The History of Islam

This page covers the history shared by Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Muslims and names the branch where accounts differ. How the branches formed is told more fully on the Branches page.

How did Islam begin?

Muslims and historians tell the story of Islam's first years differently, so both accounts appear here side by side. The tradition's account draws on the Quran, the Hadith (reports of what Muhammad said and did), and the early biographies of Muhammad, among them that of Muhammad ibn Ishaq (died about 767).¹

How do scholars weigh the early sources?

Scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim, disagree about how far the early Muslim sources can be trusted. This page groups their views by method into three broad positions, each held by named scholars.

A traditional reading. Scholars in this group hold that the Quran was preserved and fixed early, in or soon after Muhammad's lifetime. In the Sunni Hadith collection of al-Bukhari, Zayd ibn Thabit, one of Muhammad's scribes, gathers the Quran under the first caliph, Abu Bakr, from written pieces and from those who knew it by heart. Uthman later has standard copies made and sent to each province.⁸⁹ The Shia scholar al-Khoei argues that the Quran already existed as a complete collection in Muhammad's lifetime, and rejects the reports that credit the first collection to the caliphs.¹⁰ Yousef Wahb, writing for the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, argues that it was preserved by memorization and writing in Muhammad's own time.¹¹

Many Western scholars accept a similar date. Alford Welch, writing in the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1986, said that the tradition's unanimous attribution of an official text to Uthman leads most Western scholars to accept that the Quran's arrangement and basic consonantal text go back to the caliph Uthman, who ruled from 644 to 656.¹²¹³ In 2014, Nicolai Sinai argued that neither the inscriptions nor the literary evidence he examined rule out this conventional dating.¹³ In 2015, radiocarbon tests dated the parchment of two Quran leaves held by the University of Birmingham to between 568 and 645, with what the university calls 95.4 percent accuracy.⁷

On the Hadith, Muslim scholars such as Muhammad Mustafa Azami argue that reports were written down much earlier than critics allowed.³

A critical reading. Joseph Schacht, building on the work of Ignaz Goldziher, held in 1950 that every legal hadith from Muhammad should be treated as a later invention unless shown otherwise. Mohammad Hashim Kamali calls this the most extreme position on the Hadith's authenticity, and Azami called many of Schacht's conclusions exaggerated.³ Crone writes that hadith were passed on to validate law and doctrine, not to record history in the modern sense, and that, passed on orally as very short statements, they easily drifted from their original meaning as conditions changed.⁶

A revisionist reading. In 1977, John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies and Crone and Michael Cook's Hagarism questioned the standard scholarly account from several angles, Stephen Shoemaker of the University of Oregon writes. Wansbrough placed the shaping of the Quran's traditions in the religious world of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia rather than the Hijaz, the region of western Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina.¹²

Shoemaker himself argues that the fixed, standard text of the Quran is owed to the caliph Abd al-Malik (ruled 685 to 705) and his governor al-Hajjaj. He writes that most scholars dismissed earlier arguments of this kind, and that the traditional account has habitually won scholarly assent, which he holds it does not merit.¹²

The Sacred Texts page covers how the Quran was written down.

What are the key periods in Islamic history?

When	What happened
About 570 CE	Birth of Muhammad in Mecca, by the traditional date.1
610 CE	First revelation, in the Muslim account.1
622 CE	The hijrah, Muhammad's migration to Medina; the Muslim calendar counts its years from it.16
632 CE	Death of Muhammad; Abu Bakr becomes caliph; Sunnis regard him as the first caliph.14
656 to 661 CE	Caliphate of Ali and the first civil war.15
661 to 750 CE	The Umayyad caliphate.14
680 CE	Husayn, Muhammad's grandson, is killed at Karbala in Iraq.15
750 to 1258 CE	The Abbasid caliphate, until the Mongols take Baghdad.14
909 to 1171 CE	The Fatimid caliphate, ruled by Ismaili Shia imams.15
1500s CE	The Safavids make Twelver Shiism the state religion of Iran.16
3 March 1924 CE	Turkey's assembly abolishes the caliphate.17
1978 to 1979 CE	Revolution in Iran.16

Who led the community after Muhammad?

