The modern attitude towards Islam is often one that views its inception as a static date that spontaneously started a new religion that we call Islam. As Donner explains, in detail, this is no where near the truth. The early movement that spurred what what we now call Islam was a religious reformation movement, and did not try to create a clear distinctions between themselves and other monotheistic religions until later.
Donner starts this narrative by discussing the way that what will from here on be called Believers saw themselves. He mentions that “Muhammad and his early followers thought of themselves above all as a community of believers” (58), which is supported by the context of the word “believe” used in a number of passages in the Koran. Donner makes this distinction between “Muslim” and “Believer” because at the time when Muhammad was preaching his revelations, he and his followers considered themselves simply as Believers, people who Believed in the oneness of God, and only later on in the history of the region did people refer to their movement as Islam,
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He argues that “muslim” was a term used, before the leadership of al-Malik, to refer to people who were monotheists: “In the Qur’an muslim basically means ‘monotheist,’ and it could therefore be applied also to Christians, Jews, and other monotheists” (204). As Donner notes shortly after, the term Christian and Jew were still also used to describe these “muslims.” This was problematic for the emerging community of distinct monotheists, and gave way to the redefining, or “shrinkage” as Donner calls it, of the term. He claims that “‘Abd al-Malik and his entourage seem to have advanced this process energetically and in several media” (205). This was part of an effort to put the emphasis was put on Muhammad, his original movement, and his initial