Abstract
No religious tradition in history favored trade to the extent Islam did. The religion’s founder, Muhammad b. Abdallah of Mecca in west-central Arabia, was himself a businessman by profession. While in his 20s he became employed by a wealthy widow by the name of Khadija, and made his reputation by successfully carrying out a trade mission to Syria on her behalf; Khadija married him soon after.
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Notes
Traditional accounts of its size and importance may be exaggerated; see Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
A detailed case study of one such figure, Baba Tükles, is given by Devin DeWeese in Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde, State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 1994.
See Richard Bulliet, “Conversion to Islam and the Emergence of a Muslim Society in Iran,” in Nehemia Levtzion, ed., Conversion to Islam, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979, pp. 30–51.
V.V. Bartold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 3 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1959–1961, vol. 1, p. 16.
Edward H. Schafer, “Iranian Merchants in T’ang Dynasty Tales,” Semitic and Oriental Studies Presented to William Popper, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951, pp. 403–422.
Richard Bulliet, “Naw Bahar and the Survival of Iranian Buddhism,” Iran 14 (1976), pp. 140–145.
Ibn Hawkal, in M.J. DeGoeje, ed., Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, Leiden, 1889, vol. 2, p. 365.
Julian Baldick, Imaginary Muslims: the Uwaysi Sufis of Central Asia, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993, pp. 163–165.
Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of Rus, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 25.
See Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends, London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.
Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr., tr., Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels, Albany: SUNY Press, 1986, p. xi.
See Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
On the Qara-khanids see Peter Golden, “The Karakhanids and Early Islam,” in Denis Sinor, ed., Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 343–370, and Idem., Introduction, pp. 214–19.
See Joseph Fletcher, “The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China,” in B.F. Manz and Jonathan Lipman, eds., Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, London: Variorum, 1995, p. 5.
Donald Leslie, Islam in Traditional China: A Short History, Canberra: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1986, pp. 72–74.
Ou-yang Hsiu, New T’ang History, Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936, 221b/11b–12,
cited in Hajji Yusuf Chang, “The Hui (Muslim) Minority in China: An Historical Overview,” Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 8/1 (1987), p. 63. On apocryphal stories of the introduction of Islam into China, see Isaac Mason, “The Mohammadans of China: When, and How, They First Came,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, pp. 42–78.
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© 2010 Richard Foltz
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Foltz, R. (2010). The Islamization of the Silk Road. In: Religions of the Silk Road. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109100_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109100_5
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