^ 
 
 
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University Library 
 
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 Preaching of Islam: a t?i,S^?,Wiiiin«iiMniiP'^° 
 
 olin 
 
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THE PREACHING OF ISLAM 
 
THE 
 
 PREACHING OF ISLAM 
 
 A History of the Propagation of the 
 Muslim Faith 
 
 T/W. ARNOLD, B.A. 
 
 LATE SCHOLAR OP MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, 
 MUHAMMADAN ANGLO-ORIENTAL COLLEGE, ALIGARH, INDIA 
 
 WESTMINSTER 
 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. 
 
 1896 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
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 a $ ^ o ^ 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 It is with considerable diffidence that I publish these pages : the 
 subject with which they deal is so vast, and I have had to 
 prosecute it under circumstances so disadvantageous, that I can 
 hope but for small measure of success. When I may be better 
 equipped for the task, and after further study has enabled me to 
 fill up the gaps ^ left in the present work, I hope to make it a 
 more worthy contribution to this neglected department of 
 Muhammadan history ; and to this end I shall be deeply grateful 
 for the criticisms and corrections of any scholars who may deign 
 to notice the book. To such I would say in the words of 
 St. Augustine : " Qui haec legens dicit, intelligo quidem quid 
 dictum sit, sed non vere dictum est ; asserat ut placet sententiam 
 suam, at redarguat meam, si potest. Quod si cum caritate et 
 veritate fecerit, mihique etiam (si in hac vita maneo) cogno- 
 scendum facere curaverit, uberrimum fructum laboris huius mei 
 cepero."^ 
 
 As I can neither claim to be an authority nor a specialist on any 
 of the periods of history dealt with in this book, and as many of 
 the events referred to therein have become matter for controversy, 
 I have given full references to the sources consulted ; and here I 
 have thought it better to err on the side of excess rather than 
 that of defect. I have myself suffered so much inconvenience 
 
 ' E.g. The spread of Islam in Sicily and the missionary labours of the numerous 
 Muslim saints. 
 " De Trinitate, i. 5. (Migne, torn. xlii. p. 823.) 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 and wasted so much time in hunting up references to books 
 indicated in some obscure or unintelligible manner, that 1 would 
 desire to spare others a similar annoyance ; and while to the 
 general reader I may appear guilty of pedantry, I may perchance 
 save trouble to some scholar who wishes to test the accuracy of a 
 statement or pursue any part of the subject further. 
 
 The scheme adopted in this book for the transliteration of 
 Arabic words is that laid down by the Transliteration Committee 
 of the Tenth International Congress of Orientalists, held at 
 Geneva in 1894, with the exception that the last letter of the 
 article is assimilated to the so-called solar letters. In the case of 
 geographical names this scheme has not been so rigidly applied — 
 in many instances because I could not discover the original 
 Arabic form of the word, in others (e.g, Mecca, Medina), because 
 usage has almost created for them a prescriptive title. 
 
 Though this work is confessedly, as explained in the Intro- 
 duction, a record of missionary efforts and not a history of 
 persecutions,! I have endeavoured to be strictly impartial and to 
 conform to the ideal laid down by the Christian historian ^ who 
 chronicled the successes of the Ottomans and the fall of Con- 
 Stantmople : oiiTe irpos X'*P"' °^* irpos ^66vov, dW' ouSe irpos /luros 
 17 KOI •n-pos ivvouLV <ruyypd<l>tiv )(ptu>v i<TTi rbv crvyypii^ovTa, oAA' 
 lO-Topias fkovov X^P"* <"*' Tou fi,r} Xij^ijs /8d&<3 iropaSo^^vai, ^ o -jfpoviK 
 oiSc yewav, ty/v la-ropiav. 
 
 I desire to thank Her Excellency the Princess Barberini ; His 
 Excellency the Prince Chigi ; the Most Rev. Dr. Paul Goethals, 
 Archbishop of Calcutta ; the Right Rev. Fr. Francis Pesci, Bishop 
 of Allahabad ; the Rev. S. S. Allnutt, of the Cambridge Mission, 
 Dehli ; the Trustees of Dr. Williams's Library, Gordon Square, 
 London, for the liberal use they have allowed me of their 
 respective libraries. 
 
 1 Accordingly the reader will find no account of the recent history of Armenia 
 or Crete, or indeed of any part of the empire of the Turks during the present 
 century— a period singularly barren of missionary enterprise on their cart 
 
 ^ Phrantzes, p. 5. ^ 
 
PREFACE. xi 
 
 I am under an especial debt of gratitude to James Kennedy, Esq., 
 late of the Bengal Civil Service, who has never ceased to' take a 
 kindly interest in my book, though it has almost exemplified the 
 Horatian precept, Nonum prematur in annum ; to his profound 
 scholarship and wide reading I have been indebted for much 
 information that would otherwise have remained unknown to 
 me, nor do I owe less to the stimulus of his enthusiastic love of 
 learning and his helpful sympathy. I am also under a debt of 
 gratitude to the kindness of Conte Ugo Balzani, but for whose 
 assistance certain parts of my work would have been impossible 
 to me. To the late Professor Robertson Smith I am indebted for 
 valuable suggestions as to the lines of study on which the history 
 of the North African church and the condition of the Christians 
 under Muslim rule, should be worked out ; the profound regret 
 which all Semitic scholars feel at his loss is to me intensified by 
 the thought that this is the only acknowledgement I am able to 
 make of his generous help and encouragement. 
 
 I desire also to acknowledge my obligations to Sir Sayyid 
 Ahmad Khan Bahadur, K.C.S.I., LL.D. ; to my learned friend 
 and colleague, Shamsu-1 'Ulama' Mawlawi Muhammad Shibli 
 Nu'mani, who has assisted me most generously out of the 
 abundance of his knowledge of early Muhammadan history ; and 
 to my former pupil, Mawlawi Bahadur 'Ali, M.A. 
 
 Lastly, and above all, must I thank my dear wife, but for whom 
 this work would never have emerged out of a chaos of incoherent 
 materials, and whose sympathy and approval are the best reward 
 of my labours. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A missionary religion defined. Islam spread by missionary methods 
 and not by the sword. The Qur'an enjoins preaching and per- 
 suasion, and forbids violence and force in the conversion of 
 unbelievers. The present work a history of missions, not of 
 persecutions i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 STUDY OF THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD CONSIDERED AS A PREACHER 
 
 OF ISLAM. 
 
 Muhammad the type oMheMusUmrni^^ Account of his 
 early effoi^s at propagating Islam, and of the conversions made 
 in Mecca before the Hijrah. Persecution of the converts, and 
 Flight to Medina, Condition of the Muslims in Medina : begin- 
 ning of the national life of Islam. Islam offered (a) to the 
 Arabs, {6) to the whole world. Islam declared in the Qur'an to 
 be a universal religion, — as being the primitive faith delivered 
 to Abraham. Muhammad as the founder of a political organisa- 
 tion. The wars of Muhammad, not aggressive, but defensive. 
 The spread of Islam and the efforts made to convert the Arabs 
 after the Hijrah. The ideals of Islam and those of Pre-Islamic 
 Arabia contrasted 8 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF 
 WESTERN ASIA. 
 
 Causes of the early successes of the Muslims. Conversion of Chris- 
 tian Bedouins : arrangements made for the instruction of the 
 converts. Toleration extended to those who remained Chris- 
 tian. — The settled population of the towns : failure of Heraclius's 
 attempt to reconcile the contending Christian sects. The Arab 
 conquest of Syria and Palestine : their toleration : the Ordinance 
 of 'Umar ; jizyah paid in return for protection and in lieu of 
 military service. Condition of the Christians under Muslim 
 rule : they occupy high posts, build new churches : revival in 
 the Nestorian church. Causes of their conversion to Islam : 
 revolt against Byzantine ecclesiasticism : influence of rationalistic 
 thought : imposing character of Muslim civilisation. Persecu- 
 tions suffered by the Christians. Proselytising efforts. Details 
 of conversion to Islam. — Account of conversions from among 
 the Crusaders. — The Armenian and Georgian Churches . . 42 
 
xiv CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF 
 
 AFRICA. ,^^^ 
 
 Egypt : conquered by the Arabs, who are welcomed by the Copts as 
 their deliverers from Byzantine rule. Condition of the l.opts 
 under the Muslims. Corruption and negligence o' '"^ clergy 
 lead to conversions to Islam.— Nubia: relations with Muhamma- 
 dan powers : political independence maintained until their con- 
 version to Islam : not converted by force, but through Jh5_decay 
 of the Christian faith and thejnfluence-of -Muslim me/c^nts.— 
 Abyssinia : the Arabs onTHe sea-board : missionary efforts in 
 the fourteenth century : invasion of Ahmad Gragne : conver- 
 sions to Islam: progress of Islam in the present century: 
 persecution of the Muslims.— Northern Africa : extent of Chris- 
 tianity in North Africa in the seventh century : the Christians 
 are said to have been forcibly converted : reasons for thinking 
 that this statement is not true : toleration enjoyed by the Chris- 
 tians : gradual disappearance of the Christian Church . . 87 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF SPAIN. 
 
 Christianity in Spain before the Muslim conquest : miserable con- 
 dition of the Jews and the slaves. Early converts to Islam. 
 Corruption of the clergy. Toleration of the Arabs, and influence 
 of their civilisation on the Christians, who study Arabic and 
 adopt Arab dress and manners. Causes of conversion to Islam. 
 The voluntary martyrs of Cordova. Extent of the conversions . 112 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS IN EUROPE 
 UNDER THE TURKSi 
 
 Relations of the Turks to their Christian subjects during the first 
 two centuries of their rule : toleration extended to the Greek 
 Church by Muhammad II. : the benefits of Ottoman rule : its 
 disadvantages, the tribute-children, the capitation tax, tyranny 
 of individuals. Forced conversion rare. Proselytising efforts 
 made by the Turks. Circumstances that favoured the spread of 
 Islam : degraded condition of the Greek Church : failure of the 
 attempt to Protestantise the Greek Church : oppression of the 
 Greek clergy : moral superiority of the Ottomans : imposing 
 character of their conquests. Conversion of Christian slaves. — 
 Islam in Albania, conquest of the country, independent character 
 of its people, gradual decay of the Christian faith, and its 
 causes ;— in Servia, alliance of the Servians with the Turks, 
 conversions mainly from among the nobles except in Old 
 Servia ; — in Montenegro ; — in Bosnia, the Bogomiles, points of 
 similarity between the Bogomilian heresy and the Muslim creed 
 conversion to Islam ; — in Crete, conversion in the ninth century' 
 oppression of the Venetian rule, conquered by the Turks, con- 
 versions to Islam J2C 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN PERSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA. . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Religious condition of Persia at the time of the Arab conquest. 
 Islam welcomed by many sections of the population. Points of 
 similarity between the older faiths and Islam. Toleration. 
 Conversions to Islam. The Isma'ilians and their missionary 
 system. Islam in Central Asia and Af^anistan . . .177 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE MONGOLS AND TARTARS. 
 
 Account of the Mongol conquests. Buddhism, Christianity and 
 Islam in rivalry for the allegiance of the Mongols. Their 
 original religion, Shamanism, described. Spread of Buddhism, 
 of Christianity, and of Islam respectively among the Mongols. 
 Difficulties that stood in the way of Islam. Cruel treatment of 
 the Muslims by some Mongol rulers. Early converts to Islam. 
 Baraka Shan, the first Mongol prince converted. Conversion of 
 the Ilkians. Conversion of the Jagatay Mongols. History of 
 Islam under the Golden Horde: UzbegSian: failure of attempts 
 to convert the Russians. Spread of Islam in modem times in 
 the Russian Empire. The conversion of the Tartars of Siberia . 185 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA. 
 
 Distribution of the Muhammadan population. Part taken by the 
 Muhammadan rulers in the propagation of Islam : conversion 
 of Rajputs and others. — The work of the Muslim missionaries in 
 India ; in South India, proselytising labours of Ibn Malik and 
 his companions, forced conversions under Haydar 'Ali and Tipii 
 Sultan, the Mappila : — in the Maldive Islands : — in the Deccan, 
 early Arab settlements, labours of individual missionaries : — in 
 Sind, the rule of the Arabs, their toleration, account of individual 
 missionaries, conversion of the Khojahs and Borahs : — in Bengal, 
 the Muhammadan rule in this province, extensive conversions of 
 the lower castes, religious revival in recent times. — Particular 
 account of the labours of Muslim missionaries in other parts of 
 India. Propagandist movements of modern times. Circum- 
 stances facilitating the progress of Islam : the oppressiveness of 
 the Hindu caste system, worship of Muslim saints, etc. — Spread 
 of Islam in Kashmir and Thibet 208 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN CHINA. 
 
 Early notices of Islam in China. Authorities for the history of the 
 spread of Islam : Vasil'ev, De Thiersant, Sayyid Sulayman. 
 Intercourse of the Chinese with the Arabs ; spread of Islam in 
 the north-west ; influence of the Mongol conquest. Spread of 
 Islam in the south : early Arab settlements : Wahab ibn Abi 
 Kabshah. Relations of the Chinese Muslims to the Chinese 
 Government. Their efforts to spread their religion . . .242 
 
xvi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 THK SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA. 
 
 , I'ACE 
 
 The Arabs in Northern Africa : conversion of the Berbers : the 
 mission of 'Abdu-Uah ibn Yassln. Introduction of Islam into 
 the Sudan : rise of Muhammadan kingdoms : account of mission- 
 ary movements, Danfodio, 'Uthmanu-I Amir Ghani, the Qadri- 
 yah, the Tijanlyah, and the Sanusiyah. Spread of Islam on 
 the West Coast : Ashanti : Dahomey. Spread of Islam on the 
 East Coast : early Muslim settlements : the Galla : the Somali. 
 Islam in Cape Coast Colony. Account of the Muslim mission- 
 aries in Africa and their methods of winning converts . . 258 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. 
 
 Early intercourse between the Malay Archipelago and Arabia and 
 India. Methods of missionary work. History of Islam in 
 Sumatra ; in the Malay Peninsula ; in Java ; in the Moluccas ; 
 in Borneo ; in Celebes ; in Mindanao and the Sulu Islands ; 
 among the Papuans. The Muslim missionaries : traders : hajis 293 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Absence of missionary organisation in Islam : zeal on the part of 
 individuals. Who are the Muslim missionaries ? Causes that 
 have contributed to their success : the simpUcity of the Muslim 
 creed : the rationalism and ritualism of Islam. Islam not spread 
 by the sword. The toleration of Muhammadan governments. 
 Circumstances contributing to the progress of Islam in ancient 
 and in modern times 332 
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 Jihad : meaning of the word : passages in the Qur'an in which it 
 
 occurs 347 
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 Letter of Al Hashimi inviting AI Kindi to embrace Islam . . .353 
 
 APPENDIX III. 
 
 Controversial literature between Muslims and the followers of 
 
 other faiths ,rg 
 
 APPENDIX IV. 
 
 Converts to Islam that have not come under direct missionary 
 
 influences ,gj 
 
 Titles of Works cited by Abbreviated References . . 373 
 
 INDEX '^g^ 
 
THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 "Ever since Professor Max Miiller delivered his lecture in West- 
 minster Abbey, on the day of intercession for missions, in 
 December, 1873, it has been a literary commonplace, that the six 
 ^reat religions of the world may be divided into missionary and 
 non-missionary ; under the latter head will fall Judaism, Brah- 
 manism and Zoroastrianism, and under the former Buddhism, 
 Christianity and Islam ; and he has well defined what the term, — 
 a missionary religion, — should be taken to mean, viz. one " in 
 which the spreading of the truth and the conversion of unbelievers 
 are raised to the rank of a sacred duty by the founder or his 
 immediate successors. ... It is the spirit of truth in the hearts of 
 believers which cannot rest, unless it manifests itself in thought, 
 word and deed, which is not satisfied till it has carried its message 
 to every human soul, till what it believes to be the truth is 
 accepted as the truth by all members of the human family." ' 
 
 It is such a zeal for the truth of their religion that has inspired 
 the Muhammadans to carry with them the message of Islam to 
 the people of every land into which they penetrate, and that 
 justly claims for their religion a place among those we term 
 missionary. It is the history of the birch of this missionary zeal, 
 its inspiring forces and the modes of its activity that forms the 
 subject of the following pages. The 173 millions of Muhammadans 
 
 ' A note on Mr. Lyall's article : '■ Missionary Religions." Fortnightly Review, 
 July, 1874. 
 
2 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 scattered over the world at the present day are evidences of its 
 workings through the length of twelve centuries. 
 
 An eternal and life-bringing truth, the message of the One God 
 was proclaimed to the people of Arabia in the seventh century, by 
 a prophet under whose banner their scattered tribes became a 
 nation ; and filled with the pulsations of this new national life, 
 and with a religious fervour and enthusiasm that imparted an 
 almost invincible strength to their armies, they poured forth over 
 three continents to conquer and subdue. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, 
 North Africa and Persia were the first to fall before them, and 
 pressing westward to Spain and eastward beyond the Indus, the 
 followers of the Prophet found themselves, one hundred years 
 after his death, masters of an empire greater than that of Rome at 
 the zenith of its power. 
 
 Although in after years this great empire was split up and the 
 political power of Islam diminished, still its spiritual conquests went 
 on uninterruptedly. When the Mongol hordes sacked Baghdad 
 (a.d. 1258) and drowned in blood the faded glory of the 'Abbasid 
 dynasty, — when the Muslims were expelled from Cordova by 
 Ferdinand of Leon and Castile (a.d. 1236), and Granada, the last 
 stronghold of Islam in Spain, paid tribute to the Christian king,— 
 Islam had just gained a footing in the island of Sumatra and was 
 just about to commence its triumphant progress through the 
 islands of the Malay Archipelago. In the hours of its political 
 degradation, Islam has achieved some of its most brUliant spiritual 
 conquests : on two great historical occasions, infidel barbarians 
 have set their feet on the necks of the followers of the Prophet, — 
 the Saljuq Turks in the eleventh and the Mongols in the thirteenth 
 century, — and in each case the conquerors have accepted the 
 religion of the conquered. Unaided also by the temporal power 
 and innocent of any political motive, Muslim missionaries have 
 carried their faith into Central Africa, China and the East India ' 
 Islands. 
 
 At the present day the faith of Islam extends from Morocco to 
 Zanzibar, from Sierra Leone to Siberia and China, from Bosnia. 
 to New Guinea. Outside the limits of strictly Muhammadan 
 countries and of lands, such as China and Russia, that contain a. 
 large Muhammadan population, there are some few small com- 
 munities of the followers of the Prophet, which bear witness to 
 the faith of Islam in the midst of unbelievers. Such are the 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 Polish-speaking Muslims of Tartar origin in Lithuania, that 
 inhabit the districts of Kovno, Vilno and Grodno ; 1 the Dutch- 
 speaking Muslims of Cape Colony ; and the Indian coolies that 
 have carried the faith of Islam with them to 'the West India 
 Islands and to British and Dutch Guiana. In recent years, too, 
 Islam has found adherents in England (where the numbers of 
 the converts had risen in 1894 to 137), in North America and 
 Australia. 
 
 The spread of this faith over so vast a portion of the globe is 
 due to various causes, social, political and religious : but among 
 these, one of the most powerful factors at work in the production 
 of this stupendous result, has been the unremitted labours of 
 Muslim missionaries, who, with the Prophet himself as their great 
 ensample, have spent themselves for the conversion of un- 
 believers. 
 
 The duty of missionary work is no after-thought in the history 
 of Islam, but was enjoined on believers from the beginning, as 
 may be judged from the following passages in the Quran, — which 
 are here quoted in chronological order according to the date of 
 their being delivered. 
 
 " Summon thou to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and with 
 kindly warning : dispute with them in the kindest manner, 
 (xvi. 126.) 
 " They who have inherited the Book after them (i.e. the Jews 
 
 and Christians), are in perplexity of doubt concerning it. 
 " For this cause summon thou (them to the faith), and walk up- 
 rightly therein as thou hast been bidden, and follow not 
 their desires : and say : In whatsoever Books God hath 
 sent down do I believe : I am commanded to decide justly 
 between you : God is your Lord and our Lord : we have 
 our works and you have your works : between us and you 
 let there be no strife : God will make us all one : and to 
 Him shall we return." (xlii. 13-14.) 
 Similar injunctions are found also in the Medinite Surahs, 
 delivered at a time when Muhammad was at the head of a large 
 army and at the height of his power. 
 
 "Say to those who have been given the Book and to the 
 ignorant, Do you accept Islam ? Then, if they accept 
 Islam, are they guided aright : but if they turn away, then 
 ' Reclus, vol. V. p. 433. 
 B 2 
 
4 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 thy duty is only preaching ; and God's eye is on His 
 servants, (iii. 19.) 
 " Thus God clearly showeth you His signs that perchance ye 
 
 may be guided ; 
 " And that there may be from among you a people who mvite to 
 the Good, and enjoin the Just, and forbid the Wrong ; and 
 these are they with whom it shall be well. (iii. 99-100.) 
 " To every people have We appointed observances which they 
 observe. Therefore let them not dispute the matter with 
 thee, but summon them to thy Lord : Verily thou art 
 guided aright : 
 " But if they debate with thee, then say : God best knoweth 
 
 what ye do ! (xxii. 66-7.) 
 The following passages are taken from what is generally sup- 
 posed to be the last Surah that was delivered. 
 
 " If any one of those who join gods with God ask an asylum of 
 
 thee, grant him an asylum in order that he hear the 
 
 word of God ; then let him reach his place of safety." 
 
 (ix. 6.) 
 
 With regard to the unbelievers who had broken their plighted 
 
 word, who " sell the signs of God for a mean price and turn others 
 
 aside from His way," and "respect not with a believer either 
 
 ties of blood or good faith," ... it is said : — 
 
 " Yet if they turn to God and observe prayer and give alms, 
 then are they your brothers in the faith : and We make 
 clear the signs for men of knowledge." (ix. 11.) 
 Thus from its very inception Islam has been a missionary 
 religion, both in theory and in practice, for the life of Muhammad 
 exemplifies the same teaching and the Prophet himself stands at 
 the head of a long series of Muslim missionaries who have won 
 an entrance for their faith into the hearts of unbelievers. More- 
 over it is not in the cruelties of the persecutor or the fury of the 
 fanatic that we should look for the evidences of the missionary 
 spirit of Islam, any more than in the exploits of that mythical 
 personage, the Muslim warrior with sword in one hand and 
 Qur'an in the other, — but in the quiet, unobtrusive labours of the 
 preacher and the trader who have carried their faith into every 
 quarter of the globe. Such peaceful methods of preaching and 
 persuasion were not adopted, as some would have us believe only 
 when political circumstances made force and violence impossible 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 or impolitic, but were most strictly enjoined in numerous passages 
 of the Qur'an, as follows : — 
 
 " And endure- what they say with patience, and depart from 
 them with a decorous departure. 
 
 " And let Me alone with the gainsayers, rich in the pleasures 
 (of this life) ; and bear thou with them yet a little while. 
 (Ixxiii. 10 — II.) 
 
 " (My) sole (work is preaching from God and His message. 
 (Ixxii. 24.) 
 
 " Tell those who have believed to pardon those who hope not 
 for the days of God in which He purposeth to recompense 
 men according to their deserts, (xlv. 13.) 
 
 " They who had joined other gods with God say, ' Had He 
 pleased, neither we nor our forefathers had worshipped 
 aught but Him ; nor had we, apart from Him, declared 
 anything unlawful.' Thus acted they who were before 
 them. Yet is the duty of the apostles other than plain- 
 spoken preaching ? (xvi. 37.) 
 
 " Then if they turn their backs, still thy office is only plain- 
 spoken preaching, (xvi. 84.) 
 
 " Dispute ye not, unless in kindliest sort, with the people of the 
 Book ; save with such of them as have dealt wrongfully 
 (with you) : and say ye, ' We believe in what has been 
 sent down to us and hath been sent down to you. Our 
 God and your God is one, and to Him are we self- 
 surrendered.' (xxix. 45.) 
 
 " But if they turn aside from thee, yet We have not sent thee to 
 be guardian over them. 'Tis thine but to preach, (xlii. 47.) 
 
 " But if thy Lord had pleased, verily all who are in the world 
 would have believed together. Wilt thou then compel 
 men to become believers ? (x. 99.) 
 
 " And we have not sent thee otherwise than to mankind at 
 large, to announce and to warn, (xxxiv. 27.) 
 
 Such precepts are not confined to the Meccan Surahs, but are 
 found in abundance also in those delivered at Medina, as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Let there be no compulsion in religion, (ii. 257.) 
 
 " Obey God and obey the apostle ; but if ye turn away, yet is 
 our apostle only charged with plain-spoken preaching. 
 (Ixiv. 12.) 
 
6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 " Obey God and obey the apostle : but if ye turn back, still the 
 burden of his duty is on him only, and the burden of your 
 duty rests on you. And if ye obey him, ye shall have 
 guidance : but plain preaching is all that devolves upon 
 the apostle, (xxiv. 53. 
 
 " Say : O men ! I am only your plain-spoken (open) warner. 
 
 (xxii. 48.) 
 " Verily We have sent thee to be a witness and a herald of 
 
 good and a warner, 
 " That ye may believe on God and on His apostle ; and may 
 
 assist Him and honour Him, and praise Him morning and 
 
 evening, (xlviii. 8-9.) 
 " Thou wilt not cease to discover the treacherous ones among 
 
 them, except a few of them. But forgive them and pass it 
 
 over. Verily, God; loveth those who act generously." 
 
 (V. 16.) 
 It is the object of the following pages to show how this ideal 
 was realised in history and how these principles of missionary 
 activity were put into practice by the exponents of Islam. And 
 at the outset the reader should clearly understand that this work 
 is not intended to be a history of Muhammadan persecutions 
 but of Muhammadan missions — it does not aim at chronicling 
 the instances of forced conversions which may be found scattered 
 up and down the pages of Muhammadan histories. European 
 writers have taken such care to accentuate these, that there is no 
 fear of their being forgotten, and they do not strictly come within 
 the province of a history of missions. In a history of Christian 
 missions we should naturally expect to hear more of the labours 
 of St. Liudger and St. Willehad among the pagan Saxons than of 
 the baptisms that Charlemagne forced them to undergo at the 
 point of the sword.^ The true missionaries of Denmark vsrere 
 St. Ansgar and his successors rather than King Cnut, who forcibly 
 rooted out paganism from his dominions.^ Abbot Gottfried and 
 Bishop Christian, though less successful in converting the pagan 
 
 'See Enhardi Fuldensis Annales. A.D. 777. " Saxones post multas csedes et 
 varia bella afflicti, tandem christiani effecti, Francorum dicioni subduntur." 
 G. H. Pertz : Monumenta GermaniEe Historica. Vol. i. p. j^g (See also 
 PP; 156, 159.) 
 
 " "Turn zelo propagandas fidei succensus, barbara regna iusto certamine 
 aggressus, devictas subditasque nationes christianse legi subiugavit." (Breviarium 
 Romanum. lun. 19.) 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 Prussians, were more truly representative of Christian missionary 
 work than the Brethren of the Sword and other Crusaders who 
 brought their labours to completion by means of fire and sword. 
 The knights of the " Ordo fratrum militiae Christi " forced 
 Christianity on the people of Livonia, but it is not to these 
 militant propagandists but to the monks Meinhard and Theo- 
 doric that we should point as being the true missionaries of the 
 Christian faith in this country. The violent means sometimes 
 employed by the Jesuit missionaries ^ cannot derogate from the 
 honour due to St Francis Xavier and other preachers of the 
 same order. Nor is Valentyn any the less the apostle of 
 Amboyna because in 1699 an order was promulgated to the 
 Rajas of this island that they should have ready a certain number 
 of pagans to be baptised, when the pastor came on his rounds.^ 
 
 Similarly Al Mutawakkil, Al Hakim and Tipu Sultan are not to 
 be looked upon as typical missionaries of Islam to the exclusion 
 of such preachers as Mawlana. Ibrahim, the apostle of Java, 
 Khwajah Mu'inu-d Din Chishti in India and countless others who 
 won converts to the Muslim faith by peaceful means alone. 
 
 ^ Mathurin Veyssiere de la Croze : Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, pp. 
 529-531. (The Hague, 1724.) 
 ^ Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, vol. xi. p. 89. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 STUDY OF THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD CONSIDERED AS A PREACHER 
 
 OF ISLAM. 
 
 It is not proposed in this chapter to add another to the already 
 numerous biographies of Muhammad, but rather to make a study 
 of his Hfe in one of its aspects only, viz. that in which the^ 
 Prophet is presented to us as a preacher, as the apostle unto 
 men of a new religion.' The life of the founder of Islam and the- 
 inaugurator of its propaganda may naturally be expected to 
 exhibit to us the true character of the missionary activity of this 
 religion. If the life of the Prophet serves as the standard of con- 
 duct for the ordinary believer, it must do the same for the Muslim 
 missionary. From the pattern, therefore, we may hope to learn 
 something of the spirit that would animate those who sought to 
 copy it, and of the methods they might be expected to adopt. 
 For the missionary spirit of Islam is no after-thought in its 
 history ; it interpenetrates the religion from its very commence- 
 ment, and in the following sketch it is desired to show how this 
 is so, how Muhammad the Prophet is the type of the missionary 
 of Islam. It is therefore beside the purpose to describe his 
 early history, or the influences under which he grew up to man- 
 hood, or to consider him in the light either of a statesman or a: 
 general : it is as the preacher alone that he will demand our 
 attention. 
 
 When, after long internal conflict and disquietude after whole 
 days and nights of meditation and prayer in the cave of Mount 
 Hira', Muhammad was at length convinced of his divine mission 
 — when at length the Voice aroused him from his despondency^ 
 
 ' Except where special references are given, the facts recorded in this chaoter 
 are to be found in all the well-known biographies of the Prophet by Caus-in de 
 Perceval, Muir, Sprenger, Krehl, etc. Whenever several verses are quoted" from, 
 the Qur'an they are arranged in chronological order. irom. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 9- 
 
 and fear, and bade him proclaim unto men the truth that day by- 
 day more strongly forced itself upon him, his earliest efforts were 
 directed towards persuading his own family of the truth of the 
 new doctrine. The unity of God, the abomination of idolatry, 
 the duty laid upon man of submission to the will of his Creator, — 
 these were the simple truths to which he claimed their allegiance. 
 The first convert was his faithful and loving wife, Khadijah, — she 
 who fifteen years before had offered her hand in marriage to the 
 poor kinsman that had so successfully traded with her imerchan- 
 dise as a hired agent, — with the words, " I love thee, my cousin,, 
 for thy kinship with me, for the respect with which the people- 
 regard thee, for thy honesty, for the beauty of thy character and 
 for the truthfulness of thy speech." She had lifted him out of 
 poverty, and enabled him to live up to the social position to 
 which he was entitled by right of birth ; but this was as nothing to 
 the fidelity and loving devotion with which she shared his mental' 
 anxieties, and helped him with tenderest sympathy and encour- 
 agement in the hour of his despondency. When in an agony of 
 mind, after having seen a vision, he once fled to her for comfort^ 
 she thus revived his downcast spirit : "Fear not, for joyful tidings 
 dost thou bring. I will henceforth regard thee as the Prophet 
 of our nation. Rejoice : Allah will not suffer thee to fall to shame- 
 Hast thou not been loving to thy kinsfolk, kind to thy neigh- 
 bours, charitable to the poor, faithful to thy word, and ever a 
 defender of the truth ? " Thus up to her death in 619 a.d. (after 
 a wedded life of five and twenty years) she was always ready with 
 sympathy, consolation and encouragement whenever he suffered 
 from the persecution of his enemies or was tortured by doubts, 
 and misgivings. " So Khadijah believed," says the biographer of 
 the Prophet, " and attested the truth of that which came to him 
 from God. Thus was the Lord minded to lighten the burden of 
 His Prophet ; for he heard nothing that grieved him touching his 
 rejection by the people, but he had recourse unto her and she 
 comforted, re-assured and supported him." Truly, one of the- 
 most beautiful pictures of a perfect wedded life that history 
 gives us. 
 
 Among the earliest believers were his adopted children Zayd. 
 and 'All, and his bosom friend Abu Bakr, of whom Muhammad 
 would often say in after years — " I never invited any to ther 
 faith who displayed not hesitation and perplexity — excepting only 
 
30 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Abu Bakr ; who when I had pronounced unto him Islam tamed 
 'not, neither was perplexed." He was a wealthy merchant, much 
 respected by his fellow citizens for the integrity of his character 
 •and for his intelligence and ability. After his conversion he 
 expended the greater part of his fortune on the purchase of 
 Muslim slaves who were persecuted by their masters on account of 
 their adherence to the teaching of Muhammad. Through his 
 influence, to a great extent, five of the earliest converts were 
 added to the number of behevers, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, the future 
 -conqueror of the Persians ; Zubayr ibnu-1' Awwam, a relative both 
 of the Prophet and his wife ; Talhah, famous as a warrior in 
 after days ; a wealthy merchant 'Abdu-r Rahman, and 'Uthman, 
 the third i^alifah. The last was early exposed to persecution ; 
 ■his uncle seized and bound him, saying, " Dost thou prefer a new 
 religion to that of thy fathers ? I swear I will not loose thee 
 until thou givest up this new faith thou art following after." To 
 which 'Uthman replied, " By the Lord, I will never abandon it! " 
 Whereupon his uncle, seeing the firmness of his attachment to 
 Jiis faith, released him. 
 
 With other additions, particularly from among slaves and 
 poor persons, the number of the believers reached to nearly forty 
 •during the first three years of his mission. Encouraged by the 
 ■success of these private efforts, Muhammad determined on more 
 active measures. He called his kinsmen together and invited 
 them to embrace the new faith. " No Arab," he urged, " has 
 ■offered to his nation more precious advantages than those I bring 
 you. I offer you happiness in this world and in the life to come. 
 Who among you will aid me in this task ? " All were silent. 
 'Only 'All, with boyish enthusiasm, cried out, " Prophet of God, 
 I will aid thee." At this the company broke up with derisive 
 laughter. 
 
 Undeterred by the ill-success of this preaching, he repeatedly 
 ■called them together on future occasions, but his message and his 
 warnings received from them nothing but scoffing and contempt. 
 Indeed, the virulence of their opposition is probably the reason 
 ■why in the fourth year of his mission, he took up his residence 
 m the house of Arqam, an early convert. It was in a central 
 and frequented situation, fronting the Ka'bah, and here peaceably 
 -and without interruption he was able to preach and recite the 
 •Qur'an to all enquirers that came to him ; and so the number 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. ii 
 
 of the believers increased, and within the next two years rose to 
 fifty. The Quraysh viewed this progress of the new religion with 
 increasing dissatisfaction and hatred. They adopted all possible 
 means, threats and promises, insults and offers of worldly 
 honour and aggrandisement to induce Muhammad to abandon 
 the part he had taken up. 
 
 ^,On more than one occasion they tried to induce his uncle 
 Abu Talib, as head of the clan of the Banu Hashim, to which 
 Muhammad belonged, to restrain him from making such attacks 
 upon their ancestral faith, or otherwise they threatened to resort 
 to more violent measures. Abu Talib accordingly appealed to his 
 nephew not to bring disaster on himself and his family. The 
 Prophet replied : " Were the sun to come down on my right hand 
 and the moon on my left, and were the choice offered me of 
 renouncing this work or of perishing in the achievement of it, I 
 would not abandon it." Abu Talib was moved and exclaimed, 
 " Preach whatever thou wilt. I swear I will never give thee up 
 unto thy enemies." 
 
 When such peaceful methods failed, the rage and fury of the 
 Quraysh burst forth with redoubled force. They realised that 
 the triumph of the new teaching meant the destruction of the 
 national religion and the national worship, and a loss of wealth and 
 power to the guardians of the sacred Ka'bah. Muhammad him- 
 self was safe under the protection of Abu Talib and the Banu 
 Hashim, who, though they had no sympathy for the doctrines 
 their kinsman taught, yet with the strong clan- feeling peculiar to 
 the Arabs, secured him from any attempt upon his life, though 
 he was still exposed to continual insult and annoyance. But the 
 poor who had no protector, and the slaves, had to endure the 
 cruellest persecution, and were imprisoned and tortured in order 
 to induce them to recant. It was at this time that Abu Bakr 
 purchased the freedom of Bilal,i an African slave, who was called 
 by Muhammad " the first-fruits of Abyssinia." He had been 
 cruelly tortured by being exposed, day after day, to the scorching 
 rays of the sun, stretched out on his back, with an enormous 
 stone on his stomach ; here he was told he would have to stay 
 until either he died or renounced Muhammad and worshipped 
 idols, to which he would reply only, " There is but one God, there 
 is but one God." Two persons died under the fearful tortures 
 
 ' He is famous throughout the Muhammadan world as the first mu'adhdhin. 
 
12 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 they had to undergo. As Muhammad was unable to reheve his 
 persecuted followers, he advised them to take refuge in Abyssinia, 
 and in the fifth year of his mission (a.d. 615), eleven men and 
 four women crossed over to Abyssinia, where they received a 
 kind welcome from the Christian king of the country. Among 
 them was a certain Mus'ab ibn 'Umayr whose history is inter- 
 esting as of one, who had to endure that most bitter trial of the 
 new convert — the hatred of those he loves and who once loved 
 him. He had been led to embrace Islam through the teaching 
 he had listened to in the house of Arqam, but he was afraid to 
 let the fact of his conversion become known, because his tribe 
 and his mother, who bore an especial love to him, were bitterly 
 opposed to the new religion ; and indeed, when they discovered 
 the fact, seized and imprisoned him. But he succeeded in effect- 
 ing his escape to Abyssinia. 
 
 The hatred of the Quraysh pursued the fugitives even to 
 Abyssinia, and an embassy was sent to demand their extradition 
 from the king of that country. But when he heard their story 
 from the Muslims, he refused to withdraw from them his pro- 
 tection. For, said they, " We were plunged in the darkness of 
 ignorance and worshipped idols. Given up wholly to our evil 
 passions, we knew no law but that of the strongest, when God 
 raised up among us a man of our own race, illustrious by his 
 birth and long esteemed by us for his virtues. This apostle 
 called upon us to profess the unity of God, to worship God alone, 
 to reject the superstitions of our fathers, and despise the gods of 
 wood and stone. He bade us flee from wickedness, be truthful 
 in speech, faithful to our promises, kind and affectionate to our 
 parents and neighbours. He forbade us to dishonour women or 
 rob the orphans; he enjoined on us prayer, alms and fasting. 
 We believed in his mission and accepted the teachings that he 
 brought us from God. But our countrymen rose up against us, 
 and persecuted us to make us renounce our faith and return to 
 the worship of idols. So, finding no safety in our own country, 
 we have sought a refuge in yours. Putting our trust in your 
 justice, we hope that you will deliver us from the oppression of our 
 enemies." Their prayer was heard and the embassy of the 
 Quraysh returned discomfited. Meanwhile, in Mecca, a fresh 
 attempt was made to induce the Prophet to abandon his work of 
 preaching by promises of wealth and honour, but in vain. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 13 
 
 While the result of the embassy to Abyssinia was being looked 
 for in Mecca with the greatest expectancy, there occurred the 
 •conversion of a man, who before had been one of the most bitter 
 ■enemies of Muhammad, and had opposed him with the utmost 
 persistence and fanaticism — a man whom the Muslims had every 
 reason then to look on as their most terrible and virulent enemy, 
 though afterwards he shines as one of the noblest figures in the 
 early history of Islam, viz. 'Umar ibnu-1 Khattab. One day, in a 
 ft of rage against the Prophet, he set out, sword in hand, to slay 
 him. On the way, one of his relatives met him and asked him 
 •where he was going. " I am looking for Muhammad," he 
 answered, " to kill the wretch who has brought trouble and 
 ■discord among his fellow-citizens, insulted our gods, and outraged 
 the memory of our ancestors." " Why dost thou not rather 
 punish those of thy own family, who, unknown to thee, have 
 renounced the religion of our fathers ? " " And who are these of 
 my own family ? " answered 'Umar. " Thy brother-in-law Sa'id 
 and thy sister Fatimah." — 'Umar at once rushed off to the house 
 of his sister, who, with her husband and Khabbab, another of the 
 followers of Muhammad, who was instructing them in the faith, 
 were reading a passage of the Qur'an together. 'Umar burst 
 into the room : " What was that sound I heard ? " " It was 
 nothing," they replied. " Nay, you were reading, and I have 
 lieard that you have joined the sect of Muhammad." Where- 
 upon he rushed upon Sa'id and struck him. Fatimah threw 
 herself between them, to protect her husband, crying, " Yes, we 
 are Muslims ; we beheve in God and His Prophet : slay us if you 
 will." In the struggle his sister was wounded, and when 'Umar 
 saw the blood on her face, he was softened and asked to see the 
 paper they had been reading : after some hesitation she handed 
 it to him. It contained the 20th Surah of the Qur'an. When 
 'Umar read it, he exclaimed, " How beautiful, how sublime it 
 is ! " As he read on, conviction suddenly overpowered him and 
 lie cried, " Lead me to Muhammad that I may tell him of my 
 ■conversion." 
 
 About the same time also, another important convert was 
 /gained in the person of Hamzah, at once the uncle and foster- 
 brother of Muhammad, whose chivalrous soul was so stung to 
 sudden sympathy by a tale of insult inflicted on and patiently 
 iorne by his nephew, that he changed at once from a bitter 
 
14 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 enemy into a staunch adherent. His was not the only instance 
 of sympathy for the sufferings of the Muslims being thus aroused 
 at the sight of the persecutions they had to endure, and many, 
 no doubt, secretly favoured the new religion who did not declare 
 themselves until the day of its triumph. 
 
 The conversion of 'Umar is a turning-point in the history ot 
 Islam : the Muslims were now able to take up a bolder attitude. 
 Muhammad left the house of Arqam and the believers publicly 
 performed their devotions together around the Ka'bah. 
 
 But this immunity was short-lived. The embassy to Abyssinia 
 had returned unsuccessful, since the king had refused to with- 
 draw his protection from the Muslim fugitives. The situation 
 might thus be expected to give the aristocracy of Mecca just 
 cause for apprehension. For they had no longer to deal with a 
 band of oppressed and despised outcasts, struggling for a weak 
 and miserable existence. It was rather a powerful faction, adding 
 daily to its strength by the accession of influential citizens and 
 endangering the stability of the existing government by an 
 alliance with a powerful foreign prince. 
 
 The Quraysh resolved accordingly to make a determined eiFort 
 to crush out this dangerous element in the state. They put the 
 Banu Hashim and the Banu Muttalib, who through ties of 
 kindred protected the Prophet, under a ban, in accordance with 
 which the Quraysh agreed that they would not marry their 
 women, nor give their own in marriage to them ; they would 
 sell nothing to them, nor buy aught from them — that dealings 
 with them of every kind should cease. 
 
 This increased severity of persecution, with its attendant 
 dangers, led to a second flight to Abyssinia— this time, of eighty- 
 three men and eighteen women. 
 
 For three years the Banu Hashim remained shut up in one 
 quarter of the city ; during all this time the ban was put 
 rigorously in force against them. None dared venture out 
 except during the sacred months, in which all war ceased 
 throughout Arabia and a truce was made in order that pilgrims 
 might visit the sacred Ka'bah, the centre of the national religion. 
 Muhammad used to take advantage of such times of pilgrimage 
 to preach to the various tribes that flocked to Mecca and the 
 adjacent fairs. But with no success, for his uncle Abu Lahab 
 used to dog his footsteps, crying with a loud voice, " He is an 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 15 
 
 impostor who wants to draw you away from the faith of your 
 fathers to the false doctrines that he brings, wherefore separate 
 yourselves from him and hear him not." They would taunt him 
 with the words : " Thine own people and kindred should know 
 thee best : wherefore do they not believe and follow thee ? " 
 
 But at length the privations endured by Muhammad and his-- 
 kinsmen enlisted the sympathy of a numerous section of the 
 Quraysh and the ban was withdrawn. 
 
 In the same year the loss of Khadijah, the faithful wife who 
 for twenty-five years had been his counsellor and support, 
 plunged Muhammad into the utmost grief and despondency ; 
 and a little later the death of Abu Talib deprived him of his 
 constant and most powerful protector and exposed him afresh to 
 insult and contumely. 
 
 Scorned and rejected by his own townsmen, to whom he had' 
 delivered his message with so little success for ten years, he 
 resolved to see if there were not others who might be more ready 
 to listen, among whom the seeds of faith might find a more 
 receptive and fruitful soil. With this hope he set out for Ta'if, 
 a city about sixty miles from Mecca. Before an assembly of the 
 chief men of the city, he expounded his doctrine of the unity or 
 God and of the mission he had received as the Prophet of God to ^ 
 proclaim this faith ; at the same time he besought their protection 
 against his persecutors in Mecca. The disproportion between/ 
 his high claims (which moreover were unintelligible to the 
 heathen people of Ta'if) and his helpless condition only excited' 
 their ridicule and scorn, and pitilessly stoning him with stones 
 they drove him from their city. 
 
 ©n his return from Ta'if the prospects of the success of 
 Muhammad seemed more hopeless than ever, and the agony of 
 his soul gave itself utterance in the words that he puts into- 
 the mouth of Noah: "O my Lord, verily I have cried to- 
 my people night and day ; and my cry only makes them flee - 
 from me the more. 
 
 " And verily, so oft as I cry to- them, that Thou mayest forgive 
 them, they thrust their fingers into their ears and wrap them-- 
 selves in their garments, and persist (in their error), and are 
 disdainfully disdainful." (Ixxi. 5-6.) 
 
 But consolation came to him from an unexpected quarter. 
 At the time of the annual pilgrimage he was attracted by a. 
 
16 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 little group of six or seven persons whom he recognised as 
 coming from Medina, or, as it was then called, Yathrib. '' Of 
 what tribe are you ? " said he, addressing them. " We are of 
 the :|aazraj," they answered. "Confederates of the Jews?" 
 •" Yes." " Then will you not sit down awhile, that I may talk 
 with you ? " " Assuredly," replied they. Then they sat down 
 with him, and he proclaimed unto them the true God and 
 preached Islam and recited to them the Qur'an. " Now so it 
 was, in that God wrought wonderfully for Islam that there 
 were found in their country Jews, who possessed scriptures and 
 wisdom, while they themselves were heathen and idolaters. 
 Now the Jews oft times suffered violence at their hands, and 
 when strife was between them had ever said to them, " Soon will 
 a Prophet arise and his time is at hand ; him will we follow, and 
 with him slay you with the slaughter of 'Ad and of Iram." 
 When now the apostle of God was speaking with these men and 
 preached unto them the true God, they said one to another : 
 "Know surely that this is the Prophet, of whom the Jews have 
 warned us ; come let us now make haste and be the first to join 
 him." So they believed in what he preached unto them and 
 ■embraced Islam, and said to him, ' Our countrymen have long 
 been engaged in a most bitter and deadly feud with one another ; 
 but now perhaps the true God will unite them together through 
 thee and thy teaching. Therefore we will preach to them and 
 make known to them this religion, that we have received from 
 thee." So, full of faith, they returned to their own country. 
 
 Such is the traditional account of this event which was the 
 turning-point of Muhammad's mission. He had now met with a 
 people whose antecedents had in some way prepared their minds 
 for the reception of his teaching and whose present circumstances, 
 as afterwards appeared, were favourable to his cause. 
 
 The city of Yathrib had been long occupied by Jews whom 
 some national disaster, possibly the persecution under Hadrian, 
 had driven from their own country, when about 300 a.d. a party 
 of wandering emigrants, the two Arab clans of l^azraj and Aws, 
 arrived at Yathrib and were admitted by alliance to a share in the 
 territory. As their numbers increased they encroached more 
 and more on the power of the Jewish rulers, and finally, towards 
 the end of the fifth century, the government of the city passed 
 •entirely into their hands. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 17 
 
 Some of the Arabs had embraced the Jewish religion, and many 
 of the former masters of the city still dwelt there in the service 
 of their conquerors, so that it contained in Muhammad's time a 
 considerable Jewish population. The people of Yathrib were 
 thus familiar with the idea of a Messiah who was to come, and 
 were consequently more capable of understanding the claim of 
 Muhammad to be accepted as the Prophet of God, than were the 
 idolatrous Meccans to whom such an idea was entirely foreign 
 and especially distasteful to the Quraysh, whose supremacy over 
 the other tribes and whose worldly prosperity arose from the 
 fact that they were the hereditary guardians of the national 
 collection of idols kept in the sacred enclosure of the Ka'bah. 
 
 Further, the city of Yathrib was distracted by incessant civil 
 discord through a long-standing feud between the Banu Khazraj 
 and the Banu Aws. The citizens lived in uncertainty and 
 suspense, and anything likely to bind the conflicting parties 
 together by a tie of common interest could not but prove a boon 
 to the city. Just as the mediaeval republics of Northern Italy 
 chose a stranger to hold the chief post in their cities in order to 
 maintain some balance of power between the rival factions, and 
 prevent, if possible, the civil strife which was so ruinous to com- 
 merce and the general welfare, so the Yathribites would not look 
 upon the arrival of a stranger with suspicion, even though he 
 was likely to usurp or gain permission to assume the vacant 
 authority. Deadly jealousy at home had extinguished the 
 jealousy of influence from outside. 
 
 These facts go far to explain how eight years after the Hijrah 
 Muhammad could, at the head of 10,000 followers, enter the city 
 in which he had laboured for ten years with so meagre a result. 
 
 But this is anticipating. Muhammad had proposed to accom- 
 pany his new converts, the Khazrajites, to Yathrib himself, but 
 they dissuaded him therefrom, until a reconciliation could be 
 effected with the Banu Aws. " Let us, we pray thee, return unto 
 our people, if haply the Lord will create peace amongst us ; and 
 we will come back again unto thee. Let the season of pilgrimage 
 in the following year be the appointed time." So they returned 
 to their homes, and invited their people to the faith ; and many 
 helieved, so that there remained hardly a family in which mention 
 was not made of the Prophet. 
 
 When the time of pilgrimage again came round, a deputation 
 
 c 
 
1 8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 from Yathrib, ten men of the Banu :^azraj, and two of the Banu 
 Aws, met him at the appointed spot and pledged him their word 
 to obey his teaching. This, the first pledge of 'Aqabah, so called 
 from the secret spot at which they met, ran as follows : — ' We 
 will not worship any but the one God ; we will not steal, neither 
 will we commit adultery or kill our children ; we will abstain 
 from calumny and slander ; we will obey the Prophet in every- 
 thing that is right ; and will be faithful to him in weal and woe." 
 These twelve men now returned to Yathrib as missionaries of 
 Islam, and so well prepared was the ground, and with such zeal 
 did they prosecute their mission, that the new faith spread 
 rapidly from house to house and from tribe to tribe. 
 
 They were accompanied on their return by Mus'ab ibn 'Umayr ; 
 though, according to another account he was sent by the Prophet 
 upon a written requisition from Yathrib. This young man had 
 been one of the earliest converts, and had lately returned from 
 Abyssinia ; thus he had had much experience, and severe training 
 in the school of persecution had not only sobered his zeal but 
 taught him how to meet persecution and deal with those who were 
 ready to condemn Islam without waiting to learn the true contents 
 of its teaching ; accordingly Muhammad could with the greatest 
 confidence entrust him with the difficult task of directing and 
 instructing the new converts, cherishing the seeds of religious 
 zeal and devotion that had already been sown and bringing them 
 to fruition. Mus'ab took up his abode in the house of As'ad ibn 
 Zurarah, and gathered the converts together for prayer and the 
 reading of the Qur'an, sometimes here and sometimes in a house 
 belonging to the sons of Zafar, which was situated in a quarter of 
 the town occupied jointly by this family and that of 'Abdu-1 
 Ashhal. 
 
 The heads of the latter family at that time were Sa'd ibn 
 Mu'adh and Usayd ibn Hudayr. One day it happened that 
 Mus'ab was sitting together with As'ad in this house of the sons 
 of Zafar, engaged in instructing some new converts, when Sa'd 
 ibn Mu'adh, having come to know of their whereabouts, said to 
 Usayd ibn Hudayr : "Drive out this missionary and his companion 
 from our quarter ; I would spare thee the trouble did not the tie 
 that binds me and the sons of Zurarah prevent my doing him any 
 harm" (for he himself was the cousin of As'ad). Hereupon 
 Usayd took his spear and bursting in upon As'ad and Mus'ab 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 19 
 
 " What are you doing ? " he cried, " leading weak-minded folk 
 astray ? If you value your lives, begone hence." " Sit down and 
 listen," Mus'ab answered quietly, " if thou hearest what displeases 
 thee, we will go away." Usayd stuck his spear in the ground 
 and sat down to listen, while Mus'ab expounded to him the 
 fundamental doctrines of Islam and read several passages of the 
 Qur'an. After a time Usayd enraptured, cried, " What must I 
 do to enter this religion ? " " Purify thyself with water," 
 answered Mus'ab, " and confess that there is no God but God 
 and that Muhammad is the prophet of God." Usayd at once 
 complied and repeated the profession of faith, adding, "After me 
 you have still another man to convince (referring to Sa'd ibn 
 Mu'adh). If he is persuaded, his example will bring after him all 
 the tribe of 'Abdu-1 Ashhal. I will send him to you." 
 
 With these words he left them, and soon after came Sa'd ibn 
 Mu'adh himself, hot with anger against As'ad : " Wert thou not 
 my cousin, I would make thee repent of thy boldness. What ! 
 thou darest bring into the midst of us doctrines that are opposed 
 to our religion." Mus'ab begged him not to condemn the new 
 faith unheard, so Sa'd agreed to listen and soon the words of 
 Mus'ab touched him and brought conviction to his heart, and he 
 embraced the faith and became a Muslim. He went back to his 
 people burning with zeal and said to them, " Sons of 'Abdu-1 
 Ashhal, say, what am I to you ? " " Thou art our lord," they 
 answered, " tho^i art the wisest and most illustrious among us." 
 "Then I swear," replied Sa'd, "nevermore to speak to any of 
 you until you believe in God and Muhammad, His apostle." 
 And from that day, all the descendants of 'Abdu-1 Ashhal 
 embraced Islam.i 
 
 With such zeal and earnestness was the preaching of the faith 
 pushed forward that within a year there was not a family among 
 the Arabs of iledina that had not given some of its members to 
 swell the number of the faithful, with the exception of one branch 
 of the Banu Aws, which held aloof under the influence of Abu 
 Qays, the poet. 
 
 The following year, when the time of the annual pilgrimage 
 
 again came round, a band of converts, amounting to seventy-three 
 
 in number, accompanied their heathen fellow-countrymen from 
 
 Yathrib to Mecca. They were commissioned to invite Muhammad 
 
 ' Caussin de Perceval. Vol. iii. pp. 3-5. 
 
 C 2 
 
20 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to take refuge in Yathrib from the fury of his enemies, and had 
 come to swear allegiance to him as their prophet and their 
 leader. All the early converts who had before met the prophet 
 on the two preceding pilgrimages, returned to Mecca on this 
 important occasion, and Mus'ab their teacher accompanied them. 
 Immediately on his arrival he hurried to the prophet, and told 
 him of the success that had attended his mission. It is said that 
 his mother, hearing of his arrival, sent a message to him, saying: 
 " Ah, disobedient son, wilt thou enter a city in which thy mother 
 dwelleth, and not first visit her ? " " Nay, verily," he replied, " I 
 will never visit the house of any one before the prophet of God." 
 So, after he had greeted and conferred with Muhammad, he went 
 to his mother, who thus accosted him : " Then I ween thou art 
 still a renegade." He answered, " I follow the prophet of the Lord 
 and the true faith of Islam." " Art thou then well satisfied with 
 the miserable way thou hast fared in the land of Abyssinia and 
 now again at Yathrib ? " Now he perceived that she was medi- 
 tating his imprisonment, and exclaimed, " What ! wilt thou force 
 a man from his religion ? If ye seek to confine me, I will assuredly 
 slay the first person that layeth hands upon me." His mother 
 said, " Then depart from my presence," and she began to weep. 
 Mus'ab was moved, and said, " Oh, my mother ! I give thee 
 loving counsel. Testify that there is no God but the Lord and 
 that Muhammad is His servant and messenger." But she replied, 
 *' By the sparkling stars ! I will never make a fool of myself by 
 entering into thy religion. I wash my hands of thee and thy 
 concerns, and cleave steadfastly unto mine own faith." 1 
 
 In order not to excite suspicion and incur the hostility of the 
 Quraysh, a secret meeting was arranged at 'Aqabah, the scene of 
 the former meeting with the converts of the year before. 
 Muhammad came accompanied only by his uncle 'Abbas, who, 
 though he was still an idolater, had been admitted into the secret. 
 'Abbas opened the solemn conclave, by recommending his nephew 
 as a scion of one of the noblest families of his clan, which had 
 hitherto afforded the prophet protection, although rejecting his 
 teachings ; but now that he wished to take refuge among the 
 people of Yathrib, they should bethink themselves well before 
 undertaking such a charge, and resolve not to go back from their 
 promise, if once they undertook the risk. Then Bara ibn Ma'riir, 
 one of the Banu Khazraj, protesting that they were firm in their 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 21 
 
 resolve to protect the Prophet of God, besought him to declare 
 
 ■ fully what he wished of them. 
 
 ' Muhammad began by reciting to them some portions of the 
 ' Our'an, and exhorted them to be true to the faith they had pro- 
 ' fessed in the one God and the Prophet, His apostle ; he then asked 
 '^ them to defend him and his companions from all assailants just as 
 ^ they would their own wives and children. Then Bara ibn Ma'rur, 
 ^ taking his hand, cried out, " Yea, by Him who sent thee as His 
 
 - Prophet, and through thee revealed unto us His truth, we will 
 
 - protect thee as we would our own bodies, and we swear allegiance 
 to thee as our leader. We are the sons of battle and men of mail, 
 which we have inherited as worthy sons of worthy forefathers." 
 So they all in turn, taking his hand in theirs, swore allegiance to 
 
 : him. 
 
 As soon as the Quraysh gained intelligence of these secret pro- 
 
 - ceedings, the persecution broke out afresh against the Muslims,, 
 : and Muhammad advised them to flee out of the city. " Depart 
 
 unto Yathrib ; for the Lord hath verily given you brethren in 
 i: that city, and a home in which ye may find refuge." So quietly, 
 i by twos and threes they escaped to Yathrib, where they were 
 
 ■ heartily welcomed, their co-religionists in that city vying with 
 one another for the honour of entertaining them, and supplying 
 
 : them with such things as they had need of. Within two months 
 
 : nearly all the Muslims except those who were seized and im- 
 
 :. prisoned and those who could not escape from captivity had left 
 
 : Mecca, to the number of about 150. There is a story told of one 
 
 of these Muslims, by name Suhayb, whom Muhammad called " the 
 
 first-fruits of Greece " (he had been a Greek slave, and being set 
 
 : free by his master had amassed considerable wealth by successful 
 
 : trading) ; when he was about to emigrate the Meccans said to 
 
 him, "Thou earnest hither in need and penury ; but thy wealth 
 
 hath increased with us, until thou hast reached thy present 
 
 prosperity ; and now thou art departing, not thyself only, but 
 
 with all thy property. By the Lord, that shall not be ; " and he 
 
 said, "If I relinquish my property, will ye leave me free to 
 
 depart ? " And they agreed thereto ; so- he parted with all his 
 
 goods. And when that was told unto Muhammad, he said, 
 
 " Verily, Suhayb hath made a profitable bargain." 
 
 Muhammad delayed his own departure (with the intention, no 
 doubt, of withdrawing attention from his faithful followers) until 
 
22 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a determined plot against his life warned him that further delay 
 might be fatal, and he made his escape by means of a stratagem. 
 His first care after his arrival in Yathrib, or Medina as it was 
 called from this period— Madinatu-1 Nabi, the city of the Prophet-^ 
 was to build a mosque, to serve both as a place of prayer and of 
 general assembly for his followers, who had hitherto met for that 
 purpose in the dwelling-place of one of their number. The 
 worshippers at first used to turn their faces in the direction of 
 Jerusalem — an arrangement most probably adopted with the 
 hope of gaining over the Jews. In many other ways, by constant 
 appeals to their own sacred Scriptures, by according them perfect 
 freedom of worship and political equality, Muhammad en- 
 deavoured to conciliate the Jews, but they met his advances with 
 scorn and derision. When all hopes of amalgamation proved 
 fruitless and it became clear that the Jews would not accept him 
 as their Prophet, Muhammad bade his followers turn their faces in 
 prayer towards the holy Ka'bah in Mecca, (ii. 144.) ^ 
 
 This change of direction during prayer has a deeper significance 
 than might at first sight appear. It was really the beginning of 
 the National Life of Islam : it established the Ka'bah at Mecca as 
 a religious centre for all the Muslim people, just as from time 
 immemorial it had been a place of pilgrimage for all the tribes of 
 Arabia. Of similar importance was the incorporation of the 
 ancient Arab custom of pilgrimage to Mecca into the circle of 
 the religious ordinances of Islam, a duty that was to be performed 
 by every Muslim at least once in his lifetime. 
 
 There are many passages in the Qur'an that appeal to this germ 
 of national feeling and urge the people of Arabia to realise the 
 privilege that had been granted them of a divine revelation in 
 their own language and by the lips of one of theirown country- 
 nien. 
 
 " Verily We have made it an Arabic Qur'an that ye may haply 
 understand, (xliii. 2-3.) 
 
 " And thus We have revealed to thee an Arabic Qur'an, that 
 thou mayest warn the mother of cities and those around 
 it. (xlii. S.) 
 
 " And if We had made it a Qur'an in a foreign tongue, they had 
 
 1 The appointment of the fast of Ramadan (Qur'an ii. 179-184) is doubtless 
 another sign of the breaking with the Jews, the fast on the Day of Atonement 
 being thus abolished. ' Aconemem 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 23 
 
 surely said, ' Unless its verses be clearly explained (we will 
 
 not receive it)', (xli, 44.) 
 " And verily We have set before men in this Our'an eveiy kind 
 
 of parable that haply they be monished : 
 *' An Arabic Qur'an, free from tortuous (wording), that haply 
 
 they may fear (God), (xxxix. 28-9.) 
 " Verily from the Lord of all creatures hath this (book) come 
 
 down, ... in the clear Arabic tongue, (xxvi. 192, 
 
 I9S-) 
 " And We have only made it (i.e. the Qur an) easy, in thine 
 
 own tongue, in order that thou mayest announce glad 
 
 tidings thereby to the God-fearing, and that thou mayest 
 
 warn the contentious thereby." (xix. 97.) 
 But the message of Islam was not for Arabia only ; the whole 
 world was to share in it. As there was but one God, so there 
 was to be but one religion into which all men were to be invited. 
 This claim to be universal, to hold sway over all men and all 
 nations, found a practical illustration in the letters which 
 Muhammad sent in the year 628 a.d. (6 a.h.) to the great 
 potentates of that time. An invitation to embrace Islam was 
 sent in this year to the Emperor Heraclius, the king of Persia, 
 the governor of Yaman, the governor of Egypt and the king of 
 Abyssinia. The letter to Heraclius is said to have been as 
 follows : — " In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, 
 Muhammad, who is the servant of God and His apostle, to Hiraql 
 the Qaysar of Rum. Peace be on whoever has gone on the straight 
 road. After this I say, Verily I call you to Islam. Embrace 
 Islam, and God will reward you twofold. If you turn away from 
 the offer of Islam, then on you be the sins of your people. O 
 • people of the Book, come towards a creed which is fit both for us 
 and for you. It is this — to worship none but God, and not to 
 associate anything with God, and not to call others God. There- 
 fore, O ye people of the Book, if ye refuse, beware. We are 
 Muslims and our religion is Islam." However absurd this 
 summons may have seemed to those who then received it, suc- 
 ceeding years showed that it was dictated by no empty enthu- 
 siasm. These letters only gave a more open and widespread 
 expression to the claim to the universal acceptance which is 
 repeatedly made for Islam in the Qur'an. 
 
 " Of a truth it (i.e. the Qur'an) is no other than an admonition 
 
24 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to all creatures, and after a time shall ye surely know its 
 
 message, (xxxviii. 87-88.) 
 " This (book) is no other than an admonition and a clear 
 
 Qur'an, to warn whoever liveth; and that against the 
 
 unbelievers sentence may be justly given, (xxxvi. 69-70.) 
 " And We have not sent thee otherwise than to mankmd at 
 
 large, to announce and to warn, (xxxiv. 27.) 
 " He it is who hath sent His apostle with guidance and the 
 
 religion of truth, that He may make it victorious over 
 
 every other religion, though the polytheists are averse to 
 
 it." (Ixi. 9.) 
 In the hour of his deepest despair, when the people of Mecca 
 persistently turned a deaf ear to the words of their prophet 
 (xvi. 23, 114, etc.), when the converts he had made were tortured 
 until they recanted (xvi. 108), and others were forced to flee from 
 the country to escape the rage of their persecutors (xvi. 43, m)— 
 then was delivered the promise, " One day we will raise up a 
 witness out of every nation." (xvi. 86.) ^ 
 
 This claim upon the acceptance of all mankind which the 
 Prophet makes in these passages is further prophetically indicated 
 in the words " first-fruits of Abyssinia," used by Muhammad in 
 reference to Bilal, and " first-fruits of Greece," to Suhayb ; the 
 first Persian convert was a Christian slave in Medina, who em- 
 braced the new faith in the first year of the Hijrah. Further 
 there is a tradition which represents the Prophet as declaring 
 China to be within the sphere of his prophetic mission.^ Thus 
 long before any career of conquest was so much as dreamed of, 
 the Prophet had clearly shown that Islam was not to be confined 
 to the Arab race. The following account of the sending out of 
 missionaries to preach Islam to all nations, points to the same 
 claim to be a universal religion : " The Apostle of God said to his 
 companions, ' Come to me all of you early in the morning.' After 
 the morning prayer he spent some time in praising and suppli- 
 
 • It seems strange that in the face of these passages, some have denied that 
 Islam was originally intended by its founder to be a universal religion. Thus Sir 
 William Muir says, " That the heritage of Islam is the world, was an afterthought. 
 The idea, spite of much prophetic tradition, had been conceived but dimly, S at 
 all, by Mahomet himself. His world was Arabia, and for it the new dispensation 
 was ordained. From first to last the summons was to Arabs and to none 
 other. . . . The seed of a universal creed had indeed been sown j but that it 
 ever germinated was due to circumstance rather than design. " — (The Caliphate, 
 PP- 43-4-) 
 
 ^ Schefer : Trois Chapitres du Khitay Nameh, p. 31. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 25 
 
 eating God, as was his wont ; then he turned to them and sent 
 forth some in one direction and others in another, and said : ' Be 
 faithful to God in your dealings with His servants (i.e. with men), 
 for whosoever is entrusted with any matter that concerns man- 
 kind and is not faithful in his service of them, to him God shuts 
 the gate of Paradise : go forth and be not like the messengers of 
 Jesus, the son of Mary, for they went only to those that lived near 
 and neglected those that dwelt in far countries.' Then each of 
 these messengers came to speak the language of the people to 
 whom he was sent. When this was told to the Prophet he said, 
 ' This is the greatest of the duties that they owe to God with 
 respect to His servants.' " ^ 
 
 And the proof of the universality of Islam, of its claim on the 
 acceptance of all men, lay in the fact that it was the religion 
 divinely appointed for the whole human race and was now 
 revealed to them anew through Muhammad, " the seal of the 
 prophets " (xxxiii. 40), as it had been to former generations by 
 other prophets. 
 
 •'Men were of one religion only : then they disagreed one with 
 
 another and had not a decree (of respite) previously gone 
 
 forth from thy Lord, judgment would surely have been 
 
 given between them in the matter wherein they disagree. 
 
 (x. 20.) 
 
 " I am no apostle of new doctrines, (xlvi. 8.) 
 
 " Mankind was but one people : then God raised up prophets 
 
 to announce glad tidings and to warn : and He sent down 
 
 with them the Book with the Truth, that it might decide 
 
 the disputes of men : and none disagreed save those to 
 
 whom the book had been given, after the clear tokens had 
 
 reached them, through mutual jealousy. And God guided 
 
 those who believed into the truth concerning which they 
 
 had disagreed, by His will ; and God guideth whom He 
 
 pleaseth into the straight path. (ii. 209.) 
 
 " And We revealed to thee, ' follow the religion of Abraham, 
 
 the sound in faith, for he was not of those who join gods 
 
 with God.' (xvi. 124.) 
 
 " Say : As for me, my Lord hath guided me into a straight 
 
 path : a true faith, the religion of Abraham, the sound in 
 
 ' Ibn Sa'd, § 10. This story may indeed be apocryphal, but is significant at 
 least of the early realisation of the missionary character of Islam. 
 
26 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 faith ; for he was not of those who join gods with God. 
 (vi. 162.) . 
 
 " Say : Nay, the reUgion of Abraham, the sound in faith and 
 not one of those who join gods with God (is our religion), 
 (ii. 129.) 
 " Say : God speaketh truth. Follow therefore the religion of 
 Abraham, the sound in faith, who was not one of those 
 who joined other gods with God. (iii. 89.) 
 " And who hath a better rehgion than he who resigneth him- 
 self to God, who doth what is good and followeth the 
 faith of Abraham, the sound in faith ? (iv. 124.) 
 " He hath elected you, and hath not laid on you any hardship 
 in religion, the faith of your father Abraham. He hath 
 named you the Mushms." (xx. 77.) 
 But to return to Muhammad in Medina. In order properly to 
 appreciate his position after the Flight, it is important to 
 remember the peculiar character of Arab society at that time, as 
 far at least as this part of the peninsula was concerned. There 
 was an entire absence of any organised administrative or judicial 
 system such as in modern times we connect with the idea of a 
 government. Each tribe or clan formed a separate and absolutely 
 independent body, and this independence extended itself also to 
 the individual members of the tribe, each of whom recognised the 
 authority or leadership of his chief only as being the exponent of 
 a public opinion which he himself happened to share ; but he 
 was quite at liberty to refuse his conformity to the (even) 
 unanimous resolve of his fellow clansmen. Further, there was no 
 regular transmission of the ofSce of chieftain ; but he was 
 generally chosen as being the oldest member of the richest and 
 most powerful family of the clan, and as being personally most 
 qualified to command respect. If such a tribe became too 
 numerous, it would split up into several divisions, each of which 
 continued to enjoy a separate and independent existence, uniting 
 only on some extraordinary occasion for common self-defence 
 or some more than usually important warlike expedition. We 
 can thus understand how Muhammad could establish himself in 
 Medina at the head of a large and increasing body of adherents 
 who looked up to him as their head and leader and acknowledged ; 
 no other authority, — without exciting any feeling of insecurity, 
 or any fear of encroachment on recognised authority, such as 
 would have arisen in a city of ancient Greece or any similarly 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 27 
 
 organised community. Muhammad thus exercised temporal 
 authority over his people just as any other independent chief 
 might have done, the only difference being that in the case of 
 the Muslims a religious bond took the place of family and 
 blood ties. 
 
 Islam thus became what, in theory at least, it has always 
 remained — a political as well as a religious system. 
 
 " It was Muhammad's desire to found a new religion, and in 
 this he succeeded ; but at the same time he founded a political 
 system of an entirely new and peculiar character. At first his 
 only wish was to convert his fellow-countrymen to the belief in 
 the One God — Allah ; but along with this he brought about the 
 overthrow of the old system of government in his native city, 
 and in place of the tribal aristocracy under which the conduct of 
 public affairs was shared in common by the ruling families, he 
 substituted an absolute theocratic monarchy, with himself at the 
 head as vicar of God upon earth. 
 
 " Even before his death almost all Arabia had submitted to 
 him ; Arabia that had never before obeyed one prince, suddenly 
 exhibits a political unity and swears allegiance to the will of an 
 absolute ruler. Out of the numerous tribes, big and small, of a 
 hundred different kinds that were incessantly at feud with one 
 another, Muhammad's word created a nation. The idea of a 
 common religion under one common head bound the different 
 tribes together into one political organism which developed its 
 peculiar characteristics with surprising rapidity. Now only one 
 great idea could have produced this result, viz. the principle of 
 national life in heathen Arabia. The clan-system was thus for 
 the first time, if not entirely crushed — (that would have been 
 impossible) — ^yet made subordinate to the feeling of religious 
 unity. The great work succeeded, and when Muhammad died 
 there prevailed over by far the greater part of Arabia a peace of 
 God such as the Arab tribes, with their love of plunder and 
 revenge, had never known ; it was the religion of Islam that had 
 brought about this reconciliation." ^ 
 
 One of the first cares of Muhammad after his arrival in Medina , 
 was to give practical expression to this political ideal. He 
 established a bond of brotherhood between the Meccan fugitives 
 and the Medinite converts. In this bond, clan distinctions were 
 obliterated and a common religious life took the place of ties of 
 
 ' A. von Kremer. (3), pp. 309, 310. 
 
28 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 blood. Even in case of death, the claims of relationship were set 
 aside and the bond-brother inherited all the property of his 
 deceased companion. But after the battle of Badr, when such an 
 artiiicial bond was no longer needed to unite his followers, it was 
 abolished ; such an arrangement was only necessary so long as 
 the number of the Muslims was still small and the corporate life 
 of Islam a novelty, moreover Muhammad had lived in Medina 
 for a very short space of time before the rapid increase in the 
 number of his adherents made so communistic a social system 
 almost impracticable. 
 
 It was only to be expected that the growth of an independent 
 political body composed of refugees from Mecca, located in a 
 hostile city, should eventually lead to an outbreak of hostilities. 
 And, as is well known, every biography of Muhammad is largely 
 taken up with the account of a long series of petty encounters 
 and bloody battles between his followers and the Quraysh of 
 Mecca, ending in his triumphal entry into that city in 630 a.d., 
 and of his hostile relations with numerous other tribes, up to the 
 time of his death, 633 a.d. 
 
 To give any account of these campaigns is beyond the scope of 
 the present work, but it is necessary to determine exactly in what 
 relation they stood to the early missionary life of Islam. It has 
 been frequently asserted by European writers that from the date 
 of Muhammad's flight to Medina, and from the altered circum- 
 stances of his life there, the Prophet appears in an entirely new 
 character. He is no longer the preacher, the warner, the apostle 
 of God to men, whom he would persuade of the truth of the 
 religion revealed to him, but now he appears rather as the 
 unscrupulous bigot, using all means at his disposal of force and 
 statecraft to assert himself and his opinions. 
 
 But it is false to suppose that Muhammad in Medina laid aside 
 his r6le of preacher and missionary of Islam, or that when he had 
 a large army at his command, he ceased to invite unbelievers to 
 accept the faith. Ibn Sa'd gives a number of letters written by 
 the Prophet from Medina to chiefs and other members of different 
 Arabian tribes, in addition to those addressed to potentates living 
 beyond the limits of Arabia, inviting them to embrace Islam ; 
 and in the following pages will be found cases of his having sent 
 missionaries to preach the faith to the unconverted members of 
 their tribes, whose very ill-success in some cases is a sitrn of the 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 31 
 
 genuinely missionary character of their efforts and the absen-with 
 an appeal to force. ^.^ 
 
 In order fully to appreciate his new position, we need to obtaii^ 
 some satisfactory answer to the following questions. How far 
 was Muhammad himself responsible for the outbreak of hostilities? 
 ■^^^_^s he the aggressor or was he the iirst to be attacked ? ^ And 
 "T, when hostilities had been begun, was use made of 
 o/- -" '■'--*■ attended the Muslim arms, to force the accept- 
 
 ii the conquered, or indeed — as many have 
 maintameu .s not such forced conversion the very purpose for 
 which the Muslims first took up arms at all ? 
 
 The main dispute arises in relation to the circumstances which 
 led to the battle of Badr (a.d. 624), the first regular engagement 
 in the annals of Islam. 
 
 Let us try to realise these circumstances. 
 
 Here was an exUe who, with a small band of devoted companions, 
 had taken refuge in a foreign city : a man who for years had 
 striven to persuade his fellow-townsmen to adopt a faith that he 
 believed to be divinely inspired, — with no personal pretensions 
 other than that of the truth of the doctrines he taught, " I am 
 only a man like you," he would say. " It is only revealed to me 
 that your God is one God : let him then that hopeth to meet his 
 Lord work a right work" (xviii. no). Treated at first with 
 silent scorn, and afterwards with undisguised contempt, he had to 
 submit to insults and contumely of every kind — a form of treat- 
 ment which increased in virulence day by day, until his per- 
 secutors even sought to take his life. It was on his followers 
 however that the fury of persecution first spent itself ; — twice 
 were they compelled to flee for safety across the sea, pursued even 
 then by the hatred of their enemies ; many were put to the 
 cruellest tortures, under which some succumbed, as martyrs to the 
 faith they would not abandon ; and when at length the cruelty of 
 their persecutors became no longer bearable and a city was found 
 to offer them protection, the Muslims fled to Medina, followed by 
 their Prophet, who only by a stratagem succeeded in escaping 
 with his life. 
 
 Here their position was by no means free from danger : there 
 was no security of freedom from hostility on the part of the 
 
 ' For the defensive character of the first military operations in Medina, see 
 C. Snouck Hurgronje, De Islam. (De Gids. Juni 1886, p. 464.) 
 
c 
 
 28 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 bloodans^^ho had not hesitated to pursue some Medinite conver' 
 2^^ maltreat one they succeeded in capturing.^ In the city it 
 ^fiey were not altogether among friends ; the Jews who inhal' - 
 Medina in large numbers, cherished a secret hostility agair^, 
 new Prophet ; and there were many others among the (' 
 who though now indifferent, would naturally turn again 
 new-comers, if their arrival brought upon their city an irif 
 of the Quraysh and threatened it with disaster s • increase i. 
 therefore needful for the Muslims to be a-nistic a social sy 
 any hostile incursion on the part of t'' . jmoi 
 
 they forget their brethren whom thevitgrowth rCompelled to It j 
 behind in Mecca, — "the men and wc •^roo'and children who m 1 
 not able through their weakness to find the means of escap i 
 (iv. 100), who left to the mercy of cruel persecutors cried, " O 
 Lord ! bring us forth from this city whose inhabitants ai 
 oppressors ; give us a champion from Thy presence ; and give u, 
 from Thy presence a defender." (iv. 77.) 
 
 ^ Accordingly we find mention of several reconnoitring parties i 
 that went out in small numbers to watch the movements of 
 the Quraysh. None of these expeditions, with one exception^ 
 resulted in , bloodshed, and the hostile parties separated after 
 a mutual interchange of abuse and self-laudation, in accordance 
 with the old Arab custom. But on one occasion (a.h. 2) the 
 Prophet had sent 'Abdu-llah ibn Jahsh and a party of eight men, 
 with instructions to bring news of the movements of the Quraysh. 
 His written orders were, " When you read this letter, march on 
 and halt at NaJ^lah between Mecca and Ta'if ; there lie in wait 
 for the Quraysh and bring us news of them." Ibn Jahsh inter- 
 preted his orders in accordance with the impetuous impulses of 
 his own warrior spirit, and returned to Medina with two prisoners 
 and the sack of a caravan. In so doing he had not only acted 
 without authority but had violated the sacred truce which Arab 
 custom caused to be observed throughout the month of pilgrimagfls 
 Muhammad received him coldly with the words, " I gave thee no 
 command to fight in the sacred month ; " dismissed the prisoners, 
 and from his own purse paid blood-money for a Meccan who had 
 lost his life in the fray. 
 
 The facts of the case clearly show that Muhammad had great 
 
 ' In AH. I, one of the Quraysh chieftains, Kurz ibn Jabir, made a raid upon 
 some camels and flocks which were feeding in a plain a few miles from Medina. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 31 
 
 hy in checking the impetuosity of his Arab followers, with 
 orn love of fighting and plunder. The contrast drawn 
 "^en the old and the new ideal of life is proof enough 
 '*-y of his task, and the frequent admonitions of the 
 6 ; xvi. 93-96, etc.) bear witness to the same. 
 ;alise this fact that has led to the Prophet being 
 deliberate intention of plundering the caravan of 
 .liac^ thus forcing the Meccans to iight the battle of 
 lam on tiiords of the Qur'an — and this, in the face 
 ilxr-.was not sucmy of Muhammadan historians, must be 
 cognised u-first tooii^ropean 1 and Asiatic scholars to be 
 .e biography of'^es ammad — present to us the Prophet 
 lis followers in antagonism as to what line of action is to be 
 n in view of an impending attack of the Quraysh. " 5. Re- 
 mber how thy Lord caused thee to go forth from thy home 
 .e. Medina) in the cause of truth, and verily a part of the 
 oelievers were quite averse to it. 6. They disputed with thee 
 about the truth ^ after it had been made clear, as if they were 
 being led forth to death and saw it before them. 7. And re- 
 member when God promised you that one of the two troops » 
 should fall to you, and ye desired that they who had no arms 
 should fall to you ; but God purposed to prove true the truth of 
 His words, and to cut off the uttermost part of the unbelievers." 
 
 (viii. 5-7.) 
 
 The two troops here referred to, were on the one hand a richly- 
 laden caravan coming from Syria with an escort of thirty or forty 
 men, under the leadership of Abu Sufyan, and on the other a 
 large army of nearly 1000 men collected by the Quraysh of Mecca, 
 with the ostensible purpose of defending the caravan, which they 
 had been informed it was Muhammad's intention to attack. 
 Historians have generally assumed this rumour to have been true. 
 But — setting aside the fact that rumours circulated by one party 
 respecting the intentions of an opposing party are the last kind of 
 statements to be accepted as evidence — a consideration of the 
 verses quoted above shows the falsity of such a supposition. 
 
 1st. The words of v. 5 would certainly seem to show that when 
 
 ' A Sprenger, vol. i. p. xv. (Die Hauptquelle fur die Biographie des 
 Mohammad ist der Koran.) E. P. Goergens : Mohammad; ein Charakterbild. 
 
 (Berlin, 1878), p. 13. ,.,,,,. 
 
 2 i.e. The necessity for the combat and its probable results. 
 
 3 i'e' The caravan of Abii Sufyan and the army from Mecca. 
 
32 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the dispute arose the Prophet was still in Medina, and had not 
 already marched out to intercept the caravan, as so many 
 historians have maintained, and that some of his followers were 
 unwiUing to follow him in his proposed march to resist the attack 
 of the Quraysh. 
 
 2nd. The ground of these persons' opposition to the orders of 
 Muhammad was that they felt as if they were being Ted forth to 
 death and saw it before them (viii. 6). The small handful of 
 men that formed the escort of Abu Sufyan's caravan could never 
 have inspired such fear. Muhammad then must have called upon 
 them to face the invading army of the Quraysh. 
 
 3rd. Had it been his intention to attack the caravan, surely he 
 should have gone northwards from Medina, to intercept it on its 
 way from Syria ; and not south towards Badr, which was on the 
 highroad between Mecca and Medina, and exactly in the direction 
 that he would need to take in order to repel the attack of the 
 Quraysh who threatened the city of his protectors. ] 
 
 4th. Had the sole purpose of the Quraysh been the protection 
 of the caravan, they would have returned, when on the road they 
 heard of its safe arrival in Mecca ; instead of which, they reveal i 
 their real purpose by pressing on in the direction of Medina. ' 
 
 This is enough to show that the report brought into Mecca 
 that Muhammad was preparing to attack the caravan was quite 
 unfounded. The action of some of his followers might well have 
 given occasion for such a fear, but the Prophet himself must be 
 exonerated from the charge of precipitating the inevitable colli- \ 
 sion with the Quraysh. Even granting that the receipt of this 
 rumour was the cause of the expedition from Mecca, still its large 
 numbers show that the defence of the caravan was not their main 
 object, but that they had designs upon Medina itself. Muhammad 
 therefore cannot be blamed for advancing to meet them in defence 
 of the city that had given shelter to him and his followers, in 
 order to deliver it from the horrors of a siege, from which Medina 
 owing to the peculiar character of the city, would necessarily suffer 
 very severely.^ 1 
 
 If it be further objected that it was inconsistent with his mission 
 
 ^ See Wellhausen : "Medina war ein Komnlpv vnn r'.u-fi t^- e j 
 
 festem Hausern, die bald naher bald wdter ion e°n.Sier ^^?f ^^^"^ it 
 Palmgruppen, Garten und Saatfeldern zertreut laZ mThr ein s!""' •""''"'1? 
 «ine Stadt." (Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, vol. ivp^ 4 j Synoecismus als 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 33 
 
 as a prophet to intermeddle with affairs of war, it must be re- 
 membered that it was no part of his teaching to say, " My kingdom 
 is not of this world." 
 
 It would be beyond the scope of the present work to follow in 
 detail the campaigns of the Prophet, and show how forcible con- 
 version was in no case the aim that any of them had in view. 
 This has already been done with the utmost detail in the work 
 from which the above exposition has been taken ; and to this 
 work the reader who desires to pursue this subject further, is 
 referred.! 
 
 It is enough here to have shown that Muhammad when he 
 found himself at the head of a band of armed followers, was not 
 transformed at once, as some would have us believe, from a peace- 
 ful preacher into a fanatic, sword in hand, forcing his religion on 
 whomsoever he could.^ But, on the contrary, exactly similar 
 efforts were made to preach the faith of Islam and to convert the 
 unbelieving Arabs after the Hijrah, as before in the days of 
 Muhammad's political weakness ; and in the following pages 
 abundant instances of such missionary activity have been 
 collected. 
 
 In the midst of the wars and campaigns into which the hostile 
 attitude of the Quraysh had now dragged Muhammad and his 
 companions, there was little opportunity for missionary labours 
 except among the inhabitants of Medina itself and those few 
 individual Meccans who voluntarily made their way to the 
 Prophet. Among the latter was 'Umayr ibn Wahb, who after 
 the battle of Badr came to Medina with the intention of assassi- 
 nating the Prophet, but was won over to the faith, so that the 
 whilom persecutor became one of the most distinguished of his 
 disciples. In the fourth year of the Hijrah (625 a.d.) an attempt 
 was made to preach Islam to the Banu 'Amir ibn Sa'sa'ah, and at 
 the invitation of the chief of this tribe forty Muslims were sent 
 into Najd, but they were treacherously murdered and two only 
 of the party escaped with their lives. 
 
 • Sayyid Ahmad Khan : Tafslru-I Qur'an. Vol. iv. (In vol. vi. part I. of 
 Tasanif Ahmadryah.) (Aligarh, 1 888.) 
 
 2 This would seem to be acknowledged even by Muir, when speakmg of the 
 massacre of the Banu Qurayzab (a.h. 6) :— " The ostensible grounds upon which 
 Mahomet proceeded were purely political, for as yet he did not profess to force 
 men to join Islam, or to punish them for not embracing it." Muir (2), vol. iii. 
 p. 282. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 The successes of the MusHm arms, however, attracted every 
 day members of various tribes, particularly those in the vicinity 
 of Medina, to swell the ranks of the foUowers of the Prophet ; 
 and " the courteous treatment which the deputations oi these 
 various clans experienced from the Prophet, his ready attention 
 to their grievances, the wisdom with which he composed their 
 disputes, and the politic assignments of territory by which he 
 rewarded an early declaration in favour of Islam, made his name 
 to be popular, and spread his fame as a great and generous prince 
 throughout the Peninsula." ^ 
 
 It not unfrequently happened that one member of a tribe would 
 come to the Prophet in Medina and return home as a missionary 
 of Islam to convert his brethren ; we have the following account 
 by an eye-witness of such a conversion in the year 5 (a.h.). 
 *' One day as we were sitting together in the mosque, a Bedouin 
 came riding up on a camel ; he made it kneel down in the court- 
 yard of the mosque and tied it up. Then he came near to us and 
 asked, ' Is Muhammad among you ? ' We answered, ' He is the 
 man with his elbows resting on the cushions.' ' Art thou the son 
 of Abu-1 MuttaUb ? ' he asked. ' I am,' rephed the Prophet. ' I 
 trust thou wilt take no offence at my asking thee some questions.' 
 ' Ask whatever thou wilt,' answered the Prophet. Then he said, 
 ' I adjure thee by the Lord and the Lord of those who were before 
 thee, tell me, has Allah sent thee to all men ? ' Muhammad 
 answered, ' Yea, by Allah.' The other continued, ' I adjure thee 
 by Allah, tell me, hath He commanded thee that men should fest 
 during this month ? ' Muhammad answered, ' Yea, by Allah.' 
 ' I adjure thee by Allah, hath He commanded thee that thou 
 shouldest take tithes from the rich, to distribute among the 
 poor ? ' Muhammad answered again, ' Yea, by Allah.' Then 
 said the stranger, ' I believe on the revelation thou hast brought. 
 I am pimam ibn Tha'labah, and am the messenger of my tribe.' 
 So he returned to his tribe and converted them to Islam."' 
 Another such missionary was 'Amr ibn Murrah, belonging to the 
 tribe of the Banu Juhaynah, who dwelt between Medina and the 
 Red Sea. The date of his conversion was prior to the Flight, 
 and he thus describes it :— " We had an idol that we worshipped, 
 and I was the guardian of its shrine. When I heard of the 
 Prophet, I broke it in pieces and set oif to Muhammad in Mecca, 
 ' Muir (2), vol. iv. pp. 107-8. 2 Sprenger, vol. iii. pp. 202-3. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 35 
 
 where I accepted Islam and bore witness to the truth, and 
 believed on what Muhammad declared to be allowed and for- 
 sidden. And to this my verses refer : ' I bear witness that God is 
 Truth and that I am the first to abandon the gods of stones, and I 
 lave girded up my loins to make my way to you over rough ways 
 md smooth, to join myself to him who in himself and for his 
 incestry is the noblest of men, the apostle of the Lord whose 
 :hrone is above the clouds.' " He was sent by Muhammad to 
 jreach Islam to his tribe, and his efforts were crowned with such 
 iuccess that there was only one man who refused to listen to his 
 ixhortations.i 
 
 When the truce of Hudaybiyah (a.h. 6) made friendly relations 
 viih the people of Mecca possible, many persons of that city, who 
 lad had the opportunity of listening to the teaching of Muhammad 
 n the early days of his mission, and among them some men of 
 ;reat influence, came out to Medina, to embrace the faith of 
 slam. 
 
 The continual warfare carried on with the people of Mecca had 
 litherto kept the tribes to the south of that city almost entirely 
 utside the influence of the new religion. But this truce now 
 lade communications with southern Arabia possible, and a small 
 and from the tribe of the Banu Daws came from the mountains 
 lat form the northern boundary of Yaman, and joined them- 
 ;lves to the Prophet in Medina. Even before the appearance of 
 luhammad, there were some members of this tribe who had had 
 limmerings of a higher religion than the idolatry prevaihng 
 round them, and argued that the world must have nad a creator, 
 lough they knew not who he was ; and when Muhammad came 
 irward as the apostle of this creator, one of these men, by name 
 ufayl, came to Mecca to learn who the creator was. He recited 
 ) Muhammad some of his own poems ; whereupon the Prophet 
 ;peated the three last Surahs of the Qur'an, and finally won him 
 /er to Islam. He then laid on the new convert the task of 
 turning to his own people and of preaching to them Islam. At 
 •st, Tufayl met with but little success, and few persons were per- 
 laded except his father, his wife, and some of his friends who 
 id before sympathized with him in his search after religious 
 uth. Disheartened at the ill-success of his mission, he returned 
 the Prophet, and said, " The Banu Daws are a stiff-necked 
 
 I IbnSa'd, § ll8, 
 D 2 
 
36 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 people ; let thy curse fall upon them." But Muhammad prayed, 
 " O God, guide the Banu Daws into the true path," and sent 
 Tufayl back again to commence anew his missionary labours. 
 One of his friends now assisted him in his efforts, and they went 
 from house to house, preaching the faith, and by a.H. 6 they 
 succeeded in converting a great part of the tribe. Two years 
 later, the whole tribe abandoned their idolatrous beliefs, and 
 united themselves to the Muslims, while Tufayl set fire to the 
 block of wood that had hitherto been venerated as the idol of the 
 tribe.i 
 
 In A.H. 7, fifteen more tribes submitted to the Prophet, and 
 after the surrender of Mecca in a.h. 8, the ascendancy of Islam 
 was assured, and those Arabs who had held aloof, saying, " Let 
 Muhammad and his fellow-tribesmen fight it out ; if he is vic- 
 torious, then is he a genuine prophet," " now hastened to give in 
 their allegiance to the new religion. Among those who came in 
 after the fall of Mecca, were some of the most bitter persecutors of 
 Muhammad in the earlier days of his mission, to whom his noble 
 forbearance and forgiveness now gave a place in the brotherhood 
 of Islam. This same year witnessed the martyrdom of 'Urwah 
 ibn Mas'ud, one of the principal chiefs of the people of Ta'if, 
 which city the Muslims had unsuccessfully attempted to capture. 
 He had been absent at that time in Yaman, and returned from 
 his journey shortly after the raising of the siege. He had met 
 the Prophet two years before at Hudaybiyah, and had conceived 
 a profound veneration for him, and now came to Medina to 
 embrace the new faith. In the ardour of his zeal he offered to 
 go to Ta'if to convert his fellow-countrymen, and in spite of the 
 efforts of Muhammad to dissuade him from so dangerous an 
 undertaking, he returned to his native city, publicly declared 
 that he had renounced idolatry, and called upon the people to 
 follow his example. While he was preaching, he was mortally 
 wounded by an arrow, and died giving thanks to God for having 
 granted him the glory of martyrdom. A more successful mis- 
 sionary effort was made by another follower of the Prophet in 
 Yaman — probably a year later — of which we have the following 
 graphic account : " The apostle of God wrote to Al Harith and 
 Masruh, and Nu'aym ibn 'Abdi Kulal of Himyar : ' Peace be 
 
 ' Sprenger, vol. iii. pp. 25J-6. 
 
 - Al Bukharl, quoted by A. von Kremer. (3) p. 315. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 37 
 
 upon you so long as ye believe on God and His apostle. God is 
 one God, there is no partner with Him. He sent Moses with his 
 signs, and created Jesus with his words. The Jews say, " Ezra is 
 the Son of God," and the Christians say, " God is one of three, 
 and Jesus is the Son of God." ' He sent the letter by 'A3ryash 
 ibn Abi Rabi'ati-1 Makhzumi, and said : ' When you reach their 
 city, go not in by night, but wait until the morning ; then care- 
 fully perform your ablutions, and pray with two prostrations, and 
 ask God to bless you with success and a friendly reception, and to 
 keep you safe from harm. Then take my letter in your right 
 hand, and deliver it with your right hand into their right hands, 
 and they will receive it. And recite to them, " The unbelievers 
 among the people of the Book and the polytheists did not waver," 
 &c. (Surah 98) to the end of the Surah ; when you have finished, 
 say, " Muhammad has believed, and I am the first to believe." 
 And you will be able to meet every objection they bring against 
 you, and every glittering book that they recite to you will lose its 
 light. And when they speak in a foreign tongue, say, " Translate 
 it," and say to them, " God is sufficient for me ; I believe in the 
 Book sent down by Him, and I am commanded to do justice 
 among you ; God is our Lord and your Lord ; to us belong our 
 works, and to you belong your works ; there is no strife between 
 us and you ; God wLU unite us, and unto Him we must return." 
 If they now accept Islam, then ask them for their three rods, 
 before which they gather together to pray, one rod of tamarisk 
 that is spotted white and yellow, and one knotted like a cane, and 
 one black like ebony. Bring the rods out and burn them in the 
 market-place.' So I set out," tells 'Ayyash, " to do as the Apostle 
 of God had bid me. When I arrived, I found that all the people 
 had decked themselves out for a festival : I walked on to see 
 them, and came at last to three enormous curtains hung in front 
 of three doorways. I lifted the curtain and entered the middle 
 door, and found people collected in the courtyard of the building. 
 I introduced myself to them as the messenger of the Apostle of 
 God, and did as he had bidden me ; and they gave heed to my 
 words, and it fell out as he had said."i 
 
 In A.H. 9, a less successful attempt was made by a new convert, 
 Wathilah ibnu-1 Asqa', to induce his clan to accept the faith that 
 he himself had embraced after an interview with the Prophet. His 
 
 I Ibn Sa'd, § 56. 
 
