Papal bulls though do have legal power and precedence, some setting the entirety of Europe into legal cohesion on major issues.
It is no matter, it however is the reality that occurred in our timeline. We can only discuss in this framework.
Why Was Islam So Good At Conversion?
- Thread starter KingOnTheEdge
- Start date
Papal bulls though do have legal power and precedence, some setting the entirety of Europe into legal cohesion on major issues.
It is no matter, it however is the reality that occurred in our timeline. We can only discuss in this framework.
None, there was conversion of some members of the merchant class in Java. This developed into a collection of a few Islamic emirate states in Java in the declining Majaphat empire, who in turn waged war upon the remaining areas of Java, subjugating the entire island to Islam aside from the western extremes after perhaps 60 years. This was the situation that the Portuguese arrived upon, a very recently Islamized Java, which was created by an initial conversion, tolerance and then followed by a series of Islamic conquests of the island which was in its final stages in the 16th century.
It is possibly an example too of the Islamic principle of al-Istaraaj, but that is perhaps becoming too in depth for this question.
That's... oversimplifying things and a serious misunderstanding Medieval Europe. During the black death, Pope Clement VII issued in 1348 a papal bull protecting the Jews, a year later, in 1349, the worst pre-modern pogrom happened in Strasbourg. That's some 400 miles from the Pope's seat in Avignon. Needless to say that people didn't really care about what the Pope said when it wasn't of their best interest.
In contrast, we can all agree that the respect of the Dhimmi status is a well-established institution that existed in every Muslim state and it was taken very seriously 95% of the time throughout the entire history of Islam.
Lusitania
Donor
Ok let state that both Christianity and Islam as well as every group before them conquered new areas and brought their political system and religion to the conquered areas. Religious conversion or lack of is a direct result of integration of the religion into the political system.
so certain christian imperialist empires had a very integration same while others separated the two. Islamic conquerers brought and “converter” the new people into their religion too.
this had been done previously by Hindu and other older religions.
so certain christian imperialist empires had a very integration same while others separated the two. Islamic conquerers brought and “converter” the new people into their religion too.
this had been done previously by Hindu and other older religions.
The Papacy was quite weak in that period... But you can say what you will, my track record on the forum in medieval history speaks for itself. Both of Christendom or Islam.
On the other point, it is perhaps easy to say this when only two religions are included in this category. It does no gratitude or brings no satisfaction to the religions uprooted and destroyed precisely by Islamic enforcement.
Then why did they lose out so completely?
Why did Rome, Greece, Egypt, Britannia, Ireland, Scandinavia, Poland, Magyars, Bulgars, Czechs, Lithuania, the Kievan Rus, Georgia, Armenia all abandon their polytheistic traditions and adopt Christianity?
(An ecclesiastical history of Egypt would be interesting. As of the early imperial Roman era, Egypt still worshipped its old gods - Amon-Ra, Isis, Osiris, etc. The cult of Isis even won followers in Rome. So there were priests and temples and rites and presumably some kind of tithing or endowments to pay for it. But by 400 CE, probably earlier, it was all gone. The temples were abandoned, or converted to churches; the priesthoods died off.
When was the last time the rituals were conducted in the temples? When was the last new temple built?)
On the other side, why did all the tribes of Turks and Tatars convert convert to Islam?
I imagine that one has to do with political systems but honestly I'm not sure how. Maybe the assimilation of all the pagan Faith's in rome was getting obnoxious so Constantine was like "eh screw it all assimilate em all."
Plus the offical church hierarchy and the clearer legitimization of rule made it easier to maintain order. Religious conversion was often political for the ruling class (which is why Islam's success with the peasants confuses me since they had less to gain or lose politically)
I'm not trying to paint the Medieval Islamic society to be as liberal towards religious freedom as modern democracies. Still, at least there was some kind of garantee of respect to determined minorities that simply didn't exist in Christian nations until the modern era.
In addition, religious tolerance, from Augsburg until today, is a secular matter in the West, whereas dhimmitude is embedded in Islam, which is actually pretty amazing, considering that was the 7th century.
Today, Catholics can still be ambiguous about the simple notion of religious freedom. I have heard people defending Mother Theresa's baptism of dying Hindus more than once. But I'm probably derailing the thread.
its a rather complex matter. For me I go with a mix of political authority/power, trade contacts, military might and more. I would factor in the crisis of the third century as well. Though answering the question "why do people convert from one religion to another" is something that I am not sure will ever be satisfactory answered.
