The Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock (Ar. Qubbat al-Sakhra), a large octagonal building in Jerusalem commissioned by the Umayyad caliph _Abd al-Malik in 692 C.E., is the earliest major monument of Islamic architecture to survive. Muslims today consider it the third holiest shrine in Islam, after the Kaaba in Mecca and the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. Its age and its sanctity, along with its visibility and extraordinary decoration, make it a major monument of world architecture and one of the most important sites in Islam.

The Dome of the Rock is set over a rocky outcrop near the center of the large esplanade known in Arabic as al-Haram al- Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), which was once the site of the Jewish Temple, the traditional religious center of Jerusalem.

The building is a large low octagon divided internally by an arcade into two octagonal ambulatories encircling a tall cylindrical space measuring approximately 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. A high wooden dome, whose metal roof is plated with gold, spans the central space and covers the rock.

The glory of the building is its decoration. Above a high dado of quartered marble, the exterior and interior walls were once entirely covered in a mosaic of small cubes of colored and gold glass and semiprecious stones. In the sixteenth century the mosaics on the exterior were replaced with glazed tiles, themselves replaced in the twentieth century, but the mosaics on the interior stand much as they did when they were put up in the late seventh century. They depict a vast program of fantastic trees, plants, fruits, jewels, chalices, vases, and crowns. A long (about 250 meters, or 820 feet) band of Arabic writing in gold on a blue ground runs along the top of both sides of the inner octagon. The text is largely Quranic phrases and contains the earliest evidence for the writing down of the Quran. It ended with the name of the patron, the Umayyad caliph _Abd al-Malik (replaced in the ninth century by that of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma_mun), and the date of construction.

In form, materials, and decoration, the Dome of the Rock belongs to the tradition of late Antique and Byzantine architecture that flourished in the region before the coming of Islam. The domed, centrally planned building was a typical form for a martyrium, and the Dome of the Rock is similar in plan and size of dome to the nearby Holy Sepulcher, the building (also raised over a rock) that the emperor Constantine had erected in the fourth century to mark the site of Christ’s burial on Golgotha. Other Christian buildings erected in the area in the eighth century, notably the Church of the Nativity in Bethelem, show a similar use of marble and mosaics, perhaps executed by the same team of mosaicists.

Despite its antecedents and even its workmen, the Dome of the Rock is clearly a Muslim building, commissioned by a Muslim patron for Muslim purposes. Its mosaic decoration, notably its inscriptions in Arabic and its lack of figural representation, immediately distinguishes it from contemporary Christian buildings in the area. It was not intended as a place for communal prayer; that function was fulfilled by the nearby Aqsa Mosque. Rather its domed octagonal form suggests a commemorative function, though its exact purpose is unclear.

Already in the ninth century several alternative explanations for its construction were proposed. One author suggested that _Abd al-Malik had commissioned the Dome of the Rock to replace the Ka_ba, which had fallen into enemy hands. This explanation, however, is simplistic and undermines one of the five central tenets of Islam, though the building could have functioned (and does today) as a secondary site of pilgrimage. Another explanation, also current from the ninth century, associates the building with the site of Muhammad’s mi_raj, his miraculous night-journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back. However, the Qur_anic inscriptions around the interior of the Dome of the Rock, the only contemporary source for explaining the building’s purpose, mention neither of these subjects. Rather, they deal with the nature of Islam and refute the tenets of Christianity. The inscriptions suggest that the building was intended to advertise the presence of Islam. Together with the traditional identification of the rock as the place of Adam’s burial and Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son and of the esplanade as the site of Solomon’s Temple, the inscriptions suggest that the Dome of the Rock was meant to symbolize Islam as the worthy successor to both Judaism and Christianity.

The Dome of the Rock continued to play an important role long after it was built. The Abbasids, who succeeded the Umayyads, restored it several times, and the Fatimids restored it in the eleventh century after the dome collapsed in the earthquake of 1016. The Crusaders considered it Solomon’s Temple itself and rechristened the building Templum Domini. Saladin, the Ayyubid prince who recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in 1187, had the building rededicated as part of his campaign to enhance the city’s sanctity and political importance. The Mamluks, rulers of Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, had the wooden ceilings of the ambulatory and the central dome restored. The Ottoman sultan Suleyman (r. 1520–1566), whose name is the Turkish form of Solomon, ordered the building redecorated as part of his program of embellishing the holy cities of Islam. It was restored six more times in the twentieth century and has become a popular icon of Islam, decorating watches and tea towels and replicated in miniature models made of motherof- pearl and plastic. The first great monument of Islamic architecture, it has taken on a new life as the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

EAST ASIAN CULTURE AND ISLAM

Within the field of Islam in East Asia, the major developments and most lasting influences between Islam and the indigenous peoples have taken place in China, where Muslims traders first settled in the early decades of the hijra. This early interest in China as a destiny for Muslim travelers is reflected in the famous hadith, “seek knowledge, even unto China.” Despite centuries of relative isolation from the rest of the Islamic world, the Muslims in most regions of China have managed to sustain a continuous knowledge of the Islamic sciences, Arabic, and Persian. Given extended periods of persecution combined with periods of intense government efforts to legislate adoption of Chinese cultural practices and norms, that Islam should have survived, let alone flourished, is an extraordinary historical phenomenon. Although some scholars have attributed the survival of Muslim communities in China to their ability to adopt Chinese cultural traditions, when asked themselves, Chinese Muslims usually attribute their survival to their strong faith and God’s protection.