38 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 father scornfully cast him off, saying, " By God ! I will never speak 
 a word to you again," and none were found willing to believe the 
 doctrines he preached with the exception of his sister, who pro- 
 vided him with the means of returning to the Prophet at Medina.i 
 This ininth year of the Hijrah has been called the year of the 
 deputations, because of the enormous number of Arab tribes and 
 cities that now sent delegates to the Prophet, to give in their 
 submission. The introduction into Arab society of a new prin- 
 ciple of social union in the brotherhood of Islam had already 
 begun to weaken the binding force of the old tribal ideal, that 
 erected the fabric of society on the basis of blood-relationship. 
 The conversion of an individual and his reception into the new 
 society was a breach of one of the most fundamental laws of Arab 
 life, and its frequent occurrence had acted as a powerful solvent 
 on tribal organisation and had left it weak in the face of a national 
 life so enthusiastic and firmly-knit as that of the Muslims had 
 become. The Arab tribes were thus impelled to give in their 
 submission to the Prophet, not merely as the head of the strongest 
 military force in Arabia, but as the exponent of a theory of social 
 life that was making all others weak and ineffective.^ In this way, 
 Islam was uniting together clans that hitherto had been continu- 
 ally at feud with one another, and as this great confederacy grew, 
 it more and more attracted to itself the weaker among the tribes 
 of Arabia. In the accounts of the conversion of the Arab tribes, 
 there is continual mention of the promise of security against their 
 enemies, made to them by the Prophet on the occasion of their 
 submission. " Woe is me for Muhammad ! " was the cry of one of 
 the Arab tribes on the news of the death of the Prophet. " So 
 long as he was alive, I lived in peace and in safety from my 
 enemies ; " and the cry must have found an echo far and wide 
 throughout Arabia. 
 
 How superficial was the adherence of numbers of the Arab 
 tribes to the faith of Islam may be judged from the widespread 
 apostacy that followed immediately on the death of the Prophet. 
 Their acceptance of Islam would seem to have been often 
 dictated more by considerations of political expediency, and was 
 more frequently a bargain struck under pressure of violence 
 than the outcome of any enthusiasm or spiritual awakening. 
 They allowed themselves to be swept into the stream of what 
 1 Ibn Sa'd, § 91. = See Sprenger, vol. iii. pp. 360-1. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 39 
 
 had now become a great national movement, and we miss the 
 fervent zeal of the early converts in the cool, calculating atti- 
 tude of those who came in after the fall of Mecca. But even 
 from among these must have come many to swell the ranks of 
 the true believers animated with a genuine zeal for the faith, and 
 ready, as we have seen, to give their lives in the effort to preach 
 it to their brethren. But for such men as these, so vast a move- 
 ment could not have held together, much less have recovered 
 the shock given it by the death of the founder. For it must not 
 be forgotten how distinctly Islam was a new movement in heathen 
 Arabia, and how diametrically opposed were the ideals of the two 
 societies.i For the introduction of Islam into Arab society did 
 not imply merely the sweeping away of a few barbarous and 
 inhuman practices, but a complete reversal of the pre-existing 
 ideals of life. 
 
 Herein we have the most conclusive proof of the essentially 
 missionary character of the teaching of Muhammad, who thus 
 comes forward as the exponent of a new scheme of faith and 
 practice. Auguste Comte has laid down the distinction between 
 the genius that originates a movement, the energy of whose 
 spirit keeps it alive, and the man that is merely the mouthpiece 
 of the aspirations and feelings of his generation. " Sometimes 
 the individual comes first, fixes his mind on a determinate 
 purpose, and then gathers to himself the various partial forces 
 that are necessary to achieve it. More often in the case of great 
 social movements, there is a spontaneous convergence of many 
 particular tendencies, till, finally, the individual appears who 
 gives them a common centre, and binds them into one whole." 2 
 Now it has frequently been contended that Muhammad belongs 
 to the latter class, and just as Positivism has tried to put forward 
 St. Paul in place of Jesus as the founder of Christianity, so some 
 look upon 'Umar as the energising spirit in the early history of 
 Islam, and would represent Muhammad merely as the mouthpiece 
 Df a popular movement. Now this could only have been possible 
 3n condition that Muhammad had found a state of society pre- 
 pared to receive his teaching and waiting only for the voice that 
 would express in speech the inarticulate yearnings of their hearts. 
 
 ' This has been nowhere more fully and excellently brought out than in the 
 cholarly work of Prof. Ignaz Goldziher (Muhammedanische Studien, vol. i. ) 
 1-om which I have derived the following considerations. 
 
 2 Edward Caird : The Social Philosophy of Comte, pp. 42-3. (Glasgow, 1885.) 
 
40 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 But it is just this spirit of expectancy that is wanting among the 
 Arabs — those at least of Central Arabia, towards whom 
 Muhammad's efforts were at first directed. They were by no 
 means ready to receive the preaching of a new teacher, least of 
 all one who came with the (to them unintelligible) title of apostle 
 of God. 
 
 Again, the equality in Islam of all believers and the common 
 brotherhood of all Muslims, which suffered no distinctions between 
 Arab and non-Arab, between free and slave, to exist among the 
 faithful, was an idea that ran directly counter to the proud clan- 
 feeling of the Arab, who grounded his claims to personal con- 
 sideration on the fame of his ancestors, and in the strength of the 
 same carried on the endless blood-feuds in which his soul 
 delighted. Indeed, the fundamental principles in the teaching 
 of Muhammad were a protest against much that the Arabs had 
 hitherto most highly valued, and the newly-converted Muslim 
 was taught to consider as virtues, qualities which hitherto he had 
 looked down upon with contempt. 
 
 To the heathen Arab, friendship and hostility were as a loan 
 which he sought to repay with interest, and he prided himself on 
 returning evil for evil, and looked down on any who acted other- 
 wise as a weak nitherling. 
 
 He is the perfect man who late and early plotteth still 
 To do a kindness to his friends and work his foes some ill. 
 
 To such men the Prophet said, "Recompense evil with that 
 which is better " (xxiii. 98) ; as they desired the forgiveness of 
 God, they were to pass over and pardon offences (xxiv. 22), and 
 a Paradise, vast as the heavens and the earth, was prepared for 
 those who mastered their anger and forgave others (iii. 128). 
 
 The very institution of prayer was jeered at by the Arabs 
 to whom Muhammad first delivered his message, and one of the 
 hardest parts of his task was to induce in them that pious attitude 
 of mind towards the Creator, which Islam inculcates equally with 
 Judaism and Christianity, but which was practically unknown to 
 the heathen Arabs. This self-sufficiency and this lack of the 
 religious spirit, joined with their intense pride of race, little fitted 
 them to receive the teachings of one who maintained that " The 
 most worthy of honour in the sight of God is he that feareth Him 
 most" (xlix. 13). No more could they brook the restrictions 
 that Islam sought to lay upon the license of their lives ; wine. 
 
MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET. 41 
 
 women, and song were among the things most dear to the 
 Arab's heart in the days of the ignorance, and the Prophet was 
 stern and severe in his injunctions respecting each of them. 
 
 Thus, from the very beginning, Islam bears the stamp of a 
 missionary rehgion that seeks to win the hearts ofmen, to convert 
 them and persuade them to enter the brotherhood of the faithful; 
 and as it was in the beginning, so has it continued to be up to 
 the present day, as wUl be the object of the following pages to 
 show. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF 
 WESTERN ASIA. 
 
 After the death of Muhammad, the army he had intended for 
 Syria was despatched thither by Abu Bakr, in spite of the pro- 
 testations made by certain Muslims in view of the then disturbed 
 state of Arabia. He silenced their expostulations with the words: 
 " I will not revoke any order given by the Prophet. Medina may 
 become the prey of wild beasts, but the army must carry out the 
 wishes of Muhammad." This was the first of that wonderful 
 series of campaigns in which the Arabs overran Syria, Persia and 
 Northern Africa — overturning the ancient kingdom of Persia and 
 despoiling the Roman Empire of some of its fairest provinces. It 
 does not fall within the scope of this work to follow the history of 
 these different campaigns, but, in view of the missionaiy success 
 that attended the Arab conquests, it is of importance to discover 
 what were the circumstances that made such successes possible. 
 
 A great historian ^ has well put the problem that meets us here, 
 in the following words : " Was it genuine religious enthusiasm, 
 the new strength of a faith now for the first time blossoming forth 
 in all its purity, that gave the victory in every battle to the arms 
 of the Arabs and in so incredibly short a time founded the 
 greatest empire the world had ever seen ? But evidence is 
 wanting to prove that this was the case. The number was far too 
 small of those who had given their allegiance to the Prophet and 
 his teaching with a free and heartfelt conviction, while on the 
 other hand all the greater was the number of those who had been 
 brought into the ranks of the Muhammadans only through 
 pressure from without or by the hope of worldly gain. Khalid, 
 ' that sword of the swords of God,' exhibited in a very striking 
 manner that mixture of force and persuasion whereby he and 
 
 ) 
 
 ' Dollinger, pp. 5-6. 
 
THE ARAB CONQUESTS. 43 
 
 many of the QuraysH had been converted, when he said that God 
 had seized them by the hearts and by the hair and compelled 
 them to follow the Prophet. The proud feeling too of a common 
 nationality had much influence — a feeling which was more alive 
 among the Arabs of that time than (perhaps) among any other 
 people, and which alone determined many thousands to give the 
 preference to their countryman and his religion before foreign 
 teachers. Still more powerful was the attraction offered by the 
 sure prospect of gaining booty in abundance, in fighting for the 
 new religion and of exchanging their bare, stony deserts, which 
 oflFered them only a miserable subsistence, for the fruitful and 
 luxuriant countries of Persia, Syria and Egypt." But history 
 gives us several other examples of peoples (e.g. the Huns and the 
 Vandals) who poured out from the East to sack and plunder, 
 driven on not only by greed and pride of race but also by famine 
 and the pressure of want at home. Yet which of these founded 
 such a world-empire as that of the Arabs, which of them succeeded 
 in the sanie way in amalgamating and uniting to themselves the 
 subject races they had conquered ? Can a study of the Muham- 
 madan conquests fail to show us how large a measure of their 
 success was due to the marvellous enthusiasm that had its root in 
 their religion and in their religion alone— their confidence in the 
 truth of the new faith and its promises of reward here and 
 hereafter, together with the practical realisation of its teaching of 
 the brotherhood of all believers ? There may have been many in 
 whom worldly motives obscured these lofty views, but still it was 
 the faithful few who set the tone for the society as a whole. As 
 the late Archbishop of Dublin has eloquently said : " Not Kaled 
 alone, but every Moslem warrior felt himself indeed to be ' the 
 sword of God.' Comparing what they now were with what they 
 had been in ' those times of their ignorance,' when they wor- 
 shipped dead idols, they felt that they had been brought into a 
 new spiritual world, now at length had learned what was the 
 jlory and dignity of man, namely, to be the servant of the one 
 Sod, maker and ruler of aU ; that such servants they were ; whose 
 DfBce it was to proclaim His power ; themselves submitting, and 
 ;ompelling others to submit to His will. "What a truth was here, 
 ;o have taken possession of a multitude of souls ! No wonder 
 ;hat, in the strength of this, innumerable tribes which had 
 litherto done little but mutually bite and devour one another, 
 
44 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 were presently knit together into a nation, and the worshippers 
 of a thousand discordant falsehoods into a society which bore some 
 sort of similitude to a Church." ^ 
 
 Accordingly it is not surprising to find that many of the 
 Christian Bedouins were swept into the rushing tide of this great 
 movement and that Arab tribes, who for centuries had professed 
 the Christian religion, now abandoned it to embrace the Muslim 
 faith. Among these was the tribe of the Banu Ghassan, who 
 held sway over the desert east of Palestine and southern Syria, of 
 whom it was said that they were " Lords in the days of the 
 ignorance and stars in Islam." - 
 
 After the battle of Qadisiyah (a.h. 14) in which the Persian 
 army under Rustam had been utterly discomfited, many Christians 
 belonging to the Bedouin tribes on both sides of the Euphrates 
 came to the Muslim general and said : " The tribes that at the 
 first embraced Islam were wiser than we. Now that Rustam 
 hath been slain, we will accept the new belief." ' Similarly, after 
 the conquest of northern Syria, most of the Bedouin tribes, after 
 hesitating a little, joined themselves to the followers of the 
 Prophet. * 
 
 That force was not the determining factor in these conversions 
 may be judged from the amicable relations that existed between 
 the Christian and the Muslim Arabs. Muhammad himself had 
 entered into treaty with several Christian tribes, promising 
 them his protection and guaranteeing them the free exercise of 
 their religion and to their clergy undisturbed enjoyment of their 
 old rights and authority. ^ A similar bond of friendship united 
 his followers with their fellow-countrymen of the older faith, many 
 of whom voluntarily came forward to assist the Muslims in their 
 military expeditions. 
 
 In the battle of the Bridge (a.h. 13) when a disastrous defeat 
 was imminent and the panic-stricken Arabs were hemmed in 
 between the Euphrates and the Persian host, a Christian chief of 
 the Banu Tayy, sprang forward like another Spurius Lartius to 
 the side of an Arab Horatius, to assist Muthannah the Muslim 
 general in defending the bridge of boats which could alone afford 
 
 ' Lectures on Mediaeval Church History, by Richard Chenevix Trench, 
 p. 52. (London, 1879.) 
 
 2 Mas'ud;, tome iv. p. 238. 3 Mui^'g Caliphate, pp. 121-2. 
 
 * Id. p. 139. * Muir (2) , vol. ii. pp. 299, 303. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ARABS. • 45 
 
 the means of an orderly retreat. When fresh levies were raised 
 to retrieve this disgrace, among the reinforcements that came 
 pouring in from every direction was a Christian tribe of the Banu 
 Namir, who dwelt within the limits of the Byzantine empire, and 
 in the ensuing battle of Buwayb (a.h. 13), just before the final 
 charge of the Arabs that turned the fortune of battle in their 
 favour, Muthannah rode up to the Christian chief and said : " Ye 
 are of one blood with us ; come now, and as I charge, charge ye 
 with me." The Persians fell back before their furious onslaught, 
 and another great victory was added to the glorious roll of 
 MusUm triumphs. One of the most gallant exploits of the day 
 was performed by a youth belonging to another Christian tribe of 
 the desert, who with his companions, a company of Bedouin 
 horse-dealers, had come up just as the Arab army was being- 
 drawn up in battle array. They threw themselves into the fight 
 on the side of their compatriots ; and while the conflict was. 
 raging most fiercely, this youth, rushing into the centre of the 
 Persians, slew their leader, and leaping on his richly-caparisoned 
 horse, galloped back amidst the plaudits of the Muslim line, 
 crying as he passed in triumph : " I am of the Banu Taghlib. I 
 am he that hath slain the chief" ^ 
 
 The tribe to which this young man boasted that he belonged, 
 was one of those that elected to remain Christian, while other 
 Bedouin tribes of Mesopotamia, such as the Banu Namir and the. 
 Banu Quda'ah, became Musalmans. 
 
 The Caliph 'Umar forbade any pressure to be put upon them,, 
 when they showed themselves unwilling to abandon their old 
 faith, and ordered that they should be left undisturbed in the 
 practice of it, but that they were not to oppose the conversion of 
 any member of their tribe to Islam nor baptise the children of 
 such as became Muslims.^ They were called upon to pay the 
 jizyah or tax imposed on the Christian subjects, but they felt it to 
 be humiliating to their pride to pay a tax that was levied in return 
 for protection of life and property, and petitioned the Caliph to 
 be allowed to make the same kind of contribution as the Muslims 
 did. So in lieu of the jizyah they paid a double Sadqah or alms, 
 — which was a poor tax levied on the fields and cattle, etc. of the 
 Musalmans.8 
 
 ' Muir's Caliphate, pp. 90-94. " Tabarl, Prima Series, p. 2482. 
 
 ' The few meagre notices of this tribe in the works of Arabic historians have 
 
46 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 The people of Hirah had likewise resisted all the efforts made 
 by Khalid to induce them to accept the Muslim faith. This city 
 was one of the most illustrious in the annals of Arabia, and to the 
 mind of the impetuous hero of Islam it seemed that an appeal to 
 their Arab blood would be enough to induce them to enrol them- 
 selves with the followers of the Prophet of Arabia. When the 
 besieged citizens sent an embassy to the Muslim general to 
 arrange the terms of the capitulation of their city, Khalid asked 
 them, " Who are you ? are you Arabs or Persians ? " Then 
 'Adi, the spokesman of the deputation, replied, "Nay, we are 
 pure-blooded Arabs, while others among us are naturalised 
 Arabs." Kh. " Had you been what you say you are, 
 you would not have opposed us or hated our cause." 
 'A. " Our pure Arab speech is the proof of what I say." 
 Kh. " You speak truly. Now choose you one of these three 
 things : either (i) accept our faith, then all that is ours shall be 
 yours, for weal or woe, whether you choose to go into another 
 country or stay in your own land; or (2) pay jizyah; or {3) 
 fight. Verily, by God ! I have come to you with a people who 
 are more desirous of death than you are of life." 'A. " Nay, 
 we will pay jizyah." Kh. " Ill-luck to you ! Unbelief is a 
 pathless wilderness, and foolish is the Arab who, when two 
 guides meet him wandering therein — the one an Arab and the 
 other not — leaves the first and accepts the guidance of the 
 stranger." 1 
 
 Due provision was made for the instruction of the new converts, 
 for while whole tribes were being converted to the faith with such 
 rapidity, it was necessary to take precautions against errors, both 
 in respect of creed and ritual, such as might naturally be feared 
 in the case of ill-instructed fconverts. Accordingly we find that 
 the Caliph 'Umar appointed teachers in every country, whose 
 duty it was to instruct the people in the teachings of the Qur'an 
 and the observances of their new faith. The magistrates were 
 also ordered to see that all, whether old or young, were regular 
 in their attendance at public prayer, especially on Fridays and in 
 the month of Ramadan. The importance attached to this work 
 of instructing the new converts may be judged from the fact that 
 
 been admirably summarized by P^re Henri Lammens, S. J. (" Le Chantre des 
 Omiades.") (J. A. IX^^ s^rie, tome iv. pp. 97-9, 438-59.) 
 ' Tabarl, Prima Series, p. 2041. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ARABS. 47 
 
 in the city of Kufah it was no less a personage than the state 
 treasurer who was entrusted with this task.^ 
 
 From the examples given above of the toleration extended 
 towards the Christian Arabs by the victorious Muslims of the first 
 century of the Hijrah and continued by succeeding generations, 
 we may surely infer that those Christian tribes that did embrace 
 Islam, did so of their own choice and free wUl. The Christian 
 Arabs of the present day, dwelling in the midst of a Muhammadan 
 population, are a living testimony of this toleration ; Layard 
 speaks of having come across an encampment of Christian Arabs 
 at Kerak, to the east of the Dead Sea, who differed in no way, 
 either in dress or in manners, from the Muslim Arabs.^ Burck- 
 hardt was told by the monks of Mount Sinai that in the last 
 century there still remained several families of Christian Bedouins 
 who had not embraced Islam, and that the last of them, an old 
 woman, died in 1750, and was buried in the garden of the con- 
 vent.^ The vUlage of Quraytayn, in the desert, twenty-four hours' 
 journey south-west of Palmyra, has a population of 1200 souls, 
 half of whom are Syrian Christians, living in perfect harmony 
 with their Muslim neighbours and wearing, like them, the 
 Bedouin dress, so that there is no outward distinction between 
 Christian and Muslim.* Many of the Arabs of the renowned 
 tribe of the Banu Ghassan, Arabs of the purest blood, who em- 
 braced Christianity towards the end of the fourth century, still 
 retain the Christian faith, and since their submission to the 
 Church of Rome, about two centuries ago, employ the Arabic 
 language in their religious services.' 
 
 If we turn from the Bedouins to consider the attitude of the 
 settled populations of the towns and cities towards the new 
 religion, we do not find that the Arab conquest was so rapidly 
 followed by conversions to Islam. The Christians of the great 
 cities of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire seem for 
 the most part to have remained faithful to their ancestral creed, 
 to which indeed they stUl in large numbers cling. 
 
 In order that we may fuUy appreciate their condition under the 
 Muslim rule, and estimate the influences that led to occasional 
 
 ^ Mas'udI, tome iv. p. 256. 
 
 ^ Sir Henry Layard : Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia, 
 vol. i. p. 100. (London, 1887.) 
 
 " Burckhardt. (2), p. 564. ■* A. von Kremer, (4), p. 91. 
 
 * W. G. Palgrave : Essays on Eastern Questions, pp. 206-8. (London, 1872.) 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
50 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Caliph Abu Bakr for the guidance of the first expedition into 
 Syria : " Be just ; break not your plighted faith ; mutilate none ; 
 slay neither children, old men nor women ; injure not the date- 
 palm nor burn it with fire, nor cut down any fruit-bearing tree ; 
 slay neither flocks nor herds nor camels, except for food; 
 perchance you may come across men who have retired into 
 monasteries, leave them and their works in peace ; you may eat 
 of the food that the people of the land will bring you in their 
 vessels, making mention thereon of the name of God ; and you 
 will come across people with shaven crowns, touch them only 
 with the flat of the sword.^ Go forward now in the name of God 
 and may He protect you in battle and pestilence." ^ For the 
 provinces of the Byzantine Empire that were rapidly acquired 
 by the prowess of the Muslims found themselves in the enjoyment 
 of a toleration such as, on account of their Monophysite 
 and Nestorian opinions, had been unknown to them for many 
 centuries. They were allowed the free and undisturbed exercise 
 of their religion with some few restrictions imposed for the sake 
 of preventing any friction between the adherents of the rival 
 religions, or arousing any fanaticism by the ostentatious exhibition 
 of religious symbols that were so offensive to Muslim feeling. 
 The extent of this toleration — so striking in the history of the 
 seventh century — may be judged from the terms granted to the 
 conquered cities, in which protection of life and property and 
 toleration of religious belief were given in return for submission 
 and the payment of a capitation-tax.^ 
 
 In Damascus, which was held to have been partly taken by 
 storm and partly to have capitulated — for while one Muslim 
 general made his way into the city by the eastern gate at the 
 point of the sword, another at the western gate received the sub- 
 mission of the governor of the city — the churches were equally 
 divided between the Christians and the conquerors. The great 
 Cathedral of St. John was similarly divided, and for eighty years 
 the adherents of the two rival religions worshipped under the 
 
 ' Lit. tap them a tap with the sword : Uii ui-Jlj -»yii.u. These words have 
 often been falsely translated, " Put them to death," but the word j-ii means 
 originally " to hit so as to make a slight sound," and when used of a sword comes 
 to mean, " to hit with the flat of a sword" : here the action is a si-^n of the 
 authority that the Muslims would henceforth exercise over them. ° 
 
 " Tabarl, Prima Series, p. 1850. 
 
 ' Al Baladhurl, pp. 73-4. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 51 
 
 same roof. The Caliph 'Abdu-1 Malik wished to convert the 
 whole into a mosque, but abstained on finding that the terms of 
 the capitulation forbade it. Several others of the caliphs had 
 sought in vain by offers of large sums of money to achieve the 
 same object, as the Muslims suffered great annoyance from the 
 loud chanting of the Christians, until (about a.h. 90) the Caliph 
 Walid effected by force what others had sought to gain by fair 
 means. A few years later 'Umar II. listened to the complaints 
 of the Christians against the injustice that had been done them 
 and gave them, in exchange, those churches of the city and its 
 suburbs that had been confiscated at the time of the assault. 
 
 When Jerusalem submitted to the Caliph 'Umar, the following 
 conditions were drawn up : " In the name of God, the merciful, 
 the compassionate ! The following are the terms of capitulation, 
 which I, 'Umar, the servant of God, the Commander of the 
 Faithful, grant to the people of Jerusalem. I grant them 
 security for their lives, their possessions, and their children, their 
 churches, their crosses, and all that appertains to them in their 
 integrity, and their lands and to all of their religion. Their 
 churches therein shall not be impoverished, nor destroyed, 
 nor injured from among them ; neither their endowments, 
 nor their dignity ; and not a thing of their property ; neither 
 shall the inhabitants of Jerusalem be exposed to violence in 
 following their religion ; nor shall one of them be injured." 1 A 
 tribute was imposed upon them of five dinars for the rich, four 
 for the middle class and three for the poor. In company with 
 the Patriarch, 'Umar visited the holy places, and it is said while 
 they were in the Church of the Resurrection, as it was the 
 appointed hour of prayer, the Patriarch bade the Caliph offer 
 his prayers there, but he thoughtfully refused, saying that if he 
 were to do so, his followers might afterwards claim it as a place of 
 Muslim worship. 
 
 For such thoughtfulness it is hard to find parallels in the later 
 history of the Christians under Muhammadan rule, or for the 
 generosity of the Caliph Mu'awiyah (661-680), who rebuilt the 
 great Church of Edessa at the rntercession of his Christian 
 subjects.2 But, a^ a general rule, the behaviour of the Caliphs 
 
 ' The History of the Temple of Jerusalem, translated from the 'Arabic by 
 J. Reynolds, pp. 16S-9. (London, 1836.) 
 ^ Finlay, vol. i. p. 3S4.. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 towards their Christian subjects has been guided by principles of 
 toleration, and (if we except particular periods of persecution, such 
 as the reign of Al Mutawakkil), the only restrictions imposed 
 -were those found in the so-called Ordinance of 'Umar. 
 
 This formula is traditionally said to have been the one adopted 
 by the Christian cities that submitted to the Muslim army ; but 
 none of the earliest Muhammadan historians give it, and Sir 
 William Muir i doubts its authenticity and considers that it con- 
 tains oppressive terms that are more characteristic of later times 
 than of the reign of the tolerant 'Umar. " In the name of God, 
 the Merciful, the Compassionate ! This is the writing from the 
 Christians of such and such a city to 'Umar ibnu-1 E^attab. 
 When you marched against us, we asked of you protection for 
 ourselves, our families, our possessions and our co-religionists ; 
 and we made this stipulation with you, that we will not erect in 
 our city or the suburbs any new monastery, church, cell or 
 hermitage ; ^ that we will not repair any of such buildings that 
 may fall into ruins, or renew those that may be situated in the 
 Muslim quarters of the town ; that we will not refuse the Muslims 
 entry into our churches either by night or by day ; that we will 
 open the gates wide to passengers and travellers ; that we will 
 receive any Muslim traveller into our houses and give him food 
 and lodging for three nights ; that we will not harbour any spy 
 in our churches or houses, or conceal any enemy of the Muslims ; 
 that we will not teach our children the Qur'an ;^ that we will not 
 make a show of the Christian religion nor invite anyone to 
 
 1 €< -^Ye read in later days of the ' Ordinance of Omar,' regulating the condition 
 of Christian communities throughout Islam. But it would be a libel on that 
 tolerant ruler to credit him with the greater part of these observances ; . . . . the worst 
 disabilities of the intolerant ' Ordinance ' were not imposed till a later period." 
 (The Caliphate, p. 146-7.) It does not seem to be mentioned by any authority 
 earlier than the eighth century of the Hijrah. (Steinschneider, pp. 165-187.) 
 
 ^ Some authorities on Muhammadan law held that this rule did not extend to 
 ■villages and hamlets, in which the construction of churches was not to be prevented. 
 (Hidayah, vol. ii. p. 219.) 
 
 ' " The ' Ulama' are divided in opinion on the question of the teaching ot the 
 Qur'an : the sect of Malik forbids it : that of Abu Hanifah allows it ; and Shafi'i 
 has two opinions on the subject : on the one hand, he countenances the study of 
 it, as indicating a leaning towards Islam ; and on the other hand, he forbids it, 
 because he fears that the unbeliever who studies the Qur'an being still impure 
 may read it solely with the object of turning it to ridicule, since he is the enemy 
 of God and the Prophet who wrote the book ; now as these two statements are 
 contradictory, Shafi'i has no formally stated opinion on this matter." (Belin, 
 p. 508.) This very want of agreement on the part of these great Imams, or leaders 
 of three of the orthodox sects of Islam, may well make us doubt whether these 
 terms of capitulation can have been drawn up so early as the reign of 'Umar. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 53 
 
 embrace it ; that we wiU not prevent any of our kinsmen from 
 embracing Islam, if they so desire. That we will honour the 
 Muslims and rise up in our assemblies when they wish to take 
 their seats ; that we will not imitate them in our dress, either in 
 the cap, turban, sandals, or parting of the hair ; that we wiU not 
 make use of their expressions of speech,^ nor adopt their sur- 
 names ; that we will not ride on saddles, or gird on swords, or 
 take to ourselves arms or wear them, or engrave Arabic inscrip- 
 tions on our rings ; that we will not sell wine ; that we will shave 
 the front of our heads ; that we will keep to our own style of 
 dress, wherever we may be ; that we wUl wear girdles round our 
 waists ; that we will not display the cross upon our churches or 
 display our crosses or our sacred books in the streets of the 
 Muslims, or in their market-places ; ^ that we will strike the 
 beUs ' in our churches lightly ; that we will not recite our services 
 in a loud voice, when a Muslim is present, that we will not carry 
 palm-branches or our images in procession in the streets, that at 
 the burial of our dead we will not chant loudly or carry lighted 
 candles in the streets of the Muslims or their market-places ; that 
 we wiU not take any slaves that have already been in the 
 possession of Muslims, nor spy into their houses ; and that we 
 will not strike any Muslim. AJl this we promise to observe, on 
 behalf of ourselves and our co-religionists, and receive protection 
 from you in exchange ; and if we violate any of the conditions of 
 this agreement, then we forfeit your protection and you are 
 at liberty to treat us as enemies and rebels."* 
 
 To European readers, unaccustomed to the outward distinc- 
 tions in dress, etc., that Orientals of different creeds naturally and 
 spontaneously adopt, these regulations may appear an unwarrant- 
 able infringement of personal liberty. But if the brotherhood of 
 believers, — what some modern writers are fond of calling the free- 
 masonry of Islam, — was to become a reality, it demanded some 
 
 ' Such as the forms of greeting, etc., that are only to be used by Muslims to 
 one another, 
 
 2 Abii Yiisuf (p. 82) says that Christians were to be allowed to go in procession 
 once a year with crosses, but not with banners ; outside the city, not inside where 
 the mosques were. 
 
 ' The naqiis, lit. an oblong piece of wood, struck with a rod. 
 
 * H. A. Hamaker : Incerti auctoris liber de expugnatione Memphidis et 
 Alexandrise, p. 165-6. (Lugduni Batavorum, 1825.) 
 
 Von ICremer (l), vol. i. pp. 102-4. 
 
 Journal Asiatique. IV""":. serie, tome xviii. pp. 495-9. 
 
54 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 outward and visible expression, and it was necessary to prevent 
 those who refused to enter into the pale of Islam from imitating 
 the prevailing tendency among the new converts towards the 
 adoption of Arab fashions in dress and speech.^ As to the restric- 
 tions imposed on the public exhibition of religious symbols and 
 observances, these are only such as would be necessary for the pre- 
 servation of public peace and order, and for avoiding any outbreak 
 of fanaticism among the Muhammadan population, to whom any- 
 thing savouring of idolatry was so especially hateful. Had these 
 regulations always been observed, many a riot involving loss of 
 Christian lives and property would have been prevented ; but, as 
 a matter of fact, they were put into force with no sort of regularity ; 
 indeed, some outburst of fanaticism was generally needed for their 
 revival. 
 
 Enough has been said to show that the Christians in the early 
 days of the Muhammadan conquest had little to complain of in 
 the way of religious disabilities. It is true that adherence to their 
 ancient faith rendered them obnoxious to the payment of jizyah 
 or the capitation-tax, but this was too moderate to constitute a 
 burden, seeing that it released them from the compulsory military 
 service that was incumbent on their Muslim feUow-subjects. 
 Conversion to Islam was certainly attended by a certain pecuniary 
 advantage, but his former religion could have had very little hold 
 on a convert who abandoned it merely to gain exemption from 
 the jizyah ; in certain cases also, instead of the Idiaraj or land-tax, 
 he was allowed to pay a tithe on the produce, but in other cases 
 the l^araj was exacted even after conversion.* But, instead of 
 jizyah, the convert had now to pay the legal alms, zakat, annually 
 levied on most kinds of movable and immovable property .^ 
 
 The rates of jizyah fixed by the early conquerors were not 
 uniform, and the great Muslim doctors, Abu Hanifah and Malik, 
 
 ^ Goldziher, vol. i. pp. 109, 133. 
 
 = Von Kremer (i), vol. i, pp. 437.8, 177. •' Mit dem Uebertritte zum Islam 
 soUte die Kopftaxe entfallen ; allein da das Haupteinkommen des Staates eben 
 auf der Grundsteuer und Kopftaxe der Andersgliiubigen beruhte, so verhielt man 
 dieselben, trotz ihres Uebertrittes diese Taxe unveriindert zu bezahlen. Als 
 endlich der alte Grundsatz, dass kein Moslim Liindereien und andere Immobilien 
 erwerben diirfe, gefallen war, machte man den Unterschied zwischen Vollblut- 
 Arabern und Neubekehrten, dass man diese trotz ihres Uebertrittes zum Islam 
 verhielt, dennoch die Grundsteuer zu bezahlen, theilsweise sogar auch die 
 Kopftaxe, wahrend die Ersteren nur die geringe Einkommensteuer (Zehent) zu 
 entrichten hatten. (Id. vol. 11. p. 154.) ^ ' 
 
 ' Goldziher, vol. i. pp. S0-S7i 427-430. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. SS 
 
 are not in agreement on some of the less important details ; ^ the 
 following fects taken from the Kitabu-1 Kharaj, drawn up by Abu 
 Yusufatthe request of Harunu-r Rashid (a.d. 786-809) maybe 
 taken as generally representative of Muhammadan procedure 
 under the Caliphate. The rich were to pay 48 dirhams ' a year, 
 the middle classes 24, whUe from the poor, i.e. the field-labourers 
 and artisans, only 12 dirhams were taken. This tax could be paid 
 in kind if desired ; cattle, merchandise, household effects, even 
 needles were to be accepted in lieu of specie, but not pigs, wine, 
 or dead animals. The tax was to be levied only on able-bodied 
 males, and not on women or children. The poor who were 
 dependent for their livelihood on alms and the aged poor who 
 were incapable of work were also specially excepted, as also the 
 blind, the lame, the incurables and the insane, unless they hap- 
 pened to be men of wealth ; this same condition applied to priests 
 and monks, who were exempt if dependent on the alms of the 
 rich, but had to pay if they were well-to-do and lived in comfort. 
 The collectors of the jizyah were particularly instructed to show 
 leniency, and refrain from all harsh treatment or the infliction of 
 corporal punishment, in case of non-payment.' 
 
 This tax was not imposed on the Christians, as some would have 
 us think, as a penalty for their refusal to accept the Muslim faith, 
 but was paid by them in common with the other dhimmis or non- 
 Muslim subjects of the state whose religion precluded them from 
 serving in the army, in return for the protection secured for them 
 by the arms of the Musulmans. When the people of Hirah con- 
 tributed the sum agreed upon, they expressly mentioned that they 
 paid this jizyah on condition that " the Muslims and their leader 
 protect us from those who would oppress us, whether they be 
 Muslims or others." * Again, in the treaty made by iQalid with 
 some towns in the neighbourhood of Hirah, he writes, " If we 
 protect you, then jizyah is due to us ; but if we do not, then it is 
 not due."* How clearly this condition was recognised by the 
 Muhammadans may be judged from the following incident in the 
 reign of the Caliph 'Umar. The Emperor Heraclius had raised 
 an enormous army with which to drive back the invading forces 
 
 ' See Sale's note on Surah IX. v. 29, and A. von Kremer (i), vol. i. pp. 
 60, 436. 
 
 2 A dirham is about five pence. ' Abu Yusuf, pp. 69-71. 
 
 * Tabarl, Prima Series, p. 2055. » Tabarl, Prima Series, p. 2050. 
 
S6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 of the Muslims, who had in consequence to concentrate all their 
 energies on the impending encounter. The Arab general, Abu 
 'Ubaydah, accordingly wrote to the governors of the conquered 
 cities of Syria, ordering them to pay back all the jizyah that had 
 been collected from the cities, and wrote to the people, saying,. | 
 " We give you back the money that we took from you, as we 
 have received news that a strong force is advancing against us. 
 The agreement between us was that we should protect you, and 
 as this is not now in our power, we return you all that we took. 
 But if we are victorious we shall consider ourselves bound to you 
 by the old terms of our agreement." In accordance with this order, 
 enormous sums were paid back out of the state treasury, and the 
 Christians called down blessings on the heads of the Muslims,' 
 saying, "May God give you rule over us again and make you 
 victorious over the Romans ; had it been they, they would not 
 have given us back anything, but would have taken all that 
 remained with us." ^ 
 
 As stated above, the jizyah was levied on the able-bodied males, 
 in lieu of the military service they would have been called upon 
 to perform had they been Musalmans ; and it is very noticeable 
 that when any Christian people served in the Muslim army, they 
 were exempted from the payment of this tax. Such was the case 
 with the tribe of Jarajimah, a Christian tribe in the neighbour- 
 hood of Antioch, who made peace with the Muslims, promising to 
 be their allies and fight on their side in battle, on condition that 
 they should not be called upon to pay jizyah and should receive 
 their proper share of the booty.* When the Arab conquests were 
 pushed to the north of Persia in a.h. 22, a similar agreement was 
 made with a frontier tribe, which was exempted from the payment 
 of jizyah in consideration of military service.^ 
 
 We find similar instances of the remission of jizyah in the case 
 of Christians who served in the army or navy under the Turkish 
 rule. For example, the inhabitants of Megaris, a community of 
 Albanian Christians, were exempted from the payment of this tax 
 on condition that they furnished a body of armed men to guard the 
 passes over Mounts Cithaeron and Geranea, which lead to the 
 Isthmus of Corinth. Similarly, the Christian inhabitants of Hydra 
 paid no direct taxes to the Sultan, but furnished instead a con- 
 
 ' Abu Yusuf, p. Si. = AI Baladhurl, p. 159. 
 
 ' Tabari, Prima Series, p. 2665. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 57 
 
 tingent of 250 able-bodied seamen to the Turkish fleet, who were 
 supported out of the local treasury.^ The Mirdites, a tribe of 
 Albanian Catholics who occupied the mountains to the north of 
 Scutari, were exempt from taxation on condition of supplying an 
 armed contingent in time of war.^ In the same spirit, in con- 
 sideration of the services they rendered to the state, the capitation 
 tax was not imposed upon the Greek Christians who looked after 
 the aqueducts that supplied Constantinople with drinking-water.* 
 On the other hand, when the Egyptian peasants, although Muslim 
 in faith, were made exempt from military service, a tax was 
 imposed upon them as on the Christians, in lieu thereof.* 
 
 Living under this security of life and property and such tolera- 
 tion of religious thought, the Christian community — especially in 
 the towns — enjoyed a flourishing prosperity in the early days of 
 the Caliphate. Christians frequently held high posts at court, e.g. 
 a Christian Arab, Al Akhtal, was court poet, and the father of St. 
 John of Damascus, counsellor to the Caliph 'Abdu-1 Malik (685- 
 70^). In the service of the Caliph Al Mu'tasim (833-842) there 
 were two brothers, Christians, who stood very high in the confidence 
 of the Commander of the Faithful : the one, named Salmoyah, 
 seems to have occupied somewhat the position of a modern 
 secretary of state, and no royal documents were valid until 
 countersigned by him, while his brother, Ibrahim, was entrusted 
 with the care of the privy seal, and was set over the Baytu-1 Mai 
 or Public Treasury, an office that, from the nature of the funds 
 and their disposal, might have been expected to have been put 
 into the hands of a Muslim ; so great was the Caliph's personal 
 affection for this Ibrahim, that he visited him in his sickness, and 
 was overwhelmed with grief at his death, and on the day of the 
 funeral ordered the body to be brought to the palace and the 
 Christian rites performed there with great solemnity .^ Nasr ibn 
 Harun, the prime minister of 'Adudu-d Dawlah (949-982), of the 
 Buwayhid dynasty of Persia, was a Christian, and built many 
 churches and monasteries.^ For a long time, the government 
 offices, especially in the department of finance, were filled with 
 
 ' Finlay, vol. vi. p. 30, 33. ^ De la Jonquiere, p. 14- 
 
 3 Thomas Smith, p. 324. " De la Jonquiere, p. 265. 
 
 * Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah : Kitabu 'Uyiinu-1 Anba'i fl Tabaqati-1 Atibba'i. Vol. i. 
 p. 164. (Cairo, A. H. 1299.) 
 
 * Ibnu-1 Athir, vol. viii. p. 281. 
 
5 8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Christians and Persians ; i to a much later date was such the case 
 in Egypt, where at times the Christians almost entirely mono- 
 polised such posts.' Particularly as physicians, the Christians 
 frequently amassed great wealth and were much honoured in the 
 houses of the great. Gabriel, the personal physician of the 
 Caliph Harunu-r Rashid, was a Nestorian Christian and derived a 
 yearly income of 800,000 dirhams from his private property, in 
 addition to an emolument of 280,000 dirhams a year in return for 
 his attendance on the caliph ; the second physician, also a Chris- 
 tian, received 22,000 dirhams a year.^ In trade and commerce, 
 the Christians also attained considerable affluence : indeed it was 
 frequently their wealth that excited against them the jealous 
 cupidity of the mob, — a feeling that fanatics took advantage of, 
 to persecute and oppress them. Further, the non-Muslim com- 
 munities enjoyed an almost complete autonomy, for the govern- 
 ment placed in their hands the independent management of their 
 internal affairs, and their religious leaders exercised judicial 
 functions in cases that concerned their co-religionists only.* 
 Their churches and monasteries were in no way interfered with, 
 except in the large cities, where some of them were turned into 
 mosques, — a measure that could hardly be objected to in view of 
 the enormous increase in the Muslim and corresponding decrease 
 in the Christian population. They were even allowed to erect new 
 churches and monasteries. The very fact that 'Umar II. (717- 
 720), at the close of the first century of the Hijrah, should have 
 ordered the destruction of all recently constructed churches, and 
 that rather more than a century later, the fanatical Al Muta- 
 wakkil (847-861) should have had to repeat the same order, shows 
 how little the prohibition of the building of new churches was 
 put into force.^ We have numerous instances recorded, both by 
 Christian and Muhammadan historians, of the building of new 
 churches : e.g. in the reign of 'Abdu-1 Malik (685-705) a church 
 was erected in Edessa and two others at Fustat in Egypt,' and 
 one, dedicated to St. George, at Halwan, a village not far from 
 Fustat.? In 711 a.d. a Jacobite church was built at Antioch by 
 
 1 Von Kremer (l), vol. i. p. 167-S. 
 " Renaudot, pp. 430, 540. 
 
 2 Von Kremer (i), vol. ii. p. 180.1. 
 
 * id. vol. i. p. 183. 
 
 * Journal Asiatique. IV™« shie, tome xviii. (1851) pp. 433, 450. 
 <■ Michel le Grand, p. 247. Renaudot, p. 189. 
 
 ' Eutychius, torn. ii. p. 369. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 59 
 
 order of the Caliph Wahd (705-715).! In the following reign, 
 !^alidu-l Kasri, who was governor of Arabian and Persian 'Iraq 
 from 724 to 738, built a church for his mother, who was a 
 Christian, to worship in.' In 759 the building of a church at 
 Nisibis was completed, on which the Metropolitan had expended 
 a sum of 56,000 dinars.* From the same century dates the church 
 of Abu Sirjah in the ancient Roman fortress in old Cairo.* In 
 the reign of Al Mahdi (775-785) a church was erected in Baghdad 
 for the use of the Christian prisoners that had been taken captive 
 during the numerous campaigns against the Byzantine Empire.^ 
 Another church was built in the same city, in the reign of 
 Harunu-r Rashid (786-809), by the people of Samalu, who had 
 submitted to the Caliph and received protection from him ; ^ 
 during the same reign a magnificent church was erected in 
 Babylon in which were enshrined the bodies of the prophets 
 Daniel and Ezechiel.'^ When Al Ma'mun (813-833) was in Egypt 
 he gave permission to two of his chamberlains to erect a church 
 on Al Muqattam, a hill near Cairo ; and by the same caliph's 
 leave, a wealthy Christian, named Bukam, built several fine 
 churches at Burah.* The Nestorian Patriarch, Timotheus, who 
 died 820 A.D., erected a church at Takrit and a monastery at 
 Bagttdad.^ In the tenth century, the beautiful Coptic Church of 
 Abu Sayfayn was built in Fustat ; 1° in the same century the 
 Christian prime minister, Na§r ibn Harun, of the Buwayhid 
 'Acludu-d Dawlah (949-982), who ruled over Southern Persia and 
 'Iraq, had many churches and monasteries built.^^ A new church 
 was built at Jiddah in the reign of Az Zahir, the seventh Fatimid 
 Caliph of Egypt (1020-1035)." New churches and monasteries 
 were also built in the reign of the 'Abbasid, Al Mustadi (i 1 70- 
 ii8o).i* In 1 187 a church was built at Fustat and dedicated to 
 Our Lady the Pure Virgin.^* 
 
 ' Von Kremer (l), vol. ii. p. 175. 
 ' Ibn KhaUikan, vol. i. p. 485. 
 
 » Elias of Nisibis, p. 128. ,, , • 
 
 < A. J. Butler: Ihe Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. Vol. 1. p. 181. 
 (Oxford, 1884.) , .. 
 
 * Yaqiit. vol. ii. p. 662. " Yaqut, vol. ". P- 670. 
 ' Chronique de Michel le Grand, p. 266. 
 
 * Eutychius, pp. 430, 432. 
 
 ' Von Kremer (i;, vol. ii. p. I75-6- 
 
 '» Butler : Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. Vol. i. p. 76. 
 " Ibnu-1 Athir, voL viii. p. 281. '^ Renaudot, p. 399. 
 
 13 Michel le Grand,-p. 333. " Abu SSlili, p. 92- 
 
6o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Indeed, so far from the development of the Christian Church 
 being hampered by the establishment of Muhammadan rule, the 
 history of the Nestorians exhibits a remarkable outburst of 
 religious life and energy from the time of their becoming subject 
 to the Muslims.i Alternately petted and persecuted by the 
 Persian kings, in whose dominions by far the majority of the 
 members of this sect were found, it had passed a rather precarious 
 existence and had been subjected to harsh treatment, when war 
 between Persia and Byzantium exposed it to the suspicion of 
 sympathising with the Christian enemy. But, under the rule of 
 the Caliphs, the security they enjoyed at home enabled them to 
 vigorously push forward their missionary enterprises abroad. 
 Missionaries were sent into China and India, both of which 
 were raised to the dignity of metropolitan sees in the eighth 
 century ; about the same period they gained a footing in Egypt, 
 and later spread the Christian faith right across Asia, and by the 
 eleventh century had gained many converts from among the 
 Tartars. 
 
 If the other Christian sects failed to exhibit the same vigorous 
 life, it was not the fault oftheMuhammadans. All were tolerated 
 alike by the supreme government, and furthermore were pre- 
 vented from persecuting one another. In the fifth century, 
 Barsumas, a Nestorian bishop, had persuaded the Persian King 
 to set on foot a fierce persecution of the Orthodox Church, by 
 representing Nestorius as a friend of the Persians and his 
 doctrines as approximating to their own ; as many as 7800 of the 
 Orthodox clergy, with an enormous number of laymen, are said 
 to have been butchered during this persecution.^ Another per- 
 secution was instituted against the orthodox by the Persian King, 
 about I So years later, at the instigation of his private physician, 
 who was a Jacobite, and persuaded the King that the orthodox 
 would always be favourably inclined towards the Byzantines.' 
 But the principles of Muslim toleration forbade such acts of injustice 
 
 ' A Dominican monk from Florence, by name Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, who 
 visited the East about the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth 
 century, speaks of the toleration the Nestorians had enjoyed under Muhammadan 
 rule right up to his time : " Et ego inveni per antiquas historias et autenticas aput 
 Saracenos, quod ipsi Nestorini amici fuerunt Machometi et confederati cum eo, et 
 quod ipse Machometus mandauit suis posteris, quod Nestorinos maxime con- 
 seruarent. Quod usque hodie diligenter obseruant ipsi Sarraceni." (Laurent, 
 p. 128.) 
 
 2 Michel le Grand, pp. 236-7. 3 Al Makin, p. 12. 
 
CAUSES OF CONVERSION TO ISLAM. 6i 
 
 as these : on the contrary, it seems to have been their endeavour to 
 deal fairly by all their Christian subjects : e.g. after the conquest of 
 Egypt, the Jacobites took advantage of the expulsion of the 
 Byzantine authorities, to rob the Orthodox of their churches, 
 but later they were restored by the Muhammadans to their 
 rightful owners when these had made good their claim to possess 
 them.i 
 
 In view of the toleration thus extended to their Christian 
 subjects in the early period of the Muslim rule, the common 
 hypothesis of the sword as the factor of conversion seems hardly 
 satisfactory, and we are compelled to seek for other motives than 
 that of persecution. But unfortunately very few details are 
 forthcoming and we are obliged to have recourse to conjecture.^ 
 Many Christian theologians ^ have supposed that the debased con- 
 dition — moral and spiritual — of the Eastern Church of that period 
 must have alienated the hearts of many and driven them to seek 
 a healthier spiritual atmosphere in the faith of Islam which had 
 come tQ_themJn_a]l.tbe-JagPur„pf new-born zeal.* For example. 
 Dean Milman ' asks, " What was the state of the Christian world in 
 the provinces exposed to the first invasion of Mohammedanism ? 
 Sect opposed to sect, clergy wrangling with clergy upon the 
 most abstruse and metaphysical points of doctrine. The orthodox, 
 the Nestorians, the Eutychians, the Jacobites were persecuting 
 each other with unexhausted animosity ; and it is not judging too 
 severely the evils of religious controversy to suppose that many 
 would rejoice in the degradation of their adversaries under the 
 yoke of the unbeliever, rather than make common cause with 
 them in defence of the common Christianity. In how many must 
 
 ' Renaudot, p. 169. 
 
 ^ Von Kremer well remarks: " Wir verdanken dem unermiidlichen Sammel- 
 fleiss der arabischen Chronisten unsere Kenntniss der politischen und militarischen 
 ■ Geschichte jener Zeiten, welche so genau ist als dies nur immer auf eine Entfer- 
 nung von zwolf Jahrhunderten der Fall sein kann ; allein gerade die innere 
 Geschichte jener denkwiirdigen Epoche, die Geschichte des Kampfes einer 
 neuen, rohen Religion gegen die alten hochgebildeten, zum Theile iiberbildeten 
 Culte ist kaum in ihren allgemeinsten Umrissen bekannt." Von Kremer (2), 
 p. 1-2. 
 
 ' Cf. in addition to the passages quoted below, M'Clintoch & Strong's 
 Cyclopsedia, sub art. Mohammedanism, vol. vi. p. 420. James Freeman Clarke : 
 Ten Great Religions. Part ii. p. 75. (London, 1883.) 
 
 ■• Thus the Emperor Heraclius is represented by the Muhammadan historian as 
 saying, " Their religion is a new religion which gives them new zeal." Tabari, 
 p. 2103. 
 
 ' History of Latin Christianity. Vol. ii. pp. 216-217. 
 
62 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 this incessant disputation have shaken the foundations of their 
 faith! It had been wonderful if thousands had not, in their 
 weariness and perplexity, sought refuge from these interminable 
 and implacable controversies in the simple, intelligible truth of 
 the Divine Unity, though purchased by the acknowledgment of 
 the prophetic mission of Mohammed." Again, Canon Taylor' 
 says : " It is easy to understand why this reformed Judaism 
 spread so swiftly over Africa and Asia. The African and Syrian 
 doctors had substituted abstruse metaphysical dogmas for the 
 religion of Christ : they tried to combat the licentiousness of the 
 age by setting forth the celestial merit of celibacy and the 
 angelic excellence of virginity — seclusion from the world was the 
 road to holiness, dirt was the characteristic of monkish sanctity— 
 the people were practically polytheists, worshipping a crowd of 
 martyrs, saints and angels ; the upper classes were effeminate and 
 corrupt, the middle classes oppressed by taxation,^ the slaves 
 without hope for the present or the future. As with the besom 
 of God, Islam swept away this mass of corruption and superstition. 
 It was a revolt against empty theological polemics ; it was a 
 masculine protest against the exaltation of celibacy as a crown of 
 piety. It brought out the fundamental dogmas of religion— the 
 unity and greatness of God, that He is merciful and righteous, 
 that He claims obedience to His will, resignation and faith. It 
 proclaimed the responsibility of man, a future life, a day of judg- 
 ment, and stern retribution to fall upon the wicked ; and 
 enforced the duties of prayer, almsgiving, fasting and benevolence. 
 It thrust aside the artificial virtues, the religious frauds and foUies, 
 the perverted moral sentiments, and the verbal subtleties of 
 theological disputants. It replaced monkishness by manliness. 
 It gave hope to the slave, brotherhood to mankind, and recogni- 
 tion to the fundamental facts of human nature." 
 
 Islam has moreover been represented as a reaction against that 
 Byzantine ecclesiasticism,^ which looked upon the emperor and 
 
 • A paper read before the Church Congress at Wolverhampton, October 7th, 
 1887. 
 
 2 For the oppressive fiscal system under the Byzantine Empire, see Gfroret! 
 Byzantinische Geschichten. Vol. ii. pp. 337-9, 389-391, 450. 
 
 s "Der Islam war ein Rlickstoss gegen den Missbrauch, welchen Justinian mit 
 der Menschheit, besonders aber mit der christlichen Religion trieb, deren 
 oberstes geistliches und weltliches Haupt er zu sein behauptete. Dass der 
 Araber Mahomed, welcher 571 der christlichen Zeitrechnung, sechs" Tahre nach 
 dem Tode Justinian's, das Licht der Welt erblickte, mit seiner Lehre unerhortes 
 
CAUSES OF CONVERSION TO ISLAM. 63 
 
 his court as a copy of the Divine Majesty on high, and the 
 emperor himself as not only the supreme earthly ruler of 
 Christendom, but as High-priest also.^ Under Justinian this 
 system had been hardened into a despotism that pressed like an 
 iron weight upon clergy and laity alike. In 532 the widespread 
 dissatisfaction in Constantinople with both church and state, 
 burst out into a revolt against the government of Justinian, 
 which was only suppressed after a massacre of 35,000 persons. 
 The Greens, as the party of the malcontents was termed, had 
 made open and violent protest in the circus against the oppression 
 of the emperor, crying out, " Justice has vanished from the world 
 and is no more to be found. But we will become Jews, or rather 
 we will return again to Grecian paganism." ^ The lapse of a 
 century had removed none of the grounds for the dissatisfaction 
 that here found such violent expression, but the heavy hand of 
 the Byzantine government prevented the renewal of such an 
 outbreak as that of 532 and compelled the malcontents to 
 dissemble, though in 560 some secret heathens were detected in 
 Constantinople and punished.^ On the borders of the empire, 
 however, at a distance from the capital, such malcontents were 
 safer, and the persecuted heretics, and others dissatisfied with the 
 Byzantine state-church, took refuge in the East, and here the 
 Muslim armies would be welcomed by the spiritual children of 
 those who a hundred years before had desired to exchange the 
 Christian religion for another faith. Further, the general 
 adoption of the Arabic language throughout the empire of the 
 Caliphate, especially in the towns and the great centres of 
 population, and the gradual assimilation in manners and customs 
 that in the course of about two centuries caused the numerous 
 conquered races to be largely merged in the national life of the 
 ruling race, had no doubt a counterpart in the religious and 
 intellectual life of many members of the protected religions. The 
 rationalistic movement that so powerfully influenced Muslim 
 theology from the second to the fifth century of the Hijrah may 
 
 Gluck machte, verdankte er grossentheils dem Abscheu, welchen die im Umlcreise 
 des byzantinischen Reiches angesessenen Volker, wie die benachbarten Nationen , 
 iiber die von dem Basileus begangenen Greuel empfanden." Gfrorer : Byzan - 
 tinische Geschichten. Vol. ii. p. 437. 
 
 ' Id. vol. ii. pp. 296-306, 337. 
 
 ' Id. vol. ii. pp. 442-4. 
 
 ' Id. vol. ii. p. 445. 
 
64 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 very possibly have influenced Christian thinkers, and turned them 
 from a religion, the prevailing tone of whose theology seems at 
 this time to have been Credo quia impossibile. A Muhammadan 
 writer of the fourth century of the Hijrah has preserved for us a 
 conversation with a Coptic Christian which may safely be taken 
 as characteristic of the general mental attitude of the rest of the 
 Eastern Churches at this period : — 
 
 " My proof for the truth of Christianity is, that I find its teach- 
 ings contradictory and mutually destructive, for they are repugnant 
 to common-sense and revolting to the reason, on account of their 
 inconsistency and contrariety. No reflection can strengthen 
 them, no discussion can prove them ; and however thoughtfully 
 vsre may investigate them, neither the intellect nor the senses can 
 provide us with any argument in support of them. Notwith- 
 standing this, I have seen that many nations and many kings of 
 learning and sound judgment, have given in their allegiance to 
 the Christian faith ; so I conclude that if these have accepted it 
 in spite of all the contradictions referred to, it is because the 
 proofs they have received, in the form of signs and miracles, have 
 -compelled them to submit to it." ^ 
 
 On the other hand it should be remembered that those that 
 passed over from Christianity to Islam, under the influence of the 
 rationalistic tendencies of the age, would find in the Mu'tazUite, 
 presentment of Muslim theology, very much that was common to 
 the two faiths, so that as far as the articles of belief and the 
 intellectual attitude towards many theological questions were 
 concerned, the transition was not so violent as might be supposed. 
 To say nothing of the numerous fundamental doctrines, that will 
 at once suggest themselves to those even who have only a slight 
 knowledge of the teachings of the Prophet, there were many 
 other common points of view, that were the direct consequences 
 of the close relationships between the Christian and Muhammadan 
 theologians in Damascus under the Umayyad caliphs as also in 
 later times ; for it has been maintained that there is dear 
 evidence of the influence of the Byzantine theologians on the 
 ■development of the systematic treatment of Muhammadan 
 dogmatics. The very form and arrangement of the oldest rule of 
 faith in the Arabic language suggest a comparison with similar 
 
 ' Mas'udI, vol. ii. p. 387. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 65 
 
 treatises of St. John of Damascus and other Christian fathers.^ 
 The oldest Arab Sufiism, the trend of which was purely towards 
 the ascetic hfe (as distinguished from the later Sufiism which was 
 developed under the influence of ideas borrowed from India), 
 originated for the most part under the influence of Christian 
 thought.' Such influence is especially traceable in the doctrines 
 of some of the Mu'tazilite sects,' who busied themselves with 
 speculations on the attributes of the divine nature quite in the 
 manner of the Byzantine theologians : the Qadariyah or liber- 
 tarians of Islam probably borrowed their doctrine of the freedom 
 of the will directly from Christianity, while the Murjiyah in their 
 denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment were in thorough 
 agreement with the teaching of the Eastern Church on this 
 subject as against the generally received opinion of orthodox 
 Mushms.* On the other hand, the influence of the more 
 orthodox doctors of Islam in the conversion of unbelievers is 
 attested by the tradition that twenty thousand Christians, Jews 
 and Magians became Muslims when the great Imam Ibn Hanbal 
 died.' A celebrated doctor of the same sect, AbQ-l Faraj ibnu-1 
 Jawzi (a.d. 1115-1201), the most learned man of his time, a 
 popular preacher and most prolific writer, is said to have boasted 
 that just the same number of persons accepted the faith of Islam 
 at his hands. ^ 
 
 Further, the vast and unparalleled success of the Muslim arms 
 shook the faith of the Christian peoples that came under their 
 rule and saw in these conquests the hand of God.''' Worldly 
 prosperity they associated with the divine favour, and the God of 
 battle (they thought) would surely give the victory only into the 
 hands of his favoured servants. Thus the very success of the 
 Muhammadans seemed to argue the truth of their religion. 
 
 The Islamic ideal of the brotherhood of all believers was a 
 powerful attraction towards this creed, and though the Arab pride 
 of birth strove to refuse for several generations the privileges of 
 the ruling race to the new converts, stUl as " clients " of the various 
 Arab tribes to which at first they used to be affiliated, they received 
 
 ' Von Kremer (2), p. 8. 2 ^ p. 5^ & (3)^ p. 32. 
 
 ^ Among the Mu'tazilite philosophers, Muhammad ibnu-1 Hudhayl, the teacher 
 of Al Ma'mun, is said to have converted more than three thousand persons to 
 Islam. Al Murtada, sub voc. 
 
 * Von Kremer (2), pp. 3, 7-8. ' Ibn Hiallikan, vol. i. p. 45. 
 
 ' Wiistenfeld, p. 103. ' Michel le Grand, p. 231. 
 
66 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a recognised position in the community, and by the close of the 
 first century of the Hijrah they had vindicated for this ideal its 
 true place in Muslim theology and at least a theoretical recogni- 
 tion in the state. ^ 
 
 But the condition of the Christians did not always continue to be 
 so tolerable as under the earlier caliphs. In the interests of the true 
 believers, vexatious conditions were sometimes imposed upon the 
 non-Muslim population (or dhimmis as they were called, from the 
 compact of protection made with them), with the object of securing 
 for the faithful superior social advantages. Unsuccessful attempts 
 were made by several caliphs to exclude them from the public offices. 
 Decrees to this effect were passed by Al Mutawakkil (847-861), 
 Al Muqtadir (908-932), and in Egypt by Al Amir (1101-1130), 
 one of the Fatimid caliphs, and by the Mamluk Sultans in the 
 fourteenth century .^ But the very fact that these decrees ex- 
 cluding the dhimmis from government posts were so often renewed, 
 is a sign of the want of any continuity or persistency in putting 
 such intolerant measures into practice. In fact they may gene- 
 rally be traced either to popular indignation excited by the harsh 
 and insolent behaviour of Christian officials,' or to outbursts of 
 fanaticism which forced upon the government acts of oppression 
 that ^vere contrary to the general spirit of Muslim rule and were 
 consequently allowed to lapse as soon as possible. 
 
 The beginning of a harsher treatment of the native Christian 
 population dates from the reign of Harunu-r Rashid (786-809) 
 who ordered them to wear a distinctive dress and give up the 
 government posts they held to Musalmans. The first of these 
 orders shows how little one at least of the ordinances of 'Umar 
 was observed, and these decrees were the outcome, not so much 
 of any purely religious feeling, as of the political circumstances of 
 the time. The Christians under Muhammadan rule have often 
 had to suffer for the bad faith kept by foreign Christian powers in 
 their relations with Muhammadan princes, and on this occasion it 
 was the treachery of the Byzantine Emperor, Nicephorus, that 
 caused the Christian name to stink in the nostrils of Hariin.* 
 
 ' Goldziher, vol. i. chap. 3 & 4. 
 
 2 The last of these was prompted by the discovery of an attempt on the part of 
 the Christians to bum the city of Cairo. (De Guignes, vol. iv. p. 204-5.) 
 Journal Asiatique, IV^^ s^rie, tome xviii. (1851), pp. 454, 455, 463, 484, 491. 
 
 ^ Assemani, tom. iii. pars. 2, p. C. Renaudot, pp. 432, 603, 607. 
 
 "* Sir W. Muir : The Caliphate, p. 475. 
 
PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS. 67 
 
 Many of the persecutions of Christians in Muslim countries can be 
 traced either to distrust of their loyalty, excited by the intrigues 
 and interference of Christian foreigners and the enemies of Islam, 
 or to the bad feeling stirred up by the treacherous or brutal 
 behaviour of the latter towards the Musalmans. Religious fanati- 
 cism is, however, responsible for many of such persecutions, as in 
 the reign of the Caliph Al MutawakkU (847-861), under whom 
 severe measures of oppression were taken against the Christians. 
 This prince took advantage of the strong orthodox reaction that 
 had set in in Muhammadan theology against the rationalistic and 
 freethinking tendencies that had had free play under former 
 rulers, — and came forward as the champion of the extreme 
 orthodox party, to which the mass of the people as contrasted 
 with the higher classes belonged,i and which was eager to exact 
 vengeance for the persecutions it had itself suffered in the two 
 preceding reigns ; ^ he sought to curry their favour by persecuting 
 the Mu'tazUites or rationalistic school of theologians, forbidding all 
 further discussions on the Qur'an and declaring the doctrine that 
 it was created, to be heretical ; he had the followers of 'AH im- 
 prisoned and beaten, pulled down the tomb of Husayn at Karbala' 
 and forbade pilgrimages to be made to the site. The Christians 
 shared in the sufferings of the other heretics ; for Al Mutawakkil 
 put rigorously into force the rules that had been passed in former 
 reigns prescribing a distinction in the dress of dhimmis and 
 Muslims, ordered that the Christians should no longer be employed 
 in the public offices, doubled the capitation-tax, forbade them to 
 have Muslim slaves or use the same baths as the Muslims, and 
 harassed them with several other restrictions. One of his suc- 
 cessors, Al Muqtadir (908-932 a.d.), renewed these regulations, 
 which the lapse of half a century had apparently made to fall into 
 disuse. Indeed such severe measures appear to have been very 
 spasmodic and not to have been put into force with any regu- 
 larity, as may be judged from the fact that succeeding rulers were 
 called upon to renew them. Further, such oppression was con- 
 trary to the tolerant spirit of Islam and the distinct usage and 
 teaching of the Prophet, who had said, " Whoever torments the 
 dhimmis, torments me ; "^ and the fanatical party tried in vain to 
 
 Von Kremer (3), p. 246. '' Muir (i),'pp. 508, 516-17. 
 
 " Al Makin, p. II. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 enforce the persistent execution of these oppressive measures for 
 the humiliation of the non-Muslim population. "The 'ulama' 
 (i.e. the learned, the clergy) consider this state of things ; they 
 weep and groan in silence, while the princes who have the power 
 of putting down these criminal abuses only shut their eyes to 
 them."i The rules that a fanatical priesthood may lay down for 
 the repression of unbelievers cannot always be taken as a criterion 
 of the practice of civil governments : it is failure to realise this 
 fact that has rendered possible the highly-coloured pictures of 
 the sufferings of the Christians under Muhammadan rule 
 drawn by writers who have assumed that the prescriptions of 
 certain Muslim theologians represented an invariable practice. 
 Such outbursts of persecution seem in some cases to have been 
 excited by the alleged abuse of their position by those Christians 
 who held high posts in the service of the government ; they 
 aroused considerable hostility of feeling towards themselves by 
 their oppression of the Muslims, it being said that they took 
 advantage of their high position to plunder and annoy the faithful, 
 treating them with great harshness and rudeness and despoiling 
 them of their lands and money. Such complaints were laid before 
 the caliphs Al-Mansur (754-775), Al-Mahdi (775-785), Al Ma'mun 
 (813-833), Al Mutawakkil (847-861), Al Muqtadir (908-932), and 
 many of their successors.^ They also incurred the odium of many 
 Muhammadans by acting as the spies of the 'Abbasid dynasty and 
 hunting down the adherents of the displaced Umayyad family.* 
 At a later period, during the time of the Crusades they were 
 accused of treasonable correspondence with the Crusaders* and 
 brought on themselves severe restrictive measures which cannot 
 justly be described as religious persecution. 
 
 In proportion as the lot of the conquered peoples became harder 
 to bear, the more irresistible was the temptation to free them- 
 selves from their miseries, by the words, " There is no God but 
 God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God." When the state 
 was in need of money— as was increasingly the case— the subject 
 races were more and more burdened with taxes, so that the 
 condition of the non-Muslims was constantly growing more 
 
 ' Journal Asiatique. IV°": serie, tome xix. p. 109. (Paris iSw ) 
 " Belin, pp. 435-440, 442, 448, 456, 459-461, 479-480 ' 
 ' Id. p. 435, n. 2. 
 * Id. p. 478. 
 
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 69 
 
 unendurable, and conversions to Islam increased in the same 
 proportion. Further causes that contributed to the decrease of 
 the Christian population may be found in the fact that the 
 children of the numerous Christian captive women who were 
 carried off to the harems of the Muslims, had to be brought up in 
 the religion of their fathers, and in the frequent temptation that 
 was offered to the Christian slave by an indulgent master, of pur- 
 chasing his freedom at the price of conversion to Islam. But of 
 any organised attempt to force the acceptance of Islam on the 
 non-Muslim population, or of any systematic persecution intended 
 to stamp out the Christian religion, we hear nothing. Had the 
 Caliphs chosen to adopt either course of action, they might have 
 swept away Christianity as easily as Ferdinand and Isabella drove 
 Islam out of Spain, or Louis XIV. made Protestantism penal in 
 France, or the Jews were kept out of England for 350 years. The 
 Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut oiF from communion 
 with the rest of Christendom, throughout which no one would 
 have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical com- 
 munions. So that the very survival of these churches to the 
 present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of 
 the Muhammadan governments towards them.i 
 
 In the Patriarchate of Antioch there were, in 1888, 80,000 
 Christians ; in the Patriarchate of Palestine, 50,000 ; in the West 
 Syrian or Jacobite Church, 400,000 ; in the East Syrian or 
 Assyrian Church, 200,000. Besides these, there are the Maronite 
 Church of Lebanon and the other Uniat Churches in the East 
 that have submitted to the Church of Rome.^ The marvel is 
 that these isolated and scattered communities should have 
 survived so long, exposed as they have been to the ravages of 
 war, pestilence and famine,* living in a country that was for 
 
 ' The Caliph of Egypt, Al Hakim (996-1020, A.D.) did in fact order all the 
 Jews and Christians to leave Egypt and emigrate into the Byzantine territory, but 
 yielded to their entreaties to revoke his orders. (Maqriri (i), p. 91.) It would 
 have been quite possible hovrever for him to have enforced its execution as it 
 would have been for the ferocious Sallm I. (1512-1520), who with the design of 
 putting an end to all religious differences in his dominions caused 40,000 Shi'ahs 
 to be massacred, to have completed this politic scheme by the extermination of 
 the Christians also. But in allowing himself to be dissuaded from this design, he 
 most certainly acted in accordance with the general policy adopted by Muham- 
 madan rulers towards their Christian subjects. (Finlay, vol. v. pp. 29-30.) 
 
 ^ Athelstan Riley: Synopsis of Oriental Churches. (The Guardian, 
 June 27th, 1888.) 
 
 ' See A. von Kremer (l), vol. ii. pp. 490-492. 
 
70 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 centuries a continual battlefield, overrun by Turks, Mongols and 
 Crusaders,! it being further remembered that they were forbidden 
 by the Muhammadan law to make good this decay of their 
 numbers by proselytising efforts, — if indeed they had cared to do so, 
 for they seem (with the exception of the Nestorians) even before 
 the Muhammadan conquest, to have lost that missionary spirit, 
 without which, as history abundantly shows, no healthy life is 
 possible in a Christian church. It has also been suggested that 
 the monastic ideal of continence so widespread in the East, and 
 the Christian practice of monogamy together with the sense 
 of insecurity and their servile condition, may have acted as checks 
 on the growth of the Christian population. ^ 
 
 It is to some such causes as those above enumerated, together 
 with a constant stream of conversions to Islam, rather than to 
 religious persecution on the part of their Muhammadan rulers, 
 that we must attribute the decay of the Christian populations of 
 the East. 
 
 Of the details of conversion to Islam we have hardly any 
 information. At the time of the first occupation of their country 
 by the Arabs, the Christians appear to have gone over to Islam 
 in very large numbers.' Some idea of the extent of these early 
 conversions in 'Iraq for example may be formed from the fact 
 that the income from taxation in the reign of 'Umar was firom 
 100 to 120 million dirhams, while in the reign of 'Abdu-1 Malik, 
 about SO years later, it had sunk to forty millions : while this fall 
 in the revenue is largely attributable to the devastation caused by 
 wars and insurrections, still it was chiefly due to the fact that 
 such large numbers of the population had become Muhammadan 
 and consequently could no longer be called upon to pay the 
 capitation-tax.* This same period witnessed the conversion of 
 large numbers of the Christians of Ehurasan, as we learn from a 
 letter of a contemporary ecclesiastic, the Jacobite Patriarch, 
 Jesujab III., addressed to Simeon, the Metropolitan of Ravarshir 
 
 The sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 may be taken as a type 
 °V?^, treatment that the Eastern Christians met with at the hands of the Latins. 
 Abu-1 Faraj complams that the monastery of Harran was sacked and plundered 
 by Count Goscehn lord of Edessa, in 1 184, just as though he had been a Saracen 
 or a Turk. (Abu-1 Faraj (i), vol. ii. pp. 506-8.) 
 * H. H. Milman, vol. ii. p. 218. 
 
 I' J.B. Bury: A History of thelater Roman Empire. Vol. ii.p.267. CLond 1S80) 
 ■■ A. von. Kremer (i), vol. i. p. 172. r / ^ yj 
 
CONVERSION OF CHRISTIANS. 71 
 
 and Primate of Persia. We possess so very few Christian docu- 
 ments of the first century of the Hijrah, and this letter bears such 
 striking testimony to the peaceful character of the spread of the 
 new faith, and has moreover been so little noticed by modern 
 historians — that it may well be quoted here at length. " Where 
 are thy sons, O father bereft of sons ? Where is that great 
 people of Merv, who though they beheld neither sword, nor fire 
 or tortures, captivated only by love for a moiety of their goods, 
 have turned aside, like fools, from the true path and rushed head- 
 long into the pit of faithlessness — into everlasting destruction, 
 and have utterly been brought to nought, while two priests only 
 (priests at least in name) have, like brands snatched from the 
 burning, escaped the devouring flames of infidelity. Alas, alas ! 
 Out of so many thousands who bore the name of Christians, not 
 even one single victim was consecrated unto God by the shedding 
 of his blood for the true faith. Where, too, are the sanctuaries 
 of Kirman and all Persia ? it is not the coming of Satan or the 
 mandates of the kings of the earth or the orders of governors of 
 provinces that have laid them waste and in ruins — but the feeble 
 breath of one contemptible little demon, who was not deemed 
 worthy of the honour of demons by those demons who sent him 
 on his errand, nor was endowed by Satan the seducer with the 
 power of diabolical deceit, that he might display it in your land ; 
 but merely by the nod of his command he has thrown down all 
 the churches of your Persia .... And the Arabs, to whom God 
 at this time has given the empire of the world, behold, they 
 are among you, as ye know well : and yet they attack not the 
 Christian faith, but, on the contrary, they favour our religion, do 
 honour to our priests and the saints of the Lord, and confer 
 benefits on churches and monasteries. Why then have your 
 people of Merv abandoned their faith for the sake of these Arabs ? 
 and that too when the Arabs, as the people of Merv themselves 
 declare, have not compelled them to leave their own religion 
 but suffered them to keep it safe and undefiled if they gave up 
 only a moiety of their goods. But forsaking the faith which 
 brings eternal salvation, they clung to a moiety of the goods of 
 this fleeting world : that faith which whole nations have pur- 
 chased and even to this day do purchase by the shedding of their 
 blood and gain thereby the inheritance of eternal life, your people 
 of Merv were willing to barter for a moiety of their goods — and 
 
72 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 even less."i The reign of the CaHph 'Umar II. (a.d. 717-720) 
 particularly was marked with very extensive conversions : he 
 organised a zealous missionary movement and oflFered every kind 
 of inducement to the conquered peoples to accept Islam. He 
 abrogated the decree passed in a.d. 700 for the purpose of 
 arresting the impoverishment of the treasury, according to which 
 the convert to Islam was not released from the capitation-tax, 
 but was compelled to continue to pay it as before. He no longer 
 exacted the Hjaraj from the Muhammadan owners of landed 
 property, and imposed upon them the far lighter burden of a 
 tithe. These measures, though financially most ruinous, were 
 eminently successful in the way the pious-minded caliph desired 
 they should be, and enormous numbers hastened to enrol them- 
 selves among the Musalmans.^ 
 
 It must not however be supposed that such worldly considera- 
 tions were the only influences at work in the conversion of 
 the Christians to Islam. The controversial works of St. John of 
 Damascus, of the same century, give us glimpses of the zealous 
 Muslim striving to undermine by his arguments the foundations 
 of the Christian faith. The very dialogue form into which these 
 treatises are thrown, and the frequent repetition of such phrases 
 as " If the Saracen asks you," — " If the Saracen says .... then tell 
 him" . . . — give thexa an air oi vra(semi>/ance and make them a.TpTpezt 
 as if they were intended to provide the Christians with ready 
 answers to the numerous objections which their Muslim neigh- 
 bours brought against the Christian creed.^ That the aggressive 
 attitude of the Muhammadan disputant is most prominently 
 brought forward in these dialogues is only what might be 
 expected, it being no part of this great theologian's purpose to 
 enshrine in his writings an apology for Islam. His pupil, Bishop 
 Theodore Abu Qarah, also wrote several controversial dialogues* 
 with Muhammadans, in which the disputants range over all the 
 points of dispute between the two faiths, the Muslim as before 
 being the first to take up the cudgels, and enabling us to form 
 some slight idea of the activity with which the cause of Islam 
 was prosecuted at this period. " The thoughts of the Agarenes," 
 
 1 Assemani. Tom. iii. Pars Prima, pp. 130-1. 
 
 ' August MUller, vol. i. p. 440. 
 
 « Migne: Patr. Gr. Tom. 96, pp. 1336- 1348. 
 
 * Migne: Patr. Gr. Tom. 97, pp. 1528-9, 1548-61. 
 
PROSELYTISING EFFORTS. 73 
 
 says the bishop, "and all their zeal, are directed towards the 
 denial of the divinity of God the Word, and they strain every 
 effort to this end." 1 
 
 These details from the first two centuries of the Hijrah are 
 meagre in the extreme and rather suggest the existence of 
 proselytising efforts than furnish definite facts. The earliest 
 document of a distinctly missionary character which has come 
 down to us, would seem to date from the reign of Al Ma'mun 
 (813-833), and takes the form of a letter ^ written by a cousin of 
 the Caliph to a Christian Arab of noble birth and of considerable 
 distinction at the court, and held in high esteem by Al Ma'mun 
 himself. In this letter he begs his friend to embrace Islam, 
 in terms of affectionate appeal and in language that strikingly 
 illustrates the tolerant attitude of the Muslims towards the 
 Christian church at this period. This letter occupies an almost 
 unique place in the early history of the propagation of Islam, and 
 has on this account been given in full in an appendix.' In the 
 same work we have a report of a speech made by the Caliph at 
 an assembly of his nobles, in which he speaks in tones of the 
 strongest contempt of those who had become Muhammadans 
 merely out of worldly and selfish motives, and compares them to 
 the Hypocrites who while pretending to be friends of the 
 Prophet, in secret plotted against his life. But just as the 
 Prophet returned good for evil, so the Caliph resolves to treat 
 these persons with courtesy and forbearance until God should 
 decide between them.* The record of this complaint on the part 
 of the Caliph is interesting as indicating that disinterested and 
 genuine conviction was expected and looked for in the new 
 convert to Islam, and that the discovery of self-seeking and 
 unworthy motives drew upon him the severest censure. 
 
 Al Ma'mun himself was very zealous in his efforts to spread the 
 faith of Islam, and sent gracious invitations to unbelievers even 
 in the most distant parts of his dominions, such as Transoxania 
 and Farghanah.5 At the same time he did- not abuse his royal 
 power, by attempting to force his own faith upon others : when 
 
 ' Id. p. 1557. 
 
 ^ Risalatu •Abdi-llahi-bni Isma'Ili-1 Hashimi ila 'Abdi-I Masihi-bm Isljaqi-1 
 Kindi, pp. 1-37. (London, 1885.) 
 
 ' Appendix II. For an account of Muslim controversial literature, see 
 Appendix III. 
 
 * Al Kindl, pp. 111-113. ^ Al Baladhuri, pp. 430-1. 
 
74 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a certain Yazdanbakht, a leader of the Manichsean sect, came on 
 a visit to Baghdad 1 and held a disputation with the Muslim 
 theologians, in which he was utterly silenced, the Caliph tried to 
 induce him to embrace Islam. But Yazdanbakht refused, saying, 
 " Commander of the faithful, your advice is heard and your words 
 have been listened to ; but you are one of those who do not 
 force men to abandon their religion." So far from resenting the 
 ill-success of his efforts, the Caliph furnished him with a body- 
 guard, that he might not be exposed to insult from the fanatical 
 populace.!' In the early part of the next century, Theodore, the 
 Nestorian Bishop of Beth Garmai became a Musalman, and there 
 is no mention of any force or compulsion by the ecclesiastical 
 historian * who records the fact, as there would undoubtedly have 
 been, had such existed. About a hundred years later, in 1016, 
 Ignatius,* the Jacobite Metropolitan of Takrit, who had held this 
 office for twenty-five years, set out for Bagdad and embraced 
 Islam in the presence of the Caliph AI Qadir, taking the name of 
 Abu Muslim.^ It would be exceedingly interesting if an Apologia 
 pro Vita Sua had survived to reveal to us the religious develop- 
 ment that took place in the mind of either of these converts. 
 The Christian chronicler hints at immorality in both cases, but 
 such an accusation uncorroborated by any further evidence is 
 open to suspicion,* much as it would be if brought forward by a 
 
 ' It is very probable that the occasion of this visit of Yazdanbakht to Baghdad 
 was the summoning of a great assembly of the leaders of all the religious bodies 
 of the period, by Al Ma'mun, when it had come to his ears that the enemies of 
 Islam declared that it owed its success to the sword and not to the power of 
 argument : in this meeting, the Muslim doctors defended their religion against 
 this imputation, and the unbelievers are said to have acknowledged that the 
 Muslims had satisfactorily proved their point. (Al Murtada sub. voc. AI 
 Ma'mun.) 
 
 ' Kitabu-1 Fihrist, vol. i. p. 338. 
 
 ^ Aba-I Faraj (l), vol. iii. p. 230. 
 
 ■• All the Jacobite Patriarchs assume the name of Ignatius ; before his consecra- 
 tion he was called Mark bar Qiqi. 
 
 ' Aba-l Faraj (i), vol. iii. pp. 288-290. 
 
 Elias of Nisibis, pp. 153-4. He returned to the Christian faith, however, 
 before his death, which took place about twenty years later. Two similar cases 
 are recorded in the annals of the Jacobite Patriarchs of Antioch in the sixteenth 
 century: of these one, named Joshua, became a Muhammadan in 151 7, but 
 afterwards recanting fled to Cyprus (at that time in the hands of the Venetians), 
 where prostrate at the door of a church in penitential humility he suffered all who 
 went in or out to tread over his body ; the other, Ni'matu-Uah (flor. 1560), having 
 abjured Christianity for Islam, sought absolution of Pope Greeory XIII in Rome 
 (Abu-l Faraj (i), vol. ii. pp. 847-8.) t- s / . 
 
 " In fact Elias of Nisibis, the contemporary chronicler of the conversion of 
 the Jacobite Patriarch, makes no mention of such a failing. 
 
CONVERSION OF CHRISTIANS. 75 
 
 Roman Catholic when recording the conversion of a priest of his 
 3wn communion to the Protestant faith. It is doubtless owing 
 :o their exalted position in the church that the conversion of 
 these two prominent ecclesiastics of two hostile Christian sects 
 has been handed down to us, while that of more obscure indivi- 
 duals has not been recorded. But that these conversions were 
 not merely isolated instances we have the valuable evidence of 
 Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre (1216-1225), who thus speaks 
 of the Eastern Church from his experience of it in the Holy 
 Land : — " Weakened and lamentably ensnared, nay rather 
 grievously wounded, by the lying persuasions of the false prophet 
 and by the allurements of carnal pleasure, she hath sunk down, 
 and she that was brought up in scarlet, hath embraced dung- 
 hills." 1 
 
 So far the Christian churches that have been described as 
 coming within the sphere of Muhammadan influence, have been 
 the orthodox Eastern Church and the heretical communions that 
 had sprung out of it. But with the close of the eleventh century 
 a fresh element was added to the Christian population of Syria 
 and Palestine, in the large bodies of Crusaders of the Latin rite 
 who settled in the kingdom of Jerusalem and the other states 
 founded by the Crusaders, which maintained a precarious exist- 
 ence for nearly two centuries. During this period, occasional 
 conversions to Islam were made from among these foreign 
 immigrants. In the first Crusade, for example, abody of Germans 
 and Lombards under the command of a certain knight, named 
 Rainaud, had separated themselves from the main body and were 
 besieged in a castle by the Saljuq Sultan, Arslan ; on pretence of 
 making a sortie, Rainaud and his personal followers abandoned 
 their unfortunate companions and went over to the Turks, among 
 whom they embraced Islam. ^ 
 
 The history of the ill-fated Second Crusade presents us with a 
 very remarkable incident of a similar character. The story, as 
 told by Odo of Deuil, a monk of St. Denis, who, in the capacity 
 of private chaplain to Louis VII., accompanied him on this 
 Crusade and wrote a graphic account of it, runs as follows. 
 
 While endeavouring to make their way overland through Asia 
 Minor to Jerusalem, the Crusaders sustained a disastrous defeat 
 
 > Historia Orientalis. C. 15 (p. 45.) 
 
 ^ De Guignes, Tome ii. (Seconde Partie) p. 15. 
 
76 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 at the hands of the Turks in the mountain-passes of Phrygia (a.d. 
 1 148), and with difficulty reached the seaport town of Attalia. 
 Here, all who could afford to satisfy the exorbitant demands of 
 the Greek merchants, took ship for Antioch ; while the sick and 
 wounded and the mass of the pilgrims were left behind at the 
 mercy of their treacherous allies, the Greeks, who received five 
 hundred marks from Louis, on condition that they provided an 
 escort for the pilgrims and took care of the sick until they were 
 strong enough to be sent on after the others. But no sooner had 
 the army left, than the Greeks informed the Turks of the helpless 
 condition of the pilgrims, and quietly looked on while famine, 
 disease and the arrows of the enemy carried havoc and destruction 
 through the camp of these unfortunates. Driven to desperation 
 a party of three or four thousand attempted to escape, but were 
 surrounded and cut to pieces by the Turks, who now pressed on 
 to the camp to follow up their victory. The situation of the 
 survivors would have been utterly hopeless, had not the sight of 
 their misery melted the hearts of the Muhammadans to pity. 
 They tended the sick and relieved the poor and starving with 
 open-handed liberality. Some even bought up the French money 
 which the Greeks had got out of the pilgrims by force or cunning, 
 and lavishly distributed it among the needy. So great was the 
 contrast between the kind treatment the pilgrims received from 
 the unbelievers and the cruelty of their fellow-Christians, the 
 Greeks, who imposed forced labour upon them, beat them and 
 robbed them of what little they had left, that many of them 
 voluntarily embraced the faith of their deliverers. As the 
 old chronicler says : " Avoiding their co-religionists who had 
 been so cruel to them, they went in safety among the infidels 
 who had compassion upon them, and, as we heard, more than 
 three thousand joined themselves to the Turks when they 
 retired. Oh, kindness more cruel than all treachery ! They 
 gave them bread but robbed them of their faith, though it is 
 certain that contented with the services they performed, they 
 compelled no one among them to renounce his religion." ^ 
 
 ' Odo de Diogilo. (De Ludovici vii. Itinere. Migne, Patr. Lat. torn. cxcv. 
 p. 1243.) " Vitantesigitursibicrudelessociosfidei, inter infidelessibi compatientes 
 ibant securi, et sicut audivimus plusquam tria millia iuvenum sunt illis recedenti- 
 bus sociati. O pietas omni proditione crudelior ! Dantes panem fidem toUebant, 
 quamvis certum sit quia, contenli servitio, neminem negare cogebant." 
 
CONVERSION OF CRUSADERS. 77 
 
 The increasing intercourse between Christians and Musalmans, 
 the growing appreciation on the part of the Crusaders of the 
 virtues of their opponents, which so strikingly distinguishes the 
 later from the earlier chroniclers of the Crusades,^ the numerous 
 imitations of Oriental manners and ways of life by the Franks 
 settled in the Holy Land, did not fail to exercise a corresponding 
 influence on religious opinions. One of the most remarkable 
 features of this influence is the tolerant attitude of many of the 
 Christian Knights towards the faith of Islam — an attitude of mind 
 that was most vehemently denounced by the church. When 
 Ibn Munqidh, a Syrian Amir of the twelfth century, visited 
 Jerusalem, during a period of truce, the Knights Templar, who 
 had occupied the Masjidu-1 Aqs'i, assigned to him a small chapel 
 adjoining it, for him to say his prayers in, and they strongly 
 resented the interference with the devotions of their guest on the 
 part of a newly-arrived Crusader, who took this new departure in 
 the direction of religious freedom in very bad part.- It would 
 indeed have been strange if religious questions had not formed a 
 topic of discussion on the many occasions when the Crusaders and 
 the Muslims met together on a friendly footing, during the 
 frequent truces, especially when it was religion itself that had 
 brought the Crusaders into the Holy Land and set them upon 
 these constant wars. When even Christian theologians were led 
 by their personal intercourse with the Muslims to form a juster 
 estimate of their religion, and contact with new modes of 
 thought was unsettling the minds of men and giving rise 
 to a swarm of heresies, it is not surprising that many should 
 have been drawn into the pale of Islam. » The renegades in 
 the twelfth century were in sufficient numbers to be noticed in 
 the statute books of the Crusaders, the so-called Assises of 
 Jerusalem, according to which, in certain cases, their bail was not 
 accepted.* 
 
 It would be interesting to discover who were the Muslims who 
 busied themselves in winning these converts to Islam, but they 
 seem to have left no record of their labours. We know, however. 
 
 ' Guizot: Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, p. 234 (Paris, 18S2.) 
 ^ Ibn Munqidh : Premiere Partie, p. 187-8. 
 
 ' Prutz, p. 266-7 1 r- ■ J, 
 
 * Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois. (Recueil dei historiensjdes Croi?adcs. 
 Assises de Jerusalem. Tome ii. p. 325.) 
 
78 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 that they had at their head the great Saladin himself, who is 
 described by his biographer as setting before his Christian guest 
 the beauties of Islam and urging him to embrace it.i 
 
 The heroic life and character of Saladin seems to have exercised 
 an especial fascination on the minds of the Christians of his time ; 
 some even of the Christian knights were so strongly attracted 
 towards him that they abandoned the Christian faith and their 
 own people and joined themselves to the Musalmans ; such was 
 the case, for example, with a certain English Templar, named 
 Robert of St. Alban's, who in 1185 a.d. gave up Christianity for 
 Islam and afterwards married a grand-daughter of Saladin.!* Two 
 years later, Saladin invaded Palestine and utterly defeated the 
 Christian army in the battle of Hittin, Guy, king of Jeru- 
 salem, being among the prisoners. On the eve of the battle, six 
 of his knights, " possessed with a devilish spirit," deserted the king 
 and escaped into the camp of Saladin, where of their own accord 
 they became Saracens.^ At the same time Saladin seems to have 
 had an understanding with Raymund HI., Count of Tripoli, 
 according to which he was to induce his followers to abandon the 
 Christian faith and go over to the Musalmans ; but the sudden 
 death of the Count effectually put a stop to the execution of this 
 scheme.* 
 
 The fall of Jerusalem and the successes of Saladin in the Holy 
 Land stirred up Europe to undertake the third Crusade, the chief 
 incident of which was the siege of Acre (1189-91, a.d.). The 
 fearful sufferings that the Christian army was exposed to, from 
 famine and disease, drove many of them to desert and seek relief 
 from the cravings of hunger in the Muslim camp. Of these 
 deserters, many made their way back again after some time to the 
 army of the Crusaders, on the other hand many elected to throw in 
 their lot with the Musalmans ; some taking service under their 
 former enemies, still remained true to the Christian faith and (we 
 are told) were well pleased with their new masters, while others 
 embracing Islam became good Musalmans.^ The conversion of 
 these deserters is recorded also by the chronicler who accom- 
 
 ' Bahau-d din, p. 25. 
 
 " Roger Hoveden, vol. ii. p. 307. 
 
 ■' Benedict of Peterborough, vol. ii. pp. 11- 12. 
 
 ■* Benedict of Peterborough, vol. ii. pp. 20-21. 
 
 Roger Hoveden, vol. ii. pp. 316, 322. 
 ' Abu Shamah, p, 150. 
 
CONVERSION OF CRUSADERS. 79 
 
 panied Richard I. upon this Crusade : — " Some of our men 
 (whose fate cannot be told or heard without grievous sorrow) 
 yielding to the severity of the sore famine, in achieving the 
 salvation of the body, incurred the damnation of their souls. For 
 after the greater part of the affliction was past, they deserted and 
 fled to the Turks : nor did they hesitate to become renegades ; 
 in order that they might prolong their temporal life a little space, 
 they purchased eternal death with horrid blasphemies. O baleful 
 trafficking ! O shameful deed beyond all punishment ! O foolish 
 man likened unto the foolish beasts, while he flees from the death 
 that must inevitably come soon, he shuns not the death 
 unending." 1 
 
 From this time onwards references to renegades are not infre- 
 quently to be met with in the writings of those who travelled to 
 the Holy Land and other countries of the East. The terms of 
 the oath which was proposed to St. Louis by his Muhammadan 
 captors when he was called upon to promise to pay the ransom 
 imposed upon him (a.d. 1250), were suggested by certain whilom 
 priests who had become Muslims ;3 and while this business of 
 paying the ransom was still being carried on, another renegade, a 
 Frenchman, born at Provins, came to bring a present to the king : 
 he had accompanied King John of Jerusalem on his expedition 
 against Damietta in 12 19 and had remained in Egypt, married a 
 Muhammadan wife and become a great lord in that country.^ 
 The danger of the pilgrims to the Holy Land becoming converts to 
 Islam was so clearly recognised at this time that in a " Remem- 
 brance," written about 1266 by Amaury de la Roche, the master 
 of the Knights Templar in France, he requests the Pope and the 
 legates of France and Sicily to prevent the poor and the aged 
 and those incapable of bearing arms from crossing the sea to 
 Palestine, for such persons either got killed or taken prisoners by 
 the Saracens or turned renegades.* Ludolf de Suchem, who 
 travelled in the Holy Land about 13 So, speaks of three renegades 
 he found at Hebron ; they had come from the diocese of Minden 
 and had been in the service of a Westphalian knight, who was 
 held in high honour by the Soldan and other Muhammadan 
 
 ' Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Richardi, p. 131. (Chronicles 
 and Memorials of the reign of Richard I. Edited by William Stubbs.) 
 (London, 1864). - Joinville, p. 238. 
 
 ' Id. p. 262. ' Mas Latrie (l), vol. ii. p. 72. 
 
8o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 princes.i The so-styled Sir John Mandevile,^ who represents 
 himself as having travelled in Palestine about the middle of the 
 fourteenth century, makes mention of renegades, but does not tell 
 us whether his remarks refer to members of the Eastern or the 
 Western Church : " Also it befallethe sumtyme," he says, " that 
 Cristene men becomen Sarazines, outher for povertee, or for 
 symplenesse, or elles for here owne wykkednesse." He tells us 
 also that the Sultan of Egypt, in whose service he claims to have 
 spent several years, tried to persuade him to abandon his own 
 " law and belief" and become a Muslim.^ 
 
 These scattered notices are no doubt significant of more exten- 
 sive conversions of Christians to Islam, of which no record has 
 come down to us : e.g. there were said to be about 25,000 rene- 
 gades in the city of Cairo towards the close of the fifteenth century,* 
 and there must have been many also to be found in the cities of 
 the Holy Land after the disappearance of the Latin princedoms of 
 the East. But the Muhammadan historians of this period seem 
 to have been too busily engaged in recording the exploits of 
 princes and the vicissitudes of dynasties, to turn their attention 
 to religious changes in the lives of obscure individuals ; and (as 
 far as I have been able to discover^ they as little notice the 
 conversions of Christians to Islam as of those of their own co- 
 religionists to Christianity. Consequently, we have to depend for 
 our knowledge of both of these classes of events on Christian 
 writers, who, while they give us detailed and sympathetic 
 accounts of the latter, bear unwilling testimony to the existence 
 of instances of the former and represent the motives of the 
 renegades in the worst light possible. The possibility of any 
 Christian becoming converted to Islam from honest conviction, 
 probably never entered into the head of any of these writers, and 
 even had such an idea occurred to them they would hardly have 
 ventured to expose themselves to the thunders of ecclesiastical 
 censure by giving open expression to it. Even Sir John Man- 
 devile, who claimed to have lived nearly half his life in Muham- 
 madan countries and did not allow bigotry to influence his 
 judgment on their faith, could only suggest that in the absence 
 
 ' Ludolf de Suchem, p. 71. 
 
