Muslims in the context of Urban II

Islam is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number 2 billion worldwide and are the world's second-largest religious population, after Christianity.

Muslims believe that there is a primordial faith that was revealed many times through earlier prophets and messengers, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and they believe that Islam is the universal and complete version of this faith. Muslims consider the Quran to be the verbatim word of God and the unaltered, final revelation. Alongside the Quran, Muslims also believe in previous revelations, such as the Tawrat (the Torah), the Zabur (Psalms), and the Injil (Gospel). They believe that Muhammad is the main and final of God's prophets, through whom the religion was completed. The teachings and normative examples of Muhammad, called the Sunnah, documented in accounts called the hadith, provide a constitutional model for Muslims. Islam is based on the belief in the oneness and uniqueness of God (tawhid), and belief in an afterlife (akhirah) with the Last Judgment—wherein the righteous will be rewarded in paradise (jannah) and the unrighteous will be punished in hell (jahannam). The Five Pillars, considered obligatory acts of worship, are the Islamic oath and creed (shahada), daily prayers (salah), almsgiving (zakat), fasting (sawm) in the month of Ramadan, and a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. Islamic law, sharia, touches on virtually every aspect of life, from banking and finance and welfare to men's and women's roles and the environment. The two main religious festivals are Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The three holiest sites in Islam are Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Prophet's Mosque in Medina, and al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Sharia (/ʃəˈriːə/; Arabic: شَرِيعَة, romanized: sharīʿah, lit. 'path [to water]', IPA: [ʃaˈriːʕa]), also transliterated as Sharī'ah, Shari'a, or Shariah, is a body of religious law that form the Islamic tradition based on scriptures of Islam, particularly the Qur'an and hadith. In Islamic terminology sharīʿah refers to immutable, intangible divine law, in contrast to fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which refers to its interpretations by Islamic scholars. Sharia, or fiqh as traditionally known, has always been used alongside customary law from the very beginning in Islamic history; it has been elaborated and developed over the centuries by legal opinions issued by qualified jurists – reflecting the tendencies of different schools – and integrated with various economic, penal and administrative laws issued by Muslim rulers; and implemented for centuries by judges in the courts until recent times, when secularism was widely adopted in Islamic societies.

Traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognizes four sources for al-sharia: the Qur'an, sunnah (or authentic ahadith), ijma (lit. consensus) (may be understood as ijma al-ummah (Arabic: إجماع الأمة) – a whole Islamic community consensus, or ijma al-aimmah (Arabic: إجماع الائـمـة) – a consensus by religious authorities), and analogical reasoning. It distinguishes two principal branches of law, rituals (Ibadah) and social dealings (Muamalat); subsections family law, relationships (commercial, political / administrative) and criminal law, in a wide range of topics assigning actions – capable of settling into different categories according to different understandings – to categories (ahkam) mainly as: mandatory, recommended, neutral, abhorred, and prohibited. Beyond legal norms, Sharia also enters many areas that are considered private practises today, such as belief, worshipping, ethics, clothing and lifestyle, and gives to those in command duties to intervene and regulate them.

Ibn Rushd (14 April 1126 – 11 December 1198), Latinized as Averroes, was an Andalusian polymath and jurist who was proficient in a variety of intellectual fields, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, neurology, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the Western world as "The Commentator" and "Father of Rationalism".

Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as al-Farabi and Avicenna. He also defended the pursuit of philosophy against criticism by Ash'ari theologians such as Al-Ghazali. Averroes argued that philosophy was permissible in Islam and even compulsory among certain elites. He also argued scriptural text should be interpreted allegorically if it appeared to contradict conclusions reached by reason and philosophy. In Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid on the differences between Islamic schools of law and the principles that caused their differences. In medicine, he proposed a new theory of stroke, described the signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease for the first time, and might have been the first to identify the retina as the part of the eye responsible for sensing light. His medical book Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb, translated into Latin and known as the Colliget, became a textbook in Europe for centuries.

