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Islam : lit. submission to, having peace with, God; a religion founded by Prophet Mahomad. Although there have been many sects & movements in Islam, they are bound by a common faith & a sense of belonging to a single community; adherents of Islam are called Moslems or Muslims (one who submits). “The ethos of Islam is its attitude toward God: He is awful, transcendent, almighty, just, loving, merciful, & good; to His will they submit; Him they constantly praise & glorify; in Him alone they hope for there is an unbridgeable distinction between Creator & creature; they ask intercession of the prophets & saints, but they (the Shiites perhaps excepted) preserve jealously the distinction between Creator & creature, to Him alone they pray. He has given Man successive revelations through His prophets, but Man constantly falls away from these prophets & the merciful God sends new ones. Since Mahomad’s relations with the Jews & Christians became gradually worse, although Islam accepts Abraham & Jesus as the two principal prophets of God it believes that wherever the Koran differs from the Old Testament & the New Testament, it is because the Jews & Christians have corrupted or perverted the biblical text. Mohammed is the last prophet, & when the world falls away from Islam the end of the world will come. Islam is theoretically, a theocracy, & its caliph the vice-regent of God. The Prophet was succeeded by his last father-in-law Abu Bakr (573-634) as the first caliph; the 2nd caliph was Omar (c.581-killed in 644) who had been adviser to the Prophet & had organised the shura which had first elected Abu Bakr, & after Bakr’s death himself; the 3rd elected caliph was Othman (c.574-656) a son-in-law of the Prophet who belonged to the Omayyad; the 4th & last elected caliph was the Prophet’s first cousin & second convert Ali ibn Abi Tālib (c.602-killed in 661). [Compiled from Encyclopaedias Britannica & Columbia, (1950)] Sri Aurobindo: The first four were real Khalifās. Afterwards it became a political institution. ─ In the first four there was the reality of the Khilafat. They were centres of Islamic culture & had some spirituality. After that the Umayyad & other dynasties came & it became more & more religious & external. When it passed into the hands of the Turks it became a mere political institution without the fact of it. ─ Every time the Light has tried to descend it has met with resist­ance & opposition…. Sons of Light come, the earth denies & rejects them; afterwards, accepts them in name to reject them in substance. Only a small minority grows towards a spiritual birth, & it is through them that the Divine manifesta­tion takes place.... If kings & emperors had left Buddhism to those people who were really spiritual it would have been much better for real Buddhism. It was after Constantine embraced Christianity that it began to decline…. The same happened to Mohammedanism. When it succeeded, the followers of the Prophet became Khalifās; after them the religion declined. It is not kings & emperors that keep alive spirituality but people who are really spiritual that do so.” [Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 2007, pp. 268, 269-70, 578-79] Muawiya I established the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) becoming its first caliph in 661. He was the son of Abu Sufyan, a native of Mecca. He was converted the year of the surrender of Mecca & became Mohammed’s secretary. Under Omar he became the very able governor of Syria. He struggled with Ali over the government of the empire & led in the deposition of Hasan. As the 5th caliph he made Islam an autocracy, retaining the old forms of self-government. He made the Moslem empire the remarkably unified force that it was. Under him the Arabs became an obedient, flexible instrument of war & incorporated the Caucasus, Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb & the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus) into the Muslim world. ─ The Umayyad Caliphate was succeeded by the Abbasside. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire with its capital in Istanbul (Constantinople) claimed caliphal authority from 1517, inaugurating the Fourth major Caliphate (which was dissolved in March 1924). During the history of Islam, a few other Muslim states, almost all hereditary monarchies, have claimed to be caliphates. Historically, the caliphates were polities based in Islam which developed into multi-ethnic trans-national empires. [Vide Columbia Encyclopedia, 1950, & the Internet] Sri Aurobindo a Mohammedan disciple: All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God & of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal & universal & infinite & cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only…. Hindus & Confucians & Taoists & all others have as much right to enter into relation with God & find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time & finally decline & perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that Koran was the last message of God & there would be no other. God & Truth outlast these religions & manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. [SABCL 26:483-84] The Mother: In all religions we find invariably a certain number of people who possess a great emotional capacity & are full of a real & ardent aspiration, but have a very simple mind & do not feel the need of approaching the Divine through knowledge. For such natures religion has a use & it is even necessary for them; for, through external forms…it offers a kind of support & help to their inner spiritual aspiration…. But it is not the religion that gave them their spirituality; it is they who have put their spirituality into the religion. Put anywhere else, born into any other cult, they would have found there & lived there the same spiritual life. It is their own capacity; it is some power of their inner being & not the religion they profess that has made them what they are. This power in their nature is such that religion to them does not become a slavery or a bondage…it would be a crime to disturb their faith. [CWM Vol. 3:76-81]