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National Geographic : 2002 Jan
Contents
Muhammad to declare his new faith among the people of his region-no small task, given the vicious tribal warfare and idol worship rampant in seventh-century Mecca, much of it focused on the Kaaba. This cube-shaped shrine was used for pagan rituals to honor a pantheon of deities. Muhammad and his followers were ridiculed and violently attacked for their belief in a single, unseen God. After a decade of persecution Muhammad and his followers migrated to Medina, a city some 200 miles from Mecca, where the Proph et won more converts and eventually came to govern the town. After several years he and a small army of the faithful returned to Mecca, took the city, destroyed the idols of the Kaaba, and rededicated it to the God of Abraham. From that time to this, pilgrims have revered the Kaaba as the holiest shrine in Islam, reen acting the Prophet's journey to Mecca in the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, which draws as many as 2.5 million Muslims from all over the world to circle the Kaaba in the footsteps of Abraham and Muhammad. One of the Five Pillars of Islam (along with fasting in the holy month of Ramadan, prayer, charity, and profession of faith), the hajj is required of all who can manage it at least once in a lifetime. "I am now a hajji!" beamed Hamoudi bin Nweijah al- PAKISTAN Bedoul, a Bedouin man of middle age living in the rock- Islam's artistic strewn deserts southeast of woman revere the Dead Sea. His reaction die East, Punj was typical of Muslims re turning from the hajj for the first time. "It was me and my mother, and a million people just like us. We took a bus for a week, all the way to Mecca. My mother cried the whole way back." By the time the Prophet died in A.D. 632, Islam was established throughout the Arabian Peninsula, bringing peace and unity to the tribes for the first time in memory. Within a century of his death the armies of Islam, empow ered by faith, had conquered a vast swath of territory stretching from India to the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal, including North Africa and the Middle East. This Islamic world built on the intellectual achievements of the Roman and Persian cul tures it usurped, sponsoring an explosion of learning unparalleled until the Renaissance. According to historian Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, Islam's unsung heroes included its translators, who preserved the classics of the ancient world in "epoch making" Arabic versions of Greek texts on "mathematics and astronomy, physics and chemistry, medicine and pharmacology, geog raphy and agronomy, and a wide range of other subjects including, notably, philosophy" At a time when Europe was languishing in the early Middle Ages, Muslim scholars and thinkers were giving the world a great center of Islamic learning (Al-Azhar in Cairo) and refining everything from architecture to the use of numbers. At the same time, seagoing Muslim traders were spreading the faith to southern Asia, China, and the east coast of Africa. Flourishing by the end of the first millen nium, the realm of Islam was tested as western Europe, spurred by its contact with the Islamic Near East, awoke and lashed out, launching a series of armed Crusades to wrest the Holy icglory reflects from the 1494 tomb of Bibi Jawindi, a holy id by Muslims in the Punjab. Like North Africa and the Mid jab fell to Islamic armies after Muhammad's death in 632. EDKASHI NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JANUARY 2002
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