Chapter 9 Reading Guide 2

Chapter 9 Reading Guide
Due, Monday December 2
Define the following terms:
Caliphate Quran Umma Pillars of Islam Hijra Sharia Ulama Sufism Sikhism Madrassas Kaaba
Answer the following questions in full sentences:
1. In what ways did the early history of Islam reflect its Arabian origins?
2. How was Arabia transformed by the rise of Islam?
3. Why were Arabs able to construct such a huge empire so quickly?
4. What accounts for the widespread conversion to Islam?
5. What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam?
6. In what ways were Sufi Muslims critical of mainstream Islam?
7. How did the rise of Islam change the lives of women?
8. What similarities and differences can you identify in the spread of Islam to India, Anatolia, West Africa, and Spain?
9. In what ways was Anatolia changed by its incorporation into the Islamic world?
10. (read portrait) What significance did Mansa Musa likely attach to his pilgrimage? How might Egyptians, Arabians, and Europeans have viewed it?
11. What makes it possible to speak of the Islamic world as a distinct and coherent civilization?
12. In what ways was the world of Islam a “cosmopolitan” civilization?
Considering the whole chapter, answer the following:
13. How might you account for the immense religious and political/military success of Islam in its early centuries?
14. “Islam was simultaneously a single world of shared meaning and interaction and a series of separate, distinct, and conflicting communities.” What evidence could you provide to support both sides of this argument?
15. What changes did Islamic expansion generate in those societies that encountered it, and how was Islam itself transformed by those encounters?
Extra Credit:
16. Looking Back: What distinguished the early centuries of Islamic history from a similar phase in the history of Christianity and Buddhism?