Muslim Civilization

4 Pages 1098 Words

The Muslim civilization is centered around the Islamic faith. Islam is followed by a fifth of the world’s population (Pillars of Islam).The development of Islam through its environment can be explained more clearly with a background of the East territory. There are three focuses of interest in the centuries preceding the wave of Arab conquests of the Near East region in the seventh century. The Christian Byzantines had some influence over the Red Sea, extending at times to an alliance with the Monophysite Christians of Abyssinia; the Zoroastrian Persians, with their capital in Ctesiphon in Mesoptamia, had influence which reached at times the eastern side of Arabia and along the south coast to the Yemen; and the South Arabian kingdons whose century, had lost virtually all semblance of vitality by the time of the rise of the Arabs (Islam and the West). The Arabian Peninsula, although having had settled centres for several millenniums, did not contain a power to be reckoned !
with in the world at the time, except in so far as various tribal areas became pawns in the hands of external kingdoms, perhaps thereby creating the forces which would eventually expand out of the peninsula and sugjugate the earlier rulers.
In the year 527 Justinian came to the throne of the Bysantine empire at Constantinople, He was determined to restore the unity with the decaying Roman empire, the western parts of which had been lost to the Bermanic tribes, especially the Vandals and th Goths. He was successful by his death in 565, much of this accomplishment was being nullified as the result of continual local uprisings. The persians took advantage of the subsequent unstable situation and made initiatives on their western border with Byzantium. Heavy taxes, however, provoked instability on the edges of his newly expanded area. Heraclius, the Byzantine leader who died in 641, nmanaged to gain supremacy in Constantinople in 610,only to witness the Persi...