How islam expanded

The objective of the conquests was of a practical nature more than anything else, as fertile land and water were scarce in the Arabian Peninsula. A real Islamization therefore only came about in the subsequent centuries. Historians distinguish between two separate strands of converts of the time. One is animists and polytheists of tribal societies of the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile crescent; the other is the monotheistic populations of the Middle Eastern agrarian and urbanized societies.

At the outset, they were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs.

Only in subsequent centuries, with the development of the religious doctrine of Islam and with that the understanding of the Muslim Ummah, did mass conversion take place. The new understanding by the religious and political leadership led in many cases to a weakening or breakdown of the social and religious structures of parallel religious communities such as Christians and Jews. During the Abbasid Caliphate, expansion ceased and the central disciplines of Islamic philosophy, theology, law, and mysticism became more widespread, and the gradual conversions of the populations within the empire occurred.

Significant conversions also occurred beyond the extents of the empire, such as that of the Turkic tribes in Central Asia and peoples living in regions south of the Sahara in Africa through contact with Muslim traders active in the area and Sufi orders.

In Africa it spread along three routes—across the Sahara via trading towns such as Timbuktu, up the Nile Valley through the Sudan up to Uganda, and across the Red Sea and down East Africa through settlements such as Mombasa and Zanzibar. These initial conversions were of a flexible nature. The Arab-Muslim conquests followed a general pattern of nomadic conquests of settled regions, whereby conquering peoples became the new military elite and reached a compromise with the old elites by allowing them to retain local political, religious, and financial authority.

Peasants, workers, and merchants paid taxes, while members of the old and new elites collected them. The Arab conquerors did not repeat the mistake made by the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, who had tried and failed to impose an official religion on subject populations, which had caused resentments that made the Muslim conquests more acceptable to them.

Gradually, the descendants of these forced migrants became distanced from Islam, but they held on to enough awareness of their heritage so as to establish pseudo-Islamic communities in the early 20th century, such as the Moorish Science Temple of America MSTA and the Nation of Islam NOI , and to eventually return to mainstream Islam en masse starting in the late s.

Muslim population. Intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims has been historically important for the spread of Islam in many contexts. Conversion through intermarriage was important to establishing the early Muslim community Spain. In around , Pope Hadrian in Rome wrote a letter expressing his concern that some Catholics in Hispania seemed only too willing to marry into Arab Muslim families, and Christian-Muslim unions were condemned at a council in Cordoba in The early modern Ottoman Empire also offers many examples of intermarriage involving conversion.

Her son from her first marriage, Giacomo, followed his mother into Islam nearly a decade later. It was also common enough for King Matthias Hunyadi r. In British-ruled India, several dalit women i. There are at least nine reported cases between and , though four of these occurred between March and May in alone. Intermarriage has continued to play an important role in conversion to Islam in more recent times.

One case is that of immigrant Muslims marrying Latina women in the United States in the midth century. A study of Palestinian immigrants in Chicago revealed that one man had married a Mexican-American woman and had children with her.

Muslims from British-ruled India first arrived in Hong Kong in significant numbers in the early 20th century as employees of the British administration. They replied that he was their chief, excellent in judgment, and committed to their best interests. He then informed them that he had embraced Islam, and by nightfall his entire clan had followed him. The Umayyads sought religious legitimacy as a means to justifying their rule, and Syria was the first region in which efforts toward that end took shape.

From there, many non-Muslims chose to embrace the faith, some rejected it, and others may have even borrowed from it. Between and , Ho led seven maritime expeditions for the Ming dynasty, which took him to the major ports of the Indian Ocean and as far away as Mombasa Kenya.

Having embraced Sunni Islam privately, he gradually reformed the NOI to conform to the orthodox Islamic tradition and called on his followers to do the same. Muhammad into the fold of orthodox Islam. This was the case, for example, in the Lindi and Mtwara regions of southeastern Tanzania in the early 20th century. In the late s, most people in the region were not Muslim, but today Muslims form a large majority of the population.

Lastly, on the topic of the spread of Islam via influencers, it is important to briefly revisit the pioneering thesis of Richard Bulliet in this field of research. Through a quantitative analysis of the names listed in biographical dictionaries from the early centuries of Islamic history, Bulliet showed that Islam spread very slowly as evidenced by the slow rate of the change, for example, from names that were identifiably Christian to those that were clearly Muslim.

II : The acceptance of the message. The preceding discussion focused on how the message of Islam spread. The question of why it was accepted by individuals is more difficult to explore, simply because we are unable to determine their exact motivations. Some converts, such as Malcolm X, wrote about their journey to Islam, thus giving us a glimpse into the reasons behind their decision.

