Islam spread rapidly through North-Africa, Middle East, and Asia thanks largely to the strategical position of the Arabian Peninsula in which Islam originated. The Arabian Peninsula is located at the confluence between Asia and Africa, between the Red Sea to the West, the Gulf of Aden to the South, and the Persian Gulf and Indian Sea to the East. Also, it is near to the Mediterranean Sea to the North-West. These characteristics made of the Arabian Peninsula a central node of the old and large commerce networks that spanned between Africa and Asia, which gave to the nomad Arab tribes the possibility to enter in contact with different cultures and ideas.
At the time Islam rose, the Arabian Peninsula was surrounded by the Persian Sassanian Empire to the North-East and the Byzantine Empire to the North-West, but since most nomad Arab tribes were disunited, in the Peninsula there was a vacuum of power that Islam came to fill. After the unification of these tribes under Islam, they expanded and conquered lands from the neighbor empires thanks to the advantageous strategical position in which they were located.
