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Another factor is its reputation for egalitarianism and tolerance. While Christianity in Africa suffers the stigma of being the white man's religion, Islam can boast that it has neither caste nor color bar; to the valid charge that it was Arab traders who sold the black man into slavery, there is the valid answer that it was white Christians who bought him. Islam, moreover, is monolithic: the differences between its principal sects —Sunnite and Shiite—are far less than those between Paul Tillich and a Pentecostal preacher, and acrimony stops at the prayer rug. On Friday, Islam's sabbath, Moslems of all sects gather in the same mosque, just as Indonesians and Malaysians set aside political quarrels to kneel side by side on the hajj. Above all, Islam, which is Arabic for submission, is something more than a religion. Culture and ideology as well as faith, it is a way of life in which human activities should conform to the divine will of God, as made known to the world by a remarkable man and a remarkable book.
Flight from Polytheism. God's chief prophet was born about A.D. 570, the illiterate orphaned son of a Meccan merchant. Mohammed grew up to be a desert trader and thereby earned a tidy fortune. In his 40th year, according to Islamic tradition, he had a vision of the Angel Gabriel, who told him that there was only one God. In polytheistic Mecca, which earned a substantial income from pilgrims who came to worship at the shrines of some 360 deities, Mohammed's monotheism was an unwelcome message, and in 622 he was forced to make his hegira, or flight, to Medina. There he expanded his doctrine of God into a code of law, through a number of revelations that were compiled after his death as the Koran (meaning discourse). To devout Moslems, the Koran is the infallible, unchangeable word of God. To nonbelievers, it is one of the world's most puzzling sacred books, a disorganized collection of poetic desert wisdom and spiritual law interspersed with odd gleanings from the Old and New Testaments. Islam believes that Mohammed was the last in a line of prophets that extends from Abraham through Jesus. His revelations from God thus superseded those of Judaism and Christianity. Like the Jews, Mohammed shunned pork as unclean flesh, and he paraphrased many stories from the Hebrew Bible—Noah and the Ark, Joseph and his brothers—in the Koran. Although the idea of Christ as God's son was blasphemy to Mohammed, he accepted Jesus' virgin birth and ascension to heaven as divine truths.
By the time of his death in 632, Mohammed's Islam was well established as the faith of Arabia. Within a century its sway extended from Spain to India. Medieval Islam was one of history's great civilizations, something grander by far than what is implied in the fairytale world of The Arabian Nights. In the first half of the 10th century, wrote the late Harvard Science Historian George Sarton, "the main task of mankind was accomplished by Moslems. The greatest philosopher, Al Farabi, was a Moslem. The greatest mathematicians, Abu Kamil and Ibrahim ibn Sinan, were Moslems. The greatest geographer and encyclopedist, Al Masudi, was a Moslem." From Islamic civilization came the rediscovery of Aristotle, the first scientific astronomy and medicine since the Greeks, the sinuous architecture of Spain's Alhambra and India's Taj Mahal.