The Rise of Islam Essay Sample

Time of inception of Islam – was a period of intense social and political struggle, of the rapid destruction of the primitive society and the formation of early class society in the Arabian Peninsula, a time when struggle between the two world empires – the Byzantine Empire and Iran – escalated. The rise of Islam is connected both with the influence and development of monotheistic religions – Judaism and Christianity, and the evolution of the religious consciousness of the population of Arabia, with specific forms of Arabian syncretistic monotheism.
Population few Middle East cities survived only with a help of maintenance of the caravan routes between India and the West. However, by the end of the VI century positions of Iran strengthened, which won Yemen, put trade and caravan routes under its control, by moving those routes to the North of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the Arabs encountered a serious crisis. The strength of this crisis found its expression in the spiritual sphere, which led to the emergence of a new religion.
Moreover, the fragmentation of the Arab tribes, their economic backwardness, and the transition to a class society with a strong centralized state power – all these needed power, which would be capable to do this historic task. This force was Islam. Islam needed to unite all the Arab tribes for protection from hostile neighbors – Iran and Byzantium. Thanks to Islam, process of ethnic and cultural consolidation of the Arabs, who formed a unified Arabic nation, too place. Islam became an important factor in the development of medieval Arab nation, of a new political entity – the Caliphate, the new ethnic and religious community - the community of Muslims (ummah).
Steadily Islam began spreading in the direction to the Mediterranean region. Soon after a birth of Islam large territories of North Africa became the periphery of Islam, a center of which was in the Middle East. Other developed society was Baghdad in the eastern Mediterranean. Between 831 and 1071 the Emirate of Sicily was one of the major centers of Islamic culture in the Mediterranean. After its conquest by the Normans, the island has developed its own culture that was influenced by the Arab, Western and Byzantine cultures.
The darkness of the Middle Ages finally left Europe and in the XV century the first step was made in the emerging universe of Mind which was marked with the Renaissance. The new cultural approach appealed to antiquity, seeing it as an example of humanistic relations. The invention in the mid XV century of typography played a huge role in the spread of ancient heritage and new attitudes across Europe.
Renaissance affected not only all spheres of arts, but the most important thing that affected the lives of people – was a revision of life in general, the very space around the man changed. It was this era when the Western Europe for the first time gained the scientific, technical and cultural leadership. Its superiority made ​​possible the great voyages of discovery, military and economic victory of Europeans among other peoples and dissemination of European culture worldwide. Renaissance brought about an entirely new culture, which never before had been known to mankind.
In my opinion, people simply wanted to recreate the world which was known to the human race before the Medieval because, as for me, they wanted to live the lives their ancestors lived and feel that harmony which was seized by the dark ages of Medieval. Medieval period is often called hopeless barbarism and ignorance that followed the death of a brilliant classical culture of the Ancient World. Only for this reason the people of Renaissance strived to find justice in copying ideas, ideals and concepts predominant during the Antiquity. And, I believe they created a new society, they marked a new stage of human development which is known as revival of human dignity and beauty – the Renaissance. I believe, Renaissance was the successful recreation of ideas and paradigms of the Ancient World, but the world people knew in the XV century differed greatly from times of Antiquity, mainly due to scientific development and level of life.
During the XIV century former social framework began to lose its importance and a slightly noticeable rise of the common people emerged – of the urban artisans and peasants who defended their rights. Birth of a new society was carried out at the cost of enormous hardship and countless tribulations. No doubt, in Europe XIV century was the richest on a variety of crises and catastrophes. Those crises were:
- Political Conflicts. The Hundred Years` War exhausted England and France, while Germany was in a constant state of anarchy.
- Social conflicts. Jacquerie in France, the peasant uprisings in the Netherlands and England, and bloody urban unrest – "democratic revolution" during the course of which in most German cities, in Italy and in France ambitious handicraft enterprises were clashing with aristocrats. As a part of these conflicts numerous cases of beatings and expulsion of Jews took place.
- Natural disasters. It seems that the history of the European continent has never known anything like that: the great famine in the years 1315-1317 and 1347-1349 epidemic of the black plague.
Across Europe, people were asking themselves one question: why this calamity has befallen them? Along with divine reasons people often blamed tramps, beggars, dissentients and Jews finding them to be reasons for those disasters.
Renaissance was, literally, the savior to those who were subject to tortures because of their difference in comparison to others who were in majority. Renaissance, with its largest ideal of human life, brought an end to tyranny of the Church, unlawfulness of tyrants, and impunity of really guilty. For sure, with its help those massacres against human dignity didn`t disappear, however their occurrence decreased. Finally, “black ages” of injustice and strangle of the Church was defeated in the times of Reformation which started in the XVI century with a struggle against the Church in the German lands.