A policy capable of peacefully converting Muslims

So, Islam had a fantastic policy for converting Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc. to their faith. The Jizya tax being one example, and the fact that it was STILL often lower than what they were paying before anyway while nevertheless offering a financial incentive to convert.

So, my question. How could a medieval Christian nation that has conquered a large Muslim population encourage them - without violence - to gradually convert over the centuries. Presuming they were willing to go completely against the typical methods of their brethren, that is.

Either Orthodox or Catholic would work, though, really, it would probably be the former rather than the latter.

Orthodox IS easier than Catholicism, since it's a lot less centralised, and these converted Muslims don't need to accept the Pope. I guess that if it was in the Balkans or North Caucasus, then a reverse jixya could be implemented, but the problem is that Christianity doesn't have a belief in parallel to jihad, since jihad essentially expouses that the umma should come together to drive off non-Muslims, essentially making it difficult to peacefully convert them. And Islamic conversions in Albania and Bosnia were NOT peaceful, trust me.

Isn't a central tenet of Islam that Apostasy is expressly forbidden under pain of death? Forgive my ignorance here if I am wrong, I do not mean to troll. I am relying here on Professor Dawkins' description.

SeanB said:

So, Islam had a fantastic policy for converting Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc. to their faith. The Jizya tax being one example, and the fact that it was STILL often lower than what they were paying before anyway while nevertheless offering a financial incentive to convert.

So, my question. How could a medieval Christian nation that has conquered a large Muslim population encourage them - without violence - to gradually convert over the centuries. Presuming they were willing to go completely against the typical methods of their brethren, that is.

Either Orthodox or Catholic would work, though, really, it would probably be the former rather than the latter.

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Muslims aren't so different from Christians, so use the exact same method. Let Christians pay less tax, make it easier for Christians to get up in life, make it simply easier to be a christian than a muslim, while still tollerating muslims. You will see that slowly muslims will convert to christianity, just like christians converted to islam.

euromellows said:

Isn't a central tenet of Islam that Apostasy is expressly forbidden under pain of death? Forgive my ignorance here if I am wrong, I do not mean to troll. I am relying here on Professor Dawkins' description.

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Who is going to enforce that in this context?

SeanB said:

So, Islam had a fantastic policy for converting Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc. to their faith. The Jizya tax being one example, and the fact that it was STILL often lower than what they were paying before anyway while nevertheless offering a financial incentive to convert.

So, my question. How could a medieval Christian nation that has conquered a large Muslim population encourage them - without violence - to gradually convert over the centuries. Presuming they were willing to go completely against the typical methods of their brethren, that is.

Either Orthodox or Catholic would work, though, really, it would probably be the former rather than the latter.

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Same process, really. The problem is that no Christian polity ever adopted a framework for conversion as effective as the Muslim one.

The thing is, you need to have a Christian power securely in control of large Muslim populations before the age of nationalism*. This power then needs to adopt a policy which genuinely offers routes for conversion and more importantly genuinely accepts the converts. That's bolded because it's the bit which no Christian polity before the Age of Enlightenment ever really figured out.

IOTL the only major example I can think of is Spain after the Reconquista which is an example of How Not To Do It since there, the former Jewish and Muslim conversos were still regarded with suspicion, legally inferior and subject to persecution.

Basically the advantage Islam had was that Islamic polities, as far as I can tell, genuinely seemed to accept converts into the wider community as equals- to the extent that conversion was often discouraged by the authorities since it meant a loss of revenue. This also removes the problem of the convert getting ostracised by his own community- under Islamic practice he is welcomed with open arms into the Muslim community whereas as I said earlier, Christian practice meant that the convert would be considered an apostate by his own former community and be regarded as a suspicious inferior by the Christian community.

It's doable- it's just that no Christian polity ever tried it properly.

*Once nationalist ideals begin to kick in you get a lot of ethnic/cultural us vs them ideas which mess things up.

@Euromellows- in a situation analagous to the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantines or the Arab conquest of Egypt the conquered populace wouldn't really have the power to enforce executions for apostasy.

Elfwine said:

Who is going to enforce that in this context?

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Besides that, it wasn't as if christians were so happy (especially in the past, think reformation for example) when someone converted to another religion.

We have plenty of evidence that in the Middle Ages many Muslims did convert peacefully to Christianity in Spain, Norman Sicily, and the Crusader states. Of course, that involved an initial invasion, but so did the Muslim conquests.

This does not seem obvious because 1) the Crusader states eventually collapsed so any converts either fled, died, or became Muslims again, and 2) eventually the non-converted Muslim populations were expelled from Sicily and Spain. That obscures that already many Muslims had already converted.

This isn't too different from the experience of Christians in Muslim territories. Lands we consider exclsuively Muslim now once had very large Christian populations. Conversions changed some of that, but a major cause of the decline in Christian population was because the various invasions of the Middle East - especially the Turks - resulted in lots of deaths or emigration as native Christians fled.

euromellows said:

Isn't a central tenet of Islam that Apostasy is expressly forbidden under pain of death? Forgive my ignorance here if I am wrong, I do not mean to troll. I am relying here on Professor Dawkins' description.

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Pretty much. However, Christianity generally views Apostasy as unfavorably as Islam does. Only in the past century or two has attitudes relaxed about it. And that didn't stop Christians from being absorbed into the Muslim faith in the Middle East and North Africa.

Norman Sicily had something called the tributum which was pretty much a reverse jizya, targeting the Jews and Muslims of Sicily. I believe a similar thing also occurred in Valencia called the besant. I am not sure of the effectiveness of such policies so I can't say much further other than there was precedent for a relatively peaceful policy in converting Muslims.