Muslims disagree about who should have led them after Muhammad, and that question still divides Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Muslims. When Muhammad died in 632, the core of the community acclaimed Abu Bakr, one of the earliest Muslims, as its leader. All Sunnis regard him as the first caliph, or successor.¹⁴

Sunni teaching holds that Muhammad did not explicitly name a successor, so his community chose one.¹⁸ A Sunni hadith reports the second caliph, Umar, saying that Muhammad had left the succession undecided.¹⁹ The Sunni creed of al-Tahawi, as the teaching institute SeekersGuidance presents it, affirms the caliphate first for Abu Bakr, then Umar, Uthman, and Ali, whom Sunnis call the Rightly Guided Caliphs.²⁰

Shia Muslims hold that Muhammad appointed Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, as his successor at Ghadir Khumm, not long before his death, and that the community passed him over.¹⁵ Rizvi, a Shia scholar, quotes Muhammad there: Whomsoever's Master I am, this 'Ali is his Master.⁵ He argues that the beginning of Islam and Shi'ism was at the same time⁵.⁵ A version of the saying also appears in the Sunni collection of al-Tirmidhi.²¹ Sunni scholars, writes the Sunni teacher Uthman Khan, read it as praise of Ali's greatness, not necessarily as his designation as leader.²²

Ibadis, in Valerie Hoffman's account as Anthony Fiscella cites it, hold that leaders should be chosen by the community's leading men, not by family, tribe, or divine selection.²³

Historian Wilferd Madelung dates the Shia as a group to the support for Ali's caliphate in the civil war after Uthman's murder in 656. Ali was killed in 661, and his son Husayn died at Karbala in 680.¹⁵

How did Islam spread?

Muslim rule spread fast; conversion to Islam was slower. Islam entered Africa within decades of its beginnings, Nehemia Levtzion and Abdin Chande write, and empire-building took it to Morocco and Spain in the far west and to India in the east.²⁴ Conquered peoples converted gradually. Richard Bulliet found that only 7 percent of Persians had become Muslim by 750, that nearly 45 percent converted between 750 and 800, and that a majority took about another century.²⁵ The Quran states: There is no compulsion in religion. (Quran 2:256)²²

Elsewhere, traders and scholars carried the faith. Muslim traders from North Africa settled in the Sahelian kingdoms by the 11th century. In West Africa, Islam was first the religion of traders, then of rulers, and later, through the work of Muslim scholars, of ordinary people.²⁴ In Southeast Asia, A. H. Johns writes, Muslims were present in China from the early 8th century, which suggests that Muslim seamen and merchants were already stopping at the region's harbors. Port city-states ruled by Muslim sultans appear only in the 13th century.²⁶

Today, by Pew Research Center estimates for 2020, the Asia-Pacific region has the most Muslims, and a third of all Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, or India. Indonesia has about 240 million.²⁷ The spread map shows these changes over time.

What shaped Islam in the modern era?

Reform movements, European colonial rule, and the end of the caliphate shaped modern Islam. From the 18th century, reformers such as the movement in Arabia often called Wahhabi and the Sanusis of North Africa, building on the Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya, rejected the binding force of past consensus (ijma) and stressed independent legal reasoning (ijtihad).¹⁸ In the account of Tayeb El-Hibri and Maysam al-Faruqi, most Muslim countries adopted secular constitutions imposed by colonial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.¹⁸

After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, Turkey's Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate in 1922. On 3 March 1924 it abolished the caliphate itself, as one of a series of secularizing laws.¹⁷

In Iran, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, the revolution of 1978 to 1979 opened a new phase for Twelver Shiism. There, Nasr writes, Khomeini's doctrine of the rule of the jurist (vilayat-i faqih) set aside the classical Shia theory of government in favor of direct rule by a jurist.¹⁶

The Pew Research Center estimated about 2.0 billion Muslims in 2020, up from 1.7 billion in 2010.²⁷ For more on Muslims today, see the Today page.