ABSTRACT
Islam spread more rapidly than all other religions of which there exists a historical record. Only a century after its inception in Mecca, the new religion was dominant over the Pyrenees in the west and the steppes of Central Asia in the east. Moreover, to the same degree that its expansion was rapid, the consolidation of this newly conquered domain into a new world civilisation was profound and permanent. Islam developed its characteristic art within a century of its birth and its own learning and arts and sciences a hundred years later. By the end of the third/ninth century, the intellectual life of Islam had reached one of the peaks of its activity and Islamic civilisation had itself become, through the assimilation of the heritage of many previous civilisations, the new focus of intellectual life in the world.
