops. They installed a new emperor, Phocas, and Khosrow vowed revenge, using the coup as a reason to begin what historians call _______________
What is “the last great war of antiquity”?
The collapse of the Sasanian ruling family in Persia also provides a unique glimpse into something that had not happened among the elite before: the brief rise of ______________ .
Who is the female ruler, Boran?
---The daughter of Khosrow II,
--Boran came to power briefly during the civil war after the Byzantine victory over her father. The daughter of Khosrow II, Boran came to power briefly during the civil war after the Byzantine victory over her father. While such opportunities for female power in the region were few and far between, her rule underscores that seventh-century Persia was already a state and a people in transition, and the arrival of the Arab-Muslims with the cultural practices of Arabia and the religion of Islam only expedited change.
KHAN: Boran is particularly notable in the history of Iran. She was a female head of state who took the same title, Shahan Shah, as her male counterparts. Despite taking reign in a period of chaos, she was a sharp leader who constructed roadways and facilitated peace with Byzantium after nearly 30 years of war under her father, Khosrow II.
The _____________________ sought to preserve the knowledge of past societies by translating the works of the ancient world into Arabic, especially from Greek and Persian, as the Islamic world transitioned from an oral to a writerly society.
What is the Abbasid Translation Movement, or the Greco-Arabic Translation Movement?
-These texts included seminal works by the Greek thinkers Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, and Ptolemy that were given advanced study in the Muslim world when their popularity and even availability were extremely limited in the rest of the Mediterranean. So, a major goal of the translation movement was not just to preserve but also to correct and expand them.
With so much upheaval occurring despite the Byzantine victory, the war affected many aspects of society, including the state and nobility’s ability to patronize scholarship, historical writing, and the arts, leading this period to be known as the _________.
What is the “Byzantine Dark Age”?
This is because of the severe lack of historical writing that survived in the seventh and eight centuries.
The new __________________ was larger than the realm of Alexander the Great, the Romans, or the Han Chinese; it was the largest empire the world had yet seen.
What is Islamic state, or caliphate (an area under the control of a caliph-Islamic title designating a spiritual and secular leader)?