Spread of Islamic Culture | World History | Khan Academy

Hi man! Hi David! So, what we're going to do in this video is talk about the cultural spread of Islam. Where are we and when are we right now?

So, we are around the early 7th century, and here we see the Byzantine Empire, which at the time was still a continuation of Rome. This is like the Eastern Roman Empire, and it's an aging empire. We also have Sassanid Persia, which started in the third century and is still continuing into this period, right? So, we've got on the timeline—it’s going beyond our start point here. Yep!

So, these are two very powerful empires who often are in tension with one another. As you can see, they neighbor each other. Around this time, they're involved in some pretty powerful struggles here, right? So, in 628, it leads to a lot of instability within Sassanid Persia, certainly. And in some ways as well, the Byzantines are weakened by how many resources they've exhausted in these tensions.

So, around this time, a new religion emerges. Muhammad is born in Arabia, and pretty soon during his lifetime and immediately after his lifetime, the religion of Islam spreads rapidly through Islamic conquest, which Sal talked about in an earlier video. I mean, just to give you an impression, Muhammad died in the year 633. Yes, so by 750, this is what the state of the Islamic world looked like.

So, they took over most of Persia and a large part of the Byzantine Empire, as we can see. Then even beyond, it goes further east, further west, all the way over to Spain. This happens really, really quickly, but it's not the case that Islamic culture necessarily takes in all of these areas that quickly.

So, it takes a little bit longer for that to really take hold, and it also takes hold in areas far beyond this empire as well. So, certainly, the presence of Islamic or Muslim rulers in these areas certainly did affect the culture of these places. But what's more important is sort of the ways in which Islam slowly integrated with some of these cultures, and that happened through trade, through missionaries, and also through pilgrimage routes that happened emanating out from Mecca.

These religious ideas weren't static. As they moved through different areas and as they moved through different routes, they changed and they started to take the shape of the local culture and the local flavor as well. So, let me pull up some trade routes. These were the active trade routes of the period.

You can see this is a continuation of the Silk Road. It goes all the way from Rome to China. This is Xi'an, which was then known as Chang'an. This is the imperial capital of at least ten different Chinese dynasties. There's also a very large mosque here. So here we have the Great Mosque at Jinan, and what's really interesting about this mosque is that it really fuses a lot of Islamic and Chinese ideas.

For example, it still sort of has the structure of an imperial building in the way that the courtyards are set up, sure, but instead of following sort of the rules of feng shui, it is oriented towards Mecca, which is, well, the direction in which Muslims look when they pray. But it still has a very Chinese character, right? And this makes sense because these trade routes basically had to go through the Islamic Empire.

So, as people traveled, so did ideas, and those ideas transformed along the way. What's next on our whistle-stop tour, man? Let's look at the mosque in Jene.

Okay! So, Jene is in what is today Mali. It's just south of Timbuktu, or Tombouctou, as it's called today. So, it was a great center of Islamic learning, and in Jene is the site of the world's largest mud brick building, the Grand Mosque of Jene. Let me pull it up. It's a really incredible building that gets at a lot of elements of Malian culture.

So this is the Grand Mosque of Jene; it's a mud brick building. We have an article about this on Khan Academy in the art history section. What's really cool to me about the Grand Mosque of Jene is the way that it incorporates Malian traditions into Islamic tradition. So you can see on top of these spires—and some of these spires are minarets from which issue the call to prayer—you can't see it in this detail, but there are little ostrich eggs on top of the spires.

In Mali, ostrich eggs represent purity and fertility. So, even within the constraints of building a religious building, there's still expressions of local culture. Yeah, and it's really interesting how that spread through trade, but it also spread another way, which is through pilgrimage, through missionaries, through preachers, and that also took on the local traditions in interesting ways.

So, let's go to southern India, near Kerala. So, this is the Chairman Juma Mosque. This is supposed to be one of the earliest mosques in history. Its construction dates to about 630. Yup, 629 to be precise. This was actually during the life of the prophet, and it's quite far from Mecca. So, it's really fascinating how quickly it traveled there.

Um, but it traveled with a preacher. And, um, as you can see, this is a very distinctly Indian mosque. Another way that Islam traveled through preachers was through Sufis, so let's talk about Sufis for just a minute. Sure!

Um, Sufis were like a mystical devotional practice, and we see many iterations of Sufism in all different sects of Islam, but they were particularly successful at spreading Islam for a few reasons. One of them was that they adopted the teachings to local traditions, and another reason was that they built lodges and places of worship along the way, and these sometimes functioned like community centers and monasteries.

So, let's have a look at a couple of them. Sure! Let's look at some North African ones. So, this is a ribat in Tunisia. Yes, so a ribat is kind of like a hostel. You have travelers staying there. Early on in their history, there were soldiers that stayed there. Over time, they sort of took on a sort of a monastery culture for Sufis.

We also have something called a zawiya, so here is an example of one. And similarly, this was a place of learning. It was a place of worship. People often lived there for a long time, so they sort of have this monastic tradition that created a permanent presence for Islam along these routes. This was really, really integral in the spread of Islam.

And it's not just in North Africa, but even farther east, you see different iterations of that. So, once you get into former Persian territory and in Indian territory, you have something called a khanqah. So here's an example from Kashmir. This is called the Shah-e-Hamadan Mosque, and it's a 14th-century mosque. This is a commemorative building; it commemorates an important Sufi leader.

But again, you see some of the local flavor here. You see that there's some intricate wood carvings, which is really very Kashmiri. Very Kashmiri, certainly! And similarly, this was a place of worship but also a place where people passed through and interacted and learned. So it was a site of spreading Islamic tradition as well.

So that was about—sorry, I should have said that was about here in Srinagar. Yes, about there! Um, yeah, and so in this way, Islam was also spread certainly. So, if you zoom out a bit, let's have a look at sort of the bounds of the Islamic Empire.

Sure! And where we see some of these instances of new Islamic traditions were no longer in the heart of the Islamic Empire. We're beyond that, and that's because Islam was carried in many different ways. As we can see, it ended up with some really, really diverse iterations of Islam.