Description
A Short History of Islam By Mazhar ul Haq. The study of the History of Muslims is a popular and interesting theme. But it is often undertaken in an uncritical manner and with too much idealisation. We have presented it as a phenomenon of development and transformation of Islamic society and culture from tribalistic to feudal forms and ways of life. The forces of transformation were the tribal energy, inspired by the teachings of pristine Islam and led by its political structure, the Caliphal System, that is, a group of leaders and followers who were at once a religious community and politico- military elite. But the Caliphal System changed when it became an instrument of big feudal elites under the Umayyads and their successors, the Abbasids. A Short History of Islam By Mazhar ul Haq
With this transformation, further development of Islamic society and culture was arrested, because Muslims could not break through the primary kinship relations of clans, tribes, castes and local brotherhoods. These basic ways of social and cultural life, the tribes and clans in the arid and semi—arid regions of the Caliphate and the caste—like Insaf and other kinship groups in towns and villages became hotbeds of social and political decay and disintegration. They divided Muslim society into small and exclusive groups, which were incapable of welding into greater and stronger communities against their internal and external enemies. The kingship ways of life, became the forces of degeneration, declineand downfall of the Islamic kingdoms and empires before the onslaught of their internal enemies and foreign invaders. The decay from within and fall of Islamic kingdoms and empires became a regular recurrent phenomena throughout the medieval history of Muslims. A Short History of Islam By Mazhar ul Haq
These are the sociological and anthropological tools and techniques of social analysis with which we have presented the story of Islam as it actually happened in the Middle Ages. A Short History of Islam By Mazhar ul Haq
