A social environment is the combination of influencing factors, but it does not consist merely of material or physical components. There are high moral values that motivate people. These ideals regulate the material conditions and include freedom, justice, fairness and a desire to establish a functional social order that will ensure that man will be free from pressure as he makes the choice between good and evil.When we accept physical conditions as the factors shaping historical and social events, we effectively glorify physical strength. This may even urge us to distort historical events and even history itself. Orientalism, which may be described as the act of portraying the East and the Muslim world from a Western perspective, thus can be said to have sprung from this attempt to distort history. In his famous 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck talks about the conquest of İstanbul. According to Steinbeck, Turks attacked the Byzantines as a mob of looters and the already dilapidated walls of the city could not withstand their attacks. For the American novelist, the main factor that enabled Turks to conquer İstanbul was “brute force.” Following in the wake of Western historians, we can expand this theory to include all Muslim history: Muslims spread to three continents with the brute force of their swords and soon managed to dominate hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land.
But, it is only a fictional description. From another perspective, we see a surprising scene with respect to the rapid expansion of Muslims in history. Muslims spread throughout the world from the Arabian Peninsula in three main branches: those who went through Asia until they reached the Chinese border, those who moved toward north and west via Anatolia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and those who progressed toward Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, southern France and Sicily.
The main enabler of the Muslim expansion was, of course, not their military strength or capabilities -- or their sword, as the Orientalists would suggest. The primary reason was that they advocated freedom of religion and conscience and ensured that this freedom would be established without discrimination for the members of all religions in the countries they conquered. The second reason was that they liberated peasants from the rule of feudal lords and implemented new land laws and systems to maintain their liberation. The third reason was that they allowed different traditions, customs and lifestyles to coexist, which the modern Western civilization that currently dominates the whole planet has not been able to achieve until now.
Unlike the Western expansion, Muslims did not feel the need to meddle with the established legal practices and customs of the local non-Muslim people in the countries they conquered. There were three main exceptions to this: First, they banned the Indian practice of burning a woman alive with her dead husband. Second, they prohibited the Egyptian tradition of sacrificing a young girl to ensure that the Nile would be fertile that year -- which was banned by Caliph Umar. Finally, they prohibited incest, which was a common practice in some parts of Iran.
When Caliph Umar wanted to prohibit the aforementioned Egyptian tradition, the issue was debated exhaustively in Medina. Some of the companions of the Prophet (sahaba) questioned whether they were entitled to meddle with the customs or established practices of the local people. Eventually, they concluded that the ultimate purpose of Islamic Shariah as the last code of laws revealed by God as well as of all the previous ancient Shariahs is to preserve life, property, future generations, religion and reason, and in this context, the said Egyptian tradition violated the right to life of young girls. In other words, even this tradition that cruelly violates a person’s right to life was abolished only after long debates and negotiations. Thus, we can conclude that the driving force behind the Muslim expansion in history was their respect for freedom, justice and local traditions and customs.