I regard it as a snowball effect coming about due to the roman emperor's adopting it. Since that allowed them the political force to make it law and go after other religions. If you were someone who worshiped the traditional gods but found the temples closed or sacked by gangs or soldiers than you might not want to avoid those temples. If the emperor makes it a law that you have to be christian, how many would actually risk death by publically being a polytheist? Domestic matters are harder to enforce and IIRC lasted longer.
it is notably that the christians had to use rather violent force to make people be christians, most notable with the Lithuanians and Norse but it was everywhere with the exception being Ireland. Of course it also spread peacefully too, trade is a good one since IIRC iceland converted this way too.
also to your questions:
1.) Not sure when they stopped but groups in Greece and Italy use the ancient sites for religious practices to day in their faiths(Hellenism and Religio Romana)
2.) 2009 in Thessalonika. Here is a picture of it.
Though back to Islam. I had a professor explain that it was far more the trade connections that made people Muslims than the military conquests. Which makes sense, if you are an aspiring merchant you might get more trade contacts by converting and working with the arab and persian merchants. Than you have the fact that you if you weren't muslim in the caliphate you had to pay a tax and naturally as people look to not want to pay taxes they converted. Which IIRC lead the Umayyad caliphate to go basically "please stop converting guys we need your tax money"
I feel like a more important aspect of the decline of polytheism is the often extreme flexibility of these faiths. When Greeks went to Egypt, there was never the type of violence that occurred when Christians entered a foreign land, because the deities of polytheistic faiths are often historically comprised of multiple antecedent deities, and as such contain multiple aspects and facets.
Essentially, monotheistic faiths are more blatantly "I am right, and you are wrong" then the more passive "Your gods are just different aspects of our gods" of many polytheistic circles.
Lusitania
Donor
Find it interesting that some here talk about violence against those who did not follow the true faith. During the Middle Ages religions viewed the soul as being more important than the body. Since the soul would last forever and body was only on this planet for few decades. So in their eyes it was more important to save the soul than save the body.
well skip a few centuries and Christians have progressed but we still have few groups such as isis who advocate the thinking of centuries ago.
well skip a few centuries and Christians have progressed but we still have few groups such as isis who advocate the thinking of centuries ago.
In India at least there are four classical theories about conversion to Islam.
The first is the religion of the Sword- that Islamic armies came and destroyed the temples, built mosques and killed priests until the people in the area became Muslim. In my opinion, this is subject to a number of logical flaws and the evidence for it is patchy at best. People tend to read too much into the bombastic jihadi rhetoric of the Persian chronicles of the Delhi sultanate and take the phrase "they submitted to Islam" to mean conversion, when it could just as well be translated to "they submitted to the armies of Islam". Also, the idea that a community can just change its religious beliefs at swordpoint without garrisons following each and every potential religious leader at all times is just a little ridiculous. In fact, official state persecution of a religion tends to harden that religions communal solidarity- to say nothing of the Sikhs, just look at the Meo community in Rajasthan who were nominally Muslims but of a heterodox sort and Mughal attempts to bring them into the more orthodox fold only hardened their heterodoxy. The regions of India that have been under Islamic rule for the longest (upper Gangetic plain) are only around 10% Muslim, while rates of conversion were much higher in peripheral areas that were only later subjected to Islamic governments.
The second main theory of Islamisation in India was the migration thesis, much favoured by the middle class ashraf community that tried to show their pure genealogical lines that came straight from Arabia or Central Asia, bastions of prestigious Islamicate culture.
The third major theory is religion of patronage. A muslim ruler would give bureaucrats and soldiers promotions based on their conversion, and this seems to actually explain the vast majority of the real recorded instances of conversions with many instances of converts presenting themselves to the sultan and receiving a Khilat (robe of honour) but a lot of the time this didn’t make Hindus convert it just assimilated them into Persianate culture, in a similar process to the westernisation of elites in the colonial era. I think this explains the majority of the Muslim population found in the heartlands of the Gangetic states and the states of the Deccan. It can’t really explain the fact that the majority of conversions happened in peripheral areas where the reach of Islamic governments was highly limited by autonomous tribal actors and difficult terrain.
The fourth classical theory is the social liberation theory- that the oppressed Dalits and untouchables gladly abandoned the religion of their brahmanical oppressors to heed the call of equality before Allah. This is popular among Muslims as well as it casts Hinduism as backwards and oppressive and contrasts it with a decidedly modern notion of equality that Islam supposedly has. But neither did lower caste Hindus have any familiarity with Jean Jacques Rousseau and and notion that all mankind should be equal, nor was it simply the Brahmans denying them this equality for it was seen as the punishment for sins in a past life, and neither do contemporary Persian accounts mention a conception of Islam as a more equal religion. In fact, not only were there plenty of examples of shudras and lower castes participating in high governmental positions or improving their caste status through ritual, military and bureaucratic service etc, the act of converting in no way improved their social position- they now were not only ostracised because of their class but also because of their religion and by Muslims because of their ethnicity and class. Also, as with sword and patronage, geography is a major obstacle for this theory- the majority of converts to Islam cane from regions outside the traditional brahmanical heartland. If brahmanical authority was less established, the lower castes would be less oppressed, and so should theoretically be less likely to convert- the exact opposite of what actually happened.