The terms Islamic world and Muslim world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs, politics, and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In a modern geopolitical sense, these terms refer to countries in which Islam is widespread, although there are no agreed criteria for inclusion. The term Muslim-majority countries is an alternative often used for the latter sense.

The history of the Muslim world spans about 1,400 years and includes a variety of socio-political developments, as well as advances in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, law, economics and technology during the Islamic Golden Age. Muslims look for guidance to the Quran and believe in the prophetic mission of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, but disagreements on other matters have led to the appearance of different religious schools of thought and sects within Islam. The Islamic conquests, which culminated in the Caliphate 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. In the modern era, most of the Muslim world came under European colonial domination. The nation states that emerged in the post-colonial era have adopted a variety of political and economic models, and they have been affected by secular as well as religious trends.

Al-Andalus (Arabic: الأَنْدَلُس, romanized: al-ʾAndalus) was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The name refers to the different Muslim states that controlled these territories at various times between 711 and 1492. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied most of the peninsula as well as Septimania under Umayyad rule. These boundaries changed through a series of conquests Western historiography has traditionally characterized as the Reconquista, eventually shrinking to the south and finally to the Emirate of Granada.

As a political domain, it successively constituted a province of the Umayyad Caliphate, initiated by the Caliph al-Walid I (711–750); the Emirate of Córdoba (c. 750–929); the Caliphate of Córdoba (929–1031); the first taifa kingdoms (1009–1110); the Almoravid Empire (1085–1145); the second taifa period (1140–1203); the Almohad Caliphate (1147–1238); the third taifa period (1232–1287); and ultimately the Nasrid Emirate of Granada (1238–1492). Under the Caliphate of Córdoba, the city of Córdoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centres throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Islamic world. Achievements that advanced Islamic and Western science came from al-Andalus, including major advances in trigonometry (Jabir ibn Aflah), astronomy (al-Zarqali), surgery (al-Zahrawi), pharmacology (Ibn Zuhr), and agronomy (Ibn Bassal and Abu'l-Khayr al-Ishbili). Al-Andalus became a conduit for cultural and scientific exchange between the Islamic and Christian worlds.

Islam is India's second-largest religion, with 14.2% of the country's population, or approximately 172.2 million people, identifying as adherents of Islam in a 2011 census. India has the third-largest number of Muslims in the world. Most of India's Muslims are Sunni, with Shia making up around 15% of the Muslim population.

Islam first spread in southern Indian communities along the Arab coastal trade routes in Gujarat and in Malabar Coast shortly after the religion emerged in the Arabian Peninsula. Later, Islam arrived in the northern inland of Indian subcontinent in the 7th century when the Arabs invaded and conquered Sindh. It arrived in Punjab and North India in the 12th century via the Ghaznavids and Ghurids conquest and has since become a part of India's religious and cultural heritage. The Barwada Mosque in Ghogha, Gujarat built before 623 CE, Cheraman Juma Mosque (629 CE) in Methala, Kerala and Palaiya Jumma Palli (or The Old Jumma Masjid, 628–630 CE) in Kilakarai, Tamil Nadu are three of the first mosques in India which were built by seafaring Arab merchants. According to the legend of Cheraman Perumals, the first Indian mosque was built in 624 CE at Kodungallur in present-day Kerala with the mandate of the last ruler (the Tajudeen Cheraman Perumal) of the Chera dynasty, who converted to Islam during the lifetime of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632). Similarly, Tamil Muslims on the eastern coasts also claim that they converted to Islam in Muhammad's lifetime. The local mosques date to the early 700s.

The word "Saracen" (/ˈsærəsən/ SARR-ə-sən) was commonly used in medieval Europe to refer to a person who lived in or near what the ancient Romans knew as Arabia Petraea and Arabia Deserta. Its original meaning in Greek and Latin is not known with certainty. By the early medieval period, it had come to be associated with the Arabian tribes. Following the rise of Islam, which occurred in Arabia, the word's definition evolved to refer not only to Arabs, but to Muslims as well. It eventually became the standard adjective among European Christians for all people and things from the Muslim world, regardless of whether they were Arab in origin.