 ^ Mandevile, p. 141. 3 Id. p. 35^ 
 
 " Lionardo Frescobaldi, quoted in the preface of DeWmery and Saneuinetti's 
 edition of Ibn Batutah, vol. i. p. xl. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CONVERTS. 8r 
 
 of base motives, the Christian converts to Islam must have been 
 simpletons ; if they were neither rogues nor starving, they must 
 have been fools. To estimate these accounts at their true value, 
 we must remember that such was the attitude of mind of the 
 Christian writers who recorded them. 
 
 From the historical sources quoted above, we have as little 
 information respecting the number of these converts as of the 
 proselytising efforts made to induce them to change their faith. 
 The monk Burchard,i writing about 1283, a few years before the 
 Crusaders were driven out of their last strongholds and the Latin 
 power in the East came utterly to an end, — represents the 
 Christian population as largely outnumbering the Muslims 
 throughout the whole of the Muhammadan world, the latter 
 (except in Egypt and Arabia) forming not more than three or 
 four per cent, of the whole population. This language is un- 
 doubtedly exaggerated and the good monk was certainly rash in 
 assuming that what he observed in the cities of the Crusaders 
 and of the kingdom of Little Armenia held good in other parts 
 of the East. But his words may be certainly taken to indicate 
 that during the period of the Crusades there had been no wide- 
 spread conversion to Islam, and that when the Muhammadans 
 resumed their sovereignty over the Holy Land, they extended 
 the same toleration to the Christians as before, suffering them to 
 "purchase peace and quiet " by the payment of the jizyah. The 
 13resumption is that the conversions that took place were of 
 individual Christians, who were persuaded in their own minds 
 before ^they took the final step and were not forced thereto. 
 Instances have already been given of Christians who took service 
 
 ' " Notandum autem in rei veritate, licet quidam contrarium senciant, qui ea 
 •volunt asserere, que non viderunt, quod oriens totus ultra mare Yndiam et 
 Ethiopian! nomen Christi confitetur et predicat, preter solos Sarracenos et 
 <]uosdam Turcomannos, qui in Cappadocia sedem habent, ita quod pro certo 
 assero, sicut per memet ipsum vidi et ab aliis, quibus notum erat, audivl, quod 
 semper in omni loco et regno preterquam in Egypto et Arabia, ubi plurimum 
 habitant Sarraceni et alii Macliometum sequentes, pro uno Sarraceno triginta vel 
 amplius invenies Christianos. Verum tamen, quod Christiani omnes transmarini 
 natione sunt orientales, qui licet sint Christiani, quia tamen usum armorum non 
 habent multum, cum impugnantur a Sarracenis, Tartaris, vel aliis quibuscumque, 
 ■subiciuntur eis et tributis pacem et quietem emunt, et Sarraceni sive alii, qui eis 
 dominantur, balivos suos et exactores in terris illis ponunt. Et inde contigit, 
 quod regnum illud dicitur esse Sarracenorum, cum tamen in rei veritate sunt 
 omnes Christiani preter ipsos balivos et exactores et aliquos de familia ipsorum, 
 sicut oculis meis vidi in Cilicia et Armenia minori, que est subdita dominio 
 Tartarorum." (Burchardi de Monte Sion Descriptio Terras Sanctse, p. 90.) 
 
 G 
 
82 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 under Muhammadan masters, in the full enjoyment of their own. 
 faith, and the Assises of Jerusalem make a distinction between 
 " those who have denied God and follow another law "and "all 
 those who have done armed service to the Sarracens and other 
 miscreants against the Christians for more than a year and a 
 day." 1 
 
 The native Christians certainly preferred the rule of the 
 Muhammadans to that of the Crusaders,^ and when Jerusalem 
 fell finally and for ever into the hands of the Muslims (a.d. 1244), 
 the Christian population of Palestine seems to have welcomed 
 the new masters and to have submitted quietly and contentedly 
 to their rule.^ 
 
 This same sense of security of religious life under Muslim rule 
 led many of the Christians of Asia Minor, also, about the same 
 time to welcome the advent of the Saljuq Turks as their deliverers 
 from the hated Byzantine government, not only on account of 
 its oppressive system of taxation, but also of the persecuting 
 spirit of the Greek Church, which had with such cruelty crushed 
 the heresies of the Paulicians and the Iconoclasts. In the reign 
 of Michael VIII. (1261-1282), the Turks were often invited to 
 take possession of the smaller towns in the interior of Asia Minor 
 by the inhabitants, that they might escape from the tyranny of 
 the empire ; and both rich and poor often emigrated into Turkish 
 dominions.* 
 
 Some account still remains to be given of two other Christian 
 churches of Western Asia, viz. the Armenian and the Georgian. 
 Of the former it may be said that of all the Eastern churches that 
 have come under Muhammadan rule, the Armenian church has 
 probably given fewer of its members (in proportion to the size of 
 the community) to swell the ranks of Islam, than any other. So 
 
 ' Recueil des historiens des Croisades. Assises de Jerusalem, tome ii. p. 325. 
 
 ' Pmtz, pp. 146-7, 150. 
 
 ' The prelates of the Holy Land wrote as follows, in 1244, concerning the 
 invasion of the Klswarizmians, whom Sultan Ayyub had called in to assist him in 
 driving out the Crusaders :—" Per totam terram usque ad partes Nazareth et 
 Saphet libere nuUo resistente discurrunt, occupantes eandem, et inter se quasi 
 propriam dividentes, per villas et cazalia Christianorum legatos et bajolos 
 praeficiunt, suscipientes a rusticis redditus et tributa, quse Christianis prostate 
 solebant, qui jam Christianis hostes effecti et rebelles dictis Corosminis univer- 
 saliter adhseserunt. " (Matthei Parisiensis Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 
 vol. iv. p. 343. (London, 1872-83.) 
 
 " Finlay, vol. iii. p. 358-9. (J. H. Krause : Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters, 
 p. 276.) (Halle, 1869.) 
 
ARMENIA AND GEORGIA. 83 
 
 in spite of the interest that attaches to the story of the struggle 
 of this brave nation against overwhelming odds and of the fidelity 
 with which it has clung to the Christian faith — through centuries 
 of warfare and oppression, persecution and exile — it does not 
 come within the scope of the present volume to do more than 
 briefly indicate its connection with the history of the Muham- 
 tnadans. The Armenian kingdom survived the shock of the 
 Arab conquest, and in the ninth century rose to be a state of 
 some importance and flourished during the decay of the Caliphate 
 of Bagdad, but in the eleventh century was overthrown by the 
 Saljuq Turks. A band of fugitives founded the kingdom of Lesser 
 Armenia, but this too disappeared in the fourteenth century. 
 The national life of the Armenian people still survived in spite of 
 the loss of their independence, and, as was the case in Greece 
 under the Turks, their religion and the national church served as 
 the rallying point of their eager, undying patriotism. Though a 
 certain number no doubt embraced Islam, yet the bulk of the 
 race has remained true to its ancient faith. As Tavernier^ 
 rather unsympathetically remarks, " There may be some few 
 Armenians, that embrace Mahometanism for worldly interest, but 
 they are generally the most obstinate persons in the world, and 
 most firm to their superstitious principles." 
 
 The Georgian Church (founded in the early part of the fourth 
 century) was an offshoot from the Greek Church, with which she 
 has always remained in communion, although from the middle of 
 the sixth century the Patriarch or Katholikos of the Georgian 
 Church declared himself independent. 
 
 Torn asunder by internal discords and exposed to the successive 
 attacks of Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Turks and Mongols, the 
 history of this heroic warrior people is one of almost uninter- 
 rupted warfare against foreign foes and of fiercely contested feuds 
 between native chiefs : the reigns of one or two powerful 
 monarchs who secured for their subjects brief intervals of peace, 
 serving only to bring out in more striking contrast the normally 
 unsettled state of the country. The fierce independent spirit of 
 the Georgians that could not brook a foreign rule has often 
 exasperated well-nigh to madness the fury of their Muhammadan 
 neighbours, when they failed to impose upon them either their 
 civil authority or their religion. It is this circumstance— that a 
 ' Tavemier (i), p. 174- 
 G 2 
 
84 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 change of faith impUed loss of political independence— which 
 explains in a great measure the fact that the Georgian church 
 inscribes the names of so many martyrs in her calendar, while the 
 annals of the Greek church during the same period have no such 
 honoured roll to show. 
 
 It was not until after Georgia had been overrun by the devas- 
 tating armies of the Mongols, leaving ruined churches and 
 monasteries and pyramids of human heads to mark the progress 
 of their destroying hosts, and consequently the spiritual wants of 
 the people had remained long unprovided for, owing to the 
 decline in the numbers and learning of the clergy — that Chris- 
 tianity began to lose ground.^ Even among those who still 
 remained Christian, some added to the sufferings of the clergy, 
 by plundering the property of the Church and appropriating to 
 their own use the revenues of churches and monasteries, and 
 thus hastened the decay of the Christian faith.^ 
 
 In 1400 the invasion of Timur added a crowning horror to the 
 sufferings of Georgia, and though for a brief period the rule of 
 Alexander I. (1414-1442) delivered the country from the foreign 
 yoke and drove out all the Muhammadans, — after his death it was 
 again broken up into a number of petty princedoms, from which 
 the Turks and the Persians wrested the last shreds of independ- 
 ence. But the Muhammadans always found Georgia to be a 
 turbulent and rebellious possession, ever ready to break out into 
 open revolt at the slightest opportunity. Both Turks and 
 Persians sought to secure the allegiance of these troublesome 
 subjects by means of conversion to Islam. After the fall of 
 Constantinople and the increase of Turkish power in Asia Minor, 
 the inhabitants of Akhaltsikh^ and other districts to the west of 
 it became Muhammadans.^ In 1579 two Georgian princes—' 
 brothers — came on an embassy to Constantinople with a large 
 retinue of about two hundred persons : here the younger brother 
 together with his attendants became a Musalman, in the hope (it 
 -was said) of thereby supplanting his elder brother.* At a rather 
 later date, the conquests of the Turks brought some of the 
 districts in the very centre of Georgia into their power, the 
 
 T^-M°^!''^"r' ,P- "5- AH the Ap'hkhazes, Djikhethes, Ossetes, Kabardes and 
 JCisthethes fell away from the Christian faith about this time 
 "" ^^- P- "7. 3 Id. p. 143. 4 David Chytrsus, p. 49. 
 
GEORGIA. 85 
 
 inhabitants of which embraced the creed of the conquerors.^ 
 From this period Samtzkhd, the most western portion of Georgia, 
 recognised the suzerainty of Turkey : its rulers and people were 
 allowed to continue undisturbed in the Christian faith, but from 
 1625 the ruling dynasty became Muhammadan and gradually all 
 the chiefs and the aristocracy followed their example. 
 
 Chris'^ianity retained its hold upon the peasants much longer, 
 but whei the clergy of Samtzkh^ refused allegiance to the 
 Katholikos of Karthli, there ceased to be regular provision made 
 for supplying the spiritual needs of the people : the nobles, even 
 before their conversion, had taken to plundering the estates of 
 the church, and after becoming Musalmans they naturally ceased 
 to assist it with their offerings, and the churches and monasteries 
 falling into decay were replaced by mosques.* 
 
 The rest of Georgia had submitted to Persia, and when 
 Tavernier visited this part of the country, about the middle of the 
 seventeenth century, he found it divided into two kingdoms, 
 which were provinces of the Persian empire, and were governed 
 by native Georgian princes who had to turn Muhammadan before 
 being advanced to this dignity .^ One of the first of such princes 
 was the Tsarevitch Constantine, son of king Alexander II. of 
 Kakheth, who had been brought up at the Persian court and 
 had there embraced Islam, at the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century.* The first Muhammadan king of Karthli, the Tsarevitch 
 Rustam (1634-1658), had also been brought up in Persia and 
 he and his successors to the end of the century were all 
 Muhammadans.' 
 
 Tavernier describes the Georgians as being very ignorant in 
 matters of religion and the clergy as unlettered and vicious ; 
 some of the heads of the church actually sold the Christian boys 
 and girls as slaves to the Turks and Persians.* From this period 
 there seems to have been a widespread apostacy, especially 
 among the higher classes and those who sought to win the favour 
 
 ' Joselian, p. 157. 
 
 ' Brosset, II=. Partie, 1" livraison, pp. 227-235. Description geographique 
 de la Georgie par le Tsarevitch Wakhoucht, p. 79. (St. Petersburg, 1842.) 
 ^ The Six Voyages, p. 123. 
 
 * Joselian, p. 149. 
 ' Id. pp. 160-161. 
 
 * Tavernier (I), pp. 124, 126. He estimates the number of Muhammadans at 
 about twelve thousand. (Id. p. 123.) 
 
86 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 bf the Persian court.i in 1703 the occupant of the throne of 
 Karthli, Wakhtang V., was a Christian : for the first seven years 
 of his reign he was a prisoner in Ispahan, where great efForts 
 were made to induce him to become a Muhammadan ; when he 
 declared that he preferred to lose his throne rather than purchase 
 it at the price of apostacy, it is said that his younger brother, 
 although he was the Patriarch of Georgia, ofTered to abandon 
 Christianity and embrace Islam, if the crown were bestowed upon 
 him, but though invested by the Persians with the royal power, 
 the Georgians refused to accept him as their ruler, and drove him 
 out of the kingdom." 
 
 Towards the close of the eighteenth century, the king of 
 Georgia placed his people under the protection of the Russian 
 crown. Hitherto their intense patriotic feeling had helped to 
 keep the Christian faith alive among them so long as their 
 foreign invaders had been Musalmans, but now that the foreign 
 power that sought to rob them of their independence was 
 Christian, this same feeling operated in some of the districts 
 north of the Caucasus to the advantage of Islam. In Daghistan 
 a certain Darwesh Mansur endeavoured to unite the different 
 tribes of the Caucasus to oppose the Russians ; preaching the 
 faith of Islam he succeeded in converting the princes and nobles 
 of Ubichistan and Daghistan, who have remained faithful to 
 Islam ever since ; many of the Circassians, too, were converted by 
 his preaching, and preferred exile to submitting to the Russian 
 rule.' But in 1791 he was taken prisoner, and in 1800 Georgia 
 was formally incorporated in the Russian empire. 
 
 ' Brosset, lie. Partie, I« livraison, pp. 85, 181. 
 
 * Documens originaux sur les relations diplomatiques de la G^orgie avec la 
 France vers la fin du regne de Louis XIV., recueillis par M. Brosset jeune. (J. A. 
 2""= Serie, tome ix. (1832), pp. 197, 451.) 
 
 ' Mackenzie, p. 7. Garnett, p. 194. In 1864 more than half a million 
 Muhammadan Circassians migrated into Turkish territory. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF 
 
 AFRICA. 
 
 JsLAM was first introduced into Africa by the Arab army that 
 invaded Egypt under the command of 'Amr ibnu-1 'Ass in 640 a,d. 
 Three years later the withdrawal of the Byzantine troops aban- 
 doned the vast Christian population into the hands of the Muslim 
 conquerors. The rapid success of the Arab invaders was largely 
 due to the welcome they received from the native Christians, 
 who hated the Byzantine rule not only for its oppressive adminis- 
 tration, but also — and chiefly — on account of the bitterness of 
 theological rancour. The Jacobites, who formed the majority of 
 the Christian population, had been very roughly handled by the 
 orthodox adherents of the court and subjected to indignities that 
 have not been forgotten by their children even to the present 
 day.i Some were tortured and then thrown into the sea ; many 
 followed their Patriarch into exile to escape from the hands of 
 their persecutors, while a large number disguised their real 
 opinions under a pretended acceptance of the Council of Chal- 
 cedon.* To these Copts, as the Jacobite Christians of Egypt are 
 called, the Muhammadan conquest brought a freedom of religious 
 life such as they had not enjoyed for a century. On payment of 
 the tribute, 'Amr left them in undisturbed possession of their 
 churches and guaranteed to them autonomy in all ecclesiastical 
 matters, thus delivering them from the continual interference 
 that had been so grievous a burden under the previous rule ; he 
 laid his hands on none of the property of the churches and com- 
 
 ' Amelineau, p. 3. Justinian is said to have had 200,000 Copts put to death in 
 the city of Alexandria, and the persecutions of his successors drove many to take 
 refuge in the desert. (Wansleben : The Present State of Egypt, p. 11.) 
 (London, 1678.) 
 
 ^ Renaudot, p. 161. 
 
88 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 mitted no act of spoliation or pillage.^ In the early days of the 
 Muhammadan rule then, the condition of the Copts seems to 
 have been fairly tolerable,' and there is no evidence of their 
 widespread apostacy to Islam being due to persecution or unjust 
 pressure on the part of their new rulers. Even before the con- 
 quest was complete, while the capital, Alexandria, still held out, 
 many of them went over to Islam," and a few years later the 
 example these had set was followed by many others.* In the 
 reign of 'Uthman (643-655 a.d.), the revenue derived from 
 Egypt amounted to twelve millions ; a few years later, in the 
 reign of Mu'awiyah (661-679), it had fallen to five millions 
 owing to the enormous number of conversions ; under 'Umar II. 
 (717-720) it fell still lower, so that the governor of Egypt pro- 
 posed that in future the converts should not be exempted from 
 the payment of the capitation-tax, but this the pious caliph 
 refused to allow, saying, " I should be glad if all the Christians 
 became Muslims, for God sent His Prophet to be an apostle to 
 men and not a collector of taxes ! " ^ In fact many of the 
 Christians of Egypt seem to have abandoned Christianity as 
 lightly and as rapidly as, in the beginning of the fourth century, 
 they had embraced it. Prior to that period, a very small section 
 of the population of the valley of the Nile was Christian, but the 
 sufferings of the martyrs in the persecution of Diocletian, the 
 stories of the miracles they performed, the national feeling excited 
 by the sense of their opposition to the dictates of the foreign 
 government,^ the assurance that a paradise of delights was opened 
 to the martyr who died under the hands of his tormentors, — all 
 these things stirred up an enthusiasm that resulted in an 
 
 ' John, Jacobite bishop of Nikiu (second half of seventh century), p. 584. 
 
 ^ But the exactions and hardships that, according to MaqrizI, the Copts had to 
 endure about seventy years after the conquest, hardly allow us to extend this period 
 so far as Von Ranke does : " Von Aegypten weiss man durch die bestimmtesten 
 Zeugnisse, dass sich die Einwohner in den nachsten Jahrhunderten unter der 
 arabischen Herrschaft in einem ertraglichen Zustand befunden haben." (Welt- 
 geschichte, vol. v. p. 153. 4th ed.) 
 
 ' John of Nikiu, p. 560. 
 
 * Id. p. 585. "Or beaucoup des %yptiens, qui etaient de faux Chretiens, 
 reni^rent la sainte religion orthodoxe et le bapteme qui donne la vie, embrasserent 
 la religion des Musulmans, les ennemis de Dieu, et accepterent la detestable 
 doctrine de ce monstre, c'est-a-dire de Mahomet ; ils partagerent I'egarement de 
 ces idol^tres et prirent les armes centre les Chretiens." 
 
 ' Dozy (2), tome i. p. 225. 
 
 ' " Sans aucun doute il y eut dans la multiplicite des martyrs une sorte de resis- 
 tance nationale centre les gouverneurs Strangers." Am^lineau, p. 58. 
 
CONVERSION OF THE COPTS. 89 
 
 incredibly rapid spread of the Christian faith. " Instead of being 
 converted by preaching, as the other countries of the East were, 
 Egypt embraced Christianity in a fit of wild enthusiasm, without 
 any preaching, or instruction being given, with hardly any know- 
 ledge of the new religion beyond the name of Jesus, the Messiah, 
 who bestowed a life of eternal happiness on all who confessed 
 Him." 1 
 
 In the seventh century Christianity had probably very little hold 
 on a great mass of the people of Egypt. The theological catch- 
 words that their leaders made use of, to stir up in them feelings 
 of hatred and opposition to the Byzantine government, could 
 have been intelligible to a very few, and the rapid spread of Islam 
 in the early days of the Arab occupation was probably due less to 
 definite efforts to attract than to the inability of such a Christianity 
 to retain. , The theological basis for the existence of the Jacobites 
 as a separate sect, the tenets that they had so long and at so great 
 a cost struggled to maintain, were embodied in doctrines of the 
 most abstruse and metaphysical character, and many doubtless 
 turned in utter perplexity and weariness from the interminable con- 
 troversies that raged around them, to a faith that was summed up 
 in the simple, intelligible truth of the Unity of God and the mission 
 of His Prophet, Muhammad. Even within the Coptic church 
 itself at a later period^we_Jind evidence of a movement which, 
 if not distinctly Muslim, was at least closely allied thereto, and in 
 the absence of any separate ecclesiastical organisation in wfiich it 
 might find-expression, probably contributed to the increase of the 
 converts to Islam. In the beginning of the twelfth century, there 
 was in the monastery of St. Anthony (near Itfih on the Nile), a 
 monk named Balutus, " learned in the doctrines of the Christian 
 religion and the duties of the monastic life, and skilled in the 
 rules of the canon-law. But Satan caught him in one of his nets ; 
 for he began to hold opinions at variance with those taught by 
 the Three Hundred and Eighteen (of Nicaea) ; and he corrupted 
 the minds of many of those who had no knowledge or instruction 
 in the orthodox faith. He announced with his impure mouth, in 
 his wicked discourses, that Christ our Lord — to Whom be glory 
 — was like one of the prophets. He associated with the lowest 
 among the followers of his religion, clothed as he was in the 
 monastic habit. When he was questioned as to his religion and 
 ' Amelineau, p. 57-S. 
 
90 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 his creed, he professed himself a believer in the Unity of God. 
 His doctrines prevailed during a period which ended in the year 
 839 of the Righteous Martyrs (a.d. 1123) ; then he died, and his 
 memory was cut off for ever." ^ 
 
 Further, a theory of the Christian life that found its highest 
 expression in asceticism of the grossest type^ could offer little 
 attraction, in the face of the more human morality of Islam.' On 
 account of the large numbers of Copts that from time to time 
 have become Muhammadans, they have come to be considered 
 by the followers of the Prophet as much more inclined to the 
 faith of Islam than any other Christian sect, and though they 
 have had to endure the most severe oppression and persecution 
 on many occasions, yet the Copts that have been thus driven to 
 abandon their faith are said to have been few in comparison with 
 those who have changed their religion voluntarily,* and even in 
 the present day, when Egypt is said to be the most tolerant of all 
 Muhammadan countries, there are yearly conversions of the 
 Copts to the Muslim faith. ° Still, persecution and oppression 
 have undoubtedly played a very large part in the reduction of the 
 numbers of the Copts, and the story of the sufferings of the 
 Jacobite church of Egypt, — persecuted alike by their fellow 
 Christians " and by the followers of the dominant faith, is a very 
 sad one, and many abandoned the religion of their fathers in order 
 to escape from burdensome taxes and unendurable indignities. 
 The vast difference in this respect between their condition and 
 that of the Christians of Syria, Palestine and Spain at the same 
 period finds its explanation in the turbulent character of the Copts 
 themselves. Their long struggle against the civil and theological 
 
 ' Abu Salih, pp. 163-4. 2 Amelineau, pp. 53-4, 69-70. 
 
 ' Abu Salih gives an account of some monks that embraced the faith of the 
 rrophet, and these are probably representative of a larger number of whom the 
 historian has left no record, as lacking the peculiar circumstances of loss to the 
 monastery or of recantation that made such instances of interest to him (pp. 128, 
 142). 
 
 * Lane, pp. 546, 549. 
 Luttke(i), vol. i. pp. 30, 35. 
 
 ' One of the very first occasions on which they had to complain of excessive 
 taxation, was when Menas, the Christian prefect of Lower Egypt, extorted from 
 the city of Alexandria, 32057 pieces of gold, instead of 2adoo which 'Amrhad 
 fixed as the amount to be levied. (John of Nikiu, p. 585.) Renaudot (p. 168) says 
 that after the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy, about seventy years after the 
 Muhammadan conquest, the Copts suffered as much at its hands as at the hands of 
 the Muhammadans themselves. 
 
CONVERSION OF THE COPTS. 91 
 
 despotism of Byzantium seems to have welded the zealots into a 
 national party that could as little brook the foreign rule of the 
 Arabs as, before, that of the Greeks. The rising of the Copts 
 against their new masters in 646, when they drove the Arabs for 
 a time out of Alexandria and opened the gates of the city to the 
 Byzantine troops (who however treated the unfortunate Copts as 
 enemies, not having yet forgotten the welcome they had before 
 given to the Muhammadan invaders), — was the first of a long 
 series of risings and insurrections,^" — excited frequently by excessive 
 taxation — which exposed them to terrible reprisals, and caused 
 the lot of the Jacobite Christians of Egypt to be harder to bear 
 than that of any other Christian sect in this or other countries 
 under Muhammadan rule. But the history of these events belongs 
 rather to a history of Muhammadan persecution and intolerance 
 than to the scope of the present work. It must not however be 
 supposed that the condition of the Copts was invariably that of a 
 persecuted sect ; on the contrary there were times when they 
 rose to positions of great affluence and importance in the state. 
 They filled the posts of secretaries and scribes in the government 
 offices,^ farmed the taxes,^ and in some cases amassed enormous 
 wealth.* The annals of their church furnish us with many 
 instances of ecclesiastics who were held in high favour and consi- 
 deration by the reigning princes of the country, under the rule of 
 many of whom the Christians enjoyed the utmost tranquillity.^ 
 To such a period of the peace of the church belongs an incident 
 that led to the absorption of many Christians into the body of 
 the faithful. 
 
 During the reign of Salahu-d din (Saladin) (11 69-1 1 93) over 
 Egypt, the condition of the Christians was very happy under the 
 auspices of this tolerant ruler ; the taxes that had been imposed 
 upon them were lightened and several swept away altogether ; 
 they crowded into the public offices as secretaries, accountants 
 and registrars ; and for nearly a century under the successors of 
 
 ' Maqrlzi mentions five other risings of the Copts that had to be crushed by 
 force of arms, within the first century of the Arab domination. Maqrizi (2), 
 pp. 76-82. 
 
 ^ Renaudot, pp. 189, 374, 430, 540. ' Id. p. 603. 
 
 * Id. pp. 432, 607. Sefer Nameh. Relation du Voyage de Nassiri 
 
 Khosrau, pendant les annees de I'Hegire 437-444 (1035- 1042), publie par 
 Charles Schefer, pp. 155-6, (Paris 1881.) 
 
 ' Renaudot, pp. 212, 225, 314, 374, 540. 
 
9a THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Saladin, they enjoyed the same toleration and favour, and had 
 nothing to complain of except the corruption and degeneracy of 
 their own clergy. Simony had become terribly rife among them ; 
 the priesthood was sold to ignorant and vicious persons, while 
 postulants for the sacred office who were unable to pay the sums 
 demanded for ordination, were repulsed with scorn, in spite of 
 their being worthy and fit persons. The consequence was that 
 the spiritual and moral training of the people was utterly neglected 
 and there was a lamentable decay of the Christian life.i So corrupt 
 had the church become that, when, on the death of John, the 
 seventy-fourth Patriarch of the Jacobites, in I2i6,a successor was 
 to be elected, the contending parties who pushed the claims of 
 rival candidates, kept up a fierce and irreconcilable dispute for 
 nearly twenty years, and all this time cared less for the grievous 
 scandal and the harmful consequences of their shameless quarrels 
 than for the maintenance of their dogged and obstinately factious 
 spirit. On more than one occasion the reigning sultan tried to 
 make peace between the contending parties, refused the enormous 
 bribes of three, five, and even ten thousand gold pieces that were 
 offered in order to induce him to secure the election of one of the 
 candidates by the pressure of official influence, and even offered to 
 remit the fee that it was customary for a newly-elected Patriarch 
 to pay, if only they would put aside their disputes and come to 
 some agreement, — but all to no purpose. Meanwhile many 
 episcopal sees fell vacant and there was no one to take the place 
 of the bishops and priests that died in this interval ; in the 
 monastery of St. Macarius alone there were only four priests left 
 as compared with over eighty under the last Patriarch.^ So 
 utterly neglected were the Christians of the western dioceses, that 
 they all became Musalmans.* To this bald statement of the 
 historian of the Coptic church, we unfortunately have no infor- 
 mation to add, of the positive efforts made by the Musalmans to 
 bring these Christians over to their faith. That such there were, 
 
 ' Renaudot, p. 388. 
 
 2 Id. pp. 567, 571, 574-5. 
 
 ' Wansleben, p. 30. Wansleben mentions another instance (under different 
 circumstances) of the decay of the Coptic Church, in the island of Cypras, which 
 was formerly under the jurisdiction of the Coptic Patriarch : here they were so 
 persecuted by the Orthodox clergy, who enjoyed the protection of the Byzantine 
 emperors, that the Patriarch could not induce priests to go there, and consequently 
 all the Copts on the island either accepted Islam or the Council of Chalcedon, 
 and their churches were all shut up. (Id. p. 31.) 
 
CONVERSION OF THE NUBIANS. 93 
 
 there can be very little doubt, especially as we know that the 
 Christians held public disputations and engaged in written con- 
 troversies on the respective merits of the rival creeds.^ That 
 these conversions were not due to persecution, we know from 
 direct historical evidence that during this vacancy of the patriar- 
 chate, the Christians had full and complete freedom of public 
 worship, were allowed to restore their churches and even to build 
 new ones, were freed from the restrictions that forbade them to 
 ride on horses or mules, and were tried in law-courts of their own, 
 while the monks were exempted from the payment of tribute and 
 granted certain privileges.^ 
 
 How far this incident is a typical case of conversion to Islam 
 among the Copts, it is difficult to say ; (a parallel case of neglect) 
 is mentioned by two Capuchin missionaries who travelled up the 
 Nile to Luxor in the seventeenth century, where they found that 
 the Copts of Luxor had no priest, and some of them had not gone 
 to confession or communion for fifty years.^ Under such circum- 
 stances the decay of their numbers can readily be understood. 
 
 A similar neglect lost to Christianity the Nubian church which 
 recognised the primacy of the Jacobite Patriarch of Alexandria, 
 as do the Abyssinians to the present day. The Nubians had been 
 converted to Christianity about the middle of the sixth century, 
 and retained their independence when Egypt was conquered by 
 the Arabs ; a treaty was made according to which the Nubians 
 were to send every year three hundred black slaves, ten monkeys 
 and one giraffe, while the Arabs were to furnish them with corn, oil 
 and raiment. In the reign of Al Mu'tasim (833-842), ambassadors 
 were sent by the Caliph renewing this treaty, and the king of 
 Nubia visited the capital where he was received with great 
 magnificence and dismissed with costly presents.* In the twelfth 
 century they were still all Christian,* and retained their old 
 independence in spite of the frequent expeditions sent against 
 them from Egypt.® In 1275 the nephew of the then king of 
 Nubia obtained from the Sultan of Egypt a body of troops to 
 assist him in his revolt against his uncle, whom he by their help 
 
 ^ Renaudot, p. 377. * Id. p. 575. 
 
 ' Relation du voyage du Sayd ou de la Thebayde fait en 1668, par les PP. 
 Protais et Charles-Fran9ois d'Orleans, Capuchins Missionaires, p. 3. (Thevenot, 
 yol. ii.) 
 
 * Chronique de Michel le Grand, pp. 272-3. 
 
 • Idrlsj, p. 32. * Maqrizi (2), tome i. 2^' partie, p. 131. 
 
94 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 succeeded in deposing ; in return for this assistance he had to 
 cede the two northernmost provinces of Nubia to the Sultan, and 
 as the inhabitants elected to retain their Christian faith, an annual 
 tribute of one dinar for each male was imposed upon them.i But 
 this Muhammadan overlordship was temporary only, and the 
 Nubians of the ceded provinces soon re-asserted their inde- 
 pendence.^ 
 
 In the latter half of the fourteenth century Ibn Batutah * tells us 
 that the Nubians were still Christians, though the king of their chief 
 city, Dongola,* had embraced Islam in the reign of Nasir (probably 
 Nasir ibn Qalaun, one of the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, who died 
 1340 A.D.) ; the repeated expeditions of the Muslims so late as the 
 fifteenth century had not succeeded in pushing their conquests 
 south of the first cataract, near which was their last fortified place,^ 
 while Christianity seems to have extended as far up the Nile as 
 Sennaar. But it is probable that the progress of Islam in the 
 country was all this time being promoted by the Muhammadan 
 merchants and others that frequented it. Maqrizi (writing in the 
 early part of the fifteenth century) quotes one of those missionary 
 anecdotes which occur so rarely in the works of Arabic authors ; 
 it is told by Ibn SaIimu-1 Aswani, and is of interest as giving us a 
 living picture of the Muslim propagandist at work. Though the 
 convert referred to is neither a Christian nor a Nubian, still the 
 story shows that there was such a thing as conversion to Islam 
 in Nubia in the fifteenth century. Ibn Salim says that he once 
 met a man at the court of the Nubian chief of Muqurrah, who 
 told him that he came from a city that lay three months' journey 
 from the Nile. When asked about his religion, he replied, "My 
 Creator and thy Creator is God ; the Creator of the universe and 
 of all men is One, and His dwelling-place is in heaven." When 
 there was a dearth of rain, or when pestilence attacked them or 
 
 ' Maqrizi, pp. 128-130. 
 
 ^ Burckhardt (l), p. 494. ' Vol. iv. p. 396. 
 
 '' Slatin Pasha records a tradition current among the Danagia Arabs that this 
 town was founded by their ancestor, Dangal, who called it after his own name. 
 (This however is impossible, inasmuch as Dongola was in existence in ancient 
 Egyptian times, and is mentioned on the monuments. See Vivien de Saint- 
 Martin, vol. ii. p. 85.) According to their tradition, this Dangal, though a slave, 
 rose to be ruler of Nubia, but paid tribute to Bahnesa, the Coptic bishop of the 
 entire district lying between the present Sarras and Debba. (Fire and Sword in 
 he Sudan, p. 13.) (London, 1896.) 
 
 ° Ibn Salimu-1 Aswani, quoted by Maqrizi : Kitabu-l Khitat, vol. i. p. 100. 
 (Cairo 1270, a.h.) ' 
 
CONVERSION OF THE NUBIANS. 95 
 
 their cattle, his fellow-countrymen would climb up a high moun- 
 tain and there pray to God, who accepted their prayers and 
 supplied their needs before even they came down again. When 
 he acknowledged that God had never sent them a prophet, Ibn 
 Salim recounted to him the story of the prophets Moses and Jesus 
 and Muhammad, and how by the help of God they had been 
 enabled to perform many miracles. And he answered, "The 
 truth must indeed have been with them, when they did these 
 things ; and if they performed these deeds, I believe in them." 1 
 
 Very slowly^and gradually the Nubians seem to have drifted 
 from Christianity into Muhammadanism. The spiritual life of 
 their church had sunk to the lowest ebb, and as no movement of 
 reform sprang up in their midst, and as they had lost touch with 
 the Christian churches beyond their borders, it was only natural 
 that they should seek for an expression of their spiritual aspira- 
 tions in the religion of Islam, whose followers had so long borne 
 witness to its living power among them, and had already won 
 over some of their countrymen to the acceptance of it. A Portu- 
 guese priest, who travelled in Abyssinia from 1520-1527, has 
 preserved for us a picture of the Nubians in this state of tran- 
 sition ; he says that they were neither Christians, Jews nor 
 Muhammadans, but ' had come to be without faith and without 
 laws ; but still " they lived with the desire of being Christians." 
 Through the fault of their clergy they had sunk into the grossest 
 ignorance, and now there were no bishops or priests left among 
 them ; accordingly they sent an embassy of six men to the King 
 of Abyssinia, praying him to send priests and monks to instruct 
 them, but this the king refused to do without the permission of 
 the Patriarch of Alexandria, and as this could not be obtained, 
 the unfortunate ambassadors returned unsuccessful to their own 
 country .2 The same writer was informed by a Christian who had 
 travelled in Nubia, that he had found 150 churches there, in each 
 of which were still to be seen the figures of the crucified Christ, 
 of the Virgin Mary, and other saints painted on the walls. In all 
 the fortresses, also, that were scattered throughout the country, 
 
 ' Maqrlzi: Kitabu-1 Hiitat, vol. i. p. 193. 
 
 ' Lord Stanley of Alderley in his translation of Alvarez' Narrative from the 
 original Portuguese, gives the answer of the king as follows : " he said to them 
 that he had his Abima from the country of the Moors, that is to say from the 
 Patriarch of Alexandria ; . . . . how then could he give priests and friars since 
 another gave them." (p. 352), (London, 1881.) 
 
<)6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 there were churches.i Before the close of the following century, 
 Christianity had entirely disappeared from Nubia " for want of 
 pastors," but the closed churches were to be found still standing 
 throughout the whole country .2 The Nubians had yielded to the 
 powerful Mfihammadan influences that surrounded them, to which 
 the proselytising efforts of the Muslims who had travelled in 
 Nubia for centuries past no doubt contributed a great deal ; on 
 the north were Egypt and the Arab tribes that had made their 
 way up the Nile and extended their authority along the banks of 
 that river -^ on the soyth, the Muhammadan state of the Belloos, 
 separating them from Abyssinia. These Belloos, in the early part 
 of the sixteenth century, were, in spite of their Muslim faith, 
 tributaries of the Christian king of Abyssinia * ; and — if they may 
 be identified with the Baliyun, who, together with their neighbours, 
 the Bajah (the inhabitants of the so-called island of Meroe), are 
 spoken of by Idrisi, in the twelfth century, as being Jacobite 
 Christians,^ — it is probable that they had only a few years before 
 been converted to Islam, at the same time as the Bajah, who had 
 been incorporated into the Muhammadan empire of the Funj, 
 when these latter extended their conquests in 1499-1530 from the 
 south up to the borders of Nubia and Abyssinia and founded the 
 powerful state of Sennaar. When the army of Ahmad Gragne 
 invaded Abyssinia and made its way right through the country 
 from south to north, it effected a junction about 1534 with the 
 army of the Sultan of Maseggia or Mazaga, a province under 
 Muhammadan rule but tributary to Abyssinia, lying between that 
 country and Sennaar ; in the army of this Sultan there were 
 15,000 Nubian soldiers who, from the account given of them, 
 appear to have been Musalmans.* Fragmentary and insufficient 
 as these data of the conversion of the Nubians are, we may cer- 
 tainly conclude from all we know of the independent character 
 ■of this people and the tenacity with which they clung to the 
 Christian faith, so long as it was a living force among them, that 
 their change of religion was a voluntary one and could never 
 have been forced upon them by pressure from without. 
 
 Let us now pass to the history of Islam among the Abyssinians, 
 
 ' Viaggio nella Ethiopia al Prete lanni fatto par Don Francesco Alvarez 
 Portughese (1520-1527). (Ramusio, torn. i. pp. 200, 250.) 
 ' Wansleben, p. 30. S Burckhardt (1), p. 133. 
 
 •* Alvarez, p. 250. s Idrisi, p. 32. 
 
 ^ Nerazzini, p. 157, etc. 
 
ABYSSINIA. 97 
 
 who had received Christianity two centuries before the Nubians, 
 and like them belonged to the Jacobite church. 
 
 The tide of Arab emigration does not seem to have set across 
 the Red Sea, the western shores of which formed part of the 
 Abyssinian kingdom, until many centuries after Arabia had 
 accepted the faith of the Prophet. Up to the tenth century only 
 a few Muhammadan families were to be found residing in the 
 coast towns of Abyssinia, but at the end of the twelfth century the 
 foundation of an Arab dynasty alienated some of the coast-lands 
 from the Abyssinian kingdom. In 1300 a missionary, named 
 Abu 'Abdu-llah Muhammad, made his way into Abyssinia, calling 
 on the people to embrace Islam, and in the following year, having 
 collected around him 200,000 men, he attacked the ruler of 
 Amhara in several engagements.! At the close of the same 
 century the disturbed state of the country, owing to the civil 
 wars that distracted it, made it possible for the various Arab 
 settlements along the coast to make themselves masters of the 
 entire sea-board and drive the Abyssinians into the interior. In 
 the early part of the sixteenth century, while the powerful Muham- 
 madan kingdom of Adel, between Abyssinia and the southern 
 extremity of the Red Sea, and some others were bitterly hostile 
 to the Christian power, there were others again that formed 
 peaceful tributaries of " Prester John " ; e.g. in Massowah there 
 were Arabs who kept the flocks of the Abyssinian seigniors, 
 wandering about in bands of thirty or forty with their wives and 
 children, each band having its Christian "captain." 2 Some 
 Musalmans are also mentioned as being in the service of the king 
 and being entrusted by him with important posts ; * while some 
 of these remained faithful to Islam, others embraced the prevailing 
 religion of the country. What was implied in the fact of these 
 Muhammadan communities being tributaries of the king of 
 Abyssinia, it is difficult to determine. The Musalmans of Adia 
 had along with other tribute to give up every year to the king a 
 maiden who had to become a Christian ; this custom was in 
 accordance with an ancient treaty, which the king of Abyssinia 
 has always made them observe, " because he was the stronger " ; 
 besides this, they were forbidden to carry arms or put on war- 
 
 ' Maqiizi (2), tome ii. 2°"= partie, p. 183. 
 
 " Alvarez. (Ramusio, torn. i. pp. 218, 242, 249.) 
 
 3 Nerazzini, pp. 33, 82. 
 
98 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 apparel, and if they rode, their horses were not to be saddled ; 
 •' these orders," they said, " we have always obeyed, so that the 
 Icing may not put us to death and burn our mosques. Every 
 year the king sends his people to fetch the maiden ; we take and 
 wash her, and putting her on a bed, cover her with a cloth ; then 
 we carry her to the door of the house and chant the prayers for 
 the dead over her and give her up to the people of the king ; and 
 thus did our fathers and our grandfathers before us." ^ 
 
 These Muhammadan tributaries were chiefly to be found in 
 the low-lying countries that formed the northern boundary of 
 Abyssinia, from the Red Sea westward to Sennaar,^ and on the 
 south and the south-east of the kingdom.^ What influence these 
 Muhammadans had on the Christian populations with which they 
 were intermingled, and whether they made converts to Islam as 
 in the present century, is matter only of conjecture. Certain it 
 is, however, that when the independent Muhammadan ruler of 
 Adel, Ahmad Gragne — himself said to have been the son of a 
 Christian priest of Aijjo, who had left his own country and 
 adopted Islam in that of the Adels * — invaded Abyssinia from 1528 
 to 1543, many Abyssinian chiefs with their followers joined his 
 victorious army and became Musalmans, and though the Christian 
 populations of some districts preferred to pay tribute,* others 
 embraced the religion of the conqueror.^ But the contemporary 
 Muslim historian himself tells us that in some cases this conversion 
 was the result of fear, and that suspicions were entertained of the 
 genuineness of the allegiance of the new converts.' But such 
 apparently was not universally the case, and the widespread 
 character of the conversions in several districts give the impression 
 of a popular movement. The Christian chiefs who went over to 
 Islam undoubtedly did so of their own free will, and could only 
 have made use of their personal influence and the arts of per- 
 suasion in inducing their troops to follow their example. They 
 were, as we are told, in some cases very ignorant of their own 
 religion, 8 and thus the change of faith was a less difficult matter. 
 Particularly instrumental in conversions of this kind were those 
 Muhammadan chiefs who had previously entered the service of 
 
 ^ Nerazrini, p. 127. = Id. pp. 154-5. 
 
 ^ Id. pp. II, 14, 52, 127. -i Plowden, p. 31 
 
 ' Nerazzini, pp. 155, 166, 172. « Id. passim. 
 
 ' Id. pp. 73, 84, 113. 8 Id. p. 74. 
 
ABYSSINIA. 99 
 
 the king of Abyssinia, and those renegades who took the oppor- 
 tunity of the invasion of the country by a conquering Musalman 
 army to throw off their allegiance at once to Christianity and 
 the Christian king and declare themselves Muhammadans once 
 Tnore.i 
 
 One of these in 1531 wrote the following letter to Ahmad 
 Gragne : — " I was formerly a Musalman, was taken prisoner and 
 made a Christian by force ; but in my heart I have always clung 
 to the religion of Islam ; now I throw myself at thy feet and at 
 the feet of the religion of Muhammad. Accept my confession 
 and forget the past, for I return to thee and to my God. The 
 soldiers that are under me belong to the king of Abyssinia, but 
 ■with care I shall gradually succeed in inducing them to become 
 Musalmans " ; — and in fact the greater part of his army elected to 
 follow their general ; including the women and children their 
 jQumbers are said to have amounted to 20,000 souls.^ 
 
 But with the help of the Portuguese, the Abyssinians succeeded 
 in shaking off the yoke of their Muhammadan conquerors and 
 -Ahmad Gragne himself was slain in 1543. Islam had however 
 ;gained a footing in the country, which the troublous condition of 
 affairs during the remainder of the sixteenth and the following 
 ■century enabled it to retain, the rival Christian churches being 
 too busUy engaged in contending with one another, to devote 
 much attention to their common enemy. For the successful 
 proselytising of the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic missionaries 
 and the active interference of the Portuguese in all civil and 
 jolitical matters, excited violent opposition in the mass of the 
 Abyssinian Christians ; — indeed so bitter was this feeling that 
 some of the chiefs openly declared that they would rather submit 
 to a Muhammadan ruler than continue their alliance with the 
 Portuguese ; ^ — and the semi-religious, semi-patriotic movement 
 :set on foot thereby, rapidly assumed such vast proportions as to 
 -lead (about 1632) to the expulsion of the Portuguese and the 
 exclusion of all foreign Christians from the country. The con- 
 dition of Abyssinia then speedily became one of terrible confusion 
 •and anarchy, of which some tribes of the Galla race took advantage, 
 
 ' Nerazzini, pp. 17, 49, 77. l"> '^o. ^ Id. p. 76-8. 
 
 ^ lobi Ludolfi ad suam Historiam ^thiopicam C.mmentarius, p. 474. 
 <(Frankfurt a. M. 1691.) 
 
 H 2 
 
loo THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to thrust their way right into the very centre of the country, 
 where their settlements remain to the present day. 
 
 The progress achieved by Islam during this period may be 
 estimated from the testimony of a traveller of the seventeenth 
 century, who tells us that in his time the adherents of this faith 
 were scattered throughout the whole of Abyssinia and formed a 
 third of the entire population.i During the following century 
 the faith of the Prophet seems steadily to have increased by means 
 of the conversion of isolated individuals here and there. The 
 absence of any strong central government in the country favoured 
 the rise of petty independent chieftains, many of whom had strong- 
 Muhammadan sympathies, though (in accordance with a funda- 
 mental law of the state) all the Abyssinian princes must belong to 
 the Christian faith ; the Muhammadans, too, aspiring to the dignity 
 of the Abyssinian aristocracy, abjured the faith in which they had 
 been born and preteaded-conversion to Chr4Stianity_in order to 
 get themselves enrolled in the order of the -n«bles, and as 
 governors of -Christian provinces made use of all their influence 
 towards the spread of Islam." One of the chief reasons of the 
 success of this faith seems to have been the moral superiority of 
 the Muslisis-as .compared with that of the Christian population of 
 -•Abyssinia. Riippell~iays that he frequentlyTTOticed in the course 
 of his travels in Abyssinia that when a post had to be filled which 
 required that a thoroughly honest and trustworthy person shouM 
 be selected, the choice always fell upon a Muhammadan. In 
 comparison with the Christians, he says that they were more 
 active and energetic ; that every Muhammadan had his sons, 
 taught to read and write, whereas Christian children were only 
 educated when they were intended for the priesthood.' This, 
 moral superiority of the Muhammadans of Abyssinia over the 
 Christian population goes far to explain the continuous though 
 slow progress made by Islam during the last and present centuries? 
 
 ' Histoire .de la Haute Ethiopie, par le R. P. Manoel d'Alraeida, p. 7. 
 (Thevenot, vol. ii.) 
 
 2 Massaja, vol. ii. pp. 205-6. " Ognuno comprende che movente di queste- 
 conversioni essendo la sete di regnare, nel fatto non si riducevano che ad una 
 formalitk esterna, restando poi i nuovi convertiti veri mussulmani nei cuori e nei 
 costumi. £ percio accadeva che, elevati alia dignitk di Ras, si circondavano di 
 mussulmani, dando ad essi la maggior parte degli impieghi e colmandoli di titoli, 
 ricchezze e favori : e cosl I'Abissinia cristiana invasa e popolata da questa pessimi. 
 razza, passo coU'andar del tempo sotto il giogo dell' islamismo." (Id. p. 206.) 
 Riippell, vol. i. pp. 328, 366. 
 
ABYSSINIA. loi 
 
 the degradation and apathy of the Abyssinian clergy and the 
 interminable feuds of the Abyssinian chiefs, have left Muham- 
 madan influences firee to work undisturbed. Mr. Plowden, who 
 was English consul in Abyssinia from 1844 to i860, speaking of 
 the Hababs, a pastoral tribe dwelling between 16° and 17° 30' lat., 
 to the north-west of Massowah, says that they have become 
 Muhammadan " within the last 100 years, and all, save the latest 
 generation, bear Christian names. They have changed their 
 feith, through the constant influence of the Muhammadans with 
 whom they trade, and through the gradual and now entire 
 abandonment of the country by the Abyssinian chiefs, too much 
 occupied in ceaseless wars with their neighbours." 1 Other sections 
 of the population of the northern districts of the country were 
 similarly converted to Islam during the same period, because the^ 
 priests had abandoned these districts and the churches had been 
 suffered to fall into ruins, — apparently entirely through neglect, 
 as the Muhammadans here are said to have been by no means 
 fanatical nor to have borne any particular enmity to Christianity .2 
 Similar testimony to the progress of Islam in the early part of 
 this century is given by other travellers,^ who found numbers of 
 Christians to be continually passing over to that faith. The 
 Muhammadans were especially favoured by Ras Aly, one of the 
 vice-regents of Abyssinia and practically master of the country 
 before the accession of King Theodore in 1853. Though himself 
 a Christian, he distributed posts and even the spoils of the churches 
 among the followers of Islam, and during his reign one half of the 
 population of the central provinces of Abyssinia embraced the 
 feith of the Prophet.'' Such deep roots has this faith now struck 
 in Abyssinia that its followers have in their hands all the com- 
 merce as well as all the petty trade of the country, enjoy vast 
 possessions, are masters of large towns and central markets, and 
 have a firm hold upon the mass of the people. Indeed, a Christian 
 missionary who lived for thirty-five years in this country, rates 
 the success and the zeal of the Muslim propagandists so high as to 
 say that were another Ahmad Gragne to arise and unfurl the 
 banner of the Prophet, the whole of Abyssinia would become 
 
 ' Plowden, p. 15. 
 
 2 Id. pp. 8-9. 
 
 ' Beke, pp. 51-2. Isenberg, p. 36. 
 
 "" Reclus, vol. X. p. 247. Msssaja, vol. xi. p. 125. 
 
J03 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Muhammadan.i Embroilments with the Egyptian government 
 (with which Abyssinia was at war from 1875 to 1882) brought 
 about a revulsion of feeling against Muhammadanism : hatred of 
 the foreign Muslim foe re-acted upon their co-religionists within 
 the border. In 1878, King John II. summoned a Convocation of 
 the Abyssinian clergy, who proclaimed him supreme arbiter in 
 matters of faith and ordained that there should be but one religion 
 throughout the whole kingdom. Christians of all sects other 
 than the Jacobite were given two years in which to become 
 reconciled to the national church ; the Muhammadans were to 
 submit within three, and the heathen within five, years. A few- 
 days later the king promulgated an edict that showed how little 
 worth was the three years' grace allowed to the Muhammadans ; 
 for not only did he order them to build Christian churches 
 wherever they were needed and to pay tithes to the priests: 
 resident in their respective districts, but also gave three months' 
 notice to all Muhammadan officials to either receive baptism or 
 resign their posts. Such compulsory conversion (consisting as it 
 did merely of the rite of baptism and the payment of tithes) was 
 naturally of the most ineffectual character, and while outwardly 
 conforming, the Muslims in secret protested their loyalty to their 
 old faith. Massaja saw some such go straight from the church in 
 which they had been baptised to the mosque, in order to have 
 this enforced baptism wiped off by some holy man of their own 
 faith.3 These mass conversions were rendered the more ineffectual 
 by being confined to the men, for as the royal edict had made no 
 mention of the women they were in no way molested, — a circum- 
 stance that will probably prove to be of considerable significance 
 in the future history of Islam in Abyssinia, as Massaja bears 
 striking testimony to the important part the Muhammadan women 
 have played in the diffusion of their faith in this country.* By 
 1 880 King John is said to have compelled about 50,000 Muham- 
 madans to be baptised, as well as 20,000 members of one of the 
 pagan tribes and a half a million of Gallas.* Seeing that their 
 conversion has gone no further than baptism and the payment of 
 tithes, it is not surprising to learn that the only result of these 
 violent measures has been to increase the hatred and hostility of 
 both the Muslim and the heathen Abyssinians towards the 
 
 ^ Massaja, vol. xi. p. 124. 2 Id. vol. xi. pp. 77-8. 
 
 Id. pp. 124, 125. « Oppel, p. 307 ; Reclus. Tome x. p. 247. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF NORTH AFRICA. 103 
 
 Christian faith,i and as Menelik, the king of Shoa (who became 
 the king of all Abyssinia after the death of King John in 1889), is 
 said to be no fanatic as his predecessor was, but to tolerate and 
 respect the convictions of others and to extend his protection and 
 favour to honest and upright men irrespective of their creed and 
 religion ,2 it is probable^ that Islam has received but a very slight 
 check to its progress in- Abyssinia. 
 
 We must return now to the history of Africa in the seventh 
 century, when the Arabs were pushing their conquests from East 
 to West along the North coast. The comparatively easy conquest 
 of Egypt, where so many of the inhabitants assisted the Arabs in 
 bringing the Byzantine rule to an end, found no parallel in the 
 bloodyTTampaigns and the long-continued resistance that here 
 barred their further progress, and half a century elapsed before 
 the Arabs succeeded in making themselves complete masters of 
 the north coast from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean. It was not 
 till 698 that the fall of Carthage brought the Roman rule in Africa 
 to an end for ever, and the subjugation of the Berbers made the 
 Arabs supreme in the country. 
 
 The details of these campaigns it is no part of our purpose to 
 consider, but rather to attempt to discover in what way Islam 
 was spread among the Christian population. Unfortunately the 
 materials available for such a purpose are lamentably sparse and 
 insuiEcient. What became of that great African church that had 
 given such saints and theologians to Christendom ? The church 
 of TertuUian, St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, which had emerged 
 victorious out of so many persecutions, and had so stoutly 
 championed the cause of Christian orthodoxy, seems to have 
 faded away like a mist. 
 
 In the absence of definite information, it has been usual to 
 ascribe the disappearance of the Christian population to fanatical 
 persecutions and forced conversions on the part of the Muslim 
 conquerors. But there are many considerations that militate 
 against such a rough and ready settlement of this question. First 
 of all, there is the absence of definite evidence in support of such 
 an assertion. Massacres, devastation and all the other accompani- 
 ments of a bloody and long-protracted war, there were in horrible 
 
 ^ Massaja, vol. xi. pp. 79, 81. 
 
 ' Id. vol. ix. pp. 6o-i ; vol. x. p. 12 ; vol. xi. p. 84. 
 
104 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 abundance, but of^actual religious persecution we have little 
 mention, and the survival of the native Christian church for more 
 than eight centuries after the Arab conquest is a testimony to 
 the toleration that alone could have rendered such a survival 
 possible. 
 
 The causes that brought about the decay of Christianity in 
 North Africa must be sought for elsewhere than in the bigotry of 
 Muhammadan rulers. But before attempting to enumerate these, 
 it will be well to realise how very small must have been the 
 number of the Christian population at the end of the seventh 
 century — a circumstance that renders its continued existence 
 under Muhammadan rule still more significant of the absence of 
 forced conversion, and leaves such a hypothesis much less plausi- 
 bility than would have been the case had the Arabs found a large 
 and flourishing Christian church there when they commenced 
 their conquest of northern Africa. 
 
 The Roman provinces of Africa, to which the Christian popula- 
 tion was confined, never extended far southwards ; the Sahara 
 forms a barrier in this direction, so that the breadth of the coast 
 seldom exceeds 80 or 100 miles.i Though there were as many as 
 500 bishoprics just before the Vandal conquest, this number can 
 serve as no criterion of the number of the faithful, owing to the 
 practice observed in the African church of appointing bishops to 
 the most inconsiderable towns and very frequentlj- to the most 
 obscure villages,^ and it is doubtful whether Christianity ever 
 spread far inland among the Berber tribes.^ When the power of 
 the Roman Empire declined in the fifth century, different tribes 
 of this great race, known to the Romans under the names of 
 Moors, Numidians, Libyans, etc., swarmed up from the south to 
 ravage and destroy the wealthy cities of the coast. These in- 
 vaders were certainly heathen. The Libyans, whose devastations 
 are so pathetically bewailed by Synesius of Cyrene, pillaged and 
 burnt the churches and carried off the sacred vessels for their 
 own idolatrous rites,* and this province of Cyrenaica never re- 
 covered from their devastations, and Christianity was probably 
 almost extinct here at the time of the Muslim invasion. The 
 
 ' Gibbon, vol. i. p. 161, 
 " Id. vol. ii. p. 212. 
 
 " C. O. Castiglioni : Recherches sur les Beiberes Atlantiques. dd. q6'7. 
 (Milan, 1826.) ^ ' ^^ ^ 
 
 ■■ Synesii Catastasis. (Migne : Patr. Gr. Tom. Ixvi. p. 1569.) 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF NORTH AFRICA. 105 
 
 Moorish chieftain in the district of Tripolis, who was at war with 
 the Vandal king Thorismund (496-524), but respected the 
 churches and clergy of the orthodox, who had been ill-treated by 
 the Vandals, declared his heathenism when he said, " I do not 
 know who the God of the Christians is, but if he is so powerful 
 as he is represented, he will take vengeance on those who insult 
 him, and succour those who do him honour." 1 There is some 
 probability that the nomads of Mauritania also were very largely 
 heathen. 
 
 'But whatever may have been the extent of the Christian 
 church, it received a blow from the Vandal persecutions from 
 which it never recovered. For nearly a century the Arian 
 Vandals persecuted the orthodox with relentless fury ; sent their 
 bishops into exile, forbade the public exercise of their religion 
 and cruelly tortured those who refused to conform to the religion 
 of their conquerors.^ When in 534, Belisarius crushed the power 
 of the Vandals and restored North Africa to the Roman Empire, 
 only 217 bishops met in the Synod of Carthage ^ to resume the 
 direction of the Christian church. After the fierce and long- 
 continued persecution to which they had been subjected, the 
 number of the faithful must have been very much reduced, and 
 during the century that elapsed before the coming of the Muham- 
 madans, the inroads of the barbarian Moors, who shut the Romans 
 up in the cities and other centres of population, and kept the 
 mountains, the desert and the open country for themselves,* the 
 'prevalent disorder and ill-government, and above all the deso-\ 
 lating plagues that signalised the latter half of the sixth century, 
 all combined to carry on the work of destruction. Five millions 
 of Africans are said to have been consumed by the wars and 
 government of the Emperor Justinian. The wealthier citizens 
 abandoned a country whose commerce and agriculture, once so 
 flourishing, had been irretrievably ruined. "Such was the deso- 
 lation of Africa, that in many parts a stranger might wander 
 whole days without meeting the face either of a friend or an enemy. 
 The nation of the Vandals had disappeared ; they once amounted 
 to an hundred and sixty thousand warriors, without including 
 the children, the women, or the slaves. Their numbers were 
 
 ■ Neander (2), p. 320. ' Gibbon, vol. iv. pp. 331-3. 
 
 ' Id. vol. V. p. 115. * At Tijani, p. 201. Gibbon, vol. v. p. 122. 
 
io6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 infinitely surpassed by the number of Moorish families extirpated 
 in a relentless war ; the same destruction was retaliated on the 
 Romans and their allies, who perished by the cUmate, their 
 mutual quarrels, and the rage of the barbarians." ^ 
 
 In 646, the year before the victorious Arabs advanced from 
 Egypt to the subjugation of the western province, the Africaa 
 Church that had championed so often the purity of Christian 
 doctrine, was stirred to its depths by the struggle against Mono- 
 theletism ; but when the bishops of the four ecclesiastical provinces 
 in the archbishopric of Carthage, viz. Mauritania, Numidia, 
 Byzacena and Africa Proconsularis, held councils to condemn 
 Monotheletism, and wrote synodal letters to the Emperor and 
 the Pope, there were only sixty-eight bishops who assembled at 
 Carthage to represent the last-mentioned province, and forty-two 
 for Byzacena. The numbers from the other two dioceses are not 
 given, but the Christian population had undoubtedly suffered much 
 more in these than in the two other dioceses which were nearer 
 to the seat of government." It is exceedingly unlikely that any 
 of the bishops were absent on an occasion that excited so much 
 feeling, when zeal for Christian doctrine and political animosity 
 to the Byzantine court both combined in stimulating this move- 
 ment, and when Africa took the most prominent part in stirring 
 up the opposition that led to the convening of the great Lateran 
 Council of 648. This diminution in the number of the African 
 bishops certainly points to a vast decrease in the Christian 
 population, and in consideration of the numerous causes con- 
 tributing to a decay of the population, too great stress even must 
 not be laid upon the number of these, because an episcopal see 
 may be continued to be filled long after the diocese has sunk into 
 insignificance. 
 
 From the considerations enumerated above, it may certainly be 
 inferred that the Christian population at the time of the Muham- 
 madan invasion was by no means a large one. During the fifty 
 years that elapsed before the Arabs assured their victory, the 
 Christian population was still further reduced by the devastations 
 of this long conflict. The city of Tripolis, after sustaining a siege 
 
 ' Gibbon, vol. v. p. 214. 
 
 = Neander (i), vol. v. pp. 254-5. J. E. T. Wiltsch : Hand-book of the 
 geography and statistics of the church. (London, 1859.) vol. i. pp. 433-4. 
 T. Boumichon : L'Invasion Musulmane en Afrique, pp. 32-3 (Tours, 1890.) 
 
THE CONQUEST OF NORTH AFRICA. 107 
 
 of six months, was sacked, and of the inhabitants part were put to 
 the sword and the rest carried off captive into Egypt and Arabia.^ 
 Another city, bordering on the Numidian desert, was defended 
 by a Roman Count with a large garrison which bravely endured 
 J blockade of a whole year ; when at last it was taken by storm, 
 all the males were put to the sword and the women and children 
 carried off captive.^ The number of such captives is said to have 
 imoimted to several hundreds of thousands.^ Many of the 
 Christians took refuge in flight,* some into Italy and Spain,^ and 
 it would almost seem that others even wandered as far as Ger- 
 many, judging from a letter addressed to the diocese of St. 
 Boniface by Pope Gregory 11.^ In fact, many of the great Roman 
 cities were quite depopulated, and remained uninhabited for a 
 long time or were even left to fall to ruins entirely,^ while in 
 several cases the conquerors chose entirely new sites for their 
 :hief towns.* 
 
 As to the scattered remnants of the once flourishing Christian 
 church that still remained in Africa at the end of the seventh 
 century, it can hardly be-Supposed that persecution is responsible 
 For their final disappearance, in the face of the fact that traces of 
 1 native Christian community were to be found even so late as 
 the sixteenth century. Idris, the founder of the dynasty in 
 Morocco that bore his name, is indeed said to have compelled by 
 Force Christians and Jews to embrace Islam in the year 789 a.d., 
 when he had just begun to carve out a kingdom for himself with 
 :he sword,^ but, as far as I have been able to discover, this incident 
 is without parallel in the history of the native church of North 
 iMrica.io 
 
 ' Leo Africanus. (Ramusio, Tom. i. p. 70, D.) 
 
 ^ " Deusen, una citta antichissima edificata da Romani dove confina il regno di 
 Bnggla col diserto diNumidia." (Id. p. 75, F.) 
 
 ^ Pavy, Tol. i. p. iv. 
 
 * " Tons ceux qui ne se convertirent pas a I'islamisme, ou qui (conservant leur 
 'oi) ne voulurent pas s'obliger a payer la capitation, durent prendre la fuite devant 
 es armees musulmanes." At Tijanl, p. 201. 
 
 ° Leo Africanus. (Ramusio, Tom. i. p. 7.) 
 
 ' "Afros passim ad ecclesiasticos ordines (procedentes) prsetendentes nulla 
 atione snscipiat (Bonifacius), quia aliqui eorum Manicha:i, aliqui rebaptizati 
 isepius sunt probati." Epist. iv. (Migne : Patr. Lat. Tom. Ixxxix. p. 502.) 
 
 ' Leo Africanus. (Ramusio, pp. 65, 66, 68, 69, 76.) 
 
 ' Qayrwan or Cairoan, founded A.H. 50 ; Fez, founded A.H. 185 ; Almahdiyah, 
 ounded a.h. 303 ; Masilah, founded a.h. 315 ; Marccco, founded A.H. 424. 
 Abu-1 Fida. Tome ii. pp. 198, 186, 200, 191, 187.) 
 
 ' §alih ibn 'Abdu-1 Halim, p. 16 
 
 '" A doubtful case of forced conversion is attributed to 'Abdu-I Mu'mm, who 
 
io8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 The very slowness of its decay is a testimony to the toleration 
 it must have received. About 300 years after the Muhammadan 
 conquest there were still nearly forty bishoprics left,i and when in 
 1053 Pope Leo IX. laments that only five bishops could be found 
 to represent the once flourishing African church,^ the cause is 
 most probably to be sought for in the terrible bloodshed and 
 destruction wrought by the Arab hordes that had poured into the 
 country a few years before and filled it with incessant conflict and 
 anarchy.' In 1076, the African church could not provide the 
 three bishops necessary for the consecration of an aspirant to the 
 dignity of the episcopate, in accordance with the demands of 
 canon law, and it was necessary for Pope Gregory VII. to conse- 
 crate two bishops to act as coadjutors of the Archbishop of 
 Carthage ; but the numbers of the faithful were still so large as 
 to demand the creation of fresh bishops to lighten the burden of 
 the work, which was too heavy for these three bishops to perform 
 unaided,* In the course of the next two centuries, the Christian 
 church declined still further, and in 1246 the bishop of Morocco 
 
 conquered Tunis iu 1159. See De Mas Latrie. (2) pp. 77-8. "Deux auteurs 
 arabes, Ibn-al-Athir, contemporain, mais vivanta Damas axi milieu de I'exaltation 
 religieuse que provoquaient les victoires de Saladin, I'autre El-Tidjani, visitant 
 I'Afrique orientale au quatorzieme siecle, ont ecrit que le sultan, maitre de Tunis, 
 for9a les Chretiens et les juifs etablis dans cette ville k embrasser I'islamisme, et 
 que les refractaires furent impitoyablement massacres. Nous doutons de la 
 realite de toutes ces mesures. Si I'arret fatal fut prononce dans I'emportement du 
 triomphe et pour satisfaire quelques exigences momentanees, il dut etre elud^ 
 ou r^voque, tant il etait contraire au principe de la liberty religieuse respect^ 
 jusque-la par tous les princes maugrebins. Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que les 
 chrltiens et les juifs ne tarderent pas a reparaitre a Tunis et qu'on voit les 
 Chretiens avant la fin du r^gne d'Abd-el-Moumen etablis a Tunis et y jouissant 
 comme par le passe de la liberie, de leurs etablissements, de leur commerce et de 
 leur religion . . . . ' Accompagne ainsi par Dieu meme dans sa marche, dit un 
 ancien auteur maugrebin, il traversa victorieusement les terres du Zab et de 
 I'Ifrikiah, conquerant le pays et les villes, accordant I'aman a ceux qui le deman- 
 daient et tuant les r&akitrants.' Ces derniers mots confivment notre sentiment 
 sur sa politique a I'egard des Chretiens qui accepterent I'arret fatal de la 
 destin^e. ' 
 
 ]^ De Mas Latrie (2), pp. 27-8. 
 
 " S. Leonis IX. Papae Epist. Ixxxiii. (Migne : Patr. Lat. Tom. cxliii. p. 728.) 
 This letter deals with a quarrel for precedence between the bishops of Gummi 
 and Carthage, and it is quite possible that the disordered condition of Africa at 
 the time may have kept the African bishops ignorant of the condition of other 
 sees besides their own and those immediately adjacent, and that accordingly the 
 information supplied to the Pope represented the number of the bishops as being 
 smaller than it really was. 
 
 ^ A. MUller, vol. ii. pp. 628-9. 
 
 * S. Gregorii VII. Epistola xix. (Liber tertius.) (Migne : Patr. Lat. Tom. 
 cxlviii. p. 449.) 
 
DECAY OF CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AFRICA, 109 
 
 was the sole spiritual leader of the remnant of the native church.^ 
 Up to the same period traces of the survival of Christianity were 
 still to be found among the Kabils of Algeria - ; these tribes had 
 received some slight instruction in the tenets of Islam at an early- 
 period, but the new faith had taken very little hold upon them, 
 and as years went by, they lost even what little knowledge they 
 had at first possessed, so much so that they even forgot the 
 Muslim formula of prayer. Shut up in their mountain fastnesses 
 and jealous of their independence, they successfully resisted the 
 introduction of the Arab element into their midst, and thus the 
 difficulties in the way of their conversion were very considerable. 
 Some unsuccessful attempts to start a mission among them had 
 been made by the inmates of a monastery belonging to the 
 Qadariyah order, Sajiatu-1 Hamra, but the honour of winning an 
 entrance among them for the Muslim faith was reserved for a 
 number of Andalusian Moors who were driven out of Spain after 
 the taking of Granada in 1492. They had taken refuge in this 
 monastery and were recognised by the shaylch to be eminently 
 fitted for the arduous task that had previously so completely 
 bafHed the efforts of his disciples. Before dismissing them on 
 this pious errand, he thus addressed them : " It is a duty incum- 
 bent upon us to bear the torch of Islam into these regions that 
 have lost their inheritance in the blessings of religion ; for these 
 unhappy Kabils are wholly unprovided with schools, and have no 
 shaykb to teach their children the laws of morality and the virtues 
 of Islam ; so they live like the brute beasts, without God or 
 religion. To do away with this unhappy state of things, I have 
 determined to appeal to your religious zeal and enlightenment. 
 Let not these mountaineers wallow any longer in their pitiable 
 ignorance of the grand truths of our religion ; go and breathe 
 upon the dying fire of their faith and re-illumine its smouldering 
 embers ; purge them of whatever errors may still cling to them 
 fi'om their former belief in Christianity ; make them understand 
 that in the religion of our Lord Muhammad — may God have 
 compassion upon him — dirt is not, as in the Christian religion, 
 looked upon as acceptable in the eyes of God.^ I will not disguise 
 
 ' De Mas Latrie, p. 226. 
 
 ' C. Trumelet : Les saints de I'lslam (Paris, 1881), p. xxxiii. 
 ' Compare the articles published by a Junta held at Madrid in 1 566, for the 
 reformation of the Moriscoes; one of which runs as follows: "That neither 
 
no THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 from you the fact that your task is beset with difficulties, but 
 your irresistible zeal and the ardour of your faith will enable you, 
 by the grace of God, to overcome all obstacles. Go, my children, 
 and bring back again to God and His Prophet these unhappy 
 people who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance and unbelief. 
 Go, my children, bearing the message of salvation, and may God 
 "be with you and uphold you." 
 
 The missionaries started off in parties of five or six at a time in 
 -various directions ; they went in rags, staff in hand, and choosing 
 out the wildest and least frequented parts of the mountains, 
 €stablished hermitages in caves and clefts of the rocks. Their 
 austerities and prolonged devotions soon excited the curiosity of 
 the Kabils, who after a short time began to enter into friendly 
 relations with them. Little by little the missionaries gained the 
 influence they desired through their knowledge of medicine, of 
 the mechanical arts, and other advantages of civilisation, and 
 •each hermitage became a centre of Muslim teaching. Students, 
 attracted by the learning of the new-comers, gathered round 
 them and in time became missionaries of Islam to their fellow- 
 countrymen, until their faith spread throughout all the country 
 of the Kabils and the villages of the Algerian Sahara.^ 
 
 The above incident is no doubt illustrative of the manner in 
 -which Islam was introduced among such other sections of the 
 independent tribes of the interior as had received any Christian 
 teaching, but whose knowledge of this faith had dwindled down 
 to the observance of a few superstitious rites - ; for, cut off as they 
 were from the rest of the Christian world and unprovided with 
 spiritual teachers, they could have had little in the way of 
 positive religious belief to oppose to the teachings of the Muslim 
 missionaries. 
 
 There is little more to add to these sparse records of the decay 
 
 themselves, their women, nor any other persons should be permitted to wash or 
 bathe themselves either at home or elsewhere ; and that all their bathing houses 
 should be pulled down and demolished." (J. Morgan, vol. ii. p. 256.) 
 
 ' C. Trumelet : Les Saints de I'lslam, pp. xxviii-xxxvi. 
 
 ^ Leo Africanus says that at the end of the fifteenth century all the mountaineers 
 ■of Algeria and of Buggia, though Muhammadans, painted black crosses on their 
 ■cheeks and palm of the hand. (Ramusio i. p. 61); similarly the Banu Mzab to 
 the present day still keep up some religious observances corresponding to excom- 
 anunication and confession (Oppel. p. 299), and some nomad tribes of the 
 Sahara observe the practice of a kind of baptism and use the cross as a decoration 
 ioi their stuffs and weapons. (De Mas Latrie (2), p. 8.) 
 
DECAY OF CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AFRICA, iii 
 
 of the North African church. A Muhammadan traveller ,i who 
 •visited Al Jarid, the southern district of Tunis, in the early part 
 of the fourteenth century, tells us that the Christian churches, 
 although in ruins, were still standing in his day, not having been 
 destroyed by the Arab conquerors, who had contented themselves 
 with building a mosque in front of each of these churches. At 
 the end of the following century there was still to be found in 
 the city of Tunis a small community of native Christians, living 
 together in one of the suburbs, quite distinct from that in which 
 the foreign Christian merchants resided ; far from being oppressed 
 or persecuted, they were employed as the bodyguard of the Sultan.' 
 These were doubtless the same persons as were congratulated on 
 their perseverance in the Christian faith by Charles V. after the 
 <apture of Tunis in 1535.^ 
 
 This is the last we hear of the native Christian church in North 
 Africa. The very fact of its so long survival would militate against 
 any supposition of forced conversion, even if we had not abundant 
 evidence of the tolerant spirit of the Arab rulers of the various 
 North African kingdoms, who employed Christian soldiers,* 
 granted by frequent treaties the free exercise of their religion to 
 Christian merchants and settlers, ^ and to whom Popes ^ recom- 
 mended the care of the native Christian population, while exhort- 
 ing the latter to serve their Muhammadan rulers faithfully.' 
 
 ' At Tijani, p. 203. 
 
 " Leo Africanus. (Ramusio, Tom. i. p. 67.) 
 ' Pavy, vol. i. p. vii. 
 
 ' De Mas Latrie (2), pp. 61-2, 266-7 i L. del Marmol-Caravajal ; De 
 I'Afrique. Tome ii. p. 54. (Paris, 1667.) 
 ' De Mas Latrie (2), p. 192. 
 
 • e.g. Innocent III., Gregory Yll., Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. 
 ' De Mas Latrie (2), p. 273. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF SPAIN. 
 
 In 7 11 the victorious Arabs introduced Islam into Spain : in 1502 
 an edict of Ferdinand and Isabella forbade the exercise of the 
 Muhammadan religion throughout the kingdom. During the 
 centuries that elapsed between these two dates, Muslim Spain 
 had written one of the brightest pages in the history of mediaeval 
 Europe. She had inaugurated the age of chivalry and her influ- 
 ence had passed through Provence into the other countries of 
 Europe, bringing into birth a new poetry and a new culture, and 
 it was from her that Christian scholars received what of Greek 
 philosophy and science they had to stimulate their mental 
 activity up to the time of the Renaissance. But these triumphs 
 of the civilised life — art and poetry, science and philosophy — we 
 must pass over here and fix our attention on the religious condi- 
 tion of Spain under the Muslim rule. 
 
 When the Muhammadans iirst brought their religion into 
 Spain they found Catholic Christianity firmly established after its 
 conquest over Arianism. The sixth Council of Toledo had 
 enacted that all kings were to swear that they would not suffer 
 the exercise of any other religion but the Catholic, and would 
 vigorously enforce the law against all dissentients, whUe a subse- 
 quent law forbade anyone under pain of confiscation of his pro- 
 perty and perpetual imprisonment, to call in question the Holy 
 Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Evangelical Institutions, the 
 definitions of the Fathers, the decrees of the Church, and the 
 Holy Sacraments. The clergy had gained for their order a pre- 
 ponderating influence in the affairs of the State ; 1 the bishops 
 and chief ecclesiastics sat in the national councils, which met to 
 
 ' Baudissin, p. 22. 
 
SPAIN BEFORE THE ARAB CONQUEST. 113 
 
 settle the most important business of the realm, ratified the 
 election of the king and claimed the right to depose him if he 
 refused to abide by their decrees. The Christian clergy took 
 advantage of their power to persecute the Jews who formed a 
 very large community in Spain ; edicts of a brutally severe 
 character were passed against such as refused to be baptised 1 ; 
 and they consequently hailed the invading Arabs as their 
 deliverers from such cruel oppression, they garrisoned the cap- 
 tured cities on behalf of the conqueror and opened the gates of 
 towns that were being besieged.- 
 
 The Muhammadans received as warm a welcome from the 
 slaves, whose condition under the Gothic rule was a very miserable 
 one, and whose knowledge of Christianity was too superficial to 
 have any weight when compared with the liberty and numerous 
 advantages they gained, by throwing in their lot with the 
 Musalmans. 
 
 These down-trodden slaves were the first converts to Islam in 
 Spain. The remnants of the heathen population of which we 
 find mention as late as 693 a.d.,* probably followed their example. 
 Many of the Christian nobles, also, whether from genuine con- 
 viction or from other motives, embraced the new creed.* Many 
 converts were won, too, from the lower and middle classes, who 
 may well have embraced Islam, not merely outwardly, but from 
 genuine conviction, turning to it from a religion whose ministers 
 had left them ill-instructed and uncared for, and busied with 
 worldly ambitions had plundered and oppressed their flocks.^ 
 Having once become Muslims, these Spanish converts showed 
 themselves zealous adherents of their adopted faith, and they and 
 their children joined themselves to the Puritan party of the rigid 
 Muhammadan theologians as against the careless and luxurious 
 life of the Arab aristocracy.^ At the time of the Muhammadan 
 conquest the old Gothic virtues had declined and given place to 
 «iFeminacy and corruption, so that the Muhammadan rule appeared 
 to Christian theologians to be a punishment sent from God on 
 those who had gone astray into the paths of vice.'' 
 
 ' Helffericli, p. 68. ' Al Makkari, vol. i. pp. 280-2. 
 
 ^ Baudissin, p. 7. ■* Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 45-6. 
 
 * A. Miiller, vol. ii. p. 463. ° Dozy (2), tome ii. pp. 44-6- 
 
 ' So St. Boniface (a.d. 745, Epist. Ixii.) "Sicut aliis gentibus Hispaniae et 
 Provincise et Burgundionum populis contigit, quae sic a Deo recedentes fornicatje 
 sunt, donee index omnipotens talium criminum ultrices poenas per ignorantiam 
 
 I 
 
114 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 As time went on, matters do not seem to have mended them- 
 selves ; and when Christian bishops took part in the revels of the 
 Muhammadan court, when episcopal sees were put up to auction 
 and even atheists appointed as shepherds of the faithful, and 
 these in their turn bestowed the office of the priesthood on low 
 and unworthy persons,^ we may well suppose that it was not only 
 in the province of Elvira ^ that Christians turned from a religion, 
 the corrupt lives of whose ministers had brought it into discredit,* 
 and sought a more congenial atmosphere for the moral and 
 spiritual life in the pale of Islam. 
 
 Had ecclesiastical writers cared to chronicle them, Spain would 
 doubtless be found to offer instances of many a man leaving the 
 Christian church like Bodo, a deacon at the French court in the 
 reign of Louis the Pious, who in 838 a.d. became a Jew, in order 
 that (as he said), forsaking his sinful life, he might "abide stead- 
 fast in the law of the Lord." * 
 
 It is very possible, too, that the lingering remains of the old 
 Gothic Arianism — of which, indeed, there had been some slight 
 revival in the Spanish church just before the Arab conquests- 
 may have predisposed men's minds to accept the new faith whose 
 Christology was in such close agreement with Arian doctrine.* 
 
 Of forced conversion or anything like persecution in the early 
 days of the Arab conquest, we hear nothing. Indeed, it was 
 probably in a great measure their tolerant attitude towards the 
 
 legis Dei et per Saracenos venire et sasvire permisit." (Migne, Patr. Lat. torn. 
 Ixxxix. p. 761.) Eulogius : lib. i. § 30. " In cuius (i.e. gentis Saracenicffi) ditione 
 nostro compellente facinore sceptrum Hispanias translatum est." (Migne, Pair. 
 Lat. torn. cxv. p. 761.) Similarly Alvar (2), § 18. " Et probare nostro vitio- 
 inlatum intentabo flagellum. Nostra htec, fratres, nostra desidia peperit mala, 
 nostra impuritas, nostra levitas, nostra monim obsccenitas .... unde tradidit 
 nos Dominus qui iustitiam diligit, et cuius vultus sequitatem decernit, ipsi bestise 
 conrodendos." (pp. 531-2.) 
 
 ' Samson, pp. 377-8, 381. 2 Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 210. 
 
 ' Bishop Egila who was sent to Southern Spain by Pope Hadrian I. towards 
 the end of the eighth century, on a mission to counteract the growing influence of 
 Muslim thought, denounces the Spanish priests who lived in concubinage with 
 married women. (Helfferich, p. 83.) 
 
 * Alvari Cordubensis Epist xix. " Ob meritum jeternfe retributionis devovi me 
 sedulum in lege Dommi consistere." (Migne, Patr. Lat. torn, cxxi p i;i2 ) 
 
 5 Helfferich, p. 79-80. '^' ^ 
 
 ^ " Bedenkt man nun, wie wichtig gerade die alttestamentliche Idee des 
 Prophetenthums in der Chnstologie des germanischen Arianismus nachklane und 
 auch nach der Annahme des kathohschen Dogma's in dem rehgiosen Bewusstsein 
 der Westgothen haften blieb, so wird man es sehr erkliirlich finden, dass unmittel- 
 bar nach dem Einfall der Araber die verwandten Voi-stellungen des Mohamme- 
 danismus unter den geknechteten Christen auftauchten." (Helfferich p 82 ) 
 
THE SPANISH CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 115 
 
 Christian religion that facilitated their rapid acquisition of the 
 country. The only complaint that the Christians could bring 
 against their new rulers for treating them differently to their 
 non-Christian subjects, was that they had to pay the usual capita- 
 tion-tax of forty-eight dirhams for the rich, twenty -four for the 
 middle classes, and twelve for those who made their living by 
 manual labour : this, as being in lieu of military service, was 
 levied only on the able-bodied males, for women, children, monks, 
 the halt, and the blind, and the sick, mendicants and slaves were 
 exempted therefrom ^ ; it must moreover have appeared the less 
 oppressive as being collected by the Christian officials them- 
 selves.^ 
 
 Except in the case of offences against the Muslim religious law, 
 the Christians were tried by their own judges and in accordance 
 with their own laws.* They were left undisturbed in the exercise 
 of their religion * ; the sacrifice of the mass was offered, with 
 the swinging of censers, the ringing of the bell, and all the other 
 solemnities of the Catholic ritual ; the psalms were chanted in 
 the choir, sermons preached to the people, and the festivals of 
 the church observed in the usual manner. They do not appear 
 to have been condemned, like their co-religionists in Syria and 
 Eg)^t, to wear a distinctive dress as sign of their humiliation, 
 md in the ninth century at least, the Christian laity woie the 
 ame kind of costume as the Arabs.* They were at one time 
 5ven allowed to build new churches,* which was quite contrary to 
 
 ' Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 41. ^ Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 39. 
 
 ' Baudissin, pp. 11-13, 196. 
 
 * Eulogius: Mem. Sanct. lib. i. § 30, "inter ipsos sine molestia fidei 
 legimus " (p. 761). 
 
 Id. ib. lib. i. § 18, " Quos nulla prsesidialis violentia fidem 
 
 iuam negare compulit, nee a cultu sanctje piteque religionis amovit" (p. 751). 
 lohn of Gorz (who visited Spain about the middle of the tenth century) § 124. 
 ' (Christiani), qui in regno eius libera divinis suisque rebus utebantur." 
 
 A Spanish bishop thus described the condition of the Christians to John of 
 jorz. "Peccatis ad haec devoluti sumus, ut paganorum subiaceamus ditioni. 
 lesistere potestati verbo prohibemur apostoli. Tantum hoc unum relictum est 
 olatii, quod in tantje calamitatis male legibus nos propriis uti non prohibent ; 
 [ui quos diligentes Christianitatis viderint observatores, colunt et amplectuntur, 
 imul ipsorum convictu delectantur. Pro tempore igitur hoc videmur tenere 
 onsilii, ut quia religionis nulla infertur iactura, cetera eii obsequamur, iussisque 
 orum in quantum fidem non impediunt obtemperemus " § 122 (p. 302). 
 
 ^ Baudissin, pp. 16-17. 
 
 ' Eulogius, ob. 859 (Mem. Sanct. lib. iii. c. 3) speaks of churches recently 
 rected (ecclesias nuper structas). The chronicle falsely ascribed to Luitprand 
 ecords the erection of a church at Cordova in 895 (p. 11 13). 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the stipulations usually made on the conquest of a Christian 
 country. 
 
 We read also of the founding i of several fresh monasteries in 
 addition to the numerous convents both for monks and nuns that 
 flourished undisturbed by the Muhammadan rulers. The monks 
 could appear publicly in the woollen robes of their order and the 
 priest had no need to conceal the mark of his sacred ofSce,^ 
 nor at the same time did their religious profession prevent the 
 Christians from being entrusted with high offices at court." 
 
 Certainly those Christians, who could reconcile themselves to 
 the loss of political power, had little to complain of, and it is very 
 noticeable that during the whole of the eighth century we hear of 
 only one attempt at revolt on their part, namely at Beja, and in 
 this they appear to have followed the lead of an Arab chief.* 
 Those who migrated into French territory in order that they 
 miight live under a Christian rule, certainly fared no better than 
 the co-religionists they had left behind. In 812 Charlemagne 
 interfered to protect the exiles who had followed him on his 
 retreat from Spain from the exactions of the imperial officers. 
 Three years later Louis the Pious had to issue another edict on 
 their behalf, in spite of which they had soon again to complain 
 against the nobles who robbed them of the lands that had been 
 assigned to them. But the evil was only checked for a little time 
 to break out afresh, and all the edicts passed on their behalf did 
 not avail to make the lot of these unfortunate exiles more toler- 
 able, and in the Cagots (i.e. canes Gothi), a despised and ill-treated 
 class of later times, we probably meet again the Spanish colony 
 that fled away from Muslim rule to throw themselves upon the 
 mercy of their Christian co-religionists.* 
 
 The toleration of the Muhammadan government towards its 
 Christian subjects in Spain and the freedom of intercourse 
 between the adherents of the two religions brought about a 
 certain amount of assimilation in the two communities. Inter- 
 marriages became frequent^; Isidore of Beja, who fiercely inveighs 
 
 ' Eulogius: Mem. Sanct. lib. iii. c. II. (p. 8l2.) 
 
 ^ Baudissin, p. 16. 
 
 ^ id. p. 21, and John of Gorz, § 128 (p. 306.) 
 
 ■• Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 42. 
 
 * Baudissin, pp. 96-7. 
 
 « See the letter of Pope Hadrian I. to the Spanish bishops : ' ' Porro diversa 
 capitula quse ex illis audivimus partibus, id est, quod multi dicentes se catholicos 
 esse, communem vitam gerentes cum ludaeis et non baptizatis paganis, tarn in 
 
THE SPANISH CHRISTIANS UNDER ARAB RULE. 117 
 
 igainst the Muslim conquerors, records the marriage of 'Abdu-1 
 Aziz, the son of Musa, with the widow of King Roderic, without 
 1 word of blame.i Many of the Christians adopted Arab names, 
 and in outward observances imitated to some extent their 
 Muhammadan neighbours, e.g. many were circumcised,^ and in 
 matters of food and drink followed the practice of the "unbaptized 
 pagans." ^ 
 
 The very term Muzarabes (i.e. must'aribin or Arabicised) applied 
 to the Spanish Christians living under Arab rule, is significant of 
 the tendencies that were at work. The study of Arabic very 
 rapidly began to displace that of Latin throughout the country,* 
 so that the language of Christian theology came gradually to be 
 neglected and forgotten. Even some of the higher clergy ren- 
 dered themselves ridiculous by their ignorance of correct Latinity.^ 
 It could hardly be expected that the laity would exhibit more 
 zeal in such a matter than the clergy, and in 854 a Spanish writer 
 brings the following complaint against his Christian fellow-coun- 
 trymen : — " While we are investigating their (i.e. the Muslim) 
 sacred ordinances and meeting together to study the sects of their 
 philosophers — or rather philobraggers — not for the purpose of 
 refuting their errors, but for the exquisite charm and for the 
 eloquence and beauty of their language — neglecting the reading of 
 the Scriptures, we are but setting up as an idol the number of the 
 beast. (Apoc. xiii. 18.) Where nowadays can we find any learned 
 layman that, absorbed in the study of the Holy Scriptures, cares, 
 to look at the works of any of the Latin Fathers ? Who is there 
 with any zeal for the writings of the Evangelists, or the Prophets, 
 or Apostles ? Our Christian young men, with their elegant airs 
 and fluent speech, are showy in their dress and carriage, and are 
 
 escis quamque in potu et in diversis erroribus nihil pollui se inquiunt : et illud 
 ■quod inhibitum est, ut nulli liceat iugum ducere cum infidelibus, ipsi enim 
 filias suas cum alio benedicent, et sic populo gentili tradentur." (Migne : Patr. 
 Lat. tome xcviii. p. 385.) 
 
 ' Isidori Pacensis Chionicon, § 42 (p. 1266). 
 
 ^ Alvar: Indie. Lum. | 35 (p. 53). John of Gorz. § 123 (p. 303). 
 
 ' Letter of Hadrian I. p. 385. John of Gorz. § 123 (p. 303). 
 
 ■* Some Arabic verses ol a Christian poet of the eleventh century are still extant, 
 which exhibit considerable skill in handling the language and metre. (Von 
 Schack. II. 95.) 
 
 * Abbot Samson gives us specimens of the bad Latin written by some of the 
 ecclesiastics of his time, e.g. "Cum contempt! essemus simplicitas Christiana," but 
 his correction is hardly much better, "contenti essemus simplicitati christians: " 
 (pp.404. 406). 
 
ii8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 famed for the learning of the gentiles ; intoxicated with Arab 
 eloquence they greedily handle, eagerly devour and zealously 
 discuss the books of the Chaldeans (i.e. Muhammadans), and 
 make them known by praising them with every flourish of 
 rhetoric, knowing nothing of the beauty of the Church's litera- 
 ture, and looking down with contempt on the streams of the 
 Church that flow forth from Paradise ; alas ! the Christians are 
 so ignorant of their own law, the Latins pay so little attention to 
 their own language, that in the whole Christian flock there is 
 hardly one man in a thousand who can write a letter to inquire 
 after a friend's health intelligibly, while you may find a countless 
 rabble of all kinds of them who can learnedly roll out the grandi- 
 loquent periods of the Chaldean tongue. They can even make 
 poems, every line ending with the same letter, which display 
 higher flights of beauty and more skill in handling metre than 
 the gentiles themselves possess." i 
 
 In fact the knowledge of Latin so much declined in one part of 
 Spain that it was found necessary to translate the ancient Canons 
 of the Spanish Church and the Bible into Arabic for the use of 
 the Christians.^ 
 
 While the brilliant literature of the Arabs exercised such a 
 fascination and was so zealously studied, those who desired an 
 education in Christian literature had little more than the materials 
 that had been employed in the training of the barbaric Goths, 
 and could with difficulty find teachers to induct them even into 
 this low level of culture. As time went on this want of Christian 
 education increased more and more. In 1125 the Muzarabes 
 wrote to King Alfonso of Aragon : " We and our fathers have 
 up to this time been brought up among the gentiles, and having 
 been baptised, freely observe the Christian ordinances ; but we 
 have never had it in our power to be fully instructed in our 
 divine religion ; for, subject as we are to the infidels who have 
 long oppressed us, we have never ventured to ask for teachers 
 from Rome or France ; and they have never come to us of their 
 own accord on account of the barbarity of the heathen whom we 
 obey." 3 
 
 From such close intercourse with the Muslims and so diligent 
 
 I ^'™c" J"'?'''- ^"'"- * 35 (pp. SS4-6). 
 ^ Von Schack, vol. u. p. 96. 
 
 ^ Orderic Vitalis, p. 928. 
 
MUSLIM INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. 119 
 
 a study of their literature — when we find even so bigoted an 
 opponent of Islam as Alvar 1 acknowledging that the Qur'an was 
 composed in such eloquent and beautiful language that even 
 Christians could not help reading and admiring it — we should 
 naturally expect to find signs of a religious influence : and such 
 indeed is the case. Elipandus, Bishop of Toledo (ob. 810), an 
 exponent of the heresy of Adoptionism — according to which the 
 Man Christ Jesus was Son of God by adoption and not by nature 
 — is expressly said to have arrived at these heretical views through 
 his frequent and close intercourse with the Muhammadans.^ This 
 new doctrine appears to have spread quickly over a great part of 
 Spain, while it was successfully propagated in Septimania, which 
 was under French protection, by Felix, Bishop of Urgel in 
 Catalonia.' Felix was brought before a council, presided over 
 by Charlemagne, and made to abjure his error, but on his return 
 to Spain he relapsed into his old heresy, doubtless (as was 
 suggested by Pope Leo III. at the timej owing to his intercourse 
 with the pagans (meaning thereby the Muhammadans) who held 
 similar views.* When prominent churchmen were so profoundly 
 influenced by their contact with Muhammadans, we may judge 
 that the influence of Islam upon the Christians of Spain was very 
 considerable, indeed in a.d. 936 a council was held at Toledo to 
 consider the best means of preventing this intercourse from 
 contaminating the purity of the Christian faith.^ 
 
 It may readily be understood how these influences of Islamic 
 thought and practice — added to definite efforts at conversion ^ — 
 
 ' Alvar : Ind. Lum. § 29. " Compositionem verborum, et preces omnium eius 
 membrorum quotidie pro eo eleganti facundia, et venusto confectas eloquio, nos 
 ho die per eorum volumina et oculis legimus et plerumque miramur." (Migne : 
 Patr. Lat. tome cxxi. p. 546.) 
 
 ' Enhueber, § 26, p. 353. 
 
 ' Helfferich, p. 88. 
 
 ■* " Postmodum transgressus legem Dei, fugiens ad paganos consentaneos 
 periuratus effectus est." Frobenii dissertatio de h^eresi Elipandi et Felicis, § xxiv. 
 (Migne : Patr. Lat. tome ci. p. 313.) 
 
 * Pseudo-Luitprandi Chronicon, § 341 (p. IIIS). "Basilius Toletanum con- 
 cilium contrahit ; quo providetur, ne Christiani detrimentum acciperent convictu 
 Saracenoram." 
 
 ' There is little record of such, but they seem referred to in the following 
 sentences of Eulogius (Liber Apologeticus Martyrum, § 20), on Muhammad: 
 "Cuius quidem erroris insaniam, priedicationis deliramenta, et impise novitatis 
 praecepta quisquis catholicorum cognoscere cupit, evidentius ab eiusdem sectfe 
 cultoribus perscrutando advertet. Quoniam sacrum se quidpiam tenere et credere 
 autumantes, non modo privatis, sed apertis vocibus vatis sui dogmata prsedicant." 
 (Migne : Patr. Lat. tome cxv. p. 862.) 
 
