addition to murdering his brother, what other issues made al-Mamun controversial?
For all his acknowledged strengths and superior suitability for rule, al-Mamun had that nasty penchant for “heterodoxy,” as judged by the traditionalists. Al-Mamun’s popular association with liberal attitudes toward the seeking of wisdom parallels Harun’s identification with romance and mystery. Far more important to some Abbasid historians was the danger he represented to traditionalist “theology from above,” with its concern to subordinate the caliph’s authority to that of God. But alongside that theme ran the virtually opposite view that al-Mamun was indeed not only worthy to be called “God’s Shadow on Earth,” but was the mahdi (Guided One), a messianic figure appearing in due course at the turn of a new Islamic century. According to that strand, the caliph was, at least as he approached death, the staunchest of Muslims.
What crisis reversed the religious and political directions of the Abbasid caliphate?
Two reigns after al-Mamun came the next major Abbasid, al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–61). His story is in a way a mirror-reverse of al-Mamun’s: al-Mutawakkil began his reign by overturning al-Mamun’s preference for the rationalist Mutazilites, but, according to the chronicles, he ended his life a moral and political failure as a murder victim—perhaps the chronicler’s way of justifying the violent demise of yet another caliph. It was al-Mutawakkil who returned the caliphate’s official Islamic ideology to that of the more conservative Traditionalists, especially as represented by renowned legal scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855). Against the Mutazilites, the Traditionalists maintained that one must do theology “from above,” beginning not with reason but with revelation, and they eschewed the notion that human beings can know definitively the mind of God, insisting instead upon divine transcendence and mystery.
Is Islam the fastest growing religion in the world? Where are the largest concentrations of Muslim populations?
Among global religious communities, Islam does seem to show the fastest rate of growth, with Christianity running a close second. In total numbers, Christians still appear to outnumber the approximately 1.6 billion Muslims by perhaps five hundred million. The largest concentrations of Muslims by geographical region are in South Asia, with around a third of the world’s total in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Combining all the Muslims in the Middle East and Africa adds more than another third. And the populations of Indonesia, the nation with the largest number of Muslims, combined with those of the rest of East, Central, and Southeast Asia comprise roughly the final third.
Where do Muslims live today? What are their estimated numbers?
Islam is now a truly global religious tradition. Approximately 1.6 billion Muslims live worldwide, on every continent and in most countries. In very general terms, about a third of the total live in the Middle East and North Africa. Several major ethno-linguistic groups are represented there, including Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Berbers. Many people associate Islam with Arabs even though they are now a relatively small minority of the global population. Another third live in central and southern Asia, including the southern republics of the former Soviet Union, Western China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Pakistan is the most important modern example of a nation-state established as a Muslim land. Another third are in sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, and in smaller concentrations in several dozen other countries. Indonesia boasts the single largest national population of Muslims, approaching two hundred million. At over a hundred million, India is home to the world’s largest minority Muslim population. Estimates as to American Muslims vary considerably, from three to eight million. It may also be helpful to think in terms of religio-cultural spheres, defined by key language groups, in which Islam has been a particularly important influence. The Arabicate sphere, for example, includes all those areas in which Arabic has been the dominant vehicle of Islamic expression, namely, the central Middle East, north Africa, and east Africa. The Persianate sphere consists of Iran, Afghanistan, and all of southern Asia. Within the Malayo-Polynesian sphere are Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Central Asia, including western China, and present-day Turkey and the Balkans comprise the Turkic sphere. Last but not least is the sub-Saharan sphere, in which Nigeria and other west African nations are most significant.
Followers of Islam are now present all over the world, numbering about 1.6 billion people as of 2014. This map indicates the percentage of people in each country who are Muslims.
In which countries do the largest majority Muslim populations live today?
Principal nations with majority Muslim populations include virtually all of the Middle Eastern and North African countries, plus a couple of sub-Saharan African states, such as Nigeria; Pakistan and Bangladesh; Malaysia and Indonesia; and the five Central Asian republics formerly belonging to the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). Dozens of other nations include significant minority populations, with India’s over one hundred million Muslims at the head of the list. Another important minority Muslim population that Westerners rarely hear about is that of the People’s Republic of China.
Are most Muslims Arabs?
This is a widespread misperception. Arabs, the largest remaining population of Semitic ancestry, account for only about a fifth of the global Muslim population—a total roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh alone. And within the Middle East, there are several other major ethnicities and language families. The two largest of these are Turks and Iranians—neither in any direct way related to Semitic peoples, and both using languages unrelated originally either to each other or to Arabic. In addition, significant sub-groups of Middle Eastern Muslims among Turkic peoples are, for example, Turkmen; and among Iranian peoples there are large numbers of Kurds as well as several major tribal groups living in present-day Iran.
What are some other major ethnic and cultural groups of Muslims in the World today?
Across North Africa one finds also Muslims who are ethnic Berbers and in sub-Saharan Africa dozens of tribal groups such as the Tuareg, Hausa, and Fulani. People of Indic background are by far the largest single group, if one considers a large number of ethnic subgroups together, totaling almost a third of the global Muslim population. Turkic descent accounts for the lineage of most of the citizens of Turkey as well as those of the former Soviet Central Asian republics and a region once called Eastern Turkestan that now makes up a large area of Western China—totaling about one-fifth. The people of both Iran and Afghanistan are largely of Indo-Aryan descent and are more closely related ethnically to the people of the Indian subcontinent than they are to their Arab or Turkic neighbors.
Tuareg Muslims, such as these men from Desert Timbuktu in Mali, are one of the many different ethnic and cultural groups that make up the Muslim community worldwide.
What are the most important languages in major Muslim populations?
As suggested in earlier questions about the “culture spheres,” Muslims speak and write in dozens of major language groups. Arabic remains the chief Islamic language not only because so many Muslims speak it (over three hundred million), but because it is the language of the Quran and is thus associated with Islam’s sacred origins. Multiple languages and dialects—Turkic, Indic (such as Urdu, Sindhi, and Gujarati) and Indo-European (such as Persian), Malayo-Polynesian,
