IMPACT OF MUSLIM SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS: 1200-1400
This essay discusses how Muslim social and religious organizations contributed to stability and/or change during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A variety of such institutions played an important role in promoting the Islamicization of society which in general had a stabilizing effect by filling vacuums created by the turnover and militarization of political leadership and the destruction of traditional political, economic and cultural elites which occurred during these centuries. Some of the schismatic movements within Islam accelerated its fragmentation with different Muslim organizations contributing to the ascendancy of some Islamic sects over others and in some areas to a weakening of central authority.
Role of Muslim Institutions in the Revival of Sunni Islam
According to Lapidus, despite the political fragmentation of the Arab empire during the last three hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate (950-1258), "a new form of Islamic state, community and religion came into being" (139). During the 10th and 11th centuries various forms of Shiism, Ismailism in Fatimid Egypt and the Druze and Nusayri sects among others, had made inroads on Sunni Islam in the west Mediterranean area. During the reign of the Kurdish-Seljuk warrior kings Nur al-Din and Salah al-Din in the 12th century and their Ayyubid and Mamluk successors in Egypt and Syria in the 13th and 14th centuries, the dominance of Sunni Islam was re-established over other Muslim sects as well as over the Christian crusaders who were ousted from the Levant by the early 1300s.
In the Islamic umma or community of believers, the teachings of the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the hadith, and the Holy Law or sharia established social norms. Various social and religious institutions, which were supported and subsidized by the aforesaid rulers, helped bring about the Sunni Revival in the...