CH9, CH11&CH12

(CH9)

• For a thousand years (600-1600), ppls claiming allegiance to Islam represented a highly successful, prosperous, and expansive civ., encompassing parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While Chinese culture and Buddhism provided the cultural anchor for East Asia during the third-wave millennium and Christianity did the same for Europe, the realm of Islam touched on both of them and decisively shaped the history of the entire Afro-Eurasian world.
• Islam thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history.
• Submission to Allah was the primary obligation of believers and the means of achieving a God-conscious life in this world and a place in paradise after death.
• The message of the Quran challenged not only the ancient polytheism of Arab religion and the social injustice of Mecca but also the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society, which was so prone to war, feuding, and violence.
• The 5 Pillars of Islam: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God"; ritual prayer performed 5 times a day; almsgiving; fasting during Ramadan; the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). 
• "greater jihad" and "lesser jihad"
• Muhammad was not only a religious figure but also, unlike Jesus or Buddha, a political and military leader able to implement his vision of an ideal Islamic society.

(CH11)

• 4,000B.C.E. beginning of pastoral economies.
• 1,000B.C.E. beginning of horseback riding.
• 1209-1368 Mongol rule in China
• 1237-1480 Mongol rule in Russia
• Pastoral societies' generally less productive economies and their need for large grazing areas meant that they supported far smaller populations than did agricultural societies.Kin-ship based groups/clans,and tribes. Nomadic societies generally offered women a higher status, fewer restrictions, and a greater role in public life. Mongol women frequently served as political advisers and active in military affairs as well.
• Pastoral people could not depend solely on their own production; they actively sought access to the foodstuffs, manufactured goods, and luxury items from farming communities.
• The fierce independence of widely dispersed pastoral clans and tribes as well as their internal rivalries made any enduring political unity difficult to achieve. Charismatic leaders, such as Chinggis Khan, were periodically able to weld together a series of tribal alliances that for a time became powerful states. In doing so, they often employed the device of "fictive kinship," designating allies as blood relatives and treating them with a corresponding respect.
• The Xionnu Confederacy.
• In Anatolia, formerly ruled by Christian Byzantium, Muslim Turks brought both Islam and a massive infusion of Turkic culture, language, and people even as they created the Ottoman Empire, which by 1500 became one of the great powers of Eurasia.
• For all of its size and fearsome reputation, the Mongol Empire left a surprisingly modest cultural imprint on the world it had briefly governed. Unlike the Arabs, the Mongols bequeathed to the world no new language, religion, or civilization.

(CH12)

• Is Columbus a hero, a pioneer of progress and enlightenment? or a perpetrator of genocide, a slave trader, a thief, and a pirate?
• Significant events of 15th century world history:
• Timur, a Central Asian Turkic warrior, launched the last major nomadic invasion of adjacent civilizations.
• Russia emerged from two centuries of Mongol rule to begin a huge empire-building project across northern Asia.
• A new European civilization was taking shape in the Renaissance.
• In 1405 an enormous Chinese fleet, dwarfing that of Columbus, set out across the entire Indian Ocean basin, only to voluntarily withdraw 28 years later.
• The Islamic Ottoman Empire put a final end to Christian Byzantium with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453
• Spanish Christians completed the "reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims in 1492.
• The Aztec and Inca Empires gave a final and spectacular expression to Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations before they were both swallowed up in the burst of European imperialism that followed the arrival of Columbus.
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