The oldest known source mentioning "Saracens" in association with Muslims is the Greek-language Christian tract Doctrina Jacobi, which was compiled in the Byzantine Empire amidst the Muslim conquest of the Levant. The word became particularly widespread in European societies during the Crusades, when it was used by the Roman Catholic Church and by several European Christian political and military figures.

Yemen, officially the Republic of Yemen, is a country in West Asia. Including the Socotra Archipelago, mainland Yemen is located in southern Arabia; bordering Saudi Arabia to the north, Oman to the northeast, the south-eastern part of the Arabian Sea to the east, the Gulf of Aden to the south, and the Red Sea to the west, sharing maritime borders with Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia across the Horn of Africa. Covering roughly 455,503 square kilometres (175,871 square miles), with a coastline of approximately 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles), Yemen is the second largest country on the Arabian Peninsula. Sanaa is its constitutional capital and largest city. Yemen's estimated population is 34.7 million, mostly Arab Muslims. It is a member of the Arab League, the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

Owing to its geographic location, Yemen has been at the crossroads of many civilisations for over 7,000 years. The Sabaeans formed a thriving commercial kingdom that influenced parts of modern Ethiopia and Eritrea. In 275 CE, it was succeeded by the Himyarite Kingdom, which spanned much of Yemen's present-day territory and was heavily influenced by Judaism. Christianity arrived in the fourth century, followed by the rapid spread of Islam in the seventh century. From its conversion to Islam, Yemen became a center of Islamic learning, and Yemenite troops played a crucial role in early Islamic conquests. Much of Yemen's architecture survived until modern times. For centuries, it was a primary producer of coffee, exported through the port of Mocha. Various dynasties emerged between the 9th and 16th centuries. During the 19th century, the country was divided between the Ottoman and British empires. After World War I, the Kingdom of Yemen was established, which in 1962 became the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) following a civil war. In 1967, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) gained its independence from the British Aden Protectorate, becoming the first and only communist state in the Middle East and the Arab world. In 1990, the two Yemeni states united to form the modern Republic of Yemen, with Ali Abdullah Saleh serving as the first president until his resignation in 2012 in the wake of the Arab Spring.

The most widely professed religion in Bosnia and Herzegovina is Islam and the second biggest religion is Christianity. Nearly all the Muslims of Bosnia are followers of the Sunni denomination of Islam; the majority of Sunnis follow the Hanafi legal school of thought (fiqh) and Maturidi theological school of thought (kalām). Bosniaks are generally associated with Islam, Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Catholic Church, and Bosnian Serbs with the Serbian Orthodox Church. The State Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the entity Constitutions of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska provide for freedom of religion, and the Government generally respects this right in ethnically integrated areas or in areas where government officials are of the majority religion; the state-level Law on Religious Freedom also provides comprehensive rights to religious communities. However, local authorities sometimes restricted the right to worship of adherents of religious groups in areas where such persons are in the minority.

Government protection of religious freedom declined, especially during the campaign period prior to the October 2006 national elections, due to selective legal enforcement and the indifference of some government officials. At the end of the period covered by this report, the Government was implementing the State Law on Religious Freedom to protect the rights of religious communities and create a government registry allowing them to establish legal status.

The Quran (vocalized Arabic: الْقُرْآن‎, Quranic Arabic: الۡقُرۡءَان‎, al-Qurʾān [alqurˈʔaːn], lit. 'the recitation' or 'the lecture'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation directly from God (Allāh). It is organized in 114 chapters (surah, pl. suwar) which consist of individual verses (āyah). Besides its religious significance, it is widely regarded as the finest work in Arabic literature, and has significantly influenced the Arabic language. It is the object of a modern field of academic research known as Quranic studies.

Muslims believe the Quran was orally revealed by God to the final Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel incrementally over a period of some 23 years, beginning on the Laylat al-Qadr, when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632, the year of his death. Muslims regard the Quran as Muhammad's most important miracle, a proof of his prophethood, and the culmination of a series of divine messages starting with those revealed to the first Islamic prophet Adam, including the holy books of the Torah, Psalms, and Gospel in Islam.

