ABSTRACT
Non-Muslim historians marvel at the Islamic chronicle: with no standing army and hardly any institutions, the early Muslims overthrew two gargantuan centralized empires. After uniting the newly converted Arabian tribes, the four caliphs took the unifi ed programme of an empowered faith to the world. How did an Arabian religion rapidly expand into a universal civilization that became multi-ethnic, intercontinental and poly-racial? Muslims assimilated and Islamized the cultural products and bureaucratic hierarchies of the defeated empires of Byzantium and Persia; caliphs enthusiastically employed talented Jews and Christians to build a multi-lingual, multi-legal, poly-ethnic and religiously plural but nonetheless Islamic civilization. Muhammad’s faith was an imperial monotheism which built and enriched many cultures while eliminating only those local customs which were judged theologically erroneous or morally depraved.
