Explain the impact of Islamic Culture on Socio-Cultural Practices.
Answers
Islamic culture is a term primarily used in secular academia to describe the cultural practices common to historically Islamic people—i.e., the culture of the Islamicate. The early forms of Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate to early Umayyad perioud, were predominantly Arab, Byzantine, Persian and Levantine. With the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, Muslim culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Persian, Egyptian, Caucasian, Turkic, Mongol, South Asian, Malay, Somali, Berber, Indonesian, and Moro cultures.
Islamic culture generally includes all the practices which have developed around the religion of Islam. There are variations in the application of Islamic beliefs in different cultures and traditions.
Islamic culture is a term primarily used in secular academia to describe the cultural practices common to historically Islamic people—i.e., the culture of the Islamicate. The early forms of Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate to early Umayyad perioud, were predominantly Arab, Byzantine, Persian and Levantine. With the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, Muslim culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Persian, Egyptian, Caucasian, Turkic, Mongol, South Asian, Malay, Somali, Berber, Indonesian, and Moro cultures.
Islamic culture generally includes all the practices which have developed around the religion of Islam. There are variations in the application of Islamic beliefs in different cultures and traditions.[1]
Language and literature
Edit
Main article: Islamic literature
Arabic
Edit
Main article: Arabic literature
Early Muslim literature is in Arabic, as that was the language of Muhammad's communities in Mecca and Medina. As the early history of the Muslim community was focused on establishing the religion of Islam, its literary output was religious in character. See the articles on Qur'an, Hadith, and Sirah, which formed the earliest literature of the Muslim community.
A map of Muslim populations by numbers, (Pew Research Center, 2009).
With the establishment of the Umayyad empire, secular Muslim literature developed.[citation needed] See The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. While having no religious content, this secular literature was spread by the Arabs all over their empires, and so became part of a widespread culture.[citation needed]
World Muslim population by percentage (Pew Research Center, 2014).
This is only one example of a vast heritage of literature and poetry works that were composed in Arabic besides enormous numbers of texts that dealt with theology, philosophy, mysticism, the sciences, whereby the Arabic language was the lingua franca of the Muslim world for over seven centuries till the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
Persian
Edit
Main article: Persian literature
By the time of the Abbasid empire, Persian had become the second language of Muslim World. The Abbasid caliphate was founded with the help of the Persian army general Abu Muslim of Khorasan. The support of Persians in assisting the establishment of a new dynasty resulted in the dominance of Persians in the Abbasid courts. Following the establishment of empire, the capital of the Muslim world was moved from the historically Roman city of Damascus to a newly established city of Baghdad, designed by the Persian city planner Naubakht. Baghdad itself is a Persian word and not Arabic, meaning god-given. Persian bureaucracy was used as the foundation of the new administration, with Persian viziers such as the Barmakids and Fadl ibn Sahl acting as grand viziers with considerable power.
The influence of Persian culture in bureaucracy and administration remained after the weakening of the Arab caliphates and the rise of Turkic and Mongol empires. The official language of the Seljuk empires, the Mongol empires in Western Asia (Ilkhanids) and the Mughal Empire of India was Persian, given that the majority of the viziers were Persians. In essence from the 11th Century until the 18th Century the lingua franca of Western, Central and South Asia as well as the Caucasus was Persian. This influence was weakened when India was colonised by the East India Company and Central Asia and the Caucasus were seized by the Russian Empire.
Given the extensive dominance of Persian in the eastern half of the Muslim world, it is not surprising that much of the most famous Muslim literature has been written in Persian, such as Khayyam in Nishapur, Saadi in Shiraz, Rumi in Anatolia Nizami in the Caucasus, Jami in Samarkand and Amir Khusrow in Delhi.
Tabatabaee-ha House, Kashan, Iran
Perso-Indian and Indian
Edit
Main articles: Bengali literature, Urdu literature, and Indo-Persian culture