The explanation that has been given in the West to this phenomenon has been, in most of the cases and with few exceptions, of a huge simplicity: Islam is a religion of violent nature that allows its followers to impose their beliefs by the force of the arms. Therefore, military conquest and coercion have been, since this point of view, the key factors that explain the rapid expansion of Islam. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
However, if Islam was simply reduced to an Empire imposed through violence and military power, it would not have been able to become the way of life for many millions of humans. Other empires were built in less time and were more extensive, but they do not occupy such a central position in history. The Nazi regime, for example, conquered by the force most of Europe and the Soviet Union in less than three years. However, its terrible ideology was not able to survive. Thus, a plurality of factors beyond the alleged violent and intolerant nature of Islamic ideology should be accepted to reasonably explain the tremendous success of Islam as a religion and a whole living system currently professed by one fourth of the humanity. - - - - - - - - - -
In this essay we will outline the factors that, from a sociological and historical point of view, determined the rise and expansion of Islamic ideology, without analyzing factors of psychological and spiritual nature, which certainly are important but are beyond the scope of this study. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It would be wrong to think that the Arabian Peninsula was an isolated territory from the rest of the world in pre-Islamic times. It is true that large desert areas separated it from the most fertile areas in West Asia, but apart from these deserts there were no other natural boundaries between the Arabian Peninsula and Syria and Palestine to the North, and Mesopotamia to the East. Owners of this desert, the Arab tribes were able to reach these richer regions easily. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
By the seventh century the Arab tribes joined together under the figure of Muhammad and the new Muslim faith. But did this new society emerging from the new religious order have the ability to undertake a massive military conquest? Some factors show us that this is quite unlikely. Just regarding the population factor, we can see that the entire population of the Arabian Peninsula -a sparsely populated desert- only reached a small fraction of the population contained in the Byzantine or Sassanid Empires, where natural spaces with much better conditions to facilitate human settlement existed. The numerical disproportion between the armies of the two empires, on the one hand, and Muslims, on the other, makes a military victory being impossible by the latter, unless we gave credit to the assertion of the miracle of the Arab conquest.
So, what factors led to the spread of Islam? A number of conditions should have existed in order for the masses living in the Hindustan, in Asia Minor, in Central Asia, in the Fertile Crescent or in North Africa, to abandon their ancestral beliefs and adhere to the new faith. To understand the spread of Islam is necessary to compare this movement of ideas with similar historical processes produced in the past in similar geographical framework. Imperial Rome, for example, had an effective army and did not hesitate to employ it when necessary, but at the same time that army was carrying civilizing values successfully transmitted into much of the territories under his control. More recently, the United States has built its empire from military conquest of their territory at the expense of the Native Americans or the Mexicans, but much of the so-called American way of life has not been imposed militarily to the rest of the world.
Thus, we see how Islam continued its expansion by the plains of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim in the thirteenth century, when there was not even the shadow of Muslim military superiority anymore, and the Arab Abbasid dynasty was in full decline. Even the Mongols, who invaded and devastated much of the Muslim territories located in Asia, came to accept Islam and founded a great Muslim empire in India. Neither the Islam was introduced by the force in China, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where it was spread mainly through the Sufi orders and traders. - - - - - - - - - -
Although it would be naive to ignore the military factor, all this facts show us that the reasons for the success of Islam are to be found in a vast and powerful movement of ideas, along with the religious crisis that existed in varying degrees in the regions where Islam crystallized at first. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Regarding the first point, we can say that, as the spiritual utopia it was, the new religion brought a feeling of brotherhood much broader than the tribal one, and based on universal social justice, one of the most repeated general principles in the Quran. Thus, Islam resulted in a new way of social and political organization built essentially on the religious dimension. That is, although the Muslim community conserved elements taken from the ancient pre-Islamic tribal organization, the new rules were based on religion and not on family ties. Unity emerges as the great pillar of social cohesion, against tribal disintegration characteristic of pre-Islamic Arab society. - - - - - - - - - -
Muslim religion brought a new theocratic order based on equality: sovereignty belonged only to God. Over this base a new worldview was built, in which the line between political and religious power did not exist. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Regarding the religious crisis which hit the territories where Islam was setting, we found that both the Sassanid Empire and the Byzantine Empire faced at that time deep religious social upheavals that would conform a propitious scenario for the easy expansion of Islam. Most of the Sassanid Empire's population professed Zoroastrianism at that time, a religion that in the late fifth century AD had been severely shocked following the preaching of a religious reformer called Mazdak, who gave birth to a social movement with strong revolutionary attitudes, leaving a deep imprint on society. In the case of the Byzantine Empire, the struggle was otherwise. Christians of various confessions (Trinitarians, Monophysites, Nestorians, Arians, etc.) had been disputing the hegemony since the establishment of the Trinitarian doctrine in the Councils of Nicaea (395) and Chalcedon (451). The Byzantine Empire was the guarantor of Trinitarian orthodoxy, and persecution and repression against Christian "heresies" was frequent, which provided an indirect advantage to the spread of Islam. When Muslims arrived to Egypt, Syria and Persia, the people received them as liberators. - - - - - - - - - -
With the above we can say that the birth and subsequent spread of Islam was the product of a crisis of values ​​in the society of his time, along with the reaffirmation of a number of ideas that found a propitious ground for expansion in the places where Islam was penetrating. It was not some kind of 'miracle', as some Muslims want to believe, or an imposition by the sword, as determined by much of Western historiography. - - - - - -