I20 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 would lead to much more than a mere approximation and would 
 very speedily swell the number of the converts to Islam so that 
 their descendants, the so-called Muwallads— a term denoting 
 those not of Arab blood— soon formed a large and important 
 party in the state, indeed the majority of the population of the 
 country,! and as early as the beginning of the ninth century we 
 read of attempts made by them to shake off the Arab rule, and on 
 several later occasions they come forward actively as a national 
 party of Spanish Muslims. 
 
 We have little or no details of the history of the conversion of 
 these New-Muslims. Some few apostatised to escape the pay- 
 ment of some penalty inflicted by the law-courts.^ But the 
 majority of the converts were no doubt won over by the imposing 
 influence of the faith of Islam itself, presented to them as it was 
 with all the glamour of a brilliant civilisation, having a poetry, a 
 philosophy and an art well calculated to attract the reason and 
 dazzle the imagination : while in the lofty chivalry of the Arabs 
 there was free scope for the exhibition of manly prowess and the 
 knightly virtues — a career closed to the conquered Spaniards 
 that remained true to the Christian faith. Again, the learning 
 and literature of the Christians must have appeared very poor 
 and meagre when compared with that of the Muslims, the study 
 of which may well by itself have served as an incentive to the 
 adoption of their religion. Besides, to the devout mind Islam in 
 Spain could offer the attractions of a pious and zealous Puritan 
 party with the orthodox Muslim theologians at its head, which 
 at times had a preponderating influence in the state and struggled 
 earnestly towards a reformation of faith and morals. 
 
 Taking into consideration the ardent religious feeling that 
 animated the mass of the Spanish Muslims and the provocation 
 that the Christians gave to the Muhammadan government through 
 their treacherous intrigues with their co-religionists over the 
 border, the history of Spain under Muhammadan rule is singularly 
 free from persecution. With the exception of three or four cases 
 of genuine martyrdom, the only approach to anything like per- 
 secution during the whole period of the Arab rule is to be found 
 in the severe measures adopted by the Muhammadan government 
 to repress the madness for voluntary martyrdom that broke out 
 in Cordova in the ninth century. At this time a fanatical party 
 
 ' Dozy (2), tome ii. p. 53. 2 Samson, p. 379. 
 
THE MARTYRS OF CORDOVA. lar 
 
 came into existence among the Christians in this part of Spain 
 (for apparently the Christian Church in the rest of the country- 
 had no sympathy with the movement), which set itself openly 
 and unprovokedly to insult the religion of the Muslims and 
 blaspheme their Prophet, with the deliberate intention of in- 
 curring the penalty of death by such misguided assertion of their 
 Christian bigotry. 
 
 This strange passion for self-immolation displayed itself mainly 
 among priests, monks and nuns between the years 850 and 860. 
 It would seem that brooding, in the silence of their cloisters, over 
 the decline of Christian influence and the decay of religious zeal, 
 they went forth to win the martyr's crown — of which the tolera- 
 tion of their infidel rulers was robbing them — by means of fierce 
 attacks on Islam and its founder. Thus, for example, a certain 
 monk, by name Isaac, came before the Qadi and pretended that 
 he wished to be instructed in the faith of Islam ; when the Qadi 
 had expounded to him the doctrines of the Prophet, he burst out 
 with the words : " He hath lied unto you (may the curse of God 
 consume him !), who, full of wickedness, hath led so many men 
 into perdition, and doomed them with himself to the pit of hell. 
 Filled with Satan and practising Satanic jugglery, he hath given 
 you a cup of deadly wine to work disease in you, and will expiate 
 his guilt with everlasting damnation. Why do ye not, being 
 endowed with understanding, deliver yourselves from such dangers ? 
 Why do ye not, renouncing the ulcer of his pestilential doctrines, 
 seek the eternal salvation of the Gospel of the faith of Christ ? " 1 
 On another occasion two Christians forced their way into a 
 mosque and there reviled the Muhammadan religion, which, they 
 declared, would very speedily bring upon its followers the destruc- 
 tion of hell-fire.3 Though the number of such fanatics was not 
 considerable,^ the Muhammadan government grew alarmed, 
 fearing that such contempt for their authority and disregard of 
 their laws against blasphemy, argued a widespread disaffection and 
 a possible general insurrection, for in fact, in 853 Muhammad I. 
 had to send an army against the Christians at Toledo, who, 
 
 ' Bulogius: Mem. Sanct. Pref. § 2. (Migne, torn. cxv. p. 737.) 
 
 ^ Id. c. xiii. (p. 794). 
 
 ' The number of the martyrs is said not to have exceeded forty. (W. H. 
 Prescott : History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. i. p. 342, n.) 
 (London 1846.) 
 
122 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 incited by Eulogius, the chief apologist of the martyrs, had risen 
 in revolt on the news of the sufferings of their co-religionists.i 
 He is said to have ordered a general massacre of the Christians, 
 but when it was pointed out that no men of any intelligence or 
 rank among the Christians had taken part in such doings ^ (for 
 Alvar himself complains that the majority of the Christian priests 
 condemned the martyrs 3), the king contented himself with putting 
 into force the existing laws against blasphemy with the utmost 
 rigour. The moderate party in the Church seconded the efforts 
 of the government ; the bishops anathematised the fanatics, and 
 an ecclesiastical council that was held in 852 to discuss the matter 
 agreed upon methods of repression * that eventually quashed the 
 movement. One or two isolated cases of martyrdom are recorded 
 later — the last in 983, after which there was none as long as the 
 Arab rule lasted in Spain." 
 
 But under the Berber dynasty of the Almoravids at the 
 beginning of the twelfth century, there was an outburst of 
 fanaticism on the part of the theological zealots of Islam in 
 which the Christians had to suffer along with the Jews and the 
 liberal section of the Muhammadan population — the philosophers, 
 the poets and the men of letters. But such incidents are excep- 
 tions to the generally tolerant character of the Muhammadan 
 rulers of Spain towards their Christian subjects. 
 
 One of the Spanish Muhammadans who was driven out of his 
 
 ' Dozy (2), tome ii. p. i6l-2. 
 
 ^ Eulogius : Mem. Sanct. I. iii. c. vii. (p. 805). " Pro eo quod nuUus sapiens, 
 nemo urbanus, nullusque procerum Christianorum huiuscemodi rem perpetrasset, 
 idcirco non debere universes perimere asserebant, quos non pneit personalis dux 
 ad prfelium." 
 
 ^ Alvar : Ind. Lum. § 14. " Nonne ipsi qui videbantur columnE, qui 
 putabantur Ecclesi^e petrte, qui credebantur electi, nuUo cogente, nemine 
 provocante, iudicem adierunt, et in pnesentia Cyniconim, imo Epicureorum, Dei 
 martyres infamavenmt? Nonne pastores Christi, doctores Ecclesiee, episcopi, 
 abbates, presbyteri, proceres et magnati, haereticos eos esse publice clamaverunt? 
 et publica professione sine desquisitione, absque interrogatione, qu£E nee 
 imminente mortis sententia erant dicenda, spontanea voluntate, et libero mentis 
 arbitrio, protulerunt ? " (Migne : tom. cxxi. p. 529.) 
 
 ■■ Alvar : Indie. Lum. § 15. " Quid obtendendum est de illis quos ecclesias- 
 tice interdiximus, et a quibus ne aliquando ad martyrii surgerent palmam 
 iuramentum extorsimus? quibus errores gentilium infringere vetuimus, et male- 
 dictum ne maledictionibus impeterent? Evangelio et crace educta vi iurare 
 improbiter fecimus, imo feraliter et belluino terrore coegimus, minantes inaudita 
 supplicia, et monstruosa promittentes truncationum membrorum varia et horrenda 
 dictu audituve flagella?" (Migne : tom. cxxi. p. 530.) 
 
 * Baudissin, p. 199. 
 
THE TOLERATION ENJOYED BY THE CHRISTIANS. 123 
 
 native country in the last expulsion of the Moriscoes in 1610 
 while protesting against the persecutions of the Inquisition, makes 
 the following vindication of the toleration of his co-religionists : 
 " Did our victorious ancestors ever once attempt to extirpate 
 Christianity out of Spain, when it was in their power? Did they 
 not suffer your forefathers to enjoy the free use of their rites at 
 the same time that they wore their chains ? Is not the absolute 
 injunction of our Prophet, that whatever nation is conquered by 
 Musalman steel, should, upon the payment of a moderate annual 
 tribute, be permitted to persevere in their own pristine persuasion, 
 how absurd soever, or to embrace what other belief they them- 
 selves best approved of ? If there may have been some examples 
 of forced conversions, they are so rare as scarce to deserve men- 
 tioning, and only attempted by men who had not the fear of God, 
 and the Prophet, before their eyes, and who, in so doing, have 
 acted directly and diametrically contrary to the holy precepts 
 and ordinances of Islam which cannot, without sacrilege, be 
 violated by any who would be held worthy of the honourable 
 
 epithet of Musulman You can never produce, among us, any 
 
 bloodthirsty, formal tribunal, on account of different persuasions in 
 points of faith, that anywise approaches your execrable Inquisition. 
 Our arms, it is true, are ever open to receive all who are disposed 
 to embrace our religion ; but we are not allowed by our sacred 
 Qur'an to tyrannize over consciences. Our proselytes have all 
 imaginable encouragement, and have no sooner professed God's 
 Unity and His Apostle's mission but they become one of us, 
 without reserve ; taking to wife our daughters, and being em- 
 ployed in posts of trust, honour and profit ; we contenting 
 ourselves with only obliging them to wear our habit, and to seem 
 true believers in outward appearance, without ever offering to 
 examine their consciences, provided they do not openly revile or 
 profane our religion : if they do that, we indeed punish them as 
 they deserve ; since their conversion was voluntarily, and was not 
 by compulsion."^ 
 
 This very spirit of toleration was made one of the main articles 
 in an account of the " Apostacies and Treasons of the Moriscoes," 
 drawn up by the Archbishop of Valencia in 1602 when recom- 
 mending their expulsion to Philip III., as follows : " That they 
 
 1 Morgan, vol. ii. pp. 297.8, 345. 
 
124 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 commended nothing so much as that Hberty of conscience, in all 
 matters of religion, which the Turks, and all other Muhammadans, 
 suffer their subjects to enjoy." ^ 
 
 What deep roots Islam had struck in the hearts of the Spanish 
 people may be judged from the fact that when the last remnant 
 of the Moriscoes was expelled from Spain in 1610, these unfor- 
 tunate people still clung to the faith of their fathers, although for 
 more than a century they had been forced to outwardly conform 
 to the Christian religion, and in spite of the emigrations that had 
 taken place since the fall of Granada, nearly one million of them 
 are said to have been expelled at that time : " those who go 
 lowest make the numbers of the then expelled Moriscoes to 
 amount to six hundred thousand : a terrible blow for a country 
 which, even then, was not overstocked with natives." ^ Whole 
 towns and villages were deserted and the houses fell into 
 ruins, there being no one to rebuild them.^ These Moriscoes 
 were probably all descendants of the original inhabitants of the 
 country, with little or no admixture of Arab blood ; the reasons 
 that may be adduced in support of this statement are too lengthy 
 to be given here ; one point only in the evidence may be men- 
 tioned, derived from a letter written in 131 1, in which it is stated 
 that of the 200,000 Muhammadans then living in the city of 
 Granada, not more than 500 were of Arab descent, all the rest being 
 descendants of converted Spaniards.* Finally, it is of interest to 
 note that even up to the last days of its power in Spain, Islam won 
 converts to the faith, for the historian, when writing of events that 
 occurred in the year 1499, seven years after the fall of Granada, 
 draws attention to the fact that among the Moors were a few 
 Christians who had lately embraced the faith of the Prophet.' 
 
 ' Morgan, vol. ii. p. 310. ' Id. p. 227. 
 
 ' Id. p. 337. * Id. p. 289. 
 
 ^ Stirling-Maxwell. (Vol. i. p. I15.) 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS IN 
 EUROPE UNDER THE TURKS. 
 
 We first hear of the Ottoman Turks at the commencement of the 
 thirteenth century, when fieeing before the Mongols, to the 
 number of about 50,000, they came to the help of the Sultan of 
 Iconium, and in return for their services both against the 
 Mongols and the Greeks, had assigned to them a district in the 
 north-west of Asia Minor. This was the nucleus of the future 
 Ottoman empire, which, increasing at first by the absorption of 
 the petty states into which the Saljuq Turks had split up, after- 
 wards crossed over into Europe, annexing kingdom after kingdom, 
 until its victorious growth received a check before the gates of 
 Vienna in 1683.^ 
 
 From the earliest days of the extension of their kingdom in 
 Asia Minor, the Ottomans exercised authority over Christian 
 subjects, but it was not until the ancient capital of the Eastern 
 Empire fell into their hands in 1453 that the relations between 
 the Muslim Government and the Christian church were definitely 
 established on a fixed basis. One of the first steps taken by 
 Muhammad II., after the capture of Constantinople and the 
 
 ' This is no place to give a history of these territorial acquisitions, which may 
 be briefly summed up thus. In 1353 the Ottoman Turks first passed over into 
 Europe and a few years later Adrianople was made their European capital. 
 Under Bayazid (1389-1402), their dominions stretched from the ^gsean to the 
 Danube, embracing all Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly and Thrace, with the 
 exception of Chalkidike and the district just round Constantinople. Murad II. 
 (1421-1451) occupied Chalkidike and pushed his conquests to the Adriatic. 
 Muhammad II. (1451-1481) by the overthrow of Constantinople, Albania, Bosnia 
 and Servia, became master of the whole South-Eastem peninsula, with the 
 exception of the parts of the coast held by Venice and Montenegro, Sulayman II. 
 (1520-1566) added Hungary and made the JEgxan an Ottoman sea. In the 
 seventeenth century Crete was won and Podolia ceded by Poland. 
 
126 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 re-establishment of order in that city, was to secure the allegi- 
 ance of the Christians, by proclaiming himself the protector of 
 the Greek church. Persecution of the Christians was strictly 
 forbidden ; a decree was granted to the newly-elected patriarch 
 which secured to him and his successors and the bishops under 
 him, the enjoyment of the old privileges, revenues and exemp. 
 tions enjoyed under the former rule. Gennadios, the first 
 patriarch after the Turkish conquest, received from the hands of 
 the Sultan himself the pastoral staff, which was the sign of his 
 office, together with a purse of a thousand golden ducats and a 
 horse with gorgeous trappings, on which he was privileged to 
 ride with his train through the city.i But not only was the 
 head of the church treated with all the respect he had been 
 accustomed to receive from the Christian emperors, but further 
 he was invested with extensive civil power. The patriarch's 
 court sat to decide all cases between Greek and Greek : it could 
 impose fines, imprison offenders in a prison provided for its own 
 special use, and in some cases even condemn to capital punish- 
 ment : while the ministers and officials of the government were 
 directed to enforce its judgments. The complete control of 
 spiritual and ecclesiastical matters (in which the Turkish govern- 
 ment, unlike the civil power of the Byzantine empire, never 
 interfered), was left entirely in his hands and those of the grand 
 Synod which he could summon whenever he pleased ; and 
 hereby he could decide all matters of faith and dogma without 
 fear of interference on the part of the state. As a recognised 
 officer of the imperial government, he could do much for the 
 alleviation of the oppressed, by bringing the acts of unjust 
 governors to the notice of the Sultan. The Greek bishops in the 
 provinces in their turn were treated with great consideration and 
 were entrusted with so much jurisdiction in civil affairs, that up 
 to modern times they have acted in their dioceses as a kind of 
 Ottoman prefects over the orthodox population, thus taking the 
 place of the old Christian aristocracy which had been exter- 
 minated by the conquerors, and we find that the higher clergy 
 were generally more active as Turkish agents than as Greek 
 priests, and they always taught their people that the Sultan 
 possessed a divine sanction, as the protector of the orthodox 
 
 ' Phrantzes, pp. 305-6. 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIANS UNDER MUSLIM RULE. 127 
 
 hurch. A charter was subsequently published, securing to the 
 )rthodox the use of such churches as had not been confiscated to 
 brm mosques, and authorising them to celebrate their religious 
 ites publicly according to their national usages.i 
 
 Consequently, though the Greeks were numerically superior to 
 ;he Turks in all the European provinces of the Empire, the 
 •eligious toleration thus granted them, and the protection of life 
 md property they enjoyed, soon reconciled them to the change 
 jf masters and led them to prefer the domination of the Sultan 
 to that of any Christian power. Indeed, in many parts of the 
 country, the Ottoman conquerors were welcomed by the Greeks 
 as their deliverers from the rapacious and tyrannous rule of the 
 Franks and the Venetians who had so long disputed with Byzan- 
 tium for the possession of the Peloponnesos and some of the 
 adjacent parts of Greece ; by introducing into Greece the feudal 
 system, these had reduced the people to the miserable condition 
 of serfs, and as aliens in speech, race and creed, were hated by 
 their subjects,^ to whom a change of rulers, since it could not 
 make their condition worse, would offer a possible chance of 
 improving it, and though their deliverers were likewise aliens, yet 
 the infidel Turk was infinitely to be preferred to the heretical 
 Catholics.3 The Greeks who lived under the immediate govern- 
 ment of the Byzantine court, were equally unlikely to be averse 
 to a change of rulers. The degradation and tyranny that charac- 
 terised the dynasty of the Palseologi are frightful to contemplate. 
 " A corrupt aristocracy, a tyrannical and innumerable clergy, the 
 oppression of perverted law, the exactions of a despicable govern- 
 ment, and still more, its monopolies, its fiscality, its armies of tax 
 and custom collectors, left the degraded people neither rights nor 
 
 ' Finlay, vol. iii. p. 522. Pitzipios, seconde partie, p. 75. M. d'Ohsson, 
 vol. iii. p. 52-4. 
 
 ^ A traveller virho visited Cyprus in 1508 draws the following picture of the 
 tyranny of the Venetians in their foreign possessions : ' ' All the inhabitants of 
 Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians, being obliged to pay to the state a third part 
 of all their increase or income, whether the product of their ground or corn, wine, 
 oil, or of their cattle, or any other thing. Besides, every man of them is bound 
 to work for the State two days of the week wherever they shall please to appoint 
 him : and if any shall fail, by reason of some other business of their own, or for 
 indisposition of body, then they are made to pay a fine for as many days as they 
 are absent from their work : and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other 
 imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flead and pillaged, 
 that they hardly have wherewithal to keep soul and body together." (The 
 Travels of Martin Baumgarten, p. 373.) 
 
 ^ Finlay, vol. iii. p. 502. 
 
128 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 institutions, neither chance of ameHoration nor hope of redress." i 
 Lest such a judgment appear dictated by a spirit of party bias, a 
 contemporary authority may be appealed to in support of its 
 correctness. The Russian annaUsts who speak of the fall of 
 Constantinople bring a similar indictment against its government. 
 " Without the fear of the law an empire is like a steed without 
 reins. Constantine and his ancestors allowed their grandees to 
 oppress the people ; there was no more justice in their law 
 courts ; no more courage in their hearts ; the judges amassed 
 treasures from the tears and blood of the innocent ; the Greek 
 soldiers were proud only of the magnificence of their dress ; the 
 -citizens did not blush at being traitors ; the soldiers were not 
 ashamed to fly. At length the Lord poured out His thunder on 
 these unworthy rulers, and raised up Muhammad, whose warriors 
 delight in battle, and whose judges do not betray their trust." ^ 
 This last item of praise ^ may sound strange in the ears of a 
 generation that for the last fifty years has constantly been called 
 upon to protest against Turkish injustice ; but it is clearly and 
 abundantly borne out by the testimony of contemporary his- 
 torians. The Byzantine historian who has handed down to us 
 the story of the capture of Constantinople tells us how even the 
 impetuous Bayazid was liberal and generous to his Christian 
 subjects, and made himself extremely popular among them by 
 admitting them freely to his society.* Murad II. distinguished 
 himself by his attention to the administration of justice and by 
 his reforms of the abuses prevalent under the Greek emperors, and 
 punished without mercy those of his officials who oppressed any 
 of his subjects.^ For at least a century after the fall of Con- 
 •stantinople a series of able rulers secured, by a firm and vigorous 
 administration, peace and order throughout their dominions, and 
 an admirable civil and judicial organisation, if it did not provide 
 an absolutely impartial justice for Muslims and Christians alike. 
 
 ' Urquhart, quoted by Clark : Races of European Turkey, p. 82. 
 
 ^ Karamsin, vol. v. p. 437. 
 
 3 Martin Cnisius writes in the same spirit : " Et mirum est, inter barbaros, in 
 tanta tanl:e urbis coUuvie, nuUas caedes audiri, vim Iniustam non ferri, ius cuivis 
 dici. Ideo Constantinopolin Sultanus, Refugium totius orbis scribit; quod 
 ■omnes miseri, ibi tutissime latent : quodque omnibus (tarn infimis quam summis : 
 tam Christianis. quam inlidelibus) iustitia administretur." (Turcogrsecia, p. 487.) 
 i(Basile;e, 1584.) 
 
 '' Phrantzes, p. 81. ° Id. p. 92. 
 
GREEK CHRISTIANS UNDER OTTOMAN RULE. 129 
 
 ret caused the Greeks to be far better off than they had been 
 lefore. They were harassed by fewer exactions of forced labour, 
 sxtraordinary contributions were rarely levied, and the taxes they 
 )aid were a trifling burden compared with the endless feudal 
 )bIigations of the Franks and the countless extortions of the 
 Byzantines. The Turkish dominions were certainly better 
 governed and more prosperous than most parts of Christian 
 Europe, and the mass of the Christian population engaged in the 
 :ultivation of the soil enjoyed a larger measure of private liberty 
 md of the fruits of their labour, under the government of the 
 Sultan than their contemporaries did under that of many Christian 
 nonarchs.i A great impulse, too, was given to the commercial 
 ictivity of the country, for the early Sultans were always ready 
 ;o foster trade and commerce among their subjects, and many of 
 :he great cities entered upon an era of prosperity when the 
 Turkish conquest had delivered them from the paralyzing fiscal 
 Dppression of the Byzantine empire, one of the first of them being 
 Nicaea, which capitulated to Urkhan in 1330 under the most 
 'avourable terms after a long- protracted siege.^ Like the ancient 
 Romans, the Ottomans were great makers of roads and bridges, 
 md thereby facilitated trade throughout their empire ; and 
 Foreign states were compelled to admit the Greek merchants into 
 ports from which they had been excluded in the time of the 
 Byzantine emperors, but now sailing under the Ottoman flag, 
 they assumed the dress and manners of Turks, and thus secured 
 Erom the nations of Western Europe the respect and consideration 
 which the Catholics had hitherto always refused to the members 
 af the Greek church.' 
 
 There is however one notable exception to this general good 
 treatment and toleration, viz. the tribute of Christian children, 
 who were forcibly taken from their parents at an early age and 
 snrcUed in the famous corps of Janissaries. Instituted by Urkhan 
 in 1330, it formed for centuries the mainstay of the despotic power 
 3f the Turkish Sultans, and was kept alive by a regular contribu- 
 tion exacted every four years, when the officers of the Sultan 
 visited the districts on which the tax was imposed, and rnade a 
 selection from among the children between the ages of six and 
 line. The Muhammadan legists attempted to apologise for this 
 
 ' Finlay, vol. v. pp. S, 123. ' Hertzberg, pp. 467. 646. 650. 
 
 ^ Finlay, vol. v. p. 156-7. 
 
 K 
 
130 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 inhuman tribute by representing these children as the fifth of the 
 spoil which the Our'an assigns to the sovereign,! and they pre- 
 scribed that the injunction against forcible conversion ^ should be 
 observed with regard to them also, although the tender age at 
 which they were placed under the instruction of Muslim teachers 
 must have made it practically of none effect .^ Christian Europe 
 has always expressed its horror at such a barbarous tax, and 
 travellers in the Turkish dominions have painted touching pic- 
 tures of desolated homes and of parents weeping for the children 
 torn from their arms. But when the corps was first instituted, 
 its numbers were rapidly swelled by voluntary accessions fi-om 
 among the Christians themselves,* and the circumstances under 
 which this tribute was first imposed may go far to explain the 
 apathy which the Greeks themselves appear to have exhibited. 
 The whole country had been laid waste by war, and families were 
 often in danger of perishing with hunger ; the children who were 
 thus adopted were in many cases orphans, who would otherwise 
 have been left to perish ; further, the custom so widely prevalent 
 at that time of selling Christians as slaves may have made this 
 tax appear less appalling than might have been expected. This 
 custom has, moreover, been maintained to have been only a 
 continuation of a similar usage that was in force under the 
 Byzantine emperors.^ It has even been said that there was 
 seldom any necessity of an appeal to force on the part of the 
 officers who collected the appointed number of children, but 
 rather that the parents were often eager to have their children 
 enrolled in a service that secured for them in many cases a 
 brilliant career, and under any circumstances a well-cared-for and 
 comfortable existence, since these little captives were brought up 
 and educated as if they were the Sultan's own children.* This 
 
 ' Qur'an, viii. 42. 2 Qur'an, x. 99, 100. 
 
 ^ "On ne for5ait cependant pas les jeunes Chretiens a changer de foi. Les 
 principes du gouvemement s'y opposaient aussi bien que les preceptes du 
 Cour'ann ; et si des ofticiers, mus par leur fanatisme, usaient quelquefois de con- 
 trainte, leur conduite k cet ^gard pouvait bien 8tre tolerie ; mais elle n'^tait 
 jamais autoris^e par les chefs." (M. d'Ohsson, tome iii. pp. 397-8.) 
 
 ■* Hertzberg, p. 472. 
 
 ' " Sed hoc tristissimum est, quod, ut dim Christiani imperatores, ex singulis 
 oppidis, certum numerum liberorum, in quibus egregia indoles pr« ceteris 
 elucebat, delegerunt : quos ad publica officia militise togatse et bellies in Aula 
 educari curarunt : ita Turci, occupato Gi-secorum imperio, idem ius eripiendi 
 patribus familias liberos ingeniis eximiis praeditos, usurpant." (David Chytraus, 
 pp. 12-13.) 
 
 * Creasy, p. 99. M. d'Ohsson. tome iii. p. 397. 
 
THE JANISSARIES. 131 
 
 institution appears in a less barbarous light if it be true that the 
 parents could often redeem their children by a money payment. 1 
 These extenuating circumstances at the outset, and the ease with 
 which men acquiesce in any established usage — though serving in 
 no way as an excuse for so inhuman an institution — may help us 
 to understand the readiness with which the Greeks seem to have 
 fallen in with this demand of the new government that so 
 materially improved their condition. 
 
 Further, the Christian subjects of the Turkish empire had to 
 pay the capitation tax, in return for protection and in lieu of 
 military service. The rates fixed by the Ottoman law were 2^, 5 
 and 10 piastres a head for every full-grown male, according to his 
 income.' Christian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries generally speak of this tax as being a ducat a head,^ but 
 it is also variously described as amounting to 3, 5 or 5| crowns or 
 dollars.* The fluctuating exchange value of the Turkish coinage 
 in the seventeenth century is the probable explanation of the 
 latter variations. To estimate with any exactitude how far this 
 tax was a burden to those who had to pay it, would require a 
 lengthened disquisition on the purchasing value of money at that 
 period and a comparison with other items of expenditure.^ But 
 by itself it could hardly have formed a valid excuse for a change 
 of faith, as Tournefort points out, when writing in 1700 of the con- 
 version of the Candiots : " It must be confessed, these Wretches 
 
 ' " Veram tamen hos (liberos) pecunia redimere a conquisitoribus ssepe 
 parentibus licet." (David Chytraeus, p. 13.) De la Guilleti^re mentions it in 
 1669 as one of the privileges of the Athenians. (An account of a late voyage to 
 Athens, p. 272.) (London, 1676.) 
 
 ' Joseph von Hammer (2), vol. ii. p. 151. 
 
 ' Martin Crusius, p. 487 ; Sansovino, p. 67 ; Georgieviz, p. 9S-9 ; Scheffler, 
 § 56 J Ilertzberg, p. 648 ; De la Jonquiire, p. 267. 
 
 * Georgirenes, p. 9 ; Tournefort, vol. i. p. 91 ; Tavemier (3), p. 11. 
 
 ' In a work published by Joseph Georgirenes, Archbishop of Samos, in 1678, 
 during a visit to London, he gives us an account of the income of his own see, 
 the details of which are not likely to have been considered extortionate, as they 
 were here set down for the benefit of English readers : in comparing the sums 
 here mentioned, it should be borne in mind that he speaks of the capitation-tax as 
 being three crowns or dollars (p. 8-9). " At his (i.e. the Archbishop's) first 
 coming, the Papas or Parish Priest of the Church of his Residence presents him 
 fifteen or twenty dollers, they of the other Churches according to their Abilities. 
 The first year of his coming, every Parish Priest pays him four doUers, and the 
 following year two. Every Layman pays him forty-eight aspers— (In the 
 commercial treaty with England, concluded in the year 1675, the value of the 
 dollar was fixed at eighty aspers (Finlay, v. 28) — and the following years twenty- 
 four. The Samians pay one Doller for a Licence ; all Strangers two j but he that 
 comes after first marriage for a Licence for a second or third, pays three or four " 
 (PP- 33-4-) 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 sell their Souls a Pennyworth : all they get in exchange for their 
 Religion, is a Vest, and the Privilege of being exempt from the 
 Capitation-Tax, which is not above five Crowns a year."i 
 Scheffler also, who is anxious to represent the condition of the 
 Christians under Turkish rule in as black colours as possible, 
 admits that the one ducat a head was a trifling matter, and has to 
 lay stress on the extraordinary taxes, war contributions, etc., that 
 they were called upon to pay.^ The land taxes were the same both 
 for Christians and Musalmans,^ for the old distinction between lands 
 on which tithe was paid by the Muhammadan proprietor, and 
 those on which l^araj was paid by the non-Muhammadan 
 proprietor, was not recognised by the Ottomans.* Whatever 
 sufferings the Christians had to endure proceeded from the 
 tyranny of individuals, who took advantage of their official 
 position to extort money from those under their jurisdiction. 
 Such acts of oppression were not only contrary to the Muham- 
 madan law, but were rare before the central government had 
 grown weak and suffered the corruption and injustice of local 
 authorities to go unpunished.^ There is a very marked difference 
 between the accounts we have of the condition of the Christians 
 during the first two centuries of the Turkish rule in Europe and 
 those of a later date, when the period of decadence had fully set 
 in. But it is very noticeable that in those very times in which 
 the condition of the Christians had been most intolerable there is 
 least record of conversion to Islam. In the eighteenth century, 
 when the condition of the Christians was worse than at any other 
 
 ' Tournefort, vol. i. p. 91. 
 
 ^ Scheffler, § 56. " Was aber auch den Ducaten anbelangt, so werdet ihr mit 
 demselben in eurem Sinn ebener massen greulich betrogen. Denn es ist zwar 
 wahr, dass der Tiirckisclie Kayser ordentlich nicht mehr nimt als vom Haupt 
 einen Ducaten: aber wo bleiben die Zblle und ausserordentliche Anlagen! 
 nehmen dann seine Konigliche Verweser und Hauptleute nichts ? muss man zu 
 Kriegen nichts ausser ordentlich geben ? . . . . Was aber die ausser ordentliche 
 Anlagen betrifft ; die steigen und fallen nach den bosen Zeiten, und miissen von 
 den Tiirckischen Unterthanen so wohl gegeben werden als bey uns." 
 
 * Finlay, vol. v. p. 24-5. 
 
 ■I Hammer (2), vol. i. p. 346. 
 
 ' " The hard lot of the Christian subjects of the Sultan has at all times aiisei) 
 from the fact that the central authority at Constantinople has but little real 
 authority throughout the Empire of Turkey, It is the petty tyranny of the 
 village officials, sharpened by personal hatred, which has instigated those acts ol 
 atrocity to which, both in former times, and still more at the present day, th( 
 Christians in Turkey are subjected. In the days of a nation's greatness justice 
 and even magnanimity towards a subject race are possible ; these, however, arf 
 rarely found to exist in the time of a nation's decay." Rev. W. Denton; Servif 
 and the Servians, p. 15. (London, 1862.) 
 
THE CAPITATION-TAX. 133 
 
 period, we find hardly any mention of conversions at all, and the ' 
 Turks themselves are represented as utterly indifferent to the 
 progress of their religion and considerably infected with scepticism 
 and unbelief.i A further proof that their sufferings have been due 
 to misgovernment rather than to religious persecution is the fact 
 that Muslims and Christians suffered alike.' The Christians 
 would, however, naturally be more exposed to extortion and 
 ill-treatment owing to the difficulties that lay in the way of 
 obtaining redress at law, and some of the poorest may thus have 
 sought a relief from their sufferings in a change of faith. 
 
 But if we except the tribute of the children, to which the con- 
 quered Greeks seem to have submitted with so little show of 
 resistance, and which owed its abolition, not to any revolt or 
 insurrection against its continuance, but to the increase of the 
 Turkish population and of the number of the renegades who 
 were constantly entering the Sultan's service,^ — the treatment of 
 
 ' Businello, pp. 43-4. 
 
 ' "The central government of the Sultan has generally treated its Mussulman 
 subjects with as much cruelty and injustice as the conquered Christians. The 
 sufferings of the Greeks were caused by the insolence and oppression of the 
 ruling class and the corruption that reigned in the Othoman administration, 
 rather than by the direct exercise of the sultan's power. In his private affairs, a 
 Greek had a better chance of obtaining justice from his bishop and the elders of 
 his district than a Turk from the cadi or the voivode." (Finlay, vol. vi. pp. 4-5.) 
 
 '' It would be a mistake to suppose that the Christians are the only part of the 
 population that is oppressed and miserable. Turkish misgovernment is uniform, 
 and falls with a heavy hand upon all alike. In some parts of the kingdom the 
 poverty of the Mussulmans may be actually worse than the poverty of the 
 Christians, and it is their condition which most excites the pity of the traveller." 
 (William Forsyth : The Slavonic Provinces South of the Danube, pp. 157-8.) 
 (London, 1876.) 
 
 "All this oppression and misery (i.e. in the north of Asia Minor) falls upon 
 the Mohammedan population equally with the Christian." (James Bryce : 
 Transcaucasia and Ararat, p. 381.) 
 
 "L'Europe s'imagine que les Chretiens seuls sont soumis, en Turquie, a 
 I'arbitraire, aux souffrances, aux avilissements de toute nature, qui naissent de 
 I'oppression ; il n'en est rien ! Les musulmans, precisement parce que nulla 
 puissance etrang^re ne s'interesse i eux, sont peut-etre plus indignement spolies, 
 plus corbes sous le joug que ceux qui meconnaissent le prophete." (De la 
 Jonquiere, p. 507.) 
 
 " To judge from what we have already observed, the lowest order of Christians 
 are not in a worse condition in Asia Minor than the same class of Turks ; and if 
 the Christians of European Turkey have some advantages arising from the effects 
 of the superiority of their numbers over the Turks, those of Asia have the 
 satisfaction of seeing that the Turks are as much oppressed by the men in power 
 as they are themselves ; and they have to deal with a race of Mussulmans 
 generally milder, more religious, and better principled than those of Europe." 
 (W. M. Leake : Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, p. 7.) (t^ondon, 1824.) 
 
 Cf. also Laurence Oliphant : The Land of Gilead, pp. 320-3, 446. (London, 1880.) 
 
 ' It was in the sixteenth century that the tribute of children fell into desuetude, 
 and the last recorded example of its exaction w^s in the year 1676, 
 
134 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 their Christian subjects by the Ottoman emperors— at least for 
 two centuries after their conquest of Greece — exhibits a toleration 
 such as was at that time quite unknown in the rest of Europe. 
 The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania, and the Unitarians 
 of the latter country, long preferred to submit to the Turks 
 rather than fall into the hands of the fanatical house of Haps- 
 burg 1 ; and the Protestants of Silesia looked with longing eyes 
 towards Turkey, and would gladly have purchased religious free- 
 dom at the price of submission to the Muslim rule.^ It was to 
 Turkey that the persecuted Spanish Jews fled for refuge in 
 enormous numbers at the end of the fifteenth century,' and the 
 Cossacks who belonged to the sect of the Old Believers and were 
 persecuted by the Russian state church, found in the dominions of 
 the Sultan the toleration which their Christian brethren denied 
 them.* Well might Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch in the 
 seventeenth century, congratulate himself when he saw the 
 fearful atrocities that the Catholic Poles inflicted on the Russians 
 of the Orthodox Eastern Church : — " We all wept much over the 
 thousands of martyrs who were killed by those impious wretches, 
 the enemies of the faith, in these forty or fifty years. The 
 number probably amounted to seventy or eighty thousand souls. 
 O you infidels ! O you monsters of impurity ! O you hearts of 
 stone ! What had the nuns and women done ? What the girls 
 and boys and infant children, that you should murder them ? 
 .... And why do I pronounce them (the Poles) accursed? 
 Because they have shown themselves more debased and wicked 
 than the corrupt worshippers of idols, by their cruel treatment 
 of Christians, thinking to abolish the very name of Orthodox. 
 God perpetuate the empire of the Turks for ever and ever ! 
 For they take their impost, and enter into no account of religion, 
 be their subjects Christians or Nazarenes, Jews or Samaritans ; 
 
 • De la Jonquiere, p. 333 ; Scheffler, § 45-6. 
 
 ^ " Denn ich hbre mit grosser Verwunderung und Bestiirtzung, dass nicht 
 allein unter den gemeinen Pbvel Reden im Schwange gehn, es sey unter dem 
 Tiircken auch gut wohnen : wann man einen Ducaten von Haupt gebe, so ware 
 man frey ; Item er liesse die Religion frey ; man wiirde die Kirchen wieder 
 hckommen ; und was vergleichen : sondern dass auch andre, die es wol besser 
 verstehen sollten, sich dessen erfreuen, und iiber ihr eigen Ungliick frolocken ! 
 welches nicht allein Halssbriichige, sondern auch Gottlose Vermessenheiten 
 seynd, die aus keinem andrem Grunde, als aus dem Geist der Ketzerey, der zum 
 AulTruhr und gant/.licher Ausreitung des Christenthumbs geneigt ist, herkommen." 
 (Scheffler, § 48.) 
 
 ' Hertzherg, p. 650. 4 De la Jonquiere, p. 34. 
 
THE TOLERATION OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS. 135 
 
 whereas these accursed Poles were not content with taxes and 
 tithes from the brethren of Christ, though willing to serve them ; 
 but they subjected them to the authority of the enemies of 
 Christ, the tyrannical Jews, who did not even permit them to 
 build churches, nor leave them any priests that knew the 
 mysteries of their faith." 1 The Greeks of the Morea in the 
 seventeenth century, after enduring the yoke of the Venetians 
 for fourteen years (1685-1699), gladly welcomed back their 
 former masters, the Turks, whose rule was no untried experience 
 to them.' Even in Italy there were men who turned longing 
 eyes towards the Turks in the hope that as their subjects they 
 might enjoy the freedom and the toleration they despaired of 
 enjoying under a Christian government.' It is then clear that 
 Islam was not spread by force in the dominion of the Sultan of 
 Turkey, and though the want of even-handed justice and the 
 oppression of unscrupulous officials in the days of the empire's 
 decline, may have driven some Christians to attempt to better 
 their condition by a change of faith, such cases were rare in the 
 first two centuries of the Turkish rule in Europe, to which period 
 the mass of conversions belong. It would have been wonderful 
 indeed if the ardour of proselytising that animated the Ottomans 
 at this time had never carried them beyond the bounds of tolera- 
 tion established by their own laws. Yet it has been said by one 
 who was a captive among them for twenty-two years that the 
 Turks " compelled no one to renounce his faith." * Similar 
 testimony is borne by others : an English gentleman who visited 
 Turkey in the early part of the seventeenth century, tells us that 
 " There is seldom any compulsion of conscience, and then not by 
 death, where no criminal offence gives occasion." ^ Writing 
 about thirty years later (in 1663), the author « of a Tiircken- 
 SchrifFt says, " Meanwhile he (i.e. the Turk) wins (converts) by 
 craft more than by force, and snatches away Christ by fraud out 
 
 ' Macarius, vol. i. pp. 183, 165. 
 
 ' De la Jonqui^re, p. 342. Finlay, vol. v. p. 222. 
 
 ' "Alii speciem sibi quandam confixenint stultam libertatis .... quod quum 
 sub Christiano consequuturos se desperent, ideo vel Turcam mallent : quasi is 
 benignior sit in largienda libertate hac, quam Christianus." (loannis Ludovici 
 Vivis De Conditione Vitae Christianorum sub, Turca, pp. 220, 225.) (Basileae, 
 '538.) " Quidam obganniunt, liberam esse sub Turca fidem." (Othonis 
 Bninfelsii ad Principes et Christianos omnes Oratio, p. 133.) (Basileae, 1538.) 
 
 * Turcbica; spurcitise suggillatio, fol. xvii. a. 
 
 > Blount, vol. i. p. 548. ' Scbeffler, §§ 51, 53. 
 
136 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 of the hearts of men. For the Turk, it is true, at the present 
 time compels no country by violence to apostatise ; but he uses 
 other means whereby imperceptibly he roots out Christianity 
 .... What then has become of the Christians ? They are not 
 expelled from the country, neither are they forced to embrace the 
 Turkish faith : then they must of themselves have been con- 
 verted into Turks." 
 
 The Turks considered that the greatest kindness they could 
 show a man was to bring him into the salvation of the faith of 
 Islam,! and to this end they left no method of persuasion untried : 
 a Dutch traveller of the sixteenth century, tells us that while he 
 was admiring the great mosque of Santa Sophia, some Turks even 
 tried to work upon his religious feelings through his aesthetic 
 sense, saying to him, " If you become a Musalman, you will be 
 able to come here every day of your life." About a century later, 
 an English traveller - had a similar experience : " Sometimes out of 
 an excess of zeal, they will ask a Christian civilly enough, as I have 
 been asked myself in the Portico of Sancta Sophia, why will you 
 not turn Musalman, and be as one of us ? " The public rejoicings 
 that hailed the accession of a new convert to the faith, testily to 
 the ardent love for souls which made these men such zealous 
 proselytisers. The new Muslim was set upon a horse and led in 
 triumph through the streets of the city. If he was known to be 
 genuinely honest in his change of faith and had voluntarily 
 entered the pale of Islam, or if he was a person of good position, 
 he was received with high honour and some provision made for 
 his support.' There was certainly abundant evidence for saying 
 that " The Turks are preposterously zealous in praying for the 
 conversion, or perversion rather, of Christians to their irreligious 
 religion : they pray heartily, and every day in their Temples, 
 that Christians may imbrace the Alcoran, and become their 
 Proselytes, in eflFecting of which they leave no means unassaied 
 by fear and flattery, by punishments and rewards."* 
 
 These zealous efforts for winning converts were rendered the 
 
 ' Dousa, p. 38. Busbecq. p. 190. 
 
 ' Thomas Smith, p. 32. 
 
 ■' Thomas Smith, p. 42. Blount, vol. i. p. 548. Georgieviz, p. 20. 
 
 * Alexander Ross, p. ix. Cf. also Rycaut, vol. i. p. 276. "On croit meriter 
 beaucoup que de faire un Proselyte, il n'y a personne asscz riche pour avoir uil 
 esclave qui n'en veiiille un jeune, qui soit capable de recevoir sans peine toutes 
 sortes d'impressions, ct qu'il puisse appeller son convci li, afin de meriter I'honiieur 
 d'avoir augmentc le nombrc ties fidMcs.*' 
 
PROSELYTISING EFFORTS OF THE TURKS. 137 
 
 more effective by certain conditions of Christian society itself. 
 Foremost among these was the degraded condition of the Greek 
 Church. Side by side with the civil despotism of the Byzantine 
 empire, had arisen an ecclesiastical despotism which had crushed 
 air energy of intellectual life under the weight of a dogmatism 
 that interdicted all discussion in matters of morals and religion. 
 The only thing that disturbed this lethargy was the fierce con- 
 troversial war waged against the Latin Church with all the bitter- 
 ness of theological polemics and race hatred. The religion of the 
 people had degenerated into a scrupulous observance of outward 
 forms, and the intense fervour of their devotion found an outlet 
 in the worship of the Virgin and the saints, of pictures and relics. 
 There were many who turned from a church whose spiritual life 
 had sunk so low, and weary of interminable discussions on such 
 subtle points of doctrine as the Double Procession of the Holy 
 Spirit, and such trivialities as the use of leavened and unleavened 
 bread in the Blessed Sacrament, gladly accepted the clear and 
 intelligible theistic teaching of Islam. We are told^ of large 
 numbers of persons being converted, not only from among the 
 simple folk, but also learned men of every class, rank and con- 
 dition ; of how the Turks made a better provision for those 
 monks and priests who embraced the Muslim creed, in order that 
 their example might lead others to be converted. While 
 Adrianople was still the Turkish capital (i.e. before 1453), the 
 court was thronged with renegades and they are said to have 
 formed the majority of the magnates there.^ Byzantine princes 
 and others often passed over to the side of the Muhammadans, 
 and received a ready welcome among them : one of the earliest 
 of such cases dates from 1140 when a nephew of the emperor 
 John Comnenes embraced Islam and married a daughter of 
 Mas'ud, the Sultan of Iconium.' After the fall of Constantinople, 
 
 ' By an anonymous writer who was a captive in Turkey from 1436 to 1458 
 TurchicEe spurcitiae suggillatio, fol. xvii. (a.) 
 
 ' Turehicae spurcitiae suggillatio, fol. xi. (b.) Lionardo of Scio, Archbishop o 
 Mitylene, who was present at the taking of Constantinople, speaks of the large 
 number of renegades in the besieging army: "Chi circondo la citti, e ch: 
 insegno a' turchi I'ordine, se non i pessimi christiani? lo son testimonio, che 
 Greci, ch' i Latini, che i Tedeschi, che gli Ungari, e che ogni altra generation d 
 christiani, mescolati co' turchi inipararono I'opere e la fede loro, i qual: 
 domenlicatisi della fede Christiana, espugnavano la citta O enipij che rinegasli 
 Christo. O settatori di antichristo, dannati alls pene infernali, queito e hora i! 
 vostro tempo." (Sansoviuo, p. 258.) 
 
 ' J. I-I. Krniise: Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters, pp. 385-6. (Hnllc, 1S69.) 
 
138 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the upper classes of Christian society showed much more readi- 
 ness to embrace Islam than the mass of the Greeks ; among the 
 converts we meet with several bearing the name of the late 
 imperial family of the Palseologi, and the learned George 
 Amiroutzes of Trebizond abandoned Christianity in his declining 
 years, and the names of many other such individuals have found 
 a record.i The new religion only demanded assent to its simple 
 creed " There is no god but God and Muhammad is the prophet 
 of God " ; as the above-mentioned writer ^ says, " The whole 
 difficulty lies in this profession of faith. For if only a man can 
 persuade himself that he is a worshipper of the One God, the 
 poison of his error easily infects him under the guise of religion. 
 This is the rock of offence on which many have struck and fallen 
 into the snare that has brought perdition on their souls. This is 
 the mill-stone that hung about the necks of many has plunged 
 them into the pit of despair. For when these fools hear the 
 Turks execrate idolatry and express their horror of every image 
 and picture as though it were the fire of hell, and so continually 
 profess and preach the worship of One God, there no longer 
 remains any room for suspicion in their minds." 
 
 The faith of Islam would now be the natural refuge for those 
 members of the Eastern Church who felt such yearnings after a 
 purer and simpler form of doctrine as had given rise to the 
 Paulician heresy so fiercely suppressed a few centuries before. 
 This movement had been very largely a protest against the 
 superstitions of the Orthodox Church, against the worship ol 
 images, relics and saints, and an effort after simplicity of faith and 
 the devout life. As some adherents of this heresy were to be 
 found in Bulgaria even so late as the seventeenth century,' the 
 Muhammadan conquerors doubtless found many who were dis- 
 satisfied with the doctrine and practice of the Greek Church ; and 
 as all the conditions were unfavourable to the formation of any 
 such Protestant Churches as arose in the West, such dissentient 
 spirits would doubtless find a more congenial atmosphere in the 
 religion of Islam. There is every reason to think that such was 
 the result of the unsuccessful attempt to Protestantise the Greek 
 Church in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The guiding 
 
 ' Hertzberg, p. 6l6. Finlay, vol. v. p. ii8. 
 ^ Turchicae Spurcitiae Suggillatio, fol. xix. (a.) 
 ' Rycaut, vol. i. pp. 7 10-71 1. Bizzi, fol. 49 (b.) 
 
CYRIL LUCARIS. 139 
 
 spirit of this movement was Cyril Lucaris, five times Patriarch of 
 Constantinople, from 1621 to 1638 ; as a young man he had 
 visited the Universities of Wittenberg and Geneva, for the pur- 
 pose of studying theology in the seats of Protestant learning, and 
 an his return he kept up a correspondence with doctors of the 
 reformed faith in Geneva, Holland and England. But neither the 
 doctrines of the Church of England nor of the Lutherans attracted 
 his S3mipathies so warmly as the teachings of John Calvin, 1 
 which he strove to introduce into the Greek Church ; his efforts 
 in this direction were warmly supported by the Calvinists of 
 Geneva, who sent a learned young theologian, named Leger, to 
 assist the work by translating into Greek the writings of Calvinist 
 theologians.^ Cyril also found warm friends in the Protestant 
 embassies at Constantinople, the Dutch and English ambassadors 
 especially assisting him liberally with funds ; the Jesuits, on the 
 other hand, supported by the Catholic ambassadors, tried in every 
 way to thwart this attempt to Calvinise the Greek Church, and 
 actively seconded the intrigues of the party of opposition among 
 the Greek clergy, who finally compassed the death of the 
 Patriarch. In 1629 Cyril published a Confession of Faith, the 
 main object of which seems to have been to present the doctrines 
 of the Orthodox Church in their opposition to Roman Catholicism 
 in such a way as to imply a necessary accord with Protestant 
 teaching.' From Calvin he borrows the doctrines of Predestina- 
 tion and salvation by faith alone, he denies the infallibility of the 
 Church, rejects the authority of the Church in the interpretation 
 of Holy Scripture, and condemns the adoration of pictures : in 
 his account of the will and in many other questions, he inclines 
 rather to Calvinism than to the teachings of the Orthodox Church.* 
 The promulgation of this Confession of Faith as representing the 
 teaching of the whole Church of which he was the spiritual head, 
 excited violent opposition among the mass of the Greek clergy, 
 and a few weeks after Cyril's death a synod was held to condemn 
 his opinions and pronounce him to be Anathema ; in 1 642 a 
 second synod was held at Constantinople for the same purpose, 
 which after refuting each article of Cyril's Confession in detail, as 
 :he first had done, thus fulminated its curse upon him and his 
 'oUowers : — " With one consent and in unqualified terms, we 
 
 ' Pichler, pp. 164, 172. ' Id. p. 143- 
 
 » Id. p. 148. ■* Id. pp. 183.9. 
 
140 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 condemn this whole Confession as full of heresies and utterly 
 opposed to our orthodoxy, and likewise declare that its compiler 
 has nothing in common with our faith, but in calumnious fashion 
 has falsely charged his own Calvinism on us. All those who read 
 and keep it as true and blameless, and defend it by written word 
 or speech, we thrust out of the community of the faithful as 
 followers and partakers of his heresy and corruptors of the 
 Christian Church, and command that whatever be their rank and 
 station, they be treated as heathen and publicans. Let them be 
 laid under an anathema for ever and cut off from the Father, the 
 Son and the Holy Ghost in this life and in the life to come, 
 accursed, excommunicated, be lost after death, and be partakers 
 of everlasting punishment." i In 1672 a third synod met at 
 Jerusalem to repudiate the heretical articles of this Confession 
 of Faith and vindicate the orthodoxy of the Greek Church 
 against those who represented her as infected with Calvinism. 
 The attempt to Protestantise the Greek Church thus completely 
 failed to achieve success : the doctrines of Calvin were diametri- 
 cally opposed to her teachings, and indeed inculcated many 
 articles of faith which were more in harmony with the tenets of 
 Mushm theologians than with those of the orthodox Church, and 
 which moreover she had often attacked in her controversies with 
 her Muhammadan adversaries. It is this approximation to Islamic 
 thought which gives this movement towards Calvinism a place in 
 a history of the spread of Islam : a man who inveighed against 
 the adoration of pictures, decried the authority and the very 
 institution of the priesthood, maintained the doctrines of absolute 
 Predestination, denied freedom to the human will, and was in 
 sympathy with the stern spirit of Calvinism that had more in 
 common with the Old than the New Testament,— would certainly 
 find a more congenial atmosphere in Islam than in the Greek 
 Church of the seventeenth century, and there can be little doubt 
 that among the numerous converts to Islam during that century 
 were to be found men who had been alienated from the Church 
 of their fathers through their leanings towards Calvinism.!^ We 
 have no definite information as to the number of the followers of 
 
 ' Pichler, p. 226. 
 
 = As regards the Christian captives the Protestants certainly had the reputation 
 among the Turks of showing a greater inclination towards conversion thanlhc 
 LatholiLs. (Gmclm, p. 21.) 
 
CYRIL LUCARIS. 141 
 
 Cyril Lucaris and the extent of Calvinistic influences in the Greek 
 Church ; the clergy, jealous of the reputation of their church, 
 whose orthodoxy and immunity from heresy were so boastfully 
 vindicated by her children, and had thus been impugned through 
 the suspicion of Calvinism, wished to represent the heretical 
 patriarch as standing alone in his opinions.^ But a following he 
 undoubtedly had : his Confession of Faith had received the 
 sanction of a synod composed of his followers ; ^ those who 
 sympathised with his heresies were anathematised both by the 
 second synod of Constantinople (1642) and by the synod of 
 Jerusalem (1672) ^ — surely a meaningless repetition, had no such 
 persons existed ; moreover the names of some few of these have 
 come down to us : Sophronius, Metropolitan of Athens, was a 
 warm supporter of the Reformation ; * a monk named Nicodemus 
 Metaras, who had brought a printing-press from London and 
 issued heretical treatises therefrom, was rewarded with a metro- 
 politan see by Cyril in return for his services ; ^ the philosopher 
 Corydaleus, a friend of Cyril, opened a Calvinistic school in Con- 
 stantinople, and another Greek, Gerganos, published a Catechism 
 so as to introduce the teachings of Calvin among his fellow-coun- 
 trymen.* In a letter to the University of Geneva (dated July, 1636), 
 Cyril writes that Leger had gained a large number of converts to 
 Calvinism by his writings and preaching ^ ; in another letter 
 addressed to Leger, he describes how he had made his influence felt 
 in Candia.* His successor in the patriarchal chair was banished 
 to Carthage and there strangled by the adherents of Lucaris in 
 1639.' Parthenius II., who was Patriarch of Constantinople from 
 1644 to 1646, was at heart a thorough Calvinist, and though he 
 did not venture openly to teach the doctrines of Calvin, still his 
 known sympathy with them caused him to be deposed and sent 
 into exile.i** Thus the influence of Calvinism was undoubtedly 
 more widespread than the enemies of Cyril Lucaris were willing 
 to admit and, as stated above, those who refused to bow to the 
 anathemas of the synods that condemned their leader, had cer- 
 tainly more in common with their Muhammadan neighbours 
 
 ' PicMer, pp. 211, 227. ^ Id. p. 228, 181. 
 
 ^ Id. pp. 222, 226. ■* Id. p. 173- 
 
 ' Id. pp. 128, 132, 143. ' Id. p. 143- 
 
 ' Id. p. 172. ' Hefele, vol. i. p. 473. 
 
 » Le Quien, torn. i. p. 335. '" Id. torn. i. p. 337. 
 
142 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 than with the Orthodox clergy who cast them out of their midst. 
 There is no actual evidence, it is true, of Calvinistic influences in 
 Turkey facilitating conversion to Islam,i but in the absence of 
 any other explanation it certainly seems a very plausible conjec- 
 ture that such were among the factors that so enormously in- 
 creased the number of the Greek renegades towards the middle of 
 the seventeenth century — a period during which the number of 
 renegades from among the middle and lower orders of society is 
 said to have been more considerable than at any other time.' 
 Frequent mention is made of cases of apostacy from among the 
 clergy, and even among the highest dignitaries of the Church, 
 such as a former Metropolitan of Rhodes.* In 1676 it is said that 
 in Corinth some Christian people went over every day to " the 
 Turkish abomination," and that three priests had become Musal- 
 mans the year before* ; in 1679 is recorded the death of a rene- 
 gade monk.^ On the occasion of the circumcision of Mustafa, son 
 of Muhammad IV., in 1675, there were at least two hundred 
 proselytes made during the thirteen days of public rejoicing,* and 
 numerous other instances may be found in writings of this period. 
 A contemporary writer (1663) has well described the mental 
 attitude of such converts. " When you mix with the Turks in 
 the ordinary intercourse of life and see that they pray and sing 
 even the Psalms of David ; that they give alms and do other good 
 works ; that they think highly of Christ, hold the Bible in great 
 honour, and the like ; that, besides, any ass may become parish 
 priest who plies the Bassa with presents, and he will not urge 
 Christianity on you very much ; so you will come to think that 
 they are good people and will very probably be saved ; and so you 
 will come to believe that you too may be saved, if you likewise 
 become Turks. Herewith will the Holy Triunity and the cruci- 
 fied Son of God, with many other mysteries of the faith, which 
 seem quite absurd to the unenlightened reason, easily pass out of 
 your thoughts, and imperceptibly Christianity will quite die out 
 
 ' However, in an earlier attempt made by the Protestant theologians of 
 Tubingen (1573-77) to introduce the doctrines of the reformed church into the 
 eastern church, the Vaivode Quarquar of Samtskheth in Georgia, embraced the 
 Confession of Augsburg, but in 15.S0 became a Muslim. (Joselian, p. 140.) 
 
 ^ SchefHer, §§ 53-6. Finlay, vol v. pp. 118-9. 
 
 ' Hammer (i), vol. vi. p. 94. ■• Spon, vol. ii. p. 57. 
 
 * Hammer (l), vol. vi. p. 364. 
 
 ' Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, edited by J. Theodore Bent, p. 210 
 (London, 1893.) 
 
CONVERSIONS TO ISLAM. 143 
 
 in you, and you will think that it is all the same whether you be 
 Christians or Turks." 1 
 
 Another feature in the condition of the Greek Church that 
 contributed to the decay of its numbers, was the corruption 
 and degradation of its pastors, particularly the higher clergy. 
 The sees of bishops and archbishops were put up to auction to 
 the highest bidders, and the purchasers sought to recoup 
 themselves by exacting levies of all kinds from their flocks ; 
 they burdened the unfortunate Christians with taxes ordinary and 
 extraordinary, made them purchase all the sacraments at exorbi- 
 tant rates, baptism, confession, holy communion, indulgences, 
 and the right of Christian burial. Some of the clergy even 
 formed an unholy alliance with the Janissaries, and several 
 bishops had their names and those of their households inscribed 
 on the list of one of their Ortas or regiments, the better to secure 
 an immunity for their excesses and escape the punishment of 
 their crimes under the protection of this corporation that the 
 weakness of the Ottoman rulers had allowed to assume such a 
 powerful position in the state.^ The evidence of contemporar)- 
 eye-witnesses to the oppressive behaviour of the Greek clergj- 
 presents a terrible picture of the sufferings of the Christians. 
 Tournefort in 1700, after describing the election of a new 
 Patriarch, says: "We need not at all doubt but the new 
 Patriarch makes the best of his time. Tyranny succeeds to 
 Simony : the first thing he does is to signify the Sultan's order 
 to all the Archbishops and Bishops of his clergy : his greatest 
 study is to know exactly the revenues of each Prelate ; he imposes 
 a tax upon them, and enjoins them very strictly by a second letter 
 to send the sum demanded, otherwise their dioceses are adjudg'd 
 to the highest bidder. The Prelates being used to this trade, 
 never spare their Suffragans ; these latter torment the Papas : 
 the Papas flea the Parishioners and hardly sprinkle the least 
 drop of Holy Water, but what they are paid for beforehand." 
 
 " If afterwards the Patriarch has occasion for money, he farms 
 out the gathering of it to the highest bidder among the Turks : 
 he that gives most for it, goes into Greece to cite the Prelates. 
 Usually for twenty thousand crowns that the clergy is tax'd 
 at, the Turk extorts two and twenty ; so that he has the two 
 
 ' Scheffler, § 55. 
 
 ' Pitzipios, Seconde Partie, pp. 83-7. Pichler, p. 29. 
 
144 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 thousand crowns for his pains, besides having his charges borne 
 in every diocese. In virtue of the agreement he has made with 
 the Patriarch, he deprives and interdicts from all ecclesiastical 
 functions, those prelates who refuse to pay their tax."i The 
 Christian clergy are even said to have carried off the children of 
 their parishioners and sold them as slaves, to get money for their 
 simoniacal designs.^ 
 
 The extortions practised in the seventeenth have found their 
 counterpart in the present century, and the sufferings of the 
 Christians of the Greek Church in Bosnia, before the Austrian 
 occupation, exactly illustrate the words of Tournefort. The 
 Metropolitan of Serajevo used to wring as much as ;^io,ooo a 
 year from his miserable flock — a sum exactly double the salary of 
 the Turkish Governor himself — and to raise this enormous sum 
 the unfortunate parishioners were squeezed in every possible way, 
 and the Turkish authorities had orders to assist the clergy in 
 levying their exactions ; and whole Christian villages suffered the 
 fate of sacked cities, for refusing, or often being unable, to comply 
 with the exorbitant demands of Christian Prelates.^ Such un- 
 bearable oppression on the part of the spiritual leaders who should 
 protect the Christian population, has often stirred it up to open 
 revolt, whenever a favourable opportunity has offered itself.* 
 
 It is not surprising then to learn that many of the Christians 
 went over to Islam, to deliver themselves from such tyranny.^ 
 
 Though the mass of the parish clergy were innocent of the 
 charges brought against their superiors,^ still they were very 
 ignorant and illiterate. At the end of the seventeenth century, 
 there were said to be hardly twelve persons in the whole Turkish 
 
 ^ Tournefort, vol. i. p. 107. Spon uses much the same language, vol. i. p. 56. 
 
 ^ Gaultier de Leslie, p. 137. 
 
 ^ A. J. Evans, p. 267. Similarly Mackenzie and Irby say : " In most parts of 
 Old Serbia the idea we found associated with a bishop, was that of a person who 
 carried off what few paras the Turks had left" (p. 258). A similar account of 
 the clergy of the Greek Church is given by a writer in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes (tome 97, p. 336), who narrates the following story : " Au debut de 
 ce si^cle, i Tirnova, un certain pope du nom de Joachim, adore de ses ouailles, 
 d4test6 de son ^v^que, re9ut I'ordre, un jour, de faire la corvee du fumier dans 
 r^curie episcopale. II se rebiffa : aussitot la valetaille I'assaillit k coups de 
 fourche. Mais notre homme ^tait vigoureux ; il se d^battit, et, laissant sa 
 tunique en gage, s'en fut tout chaud chez le cadi. Le soleil n'^lait pas couch^ 
 qu'il devenait bon Musulman.'' 
 
 ■* Pitzipios, Seconde Partie, p. 87. 
 
 ^ Id. Seconde Partie, p. 87. Pichler, p. 29. 
 
 ' Finlay, vol. iv. pp. 153-4. 
 
CHRISTIAN EULOGIES OF THE TURKS. 145 
 
 dominions thoroughly skilled in the knowledge of the ancient 
 Greek language ; it was considered a great merit in the clergy to 
 be able to read, while they were quite ignorant of the meaning of 
 the words of their service-books.i 
 
 While there was so much in the Christian society of the time, 
 to repel, there was much in the character and life of the Turks to 
 attract, and the superiority of the early Ottomans as compared 
 with the degradation of the guides and teachers of the Christian 
 church would naturally impress devout minds that revolted from 
 the selfish ambition, simony and corruption of the Greek eccle- 
 siastics. Christian writers constantly praise these Turks for the 
 earnestness and intensity of their religious life ; their zeal in 
 the performance of the observances prescribed by their faith ; 
 the outward decency and modesty displayed in their apparel and 
 mode of living ; the absence of ostentatious display and the 
 simplicity of life observable even in the great and powerful.^ The 
 annalist of the embassy from the Emperor Leopold I. to the 
 Ottoman Porte in 1665-6, especially eulogises the devoutness and 
 regularity of the Turks in prayer, and he even goes so far as to 
 say, "Nous devons dire a la confusion des Chretiens, que les 
 Turcs temoignent beaucoup plus de soin et de z&le k I'exercice de 
 leur Religion : que les Chretiens n'en font paroitre i la pratique 
 
 de la leur Mais ce qui passe tout ce que nous experi- 
 
 mentons de devot entre les Chretiens : c'est que pendant le terns 
 de la pri^re, vous ne voyez pas une personne distraite de ses 
 yeux : vous n'en voyez pas une qui ne soit attachee a I'objet de 
 sa prifere : et pas une qui n'ait toute la reverence exterieure pour 
 son Createur, qu'on peut exiger de la Creature."' 
 
 Even the behaviour of the soldiery receives its meed of praise. 
 During the march of an army the inhabitants of the country, we 
 are told by the secretary to the Embassy sent by Charles II. to 
 the Sultan, had no complaints to make of being plundered or of 
 their women being maltreated. All the taverns along the line of 
 march were shut up and sealed two or three days before the arrival 
 of the army, and no wine was allowed to be sold to the soldiers 
 under pain of death.* 
 
 ' Tournefort, vol. i. p. 104. Cf. Picliler, pp. 29, 31. Spon, vol. i. p. 44- 
 ^ Turchic^ spurcitije suggillatio, fol. -xiii. (b) ; lol. xv. (b) ; fol. xvii. (b) ; 
 fol. XX. (a). Veniero, pp. 32, 36. Busbecq, p. 174. 
 * GauUier de Leslie, pp. 180, 182. 
 
 ' Rycaut, vol. i. p. 689. See also Georgieviz, pp. 53-4. and Menavino, p. 73. 
 
 L 
 
146 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Many a tribute of praise is given to the virtues of the Turks even 
 by Christian writers who bore them no love ; one such who had a 
 very poor opinion of their religion,^ speaks of them as follows : — 
 " Even in the dirt of the Alcoran you shall find some jewels 
 of Christian Virtues ; and indeed if Christians will but diligently 
 read and observe the Laws and Histories of the Mahometans, they 
 may blush to see how zealous they are in the works of devotion, 
 piety, and charity, how devout, cleanly, and reverend in their 
 Mosques, how obedient to their Priest, that even the great Turk 
 himself will attempt nothing without consulting his Mufti ; how 
 careful are they to observe their hours of prayer five times a day 
 wherever they are, or however employed ? how constantly do they 
 observe their Fasts from morning till night a whole month 
 together ; how loving and charitable the Muslemans are to each 
 other, and how careful of strangers, may be seen by their Hos- 
 pitals, both for the Poor and for Travellers ; if we observe their 
 Justice, Temperance, and other moral Vertues, we may truly 
 blush at our own coldness, both in devotion and charity, at our 
 injustice, intemperance, and oppression ; doubtless these Men 
 will rise up in judgment against us ; and surely their devotion, 
 piety, and works of mercy are main causes of the growth of 
 Mahometism." 
 
 The same conclusion is drawn by a modern historian,^ who 
 writes : — " We find that many Greeks of high talent and moral 
 character were so sensible of the superiority of the Mohammedans, 
 that even when they escaped being drafted into the Sultan's 
 household as tribute-children, they voluntarily embraced the faith 
 of Mahomet. The moral superiority of Othoman society must be 
 allowed to have had as much weight in causing these conversions, 
 which were numerous in the fifteenth century, as the personal 
 ambition of individuals." 
 
 A generation that has watched the decay of the Turkish power 
 in Europe and the successive curtailment of its territorial pos- 
 sessions, and is accustomed to hearing it spoken of as the " sick 
 man," destined to a speedy dissolution, must find it difficult to 
 
 • Alexander Ross, p. ix. ; he calls the Qur'an a "gallimaufry of Errors (» 
 Brat as_ deformed as the Parent, and as full of Heresies, as his scald head was of 
 scurf), — "ahodg podge made up of these four Ingredients, i. Of Contradic- 
 tions. 2. Of Blasphemy. 3. Of ridiculous Fables. 4. Of Lyes." 
 Fmlay, vol. v. p. 29. 
 
[MPOSING CHARACTER OF TURKISH CONQUESTS. 147 
 
 realise the feelings which the Ottoman Empire inspired in the 
 early days of its rise in Europe. The rapid and widespread 
 success of the Turkish arms filled men's minds with terror and 
 amazement. One Christian kingdom after another fell into their 
 hands : Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Hungary yielded up their 
 independence as Christian states. The proud Republic of Venice 
 saw one possession after another wrested from it, until the Lion of 
 St. Mark held sway on the shores of the Adriatic alone. Even 
 the safety of the eternal City ^ itself was menaced by the capture 
 of Otranto. Christian literature of the latter half of the fifteenth 
 and of the sixteenth centuries is full of direful forebodings of the 
 fate that threatened Christian Europe unless the victorious pro- 
 gress of the Turk was arrested ; he is represented as a scourge in 
 the hand of God for the punishment of the sins and backslidings 
 of His people, or on the other hand as the unloosed power of the 
 Devil working for the destruction of Christianity under the 
 hypocritical guise of religion. But — what is most important to 
 notice here — some men began to ask themselves, " Is it possible 
 that God would allow the Muhammadans to increase in such 
 countless numbers without good reason ? Is it conceivable that 
 so many thousands are to be damned like one man ? How can 
 such multitudes be opposed to the true faith ? since truth is 
 stronger than error and is more loved and desired by all men, it is 
 not possible for so many men to be fighting against it. How could 
 they prevail against truth, since God always helps and upholds 
 the truth ? How could their religion so marvellously increase, if 
 built upon the rotten foundation of error ? " ^ Such thoughts, we 
 are told, appealed strongly to the Christian peoples that lived 
 under the Turkish rule and with especial force to the unhappy 
 Christian captives who watched the years drag wearily on without 
 hope of release or respite firom their misery. Can we be surprised 
 when we find such an one asking himself ? " Surely if God were 
 pleased with the faith to which you have clung. He would not 
 have thus abandoned you, but would have helped you to gain 
 your freedom and return to it again. But as He has closed every 
 
 ' And the bright Crescent haunted Europe's eye, 
 Till many a Pope believed the demon Turks 
 Would scour the Vatican, ere he could die. 
 
 Lord Houghton's Poetical Works, vol. i. pp. 141-2. 
 ' Turchics spurcitia suggillatio, fol. xii. (b), xiii. (a.). 
 L 2 
 
148 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 avenue of freedom to you, perchance it is His pleasure that you 
 should leave it and join this sect and be saved therein. " 1 
 
 The Christian slave who thus describes the doubts that arose in 
 his mind as the slow-passing years brought no relief, doubtless 
 gives expression here to thoughts that suggested themselves to 
 many a hapless Christian captive with overwhelming persistency, 
 until at last he broke away from the ties of his old faith and 
 embraced Islam. Many who would have been ready to die as 
 martyrs for the Christian religion if the mythical choice between the 
 Qur'an and the sword had been offered them, felt more and more 
 strongly, after long years of captivity, the influence of Muham- 
 madan thought and practice, and humanity won converts where 
 violence would have failed.^ For though the lot of many of the 
 Christian captives was a very pitiable one, others who held 
 positions in the households of private individuals, were often no 
 worse off than domestic servants in the rest of Europe. As 
 organised by the Muhammadan Law, slavery was robbed of many 
 of its harshest features, nor in Turkey at least does it seem to 
 have been accompanied by such barbarities and atrocities as in the 
 pirate states of Northern Africa. The slaves, like other citizens, 
 had their rights, and it is even said that a slave might summon 
 his master before the Qadi for ill usage, and that if he alleged that 
 their tempers were so opposite, that it was impossible for them to 
 agree, the Qadi could oblige his master to sell him.^ The condi- 
 tion of the Christian captives naturally varied with circumstances 
 and their own capabilities of adapting themselves to a life of hard- 
 ship ; the aged, the priests and monks, and those of noble birth 
 suffered most, while the physician and the handicraftsman received 
 more considerate treatment from their masters, as being servants 
 that best repaid the money spent upon them.* The galley-slaves 
 
 ' Turchicse Spurcitiae Suggillatio, fol. xxvii. (a). 
 
 '^ " Dum corpora exterius fovendo sub pietatis specie non occidit : interius 
 fidem auferendo animas sua diabolica astutia occidere intendit. Huius rei 
 testimonium innumerabilis multitudo fidelium esse potest. Quorum multi 
 promptissimi essent pro fide Christi et suarum animarum salute in fide Christ! 
 mori : quos tamen conservando a morte corporali : et ductos in captivitatem per 
 successum temporis suo infectos veneno fidem Christi turpiter negare facit." 
 Turchicae Spurcitiae Suggillatio, fol. i. ; cf. fol. vi. (a). 
 
 ^ Menavino, p. 96. John Harris : Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, 
 vol.ii. p. 819. (London, 1764.) 
 
 ■• " Dieses muss man den Tiirken nachsagen, dass sie die Diener und Sclaven, 
 durch deren Fleiss und Bemiihung sie sich einen Nutzen schaffen konnen, sehr 
 wol und oft besser, als die Christen die ihrige, halten .... und wann ein 
 
CHRISTIAN SLAVES UNDER THE TURKS. 149 
 
 naturally suffered most of all, indeed the kindest treatment could 
 have but little relieved the hardships incident to such an occupa- 
 tion.i Further, the lot of the slaves who were state property was 
 more pitiable than that of those who had been purchased by 
 private individuals.^ As a rule they were allowed the free exercise 
 of their religion ; in the state-prisons at Constantinople, they had 
 their own priests and chapels, and the clergy were allowed to 
 administer the consolations of religion to the galley-slaves.^ The 
 number of the Christian slaves who embraced Islam was enor- 
 mous ; some few cases have been recorded of their being 
 threatened and ill-treated for the very purpose of inducing them 
 to recant, but as a rule the masters seldom forced them to 
 renounce their faith,* and put the greatest pressure upon them 
 during the first years of their captivity, after which they let them 
 alone to follow their own faith. ^ The majority of the converted 
 slaves therefore changed their religion of their own free choice ; 
 and when the Christian embassies were never sure from day to 
 day that some of their fellow-countrymen that had accompanied 
 
 Knecht in einer Kunst erfahren ist, gehet ihm nichts anders als die Freyheit ab, 
 ausser welche er alles andere hat, was ein freyer Mensch sich nur wiinschen kan." 
 G. C. von den Driesch, p. 132. 
 
 • ' Sir William Stirling-Maxwell says of these : " The poor wretches who tugged 
 at the oar on board a Turkish ship of war lived a life neither more nor less 
 miserable than the galley-slaves under the sign of the Cross. Hard work, hard 
 fare, and hard knocks were the lot of both. Ashore, a Turkish or Algerine 
 prison was, perhaps, more noisome in its filth and darkness than a prison at 
 Naples or Barcelona ; but at sea, if there were degrees of misery, the Christian 
 in Turkish chains probably had the advantage ; for in the Sultan's vessels the 
 oar-gang was often the property of the captain, and the owner's natural tenderness 
 for his own was sometimes supposed to interfere with the discharge of his duty." 
 (Vol. i. pp. 102-3.) 
 
 ' Gmelin, p. 16. 
 
 ' Id. p. 23. 
 
 ' John Harris : Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, vol. li. p. 810. 
 
 * " Die ersten Jahre sind fiir solche ungliickliche Leute am beschwehrlichsten, 
 absonderlich wenn sie noch jung, well die Turken selbige entweder mit Schmei- 
 cheln, Oder, wann dieses nichts verfangen will, mit der Scharfe zu ihren Glauben 
 zu bringen suchen ; wann aber dieser Sturm iiberwunden, wird man finden, dass 
 die Gefangenschaft nirgend ertraglicher als bey den Tiirken seye." (G. C. von den 
 Driesch, p. 132.) Moreover Georgieviz says that those who persevered in the 
 Christian faith were set free after a certain fixed period. " Si in Christiana fide 
 pcrseveraverint, statuitur certum tempus serviendi, quo elapso liberi hunt . . . . 
 Veram illis qui nostram religionem abiurarunt, nee certum tempus est serviendi, 
 nee uUum ius in patriam redeundi, spes libertatis solummodo pendet a domini 
 irbitrio " (p. 87). Similarly Menavino, p. 65. Cantacuzenos gives this period as 
 seven years : — " Grata k la compagnia che essi fanno a gli schiavi loro, percioche 
 Maumetto gli ha fra I'altre cose comandato che egli nou si possa tener in servitii 
 uno schiavo piu che sette anni. et percii nessuno o raro h colui che a tal comanda- 
 mento voglia contrafare" (p. 128), 
 
ISO THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 them to Constantinople as domestic servants, might not tum 
 Turk,i it can easily be understood that slaves who had lost all 
 hope of return to their native country, and found little in their 
 surroundings to strengthen and continue the teachings of their 
 earlier years, would yield to the influences that beset them and 
 would feel few restraints to hinder them from entering a new 
 society and a new religion. An English traveller ' of the 
 seventeenth century has said of them : " Few ever return to 
 their native country ; and fewer have the courage and constancy 
 of retaining the Christian Faith, in which they were educated ; 
 their education being but mean, and their knowledge but slight 
 in the principles and grounds of it ; whereof some are frightened 
 into Turcism by their impatience and too deep resentments of the 
 hardships of the servitude ; others are enticed by the blandish- 
 ments and flatteries of pleasure the Mahometan Law allows, and 
 the allurements they have of making their condition better and 
 more easy by a change of their Religion ; having no hope left 
 of being redeemed, they renounce their Saviour and their 
 Christianity, and soon forget their original country, and are no 
 longer looked upon as strangers, but pass for natives." 
 
 Much of course depended upon the individual character of the 
 different Christian slaves themselves. The anonymous writer, so 
 often quoted above, whose long captivity made him so competent 
 to speak on their condition, divides them into three classes : — 
 first, those who passed their days in all simplicity, not caring to 
 trouble themselves to learn anything about the religion of their 
 masters ; for them it was enough to know that the Turks were 
 infidels, and so, as far as their captive condition and their yoke of 
 slavery allowed, they avoided having anything to do with them 
 and their religious worship, fearing lest they should be led astray 
 by their errors, and striving to observe the Christian faith as far 
 as their knowledge and power went. The second class consisted 
 
 1 "Fromme Christen, die nach der Tiirkei oder in andere muhamedanische 
 Lander kamen, hatten Aniass genug zur Trauer iiber die Haufigkeit des Abfalls 
 ihrer Glaubensgenossen, und besonders die Schriften der Ordensgeistlichen sind 
 vol! von solchen Klagen. Bei den Sclaven konnte sich immer noch ein GefUhl 
 des Mitleids dem der Missbilligung beiniischen, aber oft genug musste man die 
 bittersten Erfahrungen auch an freien Landsleuten machen. Die christlichen 
 Gesandten waren keinen Tag sicher, ob ihnen nicht Leute von ihrem Gefolge 
 davoniliefen, und man that gut daran, den Tag nicht vor dem Abend zu loben." 
 (Gmelin, p. 22.) Of. Von den Driesch, p. 161. 
 
 2 Thomas '^mi'tb. vv 144-S 
 
CHRISTIAN SLAVES UNDER THE TURKS. 151 
 
 of those whose curiosity led them to study and investigate the 
 doings of the Turks : if, by the help of God, they had time enough 
 to dive into their secrets, and understanding enough for the 
 investigation of them and light of reason to find the interpretation 
 thereof, they not only came out of the trial unscathed, but had 
 their own faith strengthened. The third class includes those 
 who, examining the Muslim religion without due caution, fail to 
 dive into its depths and find the interpretation of it and so are 
 deceived ; believing the errors of the Turks to be the truth, they 
 lose their own faith and embrace the false religion of the 
 Mushms, hereby not only compassing their own destruction, but 
 setting a bad example to others : of such men the number is 
 infinite.^ 
 
 Conversion to Islam did not, as some writers have affirmed, 
 release the slave from his captivity and make him a free man,' 
 for emancipation was solely at the discretion of the master ; who 
 indeed often promised to set any slave free, without the payment 
 of ransom, if only he would embrace Islam ^ ; but, on the other 
 hand, would also freely emancipate the Christian slave, even 
 though he had persevered in his religion, provided he had proved 
 himself a faithful servant, and would make provision for his old 
 age.* 
 
 There were many others who, like the Christian slaves 
 separated from early surroundings and associations, found them- 
 selves cut loose from old ties and thrown into the midst of a 
 society animated by social and religious ideals of an entirely novel 
 character. The crowds of Christian workmen that came wan- 
 dering from the conquered countries in the fifteenth century to 
 Adrianople and other Turkish cities in search of employment, 
 were easily persuaded to settle there and adopt the faith of Islam. ^ 
 Similarly the Christian families that Muhammad II. transported 
 from conquered provinces in Europe into Asia Minor,* may well 
 have become merged into the mass of the Muslim population by 
 almost imperceptible degrees, as was the case with the Armenians 
 carried away into Persia by Shah 'Abbas I. (1587-1629), most of 
 
 ' Turchicae spurcitiae suggillatio, fol. xxxv. (a). 
 
 ' M. d'Ohsson, vol. iii. p. 133. Georgieviz, p. 87 (quoted above). Menavino, 
 
 P-9S- 
 ' Von den Driesch, p. 250. * Von den Driesch, p. 131-2. 
 
 ■ TurchicjE Spurcitiae Suggillatio, fol. li. • Hertzberg, p. 621. 
 
152 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 whom appear to have passed over to Islam in the second 
 generation.! 
 
 In the following pages it is proposed to give a more detailed 
 and particular account of the spread of Islam among the Christian 
 populations of Albania, Servia, Bosnia and Crete, as the history 
 of each of these countries after its conquest by the Ottomans 
 presents some special features of interest in the history of the 
 propagation of Islam. 
 
 The Albanians, with the exception of some settlements in 
 Greece,^ inhabit the mountainous country that stretches along 
 the east shore of the Adriatic from Montenegro to the Gulf of 
 Arta. They form one of the oldest and purest-blooded races in 
 Europe and belong to the Pelasgic branch of the Aryan stock. 
 Their country was first conquered by Bayazid I. in the early part 
 of the fifteenth century. For a short time it regained its inde- 
 pendence under George Castriot, who is better known under his 
 Muhammadan name of Scanderbeg or Sikandarbeg. When a 
 boy he had been surrendered, together with his three brothers, 
 by his father, the despot of Epirus, as a hostage for the payment 
 of the tribute imposed by the Turks. He was circumcised and 
 brought up as a Muslim under the especial favour of the Sultan, 
 who made him commander of 5000 Turkish horse. On the death 
 of his father, his brothers were put to death and the principality 
 seized by the Sultan, who thought that he had bound Sikandar 
 securely to himself, but thirsting for revenge, the young Albanian 
 threw off his allegiance to Islam, and for twenty-three years 
 maintained a vigorous and successful resistance to the Turkish 
 armies. After the death of Sikandarbeg in 1467, the Turks 
 began again to take possession of Albania. Kroia, the capital 
 of the Castriot dynasty, fell into their hands eleven years later, 
 and from this date there appears to have been no organised 
 resistance of the whole country, though revolts were frequent and 
 the subjection of the country was never complete. Some of the 
 sea-port towns held out much longer ; Durazzo was captured in 
 1501, while Antivari, the northernmost point of the sea-coast of 
 Albania, did not surrender until 1571. The terms of capitulation 
 
 ' " The old People dying, the young ones generally turn Mahumetans : so that 
 now (1655) you can hardly meet with two Christian Armenians in all those fair 
 Piams, which their fathers were sent to manure." Tavemier (i). p. 16. 
 
 ' For a list of these, see Finlay, vol. vi. pp. 28-9. 
 
ALBANIA. 153 
 
 were that the city should retain its old laws and magistrature, 
 that there should be free and public exercise of the Christian 
 religion, that the churches and chapels should remain uninjured 
 and might be rebuilt if they fell into decay ; that the citizens 
 should retain all their movable and immovable property and 
 should not be burdened by any additional taxation. 
 
 The Albanians under Turkish rule appear always to have 
 maintained a kind of semi- autonomy, and the several tribes and 
 clans remained as essentially independent as they were before the 
 conquest. Though vassals of the Sultan, they would not brook 
 the interference of Turkish officials in their internal administra- 
 tion, and there is reason to believe that the Turkish Government 
 has never been able to appoint or confirm any provincial 
 governor who was not a native of Albania, and had not already 
 established his influence by his arms, policy or connections.^ 
 Their racial pride is intense, and to the present day the 
 Albanian, if asked what he is, will call himself a Skipetar,' before 
 saying whether he is a Christian or a Muhammadan — a very 
 remarkable instance of national feeling obliterating the fierce dis- 
 tinction between these two religions that so forcibly obtrudes 
 itself in the rest of the Ottoman empire. The Christian and 
 Muhammadan Albanians alike, just as they speak the same 
 language, so do they cherish the same traditions, and observe 
 the same manners and customs ; and pride in their common 
 nationality has been too strong a bond to allow differences of 
 religious belief to split the nation into separate communities on 
 this basis.' Side by side they serve in the irregular troops, that 
 soon after the Turkish conquest became the main dependence of 
 the government in all its internal administration, and both 
 :lasses have found the same ready employment in the service of 
 
 ' Leake, p. 250. 
 
 ^ The name by which the Albanians always call themselves, lit. rock-dwellers. 
 
 ' One of themselves, an Albanian Christian, speaking of the enmity existinp 
 Jetween the Christians and Muhammadans of Bulgaria, says : " Aber fiir Albanien 
 iegen die Sachen ganz anders. Die Muselmanner Albaniens sind Albanesen, 
 vie die Christen ; sie sprechen dieselbe Sprache, sie haben dieselben Sitten, sie 
 olgen denselben Gebrauchen, sic haben dieselben Traditionen ; sie und die 
 -hristen haben sich niemals gehasst, zwischen ihnen herrscht koine Jahrhunderte 
 Ite Feindschaft. Der Unterschied der Religion war niemals ein zu einer 
 ystematischen Trennung treibendes Motiv ; Muselmanner und Christen haben 
 lets, mit wenigen Ausnahmen, auf gleichem Fusse gelebt, sich der gleichen 
 techte erfreuend, dieselben Pflichten erfiillend." (Wassa Effendi: Albanien 
 nti die Albanesen, p. 59). (Berlin, 1879.) 
 
1 54 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the local pashas, being accounted the bravest soldiers in the 
 empire. Christian Albanians served in the Ottoman army in 
 the Crimean War,i and though they have perhaps been a little 
 more quiet and agricultural than their Muslim fellow-countrymen, 
 still the difference has been small : they have always retained 
 their arms and military habits, have always displayed the same 
 fierce, proud, untamable spirit, and been animated with the same 
 intense national feeling as their brethren who had embraced the 
 creed of the Prophet.' 
 
 The consideration of these facts is of importance in tracing the 
 spread of Islam in Albania, for it appears to have been propagated 
 very gradually by the people of the country themselves, and not 
 under pressure of foreign influences. The details that we possess 
 of this movement are very meagre, as the history of Albania 
 from the close of the fifteenth century to the rise of 'Ali Pasha 
 three hundred years later, is almost a blank ; what knowledge we 
 have, therefore, of the slow but continuous accession of converts 
 to Islam during this period, is derived from the ecclesiastical 
 chronicles of the various dioceses,^ and the reports sent in from 
 time to time to the Pope and the Society de Propaganda Fide.* 
 But it goes without saying that the very nature of these sources 
 gives the information derived from them the stamp of imper- 
 fection, — especially in the matter of the motives assigned for 
 conversion. For an ecclesiastic of those times to have even 
 entertained the possibility of a conversion to Islam from genuine 
 conviction — much less have openly expressed such an opinion in 
 writing to his superiors — is well-nigh inconceivable. 
 
 During the sixteenth century, Islam appears to have made but 
 little progress, though the tide of conversion had already set in. 
 In 1610 the Christian population exceeded the Muhammadan in 
 the proportion of ten to one,^ and as most of the villages were 
 inhabited by Christians, with a very small admixture of Muham- 
 
 ' Finlay, vol. v. p. 46. 
 
 ' Clark, pp. 175-7. The Mirdites who are very fanatical Roman Catholics (in 
 the diocese of Alessio) will not suffer a Muhammadan to live in their mountains, 
 and no member of their tribe has ever abjured his faith ; were any Mirdite to 
 attempt to do so, he would certainly be put to death, unless he succeeded in 
 making good his escape from Albania. Hecquard : Histoire de la Haute 
 Albanie, p. 224. 
 
 ' Published in Farlati's Illyricum Sacrum. 
 
 ■* Alessandro Comuleo, 1593. Bizzi, 1610. Marco Crisio, 1651. Fra Bona- 
 Ventura di S. Antonio, 1652. Zmaievich, 1703. " Biizi, fol. 60, b. 
 
ALBANIA. 155 
 
 madans,' the conversions appear to have been more frequent in 
 the large towns. In Antivari, for example, while many Christians 
 elected to emigrate into the neighbouring Christian countries, 
 the majority of those who remained, both high-born and low, 
 went over gradually to the Muslim faith, so that the Christian 
 population grew less and less day by day.^ As the number of 
 accessions to Islam increased, churches were converted into 
 mosques — a measure which, though contrary to the terms of the 
 capitulation, seems justified by the change in the religion of the 
 people.' In 16 10 two collegiate churches only remained in the 
 hands of the Latin Christians, but these appeared to have sufficed 
 for the needs of the community * ; what this amounted to can 
 only roughly be guessed from the words of Marco Bizzi, " There 
 are about 600 houses inhabited indiscriminately by Muhammadans 
 and Christians — both Latin and Schismatics (i.e. of the Orthodox 
 Greek Church) : the number of the Muhammadans is a little in 
 excess of the Christians, and that of the Latins in excess of the 
 Schismatics." 
 
 In the accounts we have of the social relations between the 
 Christians and the Muslims, and in the absence of any sharp line 
 of demarcation between the two communities, we find some clue 
 to the manner in which Muhammadan influences gradually 
 gained converts from among the Christian population in pro- 
 portion as the vigour and the spiritual life of the church declined. 
 
 It had become very common for Christian parents to give their 
 daughters in marriage to Muhammadans, and for Christian 
 women to make no objection to such unions.^ The male children 
 born of these mixed marriages were brought up as Musalmans, 
 but the girls were allowed to follow the religion of their mother.* 
 
 ' Bizzi, fol. 35, a. ^ Farlati, vol. vii. pp. 104., 107. 
 
 ' It is also complained that the Archbishop's palace was appropriated by the 
 Muhammadans, but it had been left unoccupied for eight years as Archbishop 
 Ambrosius (flor. 1579-1598) had found it prudent to go into exile, having attacked 
 Islam " with more fervour than caution, inveighing against Muhammad ard 
 damning his Satanic doctrines." (Farlati, vol. vii. p. 107.) 
 
 ' Bizzi, fol. 9, where he says, "E comunicai quella mattina quasi tutta la 
 Christianiti latina." From a comparison with statistics given by Zmaievich 
 (fol. 227) I would hazard the conjecture that the Latin Christian community at 
 this time amounted to rather over a thousand souls. 
 
 ' B^zzi, fol. 27 b ; 38 b. , . ,^ . 
 
 • Veniero, fol. 34. This was also the custom in some villages of Albania, as 
 late as the beginning of the present century, see W. M. Leake : Travels in 
 Northern Greece, vol. i. p. 49- (London, 1835) :— " In some villages 
 Mahometans are married to Greek women, the sons are educated as Turks, and 
 the daughters as Christians ; and pork and mutton are eaten at the same table." 
 
iS6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Such permission was rendered practically ineffective by the action 
 of the Christian ecclesiastics who ordered the mothers to bo 
 excluded from the churches and from participation in the sacra- 
 ments,^ and consequently (though the parish priests often dis- 
 regarded the commands of their superiors) many of these women 
 embraced the faith of their husbands. But even then they kept 
 up a superstitious observance of the rite of baptism, which was 
 supposed to be a sovereign specific against leprosy, witches and 
 wolves,^ and Christian priests were found ready to pander to this 
 superstition for any Muhammadan woman who wished to have 
 her children baptised.^ This good feeling between the members 
 of the two religions * is similarly illustrated by the attendance of 
 Muhammadans at the festivals of Christian saints ; e.g. Marco 
 Bizzi says that on the feast-day of St. Elias (for whom the 
 Albanians appear to have had a special devotion) there were as 
 many Muhammadans present in the church as Christians.^ Even 
 to the present day we are told that Albanian Muhammadans 
 revere the Virgin Mary and the Christian saints, and make 
 pilgrimages to their shrines, while Christians on the other hand 
 resort to the tombs of Muslim saints for the cure of ailments or 
 in fulfilment of vows.^ In the town of Calevacci, where there 
 were sixty Christian and ten Muhammadan households, the 
 followers of the Prophet contributed towards the support of the 
 parish priest, as the majority of them had Christian wives.' 
 Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising to learn that 
 many openly professed Islam, while satisfying their consciences 
 by saying that they professed Christianity in their hearts.* 
 Marco Bizzi has three explanations to offer for such a lapse, — the 
 attraction of worldly advantage, the desire to avoid the payment 
 of tribute, and the want of a sufficiently large number of intelli- 
 
 • Bizzi, fol. 38, b. Farlati, torn. vii. p. 158. 
 ^ Bizzi, fol. 10, b. Veniero, fol. 34. 
 
 ' Shortly after Marco Bizzi's arrival at Anlivari a Muhammadan lady of high 
 rank wished to have her child baptised by the Archbishop himself, who tells us 
 that she complained bitterly to one of the leading Christians of the city that "io 
 non mi fossi degnato di far a lei questo piacere, il qual quotidianamente vien fatto 
 dai miei preti a richiesta di qualsivoglia plebeo " (fol. 10, b). 
 
 * For modern instances of the harmonious relations subsisting between the 
 followers of the two faiths living together in the same village, see Hyacinthe 
 Hecquard: Histoire et description de la Haute Albanie (pp. 153, 162, 200). 
 (Paris. 1858.) 
 
 'Bizzi, fol. 38, a. « Garnett, p. 267. 
 
 ' Bizzi, fol. 36, b. « Id. fol. 38, b. ; 37, a. 
 
ALBANIA. 157 
 
 gent clergy to supply the spiritual needs of the country.^ Con- 
 versions are frequently ascribed to the pressure of the burden of 
 taxation imposed upon the Christians, and whole villages are said 
 to have apostatised to avoid payment of the tribute. As no 
 details are given, it is impossible to judge whether there was 
 really sufficient ground for the complaint, or whether this was 
 not the apology for their conduct alleged by the renegades in order 
 to make some kind of excuse to their former co-religionists, — or 
 indeed an exaggeration on the part of ecclesiastics to whom a 
 genuine conversion to Islam on rational grounds seemed an 
 absolute impossibility. A century later (in 1703) the capitation - 
 tax was six reals a head for each male and this (with the exception 
 of a tax, termed sciataraccio, of three reals a year) was the only 
 burden imposed on the Christians exclusively.'' Men must 
 have had very little attachment to their religion to abandon 
 it merely in order to be quit of so slight a penalty, and with no 
 other motive ; and the very existence of so large a body of 
 Christians in Albania at the present time shows that the burden 
 could not have been so heavy as to force them into apostacy 
 without any other alternative. 
 
