- published: 28 Apr 2009
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The term Muslim world (also known as the Ummah or Islamosphere) has several meanings. In a religious sense, it refers to those who adhere to the teachings of Islam, referred to as Muslims. In a cultural sense, it refers to Islamic civilization, inclusive of non-Muslims living in that civilization. In a modern geopolitical sense, the term usually refers collectively to Muslim-majority countries, states, districts, or towns.
Islam emphasizes unity and defense of fellow Muslims, although many schools and branches (see Shi'a–Sunni relations, for example) exist. In the past both Pan-Islamism and nationalist currents have influenced the status of the Muslim world.
As of 2009, over 1.6 billion or about 23% of the world population are Muslims. Of these, around 62% live in Asia-Pacific, 20% in the Middle East-North Africa, 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa, around 3% in Europe and 0.3% in the Americas.
Muslim history involves the history of the Islamic faith as a religion and as a social institution. The history of Islam began in Arabia with the Islamic prophet Muhammad's first recitations of the Quran in the 7th century. Under the Rashidun and Umayyads, the Caliphate grew rapidly geographically expansion of Muslim power well beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a vast Muslim Empire with an area of influence that stretched from northwest India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees.
David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan an American activist and writer, and former Republican Louisiana State Representative. He was a candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1988 and the Republican presidential primaries in 1992. Duke has unsuccessfully run for the Louisiana State Senate, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and Governor of Louisiana.
A former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke describes himself as a racial realist, asserting that "all people have a basic human right to preserve their own heritage." He is in strong opposition to what he asserts to be Jewish control of the Federal Reserve Bank, the federal government and the media. Duke supports stopping both legal and illegal Non-European immigration, preservation of what he labels Western culture and traditionalist Christian "family values", strict Constitutionalism, abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, voluntary racial segregation, ardent anti-communism and white separatism.