Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 7.16
Diffusion of Islam.
This map shows the diffusion of Islam from 600
ce
to 1600
ce
© H. J. de
Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
In the Shi'ite branch, Imams are leaders whose
appointments they regard as sanctioned by Allah. Shi'ites
believe that the Imam is the sole source of true knowledge,
without sin and infallible, making them a potent social as
well as political force. Sunni Islam is much less central-
ized. An imam for a Sunni is simply a religious leader at a
mosque or recognized religious scholar.
a unifi ed realm encompassing Arabia, the Middle East,
Iran, and most of what is today Pakistan. Ultimately, the
Arab empire extended from Morocco to India and from
Turkey to Ethiopia. Through trade, Muslims later spread
their faith across the Indian Ocean into Southeast Asia
(Fig. 7.16). As Muslim traders settled trading ports in
Southeast Asia, they established new secondary hearths
of Islam and worked to diffuse the religion contagiously
from the secondary hearths. Recent diffusion of Islam
into Europe (beyond Spain and Portugal), South Africa,
and the Americas has largely been a result of migration—
of relocation diffusion.
Today, Islam, with more than 1.57 billion follow-
ers, ranks second to Christianity in global number of
adherents. Islam is the fastest growing of the world's
major religions, dominating in Northern Africa and
Southwest Asia, extending into Central Asia, the for-
mer Soviet Union and China, and including clusters in
Indonesia, Bangladesh, and southern Mindanao in the
Diffusion of Islam
At the time of Muhammad's death in 632
, Muhammad
and his followers had converted kings on the Arabian
Peninsula to Islam. The kings then used their armies to
spread the faith across the Arabian Peninsula through
invasion and conquest. Moving west, in waves of inva-
sion and conquest, Islam diffused throughout North
Africa. By the early ninth century, the Muslim world
included emirates extending from Egypt to Morocco,
a caliphate occupying most of Spain and Portugal, and
ce
