Islam

The Book of Psalms (/sɑː(l)mz/ SAH(L)MZ, US also /sɔː(l)mz/; Biblical Hebrew: תְּהִלִּים‎, romanized: Tehillīm, lit. 'praises'; Ancient Greek: Ψαλμός, romanized: Psalmós; Latin: Liber Psalmorum; Arabic: مَزْمُور, romanized: Mazmūr, in Islam also called Zabur, Arabic: زَبُورُ, romanized: Zabūr), also known as the Psalter, is the first book of the third section of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) called Ketuvim ('Writings'), and a book of the Old Testament.

The book is an anthology of Hebrew religious hymns. In the Jewish and Western Christian traditions, there are 150 psalms, and several more in the Eastern Christian churches. The book is divided into five sections, each ending with a doxology, a hymn of praise. There are several types of psalms, including hymns or songs of praise, communal and individual laments, royal psalms, imprecation, and individual thanksgivings. The book also includes psalms of communal thanksgiving, wisdom, pilgrimage, and other categories.

Arab Muslims (Arabic: ﺍﻟْمُسْلِمون ﺍﻟْﻌَﺮَﺏ, romanized: al-Muslimūn al-ʿArab) are the Arabs who adhere to Islam. They are the largest subdivision of the Arab people and the largest ethnic group among Muslims globally, followed by Bengalis and Punjabis. Likewise, they comprise the majority of the population of the Arab world. Currently, around 93% of Arabs are Muslims, while the rest are mainly Arab Christians, as well as Druze and Baháʼís.

Although Arabs account for the largest ethnicity among the world's adherents of Islam, they are a minority in the Muslim world in terms of sheer numbers. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was an ethnic Arab belonging to the Banu Hashim of the Quraysh, and most of the early Muslims were also Arabs.

Fred McGraw Donner (born 1945) is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.

The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users (after the Latin and Chinese scripts).

The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam. With the religion's spread, it came to be used as the primary script for many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols. Such languages still using it are Arabic, Persian (Farsi and Dari), Urdu, Uyghur, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi (Shahmukhi), Sindhi, Azerbaijani (Torki in Iran), Malay (Jawi), Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese and Indonesian (Pegon), Balti, Balochi, Luri, Kashmiri, Cham (Akhar Srak), Rohingya, Somali, Mandinka, and Mooré, among others. Until the 16th century, it was also used for some Spanish texts, and—prior to the script reform in 1928—it was the writing system of Turkish.

While the word religion is difficult to define and understand, one standard model of religion that is used in religious studies courses defines it as

Many religions have their own narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws, or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, or ultimate concerns.

In religious studies, an ethnic religion or ethnoreligion is a religion or belief associated with notions of heredity and a particular ethnicity. Ethnic religions are often distinguished from universal religions, such as Christianity or Islam, which are not limited in ethnic, national or racial scope.

Zarathushtra Spitama, more commonly known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra, was an Iranian religious reformer who challenged the tenets of the contemporary Ancient Iranian religion, becoming the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. In the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, which he is traditionally believed to have authored, he is described as a preacher and a poet-prophet. Some have claimed, with much scholarly controversy, to find his influence in Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, and, perhaps less controversially, in the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly through concepts of cosmic dualism and personal morality.

He spoke an Eastern Iranian language, named Avestan by scholars after the corpus of Zoroastrian religious texts written in that language. Based on this, it is tentative to place his homeland somewhere in the eastern regions of Greater Iran (perhaps in modern-day Afghanistan or Tajikistan), but his exact birthplace is uncertain. His life is traditionally dated to sometime around the 7th and 6th centuries BC; though most scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC.

The spread of Islam spans almost 1,400 years. The early Muslim conquests that occurred following the death of Muhammad in 632 CE led to the creation of the caliphates, expanding over a vast geographical area; conversion to Islam was boosted by Arab Muslim forces expanding over vast territories and building imperial structures over time. Most of the significant expansion occurred during the reign of the rāshidūn ("rightly-guided") caliphs from 632 to 661 CE, which were the first four successors of Muhammad. These early caliphates, coupled with Muslim economics and trading, the Islamic Golden Age, and the age of the Islamic gunpowder empires, resulted in Islam's spread outwards from Mecca towards the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and the creation of the Muslim world. The Islamic conquests, which culminated in the Arab empire being established across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), enriched the Muslim world, achieving the economic preconditions for the emergence of this institution owing to the emphasis attached to Islamic teachings. Trade played an important role in the spread of Islam in some parts of the world, such as Indonesia. During the early centuries of Islamic rule, conversions in the Middle East were mainly individual or small-scale. While mass conversions were favored for spreading Islam beyond Muslim lands, policies within Muslim territories typically aimed for individual conversions to weaken non-Muslim communities. However, there were exceptions, like the forced mass conversion of the Samaritans.

Muslim dynasties were soon established and subsequent empires such as those of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks, Seljukids, and the Ayyubids were among some of the largest and most powerful in the world. The Ajuran and Adal Sultanates, and the wealthy Mali Empire, in North Africa, the Delhi, Deccan, and Bengal Sultanates, and Mughal and Durrani Empires, and Kingdom of Mysore and Nizam of Hyderabad in the Indian subcontinent, the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Samanids in Persia, Timurids, and the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia significantly changed the course of history. The people of the Islamic world created numerous sophisticated centers of culture and science with far-reaching mercantile networks, travelers, scientists, hunters, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers, all contributing to the Islamic Golden Age. The Timurid Renaissance and the Islamic expansion in South and East Asia fostered cosmopolitan and eclectic Muslim cultures in the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Indonesia and China. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of the Middle East and North Africa in the early modern period, also did not officially endorse mass conversions, but evidence suggests they occurred, particularly in the Balkans, often to evade the jizya tax. Similarly, Christian sources mention requests for mass conversions to Islam, such as in Cyprus, where Ottoman authorities refused, fearing economic repercussions.

From 613 to 619 CE, the Islamic prophet Muhammad gathered in his hometown of Mecca a small following of those who embraced his message of Islam and thus became Muslims. The first person who professed Islam was his wife, Khadija bint Khuwaylid. The identity of the second male Muslim, after Muhammad himself, is disputed largely along sectarian lines, as Shia and some Sunni sources identify him as the first Shia imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, a child at the time, who grew up in the household of his cousin, Muhammad. Other sources report that the first male convert was Abu Bakr, who later succeeded Muhammad as the first Sunni caliph, or Muhammad's foster son, Zayd ibn Haritha. While it is difficult to establish the chronological order of early conversions, the identities of early Muslims are known with some certainty.