Islamic culture

Islamic culture and Muslim culture refer to cultural practices common to historically Islamic people. The early forms of Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate to early Umayyad perioud, were predominantly Arab, Byzantine, Persian and Levantine. With the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, Muslim culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Persian, Egyptian, Caucasian, Turkic, Mongol, South Asian, Malay, Somali, Berber, Indonesian, and Moro cultures.Northeast entrance to Delhi, India's Jama Masjid.The Great Mosque of Kairouan also called the Mosque of Uqba is at the same time the oldest mosque in North Africa (founded in 670 and still used as a place of worship) and one of the most important monuments of Islamic civilisation, situated in Kairouan, Tunisia.The fortress-palace of Alhambra, built in the 11th century, is a large monument and a popular tourist attraction.Istanbul's Sultan Ahmed Mosque was completed in 1616. Islamic culture and Muslim culture refer to cultural practices common to historically Islamic people. The early forms of Muslim culture, from the Rashidun Caliphate to early Umayyad perioud, were predominantly Arab, Byzantine, Persian and Levantine. With the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, Muslim culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Persian, Egyptian, Caucasian, Turkic, Mongol, South Asian, Malay, Somali, Berber, Indonesian, and Moro cultures. Islamic culture generally includes all the practices which have developed around the religion of Islam. There are variations in the application of Islamic beliefs in different cultures and traditions. Arabic literature (Arabic: الأدب العربي‎ / ALA-LC: al-Adab al-‘Arabī) is the writing, both prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is 'Adab', which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and which implies politeness, culture and enrichment. Arabic literature emerged in the 5th century with only fragments of the written language appearing before then. The Qur'an, widely regarded by people as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language, would have the greatest lasting effect on Arabic culture and its literature. Arabic literature flourished during the Islamic Golden Age, but has remained vibrant to the present day, with poets and prose-writers across the Arab world, as well as rest of the world, achieving increasing success. Persian literature comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and it is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Turkey, regions of Central Asia (such as Tajikistan) and South Asia where the Persian language has historically been either the native or official language. For instance, Rumi, one of best-loved Persian poets born in Balkh (in what is now the modern-day Afghanistan) or Vakhsh (in what is now the modern-day Tajikistan), wrote in Persian and lived in Konya, then the capital of the Seljuks in Anatolia. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature from Iran, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan, the wider Caucasus, Turkey, western parts of Pakistan, India, Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia. Not all Persian literature is written in Persian, as some consider works written by ethnic Persians in other languages, such as Greek and Arabic, to be included. At the same time, not all literature written in Persian is written by ethnic Persians or Iranians, as Turkic, Caucasian, and Indic poets and writers have also used the Persian language in the environment of Persianate cultures. Described as one of the great literatures of humanity, including Goethe's assessment of it as one of the four main bodies of world literature, Persian literature has its roots in surviving works of Middle Persian and Old Persian, the latter of which date back as far as 522 BCE, the date of the earliest surviving Achaemenid inscription, the Behistun Inscription. The bulk of surviving Persian literature, however, comes from the times following the Arab conquest of Persia c. 650 CE. After the Abbasids came to power (750 CE), the Iranians became the scribes and bureaucrats of the Arab empire and, increasingly, also its writers and poets. The New Persian language literature arose and flourished in Khorasan and Transoxiana because of political reasons, early Iranian dynasties such as the Tahirids and Samanids being based in Khorasan. Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Sa'di, Hafiz, Attar, Nezami, Rumi and Omar Khayyam are also known in the West and have influenced the literature of many countries. For a thousand years, since the invasion of India by the Ghaznavids, the Persian-Islamic culture of the eastern half of the Islamic world started to dominate the Indian culture. Persian was the official language of most Indian empires such as the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, the Deccan Sultanates (such as the Qutb Shahi dynasty) and the Mughal Empire. Persian artistic forms in literature and poetry such as ghazals have come to significantly affect Urdu and other Indian literature.More Persian literature was produced in India than in the Iranian world. As late as the 20th century, Allama Iqbal chose Persian for some of his major poetic works. The first Persian language newspaper was also published in India, given that printing machines were first implemented in India. In Bengal, the Baul tradition of mystic music and poetry merged Sufism with many local images. The most prominent poets were Hason Raja and Lalon Shah.