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The Spread of Islam began shortly after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 632!. Trade networks connected many religions which helped the spread of Islam!. During his lifetime, the community of Muslims, the ummah, was established in the Arabian Peninsula by means of conversion to Islam!. In the first centuries conversion to Islam followed the rapid growth of the Muslim world under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphs!. Muslim dynasties were soon established and subsequent empires such as those of the Abbasids, Almoravids, Seljuk Turks, Mughals in India and Safavids in Persia and Ottomans were among the largest and most powerful in the world!. The Islamic world was composed of numerous sophisticated centers of culture and science with far-reaching mercantile networks, travelers, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, doctors and philosophers, all of whom contributed to the Golden Age of Islam!. The activities of this quasi-political early ummah resulted in the spread of Islam as far from Mecca as China and Indonesia, the latter containing the world's largest Muslim population!. Today there are between 1!.1 billion and 1!.8 billion Muslims, such that Islam the second-largest religion in the world!.[1]


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Phase I: The Early Caliphs and Umayyads(610-750)
This was the time of the life of Prophet Muhammad and his early successors, the four rightly-guided caliphs, as well as the dynasty of the Umayyad Caliphs (550-661)!.

In the first century the establishment of Islam upon the Arabian peninsula and the subsequent rapid expansion of the Arab Empire during the Muslim conquests, resulted in the formation of an empire surpassed by none before!.[6] For the subjects of this new empire, formerly subjects of the vanishing Byzantine and Sassanid Empire, not much changed in practice!. The objective of the conquests was more than anything of a practical nature, as fertile land and water were scarce in the Arabian peninsula!. A real Islamisation therefore only came about in the subsequent centuries!.[7]

Ira Lapidus distinguishes between two separate strands of converts of the time: one is animists and polytheists of tribal societies of the Arabian peninsula and the Fertile crescent; the other one is the monotheistic populations of the Middle Eastern agrarian and urbanized societies!.[8]

For the polytheistic and pagan societies, apart from the religious and spiritual reasons each individual may have had, conversion to Islam "represented the response of a tribal, pastoral population to the need for a larger framework for political and economic integration, a more stable state, and a more imaginative and encompassing moral vision to cope with the problems of a tumultuous society!."[8] In contrast, for sedentary and often already monotheistic societies, "Islam was substituted for a Byzantine or Sassanian political identity and for a Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian religious affiliation!."[8] Conversion initially was neither required nor necessarily wished for: "(The Arab conquerors) did not require the conversion as much as the subordination of non-Muslim peoples!. At the outset, they were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs!."[8]

Only in subsequent centuries, with the development of the religious doctrine of Islam and with that the understanding of the Muslim ummah, did mass conversion take place!. The new understanding by the religious and political leadership in many cases led to a weakening or breakdown of the social and religious structures of parallel religious communities such as Christians and Jews!.[8]

The caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty established the first schools inside the empire, called madrasas, which taught the Arabic language and Islamic studies!. They furthermore began the ambitious project of building mosques across the empire, many of which remain today as the most magnificent mosques in the Islamic world, such as the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus!. At the end of the Umayyad period, less than 10% of the people in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Spain were Muslim!. Only on the Arabian peninsula were there substantially more Muslims among the population!.[9]

try to google it and sorry it is so long




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