The Islamic World consists of all people who are in Islam. It is not an exact location, but rather a community. When they do things together as Muslims, they are the "umma", which means "community" referring to all of the believers. The faith emphasizes unity and defense of fellow Muslims, so it is common for these nations to cooperate. Recent conflicts in the Muslim World have sometimes spread because of this desire to cooperate (see below). It is also likely that some have been made shorter and less damaging because of it. Some might even have never started.
Muslims are in many countries. In 52 nations, Muslims are the majority. Almost all are Sunni. They speak about 60 languages and come from all ethnic backgrounds.
The "Al-Jazeera" satellite TV network in the Arabic language is a news source many Muslims watch.
In most Muslim nations, the government is the main source of news. This sometimes makes it very difficult or dangerous to make anti-government statements.
There are, however, many other news programmes and websites in the Muslim world.
Islamic law exists in many variations - in Arabic it is called shariah - five schools of which were created centuries ago. These are the classical fiqh: the Hanafi school from India, Pakistan and Bangaladesh, West Africa, Egypt, the Maliki in North Africa and West Africa, the Shafi in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Hanbali in Arabia, and Jaferi in Iran and Iraq - where the majority is Shia. All five are very old and many Muslims feel a new fiqh must be created for modern society. Islam has a method for doing this, al-urf and ijtihad are the words to describe this method, but they have not been used in a long time, and few people are trusted enough to use them to make new laws.
So, in most of the Muslim world, people are very conservative, especially about alcohol, adultery, abortion and women working in jobs where they are used to lure customers.
Muslim women often dress extremely modestly, and many do so by choice. But in some countries they have been forced to do so against their will. This is one of the things that causes tension between the Western World and that of Muslims.
Islamic economics bans debt but in most Muslim countries Western banking is allowed. This is another issue that many Muslims have with the Western world.
One quarter of the world population share Islam as an ethical tradition.
Many people in these countries also see Islam as a political movement. In democratic countries there is usually at least one Islamic party.
Political Islam is powerful in all Muslim-majority countries. Islamic parties in Pakistan and Algeria have taken power.
Many in these movements call themselves Islamists, which also sometimes describes more militant Islamic groups. The relationships between these groups and their views of democracy are complex.
Some of these groups are called terrorists because they attack civilians of other non-Muslim nations, to make a political point.
Israel is very unpopular in the Muslim world, because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the way that the state of Israel came into being in 1948 which many Arabs thought was unfair.
Some Muslims see this as a fight against Judaism or Jews, but not all. In Morocco for instance, the Islamists recently invited Jews to join the party. Jewish groups also cooperate with Arabs in the West Bank, where Neturei Karta (anti-Zionist orthodox Jewish) leader Rabbi Mosche Hirsch served as the Minister for Jewish Affairs in the Fatah before there was a Palestinian Authority. Like the Arabs, this small group of Jews thought the way Israel was created was not right. However, very few Jews believe this, and most support Israel as a state.
In 1979 there was a big shift in the way the Muslim world dealt with the rest of the world. In that year, Egypt made peace with Israel, Iran became an Islamic state after a revolution, and there was an invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. A lot of things changed in that year. By 2001 the Soviet Union was gone, Jordan had also made peace with Israel, and on September 11, 2001 there were major attacks on the U.S. - which most people believe were made to drive the United States out of the Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia. In many ways the events of 1979 led to the events of 2001.
The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq are called part of a War on Terrorism by the United States. Many or most Muslims see it as a War on Islam. After the invasion, the Islamic parties won more seats, and a majority of Muslims polled in many nations expressed support for Osama bin Laden and said he would "do the right thing". Olivier Roy is a French scholar who thinks that this does not express support for al-Qaeda or militant Islam but opposing colonialism and what many Muslims call racism - favourable treatment for Jews especially those living in West Bank settlements, many of whom have American or British passport, and which the United Nations says have no right to live there.
The situation is very complicated and there are many different views of it.
The Organization of Islamic Conference formed in 1969 lets the Muslim nations work as a group. Russia joined in 2003.
The Arab League is a smaller group of only the Arab countries.
OPEC is another forum where issues between the Muslim and non-Muslim world come up. In 1973 to protest U.S. support for Israel there was an oil embargo which caused the 1973 energy crisis.
Multiverse
A multiverse is the theory of a conjectured set of multiple possible universes, including ours, which make up reality. These universes are sometimes called parallel universes. A number of different versions have been considered.
The term "multiverse" was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James as a philosophical concept.
The cosmological multiverse tries to explain why the universe we observe i.e. <nowiki>"our universe"</nowiki> seems so welcoming to the emergence of life. Even small changes to the way physics works would make life impossible. In a multiverse a vast number of universes are randomly created and some happen to favour life emerging there. Many inhospitable universes would also have been created, but there would be no life there to observe their existence.
The quantum multiverse is another version in which our universe splits into alternative futures with every quantum event. This is called many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Mechanistic paradigm
The mechanistic paradigm, also known as the Newtonian paradigm, assumes that things in the environment around humans are more like machines than like life. It was more common in the 19th century. This is a set of loosely related beliefs that affects all sciences:
Believers in this paradigm sometimes say that those who do not believe in it are following a cognitive paradigm - but almost no one uses this term, since it is redundant - cognitive science is already accepted as the most basic idea in the philosophy of science. But mechanists reject some of the ideas of cognitive scientists, like cognitive science of mathematics.
Mechanistic thinking also assumes that philosophy of perception is much less important than cognitive scientists say it is - that humans and their beliefs and equipment do not generally add a lot of bias to a scientific theory. Thomas Kuhn said otherwise, that these things matter, and that the major assumptions of science, can shift drastically. This he called a paradigm shift. The shift from mechanistic to cognitive paradigm is an example of this.
Later he used other words to describe the assumptions and beliefs, like mind-set, but the word "paradigm" is still used. Some say it is much over-used.
Economics is often said to "suffer from" assumptions of the mechanistic paradigm. Sometimes those who believe in neoclassical economics and also in the mechanistic paradigm say they "seek to unify physics and economics," as if people and particles behaved as two examples of the same kind of thing.