In Bengal an area packed with tribes and peoples that had never really been immersed in the social structure of Hinduism, Islamisation was a consequence of the role that Sufis played in forming settled communities as the agrarian frontier expanded, and Islam was seen as the religion taught by those that had tamed the wilds and made their lives possible. In Punjab as well, there were lots of pastoral and semi nomadic tribes such as the jats who were only very weakly Hinduised and thus more susceptible to conversion, whether that be to Sikhism, Islam or more orthodox Hinduism.
The first is the religion of the Sword- that Islamic armies came and destroyed the temples, built mosques and killed priests until the people in the area became Muslim. In my opinion, this is subject to a number of logical flaws and the evidence for it is patchy at best. People tend to read too much into the bombastic jihadi rhetoric of the Persian chronicles of the Delhi sultanate and take the phrase "they submitted to Islam" to mean conversion, when it could just as well be translated to "they submitted to the armies of Islam". Also, the idea that a community can just change its religious beliefs at swordpoint without garrisons following each and every potential religious leader at all times is just a little ridiculous. In fact, official state persecution of a religion tends to harden that religions communal solidarity- to say nothing of the Sikhs, just look at the Meo community in Rajasthan who were nominally Muslims but of a heterodox sort and Mughal attempts to bring them into the more orthodox fold only hardened their heterodoxy. The regions of India that have been under Islamic rule for the longest (upper Gangetic plain) are only around 10% Muslim, while rates of conversion were much higher in peripheral areas that were only later subjected to Islamic governments.
The second main theory of Islamisation in India was the migration thesis, much favoured by the middle class ashraf community that tried to show their pure genealogical lines that came straight from Arabia or Central Asia, bastions of prestigious Islamicate culture.
The third major theory is religion of patronage. A muslim ruler would give bureaucrats and soldiers promotions based on their conversion, and this seems to actually explain the vast majority of the real recorded instances of conversions with many instances of converts presenting themselves to the sultan and receiving a Khilat (robe of honour) but a lot of the time this didn’t make Hindus convert it just assimilated them into Persianate culture, in a similar process to the westernisation of elites in the colonial era. I think this explains the majority of the Muslim population found in the heartlands of the Gangetic states and the states of the Deccan. It can’t really explain the fact that the majority of conversions happened in peripheral areas where the reach of Islamic governments was highly limited by autonomous tribal actors and difficult terrain.
The fourth classical theory is the social liberation theory- that the oppressed Dalits and untouchables gladly abandoned the religion of their brahmanical oppressors to heed the call of equality before Allah. This is popular among Muslims as well as it casts Hinduism as backwards and oppressive and contrasts it with a decidedly modern notion of equality that Islam supposedly has. But neither did lower caste Hindus have any familiarity with Jean Jacques Rousseau and and notion that all mankind should be equal, nor was it simply the Brahmans denying them this equality for it was seen as the punishment for sins in a past life, and neither do contemporary Persian accounts mention a conception of Islam as a more equal religion. In fact, not only were there plenty of examples of shudras and lower castes participating in high governmental positions or improving their caste status through ritual, military and bureaucratic service etc, the act of converting in no way improved their social position- they now were not only ostracised because of their class but also because of their religion and by Muslims because of their ethnicity and class. Also, as with sword and patronage, geography is a major obstacle for this theory- the majority of converts to Islam cane from regions outside the traditional brahmanical heartland. If brahmanical authority was less established, the lower castes would be less oppressed, and so should theoretically be less likely to convert- the exact opposite of what actually happened.
In Bengal an area packed with tribes and peoples that had never really been immersed in the social structure of Hinduism, Islamisation was a consequence of the role that Sufis played in forming settled communities as the agrarian frontier expanded, and Islam was seen as the religion taught by those that had tamed the wilds and made their lives possible. In Punjab as well, there were lots of pastoral and semi nomadic tribes such as the jats who were only very weakly Hinduised and thus more susceptible to conversion, whether that be to Sikhism, Islam or more orthodox Hinduism.
Actually i wouldn't say that was the typical attitude they had, at least not for a long while.
A lot of times in the ancient world gods were seen as being particular to a place or people. You can see in the old testament that YHWH often isn't treated as the only god out there, just the most powerful and the only one his particular people were supposed to worship. Otherwise the first commandment would be along the same lines as the Islamic shahada.
