HIST 122
Spring 2014
Dr. Hutton
NVC
Weekly Assignment #8
Due: Thurs., 4/24
Read Tignor, Chap. 9, pp. 321-339 (2nd ed. 367-388), & answer these questions:
1. What do Muslims believe about Muhammad and the Quran?
2. How was Islam related to Judaism and Christianity?
3. What factors contributed to the successful spread of Islam across central AfroEurasia?
4. What are the Five Pillars of Islam?
5. How did the Umayyads govern the Islamic empire?
6. What was the Abbasid revolution? What policies did the Abbasid dynasty follow?
7. What were the caliphate, the ulama and Sharia?
8. How did Muhammad’s relationships with his wives mirror the changes in gender
rules in early Islam?
9. How did the Islamic Empire become divided? What features kept Muslims united?
10. How did the Abbasid scholars preserve and extend knowledge from Greece, Rome
and India?
11. What types of knowledge were most popular among Muslim scholars? How did the
state support scholars?
12. How did Islam spread into sub-Saharan Africa?
13. How did the division between Sunnis and Shiites emerge?
14. What crops traveled from Southeast Asia and India to the rest of the Muslim world?
What was the result?
Read “Quran and Hadith” and answer these questions:
15. How were Muslims supposed to show that they respected Allah?
16. What does the Quran say about fighting?
17. What does the Quran say about women?
Read Abu Ubaydallah al-Bakri, “A Description of 11th-century Ghana,” and answer these
questions:
18. How did Abu Ubaydallah al-Bakri describe the kingdom of Ghana? List four features
that he found interesting.
19. To what extent had the religion of Islam penetrated into Ghana by the 11th century?
20. How did the king of Malal convert to Islam? What does this story suggest about the
spread of Islam?