Islam

Islam is the second largest religion in the world. Only Christianity has more followers. People who follow the religion of Islam are called Muslims. Today, almost 1 billion people call themselves Muslims. Most Muslims live in a string of countries that extends from Morocco in North Africa to
Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

BIRTH OF ISLAM
An Arab trader named Muhammad was the founding prophet of Islam. He lived in Mecca, a busy trading town in Arabia (now called Saudi Arabia). Mecca had temples built to honor various pagan gods. Pilgrims visited these temples to worship statues of the gods. One day, while fasting in a cave, Muhammad had a vision. He returned to Mecca to preach a new religious message. He said there is only one god, not many, and no one should worship idols (statues of gods). He called on the people of Mecca to surrender themselves to Allah, as he called God.

ISLAM GAINS POWER
Muhammad’s message angered some Meccans. In the year 622, they forced him to flee to another city, now known as Medina. That journey—or Hegira, as Muslims call it—marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. In Medina, Muhammad became the head of the community. Soon, he led his Muslim followers back to Mecca. After a battle, the Meccans accepted Islam. Within a century, Muslims ruled an empire that stretched from India to Spain. Throughout this empire, Islam took root. The empire crumbled after a few centuries, but many people of these lands remained Muslims.

ISLAM DIVIDES
After Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslims disagreed about how the next leader should be chosen. One group came to be known as Sunnis and the other as Shias. Islam remains divided into these two branches. By the year 900, a Muslim movement called Sufism had developed. Sufis seek a personal experience of God. Many great Muslim poets have been Sufis. Sufis helped to spread Islam long after the Islamic empire crumbled.

WHAT DO MUSLIMS BELIEVE?
The Muslim faith centers on five beliefs and practices. These are known as the five pillars of Islam. According to the five pillars, Muslims must
1. Accept that only one God exists and Muhammad was his messenger.
2. Perform certain prayers five times a day.
3. Fast from dawn to dusk during a month called Ramadan.
4. Give a portion of their wealth to the poor.
5. Visit Mecca at least once if they are able to. These practices are based on the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an (also spelled Koran). Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the word of God, delivered through Muhammad. Muslim practices are also based on the Hadith—Muhammad’s own deeds and sayings as eported by his companions.

ISLAMIC LAWS AND CUSTOMS
In the early Islamic empire, the government and the religion were he same. All questions that came up were decided by religious scholars. Their decisions filled in a set of laws called the Sharia. These laws, which are also drawn from the Qur’an and Hadith, cover every aspect of life. They tell what crimes should be punished and how. They set the rules for marriage, contracts, and inheritance. Islam is thus a complete way of life. In this way of life, men and women generally have different roles. Their activities are often kept quite separated. Families sometimes arrange marriages. Women are expected to be well covered when they go outdoors. In some countries, they have to wear a veil covering their body. In Arab countries, such a covering is called a burka. The mosque is the traditional place of worship for Muslims. Friday is their holy day, or day of worship. Islam teaches that all Muslims are equal before God. This teaching gives Muslims around the world a sense of community, no matter what country or social class they come from.

Communism

What if nobody was rich and nobody was poor? Suppose valuable things like land and factories belonged to everyone. Imagine a world in which everyone worked, but no one got paid. Why? Because everything would be free. These are among the basic ideas of a movement called communism.

HOW WAS COMMUNISM BORN?
The ideas of communism became popular in the early 1800s. At that time, the first big factories were forming. Most workers in these factories earned low wages. Meanwhile, the factory owners were getting rich. This made many workers angry. Two Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, turned this anger into a political movement. They announced the goals of this movement in their 1848 book, The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels said that all through history, different classes (groups of people) had been at war. They said the warring classes of their time were the owners of businesses and the people who worked for them. Marx and Engels called for a world in which the workers themselves owned all businesses. They said that if workers were in charge, everybody would get what they needed to live good lives. Marx explained these ideas further in a book called Das Kapital.

THE SPREAD OF COMMUNISM
The ideas of Marx and Engels spread through Europe. In Russia, a man named Vladimir Lenin said workers needed a small, organized group to lead a revolution on their behalf. To do this, he formed the Bolshevik Party (later called the Communist Party). In 1917, a revolution overthrew the emperor of Russia. In the fighting that followed, Lenin’s party took over. Soon, his communist government owned all the land, factories, stores, and businesses in Russia. The communists in Russia conquered some neighboring countries, too. They called their new empire the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union for short. After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin took power in the USSR. He used brutal force to make the Soviet Union into a communist country. Stalin killed, imprisoned, and tortured millions of people. He built a country in which everyone worked for the government. The government made almost all decisions for the people.

HOW DID COMMUNISM SPREAD?
In World War II, the Soviet Union fought on the side that won. When the war ended in 1945, the Soviet Union gained control over most of the countries in Eastern Europe. In China, meanwhile, a communist leader named Mao Zedong was rising in power. He seized control of his country in 1949. China, with its huge population, became the biggest communist country of all.

WHY DID COMMUNISM LOSE STRENGTH?
Many noncommunist countries fought to keep communism from spreading. They feared that communism would keep expanding and threaten noncommunist countries.The United States led the fight against communism, while the Soviet Union supported communist movements around the world. This struggle is known as the Cold War. It lasted for more than 40 years. By the 1980s, communism was failing. Under communism, the Soviet Union could not produce enough goods for its people. It grew poor. Eastern European countries began to break away from
the Soviet Union. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself broke apart into 15 separate countries. None of these countries have communist governments today.
In China, the Communist Party still holds power. But China is allowing privately owned businesses to grow again. Other communist countries today include Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. As a world movement, communism appears to be losing its
appeal.