Adherents of Islam constitute the world's second largest and fastest growing major religious grouping, maintaining suggested 2017 projections in 2022. As of 2020, Pew Research Center (PEW) projections suggest there are a total of 2 billion adherents worldwide. Further studies indicate that the global spread and percentage growth of Islam is primarily due to relatively high birth rates and a youthful age structure. Conversion to Islam has no impact on the overall growth of the Muslim population, as the number of people converting to Islam is roughly equal to the number of those leaving the faith.

Most Muslims fall under either of three main branches:

The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.

On 16 March 1922, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Kemal Tengrişenk stated that "[t]he Ankara Government was strongly in favour of a solution that would satisfy world opinion and ensure tranquillity in its own country", and that "[i]t was ready to accept the idea of an exchange of populations between the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Muslims in Greece". Eventually, the initial request for an exchange of population came from Eleftherios Venizelos in a letter he submitted to the League of Nations on 16 October 1922, following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War and two days after their accession of the Armistice of Mudanya. The request intended to normalize relations de jure, since the majority of surviving Greek inhabitants of Turkey had fled from recent genocidal massacres to Greece by that time already. Venizelos proposed a "compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations", and asked Fridtjof Nansen to make the necessary arrangements. The new state of Turkey also envisioned the population exchange as a way to formalize and make permanent the flight of its native Greek Orthodox peoples while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number (400,000) of Muslims from Greece as a way to provide settlers for the newly depopulated Orthodox villages of Turkey. Norman M. Naimark claimed that this treaty was the last part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to create an ethnically pure homeland for the Turks. Historian Dinah Shelton similarly wrote that "the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks".

Western Thrace (Greek: Δυτική Θράκη, IPA: [ðitiˈci ˈθɾaci]), also known as Greek Thrace or Aegean Thrace, is a geographical and historical region of Greece, between the Nestos and Evros rivers in the northeast of the country; East Thrace, which lies east of the river Evros, forms the European part of Turkey, and the area to the north, in Bulgaria, is known as Northern Thrace.

Inhabited since Paleolithic times, it has been under the political, cultural and linguistic influence of the Greek world since the classical era; Greeks from the Aegean islands extensively colonized the region (especially the coastal part) and built prosperous cities such as Abdera (home of Democritus, the 5th-century BC philosopher who developed an atomic particle theory, and of Protagoras, a leading sophist) and Sale (near present-day Alexandroupolis). Under the Byzantine Empire, Western Thrace benefited from its position close to the imperial heartland and became a center of medieval Greek commerce and culture; later, under the Ottoman Empire, a number of Muslims settled there, marking the birth of the Muslim minority of Greece.

The Ottoman Turks (Turkish: Osmanlı Türkleri) were a Turkic ethnic group in Anatolia. Originally from Central Asia, they migrated to Anatolia in the 13th century and founded the Ottoman Empire, in which they remained socio-politically dominant for the entirety of the six centuries that it existed. Their descendants are the present-day Turkish people, who comprise the majority of the population in the Republic of Turkey, which was established shortly after the end of World War I.

Reliable information about the early history of the Ottoman Turks remains scarce, but they take their Turkish name Osmanlı from Osman I, who founded the House of Osman alongside the Ottoman Empire; the name "Osman" was altered to "Ottoman" when it was transliterated into some European languages over time. The Ottoman principality, expanding from Söğüt, gradually began incorporating other Turkish-speaking Muslims and non-Turkish Christians into their realm. By the 1350s, they had begun crossing into Europe and eventually came to dominate the Mediterranean Sea. In 1453, the fall of Constantinople, which had served as the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, enabled the Ottoman Turks to control all major land routes between Asia and Europe. This development forced Western Europeans to find other ways to trade with Asians. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turkish identity ceased to exist; the Ottoman Turkish language, which was written using the Perso-Arabic script, developed into the modern Latinized Turkish language.