You can even see it in Rome, that while they believed there were other gods out there there were also gods particular to Rome that had to be properly honored, and people got mighty pissed when foriegn gods took precedence.
Sorry, but do you have sources for this?
If what you wrote was the case, why did it take so much time to convert Egypt and Persia, and why did alot of religions survive in muslim ruled areas compared to christian ones?
Indeed, to a degree very often underestimated. There was a very large population of Jews and Christians in the Arabian peninsula, to the point where people would have been familiar with monotheism even if they themselves were polytheistic. Furthermore, there are old Arabic inscriptions referring to "Rahman", 'the merciful', as a monotheistic god dating from c. 300-400 CE, evidencing there being one or more monotheistic indigenous faiths in the Peninsula before the spread of Islam. Islam's great achievement was more codifying and regularizing these faiths than generating a completely new thing, I suspect, and I'd be willing to believe that splits in Islam reflect differing groups of Rahmanists before the split given the little time between the beginning of the religion and the sunni-shia split.
That being said, it was of course still a gradual process. For most of history until very near to the present, there were much larger nonmuslim minorities than today--likely, only a few percent of people converted, whether for material or spiritual reasons, each generation; in periods of war, I might also believe that the Muslim practice of polygamy might have mitigated the demographic impact of loss of large portions of the male population also, though I don't have the data to do much more than speculate on that. Of course, there is also the elephant in the room of the Ottoman genocide of Christian minorities in its territory and the exodus of Jews, voluntary or otherwise, to Israel following 1948, which two events greatly diminished the non-Muslim population of much of the middle east.
There are the Mari people of Russia, who still practice a Finnic pagan religion at least in some part. There might also be a few pockets of traditional Romuva/Slavic/Tengri/Finnic practicioners in European Russia for all I know.
Decreased, though certainly not nonzero, willingness to convert by the sword, as well as a greater theological acceptance of Peoples of the Book and differing population dynamics--unlike European pagans, who almost by definition (Latin paganus='redneck' or something similar) were not participants in greater-than-subsistence economies and thus less integral to the economic system--Christian and Jewish minorities tended to have a much greater economic and political role in conquered territories, with not only the numbers but also the education and connections to organize a revolt if they were too greatly oppressed.
Are you denying what I am saying, regarding religions such as:
1. Mesopotamian polytheists
2. Iranic polytheists
3. Mazdakis
4. Various types and sorts of Shi'a
5. Maichaeism
6. Buddhism in the west and Central Asia
7. Varied types of Khawarij-Shurha (only Ibadhi) remain.
Among others. The religions that remain, are those religions that were of benefit to the Muslim rulers, were Dhimmis or were adapted to a sort of life and relation that kept Islamic authorities from learning of their existence or their actual beliefs. For instance, Yazidi were almost unknown as a community in terms of existence until a very recent era, in terms of their actual beliefs and existence. Mandaens were also totally misunderstood and carry with themselves a sort of religious custom that does not permit contact with Muslim society.
Regarding sources, these are easily acquired through primary sources and ground evidences. No scholar denies these points that I mention, neither Muslim nor European historians, it is a clear cut issue. Sourcing these sorts of points is likened to asking for sources regarding evidences for Habsburg inheritance over Spain.
Something that is pretty underrated in islamic conversion is the flexibility of Islam, like, in many cases things considered "nope" in core islamic regions (Arabia, Levant, Mesopotamia and there it goes) are/were just made fine in regions like Al-Andalus, Central Asia and India for simply cultural reasons.
I think that it is all about Islam being made by a people (the arabs) made it very flexible in terms of cultural collision, like, in the 13th Century, you can't say that muslims in Iberia lived like muslims in India, but independently of it, the two communities are equally seen as rightfully muslim communities independently of some cultural differences that were assimilated into Islam.
It's just more simple convert to a religion when you can (until a certain point) merge with your day-to-day culture and at the same time still be seen as rightfully part of that faith. And then you remember that as a subject of muslims you've a good amount of benefits from conversion, it's like a super big win-win.
I think that it is all about Islam being made by a people (the arabs) made it very flexible in terms of cultural collision, like, in the 13th Century, you can't say that muslims in Iberia lived like muslims in India, but independently of it, the two communities are equally seen as rightfully muslim communities independently of some cultural differences that were assimilated into Islam.
It's just more simple convert to a religion when you can (until a certain point) merge with your day-to-day culture and at the same time still be seen as rightfully part of that faith. And then you remember that as a subject of muslims you've a good amount of benefits from conversion, it's like a super big win-win.