Christian C. Sahner is technically correct: the Islamization of the Middle East was indeed largely driven by “intermarriage, economic self-interest, and political allegiance.” But behind these bland words lies a far uglier reality. Islamic law forbids Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, but allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women. Thus since women would join their husband’s household, the Muslim community always grew at the expense of the non-Muslim community. And the “economic self-interest” was driven by the fact that, as Sahner acknowledges, non-Muslims had to pay “special taxes.” They could free themselves from this economic hardship simply by converting to Islam, so many did so, resulting in the fact that, as Sahner likewise admits, “Muslim elites sometimes even discouraged conversion, for when non-Muslims embraced Islam, they no longer had to provide these taxes to the state, and thus the state’s fiscal base threatened to contract.” Conversion was sometimes not just “discouraged,” but forbidden outright.
Sahner says that “non-Muslims were generally entitled to continue practising their faiths, provided they abided by the laws of their rulers and paid special taxes.” Those “laws of their rulers” enforced their second-class status and daily humiliation as those who had rejected Muhammad and Islam. Non-Muslims in Islamic-ruled lands were oppressed for centuries, and when that oppression was relaxed, Islamic hardliners made sure that the relaxation was temporary.
Just one example from my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS: in 1301, according to the fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Naqqash, the vizier of Gharb in North Africa visited the Mamluk sultan al-Malik an-Nasir and several other high dignitaries in Cairo, including the emir Rukn ad-Din Baybar al-Jashangir, “who offered him magnificent presents and received him with the greatest distinction.”
But the vizier was not happy with what he had seen in Egypt: the dhimmi Jews and Christians were “attired in the most elegant clothes” and “rode on mules, mares, and expensive horses.” Even worse, they were “considered worthy of being employed in the most important offices, thus gaining authority over the Muslims.”
Back home in Gharb, by contrast, the Jews and Christians were “maintained with constraints of humiliation and degradation. Thus they were not permitted to ride on horseback, nor to be employed in the public administration.”
The emir Rukn and several others were impressed, and “unanimously declared,” according to Ibn Naqqash, “that if similar conditions were to prevail in Egypt this would greatly enhance the [Muslim] religion.”
New rules were implemented swiftly. Ibn Naqqash continued: “The churches of Misr [old Cairo] and Cairo were closed and their portals were sealed after having been nailed up….Next, the dhimmis were dismissed from the public administration and the functions that they occupied in the service of the emirs. They were then prohibited to ride horses or mules. Consequently, many of them were converted to Islam.”
Of course: the light of its truth was shining brightly. Click here to order The History of Jihad, the first and only comprehensive history of jihad worldwide — not just against Europe, but against India, Africa, Israel, the U.S., and more — in the English language. This book contains the unwhitewashed truth that establishment academics don’t want you to know and hope you don’t find out.
“How did the Christian Middle East become predominantly Muslim?,” by Christian C. Sahner, University of Oxford, September 17, 2018 (thanks to Lookmann):
How did the ancient Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to the majority-Muslim world we know today, and what role did violence play in this process? These questions lie at the heart of Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton University Press), a new book by associate professor of Islamic history . In a guest post for Arts Blog, Professor Sahner, from Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies, explores his findings.
Although Arab armies quickly established an Islamic empire during the seventh and eighth centuries, it took far longer for an Islamic society to emerge within its frontiers. Indeed, despite widespread images of “conversion by the sword” in popular culture, the process of Islamisation in the early period was slow, complex, and often non-violent. Forced conversion was fairly uncommon, and religious change was driven far more by factors such as intermarriage, economic self-interest, and political allegiance. Non-Muslims were generally entitled to continue practising their faiths, provided they abided by the laws of their rulers and paid special taxes. Muslim elites sometimes even discouraged conversion, for when non-Muslims embraced Islam, they no longer had to provide these taxes to the state, and thus the state’s fiscal base threatened to contract. Compounding this was a belief among some that Islam was a special dispensation only for the Arab people. Thus, when non-Arabs converted, they were sometimes treated as second-class citizens, despised as little better than Christians, Jews, or other “infidels”.
This combination of factors meant that the Middle East became predominantly Muslim far later than an older generation of scholars once assumed. Although we lack reliable demographic data from the pre-modern period with which we could make precise estimates (such as censuses or tax registers), historians surmise that Syria-Palestine crossed the threshold of a Muslim demographic majority in the 12th century, while Egypt may have passed this benchmark even later, possibly in the 14th. What we mean by the “Islamic world” thus takes on new meaning: Muslims were the undisputed rulers of the Middle East from the seventh century onward, but they presided over a mixed society in which they were often dramatically outnumbered by non-Muslims.
It is against this backdrop that the phenomenon of Christian martyrdom took place. We know about these martyrs thanks to a large but understudied corpus of hagiographical texts written in a variety of medieval languages, including Greek, Arabic, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. Set in places as varied as Córdoba, the Nile Delta, Jerusalem, and the South Caucasus, they tell the lives of Christians who ran afoul of the Muslim authorities, were executed, and were later revered as saints. The martyrs were participants in this broader culture of conversion, but as their deaths make clear, they were also dissenters from this culture, individuals who protested Islamisation and attempted to reverse the tide of religious change….