Rise of Islam

In the early seventh century the Arabian Peninsula was a region of tribal confederations, trading towns and caravan routes at the edge of two exhausted empires, Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. Makkah was a commercial and religious centre; Yathrib, later Madinah, was an oasis settlement to its north.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ began preaching in Makkah around 610. In 622 he and his followers migrated to Madinah — the Hijrah, from which the Islamic calendar is dated — and there established the first Muslim community, with a written agreement setting out the rights and obligations of its groups.

Within a decade the greater part of Arabia had joined that community, and the tribal divisions that had defined the peninsula were reorganised around a single identity, a common language of scripture and a shared body of law.

The expansion that followed under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates was extraordinarily rapid. Within a century Muslim rule reached from the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia and the Indus, and Arabic became the administrative and scholarly language across that whole span.