How long did it take to convert the Middle East to Islam, and was this process noticeably faster or slower in certain areas?
I've done some quick Wiki-research, but I'm not finding what I'm looking for. The early and rapid Muslim expansion was not accompanied by forced conversion of the conquered peoples (at least in the Middle East, to my knowledge), so for a while much of the Middle East was ruled by Muslims living in garrison towns among a non-Muslim populace. Conversion to Islam was effected by adding legal incentives for conversions. The question is: how long did this take? How many generations did it take for the Middle East to become majority-Muslim?
Bonus question for extra useless internet points: how long did it take for the Arabic language to be adopted as the vernacular across the Middle East, supplanting Aramaic, Berber languages, etc.?
Posted Jul 17, 2012, 8:28 PM UTC
Fred Donner's new book Muhammad and the Believers goes to some lengths to answer this question. While I'm not an expert in this time period, I can tell you that it takes a few centuries, even as late as the 14th century before you have something close to a majority Muslim population in the Arab territories, Persia and Anatolia. Even then, by the time the Ottoman Empire reached its height in the 16th century, it probably ruled over more Christians than Muslims.
Some factors that you could consider as increasing the Muslim quotient in this part of the world include the legal incentives you mention and also things like slavery, which resulted in non-Muslims being enslaved, converted and eventually released. Aside from legal incentives, there were also social incentives such as access to schooling, which in many areas meant an Islamic school of one stripe or another, and access to other social services.
For your bonus question, the two are tied pretty closely. This is due to the fact that Arabic as the pure language of God is given a paramount place in the religion. Education in the Islamic system begins with the learning of Arabic, so its vernacularization inevitably came along with conversion.
Thanks for the book suggestion!
I am slightly surprised at the length of time it took to convert the populace, though. I guess I had never thought about it at length before, but I would have thought it would have been at least majority Muslim before the Crusades.
I would like to add a point of interest: Many Arabs saw Islam and the Caliphates as less taxing than the Byzantine Christians that had previously controlled the region. In case you wanted to take an economic standpoint...
Counter-point of interest: to my knowledge, the "Arabs" were mostly confined to the Arabian peninsula at that point, and the Byzantine Empire never extended very deeply into Arab-inhabited territory.
Prior to the Muslim Conquest, Levantines, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, etc. weren't "Arabs." That was part of my original post: how long it took for the peoples conquered by Muslims to be Islamized and Arabized.
Ira Lapidus wrote a formidable but excellent tome called A History of Islamic Societies that deals with this. I have not finished it myself, but I know it would answer your question. Among other factors, Islam was originally a religion of the elites that was deliberately kept from the lower classes for a time.
I read an article recently that the virtually all of the Arabs today are a mixture of the peoples who had traditionally inhabited their lands for generations mixed with various ethnic groups. The only true Arabs it claimed ( as would have been understood in the 7th century) occupy parts of Yeman.
Right, but the thing to remember there is that most of the Christian population of this area were not Roman Catholic. So far as I know, Armenians and Copts (and Nestorians and Assyrians, etc.) did not respond to the call to Crusade quite the same way their European counterparts did. I would imagine that for them the Crusades were probably an unwelcome disturbance of the peace rather than shining knights coming to rescue them from overtaxation...