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a period of extreme political violence and chaos when Muslims together with other minority groups were persecuted, Muslim communities throughout China actively sought to reclaim their religious identity and revive Islamic education.

In addition to repairing and rebuilding mosques returned to them after the revolution, Muslim communities have also pooled their resources to build new mosques and Islamic schools. These schools are filled with students of all ages, including the elderly, who after decades of government control are anxious to study Islam and Arabic. More recently a growing number of Chinese Muslims are pursing advanced Islamic studies at international Islamic centers of learning. Although there are now Muslims present in virtually every region of China, there have undoubtedly been many communities that were either completely destroyed during government military campaigns, or that simply assimilated to the point of dissolution. One interesting example of a community that came to the brink of complete assimilation, only to be revived for political reasons, was documented by an anthropologist in the early 1980s. In Quanzhou (known as Zaytun in the Arabic sources), a city located along China’s southeast coast, a large clan existed whose members had so assimilated to local customs as to be completely indistinguishable from the local Han Chinese. They took part in the full range of traditional religious practices, many of which had to do with  honoring one’s ancestors. They knew nothing of Islam, ate pork, and drank alcohol. There was one slight difference though: During the annual sacrifices made to one’s ancestors, when preparing food to offer ceremoniously to their ancestors, they would not include pork or alcohol. This tenuous connection to their ancestors (Muslim traders and officials who had first settled in this region in the early years of the hijra) was called upon in 1981 when this extended family sought government recognition as one of the officially recognized minority groups. As they had the genealogical records to prove their descent from Muslims, they were able to change their status from Han Chinese to Hui (Chinese Muslim).

Mosques and Calligraphy

Mosques and the calligraphy within them have also served as an interesting barometer of the waxing and waning of traditional Chinese influences on the development of indigenous Chinese Islamic traditions.

Although no mosques dating back to the pre-Mongol period have survived, it is assumed that mosques during this  period reflected the architecture of the immigrant Muslims who built them, as they were required to live in special districts separate from the general population. By the Ming period in the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, however, there was significant pressure for Muslims to outwardly conform to Chinese traditions. The Huajue mosque in Xian, which dates back to the Ming period and has survived down to the present, is an exquisite example of how Chinese Muslims were able to incorporate traditional Chinese motifs,  decorative arts, and temple architectural styles into the structureand decoration of mosques. In this mosque, as in most others in China, Arabic calligraphy is interspersed with carvings and paintings of traditional Chinese images of flowers, fruit, mythical animals, and Chinese calligraphy. The rooftops are protected by small animal figures along the ridges of roof tiles, and the minarets take the form of pagodas. In addition, the Arabic calligraphy is a highly stylized form that differs from region to region and reflects local calligraphic traditions that have evolved in relative isolation over centuries. However, in recent years, in part as a result from pressure from outside funding sources and the growing number of Chinese Muslims going overseas for the hajj and to study, many communities have torn down these traditional mosques and replaced them with ones believed to be more “authentic.” Over the past twenty years untold numbers of mosques dating back centuries have been destroyed. Nevertheless, in some parts of China in recent years, there has been a growing movement among Chinese Muslims to protect their unique architectural traditions.

Local Celebrations

As there are Muslims communities in every part of China with their own histories and local traditions it would be difficult to generalize about the ways in which Islamic practices have been influenced by other local Chinese traditions. However, by looking at local celebrations of _Id al-Fitr and the Maulid (birthday of the prophet Muhammad) one can gain some sense of the variety of ways in which these interactions have developed. For example, in Yunnan province in southwest China, Muslim communities spread throughout the region. Many are direct descendants of Sayyid _Ajall Shams al-Din, a Muslim from Bukhara, who served as an  official under the Mongol Yuan dynasty and settled in Yunnan at the end of the thirteenth century. Seven centuries later, during the annual celebrations of _Id al-Fitr, after communal prayers at the mosque, Muslims from different areas travel to the site of Sayyid _Ajall’s grave where special prayers are held.

First there are readings from the Qur_an, then the tomb is swept and cleaned (reminiscent of the traditional Chinese Qingming festival held once a year when Chinese go to the graves of their ancestors, sweep and clean the area and then make food offerings), and then the accomplishments of Sayyid _Ajall are retold. In conclusion, a special service is held to honor the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed during the Qing dynasty, and the hundreds killed more recently in this area during the Cultural Revolution.

In another region of Yunnan, a group of Muslim villages spread out over a vast plain have developed there a way of celebrating the birthday of the Prophet, which allows them to  reassert their ties to one another. Every year the Mawlid is celebrated in the fall over a period of two months beginning with the end of the major harvests. Each village is assigned a weekend when it will host all the other villages in a Mawlid celebration. Although the dates clearly are not connected with the Islamic calendar, their tradition allows them to share their bounty with their neighboring Muslim communities and strengthen their networks.

Meanwhile, in northwest China, the decision of when to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday is influenced not by seasonal harvests, but rather by the desire to offer younger Muslims an alternative activity during the widely and elaborately celebrated Chinese New Year. In recent years local Muslim religious leaders in Xian have considered scheduling celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday to coincide with the festivities surrounding the Chinese New Year.