However, for the overwhelming majority of cases in Islamic history, we can only speculate broadly on three of the motivations that were arguably most prominent.

These motivations have already been discussed in relation to the examples offered above, but are elaborated on in this section. This thesis is rooted in the Islamic emphasis on the pursuit of justice, in contrast to other faith traditions which allowed for if not encouraged passivity and promised only otherworldly salvation.

Of course, this is not a denial that some conversions probably were nominal, but a reminder that convenience should not simply be presumed to have been the primary motivation. These castes accepted Islam once they became aware that it was based upon justice, equality and solidarity among human beings. In the context of the early modern Ottoman Empire, many Christian women chose to convert to Islam because it offered them a more favorable situation.

Lady Elizabeth Craven d. They were particularly interested in the relative freedom that Muslim women enjoyed to obtain a divorce to escape an unfulfilling marriage.

Another example is found in the context of the Second World War. In the months following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in , many Jews tried to escape persecution by converting to Islam. Even today, this trend can be seen in the rates of conversion to Islam in prisons, particularly in the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. It is no surprise, for example, that after becoming the first known Japanese convert to Islam on November 1, , Omar Yamaoka was disembarking in Jeddah by December 10, on his way to perform the hajj.

Two descriptions of the sense of unity and affirmation that converts find as they perform the hajj were written in the past century by Muhammad Asad and Malcolm X.

Malcolm X converted to orthodox Islam due to his experience of the hajj in The hajj also served as a sort of international forum and marketplace. In pre-modern times, the journey for hajj often took months, if not years, and many Muslims deliberately prolonged the journey by stopping in major cities and centers of trade and studying with scholars along the way, and by staying for extended periods of time in Makkah and Madinah to exchange news, knowledge, and ideas, and to trade in goods and services.

This exchange not only provided a sustained integration into the ummah for recent converts but also opened up windows of opportunity that could lead to even more conversions. A case in point is the famous hajj of Mansa Musa of Mali in He is said to have led a large caravan and carried so much gold, which he distributed in charity and gifts along the way, that it caused hyperinflation and derailed the economies of Cairo, Madinah, and Makkah for years.

He became so famous for freely distributing his wealth that he inspired curiosity about his distant kingdom and thus initiated a steady stream of Muslim traders, travelers, and scholars to Mali. Of course, this sense of unity extended beyond the experience of hajj as well. The spread of Islam has been a historic success in large part due to the fact that it generally occurred in ways that were not overtly disruptive of local cultures and lifestyles.

Historically, however, early Muslim communities generally adhered to a distinctive subculture, adopting everything they deemed acceptable in the dominant or hegemonic culture and refraining from what they felt clearly conflicted with their faith. The Qur'an has a number of passages that support military action against non-Muslims , for example:.

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book Other passages confirmed the rightness of the ancient military tradition of looting from the defeated, and specified how the booty should be divided.

This is not surprising, as the armies of those days were not like modern armies - but more like a federation of tribal mercenary groups who were not paid and whose only material reward came from the spoils of war. The political status of Islam, and the role Muhammad had given it as a political as well as a religious force, was reinforced in the military conquests. A caliph such as Umar seems to have regarded himself, first and foremost, as the leader of the Arabs, and their monotheistic creed as the religious component of their new political identity.

After the death of Muhammad in CE, the young Muslim federation came under strain. Some of the tribes decided that as their loyalty to Islam had been primarily to Muhammad himself, his death allowed them to end their allegiance to Mecca and to Islam.

To make things more difficult, the Prophet had not left clear instructions as to who should lead the community after his death. Fortunately the community immediately chose the Prophet's close companion and father-in-Law Abu Bakr, as his successor.

Abu Bakr was known as the first caliph from khalifa , the Arabic for successor. Abu Bakr took swift military action against the communities that wanted to break away. These campaigns, known as the apostasy or ridda wars, effectively consolidated Arabia into a single country under Muslim control within two years. Abu Bakr died in and was succeeded by Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph, who ruled until Umar found himself the ruler of a large unified state, with an organised army, and he used this as a tool to spread Islam further in the Middle East.

Umar's early campaigns were against the Byzantine Empire. Following the decisive Battle of Yarmouk in , the former Byzantine states of Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon were conquered by the Muslim armies. Shortly afterwards the Muslim army attacked the Sassanid Empire in Iraq, gaining a massive victory in at the Battle of Qadasiya, and gradually conquering more and more of Iraq over the next dozen years. This conquest was made much easier by the weakness of the Sassanid Empire, which was wounded by internal conflicts and a lengthy war with the Byzantine Empire.