 If only we had something more than vague general complaints 
 against the " Turkish tyranny," we should be better able to 
 determine how far this could have had such a preponderating 
 influence as is ascribed to it : but the evidence alleged seems 
 hardly to warrant such a conclusion. The vicious practice 
 followed by the Ottoman Court of selling posts in the provinces 
 to the highest bidder and the uncertainty of the tenure of 
 such posts, often resulted in the occupants trying to amass 
 as large a fortune as possible by extortions of every kind. 
 But such burdens are said to have weighed as heavily on 
 Muhammadans as Christians.^ Though certainly an avaricious 
 and unjust official may have found it easier to oppress th 
 Christians than the Muslims, especially when the former wee 
 convicted of treasonable correspondence with the Venetiar' 
 and other Christian states and were suspected of a wish ^n 
 revolt. 
 
 ar per 
 
 ' Bizzi, fol. 38, b ; 61, a ; 37, a i 33, b. .^^^^"/^ 
 
 Zmaievich, fol. 5. The Venetian real in the eighteenth century wr 
 a Turkish piaiitre. (Businello, p. 94.) 
 ^ Bizzi fol. 12-13. Zmaievich, fol. 5. '^J' ^' 
 
iS8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 However this may have been, there can be little doubt of the 
 influence exerted by the zealous activity and vigorous life of 
 Islam in the face of the apathetic and ignorant Christian clergy. 
 If Islam in Albania had many such exponents as the Mulla, whose 
 sincerity, courtesy and friendliness are praised by Marco Bizzi, 
 with whom he used to discuss religious questions, it may well 
 have made its way.i The majority of the Christian clergy appear 
 to have been wholly unlettered : most of them, though they could 
 read a little, did not know how to write, and were so ignorant of 
 the duties of their sacred calling that they could not even repeat 
 the formula of absolution by heart ^ ; though they had to recite 
 the mass and other services in Latin, there were very few who 
 could understand any of it, as they were ignorant of any language 
 but their mother tongue, and they had only a vague, traditionary 
 knowledge of the truths of their religion.^ Marco Bizzi considered 
 the inadequate episcopate of the country responsible for these 
 evils, as for the small numbers of the clergy, and their ignorance 
 of their sacred calling, and for the large number of Christians 
 who grew old and even died without being confirmed and 
 apostatised almost everywhere * ; and unless this were remedied 
 he prophesied a rapid decay of Christianity in the country.' 
 Several priests were also accused of keeping concubines, and of 
 drunkenness.* 
 
 It may here be observed that the Albanian priests were not the 
 repositaries of the national aspirations and ideals, as were the 
 clergy of the Orthodox Church in other provinces of the Turkish 
 Empire, who in spite of their ignorance kept alive among their 
 people that devotion to the Christian faith which formed the 
 nucleus of the national life of the Greeks.'^ On the contrary, 
 the Albanians cherished a national feeling that was quite apart 
 "^from religious belief, and with regard to the Turks, con- 
 idered, in true feudal spirit, that as they were the masters of 
 
 ' Bizzi, fol. lo-ii. 2 Id. fol. 31, b. » Id. fol. 60, b. 
 
 rani Id. fol. 33, b. " Qui deriva il puoco numero de Sacerdoti in quelle parti e 
 that moca loro intelligenza in quel mestiero ; il gran numero de Christiani, che 
 non nxhiano, et anco morono senza il sacramento della Confermatione et apostatano 
 dai mit'ede quasi per tutto." 
 
 ' For'e I'Albania non ricevera qualche maggior agiuto in meno di anni anderi a 
 followers asi tutta quella Christianitsk per il puoco numero del Vescovi e dei 
 Hecquard.di qualche intelligenza. " Id. fol. 61, a. 
 (Paris. 1851. 36, a. Id. fol. 64, b. 
 
 ■'Bizzi, foivol. V. pp. 153-4. Clark, p. 290. 
 
 ? Bizzi, fol. 
 
ALBANIA. 159 
 
 the country they ought to be obeyed whatever commands they 
 gave.i 
 
 There is a curious story of conversion which is said to have 
 taken place owing to a want of amicable relations between a 
 Christian priest and his people, as follows : " Many years since, 
 when all the country was Christian, there stood in the city of 
 Scutari a beautiful image of the Virgin Mary, to whose shrine 
 thousands flocked every year from all parts of the country to 
 offer their gifts, perform their devotions, and be healed of their 
 infirmities. 
 
 " For some cause or other, however, it fell out that there was 
 dissension between the priest and the people, and one day the 
 latter came to the church in great crowds, declaring that unless 
 the priest yielded to them they would then and there abjure the 
 faith of Christ and embrace in its stead that of Muhammad. The 
 priest, whether right or wrong, still remaining firm, his congrega- 
 tion tore the rosaries and crosses from their necks, trampled them 
 under their feet, and, going to the nearest mosque, were received 
 by the Mollah into the fold of the True Believers." ^ 
 
 Through the negligence and apathy of the Christian clergy 
 many abuses and irregularities had been allowed to creep into the 
 Christian society ; in one of which, namely the practice of con- 
 tracting marriages without the sanction of the Church or any 
 rehgious ceremony, we find an approximation to the Muhamma- 
 dan law, which makes marriage a civil contract. In order to 
 remedy this evil, the husband and wife were to be excluded from 
 the church, until they had conformed to the ecclesiastical law and 
 gone through the service in the regular manner.^ 
 
 In the course of the seventeenth century, the social conditions 
 and other factors indicated above, bore fruit abundantly, and the 
 numbers of the Christian population began rapidly to decline. 
 In 1624 there were only two thousand Catholics in the whole 
 diocese of Antivari, and in the city itself only one church ; at the 
 close of the century, even this church was no longer used for 
 Christian worship, as there were only two families of Roman 
 
 ' " E quel miseri hanno fermata la conscientia in creder di non peccar per 
 simil coniuntioni (i.e. the giving of Christian girls in marriage to Muhammadans) 
 per esser i turchi signori del paese, e che peri> non si possa, n^ devea far altro 
 Che obbedirli quando comandano qualsivoglia cosa." (Bizzi, fol. 38, b.) 
 
 ' Gamett, p. 268. " Bizzi, fol. 38, b ; 6j, a. 
 
i6o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Catholics left.i In the whole country generally, the majority ot 
 the Christian community in 1651 was composed of women, as the 
 male population had apostatised in such large numbers to Islam.' 
 Matters were still worse at the close of the century, the Catholics 
 being then fewer in number than the Muhammadans, the propor- 
 tions being about I to i^,^ whereas less than a hundred years before, 
 they had outnumbered the Muhammadans in the proportion of 
 10 to I ; * in the Archbishopric of Durazzo the Christian population 
 had decreased by about half in twenty years, ^ in another town (in 
 the diocese of Kroia) the entire population passed from Christianity 
 to Islam in the course of thirty years.' In spite of the frequent 
 protests and regulations made by their ecclesiastical superiors, the 
 parish priests continued to countenance the open profession of 
 Islam along with a secret adherence to Christianity, on the part 
 of many male members of their flocks, by administering to them 
 the Blessed Sacrament ; the result of which was that the children 
 of such persons, being brought up as Muhammadans, were for 
 ever lost to the Christian church.^ Similarly, Christian parents 
 still gave their daughters in marriage to Muhammadans, the 
 parish priests countenancing such unions by administering the 
 sacrament to such women,^ in spite of the fulminations of the 
 higher clergy against such indulgence.' Such action on the part 
 of the lower clergy can hardly however be taken as indicating 
 any great zeal on behalf of the spiritual welfare of their flocks, in 
 the face of the accusations brought against them ; the majority of 
 them are accused of being scandalous livers, who very seldom 
 went to confession and held drunken revels in their parsonages 
 on festival days ; they sold the property of the Church, frequently 
 absented themselves from their parishes, and when censured, 
 succeeded in getting off by putting themselves under the protec- 
 tion of the Turks.^" The Reformed Franciscans and the Obser- 
 vants who had been sent to minister to the spiritual wants of the 
 people did nothing but quarrel and go to law with one another; 
 much to the scandal of the laity and the neglect of the mission." 
 
 ' Farl.iti. torn. vii. pp. 124, 141. - Marco Crisio, p. 202. 
 
 ■' Zmaievich, fol. 227. ■* Bizzi, fol. 60, b. 
 
 ^ Zmaievich, fol. 137. « Zmaievich, fol. 157. 
 
 ■ Zmaievich, fol. II, 159. * Zmaievich, fol. 13. 
 
 » Bizzi, fol. 38, b. Farlati, vol. vii. p. 158. '" Zmaievich, fol. 13-14. 
 
 " Informatione circa la missione d'Albania, fol. 196. 
 
ALBANIA. 
 
 i6i 
 
 In the middle of the seventeenth century five out of the twelve 
 Albanian sees were vacant ; the diocese of Pullati had not been 
 visited by a bishop for thirty years, and there were only two 
 priests to 6348 souls.i In some parishes in the interior of the 
 country, there had been no priests for more than forty years ; and 
 this was in no way due to the oppression of the " Turkish tyrant," 
 for when at last four Franciscan missionaries were sent, they 
 reported that they could go through the country and exercise 
 their sacred office without any hindrance whatever.!' The bishop 
 of Sappa, to the great prejudice of his diocese, had been long 
 resident in Venice, where he is said to have lived a vicious life, 
 and had appointed as his vicar an ignorant priest who was a 
 notorious evil-liver : this man had 12,400 souls under his charge, 
 and, says the ecclesiastical visitor, " through the absence of the 
 bishop there is danger of his losing his own soul and compassing 
 the destruction of the souls under him and of the property of 
 the Church." 3 The bishop of Scutari was looked upon as a 
 tyrant by his clergy and people, and only succeeded in keeping 
 his post through the aid of the Turks* ; and Zmaievich complains of 
 the bishops generally that they burdened the parishes in their 
 diocese with forced contributions.^ It appears that Christian 
 ecclesiastics were authorised by the Sultan to levy contributions 
 on their flocks. Thus the Archbishop of Antivari (1599-1607) 
 was allowed to " exact and receive " two aspers from each 
 Christian family, twelve for every first marriage (and double the 
 amount for a second, and quadruple for a third marriage), and 
 one gold piece from each parish annually, and it seems to have 
 been possible to obtain the assistance of the Turkish authorities 
 in levying these contributions.^ 
 
 Throughout the whole of Albania there was not a single 
 Christian school,'^ and the priests were profoundly ignorant : some 
 were sent to study in Italy, but Marco Crisio condemns this prac- 
 tice, as such priests were in danger of finding life in Italy so 
 pleasant that they refused to return to their native country. 
 With a priesthood so ignorant and so careless of their sacred duties, 
 it is not surprising to learn that the common people had no know- 
 
 ' Crisio, fol. 204. 
 ' Marco Crisio, fol. 202, 
 [ Zmaievich, fol. 13. 
 ' Marco Crisio, fol. 205. 
 
 205. 
 
 '' Fra Bonaventura, fol. 201. 
 ■* Id. fol. 205. 
 
 * Farlati. Tom. vii. p. 109. 
 Bizzi, fol. 19, b. 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 ledge even of the rudiments of their faith, and that numerous 
 abuses and corruptions sprang up among them, which " wrought 
 the utmost desolation to this vineyard of the Lord."i Many 
 Christians lived in open concubinage for years, still however 
 being admitted to the sacraments,^ while others had a plurality of 
 wives.^ In this latter practice we notice an assimilation between 
 the habits of the two communities — the Christian and the Muslim 
 — which is further illustrated by the admission of Muhammadans 
 as sponsors at the baptism of Christian children, while the old 
 superstitious custom of baptising Muhammadan children was still 
 sanctioned by the priests.* 
 
 Such being the state of the Christian Church in Albania in 
 the latter half of the seventeenth century, some very trifling 
 incentive would have been enough to bring about a widespread 
 apostacy; and the punishment inflicted on the rebellious Catholics 
 in the latter half of the century was a determining factor more 
 than suflttcient to consummate the tendencies that had been 
 drawing them towards Islam and to cause large numbers of them 
 to fall away from the Christian Church. The rebellious move- 
 ment referred to seems to have been instigated by George, the 
 thirty-ninth Archbishop of Antivari (1635 -1644), who through 
 the bishops of Durazzo, Scodra and Alessio tried to induce the 
 leaders of the Christian community to conspire against the Turkish 
 rule and hand over the country to the neighbouring Christian 
 power, the Republic of Venice. As in his time Venice was at 
 peace with the Turks a fitting opportunity for the hatching of 
 this plot did not occur, but in 1645 war broke out between 
 Turkey and the Republic, and the Venetians made an unsuccess- 
 ful attempt to capture the city of Antivari, which before the 
 Turkish conquest had been in their possession for more than 
 three centuries (1262-1571). The Albanian Catholics who had 
 sided with the enemy and secretly given them assistance were 
 severely punished and deprived of their privileges, while the 
 Greek Christians (who had everything to fear in the event of the 
 restoration of the Venetian rule and had remained faithful to the 
 Turkish government) were liberally rewarded and were lauded 
 as the saviours of their country. Many of the Catholics either 
 
 ' Zmaievich, fol. 11. ' Zmaievich, fol. 32. 
 
 ' Crisio, fol. 204. ■• Zmaievich, fol. 11. Farlati, vol. vii. p. 151. 
 
ALBANIA. 163 
 
 became Muhammadans or joined the Greek Church. The latter 
 fact is very significant as showing that there was no persecution 
 of the Christians as suc/i, nor any attempt to force the acceptance 
 of Islam upon them. The Catholics who became Muhammadans, 
 did so to avoid the odium of their position after the failure of 
 their plot, and could have gained the same end and have at the 
 same time retained their Christian faith by joining the Greek 
 Church, which was not only officially recognised by the Turkish 
 government but in high favour in Antivari at this time : so that 
 those who neglected to do so, could have had very little attach- 
 ment to the Christian religion. The same remark holds good of 
 the numerous conversions to Islam in the succeeding years : 
 Zmaievich attributes them in some cases to the desire to avoid 
 the payment of tribute, but, from what has been said above, it is 
 very unlikely that this was the sole determining motive. 
 
 In 1649 a still more widespread insurrection broke out, an 
 Archbishop of Antivari, Joseph Maria Bonaldo (1646-1654), being 
 again the main instigator of the movement ; and the leading 
 citizens of Antivari, Scodra and other towns conspired to throw 
 open their gates to the army of the Venetian Republic. But this 
 plot also failed and the insurrection was forcibly crushed by the 
 Turkish troops, aided by the dissensions that arose among the 
 Christians themselves. Many Albanians whose influence was 
 feared were transported from their own country into the interior 
 of the Turkish dominions ; a body of 3000 men crossed the border 
 into Venetian territory ; those who remained were overawed by 
 the erection of fortresses and the marching of troops through the 
 disaffected districts, while heavy fines were imposed upon the 
 malcontents.i 
 
 Unfortunately the Christian writers who complain of the "un- 
 just tributes and vexations " with which the Turks oppressed the 
 Albanians, so that they apostatised to Islam,^ make use only of 
 general expressions, and give us no details to enable us to judge' 
 whether or not such complaints were justified by the facts. 
 Zmaievich prefaces his account of the apostacy of two thousand 
 persons with an enumeration of the taxes and other burdens the 
 Christians had to bear, but all these, he says, were common also 
 
 ' Farlati, vol. vii. pp. 126-132. Zmaievich, fol. 4-5, fol. 20. 
 ' "Plerique, ut se iniquis tributis et vexationibus eximerent, paullatim a 
 Christiana religione deficere coeperunt." (Farlati. Tom. vii. p. 131.) 
 
 M 2 
 
1 64 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to the Muhammadans, with the exception of the capitation-tax of 
 six reals a year for each male, and another tax, termed sciataraccio, 
 of three reals a year.i He concludes with the words : " The 
 nation, wounded by these taxes in its weakest part, namely, 
 worldly interest, to the consideration of which it has a singular 
 leaning either by nature or by necessity, has given just cause for 
 lamenting the deplorable loss of about 2000 souls who apostatised 
 from the true faith so as not to be subject to the tribute." ^ There 
 is nothing in his report to show that the taxes the Catholics had 
 to pay, constituted so intolerable a burden as to force them to 
 renounce their creed, and though he attributes many conversions 
 to Islam to the desire of escaping the tribute, he says expressly 
 that these apostacies from the Christian faith are mainly to be 
 ascribed to the extreme ignorance of the clergy ,8 in great measure 
 also to their practice of admitting to the sacraments those who 
 openly professed Islam while in secret adhering to the Christian 
 faith * : in another place he says, speaking of the clergy who were 
 not fit to be parish priests and their practice of administering the 
 sacraments to apostates and secret Christians, " these are precisely 
 the two causes from which have come all the losses that the 
 Christian Church has sustained in Albania." ' There is very little 
 doubt but that the widespread apostacy at this time was the 
 result of a long series of influences similar to those mentioned in 
 the preceding pages, and that the deliverance from the payment 
 of the tribute was the last link in the chain. 
 
 What active efforts Muhammadans themselves were making to 
 gain over the Christians to Islam, we can hardly expect to learn 
 from the report of an ecclesiastical visitor. But we find mention 
 of a district, the inhabitants of which, from their intercourse with 
 the Turks, had "contracted the vices of these infidels," and one of 
 the chief causes of their falling away from the Christian faith was 
 their contracting marriages with Turkish women.' There were 
 no doubt strong Muhammadan influences at work here, as also in 
 the two parishes of Biscascia and Basia, whose joint population 
 of nearly a thousand souls was " exposed to the obvious risk of 
 apostatising through lack of any pastor," and were " much tempted 
 
 ' Zmaievich, fol. 5. '' Id. fol. 5. 
 
 3 Id. fol. IS, 197. 4 Id. fol'. I'l. 
 
 ' Id. fol. 137. » Id. fol. 149. 
 
ALBANIA. 1 6s 
 
 in their faith, and needed to be strengthened in it by wise and 
 zealous pastors." i 
 
 Zmaievich speaks of one of the old noble Christian families in 
 the neighbourhood of Antivari which was represented at that 
 time by two brothers ; the elder of these had been "wheedled " 
 by the prominent Muhammadans of the place, who were closely 
 related to him, into denying his faith ; the younger wished to 
 study for the priesthood, in which office "he would be of much 
 assistance to the Christian church through the high esteem in 
 which the Turks held his family ; which though poor was 
 universally respected." ^ This indeed is another indication of 
 the fact that the Muhammadans did not ill-treat the Christians, 
 merely as such, but only when they showed themselves to be 
 politically disaffected. Zmaievich, who was himself an Albanian, 
 and took up his residence in his diocese instead of in Venetian 
 territory, as many of the Archbishops of Antivari seem to have 
 done,' was received with " extraordinary honours " and with 
 "marvellous courtesy," not only by the Turkish officials generally, 
 but also by the Supreme Pasha of Albania himself, who gave him 
 the place of honour in his Divan, always accompanying him to 
 the door on his departure and receiving him there on his arrival.* 
 This " barbarian " who " showed himself more like a generous- 
 hearted Christian than a Turk," gave more substantial marks of 
 good feeling towards the Christians by remitting — at the Arch- 
 bishop's request — the tribute due for the ensuing year from four 
 separate towns. ^ If any of the Christian clergy were roughly 
 treated by the Turks, it seems generally to have been due to the 
 suspicion of treasonable correspondence with the enemies of the 
 Turks ; ecclesiastical visits to Italy seem also to have excited — 
 and in many cases, justly, — such suspicions. Otherwise the 
 Christian clergy seem to have had no reason to complain of 
 the treatment they received from the Muslims ; Zmaievich even 
 speaks of one parish priest being " much beloved by the principal 
 Turks," 6 and doubtless there were parallels in Albania to the 
 case of a priest in the diocese of Trebinje in Herzegovina, who in 
 the early part of the eighteenth century was suspected, on 
 account of his familiar intercourse with Muhammadans, of having 
 
 ' Zmaievich, fol. 143-4. ' I<^- f°'- ^'^• 
 
 ' Farlati. Tom. vii. p 141. * Zmaievich, fol. 7, 17. 
 
 * Id. fol. 9. " Id. fol. 141. 
 
1 66 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 formed an intention to embrace Islam, and was accordingly sent 
 by his bishop to Rome under safe custody .^ 
 
 The kingdom of Servia first paid tribute to the Ottomans in 
 1375 and lost its independence after the disastrous defeat of 
 Kossovo (1389), where both the king of Servia and the Turkish 
 sultan were left dead upon the field. The successors of the two 
 sovereigns entered into a friendly compact, the young Servian 
 prince, Stephen, acknowledged the suzerainty of Turkey, gave 
 his sister in marriage to the new sultan, Bayazid, and formed 
 with him a league of brotherhood. At the battle of Nikopolis 
 (1394), which gave to the Turks assured possession of the whole 
 Balkan peninsula, except the district surrounding Constantinople, 
 the Servian contingent turned the wavering fortune of the battle 
 and gave the victory to the Turks. On the field of Angora (1402), 
 when the Turkish power was annihilated and Bayazid himself 
 taken prisoner by Timur, Stephen was present with his Servian 
 troops and fought bravely for his brother-in-law, and instead of 
 taking this opportunity of securing his independence, remained 
 faithful to his engagement, and stood by the sons of Bayazid 
 until they recovered their father's throne. Under the successor 
 of Stephen, George Brankovitch, Servia enjoyed a semi- 
 independence, but when in 1438 he raised the standard of 
 revolt, his country was again overrun by the Turks. Then for a 
 time Servia had to acknowledge the suzerainty of Hungary, but 
 the defeat of John Hunyady at Varna in 1444 brought her once 
 more under tribute and in 1459 she finally became a Turkish 
 province. 
 
 When given the choice between the Roman Catholic rule of 
 Hungary and the Muslim rule of the Turks, the devotion of the 
 Servians to the Greek Church led them to prefer the tolerance of 
 the Muhammadans to the uncompromising proselytising spirit of 
 the Latins. An old legend thus represents their feelings at this 
 time : — The Turks and the Hungarians were at war ; George 
 Brankovitch sought out John Hunyady and asked him, "If you 
 are victorious, what will you do?" "Establish the Roman 
 Catholic faith," was the answer. Then he sought out the sdtan 
 and asked him, " If you come out victorious, what will you do 
 with our religion ? " " By the side of every mosque shall stand a 
 church, and every man shall be free to pray in whichever he 
 ' Farlati, vol. vi. p. 317. 
 
SERVIA. 167 
 
 chooses." 1 The treachery of some Servian priests forced the 
 garrison of Belgrade to capitulate to the Turks ^ ; similarly the 
 Servians of Semendria, on the Danube, welcomed the Turkish 
 troops that in 1600 delivered them from the rule of their 
 Catholic neighbours.^ 
 
 The spread of Islam among the Servians began immediately 
 after the battle of Kossovo, when a large part of the old feudal 
 nobility, such as still remained alive and did not take refuge in 
 neighbouring Christian countries, went over voluntarily to the 
 faith of the Prophet, in order to keep their old privileges 
 undisturbed.* In these converted nobles the sultans found the 
 most zealous propagandists of the new faith. = But the majority 
 of the Servian people clung firmly to their old religion through 
 all their troubles and sufferings, and only in Stara Serbia or Old 
 Servia,* which now forms the North-eastern portion of modern 
 Albania, has there been any very considerable number of con- 
 versions. Even here the spread of Muhammadanism proceeded 
 very slowly until the seventeenth century, when the Austrians 
 induced the Servians to rise in revolt and, after the ill-success of 
 this rising, the then Patriarch, Arsenius III. Tsernoievitch, in 
 1690 emigrated with 40,000 Servian families across the border into 
 Hungary; another exodus in 1739 of 15,000 families under the 
 leadership of Arsenius IV. Jovanovitch, well nigh denuded this part 
 of the country of its original Servian population.^ 
 
 Albanian colonists from the south pressed into the country 
 vacated by the fugitives : these Albanians at the time of their 
 arrival were Roman Catholics for the most part, but after they 
 settled in Old Servia they gradually adopted Islam and at the 
 present time the remnant of Roman Catholic Albanians is but small, 
 though from time to time it is recruited by fresh arrivals from the 
 mountains : the new-comers however usually follow the example 
 of their predecessors, and after a while become Muhammadans.^ 
 
 After this Albanian immigration, Islam began to spread more 
 
 ' Enrique Dupuy de L6me : Los Eslavos y Turquia. (Madrid, 1877), pp. 17-18. 
 
 • De la Jonquiere, p. 215. ^ Id. p. 290. 
 
 * Kanitz, p. 37. * Id. pp 37-8- 
 
 ' A map of this country is given by Mackenzie and Irby (p. 243) : it contains 
 Prizren, the old Servian capital ; Ipek, the seat of the Servian Patriarch, and the 
 battle-field of Kossovo. 
 
 ' Kanitz, p. 37. 
 
 ' Mackenzie and Irby, pp. 250-1. 
 
1 68 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 rapidly among the remnant of the Servian population. The 
 Servian clergy were very ignorant and unlettered, they could only 
 manage with difficulty to read their service-books and hardly any 
 had learned to write ; they neither preached to the people nor 
 taught them the catechism, consequently in whole villages scarcely 
 a man could be found who knew the Lord's Prayer or how many 
 commandments there were ; even the priests themselves were 
 quite as ignorant.i After the insurrection of 1689, the Patriarch 
 of Ipek, the ecclesiastical capital of Servia, was appointed by the 
 Porte, but in 1737, as the result of another rebellion, the Servian 
 Patriarchate was entirely suppressed and the Servian Church 
 made dependent upon the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. 
 The churches were filled with Greek bishops, who made common 
 cause with the Turkish Beys and Pashas in bleeding the un- 
 fortunate Christians : their national language was proscribed and 
 the Old Slavonic service-books, etc., were collected and sent off to 
 Constantinople.^ With such a clergy it is not surprising that the 
 Christian faith should decline : e.g. in the commune of Gora (in 
 the district of Prizren), which had begun to become Muham- 
 madanised soon after the great exodus of 1690, the Servians that still 
 clung to the Christian faith, appealed again and again to the 
 Greek bishop of Prizren to send them priests, at least occasionally, 
 but all in vain ; their children remained unbaptised, weddings and 
 burials were conducted without the blessing of the church, and 
 the consecrated buildings fell into decay .^ In the neighbouring 
 district of Opolje, similarly, the present Muslim population of 9500 
 souls is probably for the most part descended from the original Slav 
 inhabitants of the place.* At the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, Bizzi found in the city of Jagnevo, 120 Roman Catholic 
 households, 200 Greek and 180 Muhammadan^ ; less than a hundred 
 years later, every house in the city was looked upon as Muham- 
 madan, as the head of each family professed this faith and the 
 women only, with some of the children, were Christian.^ About the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, the village of Ljurs was entirely 
 Catholic ; in 1863 there were 90 Muslim and 23 Christian families, 
 but at the present day this village, together with the surrounding 
 
 ' Fariati, vol. vii. pp. 127-8. 
 
 ' Mackenzie and Irby, pp. 374-5. < Id. p_ -jg 
 
 Kanitz, p. 39. 5 Bi^^i • j^,; ^ j,_ 
 
 Id. pp. 39-40. K Zmaievich, fol. 182. 
 
SERVIA. MONTENEGRO. 169 
 
 illages, has wholly given up Christianity. ^ Until recently some 
 ingering survivals of their old Christian faith, such as the burning 
 if the Yule-log at Christmas, etc., were still to be met within 
 ertain villages, but such customs are now fast dying out. 
 
 After the battle of Kossovo and the downfall of the Servian 
 Lmpire, the wild highlands of Montenegro afforded a refuge to 
 hose Servians who would not submit to the Turks but were 
 letermined to maintain their independence. It is not the place 
 lere to relate the history of the heroic struggles of this brave 
 )eople against overwhelming odds, how through centuries of 
 ;ontinual warfare, under the rule of their prince-bishops,^ they 
 lave kept alive a free Christian state when all their brethren of 
 :he same race had been compelled to submit to Muhammadan 
 rule. While the very basis of their separate existence as a nation 
 was their firm adherence to the Christian faith it could hardly have 
 been expected that Islam would have made its way among them, 
 but in the seventeenth century many Montenegrins in the frontier 
 districts became Muhammadans and took service with the neigh- 
 bouring Pashas. But in 1703, Daniel Petrovitch, the then 
 reigning bishop, called the tribes together and told them that the 
 only hope for their country and their faith lay in the destruction 
 of the Muhammadans living among them. Accordingly, on 
 Christmas Eve, all the converted Montenegrins who would not 
 forswear Islam and embrace Christianity were massacred in cold 
 blood.' 
 
 To pass now to Bosnia : — in this country the religious and 
 social conditions of the people, before the Turkish conquest, 
 merit especial attention. The majority of the population belonged 
 to a heretical Christian sect, called Bogomiles, who from the 
 thirteenth century had been exposed to the persecution of the 
 Roman Catholics and against whom Popes had on several occasions 
 preached a Crusade.* In 1325, Pope John XXII. wrote thus to 
 the king of Bosnia : " To our beloved son and nobleman, Stephen, 
 Prince of Bosnia, — knowing that thou art a faithful son of the 
 church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in 
 
 ' Kanitz, p. 38. 
 
 ' Montenegro was ruled by bishops from 1516 to 1852. 
 
 ' K. L. Clark, pp. 362-3. „ „, . , „ ,. 
 
 * Honorius III. in 1221, Gregory IX. m 1238, Innocent IV. in 1246, Benedict 
 XII. in 1337. The Inquisition was established in 1291. 
 
1 70 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance to Fabian, our 
 Inquisitor, forasmuch as a large multitude of heretics from many 
 and divers parts collected hath flowed together into the princi- 
 pality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and 
 dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of 
 the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, 
 corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and 
 the sham assumption of the name of Christians ; their speech 
 crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in 
 secret they kill, and are wolves in, sheep's clothing, covering their 
 bestial fury as a means to deceive the simple sheep of Christ." 
 In the fifteenth century, the sufferings of the Bogomiles became so 
 intolerable that they appealed to the Turks to deliver them from 
 their unhappy condition, for the king of Bosnia and the priests 
 were pushing the persecution of the Bogomiles to an extreme 
 which perhaps it had never reached before ; as many as forty 
 thousand of them fled from Bosnia and took refuge in neigh- 
 bouring countries ; others who did not succeed in making their 
 escape, were sent in chains to Rome. But even these violent 
 measures did little to diminish the strength of the Bogomiles in 
 Bosnia, as in 1462 we are told that heresy was as powerful as ever 
 in this country. The following year, when Bosnia was invaded 
 by Muhammad II., the Catholic king found himself deserted by 
 his subjects : the keys of the ;principal fortress, the royal city of 
 Bobovatz, were handed over to the Turks by the Bogomile 
 governor ; the other fortresses and towns hastened to follow this 
 example and within a week seventy cities passed into the hands 
 of the Sultan, and Muhammad II. added Bosnia to the number of 
 his numerous conquests. 1 
 
 From this time forth we hear but little of the Bogomiles ; they 
 seem to have willingly embraced Islam in large numbers im- 
 mediately after the Turkish conquest, and the rest seem to have 
 gradually followed later, while the Bosnian Roman Catholics 
 emigrated into the neighbouring territories of Hungary and 
 Austria. It has been supposed by some ^ that a large proportion 
 of the Bogomiles, at least in the earlier period of the conquest, 
 embraced Islam with the intention of returning to their faith 
 when a favourable opportunity presented itself; as, being con- 
 
 ' Asboth, pp. 42-95. Evans, pp. xxxvi-xlii. 
 ^ Asboth, pp. 96-7. 
 
BOSNIA. 171 
 
 stantly persecuted, they may have learnt to deny their faith for 
 the time being ; but that, when this favourable opportunity never 
 arrived, this intention must have gradually been lost sight of and 
 at length have been entirely forgotten by their descendants. Such 
 a supposition is however a pure conjecture and has no direct 
 evidence to support it. We may rather find the reason for the 
 willingness of the Bogomiles to allow themselves to be merged in 
 the general mass of the Musalman believers, in the numerous 
 points of likeness between their peculiar beliefs and the tenets of 
 Islam. They rejected the worship of the Virgin Mary, the in- 
 stitution of Baptism and every form of priesthood. 1 They abomi- 
 nated the cross as a religious symbol, and considered it idolatry 
 to bow down before religious pictures and the images and relics 
 of the saints. Their houses of prayer were very simple and 
 unadorned, in contrast to the gaudily decorated Roman Catholic 
 churches, and they shared the Muhammadan dislike of bells, 
 which they styled " the devil's trumpets." They believed that 
 Christ was not himself crucified but that some phantom was 
 substituted in his place : in this respect agreeing partially with 
 the teaching of the Qur'an.^ Their condemnation of wine and the 
 general austerity of their mode of life and the stern severity of their 
 outward demeanour would serve as further links to bind them to 
 Islam,^ for it was said of them : " You will see heretics quiet and 
 peaceful as lambs without, silent, and wan with hypocritical 
 fasting, who do not speak much nor laugh loud, who let their 
 beard grow, and leave their person incompt." * They prayed five 
 times a day and five times a night, repeating the Lord's Prayer 
 with frequent kneelings,^ and would thus find it very little change 
 to join in the services of the mosque. I have brought together 
 here the many points of likeness to the teachings of Islam, which 
 
 ' " They revile the ceremonies of the church and all church dignitaries, and 
 they call orthodox priests blind Pharisees, and bay at them as dogs at horses. As 
 to the Lord's Supper, they assert that it is not kept according to God's command- 
 ment, and that it is not the body of God, but ordinary bread." Kosmas, quoted 
 by Evans, pp. xxx-xxxi. 
 
 ^ Surah iv. 156. 
 
 ' Cf. the admiration of the Turks for Charles XII. of Sweden. " Son opmi- 
 itrete i s'abstenir du vin, et sa regularite a assister deux fois par jour aux prieres 
 publiques, leur fesaient dire: C'est un vrai musulman." (CEuvres de Voltaire. 
 Tome 23, p. 200.) (Paris, 1785.) 
 
 * Kosmas, quoted by Evans, p. xxxi. 
 
 ' Asboth, p. 36. Wetzer und Welte, vol. ii. p. 975. 
 
172 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 we find in this Bogomilian heresy, but there were, of course, some 
 doctrines of a distinctly Christian character which an orthodox 
 Muslim could not hold ; still, with so much in common, it can 
 easily be understood how the Bogomiles may gradually have been 
 persuaded to give up those doctrines that were repugnant to the 
 Muslim faith. Their Manichaean dualism was equally irre- 
 concilable with Muslim theology, but Islam has always shown 
 itself tolerant of such theological speculations provided that they 
 did not issue in a schism and that a general assent and consent 
 were given to the main principles of its theory and practice. 
 
 The Turks, as was their usual custom, offered every advantage 
 to induce the Bosnians to accept their creed. All who embraced 
 Islam were allowed to retain their lands and possessions, and it is 
 probable that many rightful heirs of ancient houses who had been 
 dispossessed for heretical opinions by the Catholic faction among 
 the nobility, now embraced the opportunity of regaining their old 
 position by submission to the dominant creed. 
 
 The latest territorial acquisition of the Ottoman conquests was 
 the island of Crete, which in 1669 was wrested from the hands of 
 the Venetian Republic when the city of Candia was taken after 
 a long and desperate siege of nearly three years, which closed a 
 struggle of twenty-five years between these rival powers for the 
 possession of the island. 
 
 This was not the first time that Crete had come under Muslim 
 rule. Early in the ninth century the island was suddenly seized 
 by a band of Saracen adventurers from Spain, and it remained in 
 their power for nearly a century and a half (a.d. 825-961).! During 
 this period well-nigh the whole population of the island had 
 become Muslim, and the churches had either fallen into ruins or 
 been turned into mosques ; but when the authority of the Byzan- 
 tine empire was once re-established here, the people were con- 
 verted again to their ancient faith through the skilful preaching 
 of an Armenian monk, and the Christian religion became the 
 only one professed on the island.^ In the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century, the Venetians purchased the island from 
 Boniface, Duke of Montserrat, to whose lot it had fallen after 
 the partition of the Byzantine empire, and they ruled it with a 
 heavy hand, apparently looking upon it only in the light of a 
 
 ' Amari, vol. i. p. 163 ; vol. ii. p. 260. 
 * Cornaro, vol. i. pp. 205-8. 
 
CRETE. 173 
 
 purchase that was to be exploited for the benefit of the home 
 government and its colonists. Their administration was so 
 oppressive and tyrannical as to excite several revolts, which were 
 crushed with pitiless severity ; on one of these occasions whole 
 cantons in the provinces of Sfakia and Lassiti were depopulated, 
 and it was forbidden under pain of death to sow any corn there, 
 so that these districts remained barren and uncultivated for nearly 
 a century.i "phe terrific cruelty with which the Venetian senate 
 suppressed the last of these attempts at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century added a crowning horror to the miserable 
 condition of the unhappy Cretans. How terrible was their lot at 
 this time we learn from the reports of the commissioners sent by 
 the Venetian senate in the latter part of the same century, in 
 order to inquire into the condition of the islanders. The peasants 
 were said to be crushed down by the cruellest oppression and 
 tyranny on the part of the Venetian nobles, their feudal lords, 
 being reduced to a worse condition than that of slaves, so that 
 they never dared even to complain of any injustice. Each 
 peasant had to do twelve days' forced labour for his feudal lord 
 every year without payment, and could then be compelled to go 
 on working for as long as his lord required his services at the 
 nominal rate of a penny a day ; his vineyards were mulcted in a 
 full third of their produce, but fraud and force combined generally 
 succeeded in appropriating as much as two-thirds ; his oxen and 
 mules could be seized for the service of the lord, who had a 
 thousand other devices for squeezing the unfortunate peasant.* 
 The protests of these commissioners proved ineffectual to induce 
 the Venetian senate to alleviate the unhappy condition of the 
 Cretans and put a stop to the cruelty and tyranny of the nobles : 
 it preferred to hsten to the advice of a certain Fra Paolo Sarpi 
 who in 161 5 thus addressed the Republic on the subject of its 
 Greek colonies : " If the gentlemen of these Colonies do tyrannize 
 over the villages of their dominion, the best way is not to seem 
 to see it, that there may be no kindness between them and their 
 subjects." 3 
 
 It is not surprising to learn from the same sources that the 
 Cretans longed for a change of rulers, and that " they would not 
 
 I'errot, p. 151. ^ Pashley, vol. i. p. 30 i vol. ii. pp. 284, 39I'2. 
 
 ' Pashley, vol. ii. p. 298. 
 
174 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 much stick at submitting to the Turk, having the example of all 
 the rest of their nation before their eyes." Indeed, many at this 
 time iied into Turkey to escape the intolerable burden of taxation, 
 following in the footsteps of countless others, who from time to 
 time had taken refuge there. i Large numbers of them also 
 emigrated to Egypt, where many embraced Islam.^ Especially 
 galling to the Cretans were the exactions of the Latin clergy, who 
 appropriated the endowments that belonged of right to the Greek 
 ecclesiastics, and did everything they could to insult the Christians 
 of the Greek rite, who constituted nine-tenths of the population 
 of the island.^ The Turks on the other hand conciliated their 
 good-will by restoring the Greek hierarchy. Tliis, according to 
 a Venetian writer, was brought about in the following manner : 
 " A certain papas or priest of Canea went to Cusseim the" 
 Turkish general, and told him that if he desired to gain the good- 
 will of the Cretan people, and bring detestation upon the name 
 of Venice, it was necessary for him to bear in mind that the 
 staunchest of the links which keep civilized society from falling 
 asunder is religion. It would be needful for him to act in a way 
 different from the line followed by the Venetians. These did 
 their utmost to root out the Greek faith and establish that of 
 Rome in its place, with which interest they had made an injunc- 
 tion that there should be no Greek bishops in the island. By 
 thus removing these venerated and authoritative shepherds, they 
 thought the more easily to gain control over the scattered flocks. 
 This prohibition had caused such distress in the minds of the 
 Cretans that they were ready to welcome with joy and obedience 
 any sovereignty that would lend its will to the re-institution of 
 this order in their hierarchy — an order so essential for the proper 
 exercise of their divine worship. He added, that it would be a 
 further means of concihating the people if they were assured that 
 they would not only be confirmed in the old privileges of their 
 rehgion, but that new privileges would be granted them. These 
 arguments seemed to Cusseim so plausible that he wrote at once 
 to Constantinople with a statement of them. Here they are 
 approved, and the Greek Patriarch was bidden to institute an 
 archbishop who should be metropole of the Province of Candia. 
 
 Pasliley, vol. ii. p. 285. ■ Pashley, vol. i. p. 319. 
 
 ' Perrot, p. 151. 
 
CRETE. 
 
 I7S 
 
 Under the metropolitan seven other bishops were also to be 
 nominated." ^ 
 
 The Turkish conquest seems to have been very rapidly followed 
 by the conversion of large numbers of the Cretans to Islam. It 
 is not improbable that the same patriotism as made them cling to 
 their old faith under the foreign domination of the Venetians 
 who kept them at arm's length and regarded any attempt at 
 assimilation as an unpardonable indignity ,2 and always tried to 
 impress on their subjects a sense of their inferiority — may have led 
 them to accept the religion of their new masters, which at once 
 raised them from the position of subjects to that of equals and 
 gave them a share in the political life and government of their 
 country. Whatever may have been the causes of the widespread 
 conversions of the Cretans, it seems almost incredible that violence 
 should have changed the religion of a people who had for cen- 
 turies before clung firmly to their old faith despite the persecu- 
 tion of a hostile and a foreign creed. Whatever may have been 
 the means by which the ranks of Islam were filled, thirty years 
 after the conquest we are told that the majority of the Muslims 
 were renegades or the children of renegades,^ and in little more 
 than a century half the population of Crete had become Muham- 
 madan. From one end of the island to the other, not only in the 
 towns but also in the villages, in the inland districts and in the 
 very heart of the mountains, were (and are still) found Cretan 
 Muslims who in figure, habits and speech are thoroughly Greek. 
 There never has been, and to the present day there is not, any 
 other language spoken on the island of Crete except Greek ; even 
 the few Turks to be found here have to adopt the language of 
 the country and all the firmans of the Porte and decrees of the 
 Pashas are read and published in Greek.-* The bitter feehngs 
 between the Christians and Muhammadans of Crete that have 
 made the history of this island during the present century so sad 
 a one, was by no means so virulent before the outbreak of the 
 Greek revolution, in days when the Cretan Muslims were very 
 generally in the habit of taking as their wives Christian maidens, 
 who retained their own faith, and often stood as godfathers to 
 
 ' Charles Edwardes : Letters from Crete, pp. 90-92. (London, 1887.) 
 
 ' Pashley, vol. ii. p. 15 1-2. 
 
 ' Pashley, vol. i. p. •). * Perrot, p. 159. 
 
176 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the children of their Christian friends.i The social communica- 
 tion between the two communities was further signified by their 
 common dress, as the Cretans of both creeds dress so much alike 
 that the distinction is often not even recognised by residents of 
 long standing or by Greeks of the neighbouring islands.^ 
 
 Pashley, vol. i. pp. 10, 195. 
 
 T. A. B. Spratt : Travels and Researches in Crete, vol. i. p. 47 (Lond. 1865. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN PERSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA. 
 
 In order to follow the course of the spread of Islam westward into 
 Central Asia, we must retrace our steps to the period of the first 
 Arab conquests. By the middle of the seventh century, the great 
 dynasty of the Sasanids had fallen, and the vast empire of Persia 
 that for four centuries had withstood the might of Rome and 
 Byzantium, now became the heritage of the Muslims. When the 
 armies of the state had been routed, the mass of the people 
 offered little resistance ; the reigns of the last representatives of 
 the Sasanid dynasty had been marked by terrible anarchy, and the 
 sympathies of the people had been further alienated from their 
 rulers on account of the support they gave to the persecuting 
 policy of the state religion of Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian 
 priests had acquired an enormous influence in the state ; they 
 were well-nigh all-powerful in the councils of the king and 
 arrogated to themselves a very large share in the civil administra- 
 tion. They took advantage of their position to persecute all 
 those religious bodies — (and they were many) — that dissented 
 from them. Besides the numerous adherents of older forms of 
 the Persian religion, there were Christians, Jews, Sabaeans and 
 numerous sects in which the speculations of Gnostics, Mani- 
 chsans and Buddhists found expression. In all of these, persecu- 
 tion had stirred up feelings of bitter hatred against the established 
 religion and the dynasty that supported its oppressions, and so 
 caused the Arab conquest to appear in the light of a deliverance.^ 
 The followers of all these varied forms of faith could breathe 
 again under a rule that granted them religious freedom and 
 exemption from military service, on payment of a light tribute. 
 
 ' A de Gobineau (i), pp. 55-6. La Saussaye, vol. ii. pp. 45-6. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 For the Muslim law granted toleration and the right of paying 
 jizyah not only to the Christians and Jews, but to Zoroastrians 
 and Sabaeans, to worshippers of idols, of fire and of stone.i It was 
 said that the Prophet himself had distinctly given directions that 
 the Zoroastrians were to be treated exactly like " the people of 
 the book," i.e. the Jews and Christians, and that jizyah might 
 also be taken from them in return for protection.^ 
 
 But the Muslim cre^d was most eagerly welcomed by the 
 townsfolk, the industrial classes and the artizans, whose occupa- 
 tions made them impure according to the Zoroastrian creed, 
 because in the pursuance of their trade or occupations they 
 defiled fire, earth or water, and who thus, outcasts in the eyes of 
 the law and treated with scant consideration in consequence, 
 embraced with eagerness a creed that made them at once free 
 men, and equal in a brotherhood of faith.^ Nor were the con- 
 versions from Zoroastrianism itself less striking : the fabric of the 
 national church had fallen with a crash in the general ruin of 
 the dynasty that had before upheld it ; having no other centre 
 round which to rally, the followers of this creed would find the 
 transition to Islam a simple and easy one, owing to the numerous 
 points of similarity in the old creed and the new. For the 
 Persian could find in the Qur'an many of the fundamental 
 doctrines of his old faith, though in a rather different form : he 
 would meet again Ahuramazda and Ahriman under the names of 
 Allah and Iblis ; the creation of the world in six periods ; the 
 angels and the demons ; the story of the primitive innocence of 
 man ; the resurrection of the body and the doctrine of heaven 
 and hell.* Even in the details of daily worship there were 
 similarities to be found, and the followers of Zoroaster when they 
 adopted Islam were enjoined by their new faith to pray five times 
 a day just as they had been by the Avesta.= Those tribes iri«the 
 north of Persia that had stubbornly resisted the ecclesiastical 
 organisation of the state religion, on the ground that each man 
 was a priest in his own household and had no need of any other, 
 and believing in a supreme being and the immortality of the 
 soul, taught that a man should love his neighbour, conquer his 
 
 ' Abu Yusuf : Kitabu-1 Siaraj, p. 73. 2 j(j_ j^ 
 
 ■* A de Gobineau (2), pp. 306-310. < Dozy (i),"p. 157. 
 
 ' Haneberg, p. 5. 
 
PERSIA. 179 
 
 passions, and strive patiently after a better life — such men could 
 have needed very little persuasion to induce them to accept the 
 faith of the Prophet.^ Islam had still more points of contact 
 with some of the heretical sects of Persia, that had come under 
 the influence of Christianity. 
 
 In addition to the causes above enumerated of the rapid spread 
 of Islam in Persia, it should be remembered that the political and 
 national sympathies of the conquered race were also enlisted on 
 behalf of the new religion through the marriage of Husayn, the 
 ■son of 'Ah with Shahbanu, one of the daughters of Yazdagird, the 
 last monarch of the Sasanid dynasty. In the descendants of 
 Shahbanu and Husayn the Persians saw the heirs of their ancient 
 iings and the inheritors of their national traditions and in this 
 patriotic feeling may be found the explanation of the intense 
 devotion of the Persians to the 'Alid faction and the first 
 beginnings of Shi'ism as a separate sect.^ 
 
 That this widespread conversion was not due to force or 
 violence is evidenced by the toleration extended to those who 
 still clung to their ancient faith. Even to the present day there 
 are some small communities of fire-worshippers to be found in 
 ■certain districts of Persia, and though these have in later years 
 ■often had to suffer persecution,^ their ancestors in the early 
 centuries of the Hijrah enjoyed a remarkable degree of toleration, 
 their fire-temples were respected, and we even read of a Muham- 
 madan general (in the reign of Al Mu'tajim (833-842 a.d.), who 
 ordered an imam and a mu'adhdhin to be flogged because they 
 had destroyed a fire-temple in Su^d and built a mosque in its 
 place.* In the tenth century, three centuries after the conquest 
 -of the country, fire-temples were to be found in 'Iraq, Ears, Kirman, 
 Sijistan, Khurasan, Jibal, Adharbijan and Arran, i.e. in almost 
 eYfflV province of Persia.^ In Ears itself there were few cities in 
 
 ' Dozy (i), p. 191. A. de Gobineau (i), p. 55. 
 
 ' Les croyances Mazdeennes dans la religion Chiite, par Ahmed-Bey Agaeff. 
 '(Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, vol. ii. pp. 
 ■509-511.) (London, 1893.) 
 
 ^ Dosabhai Framji Karaka : History of the Parsis, vol. i. pp- 56-9i 62-7. 
 (London, 1884.) Nicolas de KhanikofF says that there were 12,000 families of 
 fire-worshippers in Kirman at the end of the last century. (Memoire sur la partie 
 •meridionale de I'Asie ceiitrale, p. 193.) (Paris, [861.) 
 
 ■* Chwolsohn, vol. i. p. 287. 
 
 * Mas'iidi, vol. iv. p. 86. 
 
 K 2 
 
i8o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 which fire-temples and Magians were not to be found.i Ash 
 Sharastani also (writing as late as the twelfth century), makes 
 mention of a fire-temple at Isfiniya, in the neighbourhood of 
 Bagdad itself.^ 
 
 In the face of such facts, it is surely impossible to attribute the 
 decay of Zoroastrianism to violent conversions made by the 
 Muslim conquerors. The number of Persians who embraced 
 Islam in the early days of the Arab rule was probably very large 
 from the various reasons given above, but the late survival of 
 their ancient faith and the occasional record of conversions in the 
 course of successive centuries, render it probable that the 
 acceptance of Islam was both peaceful and voluntary. About 
 the close of the eighth century, Saman, a noble of BalHsi havmg 
 received assistance from Asad ibn 'Abdu-llah, the governor of 
 Kiurasan, renounced Zoroastrianism, embraced Islam and named 
 his son Asad after his protector : it is from this convert that the 
 dynasty of the Samanids (874-999 ^■^■) took its name. About 
 the beginning of the ninth century, Karim ibn Shahriyar was the 
 first king of the Qabusiyah dynasty who became a Musalman, 
 and in 873 a large number of fire-worshippers were converted to 
 Islam in Daylam through the influence of Nasiru-1 Haqq Abu 
 Muhammad. In the following century, about 912 a.d., Hasan 
 ibn 'All, of the 'Alid dynasty on the southern shore of the 
 Caspian Sea, who is said to have been a man of learning and 
 intelligence and well acquainted with the religious opinions of 
 different sects, invited the inhabitants of Tabaristan and Daylam, 
 who were partly idolaters and partly Magians, to accept Islam ; 
 many of them responded to his call, while others persisted in 
 their former state of unbelief.^ In the year 394 a.h. (1003-4 A.D.), 
 a famous poet, Abu-1 Hasan Mihyar, a native of Daylam, who had 
 been a fire-worshipper, was converted to Islam by a still more 
 famous poet, the Sharif Ar Rida, who was his master in the poetic 
 art.* Scanty as these notices of conversions are, yet the very fact 
 that such can be found up to three centuries and a half after the 
 Muslim conquest is clear testimony to the toleration the Persians 
 
 ' Das Buch der Lander von Schech Ebu Ishak el Farsi el Isztachri, iibersetzt 
 von A. D. Mordtmann, p. 62-3. (Hamburg, 1845.) 
 
 ^ Kitabu-1 milal wa-n nihal, edited by Cureton, part i. p. 198. 
 ' Mas'udl, vol. viii. p. 279 ; vol. ix. p. 4-5. 
 ■* Ibn Khallikan, vol. iii. p. 517. 
 
THE ISMA'ILIANS. 
 
 i8i 
 
 enjoyed, and argues that their conversion to Islam was peaceful 
 and, to some extent at least, gradual. 
 
 In the middle of the eighth century, Persia gave birth to a 
 movement that is of interest in the missionary history of Islam, 
 viz. the sect of the Isma'ilians. This is not the place to enter into 
 a history of this sect or of the theological position taken up by its 
 followers, or of the social and political factors that lent it strength, 
 but it demands attention here on account of the marvellous 
 missionary organisation wfhereby it was propagated. The founder 
 of this organisation — which rivals that of the Jesuits for the keen 
 insight into human nature it displays and the consummate skill 
 with which the doctrines of the sect were accommodated to 
 varying capacities and prejudices — was a certain 'Abdu-Uah ibn 
 Maymun, who early in the ninth century infused new life into the 
 Isma'ilians. He sent out his missionaries in all directions under 
 various guises, very frequently as sufis but also as merchants and 
 traders and the like : they were instructed to be all things to all 
 men and to win over different classes of men to allegiance to the 
 grandmaster of their sect, by speaking to each man, as it were, in 
 his own language, and accommodating their teaching to the 
 varying capacities and opinions of their hearers. They captivated 
 the ignorant multitude by the performance of marvels that were 
 taken for miracles and by mysterious utterances that excited their 
 curiosity. To the devout they appeared as models of virtue and 
 religious zeal ; to the mystics they revealed the hidden meaning 
 of popular teachings and initiated them into various grades of 
 occultism according to their capacity. Taking advantage of the 
 eager looking-forward to a deliverer that was common to so 
 many faiths of the time, they declared to the Musalmans the 
 approaching advent of the Imam Mahdi, to the Jews that of the 
 Messiah, and to the Christians that of the Comforter, but taught 
 that the aspirations of each could alone be realised in the coming 
 of 'All as the great deliverer. With the Shi'ah, the Isma'ilian 
 missionary was to put himself forward as the zealous partisan of 
 all the Shi'ah doctrine, was to dwell upon the cruelty and injustice 
 of the Sunnis towards 'Ali and his sons, and liberally abuse the 
 Sunni Malifahs ; having thus prepared the way, he was to 
 insinuate, as the necessary completion of the Shi'ah system of 
 faith, the more esoteric doctrines of the Isma'ilian sect. In 
 dealing with the Jew, he was to speak with contempt of both 
 
1 82 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Christians and Muslims and agree with his intended convert in 
 still looking forward to a promised Messiah, but gradually lead 
 him to believe that this promised Messiah could be none other 
 than 'All, the great Messiah of the Isma'ilian system. If h® 
 sought to win over the Christian, he was to dwell upon the 
 obstinacy of the Jews and the ignorance of the Muslims, to 
 profess reverence for the chief articles of the Christian creed, but 
 gently hint that they were symbolic and pointed to a deeper 
 meaning, to which the Isma'ilian system alone could supply the 
 key ; he was also cautiously to suggest that the Christians had 
 somewhat misinterpreted the doctrine of the Paraclete and that it 
 was in 'All that the true Paraclete was to be found. Similarly 
 the Isma'ilian missionaries who made their way into India 
 endeavoured to make their doctrines acceptable to the Hindus^ 
 by representing 'Ali as the promised tenth Avatar of Visnu who- 
 was to come from the West, i.e. (they averred) from Alamut. 
 They also wrote a Mahdi Purana and composed hymns in 
 imitation of those of the Vamacarins or left-hand Saktas, whose 
 mysticism already predisposed their minds to the acceptance of 
 the esoteric doctrines of the Isma'ilians.i 
 
 By such means as these an enormous number of persons of 
 different faiths were united together to push forward an enter- 
 prise, the real aim of which was known to very few. The 
 aspirations of 'Abdu-Uah ibn Maymun seem to have been entirely 
 political, but as the means he adopted were religious and the one 
 common bond — if any — that bound his followers together was the 
 devout expectation of the coming of the Imam Mahdi, the 
 missionary activity connected with the history of this sect 
 deserves this brief mention in these pages.^ 
 
 The history of the spread of Islam in the countries of Central 
 Asia to the north of Persia presents little in the way of missionary 
 activity. When Ibn Qutaybah went to Samarqand, he found 
 many idols there, whose worshippers maintained that any man 
 who dared outrage them would at once fall down dead; the 
 Muslim conqueror, undeterred by such superstitious fears, set fire 
 to the idols ; whereupon the idolaters embraced Islam.s There 
 
 ' Khoja Vrittant, pp. 141-8. For a further account of Isma'ilian missionaries 
 m India, see chap. ix. 
 
 2 Le Bon Silvestre De Sacy : Expose de la Religion dts Druzes, tome i. 
 pp. Ixvu-lxxvi, cxlvm-clxu. ' 
 
 " Al Baladhuri, p. 421. 
 
CENTRAL ASIA. 183 
 
 is however but scanty record of such conversions in the earl)^ 
 history of the Muslim advance into Central Asia ; moreover the 
 people of this country seem often to have pretended to embrace' 
 Islam for a time and then to have thrown off the mask and 
 renounced their allegiance to the caliph as soon as the conquering- 
 armies were withdrawn.! jn BuH^ara and Samarqand the 
 opposition to the new faith was so violent and obstinate that none 
 but those who had embraced Islam were allowed to carry arms^ 
 and for many years the Muslims dared not appear unarmed in the 
 mosques or other public places, while spies had to be set to keep 
 a watch on the new converts. The conquerors made various 
 efforts to gain proselytes, and even tried to encourage attendance 
 at the Friday prayers in the mosques by rewards of money, and 
 allowed the Qur'an to be recited in Persian instead of in Arabic^ 
 in order that it might be intelligible to all.^ 
 
 The traditions of the A fgh an people represent the new faith as 
 having been peaceably introduced among their tribes. In the 
 first century of the Hijrah they occupied the Gior country to the 
 east of Herat, and it was there that i^alid ibn Walid is said to 
 have come to them with the tidings of Islam and to have invited 
 them to join the standard of the Prophet. He returned to 
 Muhammad accompanied by a deputation of six or seven repre- 
 sentative men of the Afghan people and their followers ; these, 
 when they went back to their own country, set to work to 
 convert their fellow-tribesmen. ^ This tradition is however 
 probably without any historical foundation in fact, and the earliest 
 authentic mention of conversion to Islam from among the 
 Afji^ans seems to be that of a king of Kabul in the reign of 
 Al Ma'mun.* 
 
 In the north the progress of Islam was very slow : some of the 
 people of Transoxania accepted the invitation of 'Umar II. 
 (a.d. 717-720) to embrace Islam,^ and large numbers were 
 converted through the preaching of a certain Abu Sayda in the 
 reign of Hisham (724-743),^ but it was not until the reign of 
 Al Mu'tasim (a.d. 833-842) that Islam was generally adopted 
 there,' one of the reasons probably being the more intimate 
 
 ' Vambery (2), p. 201. ' Vambery (i), vol. i. pp. 33-4- 
 
 ^ Bellew, pp. 15-16. ■* Al Baladhurl, p. 402. 
 
 * Id. p. 426. ° Tabari, ii. p. 1507 sqq. 
 
 ' Al Baladhurl, p. 431. 
 
]84 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 relations established at this time with the then capital of the 
 Muhammadan world, Bagdad, through the enormous numbers 
 of Turks that flocked in thousands from these parts to join the 
 army of the caliph.i Islam having thus gained a footing among 
 the Turkish tribes seems to have made but slow progress until 
 the middle of the tenth century, when the conversion of some of 
 their chieftains to Islam, like that of Clovis and other barbarian 
 kings of Northern Europe to Christianity, led their clansmen to 
 follow their example in a body. Thus the founder of the dynasty 
 of the Ilak ^ans of Turkistan, who for a time united under their 
 rule the Turkish tribes from the Caspian Sea to the borders of 
 China, became a Muslim together with two thousand families 
 of his tribe, to whom he gave the name of Turkomans to 
 distinguish them from the Turks that still remained unconverted.^ 
 
 Among the Turkish chieftains that took part in the wars of 
 this dynasty was a certain Saljuq who, in 956 a.d., migrated from 
 the Kirghiz steppes with all his clan to the province of Bu^ara, 
 where he and his people enthusiastically embraced Islam. This 
 was the origin of the famous Saljuq Turks, whose wars and 
 conquests revived the fading glory of the Muhammadan arms and 
 united into one empire the Muslim kingdoms of Western Asia. 
 
 When at the close of the twelfth century, the Saljuq Empire 
 had lost all power except in Asia Minor, and when Muhammad 
 Ohori was extending his empire from Khurasan eastward across 
 the north of India, there was a great revival of the Muslim faith 
 among the Afghans and their country was overrun by Arab 
 preachers and converts from India, who set about the task of 
 proselytising with remarkable energy and boldness.^ 
 
 Of the further history of Islam in Persia and Central Asia some 
 details will be found in the following chapter. 
 
 ■ August Miiller, vol. i. p. 520. 2 Hammer (i), vol. i. p. 7. 
 
 ^ Bellew, p. 96. 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
THE MONGOLS AND THEIR RELIGION. 187 
 
 The primitive religion of the Mongols was Shamanism, which 
 while recognising a supreme God, offered no prayers to Him, but 
 worshipped a number of inferior divinities, especially the evil 
 spirits whose powers for harm had to be deprecated by means of 
 sacrifices, and the souls of ancestors who were considered to 
 exercise an influence on the lives of their descendants. To 
 propitiate these powers of the heaven and of the lower world, 
 recourse was had to the Shamans, wizards or medicine-men, who 
 were credited with possessing mysterious influence over the 
 elements and the spirits of the departed. Their religion was not 
 one that was calculated to withstand long the efforts of a prosely- 
 tising faith, possessed of a systematic theology capable of satisfying 
 the demands of the reason and an organised body of religious 
 teachers — ^when once the Mongols had been brought into contact 
 with civilised races, had responded to their civilising influences, 
 and begun to pass out of their nomadic barbarism. It so happened 
 that the civilised races with which the conquest of the Mongols 
 brought them in contact comprised large numbers of Buddhists,, 
 Christians and Muhammadans, and the adherents of these three 
 great missionary faiths entered into rivalry with one another for 
 the conversion of their conquerors. When not carried away 
 by the furious madness for destruction and insult that usually 
 characterised their campaigns, the Shamanist Mongols showed 
 themselves remarkably tolerant of other religions, whose priests 
 were exempted from taxation and allowed perfect freedom of 
 worship. Buddhist priests held controversies with the Shamans 
 in the presence of Jingis ^an ; and at the courts of Mangu Khan 
 and Khubilay !^an the Buddhist and Christian priests and the 
 Muslim Imams alike enjoyed the patronage of the Khaqaan.^^ In 
 the reign of the latter monarch the Mongols in China began to 
 yield to the powerful influences of the surrounding Buddhism, 
 and by the beginning of the fourteenth century the Buddhist 
 faith seems to have gained a complete ascendancy over them.* 
 It was the Lamas of Thibet who showed themselves most zealous 
 in this work of conversion, and the people of Mongolia to the 
 present day cling to the same faith, as do the Kalmuks who 
 migrated to Russia in the seventeenth century. 
 
 * Guillaume de Rubrouck, pp. i6j, 231. 
 
 C. d'Ohsson, tome ii. p. 488. 
 ' De Guignes, tome iii. pp. 200, 203. 
 
i88 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Although Buddhism made itself finally supreme in the eastern 
 part of the empire, at first the influence of the Christian Church 
 was by no means inconsiderable and great hopes were entertained 
 of the conversion of the Mongols. The Nestorian missionaries in 
 the seventh century had carried the knowledge of the Christian 
 faith from west to east across Asia as far as the north of China, 
 and scattered communities were still to be found in the thirteenth 
 century. The famous Prester John, around whose name cluster 
 so many legends of the Middle Ages, is supposed to have been 
 the chief of the Kara'its, a Christian Tartar tribe living to the 
 south of Lake Baikal. When this tribe was conquered by Jingis 
 Khan, he married one of the daughters of the then chief of the 
 tribe, while his son Ogotay took a wife from the same family. 
 Ogotay's son, Kuyuk Khan, although he did not himself become 
 a Christian, showed great favour towards this faith, to which his 
 chief minister and one of his secretaries belonged. The Nestorian 
 priests were held in high favour at his court and he received an 
 embassy from Pope Innocent IV.i The Christian powers both of 
 the East and the West looked to the Mongols to assist them in 
 their wars against the Musalmans. It was Heythoum, the Chris- 
 tian King of Armenia, who was mainly instrumental in persuading 
 Mangu Khan to despatch the expedition that sacked Baghdad 
 under the leadership of Hulagu,- the influence of whose Christian 
 wife led him to show much favour to the Christians, and especi- 
 ally to the Nestorians. Many of the Mongols who occupied the 
 countries of Armenia and Georgia were converted by the Chris- 
 tians of these countries and received baptism.^ The marvellous 
 tales of the greatness and magnificence of Prester John, that fired 
 the imagination of mediaeval Europe, had given rise to a belief 
 that the Mongols were Christians — a belief which was further 
 strengthened by the false reports that reached Europe of the 
 conversion of various Mongol Khans and their zeal for the Chris- 
 tian cause. It was under this delusion that St. Louis sent an 
 ambassador, William of Rubrouck, to exhort the great ;^an to 
 persevere in his supposed efforts for the spread of the Christian 
 faith. But these reports were soon discovered to be without any 
 foundation in fact, though William of Rubrouck found that the 
 
 ' De Guignes, vol. iii. p. 115. 
 '■^ Id. p. 125. 
 
 ' Klaproth, p. 204. 
 
BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY AMONG MONGOLS. 189 
 
 Christian religion was freely tolerated at the court of Mangu 
 ;^an, and the adhesion of some few Mongols to this faith made 
 the Christian priests hopeful of still further conquests. But so 
 long as Latins, Greeks, Nestorians and Armenians carried their 
 theological differences into the very midst of the Mongol camp,, 
 there was very little hope of much progress being made, and 
 it is probably this very want of union among the preachers of 
 Christianity that caused their efforts to meet with so little success 
 among the Mongols ; so that while they were fighting among one 
 another, Buddhism and Islam were gaining a firm footing for 
 themselves. The haughty pretensions of the Roman Pontiif soon 
 caused the proud conquerors of half the world to withdraw from 
 his emissaries what little favour they might at first have been 
 inclined to show, and many other circumstances contributed to- 
 the failure of the Roman mission.^ 
 
 As for the Nestorians, who had been first in the field, they 
 appear to have been too degraded and apathetic to take much 
 advantage of their opportunities. Of the Nestorians in China, 
 William of Rubrouck- says that they were very ignorant and 
 could not even understand their service books, which were written 
 in Syriac. He accuses them of drunkenness, polygamy and 
 covetousness, and makes an unfavourable comparison between 
 their lives and those of the Buddhist priests. Their bishop paid 
 them very rare visits — sometimes only once in fifty years : on 
 such occasions he would ordain all the male children, even the. 
 babies in their cradles. The priests were eaten up with simony,, 
 made a traffic of the sacred rites of their church and concerned 
 themselves more with money-making than with the propagation 
 ofthefaith.3 
 
 In the western parts of the Mongol empire, where the Christians. 
 looked to the newly-risen power to help them in their wars with 
 the Musalmans and to secure for them the possession of the Holy 
 Land, the alliance between the Christians and the U^ans of Persia 
 was short-lived, as the victories of Baybars, the Mamluk Sultan^of 
 
 ' C. d'Ohsson, tome ii. pp. 226-7. 
 
 ^ Of this writer Col. Yule says, "He gives an unfavourable account of [the 
 literature and morals of their clergy, which deserves more weight than such 
 statements regarding those looked upon as schismatics generally do; for the 
 narrative of Rubruquis gives one the impression of being written by a thoroughly- 
 honest and intelligent person." Cathay and the way thither, vol. i. p. xcviii. 
 
 ' Guillaume de Rubrouck, pp. 128-9. 
 
190 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Egypt (1260-1277) and his alliance with Baraka Khan, gave the 
 Il^ans quite enough to do to look after their own interests. 
 The excesses that the Christians of Damascus and other cities 
 committed during the brief period in which they enjoyed the 
 favour of this Mongol dynasty of Persia, did much to discredit the 
 Christian name in Western Asia.i 
 
 For Islam to enter into competition with such powerful rivals 
 as Buddhism and Christianity were at that time, must have 
 appeared a well-nigh hopeless undertaking. For the Muslims 
 had suffered more from the storm of the Mongol invasions than 
 the others. Those cities that had hitherto been the rallying 
 points of spiritual organisation and learning for Islam in Asia, 
 had been for the most part laid in ashes : the theologians and 
 pious doctors of the faith, either slain or carried away into cap- 
 tivity.^ Among the Mongol rulers — usually so tolerant towards 
 all religions — there were some who exhibited varying degrees of 
 hatred towards the Muslim faith. Jingis Khan ordered all those 
 who killed animals in the Muhammadan fashion to be put to 
 death, and this ordinance was revived by Khubilay Kfean, who by 
 oiFering rewards to informers set on foot a sharp persecution that 
 lasted for seven years, as many poor persons took advantage of 
 this ready means of gaining wealth, and slaves accused their 
 masters, in order to gain their freedom.^ During the reign of 
 Kuyuk Khan (1246-1248), who left the conduct of affairs entirely 
 to his two Christian ministers and whose court was filled with 
 Christian monks, the Muhammadans were made to suffer great 
 severities.* Arghun (1284-1291) the fourth Ill^an persecuted 
 the Musalmans and took away from them all posts in the depart- 
 ments of justice and finance, and fordade them to appear at his 
 court.^ 
 
 In spite of all difficulties, however, the Mongols and the savage 
 
 ' MaqrizI (2), tome i. Premiere Partie, pp. 98, 1 06. 
 
 ^ So notoriously brutal was the treatment they received that even the Chinese 
 shovvmen in their exhibitions of shadow figures exultingly brought forward the 
 figure of an old man with a white beard dragged by the neck at the tail of a horse, 
 as showing how the Mongol horsemen behaved towards the Musalmans. 
 (Howorth, vol. i. p. 159.) 
 
 ^ Howorth, vol. i. pp. 112, 273. This edict was only withdrawn when it was 
 found that it prevented Muhammadan merchants from visiting the court and that 
 trade suffered in consequence. 
 
 ^ Howorth, vol. i. p. 165. 
 
 ' De Guignes, vol. iii. p. 265. 
 
SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE MONGOLS. 191 
 
 tribes that followed in their wake, were at length brought to 
 submit to the faith of those Muslim peoples whom they had 
 crushed beneath their feet. Unfortunately history sheds little 
 light on the progress of this missionary movement and only a 
 few details relating to the conversion of the more prominent 
 converts have been preserved to us. Scattered up and down 
 throughout the length and breadth of the Mongol empire, there 
 must have been many of the followers of the Prophet who 
 laboured successfully and unknown, to win unbelievers to the 
 faith. In the reign of Ogatay Khan (1229-1241), we read of a 
 certain Buddhist governor of Persia, named Kurguz, who in his 
 later years abjured Buddhism and became a Musalman.^ In the 
 reign of Timur ^an(i323-i328), Ananda,a grandson of Khubilay 
 ghan and viceroy of Kansuh, was a zealous Musalman and had 
 converted a great many persons in Tangut and won over a portion 
 of the troops under his command to the same faith. He was 
 summoned to court and efforts were made to induce him to 
 conform to Buddhism, and on his refusing to abandon his faith he 
 was cast into prison. But he was shortly after set at liberty, for 
 fear of an insurrection among the inhabitants of Tangut, who were 
 much attached to him.^ 
 
 The first Mongol ruling prince that embraced Islam was Baraka 
 Man, who was chief of the Golden Horde from 1256 to 1265.' 
 He is said one day to have fallen in with a caravan coming from 
 Bu^ara, and taking two of the merchants aside, to have 
 questioned them on the doctrines of Islam, and they expounded 
 to him their faith so persuasively that he became converted in all 
 sincerity. He first revealed his change of faith to his youngest 
 brother, whom he induced to follow his example, and then made 
 open profession of his new belief.* After his conversion, Baraka 
 ^an entered into a close alliance with the Mamluk Sultan of 
 Egypt, Ruknu-d Din Baybars. The initiative came from the 
 latter, who had given a hospitable reception to a body of troops, 
 two hundred in number, belonging to the Golden Horde ; these 
 
 ' C. d'Ohsson, voL iii. p. 121. 
 
 ' C. d'Ohsson, tome ii. p. 532-3. 
 
 ' It is of interest to note that Najmu-d Din Mukhtaru-z ZahidI in 1260 
 compiled for Baraka Ehan a treatise which gave the proofs of the divine mission 
 of the Prophet, a refutation of those who denied it, and an account of the 
 controversies between Christians and Muslims. (Steinschneider, pp. 63-4.) 
 
 * Abu-1 Sihazii tome ii. p. 181. 
 
192 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 men, observing the growing enmity between their Khan and 
 Hulagu, the conqueror of Bagdad, in whose army they were 
 serving, took flight into Syria, whence they were honourably 
 conducted to Cairo to the court of Baybars, who persuaded them 
 to embrace Islam.^ Baybars himself was at war with Hulagu, 
 whom he had recently defeated and driven out of Syria. He 
 sent two of the Mongol fugitives, with some other envoys, to 
 bear a letter to Baraka Kh,an. On their return these envoys 
 reported that each princess and amir at the court of Baraka Khan 
 had an imam and a mu'adhdhin and the children were taught 
 the Quran in the schools.^ While on their way the envoys of 
 Baybars met an embassy that had been sent to Egypt by Baraka 
 Q,an,s to bear the news of the conversion of himself and his 
 subjects to Islam. These friendly relations between Baybars 
 and Baraka Khan brought many of the Mongols of the Golden 
 Horde into Egypt, where they were prevailed upon to become 
 Musalmans.* 
 
 In Persia, where Hulagu founded the dynasty of the Il^ans, 
 the progress of Islam among the Mongols was much slower. In 
 order to strengthen himself against the attacks of Baraka ^an and 
 the Sultan of Egypt, Hulagu accepted the alliance of the Christian 
 powers of the East, such as the king of Armenia and the Crusaders, 
 His favourite wife was a Christian and favourably disposed the 
 mind of her husband towards her co-religionists, and his son 
 Abaga Khan married the daughter of the Emperor of Constanti- 
 nople. Though Abaga Khan did not himself become a Christian, 
 his court was filled with Christian priests, and he sent envoys to 
 several of the princes of Europe — St, Louis of France, King 
 Charles of Sicily and King James of Aragon — to solicit their 
 alliance against the Muhammadans ; to the same end also, an 
 embassy of sixteen Mongols was sent to the Council of Lyons in 
 1274, where the spokesman of this embassy embraced Christianity 
 and was baptised with some of his companions. Great hopes 
 were entertained of the conversion of Abaga, but they proved 
 fruitless. His brother Tokudar,^ who succeeded him, was the first 
 of the IlHians who embraced^Islam. He had been brought up as 
 
 ' Maqrizi (2), tome i. pp. 180-1, 187. 
 
 ^ Id. p. 215. 
 
 ' Id. p. 188. " Id. p. 222. 
 
 ^ Wassaf calls him NikudSr before, and Ahmad after, his conversion. 
 
CONVERSION OF TOKtJDAR. 193 
 
 a Christian, for (as a contemporary Christian writer 1 tells us), 
 •"he was baptised when young and called by the name of 
 Nicholas. But when he was grown up, through his intercourse 
 -with Saracens, of whom he was very fond, he became a base 
 Saracen, and, renouncing the Christian faith, wished to be called 
 Muhammad Khan, and strove with all his might that the Tartars 
 should be converted to the faith and sect of Muhammad, and 
 ■when they proved obstinate, not daring to force them, he brought 
 about their conversion by giving them honours and favours and 
 gifts, so that in his time many Tartars were converted to the faith 
 of the Saracens." This prince sent the news of his conversion to 
 the Sultan of Egypt in the following letter : — " By the power of 
 God Almighty, the mandate of Ahmad to the Sultan of Egypt. 
 God Almighty (praised be His name !) by His grace preventing 
 us and by the light of His guidance, hath guided us in our early 
 youth and vigour into the true path of the knowledge of His 
 deity and the confession of His unity, to bear witness that 
 Muhammad (on whom rest the highest blessings !) is the Prophet 
 of God, and to reverence His saints and His pious servants. 
 ■• Whom God shall please to guide, that man's breast will He open 
 to Islam.' - We ceased not to incline our heart to the promotion 
 of the faith and the improvement of the condition of Islam and 
 the Muslims, up to the time when the succession to the empire 
 •came to us from our illustrious father and brother, and God 
 ;spread over us the glory of His grace and kindness, so that in the 
 abundance of His favours our hopes were realised, and He 
 revealed to us the bride of the kingdom, and she was brought 
 forth to us a noble spouse. A Kuriltai or general assembly was 
 ■convened, wherein our brothers, our sons, great nobles, generals 
 of the army and captains of the forces, met to hold council ; and 
 they were all agreed on carrying out the order of our elder 
 brother, viz. to summon here a vast levy of our troops whose 
 numbers would make the earth, despite its vastness, appear too 
 narrow, whose fury and fierce onset would fill the hearts of men 
 with fear, being animated with a courage before which the 
 mountain peaks bow down, and a firm purpose that makes the 
 hardest rocks grow soft. We reflected on this their resolution 
 which expressed the wish of all, and we concluded that it ran 
 
 ^ Heythoum (Ramusiot Tom. ii,p. 60, c.) 
 , = Qur'an, vi, 125. 
 
194 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 counter to the aim we had in view — to promote the common 
 weal, i.e. to strengthen the ordinance of Islam ; never, as far as 
 lies in our power, to issue any order that will not tend to prevent 
 bloodshed, remove the ills of men, and cause the breeze of peace 
 and prosperity to blow on all lands, and the kings of other 
 countries to rest upon the couch of affection and benevolence, 
 whereby the commands of God will be honoured and mercy be 
 shown to the people of God. Herein, God inspired us to quench 
 this fire and put an end to these terrible calamities, and make 
 known to those who advanced this proposal (of a levy) what it is 
 that God has put into our hearts to do, namely, to employ all 
 possible means for the healing of all the sickness of the world, 
 and putting off what should only be appealed to as the last 
 remedy. For we desire not to hasten to^appeal to arms, until we 
 have first declared the right path, and will permit it only after 
 setting forth the truth and establishing it with proofs. Our 
 resolve to carry out whatever appears to us good and advantageous 
 has been strengthened by the counsels of the Shay]^u-1 Islam, 
 the model of divines, who has given us much assistance in 
 religious matters. We have appointed our chief justice, Qutbu-d 
 Din and the Atabak, Bahau-d Din, both trustworthy persons of 
 this flourishing kingdom, to make known to you our course of 
 action and bear witness to our good intentions for the common 
 weal of the Muslims ; and to make it known that God has 
 enlightened us, and that Islam annuls all that has gone before it, 
 and that God Almighty has put it into our hearts to follow the 
 truth and those who practice it. . . . If some convincing proof be 
 required, let men observe our actions. By the grace of God, we 
 have raised aloft the standards of the faith,^and borne witness to 
 it in all our orders and our practice, so that the ordinances-of the 
 law of Muhammad might be brought to the fore and firmly 
 established in accordance with thelprinciples;of justice laid down 
 by Ahmad. Whereby we have filled the hearts of the people 
 with joy, have granted free pardon to all oflFenders, and shown 
 them indulgences, saying ' May God pardon the past ! ' We have 
 reformed all matters concerning the pious^endowments of Muslims 
 given for mosques, colleges, charitable institutions, and the 
 rebuilding of caravanserais : we have restored their incomes to 
 those to whom they were due according to the terms laid|down 
 by the donors. . . . We hav& ordered the pilgrims to be treated 
 
ISLAM UNDER THE ILOJANS. 195 
 
 with respect, provision to be made for their caravans and for 
 securing their safety on the pilgrim routes ; we have given 
 perfect freedom to merchants, travelling from one country to 
 another, that they may go wherever they please : and we have 
 strictly prohibited our soldiers and police from interfering with 
 them in their comings or goings." He seeks the alliance of the 
 Sultan of Egypt " so that these countries and cities may again be 
 populated, these terrible calamities be put down, the sword be 
 returned to the scabbard ; that all peoples may dwell in peace 
 and quietness, and the necks of the Muslims be freed from the 
 ills of humiliation and disgrace." ^ 
 
 To the student of the history of the Mongols it is a relief to 
 pass from the recital of nameless horrors and continual bloodshed 
 to a document emanating from a Mongol prince, that gives 
 expression to such humane and benevolent sentiments, which 
 sound strange coming from such lips. 
 
 This conversion of their chief and the persecutions that he 
 inflicted on the Christians gave great offence to the Mongols, 
 who, although not Christians themselves, had been long 
 accustomed to intercourse with the Christians, and they 
 denounced their chief to Khubilay Khan as one who had 
 abandoned the footsteps of his forefathers. A revolt broke 
 out against him, headed by his nephew Arghun, who compassed 
 his death and succeeded him on the throne. During his brief 
 reign (1284-1291), the Christians were once more restored to 
 favour, while the Musalmans had to suffer persecution in their 
 tum, were dismissed from their posts and driven away from the 
 court.2 
 
 The successors of Tokudar were all heathen, until, in 1295, 
 Giazan, the seventh and greatest of the llKhans, became a 
 Musalman and made Islam the ruling religion of Persia. During 
 the last three reigns the Christians had entertained great hopes 
 of the conversion of the ruling family of Persia, who had shown 
 them such distinguished favour and entrusted them with so many 
 important offices of state. His immediate predecessor, the 
 insurgent Baydu, who occupied the throne for a few months only 
 in 1295, carried his predilection for Christianity so far as to try to 
 put a stop to the spread of Islam among the Mongols, and 
 
 ' Wassaf, pp. 231-4. 
 
 ' De Guignes, vol. iii. pp. 263-5. 
 
 O 2 
 
196 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 accordingly forbade anyone to preach the doctrines of this faith 
 among them.i 
 
 Qiiazan himself before his conversion had been brought up as a 
 Buddhist and had erected several Buddhist temples in Khurasan, 
 and took great pleasure in the company of the priests of this faith, 
 vfho had come into Persia in large numbers since the establish- 
 ment of the Mongol supremacy over that country .^ He appears 
 to have been naturally of a religious turn of mind, f9r he studied 
 the creeds of the different religions of his time, and used to hold 
 discussions with the learned doctors of each faith.^ Rashidu-d 
 Din, his learned minister and the historian of his reign,, was there- 
 fore probably correct in maintaining the genuineness of his con- 
 version to Islam, the religious observances of which he zealously 
 tept throughout his whole reign, though his contemporaries (and 
 later writers have often re-echoed the imputation) represented him 
 as having only yielded to the solicitations of some Amirs and 
 Shay^s.* " Besides, what interested motive, " asks his apologist, 
 " could have led so powerful a sovereign to change his faith : much 
 less, a prince whose pagan ancestors had conquered the world ? " 
 His conversion however certainly won over to his side the hearts 
 of the Persians, when he was contending with Baydii for the 
 throne, and the Muhammadan Mongols in the army of his rival 
 deserted to support the cause of their co-religionist. These were 
 the very considerations that were urged upon Ghazan by Nuriiz, a 
 Muhammadan Amir who had espoused his cause and who hailed 
 him as the prince who, according to a prophecy, was to appear 
 about this time to protect the faith of Islam and restore it to its 
 former splendour : if he embraced Islam, he could become the 
 ruler of Persia : the Musalmans, delivered from the grievous yoke 
 of the Pagan Mongols, would espouse his cause, and God recog- 
 nising in him the saviour of the true faith from utter destruction 
 would bless his arms with victory.^ After hesitating a little, 
 Ghazan made a public profession of the faith, and his officers and 
 soldiers followed his example : he distributed alms to men of piety 
 and learning and visited the mosques and tombs of the saints and 
 in every way showed himself an exemplary MusUm ruler. His 
 brother who succeeded him in 1304, under the name of 
 
 ' C. d'Ohssoii, tome iv. pp. 141. 2. ' Id. ib. p. 148. 
 
 ' Id. ib. p. 365. * Id. ib. pp. 148, 354. 
 
 ' Id. lb. pp. 128, 132. 
 
ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM. 197 
 
 Muhammad Khudabandah, had been brought up as a Christian in 
 the faith of his mother and had been baptised under the name of 
 Nicholas, but after his mother's death while he was still a young 
 man, he became a convert to Islam through the persuasions of his 
 wife.i Ibn Batutah says that his example exercised a great in- 
 fluence on the Mongols.- From this time forward Islam became 
 the paramount faith in the kingdom of the Il^ans. 
 
 The details that we possess of the progress of Islam in the 
 Middle Kingdom that fell to the lot of Jagatay and his descendants, 
 are still more meagre. The first of this line who " had the 
 blessedness of receiving the light of the faith " was Buraq Khan 
 (a great grandson of Jagatay), who embraced Islam two years after 
 his accession to the throne and took the name of Ghiyasu-d Din 
 (1266-70).^ But at first the success of Islam was short-lived, for 
 after the death of this prince, those who had been converted 
 during his reign relapsed into their former heathenism ; and it 
 was not until the next century that the conversion of Tarmashirin 
 ©an (1322-1330) caused Islam to be at all generally adopted by 
 the Jagatay Mongols, who when they followed the example of 
 their chief this time remained true to their new faith. But even 
 now the ascendancy of Islam was not assured, for his successor 
 persecuted the Muslims,* and it was not until some years later that 
 we hear of the first Musalman king of Kashgar, which the break- 
 up of the Jagatay dynasty had erected into a separate kingdom. 
 This prince, Tuqluq Timur :^an (1347-1363), is said to have owed 
 his conversion to a holy man from BuJiara, by name Shay^ 
 
 ' Hammer-Puigstall : Geschichte der Ilchanen, vol. ii. p. 182. 
 
 It is not improbable that the captive Muslim women took a considerable 
 part in the conversion of the Mongols to Islam. Women appear to have occupied 
 an honoured position among the Mongols and many instances might be given of 
 their having taken a prominent part in political affairs, just as already several 
 cases have been mentioned of the influence they exercised on their husbands in 
 religious matters. William of Rubrouck tells us how he found the influence of a 
 Muslim wife an obstacle in the way of his proselytising labours : " On the day of 
 Pentecost, a Saracen came to talk with us and we expounded to him our faith. 
 After hearing of the benefits that accrued to men from faith in the Incarnation, 
 the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, and absolution from sin by 
 baptism, he said that he wished to be baptised, but when we were getting ready 
 to administer to him the sacrament of baptism, he suddenly leapt on his horse 
 saying that he would go home to consult his wife. The next morning he came 
 back, saying that for nothing in the world would he dare accept baptism, as he 
 would no longer be allowed to drink mare's milk." (Guillaume de Rubrouck, 
 P-5I.) 
 
 ' Ibn Batutah, vol. ii. p. $7' 
 
 ' Abu-1 Giizi, tome ii. p. 159- " I^n Batutah, tome in. p. 47. 
 
198 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Jamalu-d Din. This Shaytt in company with a number of travel- 
 lers had unwittingly trespassed on the game-preserves of the prince, 
 who ordered them to be bound hand and foot and brought before 
 him. In reply to his angry question, how they had dared interfere 
 with his hunting, the Shaytt pleaded that they were strangers 
 and were quite unaware that they were trespassing on forbidden 
 ground. Learning that they were Persians, the prince said that 
 a dog was worth more than a Persian. "Yes," replied the 
 Shay^, " if we had not the true faith, we should indeed be worse 
 than the dogs." Struck with his reply, the 'J^a.n ordered this 
 bold Persian to be brought before him on his return from hunting, 
 and taking him aside asked him to explain what he meant by 
 these words and what was ' faith.' The Shay]^ then set before 
 him the glorious doctrines of Islam with such fervour and zeal 
 that the heart of the Khan that before had been hard as a stone 
 was melted like wax, and so terrible a picture did the holy man 
 draw of the state of unbelief, that the prince was convinced of the 
 blindness of his own errors, but said, " Were I now to make pro- 
 fession of the faith of Islam, I should not be able to lead my 
 subjects into the true path. But bear with me a little ; and when 
 I have entered into the possession of the kingdom of my fore- 
 fathers, come to me again." For the empire of Jagatay had by 
 this time been broken up into a number of petty princedoms, and 
 it was many years before Tuqluq Timur succeeded in uniting 
 under his sway the whole empire as before. Meanwhile Shaytt 
 Jamalu-d Din had returned to his home, where he fell dangerously 
 ill : when at the point of death, he said to his son Rashidu-d Din, 
 " Tuqluq Timur will one day become a great monarch; fail not to 
 go and salute him in my name and fearlessly remind him of the 
 promise he made me. " Some years later, when Tuqluq Timiir 
 had re-won the empire of his fathers, Rashidu-d Din made his way 
 to the camp of the Khan to fulfil the last wishes of his father, but 
 in spite of all his eiforts he could not gain an audience of the 
 Khan. At length he devised the following expedient : one day in 
 the early morning, he began to chant the call to prayers, close to 
 the Khan's tent. Enraged at having his slumbers disturbed in 
 this way, the prince ordered him to be brought into his presence, 
 whereupon Rashidu-d Din delivered his father's message. Tiiqluq 
 :aan was not unmindful of his promise, and repeating the pro- 
 fession of faith, declared himself a Muslim, and afterwards used 
 
ISLAM IN THE GOLDEN HORDE. 199 
 
 his influence to spread Islam among his people. From that time 
 forth Islam became the established faith in the countries under the 
 rule of the descendants of Jagatay.^ 
 
 Let us now return to the history of Islam in the Golden Horde. 
 The chief camping ground of this section of the Mongols was the 
 grassy plain watered by the Volga, on the bank of which, they 
 founded their capital city Serai, whither the Russian princes sent 
 their tribute to the Klian. The conversion of Baraka Sian, of 
 which mention has been made above, and the close intercourse 
 with Egypt that subsequently sprang up, contributed considerably 
 to the progress of Islam, and his example seems to have been 
 gradually followed by those of the aristocracy and leaders of the 
 Golden Horde that were of Mongol descent. But many tribes of 
 the Golden Horde appear to have resented the introduction of 
 Islam into their midst, and when the conversion of Baraka Ehan 
 was openly proclaimed, they sent to offer the crown, of which 
 they considered him now unworthy, to his rival Htilagu. Indeed 
 so strong was this opposition, that it seems to have largely 
 contributed to the formation of the Nogais as a separate tribe. 
 They took their name from Nogay, who was the chief commander 
 of the Mongol forces under Baraka ^an. When the other 
 princes of the Golden Horde became Musalmans, Nogay remained 
 a Shamanist and thus became a rallying point for those who 
 refused to abandon the old religion of the Mongols. His daughter, 
 however, who was married to a Shamanist, became converted to 
 Islam some time after her marriage and had to endure the ill- 
 treatment and contempt of her husband in consequence.^ 
 
 To Uzbeg Khan, who was leader of the Golden Horde from 
 1313 to 1340, and who distinguished himself by his proselytising 
 zeal, it was said, " Content yourself with our obedience, what 
 matters our religion to you ? Why should we abandon the faith 
 of Jingis Khan for that of the Arabs ? " But in spite of the strong 
 opposition to his efforts, Uzbeg Khan succeeded in winning many 
 converts to the faith of which he was so ardent a follower and 
 which owed to his efforts its firm establishment in the country 
 under his sway.^ A further sign of his influence is found in the 
 tribes of the tjzbegs of Central Asia, who take their name from 
 him and were-probably-converted during his reign. He is said to 
 
 ^ Abu-1 Ghazi, tome ii. pp. 166-8. ^ Howorth, vol. ii. p. 10x5. 
 
 ' Abu-1 Ghazw tome ii. p. 184. 
 
200 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 have formed the design of spreading the faith of Islam throughout 
 the whole of Russia,i but here he met with no success. Indeed, 
 though the Mongols were paramount in Russia for two centuries,, 
 they appear to have exercised very little influence on the people 
 of that country, and least of all in the matter of religion. It is. 
 noticeable moreover that in spite of his zeal for the spread of his. 
 own faith, tjzbeg Khan was very tolerant towards his Christian 
 subjects, who were left undisturbed in the exercise of their 
 religion and even allowed to pursue their missionary labours in 
 his territory. One of the most remarkable documents of Muham- 
 madan toleration is the charter that tJzbeg Khan granted to the 
 Metropolitan Peter in 1313 : — " By the will and power, the great- 
 ness and mercy of the most High ! tTzbeg to all our princes, great 
 and small, etc., etc. Let no man insult the metropolitan church 
 of which Peter is the head, or his servants or his churchmen ; 
 let no man seize their property, goods or people, let no maa 
 meddle with the affairs of the metropolitan church, since they are 
 divine. Whoever shall meddle therein and transgress our edict, 
 will be guilty before God and feel His wrath and be punished by 
 us with death. Let the metropolitan dwell in the path of safety 
 and rejoice, with a just and upright heart let him (or his deputy) 
 decide and regulate all ecclesiastical matters. We solemnly 
 declare that neither we nor our children nor the princes of our 
 realm nor the governors of our provinces will in any way interfere 
 with the affairs of the church and the metropolitan, or in their 
 towns, districts, villages, chases and fisheries, their hives, lands^ 
 meadows, forests, towns and places under their bailiffs, their 
 vineyards, mills, winter quarters for cattle, or any of the 
 properties and goods of the church. Let the mind of the 
 metropolitan be always at peace and free from trouble, with 
 uprightness of heart let him pray to God for us, our children 
 and our nation. Whoever shall lay hands on anything that i& 
 sacred, shall be held guilty, he shall incur the wrath of God and 
 the penalty of death, that others may be dismayed at his fate. 
 When the tribute or other dues, such as custom duties, plough- 
 tax, tolls or relays are levied, or when we wish to raise troops 
 among our subjects, let nothing be exacted from the cathedral 
 churches under the metropolitan Peter, or from any of his clergy: 
 
 ' De Guignes, vol. iii. p. 351. 
 
tJZBEG iraAN. 201 
 
 .... whatever may be exacted from the clergy, shall be returned 
 threefold. . . . Their laws, their churches, their monasteries 
 and chapels shall be respected ; whoever condemns or blames 
 this religion, shall not be allowed to excuse himself under any 
 pretext, but shall be punished with death. The brothers and 
 sons of priests and deacons, living at the same table and in the 
 same house, shall enjoy the same privileges." ^ 
 
 That these were no empty words and that the toleration here 
 promised became a reality, may be judged from a letter sent to the 
 Qan by Pope John XXII. in 131 8, in which he thanks the MusHm 
 prince for the favour he showed to his Christian subjects and the 
 kind treatment they received at his hands. ^ The successors of 
 tJzheg Hian do not appear to have been animated by the same 
 zeal for the spread of Islam as he had shown, and could not be 
 expected to succeed where he failed. So long as the Russians 
 paid their taxes, they were left free to worship according to their 
 own desires, and the Christian religion had become too closely 
 intertwined with the life of the people to be disturbed, even had 
 efforts been made to turn them from the faith of their fathers ; 
 for Christianity had been the national religion of the Russian 
 people for well nigh three centuries before the Mongols settled 
 down on the banks of the Volga, 
 
 Another race many years before had tried to win the Russians 
 to Islam but had likewise failed, viz. the Muslim Bulgarians who 
 were found in the tenth century on the banks of the Volga, and 
 who probably owed their conversion to the Muslim merchants, 
 trading in furs and other commodities of the North ; — some time 
 before a.d. 921, when the Caliph Al Muqtadir sent an envoy to 
 confirm them in the faith and instruct them in the tenets and 
 ordinances of Islam.^ 
 
 These Bulgarians attempted the conversion of Vladimir, the 
 then sovereign of Russia, who (the Russian chronicler tells us) 
 had found it necessary to choose some religion better than his 
 pagan creed, but they failed to overcome his objections to the 
 rite of circumcision and to the prohibition of wine, the use of 
 which, he declared, the Russians could never give up, as it was 
 
 J Karamzin, vol. iv. pp. 391-4. 
 
 ^ Hammer-Purgstall : Geschichte der Goldenen Horde in Kiptschak, p. 290. 
 
 ' De Baschkiris quae memoriae prodita sunt ab Ibn-Foszlano et Jakuto, 
 interprete C. N. Fraehnio. (Memoires de I'Academie imperiale des Sciences de 
 St. Petersbourg, tome viii. p. 6a6) (1822.) 
 
