The Spread of Islam began when prophet Muhammad (570 - 632) started preaching the revelation he claimed to have received from God at the age of 40. During his lifetime the Muslim ummah was established in Arabia by way of their conversion or allegiance to Islam. In the first centuries conversion to Islam followed the rapid growth of the Muslim world created by the conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphs.
Muslim dynasties were soon established and subsequent empires such as those of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Almoravids, Seljukids, Ajuuraan, Adal and Warsangali in Somalia, Mughals in India and Safavids in Persia and Ottomans were among the largest and most powerful in the world. The people of the Islamic world created numerous sophisticated centers of culture and science with far-reaching mercantile networks, travelers, scientists, hunters, mathematicians, doctors and philosophers, all of whom contributed to the Golden Age of Islam.
The activities of this quasi-political community of believers and nations, or ummah, resulted in the spread of Islam over the centuries, spreading outwards from Mecca to the Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Pacific Ocean on the east. As of October 2009, there were 1.571 billion Muslims, making Islam the second-largest religion in the world.
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“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)