Islam is the world’s fastest-growing major religion . Islamic extremism dates back to the early history of Islam with the emergence of the Kharijites in the 7th century CE. The worship of female goddesses by the Vietnamese dates back to prehistory. Ancient Greeks and Romans were strongly affected by these gods and goddesses. Muslim dynasties were soon established and subsequent empires such as those of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks, Seljukids, and the Ayyubids were among some of the largest and most powerful in the world. Within the century of the establishment of Islam upon the Arabian Peninsula and the subsequent rapid expansion during the early Muslim conquests, one of the most significant empires in world history was formed. The Timurid Renaissance and the Islamic expansion in South and East Asia fostered cosmopolitan and eclectic Muslim cultures in the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Indonesia and China. Central Asia, South Asia (in Afghanistan, Maldives, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (in Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia), Southeastern Europe (in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, among others), Eastern Europe (in the Caucasus, Crimea, and the Volga), and Southern Europe (in Spain, Portugal, and Sicily prior to re-Christianizations).

As Catholics had a single, central leader in the Pope, infiltrating and taking control of the religion was extremely difficult. Muslimization’ has more recently also been used as a term coined to describe the overtly Muslim practices of new converts to the religion who wish to reinforce their newly acquired religious identity. The early Muslim conquests that occurred following the death of Muhammad in 632 CE led to the creation of the caliphates, expanding over a vast geographical area; conversion to Islam was boosted by Arab Muslim forces expanding over vast territories and building imperial structures over time. These early caliphates, coupled with Muslim economics and trading, the Islamic Golden Age, and the age of the Islamic gunpowder empires, resulted in Islam’s spread outwards from Mecca towards the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and the creation of the Muslim world. Muslim communities have existed in West Africa for over a millennium, pointing to the fact that Islam is a significant part of the African landscape.

The Shi’a Quranic exegesis scholar and thinker Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei, in his commentary Balance of Judgment on the Exegesis of the Qur’an attempted to show the infallibility of Musa in regard to his request for a vision of God and his breaking of his promise to Khidr as a part of the Shi’a doctorine of prophetic infallibility (Ismah). He contends that supposing that the gunman was firing at random, being part of a large crowd explains-raises the probability-that someone or other is shot, but not that you are shot. He’s always throwing himself a pity party because no one likes being around him, but he also won’t acknowledge or change the reasons for people not wanting to be around him. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny. Yes, Moses promised them that faithfulness to God would make them “rich.” But to them, that meant having a couple of cows and acres of land on which they could grow their own food.

The objective of the conquests was mostly of a practical nature, as fertile land and water were scarce in the Arabian Peninsula. Ira M. Lapidus distinguishes between two separate strands of converts of the time: animists and polytheists of tribal societies of the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent and the native Christians and Jews existing before the Muslims arrived. About 85-90 percent of Muslims in the world are Sunni Muslims with most of the world’s Shia Muslims living in Iran (about 90 percent of the population) or Iraq (60 percent of the population). Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective. Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective. These terms are used concurrently with the terminology of the “spread of Islam” to refer to the process through which a society shifts towards the religion of Islam and becomes largely Muslim. In contemporary usage, “Islamization” and its variants too can also be used with implied negative connotations to refer to the perceived imposition of an Islamist social and political system on a society with an indigenously different social and political background. The English synonym of “Muslimization”, in use since before 1940 (e.g., Waverly Illustrated Dictionary), conveys a similar meaning as “Islamization”.