Worldwide in 2012, more than eight-in-ten people identified with a religious group. There are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated people around the globe, representing 84% of the world population. Over 1.6 billion of these people identified as Muslim, this is 23% of the world's population. This makes Islam the second most followed religion in the world behind only Christianity which has 32% of the world’s population. Islam was able to spread so quickly due to prevalent trade, their raids on other civilizations, and because they allowed other monotheistic peoples to continue practicing their religions for a small tax. The religious center of Islam is the city of Mecca, which is located in Western Arabia. Mecca had access to direct trade routes to all major cities throughout the Middle East which allowed culture (namely religion) to spread through trade. Some of these land trade routes included Damascus, Petra, and Constantinople. These routes were able to spread religion so efficiently due to their high volumes of exchange, all goods headed to China, India, and East Africa had to pass through Mecca. This can be seen on Document A on the included map, the solid lines clearly connect to many major …show more content…
This was called ghazu, but Islam ended this due to the fact that the Muslim communities (ummah) were not allowed to attack each other. A problem quickly erupted however, the rules of Islam didn’t prevent attacks against people of other religions so the Arab tribes had to start attacking more people outside their previous range. Eventually these attacks lead to some these attacked communities converting to Islam in order to prevent further raiding. Still facing the challenges of limited resources these tribes had to form alliances to continue pushing outwards for resources, this push for resources allowed them to conquer much of Persia and parts of