The Role of Women

Another example of how local histories and traditions within the diverse communities of Muslims in China have evolved  over the centuries can be seen in the roles of women in different communities. In central China there is a long tradition of active involvement by women in both Islamic education and religious leadership. Not only is there a long  history of women imams in this region, there is also a tradition of separate women’s mosques. In northwest China, however, women have tended not to play an active leadership role within Muslim communities, and usually they do not pray in the mosques with the men. According to Muslims in other parts of China, these attitudes in the northwest toward women are the result of the Muslims adopting local Chinese views, which are considered quite chauvinistic. In southwest China, however, women play an active role within Muslim communities and are also widely credited with insuring the survival of the Muslim population in the aftermath of a brutal massacre that took place in the 1870s. In most mosques men and women pray side by side with a half curtain dividing the prayer hall. Although over the centuries many Chinese Muslim women adopted the custom of footbinding, historically and down to the present, the Muslim community has not adopted the widespread practice of female infanticide. In conclusion, although maintaining their religious beliefs and practices over the centuries has been a continual challenge, Muslims in China have always been confident of their identities as both Muslims and Chinese. Although some Western scholars have presumed that these identities were somehow inherently antagonistic if not mutually exclusive, the survival of Islam in China belies these assumptions. Islamic and Chinese values have both proven to be sufficiently complementary and dynamic to allow for the flourishing of Islam in China.

Islam in East Asia

Islam has spread to all parts of East Asia, a region that features  some of the world’s major centers of Islamic influence.

Islam in China

With a Muslim population conservatively estimated at twenty million, China today has a larger Muslim population than most of the Arab countries of the Middle East, and yet few scholars have concentrated on this unique community located at the far reaches of the Muslim world. Of China’s fiftyfive officially recognized minority peoples (China’s majority ethnic group is known as Han Chinese), ten are primarily Muslim: the Hui, Uighur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kirghiz, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan, and Tatar. The largest group, the Hui, are spread throughout the entire country, while the other nine live primarily in the northwest.

As a result of the extensive sea trade networks between China and Southwest Asia dating back to Roman times, there have been Muslims in China since shortly after the advent of Islam. Small communities of Muslim traders and merchants survived for centuries in cities along China’s southeast coast, the most famous settlements being Canton and Quanzhou (Zaitun in the Arabic sources). During the first several centuriesthere was limited intermixing between the Muslim traders  and the local Chinese population. It was not until the thirteenth century with the establishment of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1278–1368) that thousands of Muslims from Central and Western Asia were both forcibly moved to China by the Mongols as well as recruited by them to assist in their  governance of their newly acquired territories. Although some of the higher-ranking Muslim officials may have been able to arrange marriages with women from their places of origin, it is generally assumed that most of the soldiers, officials, craftsmen, and farmers who settled in China during this early period married local women. Despite centuries of intermarriage, the Muslims who arrived at this time were able to establish communities that have survived with many of their cultural and religious traditions intact down to this day.

Islam during Ming Dynasty 

During the early part of the Ming period (1368–1644), the emperor Yongle ordered Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan in southwest China, to lead a series of massive navalexpeditions to explore the known world. In all, between 1405 and 1432, seven major expeditions were launched involving hundred of Chinese vessels and thousands of tons of goods and valuables to be traded throughout the southeast Asian  archipelago, the Indian Ocean, and as far as the east coast of Africa. The success of these trading expeditions was no doubt in part due to Zheng He’s religion and his ability to interact with many of the Muslim rulers and merchants encountered along the way. However, shortly after the death of the Yongle emperor, China’s cosmopolitan and international initiatives gave way to a period of conservatism and the redirection of imperial resources toward domestic issues and projects. During this period numerous laws were passed requiring “foreigners” to dress like Chinese, adopt Chinese surnames, speak Chinese, and essentially in appearance become Chinese.

Despite these restrictions and requirements, the Muslims of China continued to actively practice their faith and pass it on to their descendants. By the end of the Ming dynasty there were enough Chinese Muslim intellectuals thoroughly educated in the classical Confucian tradition that several scholars developed a new Islamic literary genre: religious works on Islam written in Chinese that incorporated the vocabulary of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist thought. These texts, known as the Han Kitab, were not apologist treatises written to explain Islam to a non-Muslim Chinese audience, but were rather a reflection of the degree to which the Muslims of China had become completely conversant in intellectual traditions of the society in which they lived. Moreover, as more and more Chinese Muslims lost their fluency in Arabic and Persian, it became clear that in order to insure that future generations of Muslims were able to have a sophisticated understanding of their faith, religious texts had to be written in Chinese.

The linguistic challenges of transliterating Arabic and Persian religious terms and proper names into Chinese also facilitated the blending of Chinese and Islamic principles as Chinese Muslim authors sought to create new Chinese terms to replace Arabic and Persian ones. Several of these terms are striking in their ability to use traditional Chinese characters to reflect fundamental Islamic concepts: God is translated as zhen zhu, or “the true lord”; Islam is qingzhen jiao, or “the pure and true religion”; the five pillars of Islam become the five constants, wu chang; and the prophet Muhammad is known as zhi sheng, or “utmost sage.”

