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World History Volume 1, to 1500

Check Your Understanding Questions

World History Volume 1, to 1500Check Your Understanding Questions
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Check Your Understanding Questions

1 .
What role did the cities of Mecca and Medina play in the formation of Islam?
2 .

Look at the following map (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license) and identify the Kingdom of Aksum, the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of Himyar, and the Sasanian Empire. For what reasons was Mecca not aggressively sought as a target of conquest by these neighboring states?

3 .
How did monotheistic faiths spread through the Arabian Peninsula before the rise of Islam?
4 .
Discuss the factors that led to the success of the Arab-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries.
5 .
What issues did the Muslim community have to consider in choosing Muhammad’s first successor?
6 .
Why did the earliest Arab-Islamic conquests first focus on the Arabian Peninsula?
7 .
What differences separated the two umbrella sects of Islam, the Sunni and the Shia, in the Abbasid period?
8 .
What features of Abbasid society helped make the Abbasid Translation Movement such a successful intellectual endeavor?
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