202 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the very joy of their life. Equally unsuccessful were the Jews 
 who came from the country of the Khazars on the Caspian Sea 
 and who had won over the king of that people to the Mosaic 
 faith.i After listening to their arguments, Vladimir asked them 
 where their country was. " Jerusalem," they replied, " but God 
 in His anger has scattered us over the whole world." " Then 
 you are cursed of God," cried the king, "and yet want to teach 
 others : begone ! we have no wish, like you, to be without a 
 country." The most favourable impression was made by a Greek 
 priest who after a brief criticism of the other religions, set forth 
 the whole scheme of Christian teaching beginning with the 
 creation of the world and the story of the fall of man and ending 
 with the seven oecumenical councils accepted by the Greek 
 church ; then he showed the prince a picture of the Last 
 Judgment with the righteous entering paradise and the wicked 
 being thrust down into hell, and promised him the heritage of 
 heaven, if he would be baptised. 
 
 But Vladimir was unwilling to make a rash choice of a substi- 
 tute for his pagan religion, so he called his boyards together and 
 having told them of the accounts he had received of the various 
 religions, asked them for their advice. " Prince," they replied, 
 " every man praises his own religion, and if you would make 
 choice of the best, send wise men into the diiferent countries to 
 discover which of all the nations honours God in the manner 
 most worthy of Him." So the prince chose out for this purpose 
 ten men who were eminent for their wisdom. These ambassadors 
 found among the Bulgarians mean looking places of worship, 
 gloomy prayers and solemn faces ; among the German Catholics 
 religious ceremonies that lacked both grandeur and magnificence. 
 At length they reached Constantinople : " Let them see the 
 glory of our God," said the emperor. So they were taken to the 
 church of Santa Sophia, where the Patriarch, clad in his pontifical 
 robes, was celebrating mass. The magnificence of the building, 
 the rich vestments of the priests, the ornaments of the altars, the 
 sweet odour of the incense, the reverent silence of the people, and 
 the mysterious solemnity of the ceremonial filled the savage 
 Russians with wonder and amazement. It seemed to them that 
 this church must be the dwelling of the Most High, and that He 
 
 ' Abu'Ubaydu-1 Bakri, pp. 470-1. 
 
CONVERSION OF RUSSIANS TO CHRISTIANITY. 203 
 
 manifested His glory therein to mortals. On their return to Kief, 
 the ambassadors gave the prince an account of their mission : 
 they spoke with contempt of the religion of the Prophet and had 
 little to say for the Roman Catholic faith, but were enthusiastic 
 in their eulogies of the Greek Church. "Every man," they 
 said, " who has put his lips to a sweet draught, henceforth 
 abhors anything bitter ; wherefore we having come to the 
 knowledge of the faith of the Greek Church desire none other." 
 Vladimir once more consulted his boyards, who said unto him, 
 " Had not the Greek faith been best of all, Olga, your grand- 
 mother, the wisest of mortals, would never have embraced it." 
 Whereupon Vladimir hesitated no longer and in 988 a.d. 
 declared himself a Christian. On the day after his baptism he 
 threw down the idols his forefathers had worshipped and issued 
 an edict that all the Russians, masters and slaves, rich and poor, 
 should submit to be baptised into the Christian faith.^ 
 
 Thus Christianity became the national religion of the Russian 
 people, and after the Mongol conquest, the distinctive national 
 characteristics of Russians and Tartars that have kept the two 
 races apart to the present day, the bitter hatred of the Tartar 
 yoke, the devotion of the Russians to their own faith and the 
 want of religious zeal on the part of the Tartars, kept the 
 conquered race from adopting the religion of the conqueror. 
 Especially has the prohibition of spirituous liquors by the laws of 
 Islam, been supposed to have stood in the way of the adoption of 
 this religion by the Russian people. 
 
 Not that the Mongols in Russia have been wholly inoperative 
 in promoting the spread of Islam. The distinctly Hellenic type 
 of face that is to be found among the so-called Tartars of the 
 Crimea has led to the conjecture that these Muhammadans have 
 absorbed into their community the Greek and Italian populations 
 that they found settled on the Crimean peninsula, and that we 
 find among them the Muhammadanised descendants of the in- 
 digenous inhabitants, and of the Genoese colonists.^ A traveller 
 of the seventeenth century tells us that the Tartars of the Crimea 
 tried to induce their slaves to become Muhammadans, and won 
 over many of them to this faith by promising them their liberty 
 if they would be persuaded.^ 
 
 ' Karamsin, tome i. pp. 259-271. ' Reclus, tome v. p. 831. 
 
 ^ Relation des Tartares, par Jean de Luca, p. 17 (Thevenot, tome i.). 
 
204 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 The Finns of the Volga have also been among the converts 
 that the Tartars have won over to Islam, e.g. while many of the 
 Tcheremiss are nominally Christians and are becoming Russian- 
 ised, whole villages of them have on the other hand embraced 
 Islam. The Tchuvash, who live more to the south and belong to 
 the same family, have likewise become Muhammadans, as probably 
 the whole of the Finnish population of this part of the country 
 would have done ere now if the Christian and Muslim religions 
 were allowed equal rights by the Russian government.^ 
 
 One of the most curious incidents in the missionary history of 
 Islam is the conversion of the Kirghiz of Central Asia by Tartar 
 mullas, who preached Islam among them in the eighteenth 
 century, as emissaries of the Russian government. The Kirghiz 
 began to become Russian subjects about 1731, and for 120 years all 
 diplomatic correspondence was carried on with them in the Tartar 
 language under the delusion that they were ethnographically the 
 same as the Tartars of the Volga. Another misunderstanding 
 on the part of the Russian government was that the Kirghiz 
 were Musalmans, whereas in the last century they were nearly 
 all Shamanists, as a large number of them are still to the present 
 day. At the time of the annexation of their country to the 
 Russian empire only a few of their Khans and Sultans had any 
 knowledge of the faith of Islam — and that very confused and 
 vague. Not a single mosque was to be found throughout the 
 whole of the Kirghiz Steppes, or a single religious teacher of the 
 faith of the Prophet, and the Kirghiz owed their conversion to 
 Islam to the fact that the Russians, taking them for Muham- 
 madans, insisted on treating them as such. Large sums of money 
 were given for the building of mosques, and mullas were sent to 
 open schools and instruct the young in the tenets of the Muslim 
 faith : the Kirghiz scholars were to receive every day a small sum 
 to support themselves on, and the fathers were to be induced to 
 send their children to the schools by presents and other means of 
 persuasion. An incontrovertible proof that the Musalman pro- 
 paganda made its way into the Kirghiz Steppes from the side of 
 Russia, is the circumstance that it is especially those Kirghiz who 
 are more contiguous to Europe that have become Musalmans, 
 while the further east we go, the weaker we find their faith to be, 
 and even to the present day the old Shamanism lingers among 
 
 ' Reclus, tome v. pp. 746, 748. 
 
CONVERSION OF THE KIRGHIZ TO ISLAM. 205 
 
 those who wander in the neghbourhood of Khiva, Buttiara and 
 Khokand, though these for centuries have been Muhammadan 
 countries.! This is probably the only instance of a Christian 
 government co-operating in the promulgation of Islam, and is 
 the more remarkable inasmuch as the Russian government of this 
 period was attempting to force Christianity on its Muslim subjects 
 in Europe, in continuation of the efforts made in the sixteenth 
 century soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan. The 
 labours of the clergy were actively seconded by the police and the 
 civil authorities, but though a certain number of Tartars were 
 baptised, it had to be admitted that the new converts " shame- 
 lessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and neither hold nor 
 know the Christian faith." When spiritual exhortations failed, 
 the Government ordered its officials to " pacify, imprison, put in 
 irons, and thereby unteach and frighten from the Tartar faith 
 those who, though baptised, do not obey the admonitions of the 
 Metropolitan." These more violent methods proving equally 
 ineffectual, Catherine II. in 1778 ordered that all the new converts 
 should sign a written promise to the effect that " they would 
 completely forsake their infidel errors, and, avoiding all inter- 
 course with unbelievers, would hold firmly and unwaveringly the 
 Christian faith and its dogmas." But in spite of all, these so- 
 called " baptised Tartars " are even to the present day as far from 
 being Christians as they were in the sixteenth century. They 
 may, indeed, be inscribed in the official registers as Christians, 
 but they resolutely stand out against any efforts that may be 
 made to Christianise them. In a semi-official article, published 
 in 1872, the writer says : " It is a fact worthy of attention that a 
 long series of evident apostacies coincides with the beginning of 
 measures to confirm the converts in the Christian faith. There 
 must be, therefore, some collateral cause producing those cases of 
 apostacy precisely at the moment when the contrary might be 
 expected." The fact seems to be that these Tartars having all 
 the time remained Muhammadan at heart, have resisted the 
 active measures taken to make their nominal profession of Chris- 
 tianity in any way a reality.^ The Russian government of the 
 
 ' The Russian Policy regarding Central Asia. An historical sketch. By 
 Professor V. Grigorief. (Eugene Schuyler : Turkistan, vol. ii. pp. 40S-6-) 
 <5th ed. London, 1876.) 
 
 '^ D. Mackenzie Wallace: Russia, vol. i. pp. 242-244. (London, 1877, 
 4th ed.) 
 
206 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 present day is still attempting the conversion of its Tartar subjects 
 by means of the schools it has established in their midst. In this 
 way it hopes to win the younger generation, since otherwise it 
 seems impossible to gain an entrance for Christianity among the 
 Tartars, for, as a Russian professor has said, " The citizens of Kazan 
 are hard to win, but we get some little folk from the villages on 
 the steppe, and train them in the fear of God. Once they are 
 with us they can never turn back." i For the criminal code 
 contains severe enactments against those who fall away from the 
 Orthodox church,^ and sentences any person convicted of con. 
 verting a Christian to Islam to the loss of all civil rights and to 
 imprisonment with hard labour for a term varying from eight to ten 
 years. In spite, however, of the edicts of the government, Muslim 
 propagandism succeeds in winning over whole villages to the 
 faith of Islam, especially among the tribes of north-eastern 
 Russia.^ 
 
 Of the spread of Islam among the Tartars of Siberia, we have 
 a few particulars. It was not until the latter half of the sixteenth 
 century that it gained a footing in this country, but even before 
 this period Muhammadan missionaries had from time to time 
 made their way into Siberia with the hope of winning the 
 heathen population over to the acceptance of their faith, but the 
 majority of them met with a martyr's death. When Siberia 
 came under Muhammadan rule, in the reign of Kuchum !^an, 
 the graves of seven of these missionaries were discovered by an 
 aged Shay^ who came from Buldiara to search them out, being 
 anxious that some memorial should be kept of the devotion of 
 these martyrs to the faith : he was able to give the names of this 
 number, and up to the last century their memory was still revered 
 by the Tartars of Siberia.* When Kuchum Khan (who was 
 descended from Juji Khan, the eldest son of Jingis Khan) became 
 Khan of Siberia (about the year 1570), either by right of conquest 
 or (according to another account) at the invitation of the people 
 
 ' W. Hepworth Dixon : Free Russia, vol. ii. p. 284. (London, 1870.) 
 
 ^ E.g. " En 1883, des paysans Tatars du village d'Apozof etaient poursuivis, 
 devant le tribunal de Kazan, pour avoir abandonne I'orthodoxie. Les accusfe 
 d^claraient avoir toujours ^te musalmans ; sept d' entre eux n'en furent pas moins 
 condamnes, comme apostats, aux travaux forces. . . . Beaucoup de ces relaps 
 ont et6 deportes en Siberie." Anatole Leroy Beaulieu : L'Empire des Tsars et 
 les Russes, tome iii. p. 645. (Paris, 1889-93.) 
 
 ^ D. Mackenzie Wallace : Russia, vol. i. p. 245. 
 
 ■* G. F. Miiller : Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, vol. vii. p. 191. 
 
ISLAM IN SIBERIA. 207 
 
 whose Khan had died without issue, ^ he made every effort for the 
 conversion of his subjects, and sent to Bu^ara asking for 
 missionaries to assist him in this pious undertaking. One of the 
 missionaries who was sent from Bu^ara has left us an account of 
 how he set out with a companion to the capital of Kuchum !|San, 
 on the bank of the Irtish. Here, after two years, his companion 
 died, and, for some reasons that the writer does not mention, he 
 went back again ; but soon afterwards returned to the scene of 
 his labours, bringing with him another coadjutor, when Kuchum 
 :^an had appealed for help once more to BuHjara.' Missionaries 
 also came to Siberia from Kazan. But the advancing tide of 
 Russian conquest soon brought the proselytising efforts of 
 Kuchum Khan to an end before much had been accomplished, 
 especially as many of the tribes under his rule offered a strong 
 opposition to all attempts made to convert them. 
 
 But though interrupted by the Russian conquest, the progress 
 of Islam was by no means stopped. Mullas from Bu^ara and 
 other cities of Central Asia and merchants from Kazan were 
 continually active as missionaries of Islam in Siberia. In 1745 an 
 entrance was first effected among the Baraba Tartars (between 
 the Irtish and the Ob), and though at the beginning of this 
 century many were still heathen, they have now all become 
 Musalmans.* The conversion of the Kirghiz has already been 
 spoken of above : the history of most of the other Muslim tribes 
 of Siberia is very obscure, but their conversion is probably of a 
 recent date. Among the instruments of Muhammadan propa- 
 ganda at the present time, it is interesting to note the large place 
 taken by the folk-songs of the Kirghiz, in which, interwoven with 
 tale and legend, the main truths of Islam make their way into 
 the hearts of the common people.* 
 
 ' G. F. MuUer : Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, vol. vii. pp. 183-4. 
 
 ^ Radloff, vol. i. p. 147. 
 
 ' Jadrinzew, p. 138. Radloff, vol. i. p. 241. 
 
 ^ Radloff, vol. i. pp. 472, 497. 
 
 ^ 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN INDIA. 
 
 The Muhammadan invasions of India and the foundation and 
 growth of the Muhammadan power in that country, have found 
 many historians, both among contemporary and later writers. 
 But hitherto no one has attempted to write a history of the 
 spread of Islam in India, considered apart from the military 
 successes and administrative achievements of its adherents. 
 Indeed, to many, such a task must appear impossible. For India 
 has often been picked out as a typical instance of a country in 
 which Islam owes its existence and continuance in existence to 
 the settlement in it of foreign, conquering Muhammadan races, 
 who have transmitted their faith to their descendants, and only 
 succeeded in spreading it beyond their own circle by means of 
 persecution and forced conversions. Thus the missionary spirit 
 of Islam is supposed to show itself in its true light in the brutal 
 massacres of Brahmans byMahmud of Ghazna, in the persecutions 
 of Aurangzeb, the forcible circumcisions effected by Haydar 'Ali, 
 Tipu Sultan and the like. 
 
 But among the fifty-seven millions of Indian Musalmans there 
 are vast numbers of converts or descendants of converts, in whose 
 conversion force played no part and the only influences at work 
 were the teaching and persuasion of peaceful missionaries. This 
 class of converts forms a very distinct group by itself which can 
 be distinguished from that of the forcibly converted and the 
 other heterogeneous elements of which Muslim India is made up. 
 The entire community may be roughly divided into those of 
 foreign race who brought their faith into the country along 
 with them, and those who have been converted from one of the 
 previous religions of the country under various inducements and 
 at many different periods of history. The foreign settlement 
 
THE MUHAMMADAN POPULATION OF INDIA. 209 
 
 consists of three main bodies : first, and numerically the most 
 important, are the immigrants from across the north-west frontier, 
 who are found chiefly in Sind and the Panjab ; next come the 
 descendants of the court and armies of the various Muhammadan 
 dynasties, mainly in Upper India and to a much smaller extent 
 in the Deccan ; lastly, all along the west coast are settlements 
 probably of Arab descent, whose original founders came to India 
 by sea.i But the number of families of foreign origin that 
 actually settled in India is nowhere great except in the Panjab 
 and its neighbourhood. More than half the Muslim population 
 of India has indeed assumed appellations of distinctly foreign 
 races, such as Shayjdi, Beg, Khan, and even Sayyid, but the 
 greater portion of them are local converts or descendants of 
 converts, who have taken the title of the person of highest rank 
 amongst those by whom they were converted or have affiliated 
 themselves to the aristocracy of Islam on even less plausible 
 grounds.^ Of the other section of the community — the converted 
 natives of the country — part no doubt owed their change of 
 religion to force and official pressure, but by far the majority of 
 them entered the pale of Islam of their own free-will. The 
 history of the proselytising movements and social influences that 
 hrought about their conversion has hitherto received very little 
 attention, and most of the commonly accessible histories of the 
 Muhammadans in India, whether written by European or by 
 native authors, are mere chronicles of wars, campaigns and the 
 achievements of princes, in which little mention of the religious 
 life of the time finds a place, unless it has taken the form of 
 fanaticism or intolerance. From the biographies of the Muslim 
 saints, however, and from local traditions, something may be 
 learned of the missionary work that was carried on quite inde- 
 pendently of the political life of the country. But before dealing 
 •with these it is proposed to give an account of the official pro- 
 pagation of Islam and of the part played by the Muhammadan 
 rulers in the spread of their faith. 
 
 From the fifteenth year after the death of the Prophet, when 
 an Arab expedition was sent into Sind, up to the eighteenth 
 century, a series of Muhammadan invaders, some founders of 
 
 ' Census of India, 1 89 1. General Report by J. A. Eahies, p. 167. (London, 
 i>8?3-) 
 
 " Id., pp. 126, 207. 
 
 P 
 
3IO THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 great empires, others mere adventurers, poured into India from 
 the north-west. While some came only to plunder and retired 
 laden with spoils, others remained to found kingdoms that have 
 had a lasting influence to the present day. But of none of these 
 do we learn that they were accompanied by any missionaries or 
 preachers. Not that they were indifferent to their religion. To 
 many of them, their invasion of India appeared in the light of a 
 holy war. Such was evidently the thought in the minds of 
 Mahmud of Ghazna and Timur. The latter, after his capture of 
 Dehli, writes as follows in his autobiography : — " I had been at 
 Dehli fifteen days, which time I passed in pleasure and enjoy- 
 ment, holding royal Courts and giving great feasts. I then 
 reflected that I had come to Hindustan to war against infidels, 
 and my enterprise had been so blessed that wherever I had gone 
 I had been victorious. I had triumphed over my adversaries, I 
 had put to death some lacs of infidels and idolaters, and I had 
 stained my proselyting sword with the blood of the enemies of 
 the faith. Now this crowning victory had been won, and I felt 
 that I ought not to indulge in ease, but rather to exert myself in 
 warring against the infidels of Hindustan." i Though he speaks 
 much of his " proselyting sword," it seems however to have 
 served no other purpose than that of sending infidels to hell. 
 Most of the Muslim invaders seem to have acted in a very similar 
 way ; in the name of Allah, idols were thrown down, their priests 
 put to the sword, and their temples destroyed ; while mosques 
 were often erected in their place. It is true that the offer of 
 Islam was generally made to the unbelieving Hindus before any 
 attack was made upon them.^ Fear occasionally dictated a timely 
 acceptance of such offers and led to conversions which, in the' 
 earlier days of the Muhammadan invasion at least, were generally 
 short-lived and ceased to be effective after the retreat of the 
 invader. An illustration in point is furnished by the story of 
 Hardatta, a ra'is of Bulandshahr, whose submission to Mahmud 
 of Ghazna is thus related in the history of that conqueror's cam.- 
 
 ' Elliot, vol. ii. p. 44S. 
 
 ^ The princes of India were invited to embrace Islam before the first century 
 of the Hijrah had expired, by the Caliph 'Umar ibn 'Abdi-1'Aziz. (Elliot,, 
 vol. i. p. 124.) Muhammad Qasim made a similar offer when he invaded Sind 
 (Id., p. 175, 207, where a letter is said to have been sent from the Caliph to the. 
 Chief of Kanauj), and the invaders who followed him were probably equally 
 observant of the religious law. 
 
THE MUHAMMAD AN CONQUERORS OF INDIA. 2n 
 
 paigns written by his secretary. "At length (about 1019 a.d.) 
 he (i.e. Mahmud) arrived at the fort of Barba.i in the country of 
 Hardat, who was one of the ra'is, that is " kings," in the Hindi 
 language. When Hardat heard of this invasion by the protected 
 warriors of God,, who advanced like the waves of the sea, with 
 the angels around them on all sides, he became greatly agitated, 
 his steps trembled, and he feared for his life, which was forfeited 
 under the law of God. So he reflected that his safety would 
 best be secured by conforming to the religion of Islam, since 
 God's sword was drawn from the scabbard^ and the whip of 
 punishment was uplifted. He came forth, therefore, with ten 
 thousand men, who all proclaimed their anxiety for conversion 
 and their rejection of idols." ^ 
 
 These new converts probably took the earliest opportunity of 
 apostatising presented to them by the retreat of the conqueror — 
 a kind of action which we iind the early Muhammadan historians 
 of India continually complaining of. For when Qutbu-d Din 
 attacked Baran in 1193, he was stoutly opposed by Chandrasen, 
 the then Raja, who was a lineal descendant of Hardatta and 
 whose very name betrays his Hindu faith : nor do we hear of 
 there being any Musalmans remaining under his rule.^ 
 
 But these conquerors would appear to have had very little of 
 that " love for souls " which animates the true missionary and 
 which has achieved such great conquests for Islam. The Khaljis 
 (1290-1320), the Tughlaqs (1320-1412), and theLodis (1451-1526) 
 were generally too busily engaged in fighting, to pay much 
 regard to the interests of religion, or else thought more of the 
 exaction of tribute than of the work of conversion.* Not that 
 they were entirely lacking in religious zeal : e.g. the Ghakkars, 
 
 ' Or Baran, the old name of Bularidshahr. ' Elliot, vol. ii. pp. 42-3. 
 
 ' Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. iii. part ii. p. 85. 
 
 * " The military adventurers, vifho founded dynasties in Northern India and 
 carved out kingdoms in the Dekhan, cared little for things spiritual ; most of 
 them had indeed no time for proselytism, being continually engaged in conquest 
 or in civil war. They were usually rough Tartars or Moghals ; themselves ill- 
 grounded in the faith of Mahomed, and untouched by the true Semitic enthusiasm 
 which inspired the first Arab standard bearers of Islam. The empire which they 
 set up was purely military, and it was kept in that state by the half success of 
 their conquests and the comparative failure of their spiritual invasion. They 
 were strong enough to prevent anything like religious amalgamation among the 
 Hindus, and to check the gathering of tribes into nations ; but so far were they 
 from converting India, that among the Mahomedans themselves their own faith 
 never acquired an entire and exclusive monopoly of the high offices of adminis- 
 tration." Sir Alfred C. Lyall : Asiatic Studies, p. 289. (London, 1882.) 
 
 P 2 
 
212 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a barbarous people in the mountainous districts of the North of 
 the Panjab, who gave the early invaders much trouble, are said 
 to have been converted through the influence of Muhammad 
 Ghori at the end of the twelfth century. Their chieftain had been 
 taken prisoner by the Muhammadan monarch, who induced him 
 to become a Musalman, and then confirming him in his title of 
 chief of this tribe, sent him back to convert his followers, many 
 of whom having little religion of their own were easily prevailed 
 upon to embrace Islam .1 According to Ibn Batutah, the Ehaljis 
 offered some encouragement to conversion by making it a custom 
 to have the new convert presented to the sultan, who clad him 
 in a robe of honour and gave him a collar and bracelets of gold, 
 of a value proportionate to his rank.^ But the monarchs of the 
 earlier Muhammadan dynasties as a rule evinced very little 
 proselytising zeal, and it would be hard to find a parallel in their 
 history to the following passage from the autobiography of Firuz 
 Shah Tughlaq (1351-88) : "I encouraged my infidel subjects to 
 embrace the religion of the Prophet, and I proclaimed that every 
 one who repeated the creed and became a Musalman should be 
 exempt from the jizyah, or poll tax. Information of this came to the 
 ears of the people at large and great numbers of Hindus presented 
 themselves, and were admitted to the honour of Islam. Thus 
 they came forward day by day from every quarter, and, adopting 
 the faith, were exonerated from the jizyah, and were favoured 
 with presents and honours." ^ 
 
 As the Muhammadan power became consolidated, and par- 
 ticularly under the Mughal dynasty, the religious influences of 
 Islam naturally became more permanent and persistent. A 
 powerful incentive to conversion was offered, when adherence to 
 an idolatrous system stood in the way of advancement at the 
 Muhammadan courts ; and though a spirit of tolerance, which 
 reached its culmination under the eclectic Akbar, was very often 
 shown towards Hinduism, and respected even, for the most part, 
 the state endowments of that religion *; and though the dread of 
 unpopularity and the desire of conciliation dictated a policy of 
 non-interference and deprecated such deeds of violence and such 
 
 I r;nshtah vol. i. p. 184. 2 Ibn Batutah. Tome iii. p. 197. 
 
 ' Elliot, vol. 111. p. 386. ^ " 
 
 A ^'i ^'-^^^"^ Temple : India in iSSo p. 164. (London, i88i.) Even grants 
 of land from Muhammadan pnnces to Hindu temples, though veiy rare, are not 
 unknown. Yules Marco Polo, vol. 11. p. 310. 0/1 
 
ISLAM UNDER THE MUGHAL EMPERORS. 213 
 
 outbursts of fanaticism as characterised the earlier period of 
 invasion and triumph, still such motives of self-interest gained 
 many converts from Hinduism to the Muhammadan faith. Many- 
 Rajputs became converts in this way, and their descendants are 
 to this day to be found among the landed aristocracy. The 
 most important perhaps among these is the Musalman branch of 
 the great Bachgoti clan, the head of which is the premier 
 Muhammadan noble of Oudh. According to one tradition, their 
 ancestor Tilok Chand was taken prisoner by the Emperor Babar 
 and to regain his liberty adopted the faith of Islam i; but another 
 legend places his conversion in the reign of Humayun. This 
 prince having heard of the marvellous beauty of Tilok Chand's 
 wife, had her carried off while she was at a fair. No sooner, 
 however, was she brought to him than his conscience smote him 
 and he sent for her husband. Tilok Chand had despaired of ever 
 seeing her again, and in gratitude he and his wife embraced the 
 faith " which taught such generous purity." ^ These converted 
 Rajputs are very zealous in the practice of their religion, yet often 
 betray their Hindu origin in a very striking manner. In the 
 district of Bulandshahr, for example, a large Musalman family, 
 which is known as the Lal^ani Pathans, still (with some excep- 
 tions) retains its old Hindu titles and family customs of marriage, 
 whOe Hindu branches of the same clan still exist side by side with 
 it.' In the Mirzapur district, the Gaharwar Rajputs, who are now 
 Muslim, still retain in all domestic matters Hindu laws and 
 customs and prefix a Hindu honorific title to their Muhammadan 
 names.* 
 
 Official pressure is said never to have been more persistently 
 brought to bear upon the Hindus than in the reign of Aurangzeb. 
 In the eastern districts of the Panjab, there are many cases in which 
 the ancestor of the Musalman branch of the village community 
 
 ' Manual of Titles for Oudh, p. 78. (Allahabad, 1889.) 
 
 ^ Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh, vol. i. p. 466. 
 
 ' Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. iii. part ii. p 46. 
 
 ■* Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. xiv. part ii. p. 119. In the Cawnpore district, 
 the Musalman branch of the Dikhit family observes Muhammadan customs at 
 births, marriages, and deaths, and, though they cannot, as a rule, recite the 
 prayers (namaz), they perform the orthodox obeisances (sijdah). But at the 
 same time they worship Chachak Devi to avert small-pox, and keep up their 
 friendly intercourse with their old caste brethren, the Thakurs, in domestic 
 occurrences, and are generally called by common Hindu names. (Gazetteer of the 
 N.W.P., vol. vi. p. 64.) 
 
214 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 is said to have changed his religion in the reign of this zealot, 
 " in order to save the land of the village." In Gurgaon, near 
 Dehli, there is a Hindu family of Banyas who still bear the title 
 of Shaytt (which is commonly adopted by converted Hindus), 
 because one of the members of the family, whose line is now 
 extinct, became a convert in order to save the family property 
 from confiscation.! Many Rajput landowners, in the Cawnpore 
 district, were compelled to embrace Islam for the same reason.' 
 In other cases the ancestor is said to have been carried as a 
 prisoner or hostage to Dehli, and there forcibly circumcised and 
 converted.3 It should be noted that the only authority for these 
 forced conversions is family or local tradition, and no mention of 
 such (as far as I have been able to discover) is made in the 
 historical accounts of Aurangzeb's reign.* It is established with- 
 out doubt that forced conversions have been made by Muham- 
 madan rulers, and it seems probable that Aurangzeb's well-known 
 zeal on behalf of his faith has caused many families of Northern 
 India (the history of whose conversion has been forgotten) to 
 attribute their change of faith to this, the most easily assignable 
 cause. Similarly in the Deccan, Aurangzeb shares with Haydar 
 *Ali and Tipu Sultan (these being the best known of modem 
 Muhammadan rulers) the reputation of having forcibly con- 
 verted sundry families and sections of the population, whose con- 
 version undoubtedly dates from a much earlier period, from which 
 no historical record of the circumstances of the case has come 
 down.' In an interesting collection of Aurangzeb's orders and 
 despatches, as yet unpublished,' we find him laying down what 
 may be termed the supreme law of toleration for the ruler of 
 people of another faith. An attempt had been made to induce 
 
 ' Ibbetson, p. 163. 
 
 * Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. vi. p. 64. Compare also id. vol. xiv. part iii. p. 47. 
 
 " Muhammadan cultivators are not numerous ; they are usually Nau- 
 Muslims. Most of them assign the date of their conversion to the reign of 
 Aurangzeb, and represent it as the result sometimes of persecution and sometimes 
 as made to enable them to retain their rights when unable to pay revenue. 
 
 ' Ibbetson, ib. 
 
 ' Indeed Firishtah distinctly says : " Zealous for the faith of Mahommed, he 
 rewarded proselytes with a liberal hand, though he did not choose to persecute 
 those of different persuasions in matters of religion." (The History of Hindo- 
 Stan, translated from the Persian, by Alexander Dow, vol. iii. p. 361.) (London, 
 1812.) 
 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xxii. p. 222 ; vol. xxiii. p. 282. 
 
 ' For my knowledge of this MS. I am indebted to the kindness of 'Abdu-s 
 Salam Khan §ahib, in whose possession it is. 
 
AURANGZEB. 
 
 ais 
 
 the emperor to deprive of their posts two non-Muslims, each of 
 whom held the office of a pay-master, on the ground that they 
 were infidel Parsis, and their place would be more fittingly filled 
 by some tried Muslim servant of the crown ; moreover it was 
 written in the Qur'an (Ix. i.) " O believers, take not my foe and 
 your foe for friends." The emperor replied : " Religion has no 
 concern with secular business, and in matters of this kind bigotry 
 should find no place." He too appeals to the authority of the 
 sacred text, which says : " To you your religion, and to me my 
 religion " (cix. 6), and points out that if the verse his petitioner 
 had quoted were to be taken as an established rule of conduct, 
 " then we ought to have destroyed all the Rajas and their sub- 
 jects ;" government post sought to be bestowed according to ability 
 and from no other considerations. Whether Aurangzeb himself 
 always acted on such tolerant principles may indeed be doubted, 
 but the frequent accusations brought against him of forcible con- 
 version need a more careful sifting than they have hitherto 
 received. 
 
 How Uttle was effected towards the spread of Islam by violence 
 on the part of the Muhammadan rulers, may be judged from the 
 fact that even in the centres of the Muhammadan power, such as 
 Dehli and Agra, the Muhammadans at the present day, in the 
 former district hardly exceed one-tenth, and in the latter they do 
 not form one-fourth of the population.^ A remarkable example 
 of the worthlessness of forced conversion is exhibited in the case 
 of Bodh Mai, Raja of MajhauU, in the district of Gorakhpur ; he 
 was arrested by Akbar in default of revenue, carried to Dehli, and 
 there converted to Islam, receiving the name of Muhammad 
 Salim. But on his return his wife refused to let him into the 
 ancestral castle, and, as apparently she had the sympathy of his 
 subjects on her side, she governed his territories during the 
 minority of his son Bhawani Mai, so that the Hindu succession 
 remained undisturbed.^ Until recently there were some strange 
 survivals of a similarly futile false conversion, noticeable in certain 
 customs of a Hindu sect called the Bishnois, the principal tenet 
 of whose faith is the renunciation of all Hindu deities, except 
 Visnu. They used recently to bury their dead, instead of burn- 
 
 ' SirW. W Hunter: The Religions of India. [The Times, February a5th, 
 1888 ^ 
 ^ Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. vi. p. 518. 
 
2i6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 ing them, to adopt Ghulam Muhammad and other Muhammadan 
 names, and use the Mushm form of salutation. They explained 
 their adoption of these Muhammadan customs by saying that 
 having once slain a Qadi, who had interfered with their rite 
 of widow-burning, they had compounded for the offence by 
 embracing Islam. They have now, however, renounced these 
 practices in favour of Hindu customs.^ 
 
 But though some Muhammadan rulers may have been more 
 successful in forcing an acceptance of Islam on certain of their 
 Hindu subjects than in the last-mentioned cases, and whatever 
 truth there may be in the assertion 2 that " it is impossible even to 
 approach the religious side of the Mahomedan position in India 
 without surveying first its political aspect," we undoubtedly find 
 that Islam has gained its greatest and most lasting missionary 
 triumphs in times and places in which its political power has been 
 weakest, as in Southern India and Eastern Bengal. Of such 
 missionary movements it is now proposed to essay some account, 
 commencing with Southern India and the Deccan, then after 
 reviewing the history of Sind, Cutch and Gujarat, passing to 
 Bengal, and finally noticing some missionaries whose work lay 
 outside the above geographical limits. Of several of the mission- 
 aries to be referred to, little is recorded beyond their names and 
 the sphere of their labours ; accordingly, in view of the general 
 dearth of such missionary annals, any available details have been 
 given at length. 
 
 The first advent of Islam in South India dates as far back as 
 the eighth century, when a band of refugees, to whom the 
 Mappila trace their descent, came from 'Iraq and settled in the 
 country. The trade in spices, ivory, gems, etc., between India 
 and Europe, which for many hundred years was conducted by the 
 Arabs and Persians, caused a continual stream of Muhammadan 
 influence to flow in upon the west coast of Southern India. 
 From this constant influx of foreigners there resulted a mixed 
 population, half Hindu and half Arab or Persian, in the trading 
 centres along the coast. Very friendly relations appear to have 
 existed between these Muslim traders and the Hindu rulers who 
 extended to them their protection and patronage in consideration 
 of the increased commercial activity and consequent prosperity of 
 
 ^ Gazetteer of the N.W.P., vol. v. part i. pp. 302-3 
 2 Sir Alfred C. Lyall : Asiatic Studies, p. 236. 
 
ISLAM IN SOUTH INDIA. 217 
 
 the country, that resulted from their presence in it.^ No 
 obstacles also appear to have been put in the way of the 
 work of proselytism,3 which was carried on with great zeal and 
 activity. 
 
 There is a traditionary account of the propagandist labours of 
 a small band of missionaries as early as the second century of the 
 Hijrah. A certain Shay^ Sharif Ibn Malik, accompanied by 
 his brother Malik Ibn Dinar and his nephew Malik Ibn Habib 
 and some other companions, arrived at the city of Cranganore on 
 their way to make a pilgrimage to Adam's Peak in Ceylon. The 
 king of Malabar hearing of their arrival sent for them, and 
 received them with great kindness. " The Shay^, encouraged 
 by the king's condescension, related to him the history of our 
 prophet Muhammad (upon whom may the divine favour and 
 blessing for ever rest !) explaining also to the monarch the tenets 
 of Islam ; whilst, for a confirmation of their truth, he narrated to 
 him the miracle of the division of the moon. Now, conviction 
 of the Prophet's divine mission, under the blessing of Almighty 
 God, having followed this relation, the heart of the king became 
 
 ' See Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen, translated by M. J. Rowlandson. (London, 
 1833.) ' ' Merchants from various parts frequented those ports. The consequence 
 was, that new cities sprang up. Now in all these the population became much 
 increased, and the number of buildings enlarged, by means of the trade carried on 
 by the Mahomedans, towards whom the chieftains of those places abstained from 
 all oppression ; and, notwithstanding that these rulers and their troops were all 
 pagans, they paid much regard to their prejudices and customs, and avoided any 
 act of aggression on the Mahomedans, except on some extraordinary provocation ; 
 this amicable footing being the more remarkable from the circumstance 'of the 
 Mahomedans not forming a tenth part of the population." (pp. 70-1.) " I 
 would have it understood that the Mahomedans of Malabar formerly lived in 
 great comfort and tranquility, in consequence of their abstaining from exercising 
 any oppression towards the people of the countiy ; as well as from the considera- 
 tion which they invariably evinced for the ancient usages of the population of 
 Malabar, and from the unrestricted intercourse of kindness which they preserved 
 with them." (p. 103.) " The Mahomedans of Malabar, having no emir amongst 
 them possessed of sufficient power and authority to govern them, are consequently 
 under the rule of the pagan chieftains, who faithfully guard their interests and 
 decide between them, besides granting to them advantageous privileges; and 
 should any Mahomedan subject himself to the punishment of fine by them, not- 
 withstanding his delinquency, or any other provocation, their treatment to the 
 faithful, as a body, continues kind and respectful, because to them they owe the 
 increase of towns in their country, these having sprung up from the residence of 
 the faithful amongst them." (p. 72.) 
 
 ^ "The Nairs do not molest their countrymen who have abjured idolatry and 
 come over to the Mahomedan religion, nor endeavour to intimidate them by 
 threats, but treat them with the same consideration and respect that they evince 
 towards all other Mahomedans, although the persons who have thus apostacised 
 be of the lowest grade." (id. p. 73.) 
 
2i8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 warmed with a holy affection towards Muhammad (on whom be 
 peace !), and, in consequence of this his conversion, he with much 
 earnestness enjoined the Shayjch, after the completion of his 
 pilgrimage to Adam's foot-step, to return with his companions to 
 Cranganore, as it was his desire hereafter to unite himself to 
 them ; but, in communicating, he forbade the ShayJi to divulge 
 this his secret intention to any of the inhabitants of Malabar." i 
 On the return of the pilgrims from Ceylon, the king secretly 
 departed with them in a ship bound for the coast of Arabia, 
 leaving his kingdom in the hands of viceroys. Here he remained 
 for some time, and was just about to return to his own country, 
 with the purpose of erecting mosques and propagating the 
 religion of Islam, when he fell sick and died. On his death-bed 
 he solemnly enjoined his companions not to abandon their pro- 
 posed missionary enterprise in Malabar, and, to assist them in 
 their labours, he gave them letters of recommendation to his 
 viceroys. 
 
 Armed with these, they returned to Cranganore and presented 
 the king's letter to his viceroy at that place. " And this chief 
 having informed himself of the nature of the instructions con- 
 veyed in this mandate, assigned to the bearers of it certain lands 
 and gardens, as therein directed ; and upon these being settled 
 they erected a mosque, Malik Ibn Dinar resolving to fix himself 
 there for life ; but his nephew, Malik Ibn Habib, after a time 
 quitted this place for the purpose of building mosques throughout 
 Malabar. And with this design he proceeded first to Quilon, 
 carrying with him thither all his worldly substance, and also his 
 wife and some of his children. And after erecting a mosque in 
 that town and settling his wife there, he himself journeyed on to 
 Hubaee Murawee, and from thence to Bangore, Mangalore, and 
 Kanjercote, at all which places he built mosques ; after accom- 
 plishing which he returned to Hubaee Murawee, where he stayed 
 for three months. And from this town he went to Zaraftan, and 
 Durmuftun, and Fundreeah, and Shaleeat ; in all of these towns 
 also raising mosques, remaining five months at the last place, and 
 from thence returning to his uncle Malik Ibn Dinar at Cranga- 
 nore. Here, however, he stayed but a short period, soon again 
 setting out for the mosques that he had erected at the above- 
 
 ' Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen, pp. 49-50. 
 
ISLAM IN SOUTH INDIA. 219 
 
 mentioned towns, for the purpose of consecrating and endowing 
 them ; and after doing this he once more bent his steps towards 
 Cranganore, his heart being full of gratitude towards God, because 
 of the dawning of the light of Islamism on a land which teemed 
 with idolatry. Moreover, Malik Ibn Dinar and Malik Ibn Habib, 
 with their associates and dependents, afterwards removed to 
 Quilon, where the latter and his people remained. But Ibn 
 Dinar, with certain of his companions, sailing from thence for the 
 coast of Arabia, on their arrival there proceeded to visit the tomb 
 of the deceased king. Subsequently, Malik, travelling on to 
 Murasan, there resigned his breath. As for Ibn Habib, after 
 settling some of his children in Quilon, he returned with his wife 
 to Cranganore, where they both exchanged this life for a 
 better." 1 
 
 Whether or not there be any historical foundation for the 
 above story, there can be no doubt of the peaceful proselytising 
 influences at work on the Malabar coast for centuries. At the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century the Mappila were estimated 
 to have formed one-fifth of the population of Malabar, spoke 
 the same language as the Hindus, and were only distinguished 
 irom them by their long beards and peculiar head-dress. But for 
 the arrival of the Portuguese, the whole of this coast would have 
 became Muhammadan, because of the fi-equent conversions that 
 took place and the powerful influence exercised by the Muslim 
 merchants from other parts of India, such as Gujarat and the 
 Deccan, and from Arabia and Persia.^ The history of Islam in 
 Southern India by no means always continued to be of so 
 peaceful a character, but it does not appear that the forcible con- 
 versions of the Hindus and others to Islam which were per- 
 
 ' Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen, pp. 53-5. 
 
 ^ Odoardo Barbosa, p. 310. 
 
 Similarly it has been conjectured that but for the arrival of the Portuguese, 
 Ceylon might have become a Muhammadan kingdom. For before the Portuguese 
 armaments appeared in the Indian seas, the Arab merchants were undisputed 
 masters of the trade of this island (where indeed they had formed commercial 
 establishments centuries before the birth of the Prophet), and were to be found in 
 every sea-port and city, while the facilities of commerce attracted large numbers 
 ■of fresh arrivals from their settlements in Malabar. Here as elsewhere the 
 Muslim traders intermarried vrith the natives of the country and spread their 
 religion along the coast. But no very active proselytising movement would seem 
 to have been carried on, or else the Singhalese showed themselves unwilling to 
 embrace Islam, as the Muhammadans of Ceylon at the present day appear mostly 
 to be of Arab descent. 
 
 (Sir James Emerson Tennent : Ceylon, vol. i. pp. 631-3. (5th ed., London, i860). 
 
220 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 petrated when the Muhammadan power became paramount 
 under Haydar 'Ali (1767-1782) and Tipu Sultan (1782-1799), can 
 be paralleled in the earlier history of this part of India, However 
 this may be, there is no reason to doubt that constant conversions 
 by peaceful methods were made to Islam from among the lower 
 castes,! as is the case at the present day. So numerous have 
 these conversions from Hinduism been, that the tendency of 
 the Muhammadans of the west as well as the east coast of 
 Southern India has been to reversion to the Hindu or aboriginal 
 type, and, except in the case of some of the nobler families, they 
 now in great part present all the characteristics of an aboriginal 
 people, with very little of the original foreign blood in them.* 
 In the western coast districts the tyranny of caste intolerance is 
 peculiarly oppressive ; to give but one instance, in Travancore 
 certain of the lower castes may not come nearer than seventy- 
 four paces to a Brahmin, and have to make a grunting noise as 
 they pass along the road, in order to give warning of their ap- 
 proach.^ Similar instances might be abundantly multiplied. 
 What wonder then that the Musalman population is fast increas- 
 ing through conversion from these lower castes, who thereby 
 free themselves from such degrading oppression, and raise them- 
 selves and their descendants in the social scale. 
 
 In fact the Mappila on the west coast are said to be increasing 
 so considerably through accessions from the lower classes of 
 Hindus, as to render it possible that in a few years the whole of 
 the lower races of the west coast may become Muhammadans.* 
 
 It was most probably from Malabar that Islam crossed over to 
 the Laccadive and Maldive Islands, the population of which is 
 now entirely Muslim. The inhabitants of these islands owed 
 their conversion to the Arab and Persian merchants, who estab- 
 lished themselves in the country, intermarrying with the natives, 
 and thus smoothing the way for the work of active proselytism. 
 The date of the conversion of the first Muhammadan Sultan, 
 
 ' See the passage quoted above from the Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen (p. 73). In 
 another passage (p. 69) reference is made to outcasts taking refuge within the pale 
 of Islam. 
 
 2 Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871, by W. R. Cornish 
 (pp. 71, 72, 109). (Madras, 1874.) 
 
 ^ Caste : its supposed origin ; its history ; its effects (p. 30), (Madras, 1887). 
 
 •* Report of the second Decennial Missionary Conference held at Calcutta 
 1882-3 (PP- 228, 233, 248). (Calcutta, 1883.) 
 
SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE DECCAN. 221 
 
 Ahmad Shanurazah,^ has been conjectured to have occurred about 
 1200 A.D., but it is very possible that the Muhammadan merchants 
 had introduced their reHgion into the island as much as three 
 centuries before, and the process of conversion must undoubtedly 
 have been a gradual one.^ No details, however, have come down 
 to us. 
 
 At Male, the seat of Government, is found the tomb of ShayMi 
 Yusuf Shamsu-d Din, a native of Tabriz, in Persia, who is said to 
 have been a successful missionary of Islam in these islands. His 
 tomb is still held in great veneration, and always kept in good 
 repair, and in the same part of the island are buried some of his 
 countrymen who came in search of him, and remained in the 
 Maldives until their death.* 
 
 The Deccan also was the scene of the successful labours of 
 many Muslim missionaries. It has already been pointed out that 
 from very early times Arab traders had visited the towns on the 
 west coast ; in the tenth century we are told that the Arabs were 
 settled in large numbers in the towns of the Konkan, having 
 intermarried with the women of the country and living under 
 their own laws and religion.* Under the Muhammadan dynasties 
 of the Bahmanid (1347-1490) and Bijapiir {1489-1686) kings, a 
 fresh impulse was given to Arab immigration, and with the 
 trader and the soldier of fortune came the missionaries seeking 
 to make spiritual conquests in the cause of Islam, and win 
 over the unbelieving people of the country by their preaching 
 and example, for of forcible conversions we have no record under 
 the early Deccan dynasties, whose rule was characterised by a 
 striking toleration.' 
 
 One of these Arab preachers, Pir Mahabir Khandayat, came 
 as a missionary to the Deccan as early as 1304 a.d., and among 
 the cultivating classes of Bijapur are to be found descendants of 
 
 ' Ibn Batutah. Tome iv. p. 128. - 
 
 Ibn Batutah resided in the Maldive Islands during the years 1343-4 and 
 married "the daughter of a Vizier who was grandson of the Sultan Dawud, who 
 was a grandson of the Sultan Ahmad Shanurazah" (Tome iv. p. 154) ; from 
 this statement the date a.d. I2CX} has been conjectured. 
 
 ' H. C. P. Bell : The Maldive Islands, pp. 23-5, 57-8, 71. (Colombo, 1883.) 
 
 ' Memoir on the Inhabitants of the Maldive Islands. By J. A. Young and 
 W. Christopher. (Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society from 1836 
 to 1838, p. 74, Bombay, 1844.) 
 
 * Mas^di. Tome ii. pp. 85-6. 
 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. x. p. 132 ; vol. xvi. p. 75. 
 
222 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the Jains who were converted by him.^ About the close of the 
 same century a celebrated saint of Gulbarga, Sayyid Husayn 
 Gaysudaraz,^ converted a number of Hindus of the Poona district, 
 and twenty years later his labours were crowned with a like 
 success in Belgaum.^ At Dahanu still reside the descendants of 
 the saint Shay^ Babu ahib, a relative of one of the greatest 
 saints of Islam, Sayyid 'Abdu-1 Qadir Jilani of Ba|^dad ; he came 
 to Western India about 400 years ago, and after making many 
 converts in the Konkan, died and was buried at Dahanu.* In the 
 district of Dharwar, there are large numbers of weavers whose 
 ancestors were converted by Hasham Pir Gujarat! , the religious 
 teacher of the Bijapur king, Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II., about the 
 close of the sixteenth century. These men still regard the saint 
 with special reverence and pay great respect to his descendants.' 
 The descendants of another saint, Shah Muhammad Sadiq 
 Sarmast Husayni, are still found in Nasik ; he is said to have 
 been the most successful of Muhammadan missionaries ; having 
 come from Medina in 1568, he travelled over the greater part of 
 Western India and finally settled at Nasik — in which district 
 another very successful Muslim missionary, Khwajah Khunmir 
 Husayni, had begun to labour about fifty years before." Two 
 other Arab missionaries may be mentioned, the scene of whose 
 proselytising efforts was laid in the district of Belgaum, namely 
 Sayyid Muhammad Ibn Sayyid 'Ali and Sayyid 'Umar Idrus 
 Basheban.' 
 
 Another missionary movement may be said roughly to centre 
 round the city of Multan.* This in the early days of the Arab 
 conquest was one of the outposts of Islam, when Muhammad 
 Qasim had established Muhammadan supremacy over Sind 
 (a.d. 714). During the three centuries of Arab rule there were 
 naturally many accessions to the faith of the conquerors. 
 Several Sindian princes responded to the invitation of the Caliph 
 'Umar ibn 'Abdi-1 'Aziz to embrace Islam." The people of 
 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xxiii. p. 282. 
 
 ^ Sometimes called Sayyid Mal^dtim Gaysudaraz. 
 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xviii. p. 501 ; vol. xxi. pp. 218, 223. 
 
 ■' Id. vol. xiii. p. 231. * Id. vol. xxii. p. 242. 
 
 ' Id. vol. xvi. pp. 7S"^' ' I<J. vol. xxi. p. 203. 
 
 ' At the time of the Arab conquest the dominions of the Hindu ruler of Sind 
 extended as far north as this city, which is now no longer included in this 
 province. 
 
 • ' ' When the Caliph Sulayman, son of 'Abdu-1 Malik, died, he was succeeded 
 
ISLAM IN SIND. 223 
 
 Sawandari — who submitted to Muhammad Qasim and had peace 
 granted to them on the condition that they would entertain the 
 Musalmans and furnish guides — are spoken of by Al Baladhuri ^ 
 (writing about 100 years later) as professing Islam in his time ; 
 and the despatches of the conqueror frequently refer to the 
 conversion of the unbelievers. 
 
 That these conversions were in the main voluntary, may be 
 judged from the toleration that the Arabs, after the first violence 
 of their onslaught, showed towards their idolatrous subjects. 
 The people of Brahmanabad, for example, whose city had been 
 taken by storm, were allowed to repair their temple, which was 
 a means of livelihood to the Brahmans, and nobody was to be 
 forbidden or prevented from following his own religion,' and 
 generally, where submission was made, quarter was readily given, 
 and the people were permitted the exercise of their own creeds 
 and laws. 
 
 During the troubles that befell the Caliphate in the latter half 
 of the ninth century, Sind, neglected by the central government, 
 came to be divided among several petty princes, the most power- 
 ful of whom were the Amirs of Multan and Mansura. Such 
 disunion naturally weakened the political power of the Musal- 
 mans, which had in fact begun to decline earlier in the century. 
 For in the reign of Al Mu'tasim (a.d. 833-842), the Indians of 
 Sindan' declared themselves independent, but they spared the 
 mosque, in which the Musalmans were allowed to perform their 
 devotions undisturbed.* The Muhammadans of Multan succeeded 
 in maintaining their political independence, and kept themselves 
 from being conquered by the neighbouring Hindu princes, by 
 threatening, if attacked, to destroy an idol which was held in 
 great veneration by the Hindus and was visited by pilgrims from 
 the most distant parts.' But in the hour of its political decay, 
 Islam was still achieving missionary successes. Al Baladhuri ° 
 tells the following story of the conversion of a king of 'Usayfan, 
 
 by 'Umar ibn 'Abdu-1'Aziz (a.d. 717). He wrote to the princes inviting them 
 to become Musalmans and submit to his authority, upon which they would be- 
 treated like all other Musalmans. These princes had already heard of his- 
 promises, character, and creed, so Jaishiya and other princes turned Musalmans. 
 and took Arab names." (EUiot, vol. i. pp. 124-5.) 
 
 •Id. p. 122. Md. pp. 185-6. 
 
 ' Probably the Sindan in Abrasa, the southern district of Cutch. 
 
 ■• Al Baladhuri, p. 446. ' Elliot, vol. i. pp. 27-8. 
 
 ' Al Baladhuri, p. 446. 
 
224 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a country between Kashmir and Multan and Kabul. The people 
 of this country worshipped an idol for which they :had built a 
 temple. The son of the king fell sick, and he desired the priests 
 of the temple to pray to the idol for the recovery of his son. 
 They retired for a short time, and then returned' saying, " We 
 have prayed and our supplications have been accepted." But no 
 long time passed before the youth died. Then the king attacked 
 the temple, destroyed and broke in pieces the idol, and slew the 
 priests. He afterwards invited a party of Muhammadan traders 
 who made known to him the unity of God ; whereupon he 
 believed in the unity and became a Muslim. A similar missionary 
 influence was doubtless exercised by the numerous communities 
 of Muslim merchants who carried their religion with them into 
 the infidel cities of Hindustan. Arab geographers of the tenth 
 and twelfth centuries mention the names of many such cities, 
 both on the coast and inland, where the Musalmans built their 
 mosques, and were safe under the protection of the native princes, 
 who even granted them the privilege of living under their own 
 laws.i The Arab merchants at this time formed the medium of 
 commercial communication between Sind and the neighbouring 
 countries of India and the outside world. They brought the 
 produce of China and Ceylon to the sea-ports of Sind and from 
 there conveyed them by way of Multan to Turkistan and 
 Khurasan.* 
 
 It would be strange if these traders, scattered about in the 
 cities of the unbelievers, failed to exhibit the same proselytising 
 zeal as we find in the Muhammadan trader elsewhere. To the 
 influence of such trading communities was most probably due the 
 conversion of the Sammas, who ruled over Sind from 1351 to 
 1521 A.D. While the reign of Jam Nanda bin Babiniyah of this 
 dynasty is specially mentioned as one of such " peace and security, 
 that never was this prince called upon to ride forth to battle, and 
 never did a foe take the field against him,"^ it is at the same 
 time described as being " remarkable for its justice and an increase 
 of Islam." This increase could thus only have been brought 
 about by peaceful missionary methods. One of the most famous 
 of these missionaries was the celebrated saint, Sayyid Yusufu-d 
 
 * Elliot, vol. i. pp. 27, 38, 88, 457. s Id. vo]_ ;_ __ j,. 
 
 ' Id. vol. i. p. 273. 
 
ISLAM IN SIND. 225 
 
 din who came to Sind in 1422 ; after labouring there for ten 
 years, he succeeded in winning over to Islam 700 families of the 
 Lohana caste, who followed the example of two of their number, 
 by name Sundarji and Hansraj ; these men embraced Islam, after 
 seeing some miracles performed by the saint, and on their con- 
 version received the names of Adamji and Taj Muhammad 
 respectively. Under the leadership of the grandson of the 
 former, these people afterwards migrated to Cutch, where their 
 numbers were increased by converts from among the Cutch 
 Lohanas.i Sind was also the scene of the labours of Pir Sadru-d 
 Din, a missionary of the Isma'ilian sect, whose doctrines he 
 introduced into India about 400 years ago. In accordance with 
 the principles of accommodation practised by this sect, he took 
 a Hindu name and made certain concessions to the religious 
 beliefs of the Hindus whose conversion he sought to achieve and 
 introduced among them a book entitled Dasavatar in which 
 'All was made out to be the tenth Avatar or incarnation of 
 Vi?nu ; this book has been from the beginning the accepted 
 scripture of the Khojah sect and it is always read by the bedside 
 of the dying, and periodically at many festivals ; it assumes the 
 nine incarnations of Visnu to be true as far as they go, but to 
 fall short of the perfect truth, and supplements this imperfect 
 Vaisnav system by the cardinal doctrine of the Isma'ilians, the 
 incarnation and coming manifestation of 'Ali. Further he made 
 out Brahma to be Muhammad, Vienu to be 'Ali and Adam Siva. 
 The first of Pir Sadru-d Din's converts were won in the villages 
 and towns of Upper Sind : he preached also in Cutch and from 
 these parts the doctrines of this sect spread southwards through 
 Gujarat to Bombay ; and at the present day Khojah communities 
 are to be found in almost all the large trading towns of Western 
 India and on the seaboard of the Indian Ocean.- 
 
 Pir Sadru-d Din was not however the first of the Isma'ilian 
 missionaries that came into India. Some centuries before, a 
 preacher of this sect known by the name of Nur Satagar, had 
 been sent into India from Alamut, the stronghold of the Grand 
 Master of the Isma'ilians, and reached Gujarat in the reign of the 
 
 ' Bombay Gazetteer, vol. v. p. 93. 
 
 ^ Khoia Vfttant, p. 208. „, , ,, , , ,, 
 
 Sir Bartle Frere : The Khojas : the Disciples of the Old Man of the Mounta\n. 
 Macmillau's Magazine, vol. xxxiv. pp. 431, 433-4- (London, 1876.) 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Hindu king, Siddha Raj (1094-1143 a.d.)- He adopted a Hindu 
 name but told the Muhammadans that his real name was Sayyid 
 Sa'adat ; he is said to have converted the Kanbis, Kharwas and 
 Koris, low castes of Gujarat.^ 
 
 Many of the Cutch Musalmans that are of Hindu descent rever- 
 ence as their spiritual leader Dawal Shah Pir, whose real name 
 was Malik 'Abdu-1 Latif,^ the son of one of the nobles of Mahmud 
 Bigarrah (1459-1511), the famous monarch of the Muhammadan 
 dynasty of Gujarat, to whose reign popular tradition assigns the 
 date of the conversion of many HindusJ' 
 
 To the efforts of the same monarch has been ascribed* the 
 conversion of the Borahs, a large and important trading com- 
 munity of Shi'ahs, of Hindu origin, who are found in consider- 
 able numbers in the chief commercial centres of the Bombay 
 Presidency, but as various earlier dates have also been assigned, 
 such as the beginning of the fourteenth century ' and even the 
 eleventh century, when the early Shi'ah preachers are said to 
 have- been treated with great kindness by the Hindu kings of 
 Anhilvada in Northern Gujarat,' it is probable that their conver- 
 sion was the work of several generations. A Shi'ah historian ' 
 has left us the following account of the labours of a missionary 
 named Mulla 'Ali, among these people, about the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century. " As the inhabitants of Gujarat were 
 pagans, and were guided by an aged priest, a recreant, in whom 
 they had a great confidence, and whose disciples they were, the 
 missionary judged it expedient, first to offer himself as a pupil to 
 the priest, and after convincing him by irrefragable proofs, and 
 making him participate in the declaration of faith, then to under- 
 take the conversion of others. He accordingly passed some years 
 in attendance on that priest, learnt his language, studied his 
 sciences, and became conversant with his books. By degrees he 
 opened the articles of the faith to the enlightened priest, and 
 persuaded him to become a Musalman. Some of his people 
 changed their rehgion in concert with their old instructor. The 
 
 > Khoja Vrttant, p. 158. 
 ^ The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. v. p. 89. 
 
 " Id. vol. ii. p. 378 ; vol. iii. pp. 36-7. ' Id. vol. vii. p. 70. 
 
 ' H. T. Colebrooke : Miscellaneous Essays, vol. iii, p. 202. (London, 1873.) 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xiii. p. 239. 
 
 J Nuru-Uah of Shustar in his Majalisu-l mu'minln. (Colebrooke's Essays, id. 
 pp. 204-6.) ' 
 
CONVERSION OF THE BORAHS. 227 
 
 circumstances of the priest's conversion being made known to the 
 principal minister of the king of the country, he visited the 
 priest, adopted habits of obedience towards him, and became a 
 Muslim. But for a long time, the minister, the priest, and the 
 rest of the converts dissembled their faith, and sought to keep it 
 concealed, through dread of the king. 
 
 At length the intelligence of the minister's conversion reached 
 the monarch. One day he repaired to his house, and finding 
 him in the humble posture of prayer, was incensed against him. 
 The minister knew the motive of the king's visit, and perceived 
 that his anger arose from the suspicion that he was reciting 
 prayers and performing adoration. With presence of mind in- 
 spired by divine providence, he immediately pretended that his 
 prostrations were occasioned by the sight of a serpent, which 
 appeared in the corner of the room, and against which he was 
 employing incantations. The king cast his eyes towards the 
 comer of the apartment, and it so happened that there he saw a 
 serpent ; the minister's excuse appeared credible, and the king's 
 suspicions were lulled. 
 
 After a time, the king himself secretly became a convert to 
 the Muslim faith ; but dissembled the state of his mind, for 
 reasons of state. Yet, at the point of death he ordered, by his 
 will, that his corpse should not be burnt, according to the customs 
 of the pagans. 
 
 Subsequently to his decease, when Sultan Zafar, one of the trusty 
 nobles of Sultan Firuz Shah, sovereign of Delhi (1531-88), con- 
 quered the province of Gujarat, some learned men, who accom- 
 panied him, used arguments to make the people embrace the 
 faith according to the doctrines of such as revere the traditions " 
 (i.e. the Sunnis). But, though some of the Borahs are Sunnis, 
 for example in the district of Kaira,i the majority of them are 
 Shi'ahs. 
 
 Another missionary who laboured in Gujarat in the latter part 
 of the fourteenth century was ShayMi Jalal, commonly known 
 under the appellation of Makhdum-i-Jahaniyan, who came and 
 settled in Gujarat, where he and his descendants were instru- 
 mental in the conversion of large numbers of Hindus.^ 
 
 It is in Bengal, however, that the Muhammadan missionaries 
 
 ' The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. iii. p. 36. ' Id. vol. iv. p. 41. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 in India have achieved their greatest success, as far as numbers are 
 concerned. A Muhammadan kingdom was first founded here at 
 the end of the twelfth century by Muhammad BaMjtiyar Khalji, 
 who conquered Bihar and Bengal and made Gaur the capital of 
 the latter province. The long continuance of the Muhammadan 
 rule would naturally assist the spread of Islam, and though the 
 Hindu rule was restored for ten years under the tolerant Raja 
 Kans, whose rule is said to have been popular with his Muham- 
 madan subjects,! ijis sQu^ Jatmall, renounced the Hindu religion 
 and became a Musalman. 
 
 After his father's death in 1414 he called together all the 
 officers of the state and announced his intention of embracing 
 Islam, and proclaimed that if the chiefs would not permit him to 
 ascend the throne, he was ready to give it up to his brother ; 
 whereupon they declared that they would accept him as their 
 king, whatever religion he might adopt. Accordingly, several 
 learned men of the Muslim faith were summoned to witness the 
 Raja renounce the Hindu religion and publicly profess his accept- 
 ance of Islam : he took the name of Jalalu-d Din Muhammad 
 Shah, and according to tradition numerous conversions were 
 made during his reign.^ Many of these were however due to force, 
 for his reign is signalised as being the only one in which any 
 wholesale persecution of the subject Hindus is recorded, during 
 the five centuries and a half of Muhammadan rule in Eastern 
 Bengal.3 The Af^an adventurers who settled in this province 
 also appear to have been active in the work of proselytising, for 
 besides the children that they had by Hindu women, they used 
 to purchase a number of boys in times of scarcity, and educate 
 them in the tenets of Islam.'' But it is not in the ancient centres 
 of the Muhammadan government that the Musalmans of Bengal 
 are found in large numbers, but in the country districts, in 
 districts where there are no traces of settlers from the West, and 
 in places where low-caste Hindus and outcasts most abound.' 
 
 ' So Firishtah, but see H. Blochmann : Contributions to the Geography anJ 
 History of Bengal. (J. A. S. B. vol. xlii. No. i, pp. 264-6) (1873). 
 
 ^ J. H. Ravenshaw : Gaur : its ruins and inscriptions, p. 99. (London, 1878.) 
 Firishtah, vol. iv. p. 337. 
 
 ' Wise, p. 29. 
 
 < Charles Stewart: The History of Bengal, p. 176. (London, 1813.) 
 H. Blochmann: Contributions to the Geography and History of Beiij-al. 
 (J. A. S. B., vol. xlii. No. i, p. 220) (1873). 
 
 ' The Indian Evangelical Review, p. 27S. January, 1883. Cf. also An Intro- 
 
SPREAD OF ISLAM IN BENGAL. 229 
 
 The similarity of manners between these low-caste Hindus and 
 the followers of the Prophet, and the caste distinctions which 
 they still retain, as well as their physical likeness, all bear the 
 same testimony and identify the Bengal Musalmans with the 
 aboriginal tribes of the country. Here Islam met with no con- 
 solidated religious system to bar its progress, as in the North- 
 west of India, where the Muhammadan invaders found Brahman- 
 ism full of fresh life and vigour after its triumphant struggle with 
 Buddhism ; where in spite of persecutions, its influence was an 
 inspiring force in the opposition offered by the Hindus, and 
 retained its hold on them in the hour of their deepest distress 
 and degradation. But in Bengal the Muslim missionaries were 
 welcomed with open arms by the aborigines and the low castes 
 on the very outskirts of Hinduism, despised and condemned by 
 their proud Aryan rulers. " To these poor people, fishermen, 
 hunters, pirates, and low-caste tillers of the soil, Islam came as a 
 revelation from on high. It was the creed of the ruling race, its 
 missionaries were men of zeal who brought the Gospel of the 
 unity of God and the equality of men in its sight to a despised 
 and neglected population. The initiatory rite rendered relapse 
 impossible, and made the proselyte and his posterity true 
 believers for ever. In this way Islam settled down on the richest 
 alluvial province of India, the province which was capable of 
 supporting the most rapid and densest increase of population. 
 Compulsory conversions are occasionally recorded. But it was 
 not to force that Islam owed its permanent success in Lower 
 Bengal. It appealed to the people, and it derived the great mass 
 of its converts from the poor. It brought in a higher conception 
 of God, and a nobler idea of the brotherhood of man. It offered 
 
 duction to the study of Hinduism, by Guru Proshad Sen. (The Calcutta Review, 
 October, 1890, pp. 231-2.) "Of the 19 millions of Mahomedans in Bengal 
 not more than 25,000 belong to what is known in Bengal as the Bhadralog class. 
 The remainder are agriculturists, day labourers, and petty artisans, tailors and 
 domestic servants. These were originally Hindus of the Jal Achal class, who 
 were converted to Mahomedanism. As a class they are the most prosperous 
 tenantry in India, and their condition instead of deteriorating as that of 
 Mahomedans throughout India is ordinarily supposed to be, is daily improving. 
 They were never anything more than agriculturists, and at no period of their 
 history either Government servants. Government soldiers, or zemmdars, much less 
 conquerors of India, or even followers of the Mahomedan conquerors. They are 
 bom of the country, speak the Bengali language, write the Bengali character, 
 dress like Bengalis, eat almost the same food as Bengalis, and, except as to 
 matters of religion, resemble in all respects any other Bengali ryot." 
 
230 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to the teeming low castes of Bengal, who had sat for ages abject 
 on the outermost pale of the Hindu community, a free entrance 
 into a new social organisation." ^ 
 
 The existence in Bengal of definite missionary efforts is said to 
 be attested by certain legends of the zeal of private individuals 
 on behalf of their religion,^ and the graves of some of these 
 missionaries are still honoured, and are annually visited by 
 hundreds of pilgrims,^ but detailed accounts of their proselytising 
 labours appear to be wanting. 
 
 In the present century there has been a remarkable revival of 
 the Muhammadan religion in Bengal, and several sects that 
 owe their origin to the influence of the Wahhabi reformation, 
 have sent their missionaries through the province purging out 
 the remnants of Hindu superstitions, awakening religious zeal and 
 spreading the faith among unbelievers.* 
 
 To their efforts, combined with certain social and physical con- 
 ditions that favour a more rapid increase in the Musalman as 
 compared with the Hindu population, is to be attributed the 
 marvellously rapid growth in the numbers of the followers of the 
 Prophet in recent years.^ 
 
 Some account still remains to be given of Muslim missionaries 
 who have laboured in parts of India other than those mentioned 
 above. One of the earliest of these is Shaykh Isma'il, one of the 
 most famous of the Sayyids of Bukhara, distinguished alike for 
 his secular and religious learning ; he is said to have been the 
 first Muslim missionary who preached the faith of Islam in the 
 city of Lahore, whither he came in the year 1005 a.d. Crowds 
 flocked to listen to his sermons, and the number of his converts 
 
 1 SirW. W. Hunter: The Religions of India. {The Times, February 25th, 
 1888.) See also Wise, p. 32. 
 
 ^ James Vaughan : The Trident, the Crescent and the Cross, p. 168. (London, 
 1876.) 
 
 3 Wise, p. 37. •• Id. pp. 48-55. 
 
 ' " It is statistically proved that since 1872 out of every 10,000 persons Islam 
 has gained 100 persons in Northern Bengal, 262 in Eastern IJengal, and 1 10 in 
 Western Bengal, — on an average 157 in the whole of Bengal proper. The 
 Musalman increase is real and large. If it were to continue, the faith of Muham- 
 mad would be universal in Bengal proper in six and a half centuries, whilst 
 Eastern Bengal would reach the same condition in about four hundred years. . ■ • 
 Nineteen years ago in Bengal proper Hindus numbered nearly half a million more 
 than Musalmans did, and in the space of less than two decades, the Musalmans 
 have not only overtaken the Hindus, but have surpassed them by a million and a 
 half." Census of India, 1891, vol. iii. The Lower Provinces of Bengal and their 
 Feudatories, by C. J. O'Donnell, pp, 146, 147. (Calcutta, 1893.) 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES IN INDIA. 231 
 
 swelled rapidly day by day, and it is said that no unbeliever ever 
 came into personal contact with him without being converted to 
 the faith of Islam.i 
 
 The conversion of the inhabitants of the western plains of the 
 Panjab is said to have been effected through the preaching of 
 Bahau-1 Haqq of Multan ^ and Baba Faridu-d Din of Pakpattan, 
 who flourished about the end of the thirteenth and beginning 
 of the fourteenth centuries.^ A biographer of the latter saint 
 gives a list of sixteen tribes who were won over to Islam through 
 his preaching, but unfortunately provides us with no details of 
 this work of conversion.* 
 
 One of the most famous of the Muslim saints of India and a 
 pioneer of Islam in Rajputana was Khwajah Mu'inu-d Din Chishti, 
 who died in Ajmir in 1234 a.d. He was a native of Sajistan to 
 the east of Persia and is said to have received his call to preach 
 Islam to the unbelievers in India while on a pilgrimage to Medina. 
 Here the prophet appeared to him in a dream and thus addressed 
 him : — " The Almighty has entrusted the country of India to 
 thee. Go thither and settle in Ajmir. By God's help, the faith 
 of Islam shall through thy piety and that of thy followers, be 
 spread in that land." He obeyed the call and made his way to 
 Ajmir which was then under Hindu rule and idolatry prevailed 
 throughout the land. Among the first of his converts here was a 
 Yogi, who was the spiritual preceptor of the Raja himself : 
 gradually he gathered around him a large body of disciples whom 
 his teachings had won from the ranks of infidelity and his fame 
 as a religious leader became very wide-spread and attracted to 
 Ajmir great numbers of Hindus whom he persuaded to embrace 
 Islatn.5 On his way to Ajmir he is said to have converted as 
 many as 700 persons in the city of Delhi. 
 
 Rather later in the same century, a native of 'Iraq, in Persia, 
 by name Abu 'Ali Qalandar, came into India and took up his 
 residence at Paniput, where he died at the ripe age of 100, in 
 1324 A.D. The Muslim Rajputs of this city, numbering about 
 300 maks, are descended from a certain Amir Singh who was 
 
 ' Ghulam Sarwar: Khazinatu-1 Asfiya, vol. ii. p. 230. 
 '' Otherwise known as Shayjsi Bahau-d Din Zakatia. 
 ' Ibbetson, p. 163. 
 
 ' Mawlawi Asghar 'AIT: Jaw5hir-i-Faiidi (a.h. 1033), p. 395. (Lahore, 
 1884.) 
 ' Elliot, vol. ii. p. 548. 
 
232 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 converted by this saint. His tomb is still held in honour and is 
 visited by many pilgrims. 
 
 Another such was Shaytt Jalalu-d Din, a Persian who came 
 into India about the latter half of the fourteenth century and 
 settled down at Silhat, in Lower Assam, in order to convert the 
 people of these parts to Islam. He achieved a great reputation 
 as a holy man, and his proselytising labours were crowned with 
 eminent success.^ 
 
 Similarly at the present day there are abundant witnesses for 
 Islam seeking to spread this faith in India — and with very con- 
 siderable success, the number of annual conversions being variously 
 estimated at ten, fifty, one hundred and six hundred thousand.^ 
 But the peculiarly individualistic character of Muslim missionary 
 work, and the absence of any central organisation or of anything 
 in the way of missionary reports render it exceedingly difficult 
 to obtain information. But that there are Muslim missionaries 
 engaged in active and successful propagandist labours, is un- 
 doubted. In the Panjab a certain Haji Muhammad is said to 
 have converted 200,000 Hindus.^ During the last five years a 
 mawlawi in Bangalore boasts that he has made as many as 1000 
 converts in this city and its suburbs. However suspicious these 
 statements may appear, yet the very fact of their being made, 
 points to the existence of very active efforts of a true missionary 
 character. The following details of such work have been gleaned 
 from reliable sources — in some cases from information furnished 
 by the individuals referred to, themselves. In Patiala, Mawlawi 
 'Ubaydu-llah, a converted Brahman of great learning, has proved 
 himself a zealous preacher of Islam, and in spite of the obstacles 
 that were at first thrown in his way by his relatives, has achieved 
 so great a success that his converts almost fill an entire ward of 
 the city. He has written some controversial works, which have 
 passed through several editions, directed against the Christian 
 and Hindu religions. In one of these books he has thus spoken 
 of his own conversion : — " I, Muhammad 'Ubaydu-llah, the son 
 of Munshi Kota Mai, resident of Payal, in the Patiala State, declare 
 
 ^ Ibn Batu^ah. Tome iv. p. 217. Yule (2), p. 515. 
 
 ^ The Indian Evangelical Review, vol. xvi. pp. 52-3. (Calcutta, 1889-90.) 
 The Contemporary Review, February, 1889, p. 170. The Spectator, October iSth, 
 1887, p. 1382. 
 
 ' Garcin de Tassy : La langue et la litl^rature Hindoustanies de 1850 a 1869, 
 p. 343. (Paris, 1874.) 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES IN INDIA. 233 
 
 that this poor man in his childhood and during the lifetime of 
 his father was held in the bondage of idol worship, but the mercy 
 of God caught me by the hand and drew me towards Islam, i.e. I 
 came to know the excellence of Islam and the deformities of 
 Hinduism, and I accepted Islam heart and soul, and counted 
 myself one of the servants of the Prophet of God (peace be upon 
 him !). At that time intelligence which is the gift of God sug- 
 gested to me that it was mere folly and laziness to blindly follow 
 the customs of one's forefathers and be misled by them and not 
 make researches into matters of religion and faith, whereon depend 
 our eternal bliss or misery. With these thoughts I began to 
 study the current faiths and investigated each of them impartially. 
 I thoroughly explored the Hindu religion and conversed with 
 learned Pandits, gained a thorough knowledge of the Christian 
 faith, read the books of Islam and conversed with learned men. 
 In all of them I found errors and fallacies, with the exception of 
 Islam, the excellence of which became clearly manifest to me ; 
 its leader, Muhammad the Prophet, possesses such moral ex- 
 cellences that no tongue can describe them, and he alone who 
 knows the beliefs and the liturgy, and the moral teachings and 
 practice of this faith, can fully realise them. Praise be to God ! 
 So excellent is this religion that everything in it leads the soul to 
 God. In short, by the grace of God, the distinction between 
 truth and falsehood became as clear to me as night and day, 
 darkness and light. But although my heart had long been 
 enlightened by the brightness of Islam and my mouth made clean 
 by the profession of faith, yet my evil passions and Satan had 
 bound me with the fetters of the luxury and ease of this fleeting 
 world, and I was in evil case because of the outward observances 
 of idolatry. At length, the grace of God thus admonished me : 
 ' How long wilt thou keep this priceless pearl hidden within the 
 shell and this refreshing perfume shut up in the casket ? thou 
 shouldest wear this pearl about thy neck and profit by this 
 perfume.' Moreover the learned have declared that to conceal 
 one's faith in Islam and retain the dress and habits of infidels 
 brings a man to Hell. So (God be praised !) on the 'Idu-1 Fitr 
 1264 the sun of my conversion emerged from its screen of clouds, 
 and I performed my devotions in public with my Muslim 
 brethren." 1 
 
 1 Tuhfatu-I Hind, p. 3. (Dehli, ah. 1309.) 
 
234 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Mawlawi Baqa Husayn Khan, an itinerant preacher, has in the 
 course of several years converted 228 persons, residents of Bombay, 
 Cawnpore, Ajmir, and other cities. Mawlawi Hasan 'Ali has 
 converted twenty-five persons, twelve in Poona, the rest in 
 Hyderabad and other parts of India.i In the district of Khandesh, 
 in the Bombay Presidency, the preaching of the Qadi of Nasira- 
 bad, Sayyid Safdar 'Ali, has lately won over to Islam a large body 
 of artisans, who follow the trade of armourers or blacksmiths.^ 
 A number of persons of the same trade, who form a small com- 
 munity of about 200 souls in the district of Nasik, were converted 
 in a curious way about twenty-five years ago. The Presbyterian 
 missionaries of Nasik had for a long time been trying to convert 
 them from Hinduism, and they were in a state of hesitation as to 
 whether or not to embrace Christianity, when a Muhammadan 
 faqir from Bombay, who was well acquainted with their habits of 
 thought, expounded to them the doctrines of Islam and succeeded 
 in winning them over to that faith.^ 
 
 Many Muhammadan preachers have adopted the methods of 
 Christian missionaries, such as street preaching, tract distribution, 
 
 ' Mawlawi Hasan 'All furnished me with these figures some years before his 
 death in 1896. In an obituary notice published in "The Moslem Chronicle" 
 (April 4, 1896), the following quaint account is given of his life: "In private 
 and school life, lie was marked as a very intelligent lad and made considerable 
 progress in his scholastic cai'eer within a short time. He passed Entrance at a 
 very early age and received scholarship with which he went up to the First Art, 
 but shortly after his innate anxiety to seek truth prompted him to go abroad the 
 world and abandoning his studies he mixed with persons of different persuasions, 
 Fakirs, Pandits, and Christians, entered churches, and roamed over wilderness 
 and forests and cities with nothing to help him on except his sincere hopes and 
 absolute reliance on the mercy of the Great Lord ; for one year he wandered in 
 various regions of religion until in 1874 he accepted the post of a headmaster in 
 a Patna school. ... As he was born to become a missionary of the Moslem 
 faith, he felt an imperceptible craving to quit his post, from which he used to get 
 Rs. 100 per mensem. He tendered his resignation, much to the reluctance of his 
 friends, and maintained himself for some time by publishing a monthly journal, 
 ' Noorul Islam.' He gave several lectures on Islam at Patna, and then went to 
 Calcutta, where he delivered his lecture in English, which produced such effect on 
 the audience that several European clergymen vouchsafed the truth of Islam, and 
 a notable gentleman, Babu Bepin Chandra Pal, was about to become Musulman. 
 He was invited by the people at Dacca, where his preachings and lectures left his 
 name imbedded in the hearts of the citizens. His various books and pamphlets 
 and successive lectures in Urdu and in English in the different cities and towns in 
 India gave him a historic name in the world. Some one hundred men became 
 Musalmans on hearing his lectures and reading his books." His missionary zeal 
 manifested itself up to the last hour of his life, when he was overheard to say, 
 " Abjure your religion and become a Musalman." On being questioned, he said 
 he was talking to a Christian. 
 
 - The Bombay Gazetteer, vol. xii. p. 126. 
 
 ■^ Id. vol. xvi. p. 81. 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES IN INDIA. 23^ 
 
 and other agencies. In many of the large cities of India, MusHm 
 preachers may be found daily expounding the teachings of the 
 prophet in some principal thoroughfare. In Bangalore this 
 practice is very general, and one of these preachers, who is the 
 imam of the mosque, is so popular that he is even sometimes 
 invited to preach by Hindus : he preaches in the market-place, 
 and during the last seven or eight years has gained forty-two 
 converts. In Bombay a Muhammadan missionary preaches 
 almost daily near the chief market of the city, and in Calcutta 
 there are several preaching-stations that are kept constantly 
 supplied. Among the converts are occasionally to be found 
 some Europeans, mostly persons in indigent circumstances ; the 
 mass, however, are Hindus.^ Some of the numerous Anjumans 
 that have of recent years sprung up in the chief centres of 
 Musalman life in India, include among their objects the sending 
 of missionaries to preach in the bazars ; such are the Anjuman- 
 i-Himayat-i Islam of Lahore, and the Anjuman Hami Islam of 
 Ajmir. These particular Anjumans appoint paid agents, but 
 much of the work of preaching in the bazars is performed by 
 persons who are engaged in some trade or business during the 
 working hours of the day and devote their leisure time in the 
 evenings to this pious work. 
 
 Much of the missionary zeal of the Indian Musalmans is directed 
 towards counteracting the anti-Islamic tendencies of the instruc- 
 tion given by Christian missionaries, and the efforts made are 
 thus defensive rather than directly proselytising. Some preachers 
 too turn their attention rather to the strengthening of the 
 foundation already laid, and endeavour to rid their ignorant co- 
 religionists of their Hindu superstitions, and instil in them a 
 purer form of faith, such efforts being in many cases the con- 
 tinuation of earlier missionary efforts. The work of conversion 
 has indeed been often very imperfect. Of many, nominally 
 Muslims, it may be said that they are half Hindus : they observe 
 caste rules, they join in Hindu festivals and practise nunnerous 
 idolatrous ceremonies. In certain districts also, e.g. in Mewat 
 and Gurgaon, large numbers of Muhammadans may be found 
 
 ' The Indian Evangelical Review, 1884, p. 128. Garcin de Tassy : La 
 langue et la litterature Hindoustanies de 1850 a 1869, p. 485- (Paris, 1874.) 
 Garcin de Tassy : La langue et la litterature Hindoustanies en 1871, p. 12. 
 (Paris, 1872.) 
 
236 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 who know nothing of their religion but its name ; they have no 
 mosques, nor do they observe the hours of prayer. This is 
 especially the case among the Muhammadans of the villages or in 
 parts of the country where they are isolated from the mass of 
 believers ; but in the towns the presence of learned religious men 
 tends, in great measure, to counteract the influence of former 
 superstitions, and makes for a purer and more intelligent form of 
 religious life. In recent years, however, there has been, speaking 
 generally, a movement noticeable among the Indian Muslims 
 towards a religious life more strictly in accordance with the laws 
 of Islam. The influence of the Christian mission schools has also 
 been very great in stimulating among some Muhammadans of 
 the younger generation a study of their own religion and in 
 bringing about a consequent awakening of religious zeal. Indeed, 
 the spread of education generally, has led to a more intelligent 
 grasp of religious principles and to an increase of religious 
 teachers in outlying and hitherto neglected districts. This 
 missionary movement of reform (from whatever cause it may 
 originate), may be observed in very different parts of India. In 
 the Eastern districts of the Panjab, for example, after the mutiny, 
 a great religious revival took place. Preachers travelled far and 
 wide through the country, calling upon believers to abandon 
 their idolatrous practices and expounding the true tenets of the 
 faith. Now, in consequence, most villages, in which Muham- 
 madans own any considerable portion, have a mosque, while the 
 grosser and more open idolatries are being discontinued.^ In 
 Rajputana also, the Hindu tribes who have been from time to 
 time converted to Islam in the rural districts, are now becoming 
 more orthodox and regular in their religious observances, and are 
 abandoning the ancient customs which hitherto they had observed 
 in common with their idolatrous neighbours. The Merats, for 
 example, now follow the orthodox Muhammadan form of marriage 
 instead of the Hindu ritual they formerly observed, and have 
 abjured the flesh of the wild boar.^ A similar revival in Bengal 
 has already been spoken of above. 
 
 Such movements and the efforts of individual missionaries are, 
 however, quite inadequate to explain the rapid increase of the 
 Muhammadans of India, and one is naturally led to inquire what 
 
 ' Ibbetson, p. 164. 
 
 ' The Rajputana Gs^zetteer, vol, i. p. 90 ; vol. ii. p. 47. (Calcutta, 1879.) 
 
CAUSES OF THE SPREAD OF ISLAM. 237 
 
 are the causes other than the normal increase of population, 
 which add so enormously to their numbers. The answer is to be 
 found in the social conditions of life among Hindus. The insults 
 and contempt heaped upon the lower castes of Hindus by their 
 co-religionists, and the impassable obstacles placed in the way of 
 any member of these castes desiring to better his condition, show 
 up in striking contrast the benefits of a religious system which 
 has no outcasts, and gives free scope for the indulgence of any 
 ambition. In Bengal, for example, the weavers of cotton piece- 
 goods, who are looked upon as vile by their Hindu co-religionists, 
 embrace Islam in large numbers to escape from the low position 
 to which they are otherwise degraded. 1 A very remarkable 
 instance of a similar kind occurs in the history of the north- 
 eastern part of the same province. Here in the year 1550 the 
 aboriginal tribe of the Kocch established a dynasty under their 
 great leader, Haju ; in the reign of his grandson, when the higher 
 classes in the state were received into the pale of Hinduism,^ the 
 mass of the people finding themselves despised as outcasts, became 
 Muhammadans.s Similar instances might be given from all parts 
 of India. A Hindu who has in any way lost caste and been in 
 consequence repudiated by his relations, and by the society in 
 which he has been accustomed to move, would naturally be 
 attracted towards a religion that receives all without distinction, 
 and offers to him a grade of society equal in the social scale to 
 that from which he has been banished. Such a change of religion 
 might well be accompanied with sincere conviction, but men also 
 who might be profoundly indifferent to the number or names of 
 the deities they were called upon to worship, would feel very 
 keenly the social ostracism entailed by their loss of caste, and 
 become Muhammadan without any religious feelings at all. The 
 influence of the study of Muhammadan literature also, and the 
 habitual contact with Muhammadan society, must often make 
 itself insensibly felt. Among the Rajput princes of the present 
 day in Rajputana and Bundelkhand, such tendencies towards 
 Islamism may be observed,* tendencies which, had the Mu^al 
 
 ' E. T. Dalton, p. 324. 
 
 ^ For an account of such Hinduising of the aboriginal tribes see Sir Alfred 
 Lyall : Asiatic Studies, pp. 102-4. 
 
 5 E. T. Dalton, p. 89. 
 
 * Sir Alfred Lyall (Asiatic Studies, p. 29) speaks of the perceptible pro- 
 clivity towards the faith of Islam occasionally exhibited by some of the Hindu 
 chiefs. 
 
238 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 empire lasted, would probably have led to their ultimate con- 
 version. They not only respect Muhammadan saints, but have 
 Muhammadan tutors for their sons ; they also have their food 
 killed in accordance with the regulations laid down by the 
 Muhammadan law, and join in Muhammadan festivals dressed as 
 faqirs, and praying like true believers. On the other hand, it 
 has been conjectured that the present position of affairs, under a 
 government perfectly impartial in matters religious, is much more 
 likely to promote conversions among the Hindus generally than 
 was the case under the rule of the Muhammadan kingdoms, when 
 Hinduism gained union and strength from the constant struggle 
 with an aggressive enemy.i Hindus, too, often flock in large 
 numbers to the tombs of Muslim saints on the day appointed to 
 commemorate them, and a childless father, with the feeling that 
 prompts a polytheist to leave no God unaddressed, will present 
 his petition to the God of the Muhammadans, and if children are 
 born to him, apparently in answer to this prayer, the whole family 
 would in such a case (and examples are not infrequent) embrace 
 Islam.2 
 
 Love for a Muhammadan woman is occasionally the cause of 
 the conversion of a Hindu, since the marriage of a Muslim woman 
 to an unbeliever is absolutely forbidden by the Muslim law. 
 Hindu children, if adopted by wealthy Musalmans, would be 
 brought up in the religion of their new parents ; and a Hindu 
 wife, married to a follower of the Prophet, would be likely to 
 adopt the faith of her husband. As the contrary process cannot 
 take place, the number of Muhammadans is bound to increase in 
 proportion to that of the Hindus. Hindus, who for some reason 
 or other have been driven out of their caste ; the poor who have 
 become the recipients of Muhammadan charity, or women and 
 children who have been protected when their parents have died 
 
 ' Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh, vol i. p, xix. 
 
 2 To give one instance only : in Ghatampur, in the district of Cawnpore, one 
 branch of a large family is Muslim in obedience to the vow of their ancestor, 
 Ghatam Deo Bais, who while praying for a son at the shrine of a Muham- 
 madan saint, Madar Shah, promised that if his prayer were granted, half his 
 descendants should be brought up as Muslims. (Gazetteer of the N.W.P. vol. vi. 
 pp. 64, 238.) 
 
 The worship of Muhammadan saints is so common among certain low-caste 
 Hindus that in the Census of 1891, in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh 
 alone, 2,333,643 Hindus (or 5.78 per cent, of the total Hindu population of these 
 provnices) returned themselves as worshippers of Muhammadan saints. Census 
 of India, 1891, vol. xvi. part i. pp. 217, 244. (Allahabad, 1894.) 
 
CAUSES OF THE SPREAD OF ISLAM. 239 
 
 or deserted them — (such cases would naturally be frequent in times 
 of famine) — form a continuous though small stream of additions 
 from the Hindus.i There are often local circumstances favour- 
 able to the growth of Islam ; for example, it has been pointed 
 out ^ that in the villages of the Terai, in which the number of 
 Hindus and Muhammadans happen to be equally balanced, any 
 increase in the predominance of the Muhammadans is invariably 
 followed by disputes about the killing of cows and other practices 
 offensive to Hindu feeling. The Hindus gradually move away 
 from the village, leaving behind of their creed only the Chamar 
 ploughman in the service of the Muhammadan peasants. These 
 latter eventually adopt the religion of their masters, not from any 
 conviction of its truth, but from the inconvenience their isolation 
 entails. 
 
 Some striking instances of conversions from the lower castes 
 of Hindus are also found in the agricultural districts of Oudh. 
 Although the Muhammadans of this province form only one-tenth 
 of the whole population, still the small groups of Muhammadan 
 cultivators form " scattered centres of revolt against the degrading 
 oppression to which their religion hopelessly consigns these lower 
 castes.'' ^ The advantages Islam holds out to such classes as the 
 Koris and Chamars, who stand at the lowest level of Hindu 
 society, and the deliverance which conversion to Islam brings 
 them, may be best understood from the following passage 
 descriptive of their social condition as Hindus.* " The lowest 
 depth of misery and degradation is reached by the Koris and 
 Chamars, the weavers and leather-cutters to the rest. Many of 
 these in the northern districts are actually bond slaves, having 
 hardly ever the spirit to avail themselves of the remedy offered 
 by our courts, and descend with their children from generation to 
 generation as the value of an old purchase. They hold the 
 plough for the Brahman or Chhattri master, whose pride of caste 
 forbids him to touch it, and live with the pigs, less unclean than 
 themselves, in separate quarters apart from the rest of the village. 
 Always on the verge of starvation, their lean, black, and ill-formed 
 
 ' Report on the Census of the N.W.P. and Oudh, 1881, by Edward White, 
 p. 62. fAllahabad, 1882.) 
 ' Id. p. 63. 
 
 ' Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh, vol. i. p. xix. 
 * Id. pp. xxiii.-xxiv. 
 
240 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 figures, their stupid faces, and their repulsively filthy habits 
 reflect the wretched destiny which condemns them to be lower 
 than the beast among their fellow-men, and yet that they are far 
 from incapable of improvement is proved by the active and useful 
 stable servants drawn from among them, who receive good pay 
 and live well under European masters. A change of religion is 
 the only means of escape open to them, and they have little 
 reason to be faithful to their present creed." 
 
 It is this absence of class prejudices which constitutes the real 
 strength of Islam in India, and enables it to win so many converts 
 from Hinduism. 
 
 To complete this survey of Islam in India, some account still 
 remains to be given of the spread of this faith in Kashmir and 
 thence beyond the borders of India into Thibet. Of all the 
 provinces and states of India (with the exception of Sind) Kashmir 
 contains the largest number of Muhammadans (namely 70 per 
 cent.) in proportion to the whole population, but unfortunately 
 historical facts that should explain the existence in this state of 
 so many Musalmans, almost entirely of Hindu or Thibetan origin, 
 are very scanty. But all the evidence leads us to attribute it on 
 the whole to a long-continued missionary movement inaugurated 
 and carried out mainly by faqirs and dervishes, among whom 
 were Isma'ilian preachers sent from Alamut.i 
 
 It is difficult to say when this Islamising influence first made 
 itself felt in the country. The first Muhammadan king of 
 Kashmir, Sadru-d Din, is. said to have owed his conversion to a 
 certain Darwesh Bulbul Shah in the early part of the fourteenth 
 century. This saint was the only religious teacher who could 
 satisfy his craving for religious truth, when dissatisfied with his 
 own Hindu faith he looked for a more acceptable form of doctrine. 
 Towards the end of the same century (in 1388) the progress of 
 Islam was most materially furthered by the advent of Sayyid 'Ali 
 Hamadani, a fugitive from his native city of Hamadan in Persia, 
 where he had incurred the wrath of Timur. He was accompanied 
 by 700 Sayyids, who established hermitages all over the country 
 and by their influence appear to have assured the acceptance of 
 the new religion. Their advent appears, however, to have also 
 stirred up considerable fanaticism, as Sultan Sikandar (1393-1417) 
 
 ' Khoja Vrtlant, p. 141. 
 
ISLAM IN KASHMIR. 241 
 
 acquired the name of Butshikan from his destruction of Hindu 
 idols and temples, and his prime minister, a converted Hindu, 
 set on foot a fierce persecution of the adherents of his old faith, 
 but on his death toleration was again niade the rule of the 
 kingdom.^ Towards the close of the fifteenth century, a mis- 
 sionary, by name Mir Shamsu-d Din, belohging to a Shi'ah sect, 
 came from 'Iraq, and, with the aid of his disciples, won over a 
 large number of converts in Kashmir. 
 
 When under Akbar, Kashmir became a province of the Mughal 
 Empire, the Muhammadan influence was naturally strengthened 
 and many men of learning came into the country. In the reign 
 of Aurangzeb, the Rajput Raja of Kishtwar was converted by the 
 miracles of a certain Sayyid Shah Faridu-d Din and his conversion 
 seems to have been followed by that of the majority of his subjects, 
 and along the route which the Mughal Emperors took on their 
 progresses into Kashmir we still find Rajas who are the descen- 
 dants of Muhammadanised Rajputs.^ 
 
 To the north of Kashmir, in Skardii or Little Thibet, there has 
 been a Muhammadan population for over three centuries, but 
 the traditions regarding the first introduction of this faith here 
 are very conflicting. To the north-east, Islam is encroaching 
 upon Buddhism,^ and has been carried by the Kashmiri merchants 
 into Thibet Proper itself. In all the chief cities, settlements of 
 Kashmiri merchants are to be found ; in Lhasa they number 
 about a thousand ; they marry Thibetan wives who often adopt 
 the religion of their husbands ; but active efforts at conversion 
 cannot be made from fear of the authorities.* Islam moreover 
 has made its way into Thibet from Yunnan in China and from 
 Persia.' 
 
 ' Firishtah, vol. iv. pp. 464, 469. 
 
 ' F. Drew: The Jummoo and Kashmir Territories, pp. 58, 155. (London, 
 
 ' J. D. Cunningham : A History of the Sikhs, p. 17. (London, 1853.) 
 ■• These facts were communicated to me by a Thibetan Lama from Lhasa. 
 ^ A. Bastiaa: Die Geschichte der Indochinesen, p. 159. (Leipiig, 1866.) 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN CHINA. 
 