Islam during Qing Dynasty

In 1644, the Qing dynasty was established, marking the beginning of a period of unparalleled growth and expansion, both in terms of territory and population. Travel restrictions  were lifted, and the Muslims of China were once again allowed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and study in the major centers of learning in the Islamic world. During this period several Hui scholars studied abroad and upon their return they started a movement to revitalize Islamic studies by translating the most important Islamic texts into Chinese and thus making them more accessible.

Despite the opportunities for travel and study that arose during this period, the Qing dynasty also represented a period of unparalleled violence against the Muslims of China. As reform movements led by Muslims who had studied overseas spread, conflicts arose between different communities.

In several instances the government intervened, supporting one group against another, leading to an exacerbation of the conflict, outbreaks of mass violence and the eventual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and several rebellions.

In southwest China, it was the growing number of Han Chinese migrants moving into areas where Muslims had lived for centuries that led to violent conflicts. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China experienced a massive population explosion resulting in millions of Han Chinese moving into the frontier regions. As more immigrants moved into Yunnan province along the southwest frontier, there were increasing clashes with the Hui who had settled there in the thirteenth century and whose population is estimated to have been one million. In a series of disputes between newly arrived Han migrants and Hui who had lived there for centuries, local Han Chinese officials (who themselves were not local residents), repeatedly decided to support their fellow Han Chinese against the local residents. Fighting escalated and eventually a Chinese Muslim leader led a rebellion and in 1856 established an independent Islamic state centered in Dali, in northwest Yunnan. The state survived for almost sixteen years, and the Muslims worked closely together with other indigenous peoples. Eventually, however, the Chinese emperor ordered his troops to concentrate their efforts on destroying it. The massacres that ensued wiped out the majority of Muslims in Yunnan. Some fled to nearby Thailand, and their descendants still live there, while others fled to Burma or neighboring provinces. Estimates of those killed range from 60 to 85 percent, and more than a century later, their population has still not recovered its original number. Another consequence of the rebellion was a series of government regulations severely restricting the lives of Muslims.

In the aftermath of the rebellions, the first priority of the survivors was to pool their resources, rebuild their mosques, and open Islamic schools. Having lost most of their material possessions, they were clearly determined not to lose their religious legacy. This period saw renewed contact with other centers of learning in the Muslim world and the establishment of schools that concentrated equally on secular and religious education.

The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 was followed by a period of unrest and warlordism. After the rise of the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party, a civil war ensued, in which both parties sought the support of the nation’s largest minority groups with promises of religious freedom and limited self-government. Many of the Muslims chose to support the Communists, and in the initial period of the People’s Republic of China, the Muslim minority peoples enjoyed a period of religious freedom. However, during subsequent political campaigns, culminating with the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the Muslims of China found their religion outlawed; their religious leaders persecuted, imprisoned, and even killed; and their mosques defiled, if not destroyed. During this period all worship and religious education were forbidden, and even simple common utterances such as insha_allah (God willing), or al-hamdulillah (thanks be to God) could cause Muslims to be punished. Despite the danger, Muslims in many parts of China continued their religious studies in secret.

In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the Muslims of China lost no time in rebuilding their devastated communities. Throughout China, Muslims began slowly to restore their religious institutions and revive their religious activities. Their first priority was to rebuild their damaged mosques thereby allowing communities to create a space in which they could once again pray together, but also so that the mosques could reassert their role as centers of Islamic learning. Over the next two decades mosques throughout most of the country organized classes for not only children and young adults, but also for older people who had not had the opportunity to study their religion. Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to the 1990s Islamic colleges have also been established throughout most of China. Within China, when asked how to explain the recent resurgence in Islamic education, community members cite two main reasons: a desire to rebuild that which was taken from them, and the hope that a strong religious faith would help protect Muslim communities from the myriad of social problems presently besetting China in this day and age of rapid economic development. Chinese Muslims studying overseas reiterate the need to equip themselves and their communities for their future in a state that seems to be ideologically adrift.

Islam in Korea

In some respects, the history of Islam in Korea mirrors that of China, but more as a faint reflection than as a comparable historical phenomenon. Little archaeological evidence has survived but it is commonly believed that some of the Muslim sea traders who regularly traveled to the southeast coast of China also made it as far as Korea. Arabic geographers note the existence of al-Sila, a country beyond China, and it is believed that this name is derived from the Korean dynasty Silla (668–935). Although there is some archaeological evidence of goods from Western and Central Asia being found in ancient tombs in Korea, it is not known if they were brought there directly or acquired by Korean traders in China, which had much more extensive sea and land trading routes with the rest of Asia. During the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1278–1368), Korea also fell under the control of the Mongol empire. As they had a policy of recruiting tens of thousands of men from Central and Western Asia to help them in administering their newly acquired territory, it is probable that some of these Muslims ended up serving in Korea, and that many of them settled there. However, it appears that over the centuries those who settled completely assimilated to Korean society and culture.

It was not until the modern period that Muslims returned to Korea. Beginning in the 1920s, thousands of Muslims escaping the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia fled overland through Korea, and many settled there before being forced to leave in the 1940s. The next group of Muslims who arrived were Turkish soldiers sent under United Nations auspices during the Korean War. Several soldiers settled in Korea, establishing the first mosques in Seoul, Pusan, and Taegu. Today the fledging community of Muslims living in Korea is made up of some converts, but primarily recent Muslim immigrants from South Asia.

