History Final Exam - Assignment Example

In return, serfs looked after the lord’s land, took care for his animals and carried out other everyday jobs to sustain the estate. Peasant women contributed in the farm labor with their husbands. All peasants whether free or serfs were indebted with particular jobs to the lord. These included no less than a few days of toil every week and a specified share of their grain. The manor was for the most part a self-reliant community where serfs and peasants brought up or created almost all that they and their lord required for everyday life.

For the license of living on the lord’s property, peasants paid off a lofty price. They paid a levy on all grain pounded in the lord’s mill. Peasants also paid a tax on matrimony. Weddings occurred only with the lord’s permission. Following all these expenditures to the lord, peasant families were obligated to the community priest a tithe or church tax. For the majority of serfs, life was work and more work. Back in the 7th and 8th centuries, in the Middle East, one of the fastest growing and now the second largest religion in the world was just emerging.

Muhammad, its founder, was born in roughly around 570 C.E. in the city of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula. At 40, he started to experience a succession of spiritual encounters and later taught a stringent monotheism. There is only one God and that is Allah. Proper religious conviction, as said by him, is made up solely in the surrender to Allah’s will. In a few years after his death, everything he taught were documented in Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an. Subsequently, Islam widened with boundless intensity all over the Mediterranean world starting from the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East to North Africa, the Western world and even to the boundaries of India and China.

In approximately 30 after Muhammad’s death, a great split happened in Islam and was divided into Sunni and