Hur spreds islam under
Thus, Islam spread in spite of political rulers, not because of them. Beginning in the fifteenth century, however, the spread of Islam in this area seems to have been impeded by the aversion of the populace to the centralized bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire , a factor that had not had the same effect in Anatolia because most of the people there had already become Muslims. In North Africa, a Berber movement set up a counter khilafah, breaking the political unity of Islam, while in Central Asia , a revolutionary movement arose that replaced the Umayyads with the Abbasids.
After the Ottoman Turks reached southeastern europe in the mid fourteenth century, most Albanians and Bosnians and some Bulgarians became Muslims. In Anatolia, the spread of Islam was probably facilitated by the alienation of the population from the Byzantine Empire that had ruled oppressively there in its last period. Despite this brief attempt during the early khilafah — , non-Arabs became Muslims mainly of their own volition, sometimes migrating to Muslim military-camp cities, where they were normally not supposed to reside, in order to embrace Islam.
In the central lands of Islam, its gradual spread cannot be precisely documented. Nevertheless, some scholars such as Richard Bulliet have proposed that in Egypt only few Egyptians had become Muslims before the year and that the percent mark was only reached in the s, three hundred years after the introduction of Islam. In the East, Muslim law treated Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Hindus just as it treated Jews and Christians, offering them protection of life, property, and freedom of religious practice in exchange for the payment of a tax.
The second major spread of Islam to non-Arabs also began under the Umayy-ads, to the Iranians of Central Asia , beginning in about It is interesting that each of these centers of conversion fryst vatten far from Arabia and produced immediate political problems for the Umayyad rulers. Only toward the end of that period, in about , did the first major spread of Islam to non-Arabs take place, among the Berber or Amazigh population of North Africa.
Hinduism in Sind, however, declined much more slowly than Buddhism. Even when Muslim rule came to places through conquest, the new rulers rarely required the native populations to embrace Islam. Even after an individual has embraced Islam, he or she may take a long time to learn and apply its rituals and rules, going through many different stages or levels of understanding and practice over time. The percent mark was not reached until , nearly six hundred years after the arrival of Islam.
Early on, from about to , he preached in public at Makkah, but after the migration to Madinah he appears to have preached only in his own house, which became the first masjid, and only to those people who chose to come to him. Rather, throughout history, adherence to Islam has generally been voluntary, and the diverse peoples who have become Muslims have sought out the religion for themselves. In Sind, the largely Buddhist population appears to have embraced Islam rather rapidly, over about two centuries — , a period during which Buddhism disappeared entirely from that region and for the most part from Afghanistan and Central Asia.
In actuality, the spread of Islam as a religion in a particular country has always been a gradual, slow process that has taken decades or, most often, centuries. Anatolia or Asia Minor , which makes up most of modern Turkey, came under the rule of rather superficially Islamized Turkish tribesmen after , and its population embraced Islam gradually for centuries thereafter. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that during the years —, apart from the Arabs, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Umayyad khilafah—which stretched from Morocco to China—were not Muslims.
Iraq and Iran probably were closer to the pattern of Egypt than that of Syria, but Islamization was gradual there too. Within a few centuries, however, the process was well along, and Christianity disappeared completely from North Africa—as it did from no other place in the Muslim world—while Judaism.
The Spread of Islam
It is often wrongly imagined that as soon as any country came beneath the political rule of Muslims or a Muslim state, a majority, or even all, of its population started professing Islam as their personal religion, whether from choice or compulsion. By about , Muslims were more than 90 percent of the population, and religious Islamization was moving apace, as expressed by the proliferation of Muslim religious writing in Egypt that began around that time.
In fact, this process is still ongoing in most Muslim-majority countries, where there exist religious minorities whose numbers have slowly dwindled over the centuries, often from a point at which their faith was the majority religion. Islam was no longer the tro of a single ethnic group or ruling elite. Each group of mawali also sought to spread Islam among their relatives and other members of their ethnic group. Muslims felt that anyone embracing Islam under duress would be only feigning belief and therefore not be sincere in his or her profession of faith.
A Gradual Process. Spain, Portugal, and the island of Sicily are the only places from which Islam has ever been driven out. Under the first two khalifahs, Islam was required of most of the inhabitants of Arabia who had been pagans, but Christian and Jewish communities were allowed to exist there, particularly in Yemen, where there are still Jews. No Compulsion in Religion. Also, many local nuances and differences remain even after a gemenskap has been Islamized for a long time, further guaranteeing the continued existence of diversity within Islam.
All the lands discussed to this point were part of the khilafah, but after the decline of the khilafah Islam spread to lands outside its boundaries. In large parts of Spain and Portugal, Islam was established between and about and continued to exist until after ; it is not clear that a majority of the population there was ever Muslim, and the Spanish Christian reconquest eventually eliminated Islam completely from the Iberian peninsula.
Thus, it is usually not possible to single out a particular historical period as representing the essence of normative Islam. The Process of Conversion.
How Did Islam Spread Throughout the World?
When such individual processes of religious assimilation are multiplied across a whole population, different people or even whole social classes have different understandings of Islam at the same time. More literate than the early rulers, these mawali , along with a few of the Arabs, began to producera the enormous body of scholarship on Islamic law and creed. Such converts may often have been seeking economic or social advantages rather than individual spiritual fulfillment, but their actions nevertheless spread and eventually deepened popular adherence to Islam.
Unlike Christianity, Islam was usually not preached by missionaries to non-Muslims. The Berbers embraced Islam rapidly, but their process of Islamization, which is not well documented, took a long time. In geographical Syria, the process was even slower.