Islam in Japan

Although Muslim traders had sailed the seas off the coast of Japan for centuries, there is no known evidence of any Muslim communities settling in Japan until the early part of the twentieth century, when of the thousands of Muslims who fled Russia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, several hundred were granted asylum in Japan. Many were settled in Kobe and Tokyo, which became the sites of Japan’s first two mosques, built in 1935 and 1938. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the Japanese military government became increasingly interested in encouraging scholarship on Islam as part of its policy to portray itself as a protector of Islam to the Muslim communities of China and southeast Asia. As Japan invaded neighboring countries under its “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” campaign, it justified its actions in part as a plan to safeguard all of Asia from Western imperialism, but also to protect Islam.

At present there are an estimated 100,000 Muslims living in Japan, the overwhelming majority of which are immigrants from South Asia and Iran; only a few thousand are Japanese who have converted. Scholarly research on the Middle East and Islam has developed tremendously since the early 1980s, with several research centers at major universities around the country.

Islam in Balkans

Since the late fourteenth century there have been Muslim communities in southeast Europe. For most of their history they were an important and integral part of the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when ethnic-based nation-states came to power in the Balkans, most of these Muslim communities lost prominence and some disappeared. Recent attempts by certain nationalist forces to erase the history of Muslims in the Balkans have led to new interest in these Muslim peoples of Europe.

Expansion of Islam into Southeast Europe

Ottoman armies and Sufi missionaries brought Islam into southeast Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Beginning with the conquest of eastern Thrace in the mid-1300s, the Ottomans soon took Macedonia. They fought Serbian prince Lazar and his Balkan army at Kosovo in 1389, and defeated Bulgaria soon after in 1393. Along with military conquest, the Ottomans brought Muslim settlers from Anatolia to occupy main march routes and river valleys. In 1456 Athens fell to the Ottomans, followed by Bosnian and Albanian lands, and finally Belgrade in 1521.

There was significant conversion of local people to Islam, principally among Bosnians and Albanians, but also across the Balkans. This conversion was gradual, continuing throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and even later among some Albanians. Except for the devsirme, the forced recruitment of Christian boys for special military and governmental service, this conversion to Islam was voluntary. The Balkans had been a region of contention between western, or Latin, and eastern, or Byzantine, forms of Christianity. In Bosnia and Albania neither form of Christianity had been well preached or well established. In contrast the Sufi missionaries brought a tolerant form of religion and the Ottoman state a system of order based broadly on religious affiliation. The advantages of being Muslim were economic and cultural and included exemption from the head tax, privileges in land owning, and opportunities in state administration and the military, as well as links with the vibrant culture and society of Istanbul.

History and Main Developments

During the Ottoman period, lasting from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, the history of Muslims in the Balkans largely parallels the history of the empire itself. When the Ottoman Empire was at its height in the sixteenth century, the Balkan cities of Edirne, Sarajevo, and Salonika (the latter with a significant Jewish population) were rich cosmopolitan centers of trade and learning, with impressive mosques, madrasas (schools), and bridges. Three of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent’s grand wazirs—Ibrahim the Greek, Rustem the Bulgarian, and Mehmet Sokullu, a Slav from  Bosnia—were converted Muslims from the Balkans. At the end of the seventeenth century, Albanian Muslims from the Koprulu family (Mehmet, Ahmed, Mustafa, and Husein) served as grand wazirs and provided well-needed stability in a century of decline. For, as western European countries gained power in trade routes and military prowess, formerly the purview of the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire weakened economically and the Austro-Hungarian Empire took territories from the Ottomans, including Hungary, part of presentday Croatia (1699), and later Bosnia (1878). The position of Muslim communities gradually declined as well until the breakup of Ottoman power in the Balkans left many of them vulnerable. The following period in the history of Muslims in the Balkans, the time of growth of nation-states, began variably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with southern Greece becoming independent in 1821, followed by Serbia (whose northern part had been autonomous since 1815), Romania, and Bulgaria, all in 1878, and later by Albania in 1912.

During these times there were forced migrations, massacres, and expulsions of Muslims, especially from the eastern Balkans, for the new nation-states were largely conceived as ethnic units tied to language and a form of Christianity. In contrast, many Balkan Muslims, who did not fit in the new nation-state design, were seen as allied with the Ottomans who had been increasingly ineffective and oppressive in the last century of their rule. Thousands of Muslims were forced to flee to Turkey. This would continue throughout the twentieth century with Balkan Muslims from Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bulgaria emigrating to the safety of Muslim Turkey. The exceptions to this were Muslims from the western Balkan lands of Albania and Bosnia. Most stayed in the Balkans throughout these times, although some Bosnian Muslims did emigrate in and after 1878.

The large part of Bosnian Muslims, themselves Slavs, continued as landowners and free peasants under Austria-Hungary’s rule, and remained later as part of Yugoslavia. As for the Albanian Muslims, some led the Albanian nationalist movement for independence; overall, Muslims made up 70 percent of the new independent state of Albania. There were also smaller communities of Slavic Muslims, Albanian Muslims, and Roma Muslims who stayed where they were and thus became minorities in different Balkan lands. Nationalism also came to the Turks. It is interesting that an Albanian Muslim from Struga in present-day Macedonia, Ibrahim Temo, was one of the four founding members of what became known as the Young Turks. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, was a Balkan Muslim from Salonika.

