Muslim World Cosmopolitanism

ISLAM, the second largest global religion, is historically the first cosmopolitan civilization that guaranteed its own success by letting other cultures and creeds to survive and assimilate despite its initial conquests and conversions. 

This paper argues that Muslims owed much of their success to the failure of other religious/ political systems, primarily of Christianity in Europe and Hinduism in India, wherein the mass of humanity had never experienced a sense of socioeconomic and political empowerment and belonging that Muslim ruling and religious elites preached and provided for though never perfectly practiced. 

In the case of Islam, the conqueror, along with his creed, was saved by the culture of the conquered, and hence the cosmopolitan civilization that was created out of coexistence and cooption across local cultures resulted in a truly globalized world.   Muslim world cosmopolitanism depended on non-Muslim cultures of skills and technologies which knowledge was imported, adopted and exported across continents through the vehicle of Islamic appreciation for science and scholarship.     

Never before in history, had a faith or force succeeded like Islam to create and connect commercial and educational cosmopolitans from Cueta through Constantinople to Kabul and Kolkata.