The History of the Islamic Belief and Its People Then and Now, Essay Example

When it comes to the Islamic belief, there is more to religion than just the belief of a God or his teachings, it is more of a culture, a life and a source of being. There are currently 1.6 billion individuals around the globe who are defined by the Islamic belief. This means that they roughly cover at least 23.4% of the overall population of the world. It could be noted that through the years, the increase of the population of the believers of the said faith could be noted to have taken toll on particular implications on how the different aspects of the belief itself changed through time. In the course of looking through the pages of history, there could be are at least sic primary periods in the process by which the Islamic belief evolved according to the changes in the society as well. In the discussion that follows, these six periods shall be used as foundation in seeing how much Islamic belief has taken considerable change through the years and how the people in the world responded to such changes up to these contemporary ages.

The Arabian nations are considered to be the central birth of the Islamic belief. Muhammad, the central figure in the said religion just below the supreme being of Allah, came from the Arabian regions thus indicating where the source of the belief is. It started out as a group of people living in a community, having a specific way of living, following a specific lineage of law and regulations passed on from one generation to another. Later on, the tribe following such culture grew in number and somehow was distributed around the Arabian regions. Mecca, considered as the holy land, remains to the center of holiness for Islam believers around the globe. Meanwhile the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, is believed to be a presentation and documentation of the different revelations realized by Muhammad when he was 40 years of age.

Due to blood feuds in the area, tribes carrying the beliefs and lifestyle of the Islamic religion began being distributed along neighboring regions and countries. This was when the city-states and the imperial periods of the Islamic era began. This period is characterized by the creation of city-states recognizing Islamic belief apart from what the other members of the society believes in. Being dispersed in different regions, the Muslims tried to keep their recognizable identity intact through keeping their faith and their government intact. It was as if they were creating their own government under the government of the countries they have been subjected to follow.

The universal and decentralization periods, also known as the golden age of the Islamic growth later on came in and moved the center of worship from Mecca to Baghdad. This change was apparently pushed forward according to the relationship of the nations around the said area and how they are able to live through the principles of the Islamic belief with strict and thorough following of its specific regulations. The high middle ages began to give birth to a more modernized system of belief for the Muslim people.

Today, the Islamic belief is divided into two sections, the Sunni and the Shia beliefs. The Sunni beliefs are specifically defined as the ones specifically following along the lines of Muhammad. People under this particular condition of belief are guided through a more traditional set of rules under the Islamic religion. Recognizing the ultimate value of the sayings of Muhammad as they are recorded in Hadiths, these individuals try to relive the kind of worship that the believers of Islam in the past actually lived with.

On the other end, the ones under the Shia law are more dependent on the modernized changes that the Islamic belief imposes. Rather than on the Hadith, these individuals believe on the Quran and strongly uses its contents as a form of guidance to how they should worship Allah and how they should live their daily lives. The modern Shia is noted to be defined by three other branches noted as the Ithna ashariyaa, the Islamailis and the Zaidis. Shia, compared to Sunni believers, are often experiencing more freedom when it comes to defining how they would allow their Islamic understandings to define their being. The process by which they worship is also often dependent on their convenience, therefore aiming to impose that the strictness of the process eludes the possibility of worshipping Allah in a wholehearted manner.

The changes on the condition by which the Islamic belief is noted in the modern society today could be observed to have rooted from the way by which the people believing it specifically recognize it as a tool of governance. Considering that the world is facing a global transformation of internationalization for the sake of progress and industrialization, historians believe that the internationalization of Islam itself could be accounted as a relative step towards promoting the religion more as a way of life than a religion itself.

Like other religions, the beliefs and the basic foundations of the Islamic belief has been adjusted to fit the lifestyle of the modern people. The strict rules and the strict distinctive principles have been slightly redefined to make sure that the new generation of individuals born into the Muslim community would not despise the belief and leave it, but instead understand its value according to their contemporary way of thinking. It is then expected that in the years to come, many more changes would occur in the process by which the different sections of the Islamic belief is recognized by its people through the teachings of the Imams [Muslim teachers]. And that their understanding of modern living would slowly be encrypted into the rules that define the basic rules and regulations garnered from understanding and interpreting the words of both the Quran and the Hadiths. Because of this, more people are expected to join the said religious sector.

References:

Lapidus, Ira M. (2002). A History of Islamic societes. Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, B. (1993). The Arabs in History. Oxford University Press.

Rahman, F. (1982). Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. University of Chicago Press.

Ankerl, Guy (2000). Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Mulsim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INUPress.