Abstract
Islam is often viewed in the West as monolithic, when in fact it is a highly diverse global religion. Muslims constitute about 23 percent of the world’s population. According to a 2009 Pew Report, “there are 1.57 billion Muslims living in the world today” and they are “found on all five inhabited continents.”1 Fifty-seven states throughout the world are full members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).2 While for many the term “Muslim” is synonymous with Arab, actually the 23 or so Arabic Islamic countries (including Sudan, despite its huge Christian Dinka population) constitute only around 20 percent of all Muslims. The largest Islamic country, Indonesia, has a Muslim population larger than that of the whole Arabian Peninsula.3 Further, there is also a contentious divide between Sunnis and Shi’as (roughly 86–14%), which has deep religious, historical, and ethnic roots.
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Notes
Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 90.
Ruven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118.
F. E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 199. See also, Qur’an, 2:256 (a Medinese sura).
The best example of this is Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/ Associated University Presses, 1985).
For a more sympathetic read, see Mahmoud Ayoub, “Dhimma in the Qur’an and Hadith,” Islamic Studies Quarterly 5 (1983): 172–82
C.E. Bosworth, “The ‘Protected Peoples’ (Christians and Jews) in Medieval Egypt and Syria,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 62 (1979): 11–36, and his “The Concept of dhimma in Early Islam,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: the Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols., eds. B. Braude and B. Lewis, 1:37–51 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982).
Though now quite dated, A. S. Tritton has a comprehensive discussion in The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of Umar (London: Oxford University Press, 1930).
See also Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 271.
Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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© 2014 Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan
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Amjad-Ali, C. (2014). Challenges of Diversity and Migration in Islamic Political Theory and Theology. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001047_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001047_11
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