Some very informative answers, thank you. I had this idea myself, of a reverse Jizya tax, but I wanted to see if people thought it was practical.

euromellows said:

Isn't a central tenet of Islam that Apostasy is expressly forbidden under pain of death? Forgive my ignorance here if I am wrong, I do not mean to troll. I am relying here on Professor Dawkins' description.

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No. That's a position a legal scholar might take, but they would have to argue for it. If it's a popular stance in modern times, that's because of all kinds of historical processes that have affected Islam and the ulema.

euromellows said:

Isn't a central tenet of Islam that Apostasy is expressly forbidden under pain of death? Forgive my ignorance here if I am wrong, I do not mean to troll. I am relying here on Professor Dawkins' description.

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Sure it is against the Koran, but with the Christians in control, it will not be formal state violence, but lynchings by mobs which will be suppressed by the government. Muslims convert to Christianity in the modern USA but are rarely killed.

I think you could look at the Algerian, Tunisian, and Libyan experience. To the best of my understanding, when the Christian powers took over (France/Italy) and took away many of the penalties imposed by the Islamic government, many of the Muslims quickly became non-Muslim. Places like Jordan today have 40ish % who don't really go to a Mosque (if Catholic, we call C&E Catholics). In Algeria, there was a tendency for mix religion couples to go to the Christian religion. So given long term Christian government, we would expect to see the % of Muslims decline even without an active policy to convert them. But it can take time. I took hundreds of years for Egypt to flip to Islam. I can be a slow process.

I think you add in something like the reverse tax, heavy punishment of mobs imposing Islamic justice (death penalty for all involved), and I see it as doable for a stable Christian power lasting a few centuries. The normal pattern is for some of each generation of the oppressed to convert to dominant religion for advancement of their children. It does not matter too much what the religions are, it happens over time. Italy has been Roman gods, then had lost of Mithraism/Judiasm then Christianity to now what is best describe as Agnostic. It is only when the group in power refuse to allow the oppressed to be come the non-oppressed (citizens, Muslims, whatever) that you get this not happening. And a few exceptions like Gypsies and Jews with very distinct cultures.

The secret is in the message itself. God said in Quran that it confirmed other prophets and made people return to their original message (Monotheism/tawheed)
BTW: Zakah paid by muslims is much more higher than jizya/taxes.

M. Adolphe Thiers said:

Pretty much. However, Christianity generally views Apostasy as unfavorably as Islam does.

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I wouldn't go that far. Punishing apostasy would contradict one of the core tenets of Christianity: that God tempts you during earthly life and will reward you in the afterlife if you remained true to Him. If you are forced to be a Christian under pain of death, there's no point.

My Username is Inigo Montoya said:

I wouldn't go that far. Punishing apostasy would contradict one of the core tenets of Christianity: that God tempts you during earthly life and will reward you in the afterlife if you remained true to Him. If you are forced to be a Christian under pain of death, there's no point.

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Tell that to the Old Prussians, among other groups. Not a matter of apostasy, but certainly those who refused to convert were not treated as "oh well, God will punish them".

And I'm not exactly convinced that an apostate would have fared well in a Christian dominated area either.

Ibn Katheer said:

The secret is in the message itself. God said in Quran that it confirmed other prophets and made people return to their original message (Monotheism/tawheed)
BTW: Zakah paid by muslims is much more higher than jizya/taxes.

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I wouldn't say that Islam has proven to be any more successful than other evangelical religions outside of its conquest area.

As for the amount paid, neither is precisely defined, but the historical experience in places like the Ottoman empire is that Jizya was higher than Zakah.

Elfwine said:

Tell that to the Old Prussians, among other groups. Not a matter of apostasy, but certainly those who refused to convert were not treated as "oh well, God will punish them".

And I'm not exactly convinced that an apostate would have fared well in a Christian dominated area either.

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And tell that to people who made it a policy that if you convert to the ruling position you can get or retain positions of influence and power.

My Username is Inigo Montoya said:

I wouldn't go that far. Punishing apostasy would contradict one of the core tenets of Christianity: that God tempts you during earthly life and will reward you in the afterlife if you remained true to Him. If you are forced to be a Christian under pain of death, there's no point.

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Not every one would listen to that. In Spain and the south american colonies millions died because of the many aggressive priests attached to the Church.

There was a fair amount of religious conversion on both sides during the time of the Crusader states. The Muslims were quicker to take converts; Odo of Deuil relates with wonder that 3,000 Crusaders and pilgrims willingly converted to Islam at Attalia during the disastrous Second Crusade and went to live with the Turks. There were even Christians who converted to Judaism. None less than Maimonides mentions "Obaydah, a former Christian living in the Holy Land."

The Christians of the Holy Land were very skeptical of Muslims turning Christian. King Baldwin I was criticized for appointing Saracens who'd converted to Christianity to high-ranking court positions. One, who was baptized Baldwin and may have been king Baldwin's male lover, allegedly tried to sell out his Christian brothers to the Muslims and the king reluctantly had him hanged, after some nobles "discovered" a plot which suspiciously looks like a set-up to get rid of the guy. Papal representatives in the kingdom of Jerusalem were often presented with problems that came along with these converts: were polygamous marriages made pre-conversion valid? (answer: no). Could converts remain with spouses related to them in degrees prohibited by the church? (answer: yes).

If the popes put more emphasis on conversion and the Christians are more amenable to the idea, there could be more converts.