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Islam 's Impact On The Muslim Arab World And The Middle East

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According to DeSilver (2013), a senior writer for the “Pew Research Center”, each day almost 1.6 billion Muslims face in the direction of Mecca - a city in Saudi Arabia - to perform their prayers; that’s over 23% of the world’s population. They offer these prayers not once, but five times daily. Furthermore, an excess of two million Muslims journeying each year to this sanctified city in lieu of their pilgrimage is reported (Lynch, 2014); an obligation to be fulfilled at least once in a lifetime. Moreover, Muslims make up a majority of the population in 49 countries of the world, occupying over 20% of the world’s countries. Even though Islam is often associated with the Arab world and the Middle East, fewer than 15% of Muslims are Arab, nevertheless, Muslims on a universal scale attribute this significant contribution and influence to their final prophet, Muhammad PBUH . So the question arises; how did an individual born just under one and a half millennium ago gain an influence on such a large scale that his teachings and traditions became deep-rooted in multi-ethnic cultures and societies throughout the world?
A fleeting glimpse
A moment of nostalgia narrates to us the story of Muhammad PBUH, the son of Abdullah, born in the year 570CE in Mecca, a mountain town in the high desert plateau of western Arabia. As his father had died shortly after marriage, his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib became his guardian. Abd al-Muttalib was the respected head of the clan of Hashim and the

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