How islam is spread

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.

Instead, the rulers of the new empire generally respected the traditional middle-Eastern pattern of religious pluralism, which was not one of equality but rather of dominance by one group over the others. After the end of military operations, which involved the sacking of some monasteries and confiscation of Zoroastrian fire temples in Syria and Iraq, the early caliphate was characterized by religious tolerance, and people of all ethnicities and religions blended in public life.

Before Muslims were ready to build mosques in Syria, they accepted Christian churches as holy places and shared them with local Christians. In Iraq and Egypt, Muslim authorities cooperated with Christian religious leaders.

Numerous churches were repaired and new ones built during the Umayyad era. Some non-Muslim populations did experience persecution, however. After the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians were given dhimmi non-Muslim status and subjected to persecutions; discrimination and harassment began in the form of sparse violence. Zoroastrians were made to pay an extra tax called Jizya; if they failed, they were killed, enslaved, or imprisoned. Due to their proximity, Arabia and East Africa had a long pre-Islamic history of close political and trade relations.

Soon after the advent of Islam, merchants took the lead in introducing the faith to this region. In , having completed the conquest of Egypt, Muslim forces moved south and met Nubian forces at Dongola Sudan. Rather than press for a fight, the two sides agreed to a baqt , or peace agreement, which was remarkably honored for six centuries. During the early 9th century, large deposits of gold and emeralds were discovered in the desert south of Aswan.

It is clear that the spread of Islam in this region took centuries, and Islam could be said to have supplanted Christianity in the area of Nubia only by the 14th century at the earliest. It is no coincidence that some of the first towns to develop a significant Muslim population in this region were Awdaghust Mauritania and Tadmekka Mali , two of the southern termini of the famous Trans-Saharan trade route.

Around the years and , respectively, the kings of Takrur Senegal and Gao Mali had embraced Islam. By , Islam was spreading quickly in Kanem Chad-Nigeria. And, as was the case in many places, Islamization here was a very long process and was still observably underway when the German explorer Heinrich Barth traveled through the region in the s.

Migration, both forced e. In other words, as Sylviane Diouf and others have argued, wherever these Muslims went they commonly brought with them their embodied knowledge of Islam. It has proven difficult to reliably estimate how many slaves of African origin were Muslim, but they must have numbered at least in the hundreds of thousands. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuously-occupied European city in the mainland United States, and was originally built largely by African Muslim slave laborers.

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. Ottomans conquer the Byzantine seat of Constantinople and change its name to Istanbul.

Circa C. Approximately 30 percent of Africans forced into slavery in the United States are Muslim. Muslim immigrants from the Arab world voluntarily come to the United States until the Asian Exclusion Act is passed in World War I ends with the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which was the last of the Islamic empires. Many regions populated by Muslims in Africa and Asia are colonized by Europeans. Traditional religious ways of life are threatened and, in some cases, destroyed.

The Nation of Islam is created in the U. It is based on some Islamic ideas, but contains innovations, such as the appointment or declaration of Elijah Muhammad as a prophet. The state of Israel is created. Muslim students come to the U. Wallace D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad, takes over leadership of the Nation of Islam after his father's death and brings most of his followers into mainstream Islam. He later creates the Muslim American Society, which attracts many members, most of whom are African-American.

The Iranian Revolution results in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the first attempt at an Islamic state in the modern era. Discussion and Activities.