Later in the twentieth century, the Muslims in Bosnia came to be seen as an ethnic group as well. Before World War II they were considered a religious community. But after the war, with the secularization of the Communist Party and growing importance of “nationalities,” they officially became an ethnic group under the label “Muslim” in 1968. Just as “Jew” in the United States can have both ethnic and religious meaning, so “Muslim” had both meanings in Yugoslavia. With the warfare in the 1990s, this ambiguity became a problem so that today the ethnic term for Bosnian Muslim is “Bosnjak.”

Characteristics and Cultural Achievements

The Muslims of the Balkans are largely Sunni of the Hannafi school. There are also Sufi communities with more inclusive theologies, including the Sunni Naqshibandi, as well as the Halveti, Mevlevi, Qadiri, Rifa_i, Sa_di, Melami, and Bektashi orders. Of these, the Bektashi rose to special prominence in Albania in the twentieth century, only to become a target of Communist Enver Hoxha’s regime (1944–1991). Also in Bulgaria there are communities of Ali_ids. As in other parts of the Ottoman world, religious poetry known as merthiyes and nefes stems from these orders, and mevluds and ghazels from the larger Muslim communities.

Better known to the broader world than religious poetry is the remarkable architecture of Muslims in the Balkans. This includes the older sections of cities with their bazaars, mosques, fountains, hamams (baths), türbes (mausolea), madrasas (schools), and old Ottoman homes. One of the masterpieces of Ottoman architecture is the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1575) by Sinan. Also well known were other remarkable mosques like the Ferhat Pasha Mosque of Banja Luka (1579), the Aladza Mosque in Foca (1550), and the Gazi Husrevbegova Mosque of Sarajevo (1530), all in Bosnia, as well as the famous Ottoman bridge at Mostar in Herzegovina (1566).

Contemporary Situation and Concerns

The war in Bosnia (1992–1995) between Serbian and Croatian nationalists and Muslim Bosnians led to the destruction of the famous mosques of Banja Luka and Foca and the severe damaging of the Gazi Husrevbegova Mosque in Sarajevo, as well as the destruction of many more Islamic sites throughout Bosnia. The famous bridge at Mostar, and the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, where important historical documents of the Ottoman period were housed, were both deliberately targeted and destroyed. The war in Kosovo (1999) led to the destruction of many Islamic monuments and documents there as well. One of the purposes of these civil wars was to erase the Islamic heritage of these regions of the Balkans. This is not new. There were once many mosques in Belgrade that were destroyed in the late nineteenth century. Such destruction was in marked contrast to the usual Ottoman policy that had promoted tolerance for Christian and Jewish institutions.

Nevertheless there remain Muslim communities in the  Balkans. The greatest number of Muslims are still in Bosnia, although many were killed in the war and many more became refugees. The next largest population of Muslims in the Balkans is in Albania, but many were secularized during the long communist rule. Albanians in Kosovo are also mainly Muslim. But of all the Albanian Muslims in the Balkans, those in western Macedonia are among the most observant. They form at least one-third of the population, but have been kept out of most state jobs and universities. Bulgaria has three different Muslim populations: Turks, who are the largest group; Pomaks, who are Slavs living in the southern mountains; and Roma, who are largely Muslim. During communist rule in Bulgaria, there were at times direct policies to “bulgarize” the Muslim peoples by forcing them to change their Muslim names to Slavic Bulgarian ones, and there were prohibitions against circumcision. In the 1980s over 300,000 Turks from Bulgaria went to Turkey rather than submit to these policies. Since then, some have returned and the policies in post-communist Bulgaria are not as restrictive. Romania has two small Muslim communities. In Greece, most Muslims left or were part of the population transfers in the early 1920s. There remain, however, the Turkish Muslims of western Thrace in northeast Greece.

An irony of the fighting in Bosnia at the end of the twentieth century is that the attempt of Serbian and Croatian nationalists to eradicate the Islamic history and the Muslim people of the region has resulted in a reinvigoration of Islamic practices there. The Bosnians, who were once among the most secularized of Muslims, now include those who are more observant. But the long tradition of tolerance and mutual respect of Balkan Islam, for which places like Sarajevo were justly famous, has been severely damaged.

Abbasid Caliphate 

The early Islamic empire fell to Abbasid control with the overthrow and decimation of the Umayyad house in 750 C.E. The “Abbasid revolution” followed an extended period of clandestine organization centered in the eastern province of Khurasan. Modern scholarship has devoted considerable attention to the formation and execution of the anti-Umayyad movement. Opposition to Umayyad rule appears easier to explain, however, than the movement itself. Factors contributing to the collapse of the Umayyads included the deleterious effects of several rounds of civil war; divisions within the Syrian-based armed forces; persistent problems of legitimacy fueled by charges of fiscal corruption and impious conduct on the part of the caliphs and their kin; serious military setbacks along the frontiers of North Africa, Armenia, and Central Asia; and a fierce ideological challenge posed by leading _Alids and their Shi_ite partisans that gave rise to repeated uprisings, particularly late in the Umayyad period.

Abbasid success against the Umayyads was due in part to support emanating from Shi_ite quarters as well as, it appears, the broader populace of mawali (non-Arab Muslim “clients”).

The leadership of Abbasid partisans, key among them Abu Muslim (d. 775), and the strength of the Khurasan-based forces under his command, tipped the balance in favor of the Abbasid movement. As Elton Daniel has made clear, alongside other historians, modern scholarship remains divided on at least two questions.

