Islam, which originated on the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, grew to become the third major monotheistic religion (along with Judaism and Christianity) in the West.  Much like Christianity, Islam owed its origins to a single man and was extremely small and persecuted when it began.  But the religion, and the armies that spread it, fanned out from the Arabian Peninsula and soon controlled most of the Near East and North Africa, and even some of Europe.  Although Islam spread with the sword--Christianity was also spread by the sword--conversion to the religion itself was usually not undertaken at sword point.  As Islam grew into a world religion, it simultaneously became part of a new world empire.  As such, it is often not realized that Islam inherited much from its predecessors, the Ancient Roman and Greek worlds.  (Christian Europe later in the Middle Ages also learned much from the Islamic community.)

Muhammad the founder of Islam was one of the world's great prophets and a great teacher of ethical behavior.  (See the Prophet Muhammad's Last Sermon.)  It was only relatively late in his life that he began his religious work.

Unfortunately, many people in the West today do not recognize Islam as a major component of Western civilization.  Instead, the tendency is to view Islam as a religion of some distant desert people, but Islam is very much Western.  Muhammad was a prophet, as Jesus of Nazareth, Moses and Isaiah had been.  Muhammad claimed to put right a monotheistic faith gone wrong.  Muhammad, in fact, recognized most of the work of the previous Hebrew prophets.  In addition, Muslims came into contact with, and borrowed much from, the Greek intellectual and scientific heritage and from Rome's political history.

Please remember that the Qur'an is not the "Muslim bible."  There is a distinction.  According to Muslims, the Qur'an is the exact word of God, delivered through Muhammad and recorded in Arabic.  The Holy Bible, however, is only the inspired word of men; it is not God's literal word.  The Hadith are not part of the Qur'an, but are, instead, "traditions" associated with the life and teaching of Muhammad that shed light on the writings in the Qur'an.  Most of the Hadith are short incidents from Muhammad's life that help to explain the purposes and ideas of the new religion.

• Information on Islam, the Qur'an and the Hadeeth
• Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, Lynn Nelson
• Islam (wiki)
• Lecture 18: Islamic Civilization
• Islam From The Beginning To 1300
• The University of Southern California's Compendium of Muslim Texts has some good explanatory material about some important Muslim principles.
• The Islamic Explosion and The Arab Golden Age by Charles Kimball
• PBS has an excellent website, Islam: Empire of Faith, that supports the video program, but the website alone is very useful.
• The Internet Islamic History Sourcebook is part of the series of online resources maintained by Paul Halsall.  It consists of texts and documents in their entirety and in excerpts.
• Islamic History is an annotated list of websites dealing with different aspects of Islamic history.
• Al-Islam.org: Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project includes an extensive library of resources devoted to the study of Islam.
• Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts has information of the practice of medicine in the medieval Islamic world, which was far more advanced than European medicine.
• Islam at a Glance is a very informative website produced by the BBC
• Historical maps of Islam
• A Concise History of Islam and the Arabs
• Timeline of Islamic expansion
• Islamic History, an annotated set of links to materials about the history and development of Islam
• The Five Pillars of Worship in Islam by Malcolm Clark (a good, brief explanation)
• For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a relevant website for this unit of the course.
  Send the title of the site, the url and a brief explanation why you find the information interesting and applicable to the material being studied in this unit.