The Vilayet of Kosovo (Ottoman Turkish: ولايت قوصوه, Vilâyet-i Kosova; Turkish: Kosova Vilayeti; Albanian: Vilajeti i Kosovës; Serbian: Косовски вилајет, Kosovski vilajet) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Peninsula which included the modern-day territory of Kosovo and the north-western part of the Republic of North Macedonia. The areas today comprising Sandžak (Raška) region of Serbia and Montenegro, although de jure under Ottoman control, were de facto under Austro-Hungarian occupation from 1878 until 1909, as provided under Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin. Üsküb (Skopje) functioned as the capital of the province. Its population of 32,000 made it the largest city in the province, followed by Prizren at 30,000.

The vilayet stood as a microcosm of Ottoman society; incorporated within its boundaries were diverse groups of peoples and religions: Albanians, Serbs, Bosniaks; Muslims and Christians, both Eastern Orthodox and Catholic. The province was renowned for its craftsmen and important cities such as İpek, where distinct Ottoman architecture and public baths were erected, some of which can still be seen today. The birthplace of the Albanian national identity was first articulated in Prizren, by the League of Prizren members in 1878.

Indo-Persian culture refers to a cultural synthesis present on the Indian subcontinent. It is characterised by the absorption or integration of Persian aspects into the various cultures of modern-day republics of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The earliest introduction of Persian influence and culture to the subcontinent was by various Muslim Turko-Persian rulers, such as the 11th-century Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi, rapidly pushed for the heavy Persianization of conquered territories in northwestern Indian subcontinent, where Islamic influence was also firmly established. This socio-cultural synthesis arose steadily through the Delhi Sultanate from the 13th to 16th centuries, and the Mughal Empire from then onwards until the 19th century. Various dynasties of Turkic, Iranian and local Indian origin patronized the Persian language and contributed to the development of a Persian culture in India. The Delhi Sultanate developed their own cultural and political identity which built upon Persian and Indic languages, literature and arts, which formed the basis of an Indo-Muslim civilization.

Persian was the official language of most Muslim dynasties in the Indian subcontinent, such as the Delhi Sultanate, the Kashmir Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and their successor states, and the Sikh Empire. It was also the dominant cultured language of poetry and literature. Many of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic languages as their mother tongues. The Mughals were also culturally Persianised Central Asians (of Turko-Mongol origin on their paternal side), but spoke Chagatai Turkic as their first language at the beginning, before eventually adopting Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of northern India. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the official lingua franca of the Mughal Empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The influence of these languages led to a vernacular called Hindustani that is the direct ancestor language of today's Hindi–Urdu varieties.

The Khazars (/ˈxɑːzɑːrz/) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who established a major commercial empire in the late 6th century CE spanning modern southeastern Russia, southern Ukraine, and western Kazakhstan. It was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Astride a major artery of commerce between Eastern Europe and Southwestern Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East, and Kievan Rus'. For some three centuries (c. 650–965), the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.

Although they were likely a confederation of different Turkic-speaking peoples, the precise origins and nature of the Khazars are uncertain, since there is no surviving record in the Khazar language and the state was multilingual and polyethnic. Their native religion is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples, although their multiethnic population seems to have included pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Although there is evidence that the ruling elite of the Khazars had converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century, the scope of the conversion to Judaism within the khanate remains uncertain.

The Torbeši (Macedonian: Торбеши) are a Macedonian-speaking Muslim ethnoreligious group in North Macedonia and Albania. The Torbeši are also referred to as Macedonian Muslims (Macedonian: Македонци-муслимани, romanized: Makedonci-muslimani) or Muslim Macedonians. They have been religiously distinct from the Orthodox Christian Macedonian community for centuries, and are linguistically distinct from the larger Muslim ethnic groups in the greater region of Macedonia: the Albanians, Turks and Romanis. However, some Torbeši also still maintain a strong affiliation with Turkish identity and with Macedonian Turks. The regions inhabited by these Macedonian-speaking Muslims are Debarska Župa, Dolni Drimkol, Reka, and Golo Brdo (in Albania).