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Egypt Early Developments
During his lifetime, Muhammad was the spiritual and temporal
leader of the Muslim community. He established the concept of
Islam as a complete, all-encompassing way of life for individuals
and society. Islam teaches that Allah revealed to Muhammad the
immutable principles of correct behavior. Islam therefore obliged
Muslims to live according to these principles. It also obliged
the community to perfect human society on earth according to holy
injunctions. Islam generally made no distinction between religion
and state; it merged religious and secular life, as well as
religious and secular law. Muslims have traditionally been
subject to the sharia (Islamic jurisprudence, but in a larger
sense meaning the Islamic way). A comprehensive legal system, the
sharia developed gradually during the first four centuries of
Islam, primarily through the accretion of precedent and
interpretation by various judges and scholars. During the tenth
century, legal opinion hardened into authoritative doctrine, and
the figurative bab al ijtihad (gate of interpretation)
gradually closed. Thereafter, Islamic law has tended to follow
precedent rather than to interpret law according to
circumstances.
In 632, after Muhammad's death the leaders of the Muslim
community consensually chose Abu Bakr, the Prophet's father-in-
law and one of his earliest followers, to succeed him. At that
time, some people favored Ali, the Prophet's cousin and husband
of his favorite daughter Fatima, but Ali and his supporters (the
Shiat Ali, or party of Ali, commonly known as Shia) eventually
accepted the community's choice. The next two caliphs (from
khalifa, literally successor)--Umar, who succeeded in 634,
and Uthman, who took power in 644--enjoyed the recognition of the
entire community. When Ali finally succeeded to the caliphate in
656, Muawiyah, governor of Syria, rebelled in the name of his
murdered kinsman, Uthman. After the ensuing civil war, Ali moved
his capital to Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), where in a short
time he, too, was murdered.
Ali was the last of the so-called four orthodox caliphs. His
death marked the end of the period in which all Muslims
recognized a single caliph. Muawiyah then proclaimed himself
caliph from Damascus. The Shia, however, refusing to recognize
Muawiyah or his line of Umayyad caliphs, withdrew, causing
Islam's first great schism. The Shia supported the claims of
Ali's sons and grandsons to a presumptive right to the caliphate
based on descent from the Prophet through Fatima and Ali. The
larger faction of Islam, the Sunni, claimed to follow the
orthodox teaching and example of the Prophet as embodied in the
sunna.
Early Islam was intensely expansionist. Fervor for the new
religion, as well as economic and social factors, fueled this
expansionism. Conquering armies and migrating tribes swept out of
Arabia and spread Islam. By the end of Islam's first century,
Islamic armies had reached far into North Africa and eastward and
northward into Asia. Among the first countries to come under
their control was Egypt, which Arab forces invaded in 640. The
following year, Amr ibn al As conquered Cairo (then known as
Babylon) and renamed the city Al Fustat. By 647, after the
surrender of Alexandria, the whole country was under Muslim rule
(see The Arab Conquest, 639-41
, ch. 1). Amr, Egypt's first Muslim
ruler, was influenced by the Prophet's advice that Muslims should
be kind to the Egyptians because of their kinship ties to Arabs.
According to Islamic tradition, Ismail's mother, Hagar, was of
Egyptian origin.
Amr allowed the Copts to choose between converting to Islam
or retaining their beliefs as a protected people. Amr gave them
this choice because the Prophet had recognized the special status
of the "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians), whose
scriptures he considered perversions of God's true word but
nevertheless contributory to Islam. Amr believed that Jews and
Christians were people who had approached but not yet achieved
the perfection of Islam, so he did not treat them like pagans who
would be forced into choosing between Islam and death. Jews and
Christians in Muslim territories could live according to their
own religious laws and in their own communities if they accepted
the position of dhimmis, or tolerated subject peoples.
Dhimmis were required to recognize Muslim authority, pay
additional taxes, avoid proselytism among Muslims, and give up
certain political rights. By the ninth century A.D., most
Egyptians had converted to Islam.
Amr had chosen Al Fustat as the capital of Islamic Egypt
because a canal connected the city to the Red Sea, which provided
easy access to the Muslim heartland in the Arabian Peninsula. He
initiated construction of Cairo's oldest extant mosque, the Amr
ibn al As Mosque, which was completed in 711, several years after
his death. Successive rulers also built mosques and other
religious buildings as monuments to their faith and
accomplishments. Egypt's first Turkish ruler, Ahmad ibn Tulun,
built one of Cairo's most renowned mosques, the Ibn Tulun Mosque,
in 876.
A Shia dynasty, the Fatimids, conquered Egypt in 969 and
ruled the country for 200 years
(see
The Tulinids, Ikhshidids, Fatimids, and Ayyubids, 868-1260
, ch. 1). Although the Fatimids
endowed numerous mosques, shrines, and theological schools, they
did not firmly establish their faith (known today as
Ismaili Shia Islam--see Glossary) in
Egypt. Numerous sectarian conflicts among
Fatimid Ismailis after 1050 may have been a factor in Egyptian
Muslim acceptance of Saladin's (Salah ad Din ibn Ayyub)
reestablishment of Sunni Islam as the state religion in 1171. Al
Azhar theological school, endowed by the Fatimids, changed
quickly from a center of Shia learning to a bastion of Sunni
orthodoxy. There were virtually no Ismailis in Egypt in 1990,
although large numbers lived in India and Pakistan and smaller
communities were in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and several
countries in East Africa.
Data as of December 1990
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