 It is remarkable how little attention until very recently has been 
 paid to Islam in China. This neglect is all the more striking 
 when we consider how long the fact of its existence in this 
 country has been known to the West and how early it was noted 
 by European travellers. So far back as the thirteenth century, 
 Marco Polo speaks of the Muhammadans he met with while 
 travelling in China. In the province of Carajan (i.e. Yunnan), 
 he says " the people are of sundry kinds, for there are not only 
 Saracens and Idolaters, but also a few Nestorian Christians." ^ 
 Again, speaking of a city called Sinju (the modern Siningfu), he 
 says : " The population is composed of Idolaters and worshippers 
 of Mahomet, but there are some Christians." ^ 
 
 The Jesuit missionaries and others of the latter part of the 
 seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century not 
 infrequently make mention of the Muhammadans in China, but 
 appear to have taken little care to inquire into their history or 
 to obtain information regarding their numbers and position in 
 the country : indeed at this time the Chinese Muslims seem to 
 have attracted very little interest in Europe.* 
 
 Even among the general mass of the Muhammadans them- 
 selves, very little is known of their Chinese co-religionists, beyond 
 the account given of them by Ibn Batutah, who visited China 
 about the middle of the fourteenth century. He speaks of the 
 hearty welcome he received as being a new-comer from the 
 
 ' Yule's Marco Polo, vol. ii. p. 39. 2 Id. vol. i. p. 241. 
 
 ' A Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. ii. pp. 76, 79. (London, 1745.) 
 A Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. i. pp. 17, 76. (London, 1752.) 
 J. B. du Halde : Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique 
 et physique de I'Empire de la Chine. Tome i. p. 133. (Paris, 1735.) 
 
HISTORY OF ISLAM IN CHINA. 243 
 
 country of Islam ^ and tells us that " In every town there is a 
 special quarter for the Muslims, inhabited solely by them, where 
 they have their mosques ; they are honoured and respected by 
 the Chinese." ^ 
 
 When however the great Muhammadan rebellion in Yunnan, 
 which reached its climax about twenty years ago, brought the 
 existence of a large Muslim population in China forcibly to the 
 notice of the world, two very remarkable works were published 
 on the Chinese Muhammadans. The one, in Russian, by Pro- 
 fessor Vasil'ev, drew an alarmist picture of the danger that 
 threatened the civilisation of Europe from the presence of this 
 vast Muhammadan population, the existence of which had 
 been hitherto so unsuspected, and whose religion, he seems to 
 think, is destined to be the national faith of the China of the 
 future. " If China, which contains at least one-third of the 
 human race, were to be converted into a Muhammadan empire, 
 the political relations of the whole East would be considerably 
 modified. The world of Islam stretching from Gibraltar to the 
 Pacific Ocean might once again lift up its head. Islam might 
 and would again threaten Christendom, and the peaceful activity 
 of the Chinese people which is now so profitable to the rest of 
 the world, would, in the hands of fanatics, be turned into a yoke 
 upon the necks of other nations." " TheMusalmans in Turkistan 
 and Zungaria will certainly not fail to continually threaten the 
 Chinese Empire, where their co-religionists are found scattered 
 all over the country ; and even if these provinces were to come 
 again under Chinese rule, would Islam be the weaker for it or 
 its spread and development be checked ? The question we have 
 raised may be postponed for some few years only : suppose, for ten, 
 or perhaps at most for a century : but all this while Islam will 
 continue to make progress, and watching for a favourable oppor- 
 tunity for the realisation of its hopes, will in the end attain the 
 goal of its aspirations." " If the Chinese Muhammadans were 
 only the descendants of strangers who came into the country 
 some long time ago, we should have no concern with the question 
 as to whether the whole of China will one day be converted to 
 Muhammadanism : but this very question pre-supposes that 
 Muhammadanism is always gaining fresh adherents from among 
 
 ' Tome iv. p. 270, ' Tome iv. p. 258. 
 
 R 1 
 
244 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the natives of the country, and we may therefore well inquire 
 whether the progress it is making will ever stop." " Again, if 
 Islam some day succeeds in establishing its political supremacy 
 over China, and then claims the allegiance of the mass of the 
 population to its faith, will it meet with a refusal ? We think 
 not, for such a change will seem infinitely easier to the Chinese 
 than the change of costume which took place on the accession 
 of the reigning dynasty." i One is naturally led to inquire what 
 authority there is for such startling conclusions ; and the fullest 
 account of the facts on which they are based is to be found in 
 the work ' of M. P. Dabry de Thiersant, late Consul General and 
 Chargd d'Affaires in China, who has written an exhaustive 
 account of the Chinese Musalmans, based on their own historical 
 and liturgical literature, on imperial decrees relating to them, 
 on private inquiries from learned men, and other sources. 
 
 No book has ever been published in which the subject of Islam 
 in China has been treated with such fulness of detail and such 
 a wealth of information, and it is from this work, except where 
 other authorities are expressly referred to, that the facts con- 
 tained in the present chapter have been drawn. 
 
 The main features of M. de Thiersant's volumes have recently 
 received a very remarkable confirmation from a Chinese Musal- 
 man himself, named Sayyid Sulayman, a native of Yunnan and 
 son of a Chinese governor. With his brother he visited Turkey 
 and other parts of the Muhammadan world, and in Cairo in 1894 
 he was interviewed by the representative of an Arabic journal, 
 who has published the conversations that ensued on these 
 occasions.^ 
 
 From this brief sketch of the authorities for the history of 
 Islam in China, let us now turn to the facts of this history them- 
 selves. Islam came into China from two directions, by sea from 
 the South and by land from the North-west. It is in the North- 
 west, in the provinces of Kan-suh and Shen-si,' that by far the 
 majority— both numerically and proportionately — of the Mu- 
 
 ' Vasil'ev, pp. 3, 5, 14, 17. 
 
 Le Mahometisme en Chine. (Paris, 1878.) 
 3 Thamaratu-1 Funun. (Bayrut, 13th Sha'ban— 26th Shawwal. A.H. nil, 
 
 A.D. 1894.) •" 
 
 ■•Kan-suh contains 8,350,000 Musalmans, who in this province are, relatively 
 to the other Chinese, in the proportion of six to five or four, whUe in Shen-si 
 there are 6,500,000. (De Thiersant. Tome i. pp. 40.41.) 
 
ISLAM IN THE NORTH-WEST. 245 
 
 hammadan population is to be found. These two provinces 
 between them contain almost three-fourths of the twenty 
 millions of Musalmans scattered throughout the Chinese 
 Empire.! 
 
 Muslim missionaries first made their way into this part of the 
 Chinese Empire, through Central Asia, in consequence of the 
 friendly relations that were established in the early days of the 
 Caliphate between the Emperor of China and the new power in 
 the West, which from Arabia was so rapidly extending its 
 dominion over the neighbouring kingdoms. Arabia had been 
 known to the Chinese as early as the second century of the 
 Christian era, but the first occasion mentioned of diplomatic 
 relations being established between them is after the death of 
 Yazdagird, the last king of Persia, when his son Firuz appealed 
 to the Emperor of China to help him against his enemies. The 
 Emperor replied that Persia was too far distant for him to send 
 an army, but that he would speak on his behalf to the caliph 
 'Uthman. The caliph gave a favourable reception to the imperial 
 ambassador : and on his return he was accompanied by one of 
 the Arab generals, who was received by the Emperor in 651 
 with similar courtesy. In the reign of Walid (705-715), the 
 famous Arab general, Qutaybah ibn Muslim, having been 
 appointed governor of Khurasan, crossed the Oxus and began a 
 series of most successful campaigns, in which he successivel}- 
 captured Bu^ara, Samarqand and other cities, and converted 
 the surrounding country to Islam. Then with his victorious 
 army he marched eastward towards the frontier of China and 
 sent envoys to the Emperor, who (according to Arab historians) 
 dismissed them with a large sum of money in token of homage 
 to the Caliph. A few years later, the Chinese annals make 
 mention of more than one ambassador who came bringing 
 
 ' This is M. de Thiersant's estimate, calculated from information furnished him 
 hy Chinese officials. A more recent authority gives the number as "probably 
 thirty mUlions." (Asia, by A. H. Keane, edited by Sir Richard Temple, p. 578. 
 London, 1882. ) Sayyid Sulayman says that these estimates are out of date owmg 
 to the yearly increase in the numbers of the Muhammadan population, which he 
 declares to amount to seventy millions, not including the people of Kashgar. 
 (Thamaratu-1 Funun, 26th Ramadan, p. 3.) As an instance of the ignorance 
 respecting the Muhammadans of China, it may be noticed that Mr. Wilfrid S. 
 Blunt (p. 8) puts the number at fifteen millions, Dr. Jessup (p. 5) as low as four, 
 and the Archimandrite Palladius between three and four millions. (Z.D.M.G. 
 vol. xxi. p. soa. 1867.) 
 
246 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 presents from the Caliph Hisham (724-743). Another embassy 
 was sent to the Emperor Sutsung by the Caliph Al Mansur in 
 7S7 A.D., at a time when trade was being largely developed in 
 the East, and from this time onwards such embassies are fre- 
 quently mentioned. The friendly relations thus established 
 between the two powers and the stimulus given to trade must 
 have largely facilitated the missionary activity of those most 
 zealous propagandists of Islam, the Musalman traders, many of 
 whom came into China from Bukhara, Transoxania and Arabia. 
 The Chinese annalist of this period (713-742 a.d.) says that "the 
 barbarians of the West came in crowds, like a deluge, from a 
 distance of more than 3000 miles and from more than 100 
 kingdoms, bringing as tribute their sacred books, which were 
 received and deposited in the hall set apart for translations 
 of sacred or canonical books, in the imperial palace ; from this 
 period the religious doctrines of these different countries were 
 thus diffused and openly practised in the empire." 
 
 The first mosque in the North of China was built in the year 
 742 A.D., in the capital city of the province of Shen-si, and a 
 mandarin was appointed to look after the affairs of the Muslim 
 community. The Archimandrite Palladius speaks of an inscribed 
 tablet that was discovered at Singan-fu (where also the famous 
 Nestorian tablet was dug up), bearing the same date (742 a.d.) 
 and referring to the introduction of Islam into China, but it 
 assigns an impossible date to this event, namely, the reign of the 
 Sui emperor, Kai-huang (a.d. 581-600). The evidence of this 
 tablet is, however, conclusive as to the early period at which 
 Islam reached this country.i 
 
 The details of the spread of the new religion are very meagre. 
 It appears to have made its way into the province of Kan-suh, 
 which at that time formed part of the Empire of the Hoey-hu 
 (whose original home lay between the rivers Irtish and Orkhon), 
 about the middle of the eighth century. How far the religion 
 had spread among them, when about the middle of the tenth 
 century, their Khan, Satoc, was converted to Islam, it is impossible 
 to say. This prince made war on all unbelievers and endeavoured 
 to force all his subjects to become Musalmans. His example was 
 followed by his successors who forbade the exercise of all other 
 
 ' Bretschneider (i), vol. i. p. 266 ; vol. ii. p. 305. 
 
ISLAM IN THE NORTH-WEST. 247 
 
 religions with the exception of Nestorian Christianity. But in 
 the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Jingis Khan 
 destroyed the kingdom of the Hoey-hu, he proclaimed religious 
 liberty throughout all his dominions. Among the subjects of 
 the Khan of the Hoey-hu, were the Uigurs (a Turkish tribe, which 
 formed the base of the Ottoman Turks, coming originally from 
 Khamil in Chinese Turkistan),i and one account ^ traces the 
 origin of the Tungani (which in the Turki language means " a 
 convert " and is the name given in Turkistan to the Chinese 
 Muhammadans) to a large body of Uigurs, who were transferred 
 to the vicinity of the Great Wall during the rule of the Thang 
 dynasty (618-907. a.d.). Marriages were encouraged between 
 these settlers and the Chinese women, and when in later times 
 the Uigur tribe embraced Islam,^ their kindred in China followed 
 their example. They still, however, kept up the practice of 
 marrying Chinese women, the children of such unions being 
 brought up as Muhammadans. At a later period these Tunganis 
 received fresh accessions of their kindred who flocked into the 
 provinces of Shen-si and Kan-suh, at the time when the conquests 
 of Jingis Khan, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, opened 
 up a high-road of communication between the East and West of 
 Asia. These people are said to have a special liking for 
 mercantile pursuits and are known in Central Asia for their com- 
 mercial integrity. They are distinguished from the Chinese by 
 their strength of body and are generally selected by them for 
 
 police duties. 
 
 The conquests of the Mongols resulted in a vast immigration 
 of Musalman Syrians, Arabs, Persians and others into the Chinese 
 Empire/ Some came as merchants, artisans, soldiers or 
 colonists, others were brought in as prisoners of war. A great 
 number of them settled in the country and developed into a 
 populous and flourishing community, gradually losing their racial 
 peculiarities by their marriages with Chinese women. We find 
 
 1 Anderson p 162. ^ Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. pp. 255-6. 
 
 ' "They had abjured Buddhism about two hundred years and a half before the 
 conquest of China by the Tartars (1207-1217)." Anderson, p. 148. 
 
 Ti?at Oierewal' somTmigr^ation westward also of Chinese into the conquered 
 countries of Islam, where they would come withm the sphere of its religious 
 nflu nee, we am from the diary of a Chinese tnonk, who travelled through 
 Cral Asia to Persia in the years .221-4 : speaking of Samarqand, he says. 
 " Chinese workmen are living everywhere." (Bretschneider (l), vol. 1. p. 78.) 
 
248 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 several Muhammadans also occupying high posts under the 
 Mongol Khaqaans : such were'Abdu-r Rahman, who in 1244 was 
 appointed head of the Imperial finances and allowed to farm the 
 taxes imposed upon China 1 ; and Sayyid Ajal, a native of 
 Bul^ara, to whom Khubilay Khan, on his accession in 1259, 
 entrusted the management of the Imperial finances ; he died in 
 1270, leaving a high reputation for honesty, and was succeeded 
 by another Muhammadan named Ahmad, who on the other 
 hand left behind him a reputation the very reverse of that of his 
 predecessor. The Chinese historians who praise the reign of 
 Khubilay Khan make it a cause of complaint against this monarch 
 that he did not employ Chinese officials instead of these Turks 
 and Persians.^ This same potentate established at Peking an 
 imperial college for the Hoey-hu that had embraced Islam, a 
 further proof of the increasing importance of the Musalmans in 
 China. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, all the 
 inhabitants of Yunnan are said, by a contemporary authority, 
 to have been Musalmans.^ 
 
 Up to this period the Muhammadans seemed to have been 
 looked upon as a foreign community in China, but after the ex- 
 pulsion of the Mongol dynasty in the latter part of the same 
 century, being cut off from communication with their co-religion- 
 ists in other countries, and being anxious not to excite against 
 themselves the suspicions of the new dynasty, they instituted the 
 practice (which they have continued to the present day), of 
 avoiding the open exhibition of any specially distinguishing 
 features of religious faith and practice, and tried to merge them- 
 selves as much as possible in the common mass of the Chinese 
 people. By this time Islam had been firmly established in the 
 North of China and slowly but surely now began to extend the 
 sphere of its influence by means of cautious and unobtrusive 
 missionary efforts. The history- of this movement is buried in 
 obscurity, but the Muhammadan communities of the present day 
 are a living testimony to its efficacy. Throughout all the chief 
 towns of Southern Mongolia the followers of the Prophet are to 
 be found in considerable numbers in the midst of a population 
 mainly Buddhist. In the capital city of Peking itself there are 
 
 ' Howorth, vol. i. p. 161, J Id. toI. i. p. 2?7. 
 
 » Rashldu-d Din. (Yule's Cathay, p. 269.) 
 
ISLAM IN THE NORTH AND NORTH-WEST. 249 
 
 20,000 Muhammadan families and thirteen mosques, the mullas 
 of which come not from the West, but from Lin-tsin-chow, on 
 the Imperial canal south-east of Peking, which is one of the most 
 important centres of Muhammadan influence in the North-east 
 ofChina.i 
 
 It is interesting to note that the Muslim community added 
 considerably to its numbers through the accession of Chinese 
 Jews, whose establishment in this country dates from a very 
 early period : they held employments under the Government 
 and were in possession of large estates, but by the close of the 
 seventeenth century a great part of them had been converted to 
 Islarn.^ 
 
 The eighteenth century was signalised by a revival of mission- 
 ary activity on the part of the Muslims and an increase in the 
 number of conversions.^ One of the stimulating influences that 
 contributed to this result may be found in the Chinese conquests 
 in Central Asia and the extension of the empire towards the 
 West, which were followed by the establishment of commercial 
 relations with the Muhammadan cities of the Tian Shan region 
 and the Khanates of Western Turkistan, thus bringing the 
 North-west of China once again under the direct influence of 
 the Muslim outer world.* 
 
 But in addition to this stream of Muhammadan influence 
 entering China from the North-west, we find another distinct 
 stream pouring in by sea from the South. Though this latter 
 movement is numerically not so important, yet it is of consider- 
 able historical interest. 
 
 Commercial relations by sea had been established between 
 Arabia and China long before the birth of Muhammad. It was 
 through Arabia, in a great measure, that Syria and the ports of 
 the Levant received the produce of the East. In the sixth 
 century, there was a considerable trade between China and 
 Arabia by way of Ceylon, and at the beginning of the seventh 
 
 ' Vasil'ev, pp. 8-9. 
 
 'Clark Abel: Narrative of a Journey in the interior of China, p. 361. 
 (London, 1818.) 
 
 ' Lettres edifiantes et curieuses. Tome xix. p. 140. ^ A missionary writing 
 from Peking in 1721 says, " Le secte des Mahometans s'etend de plus en plus." 
 See also I'Abbe Grosier. Tome iv. p. 507. 
 
 * Demetrius C. Boulger : History of China, vol. ii. pp. 529-30. (London, 
 lSg|-4.) 
 
2 50 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 century the commerce between China, Persia and Arabia was 
 still further extended, the town of Siraf on the Persian Gulf 
 being the chief emporium for the Chinese traders. It is at this 
 period, at the commencement of the Thang dynasty (618-907), 
 that mention is first made of the Arabs in the Chinese annals.i 
 The Chinese chroniclers speak of the arrival in Canton of "a 
 great number of strangers from the kingdom of Annam, Cam- 
 bodge, Medina and several other countries." That these men 
 were certainly Arabs and also Muslims may be determined from 
 the details given of their habits and religious observances :— 
 " These strangers worshipped the heaven (i.e. God), and had 
 neither statue, idol nor image in their temples. The kingdom of 
 Medina is close to that of India : in this kingdom originated the 
 religion of these strangers, which is different to that of Buddha. 
 They do not eat pork or drink wine and they regard as unclean 
 the flesh of any animal not killed by themselves. They are 
 nowadays called Hoey-hoey.^ They had a temple called the 
 temple of the Blessed Memory (i.e. the mosque built by Wahab 
 ibn Abi Kabshah referred to below), which was built at the com- 
 mencement of the Thang dynasty. At the side of the temple is 
 a large round tower, 160 feet high, called Kang-ta (the undecorated 
 tower). These strangers went every day to this temple to 
 perform their ceremonies. After having asked and obtained the 
 Emperor's permission to reside in Canton, they built magnificent 
 houses, of a different style to that of our country. They were 
 very rich and obeyed a chief chosen by themselves." ^ 
 
 It is impossible to tell with certainty (and the Chinese Muham- 
 madans themselves can only offer conjectures on the matter), who 
 was the leader of this colony in Canton. In their traditional 
 accounts his name is variously given as Sarta, Sa-ka-pa, (this 
 name is important, as pointing to the fact that he was a Sahabi, 
 or companion of the Prophet), or Wang-ka-ze, but in each case 
 he is stated to have been a maternal uncle of Muhammad.* M. 
 
 ' Bretschneider (2), p. 6. 
 
 ' This is the name by which the Chinese Musulmans call themselves. It 
 signifies at once "return" and "submission," i.e. return to God by the straight 
 path and submission to the will of the Almighty. 
 
 ^ De Thiersant. Tome i. pp. 19-20. 
 
 " Husayn ibn Muljammad al Diyarbakri (vol. i. p. 184, Cairo, A.H. 1283) 
 .«ays that Aminah, the mother of the Prophet, bad neither brothers nor sisters, but 
 that the Banu Zuhrah called themselves theunclesof Muhammad, because Aminah 
 was of their tribe. 
 
ISLAM IN THE SOUTH. 251 
 
 Dabry de Thiersant identifies him with Wahab ibn Abi Kabshah, 
 who is said to have stood in that relationship to the Prophet ; 
 and he considers that the following account, derived from native 
 Muhammadan sources and disentangled from among the legends 
 and other embellishments that have gathered round the story of 
 their great founder, may be taken to represent the main historical 
 facts of his life. In the year 628 a.d. (a.h. 6, called in Arabian 
 history, the year of the missions), Wahab ibn Abi Kabshah was 
 sent by the Prophet to China to carry presents to the Emperor 
 and announce to him the new religion. He was graciously re- 
 ceived in Canton, and permission granted him to build a mosque, 
 and the right of freely professing their religion in the empire was 
 given to him and his co-religionists. After the accomplishment 
 of his mission, he returned to Arabia in 632, but to his great grief 
 found that the Prophet had died that same year. He must have 
 stayed in Arabia a short time, because when he set out again for 
 China, he took with him a copy of the Qur'an, which was first 
 collected by the order of Abu Bakr in the eleventh or twelfth 
 year of the Hijrah (a.d. 633-4). He died on his arrival at Canton, 
 exhausted by the fatigues of his journey, and was buried in one of 
 the suburbs of the city, where his tomb is stUl an object of rever- 
 ence for all the Muhammadans of China. Around the mosque 
 built by their founder, the little colony of Arab traders grew and 
 flourished, living in perfectly friendly relations with their Chinese 
 neighbours, their commercial interests being identical. They 
 appear to have lived for some time as a foreign community, for 
 an Arab merchant (about the middle of the ninth century) says that 
 at that time the Muhammadans of the city of Canton had their 
 own qadi, and did not pray for the Emperor of China, but for 
 their own sovereign. This Muslim community, thus settled in 
 Canton, speedily multiplied, partly through new arrivals, partly by 
 marriage with the Chinese and by conversions from among them. 
 In 758, however, they received an important addition to their 
 numbers in 4000 Arab soldiers who had been sent by the Caliph 
 Al Mansur to help the Emperor Sah-Tsung in crushing a re. 
 bellion that had broken out against him. At the end of the war 
 these troops refused to return ; when the governor of the capital 
 tried to compel them, they joined with the Arab and Persian 
 merchants, their co-religionists, and pillaged the principal com- 
 mercial houses in the city. The governor saved himself by fleeing 
 
252 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 to the ramparts, and could only return after obtaining from 
 the Emperor permission for them to remain in China. Houses 
 and lands were assigned to them in different cities, and marrying 
 with the women of the country they formed a nucleus of the 
 Muhammadan population, spread nowadays throughout the whole 
 Celestial Empire. The only other important accession to their 
 numbers that they have since received from outside, consists in 
 the immigrations that took place at the time of the Mongol con- 
 quests under Jingis Zhan and his successors, of which mention 
 has already been made. It was probably at this time that those 
 scattered Muhammadan communities began to be formed, which 
 have grown to such large proportions in so many provinces of 
 China, where, very often, whole villages are to be met with, 
 inhabited solely by Musalmans. The gradual and constant in- 
 crease that has brought about this result does not seem in any 
 way to have received any foreign assistance since the fall of the 
 Mongol dynasty ; for, from that period, the Chinese government 
 adopted that policy of keeping strangers at arm's length, which it 
 has only abandoned within recent years. Isolated thus, the 
 Muhammadan settlers became gradually merged into the mass 
 of the native population, by their marriage with Chinese women 
 and the adoption of Chinese habits and manners. So long as the 
 trade with Arabia caused the commercial interests of the Chinese 
 to be bound up with a foreign Muhammadan power, and a 
 friendly alliance with the Caliph served as a safeguard against the 
 common enemy, the Thibetans, so long were the Chinese Musal- 
 mans assured from any harsh treatment or persecution. But 
 even when this protection was withdrawn, we find them still 
 enjoying the utmost freedom and toleration at the hands of the 
 Chinese government. This is due in large measure to the 
 skilful compromises and the careful concessions which the 
 Muhammadans have always made to the prejudices of their 
 fellow-countrymen. In their ordinary life they are completely 
 in touch with the customs and habits prevalent around them ; 
 they wear the pigtail and the ordinary dress of the Chinese, and 
 put on a turban as a rule, only in the mosque. To avoid offend- 
 ing against a superstitious prejudice on the part of the Chinese, 
 they also refrain from building tall minarets.^ Even in Chinese 
 
 ' Vasil'ev, p. 15. 
 
THE CHINESE MUSLIMS. 253 
 
 Tartary, where the special privilege is allowed to the Musalman 
 soldiers, of remaining unmixed, and of forming a separate body, 
 the higher Muhammadan officials wear the dress prescribed to 
 their rank, long moustaches and the pigtail, and, on holidays they 
 perform the usual homage demanded from officials, to a portrait 
 of the Emperor, by touching the ground three times with their 
 forehead.i Similarly all Muhammadan mandarins and other 
 officials in other provinces perform the rites prescribed to their 
 official position, in the temples of Confucius on festival days ; in 
 fact every precaution is taken by the Muslims to prevent their 
 faith from appearing to be in opposition to the state religion, and 
 hereby they have succeeded in avoiding the odium with which 
 the adherents of foreign religions, such as Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity are regarded. They even represent their religion to their 
 Chinese fellow-countrymen as being in agreement with the teach- 
 ings of Confucius, with only this difference, that they follow the 
 traditions of their ancestors with regard to marriages, funerals, 
 the prohibition of pork, wine, tobacco, and games of chance, and 
 the washing of the hands before meals.^ Similarly the writings 
 of the Chinese Muhammadans treat the works of Confucius and 
 other Chinese classics with great respect, and where possible, 
 point out the harmony between the teachings contained therein 
 and the doctrines of Islam.^ 
 
 The Chinese government, in its turn, has always given to its 
 Muhammadan subjects (except when in revolt) the same privi- 
 leges and advantages as are enjoyed by the rest of the popula- 
 tion. No office of state is closed to them ; and as governors of 
 provinces, generals, magistrates and ministers of state they enjoy 
 the confidence and respect both of the rulers and the people. 
 Not only do Muhammadan names appear in the Chinese annals 
 as those of famous officers of state, whether military or civil, but 
 they have also distinguished themselves in the mechanical arts 
 and in sciences such as mathematics and astronomy.* The 
 favour shown to the Muhammadans of China by the imperial 
 government has more than once stirred up a spirit of envy and 
 detraction in some of the Chinese mandarins, and the following 
 
 ' Arminius Vamb^ry : Travels in Central Asia, p. 404. (London, 1864.) 
 " Vasil'ev, p. 16. ^ De Thiersant. Tome ii. pp. 367, 372. 
 
 * Id. Tome i. p. 247- 
 Thamaratu-1 Funun. (28th Sha'ban, p. 3.) 
 
54 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 decree of the year 1731, called forth by such an accusation against 
 the Muhammadans of the province of Shen-si, deserves quotation 
 as exhibiting very clearly the spirit in which the Chinese 
 Emperors have regarded their Muhammadan subjects : — 
 
 "In every province of the empire, for many centuries past have 
 been found a large number of Muhammadans who form part of 
 the people whom I regard as my own children just as I do my 
 other subjects. I make no distinction between them and those 
 who do not belong to their religion. I have received from 
 certain officials secret complaints against the Muhammadans on the 
 ground that their religion differs from that of the other Chinese, 
 that they do not speak the same language, and wear a different 
 dress to the rest of the people. They are accused of disobedience, 
 haughtiness, and rebellious feelings, and I have been asked to 
 employ severe measures against them. After examining these 
 complaints and accusations, I have discovered that there is no 
 foundation for them. In fact, the religion followed by theMusalmans 
 is that of their ancestors ; it is true their language is not 
 the same as that of the rest of the Chinese, but what a multi- 
 tude of different dialects there are in China. As to their 
 temples, dress and manner of writing, which differ from those of 
 the other Chinese — these are matters of absolutely no importance. 
 These are mere matters of custom. They bear as good a charac- 
 ter as my other subjects, and there is nothing to show that they 
 intend to rebel. It is my wish, therefore, that they should be 
 left in the free exercise of their religion, whose object is to teach 
 men the observance of a moral life, and the fulfilment of social 
 and civil duties. This religion respects the fundamental basis of 
 Government, and what more can be asked for ? If then the 
 Muhammadans continue to conduct themselves as good and loyal 
 subjects, my favour will be extended towards them just as much 
 as towards my other children. From among them have come 
 many civil and military officers, who have risen to the very 
 highest ranks. This is the best proof that they have adopted our 
 habits and customs, and have learned to conform themselves to 
 the precepts of our sacred books. They pass their examinations 
 in literature just like every one else, and perform the sacrifices 
 enjoined by law. In a word, they are true members of the great 
 Chinese family and endeavour always to fulfil their religious, 
 civil and political duties. When the magistrates have a civil case 
 
TOLERATION OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. 253 
 
 brought before them, they should not concern themselves with 
 the religion of the litigants. There is but one single law for all 
 my subjects. Those who do good shall be rewarded, and those 
 who do evil shall be punished." ^ 
 
 It must not be supposed however that the Muhammadans of 
 China any the less form a very distinct and separate community, 
 in spite of the care with which they avoid drawing upon them- 
 selves the attention of the Government. The serious riots and 
 hostile encounters, attended often with great loss of life, that 
 have occasionally broken out between the Chinese Muhammadans 
 and their heathen neighbours, show how strong a bond of union 
 exists between them, at least within the limits of each separate 
 province. The so-called Panthay insurrection in the province of 
 Yunnan is a case in point ; this revolt was crushed by the 
 Chinese Government only after a long and bloody struggle 
 extending over a number of years (1855-74), in which more than 
 two millions of Muhammadans are said to have been massacred." 
 The Muhammadans of China have never yet, however, acted as 
 one united body, and such disturbances have been local and con- 
 fined to individual provinces. But these outbreaks are enough 
 to show that the Chinese Muhammadans are not so politically 
 unimportant or so unlikely to join in any united Muhammadan 
 movement, as some have supposed.^ They at the same time 
 afford us evidence of the missionary activity which has been 
 quietly engaged in producing and organising these diiferent 
 communities. 
 
 Not that this propagandism has been carried out by the method 
 of public preaching. Such a method would be attended with 
 much danger, and might bring upon the Muhammadans the 
 charge of sedition, as may be judged from an interesting 
 report which was sent to the Emperor in the year 1783 by a 
 governor of the province of Khwang-Se. It runs as follows : " I 
 have the honour respectfully to inform your Majesty that an 
 adventurer named Han-Fo-Yun, of the province of Khwang-Se, 
 has been arrested on a charge of vagrancy. This adventurer 
 
 ' De Thiersant. Tome i. pp. 154-6. 
 
 ^ But still half or rather more than half of the (according to Sayyid Sulayman) 
 wenty-six million inhabitants of this province are said at the present day to be 
 Muhammadans. (Thamaratu-1 Funiin. 21st Sha'ban, A H. 1311.) 
 
 ' Sir Richard Temple, Oriental Experience, p. 322. (London, 1883.) 
 
2S6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 when interrogated as to his occupation, confessed that for the 
 last ten years he had been travelling through the different pro- 
 vinces of the Empire in order to obtain information about his 
 religion. In one of his boxes were found thirty books, some of 
 which had been written by himself, while others were in a 
 language that no one here understands. These books praise in 
 an extravagant and ridiculous manner a Western king, called 
 Muhammad. The above-mentioned Han-Fo-Yun, when put to 
 the torture, at last confessed that the real object of his journey 
 was to propagate the false religion taught in these books, and 
 that he remained in the province of Shen-Si for a longer time 
 than anywhere else. I have examined these books myself. Some 
 are certainly written in a foreign language ; for I have not 
 been able to understand them : the others that are written in 
 Chinese are very bad, I may add, even ridiculous on account 
 of the exaggerated praise given in them to persons who 
 certainly do not deserve it because I have never even heard of 
 them. 
 
 " Perhaps the above-mentioned Han-Fo-Yun is a rebel from 
 Kan-Su. His conduct is certainly suspicious, for what was he 
 going to do in the provinces through which he' has been travelling 
 for the last ten years ? I intend to make a serious inquiry into 
 the matter. Meanwhile, I would request your Majesty to order 
 the stereotyped plates, that are in the possession of his family, to 
 be burnt, and the engravers to be arrested, as well as the authors 
 of the*books, which I have sent to your Majesty desiring to know 
 your pleasure in the matter." ^ 
 
 It is true that this missionary was released and the Governor 
 censured by the Emperor, but the incident is sufficient to show 
 the dangers of any active and open propagandism. Accordingly 
 though a certain number of unbelievers from among the Chinese 
 embrace Islam every year, their conversion is the result of the 
 quiet, unobtrusive persuasions of private individuals. For a 
 similar reason, conversions on a large scale have seldom occurred 
 in modern times, though an instance from the last century may 
 be mentioned, when, after the revolt was crushed in Zungaria, in 
 1770, ten thousand military colonists with their families followed 
 by many others were transplanted thither from other parts of 
 
 ' Dc Thieisant. Tome ii. pp. 361-3. 
 
METHODS OF SPREADING ISLAM IN CHINA. 257 
 
 China to repeople the country, and they all embraced the religion 
 of the surrounding Muhammadan population. ^ 
 
 In the towns, the Muhammadans tend little by little to form 
 separate Muhammadan quarters, and finally do not allow any 
 person to dwell among them who does not go to the mosque. ^ 
 Islam has also gained ground in China because of the promptitude 
 with which the Muhammadans have repeopled provinces devas- 
 tated by the various scourges so familiar to China. In times of 
 famine they purchase children from poor parents, bring them up 
 in the faith of Islam, and when they are full-grown provide them 
 with wives and houses, often forming whole villages of these new 
 converts. In the famine that devastated the province of Kwang- 
 tung in 1790, as many as ten thousand children are said to have 
 been purchased in this way from parents who, too poor to support 
 them, were compelled by necessity to part with their starving 
 little ones.' Sayyid Sulayman says that the number of accessions 
 to Islam gained in this way every year is beyond counting.* 
 Every effort is made to keep faith alive among the new converts, 
 even the humblest being taught, by means of metrical primers, 
 the fundamental doctrines of Islam. ^ To the influence of the 
 religious books of the Chinese Muslims, Sayyid Sulayman 
 attributes many of the conversions that are made at the present 
 day.^ Thus, though they have no organised system of religious 
 propaganda, yet the zealous spirit of proselytism with which the 
 Chinese Musalmans are animated, secures for them a constant 
 succession of new converts, and they confidently look forward to 
 the day when Islam will be triumphant throughout the length 
 and breadth of the Chinese Empire.'' 
 
 ' De Thiersant. Tome i. pp. 163-4. 
 
 ' L'Abbe Grosier : De la. Chine, ou description ge'nevale de cet empne. 
 Tome iv. p. 508. (Paris, 1819.) 
 ' Anderson, p. 151. L'Abbe Grosier : De la Chine. Tome iv. p. 507. 
 ^ Thamaratu-1 Funun. (17th Shawwal, p. 3.) 
 
 *' W. J. Smith, p. 175. ° Thamaratu-1 Funun, id. 
 
 '^De Thiersant. Tome i. p. 39- 
 Thamaratu-r Funun. (26th Shawwal, p. 3.) 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA. 
 
 The history of Islam in Africa, covering as it does a period of 
 well-nigh thirteen centuries and embracing two-thirds of this 
 vast continent, with its numerous and diverse tribes and races, 
 presents especial difficulties in the way of systematic treatment, 
 as it is impossible to give a simultaneous account in chronological 
 order of the spread of this faith in all the different parts of the 
 continent. Its relations to the Christian churches of Egypt and 
 the rest of North Africa, of Nubia and Abyssinia have already 
 been dealt with in a former chapter ; in the present chapter, 
 it is proposed to trace its progress first among the heathen 
 population of North Africa, then throughout the Sudan and 
 along the West coast, and lastly along the East coast and in 
 Cape Colony. 
 
 The information we possess of the spread of Islam among the 
 heathen population of North Africa is hardly less meagre than 
 the few facts recorded above regarding the disappearance of the 
 Christian church. It seems however that Islam made rapid 
 progress among the Berbers, whose national characteristics and 
 habits of life exhibited so close an affinity to those of their con- 
 querors. When in 703 the Berbers made their last stand against 
 the Arab army, their great queen and prophetess, Kahina, fore- 
 seeing that the fortune of battle was to turn against them, sent 
 her sons into the camp of the Muslim general with instructions 
 that they were to embrace Islam_ and make common cause with 
 the enemy ; she herself elected to fall fighting at the head of 
 her countrymen in the great battle that crushed the political 
 power of the Berbers, at the Springs of Kahina.i After the loss 
 
 ' A. Miiller, vol. i. p. 421. 
 
THE BERBERS. 359 
 
 of their political independence, they accepted a religion that by- 
 its simplicity would naturally have recommended itself so much 
 to them, and to which their prophetess had pointed them by 
 what was virtually a submission on her part to the new faith. 
 
 The army of twelve thousand Berbers that sailed from Africa 
 in 711 under the command of Tariq (himself a Berber) to the 
 conquest of Spain, was composed of recent converts to Islam, 
 and their conversion is expressly said to have been sincere : 
 learned Arabs and theologians were appointed, " to read and 
 explain to them the sacred words of the Qur'an, and instruct 
 them in all and every one of the duties enjoined by their new 
 religion." 1 Musa, the great conqueror of Africa, showed his zeal 
 for the progress of Islam, by devoting the large sums of money 
 granted him by the Caliph 'Abdu-1 Malik to the purchase of such 
 captives as gave promise of showing themselves worthy children 
 of the faith : " for whenever after a victory there was a number 
 of slaves put up for sale, he used to buy all those whom he 
 thought would willingly embrace Islam, who were'of noble origin, 
 and who looked, besides, as if they were active young men. 
 To these he first proposed the embracing of Islam, and if, after 
 cleansing their understanding and making them fit to receive 
 its sublime truths, they were converted to the best of religions, 
 and their conversion was a sincere one, he then would, by way 
 of putting their abilities to trial, employ them. If they evinced 
 good disposition and talents he would instantly grant them 
 liberty, appoint them to high commands in his army, and 
 promote them according to their merits ; if, on the contrary, 
 they showed no aptitude for their appointments, he would send 
 them back to the common depot of captives belonging to the 
 army, to be again disposed of according to the general custom of 
 drawing out the spoil by arrows." ^ In the caliphate of 'Umar 
 11, the then governor of Africa Isma'il ibn 'Abdu-llah is said to 
 have won over the Berbers to Islam by his mild and just ad- 
 ministration, though the statement that in his time not a single 
 Berber remained unconverted, is hardly credible.^ For the 
 conversion of the Berbers was-undtrtrbtedly the work of several 
 centuries ; though the details of the spread of Islam among them 
 
 1 Al Makkarl, vol. i. p. 253. ' ^<^- P- '^^■* 
 
 * Weil, vol. i. p. 583. 
 
 S 2 
 
26o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 are unrecorded, still several circumstances may be mentioned 
 which had a probable influence on their acceptance of this faith. 
 
 The Berbers were in constant revolt against their Arab con- 
 querors, and the Shi'ah missionaries who paved the way for the 
 establishment of the Fatimid dynasty in the beginning of the 
 tenth century found a ready welcome among them, and it is not 
 improbable that the enthusiasm with which several of the Berber 
 tribes supported this movement of revolt may have brought into 
 the pale of Islam many who before had looked upon the accept- 
 ance of this faith as a sign of loss of political independence. 
 About the middle of the eleventh century, a still more popular 
 movement attracted a great many of the Berber tribes to join 
 the Muslim community. In the early part of this century, a 
 chieftain of the Lam^una, one of the Berber tribes of the 
 Sahara, on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, sought in the 
 religious centres of Northern Africa for a learned and pious 
 teacher, who should accompany him as a missionary of Islam 
 to his benighted and ignorant tribesmen : at first he found it 
 difficult to find a man willing to leave his scholarly retreat and 
 brave the dangers of the Sahara, but at length he met in 'Abdu- 
 llah ibn Yassin the fit person, bold enough to undertake so 
 difficult a mission, pious and austere in his life, and learned in 
 theology, law and other sciences. So far back as the ninth 
 century the preachers of Islam had made their way among the 
 Berbers of the Sahara and established among them the religion 
 of the Prophet, but this faith had found very little acceptance 
 there, and 'Abdu-llah ibn Yassin found even the professed 
 Muslims to be very lax in their religious observances and given 
 up to all kinds of vicious practices. He ardently threw himself 
 into the task of converting them to the right path and instruct- 
 ing them in the duties of religion : but the sternness with which 
 he rebuked their vices and sought to reform their conduct; 
 alienated their sympathies from him, and the ill-success of his 
 mission almost drove him to abandon this stiff-necked people 
 and devote his efforts to the conversion of the Sudan. Being 
 persuaded however not to desert the work he had once under- 
 taken, he retired with such disciples as his preaching had 
 gathered around him, to an island in the River Senegal, where 
 they founded a monastery and gave themselves up unceasingly 
 to devotional exercises. The more devout-minded among the 
 
THE BERBERS. 261 
 
 J Berbers, stung to repentance by the thought of the wickedness 
 that had driven their holy teacher from their midst, came humbly 
 to his island to implore his forgiveness and receive his instructions 
 iin the saving truths of religions. Thus day by day there gathered 
 around him an increasing band of disciples whose numbers 
 I swelled at length to about a thousand. 'Abdu-llah ibn Yassin 
 then recognised that the time had come for launching out upon 
 a wider sphere of action, and he called upon his followers to 
 show their gratitude to God for the revelation he had vouchsafed 
 them, by communicating the knowledge of it to others : " Go to 
 your fellow-tribesmen, teach them the law of God and threaten 
 them with His chastisement. If they repent, amend their ways 
 and accept the truth, leave them in peace : if they refuse and 
 persist in their errors and evil hves, invoke the aid of God 
 against them, and let us make war upon them until God decide 
 between us." Hereupon each man went to his own tribe and 
 began to exhort them to repent and believe, but without success : 
 equally unsuccessful were the efforts of 'Abdu-llah ibn Yassin 
 himself, who left his monastery in the hope of finding the Berber 
 chiefs more willing now to listen to his preaching. At length in 
 1042 he put himself at the head of his followers, to whom he had 
 given the name of Al Murabitin (the so-called Almoravides) — a 
 name derived from the same root as the ribaf or monastery on 
 his island in the Senegal, — and attacked the neighbouring tribes 
 and forced the acceptance of Islam upon them. The success that 
 attended his warlike expeditions appeared to the tribes of the 
 Sahara a more persuasive argument than all his preaching, and 
 they very soon came_foxward veluntarily to embrace a faith that 
 secured such brilliant successes to the arms of its adherents. 
 'Abdu-Uah Tbn Yassin died in 1059, but the movement he had 
 initiated lived after him and many heathen tribes of Berbers 
 came to swell the numbers of their Muslim fellow-countrymeD , 
 embracing their religion at the same time as the cause they 
 championed, and poured out of the Sahara over North Africa 
 and later on made themselves masters of Spain also.i 
 
 It is not improbable that the other great national movement 
 that originated among the Berber tribes, viz. the rise of the 
 Almohades at the beginning of the twelfth century, may have 
 
 ' §alit ibn 'Abdi-1 Halim, pp. 168-173. 
 A. Miiller, vol. ii. pp. 611 -613. 
 
262 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 attracted into the Muslim community some of the tribes that 
 had up to that time still stood aloof. Their founder, Abu 'Abdi- 
 llah Muhammad ibn Tumart, popularised the sternly Unitarian 
 tenets of this sect by means of a work in the Berber language 
 entitled Tawhid or the Unity (of God), which expounded from 
 his own point of view the fundamental doctrines of Islam.^ Some 
 of the Berber tribes however remained heathen up to the close 
 of the fifteenth century,^ but the general tendency was naturally 
 towards an absorption of these smaller communities into the 
 larger. 
 
 From the Sahara the knowledge of Islam first spread among 
 the Negroes of the Sudan. The early history of this movement 
 is wrapped in obscurity : it was probably about the eleventh 
 century that some Arab tribes — or if not of pure Arab descent,^ 
 with some admixture of Arab blood in their veins — came and 
 settled among them. But even before then, individual Berber^ 
 preachers and Arab merchants had not been without influence 
 among the Negroes. The reign of Yusuf Ibn Tashlin, the founden 
 of Morocco (1062 A.D.) and the second Amir of the Almoravide 
 dynasty, was very fruitful in conversions and many Negroes under 
 his rule came to know of the doctrines of Muhammad.^ Two 
 Berber tribes, the Lamtuna and the Jodala, whose habitat 
 bordered on and partly extended into the Sudan, especially 
 distinguished themselves by their religious zeal in the work of 
 conversion.* From the records we possess of the progress of the 
 faith among the negroes it is clear that Islam was brought from 
 the north first to the tribes of- the west and froni_them spread 
 towards the east. -One of the earliest conversions of which we 
 have any record is that of Sa-Ka-ssi, the fifteenth king of the 
 dynasty of Sa in Sonrhay (S.E. of Timbuktu), who was converted 
 to Islam about 400 a.h. (1009-10 a.d.) and was the first Muham- 
 madan king of Sonrhay. From this period the states on the 
 Upper Niger formed a bulwark of the faith and attained to what 
 for those times was a high level of civilisation and culture.' 
 Timbuktu, which was founded in 1077, became especially 
 
 ' Salih ibn 'Abdi-Uah Hallm, p. 250. 
 
 ° Leo Africanus. (Ramusio. Tom. i. p. 11.) ^ Id. pp. 7, 77. 
 
 ■* Chronik der Sultane von Bornu, bearbeitet von Otto Blau, p. J22. (Z D.M.G. 
 vol. vi. 1852.) 
 * Oppel, p. 288. 
 
ISLAM IN THE SUDAN. 263 
 
 influential as a seat of Muhammadan learning and piety, and 
 students and divines flocked there in large numbers attracted by 
 the encouragement and patronage they received. Ibn Batutah, 
 who travelled through this country in the middle of the fourteenth 
 century, praises the Negroes for their zeal in the performance of 
 their devotions and in the study of the Qur'an : unless one went 
 very early to the mosque on Friday, he tells us, it was impossible 
 to find a place, so crowded was the attendance.^ In his time, 
 the most powerful state of the Western Sudan was that of Melle 
 or Malli, which had been founded a century before by the Man- 
 dingos, one of the finest races of Africa : Leo Africanus 2 calls 
 them the most civilised, the most intellectual and most respected 
 of all the Negroes, and modern travellers praise them for their 
 industry, cleverness and trustworthiness.^ These Mandingos 
 have been among the most active missionaries of Islam, which 
 has been spread by them among the neighbouring peoples.* 
 
 Islam made its way further west about the middle of the 
 eleventh century, when the reigning Sultan of Bornu (on the 
 E. coast of Lake Chad) became a Muhammadan under the name 
 of Hami ibnu-1 Jalil.^ To the same period belongs the conversion 
 of Kanem, a kingdom on the N. and N.E. of Lake Chad, which 
 shortly after the adoption of Islam rose to be a state of consider- 
 able importance, and whose sway extended over all the tribes of 
 the Eastern Sudan to the borders of Egypt and Nubia. Having 
 thus reached the very centre of Africa, the religion soon began to 
 spread in all directions, and it is very probable that here two 
 distinct streams of missionary enterprise met, the one coming 
 from the West and the other from the North-east. The merchants 
 of Kordofan and in the Eastern Sudan generally, boast that they 
 are descended from Arabs, who made their way thither after the 
 fall of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt in the twelfth century. In 
 the fourteenth century the Tungur Arabs, emigrating S. from 
 Tunis, made their way through Bornu and Wadai to Darfur : 
 
 ' Ibn Batutah. Tome iv. pp. 421-2. ^ Ramusio. Tom. i. p. 7S. 
 
 ^ Winwood Reade describes them as " a tall, handsome, light-coloured race, 
 Moslems in religion, possessing horses and large herds of cattle, but also cultivating 
 cotton, ground-nuts, and various kinds of com. I was much pleased with their 
 kind and hospitable manners, the grave and decorous aspect of their women, the 
 cleanliness and silence of their villages." W. Winwood Reade : African Sketch- 
 book, vol. i. p. 303. 
 
 < Waitz, iier. Theil, pp. 18-19. ' Otto Blau, p. 32*. 
 
264 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 one of their number named Ahmad met with a kind reception 
 from the heathen king of Darfur, who took a fancy to him, made 
 him director of his household and consulted him on all occasions. 
 His experience of more civilised methods of government enabled 
 him to introduce a number of reforms both into the economy of 
 the king's household and the government of the state. By 
 judicious management, he is said to have brought the unruly 
 chieftains into subjection, and by portioning out the land among 
 the poorer inhabitants to have put an end to the constant internal 
 raidings, thereby introducing a feeling of security and content- 
 ment before unknown. The king having no male heir gave 
 Ahmad his daughter in marriage and appointed him his suc- 
 cessor, — a choice that was ratified by the acclamation of the 
 people, and the Muhammadan dynasty thus instituted has con- 
 tinued down to the present century. The civilising influences 
 exercised by this chief and his descendants ' were doubtless 
 accompanied by some work of proselytism, but these Arab 
 immigrants seem to have done very little for the spread of 
 their religion among their heathen neighbours. Darfur only 
 definitely became Muhammadan through the efforts of one of its 
 kings named Sulayman who began to reign in 1596,1 and it was 
 not until the sixteenth or seventeenth century that Islam gained a 
 footing in the other kingdoms lying between Kordofan and Lake 
 Chad, such as Wadai and Bagirmi. The chief centre of Muham- 
 madan influence at this time was the kingdom of Wadai, which 
 was founded by 'Abdu-1 Karim about 1612 A.n. In the same 
 century Katsena and Kano ^ in the Hausa country came under 
 Muhammadan rule, and it is probable that Islam had gained 
 adherents throughout the whole of the Sudan before the century 
 drew to a close.* 
 
 But the history of the Muhammadan propaganda in Africa 
 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very slight and 
 wholly insignificant when compared with the remarkable revival 
 
 ' R. C. Slatin Pasha : Fire and Sword in the Sudan, pp. 38, 40-2. (London, 
 1896.) 
 
 ^ Kano is said to have been founded in the middle of the tenth century : twenty- 
 five of its kings were heathen, but the next was a Muhammadan; under his six 
 immediate successors, Kano was again under heathen rule, but thenceforward all 
 its kings have been Muhammadans. (C. H. Robinson : Hausaland, p. 178.) 
 (London, 1896.) 
 
 ' Oppel, pp. 290-1. 
 
ISLAM IN THE SUDAN. 265 
 
 of missionary activity during the present century. Some powerful 
 influence was needed to arouse the dormant energies of the 
 African Muslims, whose condition during the eighteenth century 
 seems to have been almost one of religious indifference. Their 
 spiritual awakening owed itself to the influence of the Wahhabi 
 reformation at the close of the last century ; whence it comes that 
 in modern times we meet with some accounts of proselytising 
 movements among the Negroes that are not quite so forbiddingly 
 meagre as those just recounted, but present us with ample details 
 of the rise and progress of several important missionary 
 enterprises. 
 
 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a remarkable man, 
 Shay^ 'Uthman Danfodio,i arose from among the Fulahs as a 
 religious reformer and warrior-missionary. From the Sudan he 
 made the pilgrimage to Mecca, whence he returned full of zeal 
 and enthusiasm for the reformation and propagation of Islam. 
 Influenced by the doctrines of the Wahhabis, who were growing 
 powerful at the time of his visit to Mecca, he denounced the 
 practice of prayers for the dead and the honour paid to departed 
 saints, and deprecated the excessive veneration of Muhammad 
 himself ; at the same time he attacked the two prevailing sins of 
 the Sudan, drunkenness and immorality. 
 
 Up to that time the Fulahs had consisted of a number of small 
 scattered clans living a pastoral life ; they had early embraced 
 Islam, and hitherto had contented themselves with forming 
 colonies of shepherds and planters in different parts of the Sudan. 
 The accounts we have of them in the early part of the eighteenth 
 century, represent them to be a peaceful and industrious people ; 
 one 2 who visited their settlements on the Gambia in 1731 speaks 
 of them thus: " In every kingdom and country on each side of 
 the river are people of a tawny colour, called Pholeys (i.e. Fulahs), 
 who resemble the Arabs, whose language most of them speak ; 
 for it is taught in their schools, and the Koran, which is also their 
 law, is in that language. They are more generally learned in the 
 Arabic, than the people of Europe are in Latin ; for they can 
 most of them speak it ; though they have a vulgar tongue called 
 Pholey. They live in hordes or clans, build towns, and are not 
 
 ' S. W. Koelle : Polyglotta Africana, p. 18. (London, 1854) Winwood 
 Reade, vol. i. p. 317. Oppel, p. 292. 
 ' Francis Moore, pp. 75-7. 
 
266 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 subject to any of the kings of the country, tho' they live in 
 their territories ; for if they are used ill in one nation they break 
 up their towns and remove to another. They have chiefs of 
 their own, who rule with such moderation, that every act of 
 government seems rather an act of the people than of one man. 
 This form of government is easily administered, because the 
 people are of a good and quiet disposition, and so well instructed 
 in what is just and right, that a man who does ill is the abomina- 
 tion of all They are very industrious and frugal, and raise 
 
 much more corn and cotton than they consume, which they sell at 
 reasonable rates, and are so remarkable for their hospitality that 
 the natives esteem it a blessing to have a Pholey town in their 
 neighbourhood ; besides, their behaviour has gained them such 
 reputation that it is esteemed infamous for any one to treat 
 them in an inhospitable manner. Though their humanity 
 extends to all, they are doubly kind to people of their own 
 race ; and if they know of any of their body being made a slave, 
 all the Pholeys will unite to redeem him. As they have plenty 
 of food they never suffer any of their own people to want ; but 
 support the old, the blind, and the lame, equally with the others. 
 They are seldom angry, and I never heard them abuse one 
 another ; yet this mildness does not proceed from want of courage, 
 for they are as brave as any people of Africa, and are very expert 
 in the use of their arms, which are the assagay, short cutlasses, 
 
 bows and arrows and even guns upon occasion They are 
 
 strict Mahometans ; and scarcely any of them will drink brandy, 
 or anything stronger than water." 
 
 Danfodio united these scattered clans into one powerful 
 kingdom, and inspiring them with the religious zeal, which to 
 this day places them among the most active of Muhammadan 
 missionaries, led them against the heathen tribes of the Hausa 
 country. At the same time he sent letters to the kings of 
 Timbuktu, Bornu, etc., commanding them to reform their lives 
 and those of their subjects, or he would chastise them in the 
 name of God. The conquering Fufehs spread southwards and 
 westwards^ laying waste whole tracts of couiitry, aii3"compelling 
 all the tribes they conquered to embrace the faith of the Prophet. 
 The petty communities thus broken up and subdued were united 
 under one political organisation ; in this way Sokoto was built 
 and made the capital of a Muhammadan kingdom, and later (in 
 
DANFODIO. 267 
 
 1837) Adamaua was founded on the ruins of several pagan 
 kingdoms. In the Yoruba country, Danfodio destroyed the chief 
 town Oyo, and founded near its site a new city, called Ilorin,with 
 
 twide streets, market squares, and numerous mosques. The con- 
 quering Fulahs made their way westward nearly to the ocean, 
 and at the present day four powerful Muhammadan kingdoms in 
 Senegambia and the Sudan attest the missionary zeal of 'Uthman 
 Danfodio. 
 f Danfodio made of his people a nation of conquerors, and what 
 is more to the present purpose, stirred up in them such zeal for 
 the cause of their faith that they are among the most active 
 propagandists of Islam in Africa, and their superior civilisation 
 and education make them eminently fitted for this work. The 
 progress oftheir religion has been furthered less by their conquests 
 than by the peaceful missionary activity with which they have 
 followed them up. 
 
 But there has been much missionary work done for Islam in 
 this part of Africa by men who have never taken up the sword to 
 further their end, — the conversion of the heathen. Such have 
 been the members of some of the great Muhammadan religious 
 orders, which form such a prominent feature of the religious life 
 of Northern Africa. Their efforts have achieved great results 
 during the present century, and though doubtless much of their 
 work has never been recorded, stUl we have accounts of some of 
 the movements initiated by them. 
 
 Of these one of the earliest in the present century owed its 
 inception to Si Ahmad ibn Idris 1 who enjoyed a wide reputation 
 as a religious teacher in Mecca from 1797 to 1833, and was the 
 spiritual chief of the Khadriyah ; before his death in 1835 he sent 
 one of his disciples, by name Muhammad 'Uthmanu-1 Amir Ghani, 
 on a proselytising expedition into Africa. Crossing the Red 
 Sea to Kossayr, he made his way inland to the Nile ; here, among 
 a Muslim population, his efforts were mainly confined to enrolling 
 members of the order to which he belonged, but in his journey 
 up the river he did not meet with much success until he reached 
 Aswan ; fj-om this point up to Dongola, his journey became quite 
 a triumphant progress ; the Nubians hastened to join his order, 
 and the royal pomp with which he was surrounded produced an 
 
 ' Rinn, pp. 403-4. 
 
268 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 impressive effect on this people, and at the same time the fame 
 of his miracles attracted to him large numbers of followers.. At 
 Dongola Muhammad 'Uthman left the valley of the Nile to go to 
 Kordofan, where he made a long stay, and it was here, that his 
 missionary work among unbelievers began. Many tribes in this 
 country and about Sennaar were still pagan, and among these the 
 preaching of Muhammad 'Uthman achieved a very remarkable 
 success, and he sought to make his influence permanent by coh- 
 tracting several marriages, the issue of which, after his death in 
 1853, carried on the work of the order he founded — called after 
 his name the Amir^^aniyah.^ 
 
 A few years before this missionary tour of Muhammad 
 'Uthman, the troops of Muhammad 'Ali, the founder of the 
 present dynasty of Egypt, had begun to extend their conquests 
 into the Eastern Sudan, and the emissaries of the various 
 religious orders in Egypt were encouraged by the Egyptian 
 government, in the hope that their labours would assist in the 
 pacification of the country, to carry on a propaganda in this 
 newly-acquired territory, where they laboured with so much 
 success, that the recent insurrection in the Sudan under the 
 Mahdi has been attributed to the religious fervour their preaching 
 excited.^ 
 
 In the West of Africa two orders have been especially instru- 
 mental in the spread of Islam, the Qadriyah and the Tijaniyah. 
 The former, the most widespread of the religious orders of Islam, 
 was founded in the twelfth century by TSBdu-l Qadiri-1 Jilani, said 
 to be the most popular and most universally revered of all the 
 saints of Islam,' — and was introduced into Western Africa in the 
 fifteenth century, by emigrants from Tuat, one of the oases in 
 the western half of the Sahara ; they made Walata the first 
 centre of their organisation, but later on their descendants were 
 driven away from this town, and took refuge in Timbuktu, further 
 to the east. In the beginning of the present century the great 
 spiritual revival that was so profoundly influencing the Muham- 
 madan world, stirred up the Qadriyah of the Sahara and the 
 Western Sudan to renewed life and energy, and before long, 
 learned theologians or small colonies of persons affiliated to the 
 
 ' Le Cbatelier (i), pp. 231-3. = Id. (2), pp. 89-91. 
 
 ' Rinn, p. 175. 
 
INFLUENCE OF THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS. 269 
 
 order were to be found scattered throughout the Sudan, on the 
 mountain chain that runs along the coast of Guinea, and even to 
 the west of it in the free state of Liberia. These initiates formed 
 centres of Islamic influence in the midst of a pagan population, 
 among whom they received a welcome as public scribes, legists, 
 writers of amulets, and schoolmasters : gradually they would 
 acquire influence over their new surroundings, and isolated cases 
 of conversion would soon grow into a little band of converts, the 
 most promising of whom would often be sent to complete their 
 studies at the chief centres of the order ; here they might remain 
 for several years, until they had perfected their theological studies 
 and would then return to their native place, fully equipped for 
 the work of spreading the faith among their fellow-countrymen. 
 In this way a leaven has been introduced into the midst of fetish- 
 worshippers and idolaters, which has gradually spread the faith of 
 Islam surely and steadily, though by almost imperceptible 
 degrees. Up to the middle of the present century most of the 
 schools in the Sudan were founded and conducted by teachers 
 trained under the auspices of the Qadriyah, and their organi- 
 sation provided for a regular and continuous system of propaganda 
 among the heathen tribes. The missionary work of this order 
 has been entirely of a peaceful character, and has relied wholly 
 on personal example and precept, on the influence of the teacher 
 over his pupils, and on the spread of education.^ In this way the 
 Qadriyah missionaries of the Sudan have shown themselves true 
 to the principles of their founder and the universal tradition of 
 their order. For the guiding principles that governed the life 
 of 'Abdu-1 Qadir were love of his neighbour and toleration : 
 though kings and men of wealth showered their gifts upon him, 
 his boundless charity kept him always poor, and in none of his 
 books or precepts are to be found any expressions of ill-will or 
 enmity towards the Christians ; whenever he spoke of the 
 people of the Book, it was only to express his sorrow for their 
 religious errors, and to pray that God might enlighten them. 
 This tolerant attitude he bequeathed as a legacy to his disciples, 
 and it has been a striking characteristic of his followers in all 
 ages.2 
 The Tijaniyah, belonging to an order founded in Algiers 
 
 ' Le Chatelier (2), pp. 100-109. ' R'""' P- '74- 
 
270 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 towards the end of the last century, have, since their establish- . 
 ment in the Sudan about the middle of the present century, 
 pursued the same missionary methods as the Qadriyah, and their 
 numerous schools have contributed largely to the propagation of 
 the faith ; but, unlike the former, they have not refrained from , 
 appealing to the sword to assist in the furtherance of their scheme 
 of conversion, and, unfortunately for a true estimate of the 
 missionary work of Islam in Western Africa, the fame of their 
 Jihads or religious wars has thrown into the shade the successes 
 of the peaceful propagandist, though the labours of the latter 
 liave been more effectual towards the spread of Islam than the 
 creation of petty, short-Uved dynasties. The records of cam- 
 paigns, especially when they have interfered with the commercial 
 projects or schemes of conquest of the white men, have naturally 
 attracted the attention of Europeans more than the unobtrusive 
 labours of the Muhammadan preacher and schoolmaster. But 
 the history of such movements possesses this importance, that— 
 as has often happened in the case of Christian missions also— 
 conquest has opened out new fields for missionary activity, and 
 forcibly impressed on the minds of the faithful the existence of 
 large tracts of country whose inhabitants still remained uncon- 
 verted. 
 
 The first of these militant propagandist movements on the part 
 of the members of the Tijaniyah order owes its inception to 
 'Umaru-1 Haji, who had been initiated into this order by a 
 leader of the sect whose acquaintance he made in Mecca. He 
 was a native of Futah Toro, and appears to have been a man of 
 considerable endowments and personal influence, and of a com- 
 manding presence. He was educated by a missionary from 
 Arabia, with whom he spent several years in the study of Arabic. 
 On his return in the year 1854 or 1855, from the Holy City, to 
 which he had made the pilgrimage three times, he armed his 
 slaves, gathered together an army of 20,000 men, and commenced 
 a series of proselytising expeditions against those tribes that still 
 remained pagan about the Upper Niger and Senegal. 
 
 Some mention has already been made of the introduction' of 
 Islam into this part of Africa. The seed planted here by 'Abdu- 
 llah ibn Yassin and his companions, was fructified by continual 
 contact with Muhammadan merchants and teachers, and v^ith the 
 Arabs of the oasis of Al Hodh and others. A traveller of the 
 
'UMARU-L HAJI. 271 
 
 fifteenth century tells how the Arabs strove to teach the Negro 
 ) chiefs the law of Muhammad, pointing out how shameful a thing 
 it was for them, being chiefs, to live without any of God's laws, 
 and to do as the base folk did who lived without any law at all. 
 From which it would appear that these early missionaries took 
 advantage of the imposing character of the Muslim religion and 
 ' constitution to impress the minds of these uncivilised savages.^ 
 But in spite of centuries of contact with Muhammadan influences, 
 'Umaru-1 Haji in the nineteenth century found that large masses 
 of his fellow-countrymen still clung to the idolatry and super- 
 stitions of their heathen forefathers. He first attacked the_ 
 Mandingos of Bambuk, then turned towards the Upper Senegal 
 and banished paganism from Segu, where the Bambara were still 
 heathen, and reformed several Muslim states that had become 
 imbued with heathenish ideas. He finally established himself in 
 Segu and Moassina, where he subdued the Bambara and con- 
 verted them to Islam, for the most part by violent means. He 
 was killed about 1865, leaving his sons to rule over the whole of 
 the country between the Upper Senegal and the Niger, which he 
 had brought under his sway.^ 
 
 'Umaru-1 Haji has had several successors in this method of 
 extending the sphere of Muhammadan influence, — members of 
 his own family or disciples, — who have imitated the leader of 
 their order in stirring up the Tijaniyah to Jihad. But our infor- 
 mation respecting their petty wars is very meagre and insufficient, 
 for in their hands the empire of 'Umaru-1 Haji has been split up 
 into a number of insignificant and petty states. We have ampler 
 details of a more recent movement of the same kind, that has 
 been set on foot in the south of Senegambia by a Mandingo, 
 named Samudu, who at the head of a large body of zealous 
 Muhammadans has succeeded in subduing several warlike and 
 powerful pagan tribes. In 1884 he captured Falaba, the capital 
 of the Soohma country, 250 miles east of Sierra Leone, after an 
 obstinate siege of several months : for fifty years the people of 
 Falaba had successfully resisted the attacks of the Fulah Muham- 
 madans, who had attempted by yearly expeditions to reduce 
 them. An Arabic account of the career of Samudu, written by 
 
 f ' Delle Navigationi di Messer Alvise da Ca da Mosto. (a.d. 1454.) Ramusio. 
 \ Tome i. p. loi. 
 
 ' Oppel, p. 292-3. Blyden, p. 10. 
 
2 72 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 a native chronicler, gives us some interesting details of his 
 achievements. It begins as follows: " This is an account of the 
 Jihad of the Imam Ahmadu Samudu, a Mandingo. . . . God con- 
 ferred upon him His help continually after he began the work of 
 visiting the idolatrous pagans, who dwell between the sea and the 
 country of Wasulu, with a view of inviting them to follow the 
 religion of God, which is Islam. 
 
 " Know all ye who read this — that the first effort of the Imam 
 Samudu was a town named Fulindiyah. Following the Book 
 and the Law and the Traditions, he sent messsengers to the king 
 at that town, Sindidu by name, inviting him to submit to his 
 government, abandon the worship of idols and worship one God, 
 the Exalted, the True, whose service is profitable to His people 
 in this world and in the next ; but they refused to submit. Then 
 he imposed a tribute upon them, as the Qur'an commands on 
 this subject ; but they persisted in their blindness and deafness. 
 The Imam then collected a small force of about five hundred 
 men, brave and valiant, for the Jihad, and he fought against the 
 town, and the Lord helped him against them and gave him the 
 victory over them, and he pursued them with his horses until 
 they submitted. Nor will, they return to their idolatry, for now 
 all their children are in schoolsi being taught the Qur'an, and a 
 knowledge of religion and civilisation. Praise be to God for 
 this." 
 
 In a similar way he has brought several pagan states under 
 the influence of Muhammadan schools and teachers and 
 administers them in accordance with the law of the Qur'an. In 
 every town that falls into his power, either by capture or by its 
 voluntary submission, h« establishes a mosque and schools, which 
 are served by duly qualified persons. Though he is at the head 
 of a large army, he trusts more to the Qur'an and the educative 
 influence of schools than to the sword, and he is said to have the 
 art, as a rule, without bloodshed, of making his message accept- 
 able to the pagans whom he summons to the faith. i 
 
 With regard to these militant movements of Muhammadan 
 propagandism, it is important to notice that it is not the military 
 successes and territorial conquests that have most contributed to 
 the progress of Islam in these parts ; for it has been pointed out 
 
 ' BIyden, pp. 3S7-60. 
 
THE SANUSIYAH. 273 
 
 that, outside the limits of those fragments of the empire of 
 'Umaru-l Haji that have definitively remained in the hands of 
 his successors, the forced conversions that he made have quickly 
 been forgotten, and in spite of the momentary grandeur of his 
 successes and the enthusiasm of his armies, very few traces remain 
 of this armed propaganda.i The real importance of these move- 
 ments in the missionary history of Islam in Western Africa is 
 the religious enthusiasm they have stirred up, which has exhibited 
 itself in a widespread missionary, activity of a purely peaceful 
 character among the heathen populations. These Jihads, rightly 
 looked upon, are but incidents in the modern Islamic revival and 
 are by no means characteristic of the forces and activities that 
 have been really operative in the promulgation of Islam in Africa : 
 indeed, unless followed up by distinctly missionary efforts they 
 would have provedalmost wholly ineffectual in the creaition of a true 
 Muslim community. This Muhammadan propaganda has spread 
 the faith of the Prophet in many parts of Guinea and 5enegambia, 
 to. which the Fulahs and merchants from the Hausa country in 
 their frequent trading expeditions have brought the knowledge 
 of their religion, and where they have succeeded during the 
 present century in winning large numbers of converts. 
 
 But the proselytising work of the order that is jpow to bfi 
 desqribed has never in any way been connected with, violence 
 or war and has employed in the service of religion only the arts 
 of peace and persuasion. In 1837 a religious society was founded 
 by an Algerian jurisconsult, named Sidi Muhammad ibn 'Ali as 
 Sanusi, with the object of reforming Islam and spreading the 
 faith.; before his death in 1859, he had succeeded in , establishing, 
 by the sheer force of his genius and without the shedding of 
 blood, a theocratic state, to which his followers render devoted 
 allegiance and the limits of which are every day being extended 
 by his successors. The members of this sect are bound by rigid 
 rules to carry out to the full the precepts of the Qur'an in 
 afcordance with the most strictly monotheistic principles, 
 .whereby worship is to be given to God alone, and prayers to 
 ?aint^ and pilgrimages to their tombs are absolutely interdicted. 
 They must abstain from coffee and tobacco, avoid all intercourse 
 with Jews or Christians, contribute a certain portion of their 
 
 1 Le Chatelier (2), p. 112. 
 
274 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 income to the funds of the society, if they do not give themselves 
 up entirely to its service, and devote all their energies to the 
 advancement of Islam, resisting at the same time any concessions 
 to European influences. This sect is spread over the whole of 
 North Africa, having religious houses scattered about the 
 country from Egypt to Morocco, and far into the interior, in the 
 oases of the Sahara and the Sudan. The centre of its organisation 
 is in the oasis of Jaghbub in the Libyan desert between Egypt 
 and Tripoli, where every year hundreds of missionaries are 
 trained and sent out as preachers of Islam to all parts of northern 
 Africa. It is to the religious house in this village that all the 
 branch establishments (which are said to be 121 in number) look 
 for counsel and instruction in all matters that concern the 
 management and extension of this vast theocracy, which embraces 
 in a marvellous organisation thousands of persons of numerous 
 races and nations, otherwise separated from one another by vast 
 differences of geographical situation and worldly interests. For 
 the success that has been achieved by the zealous and energetic 
 emissaries of this association is enormous ; convents of the order 
 are to be found not only all over the north of Africa from Egypt 
 to Morocco, throughout the Sudan, in Senegambia and Somali- 
 land, but members of the order are to be found also in Arabia, 
 Mesopotamia and the islands of the Malay Archipelago.i Though 
 primarily a movement of reform in the midst of Islam itself, 
 the Sanusiyah sect is also actively proselytising, and several African 
 tribes that were previously pagan or merely nominally Muslim, 
 have since the advent of the emissaries of this sect in their midst, 
 become zealous adherents of the faith of the Prophet. Thus, 
 for example, the Sanusi missionaries are labouring to convert 
 that portion of the Baele (a tribe inhabiting the hill country of 
 Ennedi, E. of Borku) which is still heathen, and are communi- 
 cating their own religious zeal to such other sections of the tribe 
 as had only a very superficial knowledge of Islam, and were 
 Muhammadan only in name ^ ; the Tedas of Tu or Tibesti, in 
 the Sahara, S. of Fezzan, who were likewise Muhammadans 
 only in name when the Sanusiyah came among them, also bear 
 witness to the success of their efforts.^ The missionaries of this 
 
 1 Riedel (i), pp. 7, 59, 162. 
 
 2 G. Nachtigal : Sahara und Sudan, vol. ii. p. 175. (Berlin, 1870-81 1 
 •'• Duveyrier, p. 45. 
 
THE SAN0S1YAH. 275 
 
 sect also carry on an active propaganda in the Galla country and 
 fresh workers are sent thither every year from Harar, where the 
 Sanusiyah are very strong and include among their numbers all 
 the chiefs in the court of the Amir almost without exception.^ 
 In the furtherance of their proselytising efforts these missionaries 
 open schools, form settlements in the oases of the desert, and — 
 noticeably in the case of the Wadai — they have gained large 
 accessions to their numbers' by the purchase of slaves, who have 
 been educated at Ja^bub and when deemed sufficiently well 
 instructed in the tenets of the sect, enfranchised and then sent 
 back to their native country to convert their brethren. 
 
 Slight as these records are of the missionary labours of the 
 Muslims among the pagan tribes of the Sudan, they are of im- 
 portance in view of the general dearth of information regarding 
 the spread of Islam in this part of Africa. But while document- 
 ary evidence is wanting, the Muhammadan communities dwelling 
 in the midst of fetish-worshippers and idolaters, as representatives 
 of a higher feith and civilisation, are a living testimony to the 
 proselytising labours of the Muhammadan missionaries, and 
 (especially on the south-western borderland of Islamic influence) 
 present a striking contrast to the pagan tribes demoralised by 
 the European gin traffic. This contrast has been well indicated 
 by a modern traveller,^ in speaking of the degraded condition of 
 the tribes of the Lower Niger : " In steaming up the river (i.e. 
 the Niger), I saw little in the first 200 miles to alter my views, 
 for there luxuriated in congenial union fetishism, cannibalism 
 and the gin trade. But as I left behind me the low-lying coast 
 region, and found myself near the southern boundary of what is 
 called the Central Sudan, I observed an ever-increasing improve- 
 ment in the appearance of the character of the native ; cannibal- 
 ism disappeared, fetishism followed in its wake, the gin trade 
 largely disappeared, while on the other hand, clothes became 
 more voluminous and decent, cleanliness the rule, while their 
 outward more dignified bearing still further betokened a moral 
 regeneration. Everything indicated a leavening of some higher 
 element, an element that was clearly taking a deep hold on the 
 
 ■ ' Paulitschke, p. 214. 
 
 ^ H. Duveyrier : La con'rerie musulmane de Sidi Mohammed Ben 'All Es- 
 Senotlsi. passim. (Paris, 1886.) 
 
 Louis Rinn : Marabouts et Khouans, pp. 481-513. 
 
 ' Jo.seph Thomson (2), p. 185. , 
 
 T 2 
 
276 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 negro nature and making him a new man. That element you 
 will perhaps be surprised to learn is Mahommedanism. 
 
 " On passing Lokoja at the confluence of the Benue with the 
 Niger, I left behind me the missionary outposts of Islam, and 
 entering the Central Sudan, I found myself in a comparatively 
 well-governed empire, teeming with a busy populace of keen 
 traders, expert manufacturers of cloth, brass work and leather; a 
 people, in fact, who have made enormous advances towards 
 civilisation." 
 
 In order to form a just estimate of the missionary activity 
 of Islam in Nigritia, it must be borne in mind that, while on 
 the coast and along the southern boundary of the sphere of 
 Islamic influence, the Muhammadan missionary is the pioneer of 
 his religion, there is still left behind him a vast field for Muslim 
 propaganda in the inland countries that stretch away to the 
 north and the east, though it is long since Islam took firm root in 
 this soil. Some sections of the Funj, the predominant Negro race 
 of Sennaar, are partly Muhammadan and partly heathen, and 
 Muhammadan merchants from Nubia are attempting the con- 
 version of the latter.i It would be easy also to enumerate many 
 sections of the population of the Sudan and Senegambia, that 
 still retain their heathen habits and beliefs, or cover these only 
 with a slight veneer of Muhammadan observances even though 
 they have been (in most cases) surrounded for centuries by the 
 followers of the Prophet. Consequently, the remarkable zeal for 
 missionary work that has displayed itself among the Muham- 
 niadans of these parts during the present century, has not far to 
 go in order to find abundant scope for its activity. Hence the 
 importance, in the missionary history of Islam in this continent, 
 of the movements of reform in the Muslim religion itself and the 
 revivals of religious life, to which attention has been drawn above. 
 
 The West Coast is another field for Muhammadan missionary 
 enterprise wherein Islam finds itself confronted with a vast popu- 
 lation stiU unconverted, in spite of the progress it has made on 
 the Guinea Coast, in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in which last 
 there are more Muhammadans than heathen. In Ashanti there 
 was a nucleus of a Muhammadan population to be found as early 
 as 1750 and the missionaries of Islam have laboured there ever 
 
 ' Oppel, p. 30.3. j 
 
THE WEST COAST OF AFRICA. 277 
 
 since with slow but sure success,^ as they find a ready welcome in 
 the country and have gained for themselves considerable influence 
 at the court ; by means of their schools they get a hold on the 
 minds of the younger generation, and there are said to be sig- 
 nificant signs that Islam will become the predominant religion in 
 Ashanti, as already many of the chiefs have adopted it.* In 
 Dahomey and the Gold Coast, Islam is daily making fresh 
 progress, and even when the heathen chieftains do not themselves 
 embrace it, they very frequently allow themselves to come under 
 the influence of its missionaries, who know how to take advan- 
 tage of this ascendancy in their labours among the common 
 people.' Dahomey and Ashanti are the most important kingdoms 
 in this part of the continent that are still subject to pagan rulers 
 and their conversion is said to be a question of a short time only.* 
 In Lagos there are well nigh 10,000 Muslims, and all the trading 
 stations of the West Coast include in their populations numbers 
 of Musalmans belonging to the superior Negro tribes, suth as the 
 Fulahs, the Mandingos and the Hausa. When these men come 
 down to the cities of the coast, as they do in considerable 
 numbers, either as traders or to serve as troops in the armies of 
 the European powers, they cannot fail to impress by their bold 
 and independent bearing the Negro of the coast-land ; he sees 
 that the believers in the Qur'an are everywhere respected by 
 European governors, officials and merchants ; they are not so far 
 removed from him in race, appearance, dress or manners as to 
 make admission into their brotherhood impossible to him, and to 
 him too is offered a share in their privileges on condition of con- 
 version to their faith. ^ As soon as the pagan Negro, however 
 obscure or degraded, shows himself willing to accept the teachings 
 of the Prophet, he is at once admitted as an equal into their 
 society, and admission into the brotherhood of Islam is not a 
 privilege grudgingly granted, but one freely off'ered by zealous 
 and eager proselytisers. For, from the mouth of the Senegal to 
 Lagos, over two thousand miles, there is said to be hardly any 
 town of importance on the seaboard in which there is not at 
 least one mosque, with active propagandists of Islam, often 
 working side by side with the teachers of Christianity.' 
 
 1 Waltz : iier Theil, p. 250. "^ C. S. Salmon, p. 891. 
 
 3 Pierre Bouche, p. 256. ■• Blyden, p. 357- 
 
 '' C. S. Salmon, p. 887. ' Blyden, p. 202. 
 
278 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Authorities are not agreed as to what are the exact geographical 
 Hmits to be assigned to the sphere of Islam in Africa ;i speaking 
 roughly, lat. io° N. may be taken as the southern boundary of 
 Muslim Africa, although some tribes to the north of this line still 
 remain heathen.^ As already pointed out this southern limit has 
 been long overpassed on the West Coast, as also on the Lower 
 Niger, but, with the exceptions to be afterwards noted, Central 
 Africa has been very little touched by Muslim influences. Not 
 but what there are many Muhammadans to be found in Central 
 Africa, particularly the settlements of the Arab traders that have 
 made their way inland from Zanzibar ; but these appear to be 
 animated by little or no missionary zeal, and have not founded 
 states similar to those in the Sudan, organised and governed in 
 accordance with the law of the Qur'an. Further east, indeed, the 
 coast-land has been under Muhammadan influence since the 
 second century of the Hijrah, but Eastern Africa (with the 
 exception of the country of the Galla and Somali) has contributed 
 very little to the missionary history of Islam. 
 
 The facts recorded respecting the early settlements of the 
 Arabs on the East Coast are very meagre ; according to an Arabic 
 chronicle which the Portuguese found in Kiloa * when that town 
 was sacked by Don Francisco d'Almeida in 1505, the first settlers 
 were a body of Arabs who were driven into exile because they 
 followed the heretical teachings of a certain Zayd,* a descendant 
 of the Prophet, after whom they were called Emozaydij (probably 
 hSij iil or people of Zayd). The Zayd here referred to is 
 probably Zayd ibn 'Ali, a grandson of Husayn and so great-grand- 
 son of 'Ah, ithe nephew of Muhammad : in the reign of the 
 Caliph Hisham he claimed to be the Imam Mahdi and stirred up 
 a revolt among the Shi'ah faction, but was defeated and put to 
 death in a.h. 122 (a.d. 740). ^ 
 
 They seem to have lived in considerable dread of the original 
 pagan inhabitants of the country, but succeeded gradually in 
 
 ' For the line in the map, indicating the Southern limit of Muhammadan 
 influence, I am indebted to Dr. Oscar Baumann, who is well known for his 
 explorations in German East Africa. 
 
 Oppel, pp. 294-7. " Situated on an island about 2° S. of Zanzibar. 
 
 * " Hum Mouro chamado Zaide, que foi neto de Hocem filho de Ale o sobrinho 
 de Mahamed." Da Barros, Dec. i. Liv. viii. cap. iv. p. 211. 
 
 • Ibn Eialdun, vol. iii. pp. 98-100. 
 
THE EAST COAST OF AFRICA. 279 
 
 extending their settlements along the coast, until the arrival of 
 another band of fugitives who came from the Arabian side of the 
 Persian Gulf, not far from the island of Bahrayn. These came in 
 three ships under the leadership of seven brothers, in order to 
 escape from the persecution of the king of Lasah,i a city hard by 
 the dweUing-place of their tribe. The first town they built was 
 Magadaxo,^ which afterwards rose to such power as to assume 
 lordship over all the Arabs of the coast. But the original settlers, 
 the Emozaydij, belonging as they did to a different Muhammadan 
 sect, being Shi'ahs, while the new-comers were Sunnis, were un- 
 willing to submit to the authority of the rulers of Magadaxo, and 
 retired into the interior, where they became merged into the 
 native population, intermarrying with them and adopting their 
 manners and customs.^ 
 
 Magadaxo was founded about the middle of the tenth century 
 and remained the most powerful city on this coast for more than 
 seventy years, when the arrival of another expedition from the 
 Persian Gulf led to the establishment of a rival settlement further 
 south. The leader of this expedition was named 'Ali, one of the 
 seven sons of a certain Sultan Hasan of Shiraz : because his mother 
 was an Abyssinian, he was looked down upon with contempt by 
 his brothers, whose cruel treatment of him after the death of 
 their father, determined him to leave his native land and seek a 
 home elsewhere. Accordingly with his wife and children and a 
 small body of followers, he set sail from the island of Ormuz, and 
 avoiding Magadaxo, whose inhabitants belonged to a different 
 sectj and having heard that gold was to be found on the Zanzibar 
 coast, he pushed on to the south and founded the city of Kiloa, 
 where he could maintain a position of independence and be free 
 from the interference of his predecessors further north.* 
 
 In this way a number of Arab towns sprang up along the east 
 coast from the Gulf of Aden to the Tropic of Capricorn, on the 
 fringe of what was called by the mediaeval Arab geographers the 
 country of the Zanj. Whatever efforts may have been made by 
 the Muhammadan settlers to convert the Zanj, no record of them 
 seems to have survived. There is a curious story preserved in an 
 
 ' Possibly a mistake for Al Has5. See Ibn BatStah. Tome ii. pp. 247-8- 
 
 ^ Or (to give it its Arabic name) Maqdishu. 
 
 ' J. de Barros. Dec. i. Liv. viii. cap. iv. pp. 2II-'.I2. 
 
 ■* De Barros, id. pp. 224-5. 
 
28o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 old collection of travels written probably in the early part of the 
 tenth century, which represents Islam as having been introduced 
 among one of these tribes by the king of it himself. An Arab- 
 trading vessel was driven out of its course by a tempest in the year 
 922 A.D. and carried to the country of the man-eating Zanj, where 
 the crew expected certain death. On the contrary, the king of 
 the place received them kindly and entertained them hospitably 
 for several months, while they disposed of their merchandise on- 
 advantageous terms ; but the merchants repaid his kindness with 
 foul treachery, by seizing him and his attendants when they came 
 on board to bid them farewell, and then carrying them off as 
 slaves to Oman. Some years later the same merchants were 
 driven by a storm to the same port, where they were recognised 
 by the natives who surrounded them in their canoes ; giving 
 themselves up for lost this time, they repeated for one another 
 the prayers for the dead. They were taken before the king, 
 whom they discovered to their surprise and confusion to be the 
 same they had so shamefully treated some years before. Instead, 
 however, of taking vengeance upon them for their treacherous 
 conduct, he spared their lives and allowed them to sell their 
 goods, but rejected with scorn the rich presents they offered. 
 Before they left, one of the party ventured to ask the king to tell 
 the story of _ his escape. He described how he had been taken as 
 a slave to Basrah and thence to Baghdad, where he was converted' 
 to Islam and instructed in the faith ; escaping from his master, 
 he joined a caravan of pilgrims going to Mecca, and after per- 
 forming the prescribed rites, reached Cairo and made his way up 
 the Nile in the direction of his own country, which he reached 
 at length after encountering many dangers and having been more 
 than once enslaved. Restored once again to his kingdom, he 
 taught his people the faith of Islam ; " and now I rejoice in that 
 God hath given to me and to my people the knowledge of Islam 
 and the true faith ; to no other in the land of the Zanj hath this 
 grace been vouchsafed ; and it is because you have been the 
 cause of my conversion, that I pardon you. Tell the Muslims 
 that they may come to our country, and that we— Muslims like 
 themselves— V(fill treat them as brothers." 1 
 
 d,.r nih^'^l'^f,' a'"' ^t"^/" ^^l^ f ^' Merveilles de I'Inde, public par P.A. van 
 cler l^ith. pp. 51-60. (Leiden, 1883.) ^ 
 
EAST AFRICA. 281 
 
 : From the same source we learn that even at this early period, 
 this coast-land was frequented by large numbers of Arab traders, 
 yet in spite of centuries of intercourse with the followers of Islam, 
 the original inhabitants of this coast (with the exception of the 
 Somalis) have been remarkably little influenced by this religion. 
 Even before the Portuguese conquests of the sixteenth century, 
 what few conversions had been made, seem to have been wholly 
 confined to the sea-border, and even after the decline of Portu- 
 guese influence in this part of the wor]d, and the restoration of 
 Arab rule under the Sayyids of Oman, hardly any efforts have 
 been made to spread the knowledge of Islam among the tribes of 
 the interior, with the exception of the Galla and Somali. As a 
 modern traveller has said : " During the three expeditions which 
 r cotiducted in East Central Africa I saw nothing to suggest 
 Mohammedanism as a civilising power. Whatever living force 
 might be in the religion remained latent. The Arabs, or their 
 descendants, in these parts were not propagandists. There were 
 no missionaries to preach Islam, and the natives of Muscat were 
 content that their slaves should conform, to a certain extent, to 
 the forms of the religion. They left the East African tribes, who 
 indeed, in their gross darkness, were evidently content to remain 
 in happy ignorance. Their inaptitude for civilisation was 
 strikmgly shown in the strange fact that five hundred years of 
 contact with semi-civilised people had left them without the 
 faintest reflection of the higher traits which characterised their 
 neighbours — not a single good seed during all these years had 
 struck root and flourished." 1 Given up wholly to the pursuits of 
 commerce or to slave-hunting, the Arabs in Eastern Africa have 
 exhibited a lukewarmness in promoting the interests of their 
 faith, which is in striking contrast to the missionary zeal displayed 
 by their co-religionists in other parts of Africa.^ One powerful 
 obstacle, however, in the way of the progress of Islam among 
 most of the tribes of East Equatorial Africa, is doubtless the 
 remarkable lack of religious sentiment which characterises them. 
 For further north, in Uganda, the inhabitants of which are not 
 
 ' Mohammedanism in Central Africa, by Joseph Thomson, p. 877. 
 
 * Islam is still however gaining ground in German East Africa among the people 
 of Bondei and the Wadigo (a little inland from the coast), among whom Swahih 
 schoolmasters carry on a lively and successful mission work. (Oscar Baumann : 
 Usambara und seine Nachbargebiete, pp. 141, IS3-) (Berlin, 1891.) 
 
282 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 similarly insensible to religious influences, the Arabs from 
 Zanzibar have succeeded in gaining some converts to Islam. 
 
 Islam has been more successful among the Galla and the Somali. 
 Mention has already been made of the Galla settlements in 
 Abyssinia : these immigrants, who are divided into seven prin- 
 cipal clans, with the generic name of Wollo-Galla, were probably 
 all heathen at the time of their incursion into the country ,i and 
 the majority of them remain so to the present day. After settling 
 ip' Abyssinia they soon became naturalised there, and in many 
 instances adopted the language, manners and customs of the 
 original inhabitants of the country.^ 
 
 The story of their conversion is obscure : while some of them 
 are said to have been forcibly baptised into the Christian faith, 
 the absence of any political power in the hands of the Muham- 
 madans precludes the possibility of any converts to Islam having 
 been made in a similar fashion. In the last century, those in the 
 south were said to be mostly Muhammadans, those to the east 
 and west chiefly pagans.^ More recent information points to a 
 further increase in the number of the followers of the Prophet, 
 and as they are said to be " very fanatical," we may presume that 
 they are by no means half-hearted or lukewarm in their adhe- 
 rence to this religion.* Among the Galla tribes of the true Galla 
 country, the population is partly Muhammadan and partly 
 heathen, with the exception of those tribes immediately border- 
 ing on Abyssinia, who have been recently forced by the late king 
 of that country to accept Christianity.^ Among the mountains, 
 the Muhammadans are in a minority, but on the plains the 
 missionaries of Islam have met with striking success, and their 
 teaching has found a rapidly increasing acceptance during the 
 present century. Antonio Cecchi, who visited the petty kingdom 
 
 ' A contemporary Ethiopic account of these tribes, — Geschichte der Galla. 
 Bericht eines abessinischen Mbnches iiber die Invasion der Galla in sechzehnten 
 Jahrhundert. Text und Ubersetzung hrsg, von. A. W. Schleichler — (Berlin, 
 1893) — seems certainly to represent them as heathen, though no detailed account 
 is given of their religion. Reclus (Tome x. p. 330) however supposes them to 
 have been Muhammadan at the time of their invasion. 
 
 ^ Henry Salt : A Voyage to Abyssinia, p. 299. (London, 1S14.) 
 
 ^ James Bruce : Travels to discover the source of the Nile, 2nd ed. vol. iii. 
 p. 243. (Edinburgh, 1805.) 
 
 * I. L. Krapf : Reisen in Ost-Africa, ausgefiihrt in den Jahren 1837.55, vol. i. 
 p. 106. (Kornthal, 1858.) 
 
 ' Reclus. Tome x. p. 309. 
 
THE GALLA. 283 
 
 ofLimmu in 1878, gives an account of the conversion of Abba 
 Baghibo,! thg father of the reigning chieftain, by Muhammadans 
 who for some years had been pushing their proselytising efforts 
 in this country in the guise of traders. His example was followed 
 by the chiefs of the neighbouring Galla kingdoms and by the 
 ofiicers of their courts ; part of the common people have also 
 been, won over to the new faith, and it is still making progress 
 among them, but the greater part cling firmly to their ancient 
 cult.^ These traders received a ready welcome at the courts of 
 the Galla chiefs, inasmuch as they found them a market for the 
 commercial products of the country and imported objects of 
 foreign manufacture in exchange. As they made their journeys 
 to the coast once a year only, or even once in two years, and 
 lived all the rest of the time in the Galla country, they had plenty 
 of opportunities, which they knew well how to avail themselves 
 of, for the work of propagating Islam, and wherever they set their 
 foot they were sure in a short space of time to gain a large number 
 of proselytes.^ Islam has here come in conflict with Christian 
 missionaries from Europe, whose efforts, though winning for 
 Christianity a few converts, have been crowned with very little 
 success,* — even the converts of Cardinal Massaja (after he was 
 expelled from these parts) either embraced Islam or ended bj- 
 believing neither in Christ nor in Allah, ^ — whereas the Muslim 
 missionaries have achieved a continuous success, and have now 
 pushed their way far to the south, and have lately crossed the 
 Wabi river.^ The majority of the Galla tribes dwelling in the 
 west of the Galla country are still heathen, but among the most 
 westerly of them, viz. the Lega,'' the old nature worship appears 
 to be on the decHne and the growing influence of the Muslim 
 missionaries makes it probable that within a few years the Lega 
 
 ' When the Roman Catholics opened a mission among the Gallas in 1846, 
 Abba B^hibi) said to them : "Had you come thirty years ago, not only I, but 
 all my countrymen might have embraced your religion ; but now it is impossible.'' 
 (Massaja, vol, iv. p. 103.) 
 
 ^ Da Zeila alle frontiere del Caffa, vol. ii. p. 160. (Rome, 1886-7.) 
 Massaja, vol. iv. p. 103 ; vol. vi. p. 10. 
 
 ^ Massaja, vol. iv. p. 102. 
 
 * Speaking of the failure of Christian missions, Cecchi says : "di ci6 si deve 
 ricercare la causa nello espandersi che face quaggiii in questi ultimi anni I'islamismo, 
 portato da centinaja di preti e mercanti musulmani, cui non facevano difetto i 
 mezzi, I'astuzia e la plena conoscenra della lingua. (Op. cit. vol. ii. p. 342.) 
 
 ' Id. p. 343. ^ Reclus. Tome xiii. p. 834. 
 
 ' The Lega are found in long. 9° to 9° 30' and lat. E. 34° 35' to 35°. 
 
284 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 will all have entered into the pale of Islam.i The North-East 
 Africa of the present day presents indeed the spectacle of a 
 remarkably energetic and zealous missionary activity on the part 
 of the Muhammadans. Several hundreds of missionaries come 
 from Arabia every year, and they have been even more successful 
 in their labours among the Somali than among the Galla.^ The 
 close proximity of the Somali country to Arabia must have caused 
 it very early to have been the scene of Muhammadan missionary 
 labours, but of these unfortunately little record seems to have 
 survived. The Somalis of the north have a tradition of a certain 
 Arab of noble birth who, compelled to flee his own country, 
 crossed the sea to Adel, where he preached the faith of Islam 
 among their forefathers.^ In the fifteenth century a band of 
 forty-four Arabs came as missionaries from Hadramawt, landing 
 at Berberah on the Red Sea, and thence dispersed over the 
 Somali country to preach Islam. One of them, Shay^i Ibrahim 
 Abu Zarbay, made his way to the city of Harar about 1430 a.d., 
 and gained many converts there, and his tomb is still honoured 
 in .that' city. A hill near Berberah is still called the Mount of 
 Saint's in memory of these missionaries, who are said to have sat 
 there in solemn conclave before scattering far and wide to the 
 work of conversion.* 
 
 In order to complete this survey of Islam in Africa, it remains 
 only to draw attention to the fact that this religion has also made 
 its entrance into the extreme south of this continent, viz. in Cape 
 Coast Colony. These Muhammadans of the Cape are descendants 
 of Malays, who were brought here by the Dutch ^ either in the 
 seventeenth or eighteenth century ; they speak a corrupt form of 
 the Boer dialect, with a considerable admixture of Arabic, and 
 some English and Malay words. A curious little book published 
 in this dialect and written in Arabic characters was published in 
 Constantinople in 1877 by the Turkish minister of educatiorij to 
 serve as a handbook of the principles of the Muslim faith.* ' The 
 
 ' Reclus. Tome x. p. 350. ^ Paulitschke, pp. 330-1. 
 
 ^ Documents sur I'histoire, la g^ographie et le commerce de I'Affique Orientale, 
 recueillis par M. Guillain. Deuxi^me Partie. Tome i. p. 399. (Paris, 1856.) 
 
 ■* R. F. Burton : First Footprints in East Africa, pp. 76, 4104. (London, 1856.) 
 