The first question concerns the point at which the Abbasid family assumed leadership of the anti-Umayyad movement. Evidence indicates that the movement remained clandestine until a very late point and that its propaganda was kept deliberately vague. In an attempt to appeal to _Alid sympathies, the slogans of the movement spoke only of restoring “a chosen one” (from the Prophet’s family) rather than a member of the Abbasid house specifically. The Abbasids only showed their hand at a very late point; assuming control of  the caliphate, the dynasty alienated the _Alids and their Shi_ite backers. The second question relates to the composition of the movement itself. One view is that the movement, however broad-based it later became, only succeeded because of the participation of Arab tribesmen that had settled in Khurasan during the early Islamic conquest period. In response to the “Arabist,” and hence largely ethnic, argument, other scholars have sought an explanation based variously in the socioeconomic conditions of eighth-century Khurasan and the religiopolitical appeal of Shi_ite ideals for Arab and non-Arab Muslims alike.

Beginning of Abbasid Khilafate

The reigns of the first two Abbasid caliphs, Abu ’l-Abbas al-Saffah (r. 750–754) and al-Mansur (r. 754–775), began with a period of consolidation that led to the elimination of Abu Muslim among other leaders of the revolutionary movement.

A period of sustained prosperity, if continued political unrest, ensued. Al-Mansur established Baghdad in the 760s and is properly viewed as the real founder of the dynasty. At its height, under al-Mansur’s immediate successors, al-Mahdi (r. 775–785), al-Hadi (r. 785–786) and, most significantly, Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), the Abbasid empire stretched from the central Maghrib across the Middle East and southern Anatolia into Transoxiana. Sustained civil war, initially a conflict between the sons of al-Rashid, Muhammad al-Amin (r. 809–813) and _Abdallah al-Ma_mun (r. 813–833), followed by the effort at consolidation by al-Ma_mun over Baghdad and its hinterland, initiated the gradual dissolution of the empire. Despite the skilled leadership of later caliphs, by the end of the ninth century, local dynasties and semiautonomous governing families had come to the fore in Egypt, Khurasan, Spain, and the Maghrib.

Fragmentation of the imperial domain and a dissolution of dynastic legitimacy set in by the first quarter of the tenth century with an eclipse of Abbasid authority at the hands of bureaucratic families and condottiere. By the 940s, Syria, Iraq, Fars, and western Iran were divided into principalities under Hamdanid or Buyid (Buwayhid) control; members of both families had served in the Abbasid military before asserting control over regions of the empire. Egypt, by the 970s, fell to the control of the Fatimids, an Isma_ili Shi_ite dynasty created in the central Maghrib earlier in the tenth century; the dynasty controlled Egypt, and, for extended periods, Syria and the Hijaz, into the second half of the twelfth century. Buyid rule gave way in the mid-eleventh century to a Sunni Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, whose reign was largely defined by rivalry with the Fatimids, conflict against the Crusader states, and the onset of an extended period of Turkish domination of Near Eastern political life.

From the Buyid period on, the Abbasids themselves usually wielded little more than the trappings of authority; in Iraq, Abbasid history came to an end with the Mongol invasion in 1258. A branch of the family retained a wholly symbolic role under the Mamluks in Egypt until the Ottoman invasion of 1517 that brought an end to Abbasid claims upon the caliphate.

Politics and Administration

Taking their lead from the Umayyads, the early Abbasids worked quickly to fashion a highly centralized state. Like their predecessors, the Abbasids drew inspiration from  Sassanian, Byzantine, and more deeply rooted patterns of Near Eastern imperial statecraft. For example, the caliphs relied upon elaborate systems of monarchical ritual and symbolism, such as the use of screens used to shield them during open sessions of the court. More dramatic still was the plan of Baghdad: The city, known as the Round City, was originally built around a massive circular core containing the caliphal residence, mosque, treasuries, and barracks. Historians understand the plan in terms of the assertion, through symbolic means, of the coming of a new imperial age. No less than earlier dynasties, the first Abbasids thus devoted themselves to massive building programs. In Baghdad, Samarra, and elsewhere, extensive palace complexes emerged alongside congregational mosques, extensive markets, and an impressive infrastructure of roads, canals, way-stations, and the like.

It appears as well that the early Abbasids sought to imbue their office with religious as well as political meaning. Commitment to holy war (jihad), a presiding role in the hajj, patronage of religious scholars: All were efforts to perpetuate the caliph’s moral leadership. The claim found little sustained support within the religious community. For the ulema, the traditions of theocratic monarchy contradicted the model of leadership crafted by the prophet Muhammad and the first generation of caliphs. The problem of delineating lines of authority was gradually resolved by the middle Abbasid period as the scholars asserted a near-monopoly over legal and social authority. No less significant a source of challenge to Abbasid legitimation were the sectarian movements of the Kharijites and the various Shi_ite tendencies, all of whom viewed Abbasid authority as illegitimate. Early Kharijite rebellions under the first Abbasid caliphs were suppressed at a moderate expense to the state. Far more costly, in ideological and political terms, was the challenge of their Shi_ite detractors. If the emergent Twelver Shi_ite tendency in Iraq and elsewhere remained relatively quiescent, by the early tenth century, a prominent Isma_ili movement had won support from local forces in the central Maghrib (modern-day Tunisia) and laid the foundation for the Fatimid state.

