Mohammed, the founder of Islam conquered Mecca and unilaterally declared Islam to be the only true religion ordained to govern the world. These statements may seem harsh and unforgiving, but they are true. It may be a fact that Andrew visited the Crimea (Khersonnesos), sailing (as was normal) from Sinope. Despite the long-running nature of the Sunni-Shia divide, the fact that the two sects coexisted in relative peace for many centuries suggests their struggles may have less to do with religion than with wealth and power. Though the two main sects within Islam, Sunni and Shia, agree on most of the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam, a bitter split between the two goes back some 14 centuries. “The psalmist goes on to encourage the godly to ‘know’ that the Lord is God. The first serious integration of Lord with the Vedic religion occurred with his association with the followers of Shakti. Eventually the Sunni majority (named for sunna, or tradition) won out, and chose Muhammad’s close friend Abu Bakr to become the first caliph, or leader, of the Islamic community. Despite their differences, Sunni and Shia have lived alongside each other in relative peace for most of history.

A common thread in most of these conflicts is the ongoing battle between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran for influence in the oil-rich Middle East and surrounding regions. Islamization of the world began in Mecca and spread first to the Middle East and South Asia. He decreed the spread of Islam to all non-Muslim individuals and nations-by force, if necessary. Both also have established traditions of pluralist and democratic Islam. If they continue to develop economically and link market development to efforts to revitalize Islamic education, as the moderate leadership in both countries is attempting, these countries will jump to the front of the global struggle to forge a pluralist and democratic Islam. Notwithstanding a conservative Islamist opposition in Malaysia and a tiny terrorist fringe in Indonesia, both of these countries have begun to develop an impressive system of democratic elections. It is a meaning system of social solidarity and identity, which provides the fabric of Chinese society, uniting all its levels from the lineages to the village or city communities, to the state and the national economy. Both religious and philosophical thinking raise many of the same, fascinating questions and possibilities about the nature of reality, the limits of reason, the meaning of life, and so on.

These three collections form the foundation for Muslim’s religious practices and culture known as Sharia, the entire body of Islamic law. If this happens, the achievement will be good news for the entire Muslim world. In short, a democratic Islam is emerging, and its first land of accomplishment may well be not the Arab heartland, but Muslim Southeast Asia. “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. There is need to be what you are, to prove that you know your job and that you know your trade and to prove you have the connections and available helpers as a direct result of yourself helping others before numerous times with love and professionalism. There are a number of Pentecostal Christians, Evangelical Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

These ideas are especially interesting when related to trinitarian conceptions, as they sometimes are. If God is supremely good, there had to be some overflowing of goodness in the form of a cosmos (see Stump & Kretzmann 1981, on the ideas of Dionysius the Areopagite; see Rowe 2004 for arguments that God is not free). By the eighteenth century there were many thousands of them, working as slaves on plantations. On the other hand, the writers of the New Testament were either eyewitnesses to the events they recorded, or they recorded firsthand testimony of others who were there. “The essence of the problem is that Muhammad died without a male heir, and he never clearly stated who he would want to be his successor,” says Lesley Hazleton, author of After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Sunni-Shia Split in Islam. “Neither of them are representative of the vast majority of Sunni Muslims or the vast majority of Shia Muslims around the world,” says Hazleton of the fundamentalist regimes governing both Saudi Arabia and Iran. “It was obviously intended by the Ummayads to put the definitive end to all claims to leadership of the ummah as a matter of direct descendence from Muhammad,” says Hazleton of Hussein’s death, and the death of all the surviving members of Muhammad’s family, at Karbala.