According to Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081296618X/qid=1133461877/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8357406-3872927?n=507846&s=books&v=glance), Mohammed and his first generation of followers did not think of Islam the way St. Paul thought of Christianity – as The One True Faith to which all the world must ultimately be converted. Rather, they thought of it as the Arabs’ version of Judaism. Arabs of Mohammed’s time believed (and, for all I know to the contrary, Arabs today still believe) that they were the lineal, biological descendants of Abraham, through his elder, bastard son, Ishmael – just as the Jews were descendants of Abraham through his younger, legitimate son, Isaac. In Mohammed’s view, this meant that the Arabs also partook in Abraham’s personal/tribal covenant with God – in fact, Mohammed identified Allah, the chief god of the Arab pantheon, as the exact same being as El Shaddai/Yahweh; all he had to do was get rid of the others, the lesser and false gods, who shared the temples with Allah, and let Allah reign alone. Therefore, Judaism was the proper mode of worship for the Jews, the children of Isaac; and Islam was the proper mode of worship for the Arabs, the children of Ishmael. As for how/whom other nations should worship, that was their problem.
Even after Mohammed’s death, when Arabs poured out of Arabia and conquered a multinational empire for the first time in their history, they made no attempt to spread their new religion. The Caliphate, at first, was a conventional empire, with a master race/nation ruling and taxing conquered subject peoples – and the infidels, dhimmis, were not encouraged to convert to Islam, nor even to associate with their Arab overlords, who lived apart in special military settlements to keep them pure. This changed gradually, because many infidels did convert, in order to become exempt from paying taxes/tribute to the Caliphate; and gradually Islam evolved into a universalist religion, open to anybody, and sending out missionaries far beyond the Caliphate’s range of political control; but at the beginning, it was not so.
All that I know about this subject, I learned from Anthony Nutting’s history book The Arabs, which I highly recommend as a survey of Arab history. The Arab peninsula, during Mohammed’s life, was more or less limited ot the ethnic group known as “Arabs”. Caravans from both Africa and Asia moved across the peninsula and there may have been small settlements of foreigners along the sea coast, but the desert interior was inhabited only by nomadic Arab tribes.
The early Muslims during Mohammed’s lifetime believed that all the Arab tribes should be united under the rule of the Prophet. This was basically achieved during his lifetime. After his death, rebellions occured in parts of Arabia, and were defeated by Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s father-in-law. Once they began the invasion of Iraq and Syria, however, the Muslims were not interested in total conversion of the native populations to Islam. They were content merely to become the dominant class. They held all positions of political and military authority. Other religions in the conquered regions were allowed to operate openly.
Not quite. Here’s a rough outline of their beliefs:
God had made revelations to the people of the world a number of times through a number of prophets. The Jews and the Christians, through prophets such as Moses and Jesus, had received God’s message. However, the Jews and the Christians were not quite following God’s message. The Christians, for example, had the incorrect idea that Jesus was the son of God.
Therefore, God picked a guy, Muhammad, and told him the exact message, and how not to get it wrong this time. This message is reprinted, word-for-word, in the Qur’an. God’s message lays out how he truly wants people to behave, and devotes a fair amount of time to refuting the mistakes of the Jews and Christians, and related groups such as the Sabaeans. I think the Zoroastrians get a bit of advice too. As such, it was written as a corrective for all those who believed in God, no matter how ‘misguided’ they were with all that Jesus stuff. It is explicitly the one true faith and as such applies to everyone, but Jews and Christians should receive some degree of tolerance because their beliefs are fairly close to the mark.
That’s the theology, the practice was quite different and dictated, as has been noted, by a lot of outside factors. Admission to Islam, in a way, was similar to the Roman idea of the franchise. In terms of citizens’ rights, if you were a Muslim, you got certain rights to participate in government, certain tax breaks, and certain additional obligations like a religious tax and military service if required of you. This represented a pretty hefty enticement to non-Muslims, and there were many converts. By only a couple of generations after Muhammad, there was dramatic particpation in the Islamic empires by former Roman / Byzantine citizens / subjects, as well as Persians and many others.
Yes, with equivocations. One possible equivocation - it is attested ( but not conclusively proven ) that Muhammed sent letters to a number of leading rulers, including the Sassanian shah Khusrau II and the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, requesting that they convert. So Muhammed himself may have been a universalist, even if many/most of his followers ultimately were not.
Another bigger one - the Qur’an itself comes off as quite universal. In terms of action the argument that Muhammed regarded Judaism as the proper religion for the Jews founders a bit over Muhammed’s aggressive ( and largely failed ) attempt to convert them in Medina ( it might be argued these were “Arab Jews”, but then you get into very murky territory ).
However in general Armstrong is correct - in the very earliest generations Islam functioned largely as an ethnic faith and the universalist argument only really won out definitively in 749, well over one hundred years after Muhammed’s death ( but it had been growing in strength for some time - certainly at least Umar II among the Umayyad Caliphs was an explicit universalist ).