ABSTRACT
Islam is a concept which, phenomenalized in a number of linked but diverse political, social and religious organisms, covers an immense area in space and time. In different regions and epochs it has presented differing features under the impact of and in response to local geographical, social and political forces. Western Islam for example, in northwest Africa and medieval Spain, though it was closely related to the Muslim heartlands in Western Asia and its culture was an offshoot from their culture, yet evolved several distinguishing characteristics, some of which in turn influenced Islam in Western Asia. In other large and self-contained geographical areas, such as the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia, or in the steppe lands extending from southern Russia to the borders of China, parallel factors produced similarly distinguishing forms. Yet each and all of these retain a certain easily recognizable common Islamic stamp. It is impossible within the limits of a single essay to deal with all these diverse regions. The present article is therefore confined to Islam in Western Asia with the double object: (1) of tracing the development of Islamic culture and the gradual evolution which by the end of the fourteenth century had transformed its inner structure, and (2) of examining the processes by which its institutions were molded into a coherent unity and given their specifically Islamic stamp, however widely Islam might spread and however various their external forms. It should thus supply a provisional framework within which (corrected or adjusted where necessary) other studies devoted to particular aspects and relations of Islamic culture may be coordinated.