The considerable wealth of the early Abbasid empire drew predictably on agricultural production and commerce. Al- Mansur’s decision to build a new capital beside the two major Iraqi rivers and in the midst of the extensively farmed areas of central and southern Iraq, had much to do with assuring control over both sources of income. To assure a reliable flow  of money and goods, the early Abbasids continued late Umayyad efforts to systematize tax collection. These efforts, initially successful, ultimately came up short as the health of the Abbasid economy fell victim to the civil war that followed the death of al-Rashid in the early ninth century and, some decades later, the turmoil sparked by the assassination of al- Mutawakkil (r. 847–861). By the early tenth century, the Iraqi agrarian system was in sharp decline. Commercial activity flourished in the early to mid-Abbasid periods, fueled by rapid urbanization in the Near East and the related rise in investment opportunities, urban surplus wealth, and the spread of new products, chief among them paper, cotton, and sugar. Merchant networks would play a key part in the dissemination of Islam into Central Asia, the Pacific Basin, and Saharan Africa from the ninth century on.

To administer their empire, the Abbasids relied on skilled bureaucrats, many of Persian or Christian origins. These officials (kuttab) oversaw a growth in the Abbasid bureaucracy to a size and complexity unknown under the Umayyads. The offices (diwans) of the Abbasid administration included the chancery, treasury, police, and intelligence-gathering services, and a special court of appeals (mazalim) presided over by the caliph. Control of the treasury and access to the imperial family allowed key families to build extensive networks of influence as exemplified by the eastern Iranian (and originally Buddhist) Barmakid family under al-Rashid. In 803, al-Rashid, having long tolerated Barmakid authority, finally turned against the family. By the first half of the tenth century, however, his successors, such as al-Muqtadir (r. 908–932), proved incapable of resisting pressures exerted by their top bureaucrats. High-level bureaucrats retained no less crucial a role under the Buyids and Seljuks; prominent civilian officials played a similar part in Egypt, particularly late in the Fatimid period.

To defend its borders and assure political calm, the Abbasids, like the Umayyads, relied upon a semiprofessional army largely supplied and paid by the state. The mainstay of the earliest Abbasid armies were the Khurasani troops that had fought to bring the dynasty to power. A number of these regiments were settled in Baghdad by al-Mansur and his successors, and naturally viewed themselves as integral to the fortunes of the new state. The civil war that brought al- Ma_mun to power in the early ninth century witnessed the defeat of these regiments at the hands of a new generation of eastern troops recruited by the new caliph bolstered by a new-style regiment of Turkish slave troops led by his brother, and successor, Abu Ishaq al-Mu_tasim (r. 833–842). In good part to house these new forces, al-Mu_tasim founded a garrison center in Samarra, north of Baghdad; his successors would administer the empire from Samarra for the next halfcentury. The practice of using slave regiments, many of which were drawn from Turkic peoples of Central Asia, would be emulated by later Near Eastern dynasties. The heads of the Samarran Turkish regiments, however, would rely on their troops, and close ties to the caliphate, to interfere in caliphal decision-making; the result was a period of violence and instability in Samarra that sapped the resources of the caliphate and set the stage for the humiliations of the tenth century.

Culture and Society

A revival of Near Eastern urban culture, rooted in Umayyad history, was a hallmark of the Abbasid period. The early Arab garrison centers, among them Basra, Kufa, Fustat, and Qayrawan, were now functioning towns while, under Umayyad and then Abbasid rule, Damascus and other pre-Islamic centers witnessed rapid population growth and cultural development. Constructed expressly as an imperial center, and occupied probably by the late 760s, Baghdad quickly emerged, however, as the nexus of early Islamic culture and scholarship.

(Samarra, the imperial administrative seat for much of the ninth century, never replaced Baghdad in this sense.) Much of this activity was directly tied to the patronage of the imperial state and networks of elite urban families. Historians are divided, however, over the question of whether to credit the  support of the caliphs and elite urban society with the complex translation movement that rendered, in Arabic, nearly the entire corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical work over a period of roughly two hundred years beginning under al-Mansur in the later eighth century. Equally significant was urban literary production. The list of writers, poets, musicians, and cognoscenti that flourished in the Iraqi urban milieu included such luminaries as the grammarian Sibawayh (d. 793); the poet Abu Nuwas (d. 810); the essayist, linguist, and theologian al-Jahiz (d. 868); and the tenth-century polymath Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 1023).

Urban patronage and the demands created by steady conversion to Islam throughout the empire explain the formation of a community of sophisticated and increasingly selfconfident religious scholars (ulema). Their efforts yielded seminal contributions to Qur_anic exegesis, hadith scholarship, and Islamic law. In the Sunni regions, four major schools of legal interpretation emerged: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi_i, and Hanbali. The work of the great exegete and historian Abu Ja_far al-Tabari (d. 923) exemplifies both the remarkable scholarly achievements of the ulema and their ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the caliphal state. Ulema served the empire in their capacity as judges, market inspectors, and the like; their role in imperial administration was crucial. As noted earlier, however, they were loath to provide yet further backing to the caliphate. The trajectory to socioreligious prominence of the scholars occurred as the fortunes of the Abbasid state sharply declined.