| Although lands of the Islamic world now occupy a broad belt of territories ranging from the African shores of the Atlantic to the Indonesian archipelago, the core regions of Western Asia where Islam originated exercised a decisive influence on its development. Compared to Western Europe and North America, the region is perennially short on rainfall. During the winter, rain and snow born by westerlies from the Atlantic fall in substantial quantities on the Atlas and Riffian Mountains, the Cyrenaican massif, and Mount Lebanon, with the residue falling intermittently on the Green Mountain of Oman, the Zagros, the Elburz, and the mountains of Afghanistan. But the only rains that occur with predictable regularity fall in the highlands of Yemen and Dhufar, which catch the Indian Ocean monsoons, and the Junguli region lying south of the Caspian Sea under the northern slopes of the Elburz, which catches moisture-laden air flowing southward from Russia. |
Originally built in the fourteenth century, the mosque at Agades, in Niger, is made of mud. Its structure is constantly renewed by workers bearing new mud who climb up the wooden posts that protrude from the sides and serve as scaffolding. |
| Before recent times, when crops such as wheat, requiring large amounts of water, appeared in the shape of food imports, and underground fossil water (stored for millions of years in aquifers) became available through modern methods of drilling, agriculture was highly precarious. A field that had yielded wheat for millennia would fail when the annual rainfall was one inch instead of the usual twenty. Ancient peoples understood this well, and provided themselves with granaries. However, agriculture did flourish in the great river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Here the annual flooding caused by the tropical rains in Africa and melting snows in the Anatolian and Iranian highlands produced regular harvests and facilitated the development of the complex city-based cultures of ancient Sumer, Assyria, and Egypt. The need to manage finely calibrated systems of irrigation using the nutrient-rich waters of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile required complex systems of recording and control, making it necessary for literate priestly bureaucrats to govern alongside the holders of military power. Together with the Yellow River in China and the Indus Valley, the three great river systems of the Fertile Crescent are at the origins of human civilization. The first states, in the sense of orderly systems of government based on common legal principles, appeared in these regions more than five millennia ago. |
| .The limited extent of the soil water necessary for agricultural production had a decisive impact on the evolution of human societies in the arid zone. Though conditions vary from one region to another, certain features distinguish the patterns of life from those of the temperate zones to the north or tropical zones to the south. Where rainfall is scarce and uncertain, animal husbandry — the raising of camels, sheep, goats, cattle, and, where suitable, horses — offers the securest livelihood for substantial numbers of humans. The “pure deserts” or sand seas of shifting dunes shaped by the wind, which cover nearly one-third of the land area of Arabia and North Africa, are wholly unsuitable for human and animal life, and have generally been avoided by herdsmen, traders, and armies. But in the broader semidesert regions complex forms of nomadic and semi nomadic pastoralism have evolved. In winter the flocks and herds will range far into the wadis or semidesert areas, to feed on the grasses and plants that can spring up after the lightest of showers. In the heat of summer they will move, where possible, to pastures in the highlands, or cluster near pools or wells. Unlike peasant cultivators, a portion of whose product may be extracted by priests in the form of offerings or by the ruler in taxes, nomadic pastoralists will often avoid the confines of state power. People are organized into tribes or patrilineal kinship groups descended from a common male ancestor. Military prowess is encouraged because, where food resources are scarce, tribal or “segmentary” groups may have to compete with each other, or make raids on settled villages, in order to survive. Property is held communally, classically in the form of herds, rather than in the form of crop-yielding land. Property and territory are not coterminous (as they tended to become in regions of higher rainfall) because the land may be occupied by different users at different seasons of the year. Vital resources, such as springs or wells in which everyone has an interest, are often considered as belonging to God, and are entrusted to the custodianship of special families regarded as holy. |
As Islam established itself along the Silk Road, mosques were built for travelers and local converts. This mosque in the Xinjiang province of China reflects the Central Asian influence in its design. |
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