 * The Cape of Good Hope was in the possession of the Dutch from 1652 to 
 '795 ; restored to them after the Peace of Amiens in 1802, it was re-occupied by 
 the British as soon as war broke out again 
 
 ^ M. J. de Goeje : Mohammedaansche Propaganda, pp. 2, 6. (Overgedrukt 
 uit de Nederlandsche Spectator, No. 51, i88i.) 
 
THE SOMALI. CAPE COAST COLONY. 285 
 
 thoroughly Dutch names that some of them bear, and the type 
 efface observable in many of them, point to the probability that 
 they have at some time received into their community some 
 persons of Dutch birth, or at least that they have in their veins 
 a considerable admixture of Dutch blood. They have also gained 
 some converts from among the Hottentots. Very little notice 
 has been taken of them by European travellers,! or even by their 
 co-religionists until recently ; but during the last thirty years 
 ithey have been visited by some zealous Musalmans from other 
 countries, and more attention is now paid by them to education, 
 and a deeper religious life has been stirred up among them. 
 Every year some of them make the pilgrimage to Mecca, where a 
 special Shay^ has been appointed to look after them.- The 
 Indian coolies that come to work in the diamond fields of South 
 j^frica are also said to be propagandists of Islam.^ 
 , From the historical sketch given above it may be seen that 
 peaceful methods have characterised on the whole the Muham- 
 madan missionary movement in Africa, and though Islam has 
 :Often taken the sword as an instrument to further its spiritual 
 conquests, such an appeal to violence and bloodshed has in most 
 cases been preceded by the peaceful efforts of the missionary, and 
 the preacher has followed the conqueror to complete the im- 
 perfect work of conversion. It is true that the success of Islam 
 has been very largely facilitated in many parts of Africa by the 
 worldly successes of Muhammadan adventurers, and the erection 
 of Muhammadan states on the ruins of pagan kingdoms, and fire 
 and bloodshed have often marked the course of a Jihad, pro- 
 jected for the extermination of the infidel. The words of the 
 young Arab from Bornu whom Captain Burton* met in the 
 >palace of the king of Abeokuta doubtless express the aspirations 
 of many an African Muhammadan : " Give those guns and 
 -powder to us, and we will soon Islamise these dogs " : and they 
 find an echo in the message that Mungo Park ^ gives us as having 
 been sent by the Muslim King of Futah Toro to his pagan 
 
 ■ ' Attention was drawn to tliem ini8i4 by a Mr. Campell. See William Adams : 
 The Modern Voyager and Traveller, vol. i. p. 93. (London, 1834.) 
 
 ^ C. Snouck Hurgronje (3), vol. ii. pp 296-7. 
 
 ^ Jacques Bonzon : Les Missionaires de I'lslam en Afrique. (Revue Chretienne. 
 Tomexiii. p. 295.) (Paris, 1893.) 
 
 < Richard F. Burton (i), vol. i. p. 256. 
 
 5 Travels in the Interior of Africa, chap. xxv. ad/n. 
 
286 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 neighbour : " With this knife Abdulkader will condescend to 
 shave the head of Damel, if Damel will embrace the Mahommedan 
 faith ; and with this other knife Abdulkader will cut the throat 
 of Damel, if Damel refuses to embrace it ; take your choice." 
 
 But much as Islam may have owed to the martial prowess of 
 such fanatics as these, there is the overwhelming testimony of 
 travellers and others to the peaceful missionary preaching, and 
 quiet and persistent labours of the Muslim propagandist, which 
 have done more for the rapid spread of Islam in modern Africa 
 than any violent measures : by the latter its opponents may 
 indeed have been exterminated, but by the former chiefly, have 
 its converts been made, and the work of conversion may still be 
 observed in progress in many regions of the coast and the 
 interior.! Wherever Islam has made it way, there is the 
 Muhammadan missionary to be found bearing witness to its 
 doctrines, — the trader, be he Arab, Fulah or Mandingo, who 
 combines proselytism with the sale of his merchandise, and whose 
 very profession brings him into close and immediate contact with 
 those he would convert, and disarms any possible suspicion of 
 sinister motives ; such a man when he enters a pagan village soon 
 attracts attention by his frequent ablutions and regularly re- 
 curring times of prayer and prostration, in which he appears to 
 be conversing with some invisible being, and by his very assump- 
 tion of intellectual and moral superiority, commands the respect 
 and confidence of the heathen people, to whom at the same time 
 he shows himself ready and willing to communicate his high 
 privileges and knowledge ; — the haji or pilgrim who has returned 
 from Mecca full of enthusiasm for the spread of the faith, to 
 which he devotes his whole energies, wandering about from place 
 to place, supported by the alms of the faithful that bear witness 
 to the truth in the midst of their pagan neighbours ; — the 
 ■student who has pursued his studies at the mosque of Al Azhar 
 m Cairo, and in consequence of his knowledge of Islamic theology 
 and law, receives honour as a man of learning : sometimes, too, 
 lie practises medicine, or at least he is in great requisition as a 
 writer of charms, texts from the Qur'an, which are sewn up in 
 pieces of leather or cloth and tied on the arms, or round the 
 
 ' D. J. East, pp. 1 18-120. W. Winwood Reade, vol. i. p. 312. 
 Blyder, pp. 13, 202. 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES IN AFRICA. 287 
 
 neck, and which he can turn to account as a means of adding to 
 the number of his converts : for instance, when childless women 
 or those who have lost their children in infancy, apply for these 
 charms, as a condition of success the obligation is always imposed 
 upon them of bringing up their future children as Muham- 
 madans.^ These religious teachers, or marabuts, or alufas as they 
 are variously termed, are held in the highest estimation. In 
 some tribes of Western Africa every village contains a lodge for 
 their reception, and they are treated with the utmost deference 
 and respect : in Darfur they hold the highest rank after those 
 who fill the offices of government : among the Mandingos they 
 rank still higher, and receive honour next to the king, the subor- 
 dinate chiefs being regarded as their inferiors in point of dignity: 
 in those states in which the Qur'an is made the rule of govern- 
 ment in all civil matters, their services are in great demand, in 
 order to interpret its meaning. So sacred are the persons of 
 these teachers esteemed, that they pass without molestation 
 through the countries of chiefs, not only hostile to each other, 
 but engaged in actual warfare. Such deference is not only paid 
 to them in Muhammadan countries, but also in the pagan villages 
 in which they establish their schools, where the people respect 
 them as the instructors of their children, and look upon them as 
 the medium between themselves and Heaven, either for securing 
 a supply of their necessities, or for warding off or removing 
 calamities.^ Many of these teachers have studied in the mosques 
 of Qayrwan, Fas, Tripolis ^ and other centres of Muslim learning ; 
 but if Islam may be said to possess a missionary college, it is the 
 mosque of Al Azhar that best deserves this name. Students 
 flock to it from all parts of the Muslim world, and among them 
 is always to be found a contingent from Negro Africa, — students 
 from Darfur, Wadai and Bornu, and some who even make their 
 way on foot from the far distant West Coast ; when they have 
 finished their courses of study in Muslim theology and juris- 
 prudence, there are many of them who become missionaries 
 
 ' Bishop Crowther on Islam in Western Africa. (Church Missionary Intdli- 
 gencer, p. 254, April, 1888.) 
 ' D.J. East, pp. 112-13. 
 
 ^ It L Sid Aft°oVer a thousand missionaries of Islam leave Tripolis every year 
 to work in the Sudan. (Paulitschke, p. 331- ) 
 
288 . THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 among the heathen pqpulation of their native land. The number 
 pf students at this college shows a constant increase. Whep Dr. 
 Dollinger 1 visited Cairo about 1838 their number was so low as 
 500, but since then there has been a gradual rise, and in 
 ;884 there were as many as 12,025 students on the rolls.^ 
 Schools are estabhshed by these missionaries in the towns -they 
 visit, which are frequented by the pagan as well as the Muslim 
 children. They are taught to read the Qur'an, and instructed in 
 the doctrines and ceremonies of Islam. Having thus gained a 
 footing, the Muhammadan missionary, by his superior knowledge 
 and attainments, is not slow to obtain great influence over the 
 people among whom he has come to live. In this he is aided by 
 the fact that his habits and manner of life are similar in many 
 respects to their own, nor is he looked upon with suspicion, in- 
 asmuch as the trader has already prepared the way [for him ; and 
 by intermarriage with the natives, being thus received into their 
 social system, his influence becomes firmly rooted and permanent, 
 and so in the most natural manner he gradually causes .the 
 knowledge of Islam to spread among them. The arrival of the 
 Muhammadan in a pagan country is also the beginning of the 
 opening up of a more extensive trade, and of communication with 
 great Muhammadan trading centres such as Segu and Kano, and 
 a share in the advantages of this material civilisation is ofiered, 
 together with the religion of the Prophet. Thus " among ^he 
 uncivilised negro tribes the missionary may be always sure of a 
 ready audience : he can not only give them many truths regard- 
 ing God and man which make their way to the heart and eley^te 
 the intellect, but he can at once communicate the Shibboleth, of 
 admission to a social and political communion, which is a passport 
 for protection and assistance from the Atlantic to the WaJL of 
 China. Wherever a Moslem house can be found there the negro 
 convert who can repeat the dozen syllables of his creed, is sure of 
 shelter, sustenance and advice, and in his own country he finds 
 himself at once a member of an influential, if not of a dominant 
 caste. This seems the real secret of the success of the Moslem 
 missionaries in West Africa. It is great and rapid as regards 
 numbers, for the simple reason that the Moslem missionary, from 
 
 'Mohammed's Religion, p. 144. 
 
 - Annalei de I'Extreme Orient et de I'.Vfrique, p. 341. (Jlai, 1884.) 
 
SUCCESS OF MUSLIM MISSIONS. .289 
 
 the very first profession of the convert's belief, acts practically on 
 those principles regarding the equality and brotherhood of all 
 believers before God, which Islam shares with Christianity ; and 
 he does this, as a general rule more speedily and decidedly than 
 r the Christian missionary, who generally feels bound to require 
 good evidence of a converted heart before he gives the right hand 
 of Christian fellowship, and who has always to contend with race 
 prejudices not likely to die out in a single generation where the 
 white Christian has for generations been known as master, and 
 the black heathen as slave." ^ 
 
 It is important, too, to note that neither his colour nor his race 
 in any way prejudice the Negro in the eyes of his new co- 
 religionists. The progress of Islam in Negritia has no doubt been 
 materially advanced by this absence of any feeling of repulsion 
 towards the Negro — indeed Islam seems never to have treated 
 the Negro as an inferior, as has been unhappily too often the 
 f case in Christendom.^ According to Muhammadan tradition 
 ' Moses was a black man, as may be seen from the following 
 passages in the Qur'an. " Now draw thy hand close to thy side : 
 it shall come forth white, but unhurt :— another sign ! " (xx. 23). 
 " Then drew he forth his hand, and lo ! it was white to the be- 
 holders. The nobles of Pharaoh's people said : ' Verily this is an 
 expert enchanter.' " (vii. 105, 6). The foUowing story also, handed 
 down to us from the golden period of the 'Abbasid dynasty, is 
 interesting as evidence of Muhammadan feeling with regard to 
 
 H 
 
 ' Sir Bartle Frere (i), pp. 18-19. 
 
 ' E. W. Blyden, pp. 18-24. ,1. * .i, , • , 
 
 In a very interesting, but nowf orgotten, debate before the Anthropological 
 Society of London, on the Efforts of Missionaries among Savages, a case was men- 
 tioned of a Christian mis,ionary in Africa who married a negress : the feeling 
 against him in consequence was so strong that he had to leave the colony The 
 Muslim missionary labours under no such disadvantage. (Journal of the Anthro- 
 pological Society of London, vol. iii. 1865.) 
 
 The contrast between the way in which ChnsUanity and Islam present them- 
 selves to the African is well brought out by one who is himself a Negro, in the 
 foUowing passage :— " Tandis que les missions renvoient i une epoque mdefinie 
 l'^tabU.sement du pastorat indigene, les pr^tres musulmans pen^trent dans 
 I'interieur de I'Afrique, trouvent un acc^s facile chez les paiens et les convertissent 
 k I'islam. De sorte qu'aujourdhui les n^gres regardent 1 islam comme la religion 
 des noirs, et le christianisme comme la religion des blancs. Le christianisme, 
 " "•> ^ .... , . .. .:_ 1..: ..„; — „ „„„ „io,.» tellement basse 
 
 haw que possible.' Alors, le n&gre enthousiasm6 se livre corps et ame au service 
 decetie religion." L'islam et le christianisme en Afrique d apr^s un Africam. 
 Journal des Missions Evangiiiques. 63= • annee, p. 207. ) (I'ans, I»S». ) 
 
 U 
 
290 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the Negro. Ibrahim, a brother of Harunu-r Rashid and the 
 son of a negress, had proclaimed himself Caliph at Bagdad, but 
 was defeated and forgiven by Al Ma'mun, who was then reigning 
 (819 A.D.). He thus describes his interview with the Caliph :— 
 " Al Ma'mun said to me on my going to see him after having 
 obtained pardon : ' Is it thou who art the Negro Khalifah ? ' to 
 which I replied : — ' Commander of the faithful ! I am he whom 
 thou hast deigned to pardon ; and it has been said by the slave 
 of Banu-1 Hashas : — " When men extol their worth, the slave of 
 the family of Hashas can supply, by his verses, the defect of birth 
 and fortune." Though I be a slave, my soul, through its noble 
 nature, is free ; though my body be dark, my mind is fair.' " 
 
 To this Al Ma'mun replied : " Uncle ! a jest of mine has put 
 you in a serious mood." He then spoke these verses : 
 
 " Blackness of skin cannot degrade an ingenious mind, or lessen 
 the worth of the scholar and the wit. Let darkness claim the 
 colour of your body : I claim as mine your fair and candid soul." ' 
 
 So that the converted Negro at once takes an equal place in 
 the brotherhood of believers, neither his colour nor his race nor 
 any associations of the past standing in the way. It is doubtless 
 the ready admission they receive, that makes the pagan Negroes 
 willing to enter into a religious society whose higher civilisation 
 demands that they should give up many of their old barbarous 
 habits and customs ; at the same time the very fact that the, 
 acceptance of Islam does imply an advance in civilisation and is 
 a very distinct step in the intellectual, moral and material pro- 
 gress of a Negro tribe, helps very largely to explain the success 
 of this faith. The forces arrayed on its side are so powerful and 
 ascendant, that the barbarism, ignorance and superstition which 
 it seeks to sweep away have little chance of making a lengthened 
 resistance. What the civilisation of Muslim Africa implies to 
 the Negro convert, is admirably expressed in the foUbwihg 
 words: " The worst evils which, there is reason to believe, pre- 
 vailed at one time over the whole of Africa, and which are still 
 to be found in many parts of it, and those, too, not far from the 
 Gold Coast and from our own settlements — cannibalism and 
 human sacrifice and the burial of living infants — disappear at 
 once and for ever. Natives who have hitheirto lived in a state 
 
 ' Ibn Khallikan, vol. i. p. 18. 
 
ISLAM AND THE NEGROES. 291 
 
 of .nakedness, or nearly so, begin to dress, and that neatly; 
 natives who have never vs^ashed before begin to wash, and that 
 frequently ; for ablutions are commanded in the Sacred Law, 
 and it is an ordinance which does not involve too severe a strain 
 on their natural instincts. The tribal organisation tends to give 
 place to something which has a wider basis. In other words, 
 tribes coalesce into nations, and, with the increase of energy and 
 intelligence, nations into empires. Many such instances could 
 be adduced from the history of the Soudan and the adjoining 
 countries during the last hundred years. If the warlike spirit 
 is thus stimulated, the centres from which war springs are fewer 
 in number and further apart. War is better organised, and is 
 under some form of restraint ; quarrels are not picked for 
 nothing ; there is less indiscriminate plundering and greater 
 security for property and life. Elementary schools, 1 like those 
 described by Mungo Park a century ago, spring up, and even if 
 they only teach their scholars to recite the Koran, they are worth 
 something in themselves, and may be a step to much more- 
 The well-built and neatly-kept mosque, with its call to prayer 
 repeated five times a day, its Mecca-pointing niche, its Imam 
 and its weekly service, becomes the centre of the village, instead 
 of the ghastly fetish or Juju house. The worship of one God, 
 omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and Compassionate, is an 
 immeasurable advance upon anything which the native has been 
 
 ' "In every Mohammedan town there is a public school and a public Ubrary. 
 The public library consists chiefly of different copies of the Koran, some of them 
 beautiful' specimens of caligraphy. They have also very frequently the Arabic 
 version of the Pentateuch, which they call Torat Mousa : the Psalms of David, el 
 Zabour Dawidi ; and even the Gospel of Jesus, el Indjil Isa. They also preserve 
 public rasters and records." W. Winwood Reade : Savage Africa, p. 580. 
 ■ " Extracts from the Koran form the earliest reading lessons of children, and the 
 commentaries and other works founded upon it furnish the principal subjects of 
 the advanced studies. Schools of different grades have existed for centuries in 
 various interior negro countries, and under the provision of law, in which even the 
 poor are educated at the public expense, and in which the deserving are carried on 
 many years through long courses of regular instruction. Nor is the system always 
 conhned to the Arabic language, or to the works of Arabic writers. A number 
 of native languages have been reduced to writing, books have been translated 
 Irom the Arabic, and original works have been written in them. Schools also 
 have been kept in which native languages are taught." Condition and Character 
 of Negroes in Africa. By Theodore Dwight. (Methodist Quarterly Review, 
 January, 1869.) j ,, •,, ,• 
 
 Dr. Blyden (p. 206-7) mentions the following books as read by Muslims in 
 Western Africa : Maqamat of Hariri, portions of Aristotle and Plato translated 
 into Arabic, an Arabic version 'of Hippocrates, and the Arabic New Testament 
 md Psalms issued by the American Bible Society. 
 
 U 2 
 
J92 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 taught to worship before. The Arabic language, in which the 
 Mussulman scriptures are always written, is a language of extra- 
 ordinary copiousness and beauty ; once learned it becomes a 
 lingua franca to the tribes of half the continent, and serves as an 
 introduction to literature, or rather, it is a literature in itself. 
 It substitutes moreover, a written code of law for the arbitrary 
 caprice of a chieftain — a change which is, in itself, an immense 
 advance in civilisation. Manufactures and commerce spring up, 
 not the dumb trading or the elementary bartering of raw products 
 which we know from Herodotus to have existed from the earliest 
 times in Africa, nor the cowrie shells, or gunpowder, or tobacco, 
 or rum, which still serve as a chief medium of exchange all along 'J 
 the coast, but manufactures involving considerable skill, and a ' 
 commerce which is elaborately organised ; and under their in- 
 fluence, and that of the more settled government which Islam 
 brings in its train, there have arisen those great cities of Negro- \ 
 land whose very existence, when first they were described by 
 European travellers, could not but be half discredited. « 
 
 " I am far from saying that the religion is the sole cause of all:^ 
 this compatative prosperity. I only say it is consistent with it, 
 and it encourages it. Climatic conditions and various other T 
 influences co-operate towards the result ; but what has Pagan 
 Africa, even where' the conditions are very similar, to compare 
 with it ? 
 
 " As regards the individual, it is admitted on all hands that 
 Islam gives to its new Negro converts an energy, a dignity, a , 
 self-reliance, and a self-respect which is all too rarely found in 
 their Pagan or their Christian fellow-countrymen." ^ 
 
 1 Mohammedanism in Africa, by R. Bosworth Smith. (The Nineteenth 
 Century, December 1887, pp. 798-800.) 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. 
 
 The history of the Malay Archipelago during the last 600 years 
 furnishes us with one of the most interesting chapters in the 
 story of the spread of Islam by missionary efforts. During the 
 whole of this period we find evidences of a continuous activity on 
 the part of the Muhammadan missionaries, in one or other at 
 least of the East India islands. In every instance, in the begin- 
 ning, their work had to be carried on without any patronage or 
 assistance from the rulers of the country, but solely by the force 
 of persuasion, and in many cases in the face of severe opposition, 
 especially on the part of the Spaniards. But in spite of all diffi- 
 culties, and with varying success, they have prosecuted their 
 efforts with untiring energy, perfecting itheir work (more espe- 
 cially in the present day) wherever it has been partial or 
 insufficient. 
 
 It is impossible to fix the precise date of the first introduction 
 of Islam into the Malay Archipelago. It was doubtless carried 
 thither by the Arab traders in the early centuries of the Hijrah, 
 long before we have any historical notices of such influences 
 being at work. This supposition is rendered the more probable 
 by the knowledge we have of the extensive commerce with the 
 East carried on by the Arabs from very early times. In the 
 second century B.C. the trade with Ceylon was wholly in their 
 hands. At the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian 
 era, the trade with China, through Ceylon, received a great 
 impulse, so that in the middle of the eighth century Arab traders 
 were to be found in great numbers in Canton ; while from the 
 tenth to the fifteenth century, until the arrival of the Portuguese, 
 they were undisputed masters of the trade with the East.i We 
 
 ' Niemann, p. 337. 
 
294 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 may therefore conjecture with tolerable certainty that they must 
 have established their commercial settlements on some of the 
 islands of the Malay Archipelago, as they did elsewhere, at a very 
 early period : though no mention is made of these islands in the 
 works of the Arab geographers earlier than the ninth century,' 
 yet in the Chinese annals, under the date 674 a.d. an account is 
 given of an Arab chief, who from later notices is conjectured to 
 have been the head of an Arab settlement on the west coast of 
 Sumatra.^ 
 
 Missionaries must also, however, have come to the Malay 
 Archipelago from the south of India, judging from certain pecu- 
 liarities of Muhammadan theology adopted by the islanders. 
 Most of the Musalmans of the Archipelago belong to the 
 Shafi'iyah sect, which is at the present day predominant on the 
 Coromandel and Malabar coasts, as was the case also about the 
 middle of the fourteenth century when Ibn Batufah visited these 
 parts.3 So when we consider that the Muhammadans of the 
 neighbouring countries belong to the Hanafiyah sect, we can only 
 explain the prevalence of Shafi'iyah teachings by assuming them 
 to have been brought thither from the Malabar coast, the ports 
 of which were frequented by merchants from Java, as well as 
 from China, Yaman and Persia.* From India, too, or from 
 Persia, must have come the Shi'ism, of which traces are still 
 found in Java and Sumatra. From Ibn Batutah we learn that 
 the Muhammadan Sultan of Samudra had entered into friendly 
 relations with the court of Dehli, and among the learned doctors 
 of the law whom this devout prince especially favoured, there 
 were two of Persian origin, the one coming from Shiraz and the 
 other from Ispahan.^ But long before this time merchants from 
 the Deccan, through whose hands passed the trade between the 
 Mussalman states of India and the Malay Archipelago, had estab- 
 hshed themselves in large numbers in the trading ports of these 
 islands, where they sowed the seed of the new religion.^ 
 
 It is to the proselytising eflForts of these Arab and Indian 
 
 ^ Reinaud : Geographic d'Aboulf^da. Tome i. p. cccxxxix. 
 
 ^ vXcstte p^8^: ' '''" ^''^'■■'''- ^°- - pp- ^' 8°- 
 
 Ibn Batutah. Tome iv. p. 89. 
 Ibn Batutah. Tome iv. pp. 230, 234. 
 " Snouck Hurgronje (l), pp. 8-9. 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES IN THE ARCHIPELAGO. 295 
 
 merchants that the native Muhammadan population, which we 
 find already in the earliest historical notices of Islam in these 
 parts, owes its existence. Settling in the centres of commerce, 
 they intermarried with the people of the land, and these heathen 
 wives and the slaves of their households thus formed the nucleus 
 of a Muslim community which its members made every effort in 
 their power to increase. The following description of the methods 
 adopted by these merchant missionaries in the Philippine Islands, 
 gives a picture of what was no doubt the practice of many 
 preceding generations of Muhammadan. traders : — " The better 
 to introduce their religion into the country, the Muhammadans 
 adopted the language and many of the customs of the natives, married 
 their women, purchased slaves in order to increase their personal 
 importance, and succeeded finally in incorporating themselves 
 among the chiefs who held the foremost rank in the state. Since 
 they worked together with greater ability and harmony than the 
 natives, they gradually increased their power more and more, as 
 having numbers of slaves in their possession, they formed a kind 
 of confederacy among themselves and established a sort of 
 monarchy, which they made hereditary in one family. Though 
 such a confederacy gave them great power, yet they felt the 
 necessity of keeping on friendly terms with the old aristocracy, 
 and of ensuring their freedom to those classes whose support they 
 could not afford to dispense with." 1 It must have been in some 
 such way as this that the different Muhammadan settlements in 
 the Malay Archipelago laid a firm political and social basis for 
 their proselytising efforts. They did not come as conquerors, 
 like the Spanish in the sixteenth century, or use the sword as an 
 instrument of conversion ; nor did they arrogate to themselves 
 the privileges of a superior and dominant race so as to degrade 
 and oppress the original inhabitants, but coming simply in the 
 guise of traders they employed all their superior intelligence and 
 civilisation in the service of their religion, rather than as a means 
 towards their personal aggrandisement and the amassing of wealth.^ 
 With this general statement of the subsidiary means adopted by 
 them, let us follow in detail their proselytising efforts through 
 the various islands in turn. 
 
 ' Padre Gainza, quoted by C. Semper, p. 67. 
 ' Crawfurd (2), vol. ii. p. 265. 
 
296 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Sumatra. The nearest point of the Malay Archipelago to Arabia, where 
 consequently we should expect to find the first signs of Muham- 
 madan influence, is the north coast of Sumatra. According to 
 the Malay chronicles, Islam was first introduced into Atjih, on the 
 extreme north-west promontory of the island, about the middle of 
 the twelfth century, by an Arab missionary named ShayMi 
 'Abdu-llah 'Arif ; so successful was the propaganda he instituted 
 that by 11 77 the preaching of one of his disciples, Burhanu-d Din, 
 had carried the knowledge of the faith down the west coast as 
 far south as Priaman. There were doubtless many other 
 labourers in the same field, of whom no record has come down to 
 us ; but the name of one Johan (? Jahan) Shah, has been handed 
 down as the traditionary founder of the Muhammadan dynasty of 
 Atjih : he is said to have been a stranger from the West, who 
 came to these shores to preach the faith of the Prophet : here 
 he made many proselytes, married a wife from among the inha- 
 bitants of the country and was hailed by them as their king, under 
 the half-Sanskrit, half- Arabic title of Sri Paduka Sultan.i 
 
 It seems very possible that the success of this mission was 
 short-lived and that the work was not continued, since Marco 
 Polo, who spent five months on the north coast of Sumatra in 
 1292, speaks of all the inhabitants being idolaters, except in the 
 petty kingdom of Parlak on the north-east corner of the island, 
 where, too, only the townspeople were Muhammadans, for " this 
 kingdom, you must know, is so much frequented by the Saracen 
 merchants that they have converted the natives to the Law of 
 Mahomet," but the hill-people were all idolaters and cannibals." 
 Further, one of the Malay chronicles says that it was Sultan 
 'All Mughayyat Shah who reigned over Atjih from 1507 to 1522, 
 who first set the example of embracing Islam, in which he was 
 followed by his subjects.^ But it is not improbable that the 
 honour of being the first Muslim ruler of the state, has been 
 here attributed as an added glory to the monarch who founded 
 the greatness of Atjih and began to extend its sway over the 
 neighbouring country, and that he rather effected a revival of, 
 or imparted a fresh impulse to, the religious life of his subjects 
 than gave to them their first knowledge of the faith of the 
 
 ' De Hollander, vol. i. p. 581. Veth (i), p. 60. 
 
 * Yule's Marcc Polo, vol. ii. p. 227. 8 Veth d") n 61 
 
SUMATRA. 297 
 
 Prophet. For Islam had certainly set firm foot in Sumatra long 
 before his time. 
 
 In the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Sharif of 
 Mecca sent a mission to convert the people of Sumatra. The 
 leader of the party was a certain Shaykh Isma'il : the first 
 place on the island at which they touched, after leaving Malabar, 
 was Pasuri (probably situated a little way down the west coast), 
 the people of which were persuaded by their preaching to 
 embrace Islam. They then proceeded northward to Lambri and 
 then coasted round to the other side of the island and sailed 
 as for down the east coast as Aru, nearly opposite Malacca, and 
 in both of these places their efforts were crowned with a 
 like success. At Aru they made inquiries for Samudra, a 
 city on the north coast of the island which seems to have been 
 the special object of their mission, and found that they had passed 
 it. Accordingly they retraced their course to Parlak, where 
 Marco Polo had found a Muhammadan community a few 
 years before, and having gained fresh converts here also, they 
 went on to Samudra. This city and the kingdom of the same 
 name had lately been founded by a certain Mara Silu, who was 
 persuaded by Shaykh Isma'il to embrace Islam, and took the 
 name of Maliku-s Salih. He married the daughter of the king of 
 Parlak, by whom he had two sons, and in order to have a princi- 
 pality to leave to each, he founded the Muhammadan city and 
 kingdom of Pasei, also on the north coast. ^ When Ibn Batutah 
 visited the island in 134S, he found the elder of these sons, 
 Maliku-z Zahir, reigning at Samudra. This prince displayed all 
 the state of Muhammadan royalty, and his dominions extended 
 for many days' journey along the coast ; he was a zealous and 
 orthodox Muslim, fond of holding discussions with jurisconsults 
 and theologians, and his court was frequented by poets and men 
 of learning. Ibn Batutah gives us the names of two jurisconsults 
 who had come thither from Persia and also of a noble who had 
 gone on an embassy to Delhi on behalf of the king — which shows 
 that Sumatra was already in touch with several parts of the 
 Muhammadan world. Maliku-? Zahir was also a great general, 
 and made war on the heathen of the surrounding country until 
 they submitted to his rule and paid tribute.^ 
 
 ' Yule's Marco Polo, vol. ii. pp. 237, 245. 
 " Ibn Batutah. Tome iv. pp. 230-6. 
 
298 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Islam had undoubtedly by this time made great progress in 
 Sumatra and after having established itself along the coast, began 
 to make its way inland. The mission of Shaykh Isma'il and his 
 party had borne fruit abundantly, for a Chinese traveller who 
 visited the island in 141 3, speaks of Lambri as having a popula- 
 tion of 1000 families, all of whom were Muslims " and very good 
 people," while the king and people of the kingdom of Aru were 
 all of the same faith.i It was either about the close of the same 
 century or in the fifteenth century, that the religion of the 
 Prophet found adherents in the great kingdom of Menangkabau, 
 whose territory at one time extended from one shore to another, 
 and over a great part of the island, N. and S. of the 
 equator.^ Though its power had by this time much declined, 
 still as an ancient stronghold of Hinduism, it presented great 
 obstacles in the way of the progress of the new religion. 
 Despite this fact, Islam eventually took firmer root among the 
 subjects of this kingdom than among the majority of the inha- 
 bitants of the interior of the island.' It is very remarkable that 
 this the most central people of the island should have been more 
 thoroughly converted than the inhabitants of so many other 
 districts that were more accessible to foreign influences. To the 
 present day, the inhabitants of the Batta country are still heathen, 
 with some few exceptions, e.g., some living on the borders of 
 Atjih have been converted, by their Muhammadan neighbours,* 
 others dwelling in the mountains of the Rau country on the 
 equator have likewise become Musalmans ^ ; on the east coast also 
 conversions of Battas who come much in contact with Malays, 
 are not uncommon.^ In Central Sumatra there is still a large 
 heathen population, though the majority of the inhabitants are 
 Muslims ; but even these latter are very ignorant of their reli- 
 gion, with the exception of a few hajis and religious teachers : 
 even among the people of Korintji who are for the most part zealous 
 adherents of the faith, there are certain sections of the popula- 
 
 * Groeneveldt, p. 94. 
 
 ^ At the height of its power, it stretched from 2° N. to 2° S. on the west coast, 
 rnd from 1° N. to 2° S. on the east coast, but in the sixteenth century it had lost 
 its control over the east coast. (De Hollander, vol. i. p. 3.) 
 
 » Marsden, p. 343. " J. H. Moor. (Appendix, p. I.) 
 
 ^ Marsden, p. 355. 
 
 " Godsdienstige verschijnselen en toestanden in Oost-Indie. (Uit de koloniale 
 verslagen van 1886 en 1887.) Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, vol. xxxii. pp. 175.6. 
 (18SS.) 
 
SUMATRA. 299 
 
 tjon who still worship the gods of their pagan ancestors.'' 
 ■ Eiforts are, however, being made towards a religious revival and 
 the Muslim missionaries are making fresh conquests from among 
 the heathen, especially along the west coast.^ In the district of 
 Sipirok a religious teacher attached to the mosque in the town of 
 the same name has, in a quarter of a century, converted the 
 whole population of this district to Islam, with the exception of 
 the Christians who are to be found there, mostly descendants 
 
 I of former slaves.^ 
 
 The introduction of Islam into Palembang is so closely con- 
 nected with the history of Java, that it will be more proper to 
 speak of it when we give an account of that island. It was from 
 JavathatJslam^.was,£rst.Jijro«ght''^Ht<»^th«"L^ 
 that fcrmthe southern extremity of Suro^tra. by a chieftain of 
 these districts, named Minak Kamala Bumi. About the end of 
 tmrfflreentn century, he crossed over the Strait of ,Simda, to the 
 
 I kingflOiflWBariteh on the west coast of Java, whichbad accepted 
 thSf^cmngs of the Muslim missionaries a few years befgre the 
 dulwiof his 'Vi!lit"7"fi^e 'Re "too embraced Islam, and after making 
 tht pllg'l'Ma'ge'°to' Mecca^^ spread ^^the kaowledge of his -newly 
 ^i!^PV^^S^.^mioxig,'bJsSdlaw.T.cQURtJLymsn,* This religion has 
 made considerableprogress among the Lampongs, and most of 
 their vuiages Tia;ye.. mosques in them, but the old superstitions 
 stui linger on in parts of the interior.' 
 In tHFe'af ly part of this century a religious revival was set on 
 
 • foot in Sumatra, which was not without its influence in promot- 
 ing the further propagation of Islam. In 1 803 three Sumatran 
 hajis returned from Mecca to their native country : during their 
 stay in the holy city they had been profoundly influenced by the 
 Wahhabi movement for the reformation of Islam, and were now 
 eager to introduce the same reforms among their fellow-country- 
 men and to stir up in them a purer and more zealous religious 
 life. Accordingly they began to preach the strict monotheism 
 of the 'Wahhabi sect, forbade prayers to saints, drinking and 
 gambling and all other practices contrary to the law of the 
 
 ' A. L. van Hassalt, pp. 55, 68. 
 ' Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, id. p. 173. 
 
 ' Uit het Koloniaal verslag van 1889, (Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, vol. xxxir. 
 p. I68.) (1890.) 
 * Canne, p. 510. ' Marsden, p. 301. 
 
3O0 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Qur'an. They made a number of proselytes both from among 
 their co-religionists and the heathen population. They later 
 declared a Jihad against the Battas, and in the hands of unscrupu- 
 lous and ambitious men the movement lost its original character 
 and degenerated into a savage and bloody war of conquest. In 
 1 82 1 these so-called Padris came into conflict with the Dutch 
 Government and it was not until 1838 that their last stronghold 
 was taken and their power broken.^ 
 P "nfnsula AJ^JiiS-SiaUssliMi^ pf Ja^e«.^Ialay,J^e^i]B§ulaJJas^^ 
 originjto jnjgr2itio.nft.,#.ftffl^Wi»t«a, esp&ciaUyjfeiatagMigfta ngkahau, 
 
 tKe famous kingdom ,in(;ctti0W!d.,abQVe,. which is. said TafcgS&iime 
 ttrtrave'teen the most powerful Qa ths.;idaB,^4s,§/B«?^iiUJlgjto'^ 
 of tile interior states of the southern part of the Malay Peninsula 
 still receive their investiture from this place. At what period 
 these colonies from the heart of Sumatra settled in the interior 
 of the Peninsula, is matter of conjecture, but Singapore and the 
 southern extremity of the Peninsula seem to have received a 
 I colony in the middle of the twelfth century, by the descendants 
 i of which Malacca was founded about a century later .* From its 
 ', advantageous situation in the highway of eastern commerce it 
 \ soon became a large and flourishing city, and there is little doubt 
 \ but that Islam was introduced by the Muhammadan merchants 
 \ who settled here.' The Malay Chronicle of Malacca assigns the 
 't. conversion of this kingdom to the reign of a certain Sultan 
 Muhammad Shah who came to the throne in 1276. But the 
 general character of this document makes its trustworthiness ex- 
 ceedingly doubtful,* in spite of the likelihood that the date of so 
 important an event would have been exactly noted (as was done 
 in many parts of the Archipelago) by a people who, proud of the 
 event, would look upon it as opening a new epoch in their 
 history. A Portuguese historian gives a much later date, namely 
 1388, in which year, he says, a Qadi came from Arabia and having 
 converted the king, gave him the name of Muhammad after the 
 Prophet, adding Shah to it.'' 
 
 In the annals of Queda, one of the northernmost of the states 
 
 • Niemann, pp. 356-9. " J, H. Moor, p. 255. 
 
 ^ " Estes de induzidos por os Mouros Parseos, e Guzarates, (que alii vieram residir 
 por causa do commercio,) de Gentios os converteram a secta de Mahamed. Da 
 qual conversao por alii concorrerem varias na(joes, comeyou lavrar esta infernl 
 peste pela virzinhanQa de Malaca." (De Barros. Dec. ii. Liv. vi. Cap. i. p. 15.) 
 
 ■* Crawfurd (l), pp. 241-2. '' De Barros, Dec. iv. Liv. ii. Cap. 1. 
 
MALAY PENINSULA. 301 
 
 of the Malay Peninsula, we have a curious account of the intro- 
 duction of Islam into this kingdom, about a.d. 1501,1 which 
 (divested of certain miraculous incidents) is as follows : A learned 
 Arab, by name Shay^ 'Abdu-llah, having come to Queda, visited 
 the Raja and inquired what was the religion of the country. 
 " My religion," replied the Raja, " and that of all my subjects is 
 that which has been handed down to us by the people of old. 
 We all worship idols." " Then has your highness never heard 
 of Islam, and of the Qur'an which descended from God to 
 Muhammad, and has superseded all other religions, leaving them 
 in the possession of the devil ? " "I pray you then, if this be 
 true," said the Raja, " to instruct and enlighten us in this new 
 faith." In a transport of holy fervour at this request, Shay^ 
 'Abdu-llah embraced the Raja and then instructed him in the 
 creed. Persuaded by his teaching, the Raja sent for all his jars 
 of spirits (to which he was much addicted), and with his own 
 hands emptied them on the ground. After this he had all the 
 idols of the palace brought out ; the idols of gold, and silver, and 
 clay, and wood were all heaped up in his presence, and were all 
 broken and cut to pieces by Shay^ 'Abdu-llah with his sword 
 and with an axe, and the fragments consumed in the fire. 
 
 The Shaykh asked the Raja to assemble all his women of the 
 fort and palace. When they all had come into the presence of the 
 Raja and the Shay^, they were initiated into the doctrines of 
 Islam. The ShayHi was mild and courteous in his demeanour, 
 persuasive and soft in his language, so that he gained the hearts 
 of the inmates of the palace. 
 
 The Raja soon after sent for his four aged ministers, who, on 
 entering the hall, were surprised at seeing a Shay^ seated near 
 the Raja. The Raja explained to them the object of the ShayJ^'s 
 coming ; whereupon the four chiefs expressed their readiness to 
 follow the example of his highness, saying, " We hope that Shayli 
 'Abdu-llah will instruct us also." The latter hearing these words, 
 embraced the four ministers and said that he hoped that, to prove 
 their sincerity, they would send for all the people to come to the 
 audience hall, bringing with them all the idols that they were 
 wont to worship and the idols that had been handed down by the 
 
 ■ Barbosa, writing in 1516, speaks of the numerous Muhammadan merchants 
 that frequented the port of Queda. (Ramusio. Tom. i. p. 317-) 
 
302 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 men of former days. The request was complied with and all the 
 idols kept by the people were at that very time brought down 
 and there destroyed and burnt to dust ; no one was sorry at this 
 demolition of their false gods, all were glad to enter the pale of 
 Islam. 
 
 Shayjkii 'Abdu-llah after this said to the four ministers, " What 
 is the name of your prince ? " They repUed, " His name is 
 Pra Ong Mahawangsa." " Let us change it for one in the 
 language of Islam," said the Shay^. After some consultation, 
 the I name of the Raja was changed at his request to Sultan 
 Muzlafu-1 Shah, becausCj the Shay^i averred, it is a celebrated 
 name and is found in the Qur'an.i 
 
 The Raja now built mosques wherever the population was 
 considerable, and directed that to each there should be attached 
 forty-four of the inhabitants at least as a settled congregation, for 
 a less number would have been few for the duties of religion. So 
 mosques were erected and great drums were attached to them to 
 be beaten to call the people to prayer on Fridays. ShayVT^ 'Abdu- 
 llah continued for some time to instruct the people in the 
 religion of Islam ; they flocked to him from all the coasts and 
 districts of Queda and its vicinity, and were initiated by him into 
 its forms and ceremonies. 
 
 The news of the conversion of the inhabitants of Queda by 
 ShayMi 'Abdu-llah reached Atjih, and the Sultan of that countrj' 
 and a certain Shay]^ Nuru-d Din, an Arab missionary, who had 
 come from Mecca, sent some books and a letter, which ran as 
 follows : — " This letter is from the Sultan of Atjih and Nuru-d 
 Din to our brother the Sultan of Queda and ShayHi 'Abdu-llah 
 of Yaman, now in Queda. We have sent two religious books, in 
 order that the faith of Islam may be firmly established and the 
 people fully instructed in their duties and in the rites of the 
 faith." A letter was sent in reply by the Raja and ShayJi 
 'Abdu-llah, thanking the donors. So ShayH^ 'Abdu-llah re- 
 doubled his efforts, and erected additional small mosques in all 
 the different villages for general convenience, and instructed the 
 people in all the rules and observances of the faith. 
 
 '■ The form J;., does not actually occur in the Qur'an ; reference is probably 
 made to some such passage as xxvi. 90 : (jj-S^ i-;V I c^ijjlj "And paradise 
 shall be brought near the pions." 
 
MALAY PENINSULA. 303 
 
 The Raja and his wife were constantly with the Shay^, learning 
 to read the Qur'an. The royal pair searched also for some maiden 
 of the lineage of the Raja's of the country, to be the Shay^'s 
 wife. But no one could be found who was willing to give his 
 daughter thus in marriage because the holy man was about to 
 return to Baghdad, and only waited until he had sufficiently 
 instructed some person to supply his place. 
 
 Now at this time the Sultan had three sons, Raja Mu'azzim 
 Shah, Raja Muhammad Shah, and Raja Sulayman Shah. These 
 names had been borrowed from the Qur'an by ShayJ^ 'Abdu-llah 
 and bestowed upon the princes, whom he exhorted to be patient 
 and slow to anger in their intercourse with their slaves and the 
 lower orders, and to regard with pity all the slaves of God, and the 
 poor and needy .^^ 
 
 It must not be supposed that the labours of ShaylA, 'Abdu-llah 
 were crowned with complete success, for we learn from the 
 annals of Atjih that a Sultan of this country who conquered 
 Queda in 1649, set himself to " more firmly establish the faith 
 and destroy the houses of the Liar " or temples of idols.^ Thus a 
 century and a half elapsed before idolatry was completely rooted 
 out. 
 
 We possess no other details of the history of the conversion of 
 the Malays of the Peninsula, but in many places the graves of the 
 Arab missionaries who first preached the faith to them, are 
 honoured by these people.^ Their long intercourse with the 
 Arabs and the Muslims of the East coast of India has made them 
 very rigid observers of their religious duties, and they have the 
 reputation of being the most exemplary Muhammadans of the 
 Archipelago ; at the same time their constant contact with the 
 Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and pagans of their own country 
 has made them liberal and tolerant. They are very strict in 
 the keeping of the fast of Ramadan and in performing the 
 pilgrimage to Mecca. The religious interests of the people are 
 always considered at the same time as their temporal welfare ; 
 and when a village is found to contain more than forty houses 
 and is considered to be of a size that necessitates its organisation 
 and the appointment of the regular village officers, a public 
 
 ' A translation of the Keddah annals, by Lieut.-Col. James Low, vol. iii. 
 pp. 4.74.-4.77. 
 'Id p. 480. ' Newbold, vol. i. p. 252. 
 
304 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 preacher is always included among the number and a mosque is 
 formally built and instituted. ^ 
 
 In the North where the Malay states border on Siam, Islam has 
 exercised considerable influence on the Siamese Buddhists ; those 
 who have here been converted are called Samsams and speak a 
 language that is a mixed jargon of the languages of the two 
 people.2 Converts are also made from among the wild tribes of 
 the Peninsula.^ 
 j;i\a. We must now go back several centuries in order to follow 
 out the history of the conversion of Java. The preaching and 
 promulgation of the doctrines of Islam in this island were 
 undoubtedly for a long time entirely the result of the labours 
 of individual mercharits or of the leaders of small colonies, for 
 in Java there was no central Muhammadan power to throw 
 in its influence on the side of the new religion or enforce the 
 acceptance of it by warlike means. On the contrary, the Muslim 
 missionaries came in contact with a Hindu civilisation, that had 
 thrust its roots deep into the life of the country and had raised 
 the Javanese to a high level of culture and progress — expressing 
 itself moreover in institutions and laws radically different to those 
 of Arabia. Even up to the present day, the Muhammadan law 
 has failed to establish itself absolutely, even where the authority 
 of Islam is generally predominant, and there is still a constant 
 struggle between the adherents of the old Malayan usages and 
 the Hajis, who having made the pilgrimage to Mecca, return 
 enthusiastic for a strict observance of Muslim Law. Conse- 
 quently the work of conversion must have proceeded very 
 slowly, and we can say with tolerable certainty that while part 
 of the history of this proselytising movement may be disentangled 
 from legends and traditions, much of it must remain wholly 
 unknown to us. In the Malay Chronicle which purports to give 
 us an account of the first preachers of the faith, what was 
 undoubtedly the work of many generations and must have been 
 carried on through many centuries, is compressed within the 
 compass of a few years ; and, as frequently happens in popular 
 histories, a few well-known names gain the fame and credit 
 that belongs of right to the patient labours of their unknown 
 predecessors.* Further, the quiet, unobtrusive labours of many 
 
 ' McNair, pp. 226-9. ' J. H. Moor, p. 242. 
 
 ^ Newbold, vol. ii. pp. 106, 396. ♦ Snouck Hurgronje (l), p. 9. 
 
JAVA. 305 
 
 of these missionaries would not be likely to attract the notice 
 of the chronicler, whose attention would naturally be fixed rather 
 on the doings of kings and princes, and of those who came in 
 close relationship to them. But failing such larger knowledge, 
 we must fain be content with the facts that have been handed 
 down to us. 
 
 in the following pages, therefore, it is proposed to give a brief, 
 sketch of the establishment of the Muhammadan religion in this 
 island, as presented in the native chronicle, which, though full of 
 contradictions and fables, has undoubtedly a historical foundation, i 
 as is attested by the inscriptions on the tombs of the chief \^ 
 personages mentioned and the remains of ancient cities, etc. The 
 following account therefore may, in the want of any other 
 authorities, be accepted as substantially correct, with the caution 
 above mentioned against ascribing too much efficacy to the 
 proselytising efforts of individuals. 
 
 The first attempt to introduce Islam into Java was made by a 
 native of the island about the close of the twelfth century. The 
 first king of Pajajaran, a state in the western part of the island, 
 left two sons ; of these, the elder chose to follow the profession of 
 a merchant and undertook a trading expedition to India, leaving 
 the kingdom to his younger brother, who succeeded to the throne 
 in the year 1190 with the title of Prabu Munding Sari. In the 
 course of his wanderings, the elder brother fell in with some Arab 
 merchants, and was by them converted to Islam, taking the name 
 of Haji Purwa. 
 
 On his return to his native country, he tried with the help of an 
 Arab missionary to convert his brother and the royal family to his 
 new faith ; but, his efforts proving unsuccessful, he fled into the 
 jungle for fear of the king and his unbelieving subjects, and we 
 hear no more of him.i 
 
 In the latter half of the fourteenth century, a missionary move- 
 ment, which was attended with greater success, was instituted by 
 a certain Mawlana Malik Ibrahim, who landed on the east coast of 
 Java with some of his co-religionists, and established himself near 
 the town of Gresik, opposite the island of Madura. He is said to 
 have traced his descent to Zaynu-1 ' Abidin, a great-grandson of 
 
 Veth (3). vol. ii. p. 143- 
 
 Raffles (ed. of 1830), vol. n. pp. 103, 104, 183. 
 
3o6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the Prophet, and to have been cousin of the Raja of Chermen.i 
 Here he occupied himself successfully in the work of conversion, 
 and speedily gathered a small band of believers around him. 
 Later on, he was joined by his cousin, the Raja of Chermen, who 
 came in the hope of converting the Raja of the Hindu Kingdom 
 of Majapahit, and of forming an alliance with him by offering his 
 daughter in marriage. On his arrival he sent his son to Majapahit 
 to arrange an interview, while he busied himself in the building of 
 a mosque and the conversion of the inhabitants. A meeting of 
 the two princes took place accordingly, but before the favourable 
 impression then produced could be followed up, a sickness broke 
 out among the people of the Raja of Chermen, which carried off 
 his daughter, three of his nephews who had accompanied him, 
 and a great part of his retinue ; whereupon he himself returned 
 to his own kingdom. These misfortunes prejudiced the mind of 
 the Raja of Majapahit against the new faith, which he said should 
 have better protected its votaries : and the mission accordingly 
 failed, Mawlana Ibrahim however remained behind, in charge of 
 the tombs 3 of his kinsfolk and co-religionists, and himself died 
 twenty-one years later, in 141 9, and was buried at Gresik, where 
 his tomb is still venerated as that of the first apostle of Islam to 
 Java. 
 
 A Chinese Musalman, who accompanied the envoy of the 
 Emperor of China to Java in the capacity of interpreter, six years 
 before the death of Mawlana Ibrahim, i.e. in 141 3, mentions the 
 presence of his co-religionists in this island in his " General 
 Account of the Shores of the Ocean," where he says, " In this 
 country there are three kinds of people. First the Muhammadans, 
 who have come from the west, and have established themselves 
 here ; their dress and food is clean and proper ; second, the 
 Chinese who have run away and settled here ; what they eat and 
 use is also very fine, and many of them have adopted the Muham- 
 madan religion and observe its precepts. The third kind are the 
 natives, who are very ugly and uncouth, they go about with un- 
 combed heads and naked feet, and believe devoutly in devils. 
 
 ' The situation of Chermen is not known. Veth (3), vol. ii. p. 184, conjectures 
 that it raay have been in India. 
 
 ^ A description of the present condition of these tombs, on one of which 
 traces of an inscription in Arabic characters are still visible, is given by 
 ]. F. G. Brumund, p. 185. 
 
JAVA. 307 
 
 theirs being one of the countries called devil-countries in 
 Buddhist books." 1 
 
 We now approach the period in which the rule of the Muham- 
 madans became predominant in the island, after their religion 
 had been introduced into it for nearly a century ; and here it will 
 be necessary to enter a little more closely into the details of the 
 history in order to show that this was not the result of any 
 fanatical movement stirred up by the Arabs, but rather of a 
 revolution carried out by the natives of the country themselves,^ 
 who (though they naturally gained strength from the bond of a 
 common faith) were stirred up to unite in order to wrest the 
 supreme power from the hands of their heathen fellow-country- 
 men, not by the preaching of a religious war, but through the 
 exhortations of an ambitious aspirant to the throne who had a 
 wrong to avenge.* 
 
 The political condition of the island may be described as 
 follows : — The central and eastern provinces of the island, which 
 were the most wealthy and populous and the furthest advanced 
 in civilisation, were under the sway of the Hindu kingdom of 
 Majapahit. Further west were Cheribon and several other petty 
 independent princedoms ; while the rest of the island, including 
 all the districts at its western extremity, was subject to the King 
 of Pajajaran. 
 
 The King of Majapahit had married a daughter of the prince 
 of Champa, a small state in Cambodia, east of the Gulf of Siam. 
 She being jealous of a favourite concubine of the King, he sent 
 this concubine away to his son Aria Damar, governor of Palem- 
 bang in Sumatra, where she gave birth to a son, Raden Fatah, 
 who was brought up as one of the governor's own children. 
 This child (as we shall see) was destined in after years to work a 
 terrible vengeance for the cruel treatment of his mother. 
 Another daughter of the prince of Champa had married an Arab 
 who had come to Champa to preach the faith of Islam.* From 
 this union was born Raden Rahmat, who was carefully brought 
 up by his father in the Muhammadan religion and is still vener- 
 
 ■ Groeneveldt, pp. vii. 49-50. 
 ^ Kern, p. 21. 
 
 » Veth (3), vol. ii. pp. 186-198. Raffles, vol. 11. pp. 1 13-133- 
 ■* Remains of minarets and Muhammadan tombs are still to be found in Cliampa. 
 (Bastian, vol. i. pp. 498-9-) 
 
 X 2 
 
3o8 
 
 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 ated by the Javanese as the chief apostle of Islam to their 
 
 country.! 
 
 When he reached the age of twenty, his parents sent him with 
 letters and presents to his uncle, the King of Majapahit. On his 
 way, he stayed for two months at Palembang, as the guest of 
 Damar whom he almost persuaded to become a Musalman, only 
 he dared not openly profess it for fear of the people who were 
 so strongly attached to their ancient superstitions. Continuing 
 his journey Raden Rahmat came to Gresik, where an Arab 
 missionary, ShayWi Mawlana Jamada-1 Kubra, hailed him as the 
 promised Apostle of Islam to East Java, and foretold that the fall 
 of paganism was at hand, and that his labours would be crowned by 
 the conversion of many to the faith. At Majapahit he was very 
 kindly received by the King and the princess of Champa. 
 Although the King was unwilling himself to become a convert to 
 Islam, yet he conceived such an attachment and respect for 
 Raden Rahmat, that he made him governor over 3000 families at 
 Ampel, on the east coast, a little south of Gresik, allowed him 
 the free exercise of his religion and gave him permission to make 
 converts. Here after some time he gained over most of those 
 placed under him, to Islam. 
 
 Ampel was now the chief seat of Islam in Java, and the fame 
 of the ruler who was so zealously working for the propagation of 
 his religion, spread far and wide. Hereupon a certain Mawlana 
 Ishaq came to Ampel to assist him in the work of conversion, 
 and was assigned the task of spreading the faith in the kingdom 
 
 ' This genealogical table will make clear these relationships, as well as others 
 referred to later in the text : — 
 
 King of Champa. 
 I 
 
 a daughter a daughter=an Arab missionary, 
 
 named 
 A concubine = Angka Wijaya, =Darawati 
 King of Majapahit. 
 
 Aria Damar. 
 
 I Raden Rahmat. 
 
 Raden Husayn. I 
 
 Raden Patah = a dautrhter. 
 
 a daughters Raden 
 Paku. 
 
JAVA. 309 
 
 of Balambangan, in the extreme eastern extremity of the island. 
 Here he cured the daughter of the King, who was grievously sick, 
 and the grateful father gave her to him in marriage. She 
 ardently embraced the faith of Islam and her father allowed him- 
 self to receive instruction in the same, but when the Mawlana, 
 urged him to openly profess it, as he had promised to do, if his 
 daughter were cured, he drove him from his kingdom, and gave 
 orders that the child that was soon to be born of his daughter, 
 should be killed. But the mother secretly sent the infant away 
 to Gresik to a rich Muhammadan widow ^ who brought him up 
 with all a mother's care and educated him until he was twelve 
 years old, when she entrusted him to Raden Rahmat. He, after 
 learning the history of the child, gave him the name of Raden 
 Paku, and in course of time gave him also his daughter in 
 marriage. Raden Paku afterwards built a mosque at Giri, to the 
 south-west of Gresik, where he converted thousands to the faith ; 
 his influence became so great, that after the death of Raden 
 Rahmat, the King of Majapahit made him governor of Ampel 
 and Gresik.^ Meanwhile several missions were instituted from 
 Gresik. Two sons of Raden Rahmat established themselves at 
 different parts of the north-east coast and made themselves 
 famous by their religious zeal and the conversion of many of the 
 inhabitants of those parts. Raden Rahmat also sent a missionary, 
 by name Shaykh Khalifah Husayn, across to the neighbouring 
 island of Madura, where he built a mosque and won over many 
 to the faith. 
 
 In the Western provinces, the work of conversion was being 
 carried on by Shay^ Nuru-d Din Ibrahim, who after many 
 wanderings in the Archipelago, at length in 141 2 settled in 
 Cheribon. Here he gained a great reputation by the cure of a 
 woman afflicted with leprosy, and thousands came to him to be 
 instructed in the tenets of the new religion. At first the 
 neighbouring chiefs tried to set themselves against the movement, 
 but finding that their opposition was of no avail, they suffered 
 themselves to be carried along with the tide and many of them 
 became converts to the faith. 
 
 We must return now to Aria Damar, the governor of Palem- 
 
 ' The memory of this woman is held in great honour by the Javanese, and 
 many come to pray by her grave. See Brumund, p. 186. 
 ^ Veth (3), vol. ii. pp. 188-190. 
 
310 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 bang. (See p. 307.) He appears to have brought up his children 
 in the rehgion which he himself feared openly to profess, and he 
 now sent Raden Patah, when he had reached the age of twenty, 
 together with his foster brother, Raden Husayn, who was two 
 years younger, to Java, where they landed at Gresik. Raden 
 Patah, aware of his extraction and enraged at the cruel treatment 
 his mother had received, refused to accompany his foster brother 
 to Majapahit, but stayed with Raden Rahmat at Ampel while 
 Raden Husayn went on to the capital, where he was well received 
 and placed in charge of a district and afterwards made general of 
 the army. 
 
 Meanwhile Raden Patah married a granddaughter of Raden 
 Rahmat, and formed an establishment in a place of great natural 
 strength called Bintara, in the centre of a marshy country, to the 
 west of Gresik. As soon as the King of Majapahit heard of this 
 new settlement, he sent Raden Husayn to his brother with 
 orders to destroy it unless its founder would come to the capital 
 and pay homage. This Raden Husayn prevailed upon him to do, 
 and he went to the court, where his likeness to the king was at 
 once recognised, and where he was kindly received and formally 
 appointed governor of Bintara. Still burning for revenge and 
 bent on the destruction of his father's kingdom, he returned to 
 Ampel where he revealed his plans to Raden Rahmat. The 
 latter endeavoured to moderate his anger, reminding him that he 
 had never received anything but kindness at the hands of the 
 king of Majapahit, his father, and that while the prince was so 
 just and so beloved, his religion forbade him to make war upon 
 or in any way to injure him. However, unpersuaded by these 
 exhortations (as the sequel shows), Raden Patah returned to 
 Bintara, which was now daily increasing in importance and 
 population, while great numbers of people in the surrounding 
 country were being converted to Islam. He had formed a plan 
 of building a great mosque, but shortly after the work had been 
 commenced, news arrived of the severe illness of Raden Rahmat. 
 He hastened to Ampel, where he found the chief missionaries 
 of Islam, gathered round the bed of him they looked upon 
 as their leader. Among them were the two sons of Raden 
 Rahmat mentioned above (p. 309), Raden Paku of Giri, and five 
 others. A few days afterwards Raden Rahmat breathed his last, 
 and the only remaining obstacle to Raden Patah's revengeful 
 
JAVA. 3„ 
 
 schemes was thus removed. The eight chiefs accompanied him 
 back to Bintara, where they assisted in the completion of the 
 mosque,! and bound themselves by a solemn oath to assist him 
 in his attempt against Majapahit. All the Muhammadan princes 
 joined this confederacy, with the exception of Raden Husayn, 
 who with all his followers remained true to his master, and 
 refused to throw in his lot with his rebellious co-religionists. 
 
 A lengthy campaign followed, into the details of which we 
 need not enter, but in 1478 after a desperate battle which lasted 
 seven days, Majapahit fell and the Hindu supremacy in Eastern 
 Java was replaced by a Muhammadan power. A short time after, 
 Raden Husayn was besieged with his followers in a fortified 
 place and compelled to surrender and brought to Ampel, where 
 he was kindly received by his brother. A large number of those 
 who remained faithful to the old Hindu religion fled in 1481 to 
 the island of Bali, where the worship of Siva is still the prevailing 
 religion.2 Others seem to have formed small kingdoms, under the 
 leadership of princes of the house of Majapahit, which remained 
 heathen for some time after the fall of the great Hindu capital. 
 
 While these events were transpiring in the Eastern parts 
 of the island, the missionaries of Islam were not idle in the 
 West. ShaylA Nuru-d Din Ibrahim of Cheribon sent his son, 
 Mawlana Hasanu-d Din, to preach the faith of Islam in Banten, 
 the most westerly province of the island, and a dependency of 
 the heathen kingdom of Pajajaran. Here his efforts were 
 attended with considerable Success, among the converts being a 
 body of ascetics, 800 in number. It is especially mentioned in 
 the annals of this part of the country that the young prince won 
 
 ' This mosque is still standing and is looked upon by the Javanese as one of the 
 most sacred objects in their island. 
 
 ' The people of Bali to the present day have resisted the most zealous efforts of 
 the Muharamadans to induce them to accept the faith of Islam, though from time 
 to time conversions have been made and a small native Muhammadan community 
 has been formed, numbering about 3000 souls out of a population of over 862 
 thousand. The favourable situaiion ol the island for purposes of trade has always 
 attracted a number of foreigners to its shores, who have in many cases taken up a 
 permanent residence in the island. While some of these settlers have always held 
 themselves aloof from the natives of the country, others have formed matrimonial 
 alliances with them and have consequently become merged into the mass of the 
 population. It is owing to the efforts of the latter, that Islam has made this very 
 slow but sure progress, and the Muhammadans of Bali are said to form an 
 energetic and flourishing community, full of zeal for the promotion of their faith, 
 which at least impresses their pagan neighbours, though not successful in persuad- 
 ihg them to deny their favourue food of swine's flesh for the sake of the worship 
 of Allah. (Liefrinck, pp. 241-3.) 
 
312 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 over those whom he converted to Islam, solely by the gentle 
 means of persuasion, and not by the sword.i He afterwards 
 went with his father on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and on his return 
 assisted Raden Patah in his attack on Majapahit. 
 
 But the progress of Islam in the West of Java seems to have 
 been much slower than in the East ; a long struggle ensued 
 between the worshippers of Siva and the followers of the 
 Prophet, and it was not probably until the middle of the next 
 century that the Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran, which in one period 
 of the history of Java seems to have exercised suzerainty over 
 the princedoms in the western part of the island, came to an end,' 
 while other smaller heathen communities survived to a much 
 later period,^ — some even to the present day. The history of 
 one of these — the so-called Baduwis — is of especial interest ; they 
 are the descendants of the adherents of the old religion, who 
 after the fall of Pajajaran fled into the woods and the recesses of 
 the mountains, where they might uninterruptedly carry out the 
 observances of their ancestral faith. In later times when they 
 submitted to the rule of the Musalman Sultan of Banten, they 
 were allowed to continue in the exercise of their religion, on 
 condition that no increase should be allowed in the numbers of 
 those who professed this idolatrous faith*; and strange to say, 
 they still observe this custom although the Dutch rule has been 
 so long established in Java, and sets them free from the necessity 
 of obedience to this ancient agreement. They strictly limit their 
 number to forty households, and when the community increases 
 beyond this limit, one family or more has to leave this inner 
 circle and settle among the Muhammadan population in one of 
 the surrounding villages.^ 
 
 But, though the work of conversion in the West of Java pro- 
 ceeded more slowly than in the other parts of the island, yet, 
 owing largely to the fact that Hinduism had not taken such deep 
 root among the people here, as in the centre of the island, the 
 victory of Islam over the heathen worship which it supplanted 
 was more complete than in the districts which came more im- 
 mediately under the rule of the Rajas of Majapahit. The 
 
 ' Raffles, vol. ii. p. 316. ^ Veth (3), vol. ii. pp. 257, 270. 
 
 A traveller in Java in 1596 mentions two or three heathen kingdoms with a 
 large heathen population. Niemann, p. 342. 
 * Raffles, vol. ii. p. 132-3. ' Metzger, p. 279. 
 
JAVA. 313 
 
 Muhammpdan law is here a living force and the civilisation 
 brought into the country from Arabia has interwoven itself with 
 the government and the life of the people ; and it has been 
 remarked that at the present day, the Muhammadans of West 
 Java, who study their religion at all or have performed the 
 pilgrimage to Mecca, form as a rule the most intelligent and 
 prosperous part of the population. 1 
 
 We have already seen that large sections of the Javanese re- 
 mained heathen for centuries after the establishment of Muham- 
 madan kingdoms in the island ; at the present day the whole 
 population of Java, with some trifling exceptions, is wholly 
 Muhammadan, and though many superstitions and customs have 
 survived among them from the days of their pagan ancestors, still 
 the tendency is continually in the direction of the guidance of 
 thought and conduct in accordance with the teaching of Islam. 
 This long work of conversion has proceeded peacefully and gradu- 
 ally, and the growth of Muslim states in this island belongs rather 
 to its political than to its religious history, since the progress of 
 the religion has been achieved by the work rather of missionaries 
 than of princes. 
 
 While the Musalmans of Java were plotting against the Hindu 
 Government and taking the rule of the country into their own 
 hands by force, a revolution of a wholly peaceful character was 
 being carried on in other parts of the Archipelago through the 
 preaching of the Muslim missionaries who were slowly but surely 
 achieving success in their proselytising efforts. Let us first turn 
 our attention to the history of this propagandist movement in the 
 Molucca islands. 
 
 The trade in cloves must have brought the Moluccas into con- Molucc! 
 tact with the islanders of the western half of the Archipelago 
 from very early times, and the converted Javanese and other 
 Malays who came into these islands to trade, spread their faith 
 among the inhabitants of the coast.^ The companions of Magellan 
 brought back a curious story of the way in which these men intro- 
 duced their religious doctrines among the Muluccans. "The 
 kings of these islands ^ a few years before the arrival of the 
 
 ' L. W. C. van den Berg (i), pp. 35-6- C. Poensen, pp. 3-8. 
 2 De Bartos, Dec. iii. Liv. v. Cap. v. pp. 579-580. Argensola, p. 11 B. 
 ' At this period, the Moluccas were for the most part under the rule of four 
 princes, viz. those of Ternate, Tidor, Gilolo and Batjan. The first was by far 
 
314 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Spaniards began to believe in the immortality of the soul, in- 
 duced by no other argument but that they had seen a very beau- 
 tiful little bird, that never settled on the earth nor on anything 
 that was of the earth, and the Mahometans, who traded as 
 merchants in those islands, told them that this little bird was born 
 in paradise, and that paradise is the place where rest the souls of 
 those that are dead. And for this reason these seignors joined 
 the sect of Mahomet, because it promises many marvellous things 
 of this place of the souls." ^ 
 
 Islam seems first to have begun to make progress here in the 
 fifteenth century. A heathen king of Tidor yielded to the per- 
 suasions of an Arab, named Shayldi Mansur, and embraced Islam 
 together with many of his subjects. The heathen name of the 
 king, Tjireli Lijatu, was changed to that of Jamalu-d Din, while 
 his eldest son was called Mansur after their Arab teacher.* It was 
 the latter prince who entertained the Spanish expedition that 
 reached Tidor in 1521, shortly after the ill-fated death of Magellan. 
 Pigafetta, the historian of this expedition, calls him Raia Sultan 
 Mauzor, and says that he was more than fifty-five years old, and 
 that not fifty years had passed since the Muhammadans came to 
 live in these islands.^ 
 
 Islam seems to have gained a footing on the neighbouring 
 island of Ternate a little earlier. The Portuguese who came to 
 this island the same year as the Spaniards reached Tidor, were in- 
 formed by the inhabitants that it had been introduced a little more 
 than eighty years.* 
 
 According to the Portuguese account ^ also the Sultan of 
 Ternate was the first of the Muluccan chieftains who became a 
 
 the most powerful : his territory extended over Ternale and the neighbouring 
 small islands, a portion of Halemahera, a considerable part of Celebes, Amboyna 
 and the Banda islands. The Sultan of Tidor ruled over Tidor and some small 
 neiglibouring islands, a portion of Halemahera, the islands lying between it and 
 New Guinea, together with the west coast of the latter and a part of Ceram. 
 The territory of the Sultan of Gilolo seems to have been confined to the central 
 part of Halemahera and to a part of the north coast of Ceram ; while the Sultan 
 of Batjan ruled chiefly over the Batjan and Obi groups. (De Hollander, 
 vol. i. p. 5.) 
 
 ' Massimiliano Transilvano. (Ramusio. Tom. i. p. 351 D.) 
 
 2 P. J. B. C. Robide van der Aa, p. 18. 
 
 3 Pigafetta. Tome i. pp. 365, 368. 
 
 ■* " Segundo a conta que elles dam, ao tempo que os nossos descnbriram 
 aquellas llhas, haveria pouco mais de oitenta annos, que nellas tinha entrada esta 
 peste." J. de Barros : Da Asia, Decada iii. Liv. v. Cap. v. p. 580. 
 
 * De Barros, id. ib. 
 
THE MOLUCCAS. 315 
 
 Muhammadan. This prince, who occupied the foremost place 
 among the independent rulers in these islands, is said to have 
 made a journey to Gresik, in Java, in order to embrace the 
 Muhammadan faith there, in 1495.^ Islam, however, seems at 
 first to have made but slow progress, and to have met with con- 
 siderable opposition from those islanders who clung zealously to 
 their old superstitions and mythology. So that the old idolatry 
 lasted on for some time, crudely mixed up with the teachings of 
 the Qur'an, and keeping the minds of the people in a perpetual 
 state of incertitude.^ 
 
 The Portuguese conquest also made the progress of Islam 
 slower than it would otherwise have been. They drove out the 
 Qadi, whom they found instructing the people in the doctrines of 
 Muhammad, and spread Christianity among the heathen popu- 
 lation with some considerable, though short-lived success.^ For 
 when the Muluccans took advantage of the attention of the 
 Portuguese being occupied with their own domestic troubles, in 
 the latter half of the sixteenth century, to try to shake oif their 
 power, they instituted a fierce persecution against the Christians, 
 many of whom suffered martyrdom, and others recanted, so that 
 Christianity lost all the ground it had gained,* and from this time 
 onwards, the opposition to the political domination of the Chris- 
 tians secured a readier welcome for the Muslim teachers who came 
 in increasing numbers from the west.^ The Dutch completed the 
 destruction of Christianity in the Moluccas by driving out the 
 Spanish and Portuguese from these islands in the seventeenth 
 century, whereupon the Jesuit fathers carried oif the few remain- 
 ing Christians of Ternate with them to the Philippines.* 
 
 From these islands Islam spread into the rest of the Moluccas ; 
 though for some time the conversions were confined to the in- 
 habitants of the coast.' Most of the converts came from among 
 
 I' Boltemeyer, p. 39. ^ Argensola, pp. 3-4. 
 
 ' Id. p. 15 B. ■* Id. pp. 97, 98. 
 
 * Id. p. 15s and 158, where he calls Teruate "este receptaculo de setas, 
 donde tienen escuela tudas las apostasias ; y particularmente los torpes sequazes 
 de Mahoma. Y desde el anno de mil y quinientos y ochenta y cinco, en que los 
 Holandeses tentaron aquellos mares, hasta este tiempo no han cessado de 
 traer sectaries, y capitanes pyratas. Estos Uevan las riquezas de Assia, y en su 
 Ingar dexan aquella falsa dotrina, con que hazen infrutuosa la conversion de tantas 
 almas." 
 
 ! ' Their descendants are still to be found in the province of Ca.v\ti in the island 
 ofLuzon. (Crawfurd (i), p. 85.) 
 ' W. F. Andriessen, p. 222. 
 
3i6 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the Malays, who compose the whole population of the smaller 
 islands, but inhabit the coast-lands only of the larger ones, the 
 interior being inhabited by Alfurs. But converts in later times 
 were drawn from among the latter also.i Even so early as 1521, 
 there was a Muhammadan king of Gilolo, a kingdom on the 
 western side of the northern limb of the island of Halemahera.2 
 In modern times the existence of certain regulations, devised for 
 the benefit of the state-religion, has facilitated to some extent the 
 progress of the Muhammadan religion among the Alfurs of the 
 mainland, e.g. if any one of them is discovered to have had illicit 
 intercourse with a Muhammadan girl, he must marry her and be- 
 come a Muslim ; any of the Alfur women who marry Muhamma- 
 dans must embrace the faith of their husbands ; offences against 
 the law may be atoned for by conversion to Islam ; and in filling 
 up any vacancy that may happen to occur among the chiefs, less 
 regard is paid to the lawful claims of a candidate than to his 
 readiness to become a Musalman.^ 
 
 Similarly, Islam in Borneo is mostly confined to the coast, 
 although it had gained a footing in the island as early as the be- 
 ginning of the sixteenth century. About this time, it was adopted 
 by the people of Banjarmasin, a kingdom on the southern side, 
 which had been tributary to the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit, 
 until its overthrow in 1478 *; they owed their conversion to one 
 of the Muhammadan states that rose on the ruins of the latter.^ 
 The story is that the people of Banjarmasin asked for assistance 
 towards the suppression of a revolt, and that it was given on con- 
 dition that they adopted the new religion ; whereupon a number 
 of Muhammadans came over from Java, suppressed the revolt and 
 effected the work of conversion.* On the N.-W. coast, the 
 Spaniards found a Muhammadan king at Brunai, when they 
 reached this place in 152 1.'' A little later, 1550, it was introduced 
 into the kingdom of Sukkadana,^in the'western part of the island, 
 by Arabs coming from Palembang in Sumatra.® The reigning 
 
 ' T. Forrest, p. 68. ' Pigafetta. (Ramusio, vol. i. p. 366.) 
 
 ' Campen, p. 346. *' Dulaurier, p. 528. 
 
 ' Damak, on the north coast of Java, opposite the south of Borneo. 
 
 * Hageman, pp. 236-9. 
 
 ' Pigafetta. (Ramusio. Tom. i. pp. 363-4.) 
 
 * This kingdom had been founded by a colony from the Hindu kingdom of 
 Majapahit (De Hollander, vol. ii. p. 67), and would naturally have come under 
 Muslim influence after the conversion of the Javanese. 
 
 ' Dozy (1), p. 386. 
 
BORNEO. 317 
 
 king refused to abandon the faith of his fathers, but during the 
 forty years that elapsed before his death (in 1590), the new religion 
 appears to have made considerable progress. His successor became 
 a Musalman and married the daughter of a prince of a neighbour- 
 ing island, in which apparently Islam had been long established ^; 
 during his reign, a traveller ,3 who visited the island in 1600, speaks 
 of Muhammadanism as being a common religion along the coast. 
 The inhabitants of the interior, however, he tells us, were all 
 idolaters — as indeed they remain for the most part to the present 
 
 day. 
 
 The progress of Islam in the kingdom of Sukkadana seems now 
 to have drawn the attention of the centre of the Muhammadan 
 world to this distant spot, and in the reign of the next prince, a 
 certain Shay]^ Shamsu-d Din came from Mecca bringing with him 
 a present of a copy of the Qur'an and a large hyacinth ring, 
 together with a letter in which this defender of the faith received 
 the honourable title of Sultan Muhammad Safiyu-d Din.^ 
 
 In the latter part of the eighteenth century one of the inland 
 tribes, called the Idaans, dwelling in the interior of N. Borneo, 
 'is said to have looked upon the Muhammadans of the coast with 
 'very great respect, as having a religion which they themselves 
 had not yet got.* Dalrymple, who obtained his information on 
 the Idaans of Borneo during his visit to Sulu from 1761 to 1764^ 
 tells us that they " entertain a just regret of their own ignorance, 
 and a mean idea of themselves on that account ; for, when they 
 come into the houses, or vessels, of the Mahometans, they pay 
 them the utmost veneration, as superior intelligences, who know 
 their Creator ; they will not sit down where the Mahometans 
 sleep, nor will they put their fingers into the same chunam, or 
 betel box, but receive a portion with the utmost humility, and 
 in every instance denote, with the most abject attitudes and 
 gesture, the veneration they entertain for a God unknown, in 
 the respect they pay to those who have a knowledge of Him." ^ 
 These people appear since that time to have embraced the 
 
 , ' Veth (2), vol. i. p. 193. , ,, ,„, 
 
 ' Olivier de Noort (Histoire g^nerale des voyages, vol. xiv. p. 225). (The 
 
 Hj^e, 17^6.) , 
 
 ' i.e. Purity of Religion ; he died about 1677 j his father does not seem to have 
 taken a Muhammadan name, at least he is only known by his heathen name of 
 Panembahan Giri-Kusuma. (Netscher, pp. 14-15- ) .re, 
 
 ' Thomas Forrest, p. 371. ' Essiy towards an account of Sulu. p. 5,7- 
 
3i8 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Muhammadan faith i one of the numerous instances of th(, 
 powerful impression that Islam produces upon tribes that ari. 
 low down in the scale of civilisation. From time to time othei' 
 accessions have been gained in the persons of the numerous, 
 colonists, Arabs, Bugis and Malays, as well as Chinese (who have, 
 had settlements here since the seventh century),^ and of the slaves^ 
 introduced into the island from different countries ; so that at 
 the present day the Muhammadans of Borneo are a very mixed 
 race.^ Many of these foreigners were still heathen when they 
 first came to Borneo, and of a higher civilisation than the Dyaks 
 whom they conquered or drove into the interior, where they 
 mostly still remain heathen, except in the western part of the 
 island, in which from time to time small tribes of Dyaks embrace 
 Islam.* 
 Celebes. In the island of Celebes we find a similar slow growth of the 
 Muhammadan religion, taking its rise among the people of the 
 coast and slowly making its way into the interior. Only the 
 more civilised portion of the inhabitants has however adopted 
 Islam ; this is mainly divided into two tribes, the Macassars and 
 the Bugis, who inhabit the south-western peninsula, the latter 
 however also forming a large proportion of the coast population 
 on the other peninsulas. The interior of the island, except in 
 the south-western peninsula where nearly all the inhabitants are 
 Muhammadan, is still heathen and is populated chiefly by the 
 Alfurs, a race low in the scale of civilisation, who also form the 
 majority of the inhabitants of the N., E. and S.E. peninsulas; 
 at the extremity of the first of these peninsulas, in Minahassa, 
 they have in large numbers been converted to Christianity; 
 the Muhammadans did not make their way hither until after 
 the Portuguese had gained a firm footing in this part of the 
 island, and the Alfurs that they converted to Roman Catho- 
 licism were turned into Protestants by the Dutch, whose 
 missionaries have laboured in Minahassa with very considerable 
 success. But Islam is slowly making its way among the heathen 
 tribes of Alfurs in different parts of the island, both in the districts 
 directly administered by the Dutch Government and those under 
 the rule of native chiefs.^ 
 
 ' B. Panciera, p. i6i. 2 j Hageman, p. 224. 
 
 ' Veth (2), vol. i. p. 179. ■• De Hollander, vol ii. p. 61. 
 
 '■> Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, vol. xxxii. p. 177 ; vol. xxxiv. p. 170. 
 
CELEBES. 
 
 319 
 
 When the Portuguese first visited the island about 1 540, they 
 found only a few Muhammadan strangers in Goa, the capital of 
 the Macassar kingdom, the natives being still unconverted, and 
 it was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that 
 Islam began to be generally adopted among them. The history 
 of the movement is especially interesting, as we have here one of 
 the few cases in which Christianity and Islam have been com- 
 peting for the allegiance of heathen people. One of the incidents 
 in this contest is thus admirably told by an old compiler : " The 
 discovery of so considerable a country was looked upon by the 
 Portuguese as a Matter of Great Consequence, and Measures 
 were taken to secure the Affections of those whom it was not 
 found easy to conquer ; but, on the other hand, capable of being 
 obliged, or rendered useful, as their allies, by good usage. The 
 People were much braver, and withal had much better Sense 
 than most of the Indians ; and therefore, after a little Conver- 
 sation with the Europeans, they began, in general, to discern 
 that there was no Sense or Meaning in their own Religion ; and 
 the few of them who had been made Christians by the care of 
 Don Antonio Galvano (Governor of the Moluccas), were not so 
 thoroughly instructed themselves as to be able to teach them a 
 new Faith. The whole People, in general, however, disclaimed 
 their old Superstitions, and became Deists at once ; but, not 
 satisfied with this, they determined to send, at the same time, 
 to Malacca and to Achin,i to desire from the one. Christian 
 Priests ; and from the other. Doctors of the Mohammedan Law ; 
 resolving to embrace the Religion of those Teachers who came 
 first among them. The Portugeze have hitherto been esteemed 
 zealous enough for their Religion ; but it seems that Don Ruis 
 Perera, who was then Governor of Malacca, was a little deficient 
 in his Concern for the Faith, since he made a great and very 
 unnecessary delay in sending the Priests that were desired. 
 
 "On the other hand, the Queen of Achin being a furious 
 Mohammedan no sooner received an Account of this Disposition 
 in the people of the Island of Celebes than she immediately 
 dispatched a vessel fuU of Doctors of the Law, who in a short 
 time, established their Religion effectually among the Inhabitants. 
 Some time after came the Christian Priests, and inveighed bitterly 
 
 p ' i.e. Atjih. 
 
320 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 against the Law of Mohammed but to no Purpose ; the People 
 of Celebes had made their Choice, and there was no Possibility 
 of bringing them to alter it. One of the Kings of the Island, 
 indeed, who had before embraced Christianity, persisted in the 
 Faith, and most of his Subjects were converted to it ; but still, 
 the Bulk of the People of Celebes continued Mohammedans, and 
 are so to this Day, and the greatest Zealots for their Religion of 
 any in the Indies." ^ 
 
 This event is said to have occurred in the year 1603.2 The 
 frequent references to it in contemporary literature make it im- 
 possible to doubt the genuineness of the story.^ In the little 
 principality of Tallo, to the north of Goa, with which it has 
 always been confederated, is still to be seen the tomb of one of 
 the most famous missionaries to the Macassars, by name Khafib 
 Tungal. The prince of this state, after his conversion proved 
 himself a most zealous champion of the new faith, and it was 
 through his influence that it was generally adopted by all the 
 tribes speaking the Macassar language. The sequel of the move- 
 ment is not of so peaceful a character. The Macassars were 
 carried away by their zeal for their newly-adopted faith, to make 
 an attempt to force it on their neighbours the Bugis. The king 
 of Goa made an offer to the king of Boni to consider him in all 
 respects as an equal if he would worship the one true God. The 
 latter consulted his people on the matter, who said, " We have 
 not yet fought, we have not yet been conquered." They tried 
 the issue of a battle and were defeated. The king accordingly 
 became a Muhammadan and began on his own account to attempt 
 by force to impose his own belief on his subjects and on the 
 smaller states, his neighbours. Strange to say, the people applied 
 for help to the king of Macassar, who sent ambassadors to demand 
 from the king of Boni an answer to the following questions,— 
 Whether the king, in his persecution, was instigated by a par- 
 
 ^ A Compleat History of the Rise and Progress of the Portugeze Empire in the 
 East Indies. Collected chiefly from their own Writers. John Harris : Navigan- 
 tium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca. (London, 1764.) Vol. i. p. 682. j 
 
 2 Crawfurd (l), p. 91. ^ 
 
 '■' Fernandez Navarette, a Spanish priest, who went to the Philippine Islands 1 
 in 1646. (Collection of Voyages and Travels, p. 236. London, 1752.) ' 
 
 Tavernier, who visited Macassar in 1648. (Travels in India, p. 193.) (London, 1 
 1678.) 
 
 Itinerarium Orientale R. P. F. Philippi a SSma. Trinitate Carmelilae 
 Discalceati abip^in conscriptum, p. 267. (Lugduni. 1649.) 
 
Cxi^l-iEBES. -2 21 
 
 ticular revelation from the Prophet ? — or whether he paid 
 obedience to some ancient custom ? — or followed his own personal 
 pleasure? If for the first reason, the king of Goa requested 
 information ; if for the second, he would lend his cordial co- 
 operation ; if for the third, the king of Boni must desist, for 
 those whom he presumed to oppress were the friends of Goa. 
 The king of Boni made no reply and the Macassars having 
 marched a great army into the country defeated him in three 
 successive battles, forced him to fly the country, and reduced 
 Boni into a province. After thirty years of subjection, the people 
 of Boni, with the assistance of the Dutch, revolted against the 
 Macassars, and assumed the headship of the tribes of Celebes, in 
 the place of their former masters.i The propagation of Islam 
 certainly seems to have been gradual and slow among the Bugis,^ 
 but when they had once adopted the new religion, it seems to 
 have stirred them up to action, as it did the Arabs, (though this 
 newly-awakened energy in either case turned in rather different 
 directions,) — and to have made them what they are now, at once 
 the bravest men and the most enterprising merchants and navigators 
 of the Archipelago.^ In their trading vessels they make their way 
 to all parts of the Archipelago, from the coast of New Guinea to 
 Singapore, and their numerous settlements, in the establishment 
 of which the Bugis have particularly distinguished themselves, 
 have introduced Islam into many a heathen island : e.g. one of 
 their colonies is to be found in a state that extends over a con- 
 siderable part of the south coast of Flores, where, intermingling 
 with the native population, that formerly consisted partly of 
 Roman Catholics, they have succeeded in converting all the 
 inhabitants of this state to Islam.* 
 
 In their native island of Celebes also the Bugis have combined 
 proselytising efforts with their commercial enterprises, and in the 
 
 ' Crawford, vol. ii. pp. 38S-9- 
 
 ' " No extraordinary exertion seems for a long time to have been made on 
 behalf of the new religion. An abhorrence of innovation and a most pertinacious 
 and religious adherence to ancient custom, distinguish the people of Celebes 
 beyond all the other tribes of the Eastern isles ; and these would, at first, prove 
 the most serious obstacles to the dissemination of Mahometanism. It was this, 
 probably, which deferred the adoption of the new religion for so long a period, 
 and till it had recommended itself by wearing the garb of antiquity." Crawfurd 
 (2), vol. ii. p. 387. 
 
 ' Crawford (i), p. 75. De Hollander, vol. 11. p. 212. 
 
 * De Hollander, vol. u. p. 666. Riedel (2), p. 67. 
 
322 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 little kingdom of Bolaang-Mongondou in the northern peninsula i 
 they have succeeded, in the course of the present century, in 
 winning over to Islam a Christian population whose conversion 
 dates from the end of the seventeenth century. The first Christian 
 king of Bolaang-Mongondou was Jacobus Manopo (1689- 1709), 
 in whose reign Christianity spread rapidly, through the influence 
 of the Dutch East India Company and the preaching of the Dutch 
 clergy.^ His successors were all Christian until 1844, when the 
 reigning Raja, Jacobus Manuel Manopo, embraced Islam. His 
 conversion was the crown of a series of proselytising efforts that 
 had been in progress since the beginning of the century, for it 
 was about this time that the zealous efforts of some Muhammadan 
 traders — Bugis and others — won over some converts to Islam in 
 one of the coast towns of the southern kingdom, Mongondou ; 
 from this same town two trader missionaries, Hakim Bagus and 
 Imam Tuweko by name, set out to spread their faith throughout 
 the rest of this kingdom. They made a beginning with the 
 conversion of some slaves and native women whom they married, 
 and these little by little persuaded their friends and relatives to 
 embrace the new faith. From Mongondou Islam spread into the 
 northern kingdom Bolaang ; here, in 1830, the whole population 
 was either Christian or heathen, with the exception of two or 
 three Muhammadan settlers ; but the zealous preachers of Islam, 
 the Bugis, and the Arabs who assisted them in their missionary 
 labours, soon achieved a wide-spread success. The Christians, 
 whose knowledge of the doctrines of their religion was very 
 slight and whose faith was weak, were ill prepared with the 
 weapons of controversy to meet the attacks of the rival creed ; 
 despised by the Dutch Government, neglected and well nigh 
 abandoned by the authorities of the church, they began to look 
 on these foreigners, some of whom married and settled among 
 them, as their friends. As the work of conversion progressed, 
 the visits of these Bugis and Arabs, — at first rare, — became more 
 frequent, and their influence in the country very greatly increased, 
 so much so that about 1832 an Arab married a daughter of the 
 king, Cornells Manopo, who was himself a Christian : many of 
 
 ' To the east of Minahassa, between long. 124° 45' and 123° 20', with a popu- 
 lation that has been variously estimated at 35,000 and 50,000. (De Hollander, 
 vol. ii. p. 247.) 
 
 ? Wilken (l), pp. 42-4. 
 
BOLAANG-MONGONDOU. 323 
 
 the chiefs, and some of the most powerful among them, about the 
 same time, abandoned Christianity and embraced Islam. In this 
 way Islam had gained a firm footing in his kingdom before Raja 
 Jacobus Manuel Manopo became a Muslim in 1844 ; this prince 
 had made repeated applications to the Dutch authorities at 
 Manado to appoint a successor to the Christian schoolmaster. 
 Jacobus Bastiaan, — whose death had been a great loss to the 
 
 ; Christian community — but to no purpose, and learning from the 
 resident at Manado that the Dutch Government was quite in- 
 different as to whether the people of his state were Christians or 
 Muhammadans, so long as they were loyal, openly declared him- 
 self a Musalman and tried every means to bring his subjects over 
 to the same faith. An Arab missionary took advantage of the 
 occurrence of a terrible earthquake in the following year, to 
 prophesy the destruction of Bolaang-Mongondou, unless the 
 people speedily became converted to Islam. Many in their 
 terror hastened to follow this advice, and the Raja and his nobles 
 lent thear support to the missionaries and Arab merchants, whose 
 methods of dealing with the dilatory were not always of the 
 gentlest. Nearly half the population however still remains 
 heathen, but the progress of Islam among them, though slowi 
 is continuous and sure.^ 
 
 The neighbouring island of Sambawa likewise probably re- Sambi 
 ceived its knowledge of this faith from Celebes, through the 
 preaching of missionaries from Macassar between 1540 and 1550. 
 All the more civilised inhabitants are true believers and are said 
 to be stricter in the performance of their religious duties than any 
 of the neighbouring Muhammadan peoples. This is largely due 
 to a revivalist movement set on foot by a certain Haji 'Ali after 
 the disastrous eruption of Mount Tambora in 181 5, the fearful 
 suffering that ensued thereon being made use of to stir up the 
 
 ' people to a more strict observance of the precepts of their 
 religion and the leading of a more devout life.^ At the present 
 time Islam still continues to win over fresh converts in this 
 
 I island.3 
 
 The inhabitants of the neighbouring island of Lombok also Lombc 
 owed their conversion to the preaching of the Bugis, who form a 
 
 ' Wilken (2), pp. 376-9. " Zollinger (2), pp. 126, 169. 
 
 ' Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, xxxii. p. 177; xxxiv. p. 170. 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 large colony here, having either crossed over the strait from 
 Sambawa or come directly from Celebes : at any rate the con- 
 version appears to have taken place in a peaceable manner.i 
 ■ In the Philippine Islands we find a struggle between Chris- 
 tianity and Islam for the allegiance of the inhabitants, somewhat 
 similar in character to that in Celebes, but more stern and 
 enduring, entangling the Spaniards and the Muslims in a fierce 
 and bloody conflict, even up to the present day. It is uncertain 
 when Islam was first introduced into these islands," but the 
 Spaniards who discovered them in 1 52 1, found the population of 
 the northern islands to be rude and simple pagans, while 
 Mindanao and the Sulu Islands were occupied by more civilised 
 Muhammadan tribes.^ The latter have to this day successfully 
 resisted for the most part all the efforts of the Christians towards 
 conquest and conversion, so that the Spanish missionaries despair 
 of ever effecting their conversion.* The success of Islam as com- 
 pared with Christianity has been due in a great measure to the 
 different form under which these two faiths were presented to the 
 natives. The adoption of the latter implied the loss of all 
 political freedom and national independence, and hence came to 
 be regarded as a badge of slavery. The methods adopted by the 
 Spaniards for the propagation of their religion were calculated to 
 make it unpopular from the beginning ; their violence and in- 
 tolerance were in strong contrast to the conciliatory behaviour of 
 the Muhammadan missionaries, who learned the language of 
 the people, adopted their customs, intermarried with them, and, 
 melting into the mass of the people, neither arrogated to them- 
 selves the exclusive rights of a privileged race nor condemned 
 the natives to the level of a degraded caste. The Spaniards, on 
 the other hand, were ignorant of the language, habits and 
 manners of the natives ; their intemperance and above all their 
 avarice and rapacity brought their religion into odium ; while its 
 
 ' Zollinger (i), p. 527. 
 
 ^ Captain Thomas Forrest, writing in 1775, says that Arabs came to the island 
 of Mindanao 300 yea'S l)efore and that the tomb of the first Arab, a Sharif from 
 Mecca, was still shown -"a rude heap of coral rock stones," pp. 201, 313. 
 
 ^ Relatione di Ivan Gaetan del discoprimento dell' Isole Molucche. (Ramusio. 
 Tom. i. p. 375 E.) 
 
 ■* " Se muestran tan obsinados a la gracia de Dies y tan aferrados i sus 
 creencias, que es casi moralmente imposible su conversion al cristianismo." 
 
 Cartas de los PP. de la Compafiia de Jesus de la Missi6n de Filipinas, 1879, 
 quoted by Montero y Vidal. Tom. i. p. 21. 
 
PHILIPPINE AND SULU ISLANDS. 325 
 
 propagation was intended to serve as an instrument of their 
 political advancement.! It is not difficult therefore to understand 
 the opposition oflfered by the natives to the introduction of 
 Christianity, which indeed only became the religion of the people 
 in those parts in which the inhabitants were weak enough, or the 
 island small enough, to enable the Spaniards to effect a total 
 subjugation ; the native Christians after their conversion had to 
 be forced to perform their religious duties through fear of punish- 
 ment, and were treated exactly like school-children.^ To this day, 
 the independent Muhammadan kingdom of Mindanao is a refuge 
 for those who wish to escape from the hated Christian govern- 
 ment ^ ; the island of Sulu, also, though nominally a Spanish 
 possession since 1878, forms another centre of Muhammadan 
 opposition to Christianity, Spanish-knowing renegades even being 
 found here.* 
 
 We have no certain historical evidence as to how long the Sulu 
 inhabitants of the Sulu Islands had been Muhammadan, before 
 the arrival of the Spaniards. They have a tradition that a 
 merchant named Sayyid 'Ali, who came from Mecca, converted 
 one half of the islanders, the other half still remaining heathen : 
 he was elected sultan and reigned seven years. His fame was so 
 wide-spread that his tomb became a place of pilgrimage. During 
 the reign of his great-grandson, another missionary arrived from 
 Mecca, and succeeded in converting almost the whole of such 
 part of the population as still remained heathen.^ Though so 
 long converted, the people of Sulu are far from being rigid 
 Muhammadans, indeed, the influence of the numerous Christian 
 slaves that they carry off from the Philippines in their predatory 
 excursions is so great, that it has even been asserted ^ that " they 
 
 ' Crawfurd (2), vol. ii. pp. 274-280. 
 
 ' " lis sont peu soigneux de satisfaire au devoir du Christianisme qu'ils ont 
 receu, et il les y faut contraindre par la crainte du chastimeiit, et gouvernercomme 
 desenians a I'escole." Relation des Isles Philippines, Faite parun Religieux, p. 7. 
 (Thevenot. vol. i.) 
 
 ^ "A Mindanao, les Tagal de I'Est, fuyant le joug abhorre de leurs maitres 
 catholiques, se groupent chaque jour davantage autour des chefs de.s dynasties 
 nationales. Plus de 360,000 sectateurs du coran y reconnaissent un sultan inde- 
 pendant. Aux jesuites chasses de lile, aux reprJsentants duculte officiel, se sub- 
 stiiueiit comme malties religieux et educateurs de la population, les missionnaires 
 musulmans de la Chine et de I'lnde, qui renovent ainsi la propagande, commencee 
 par les invasions Arabes." A. le Chatelier (2), p. 45. 
 
 * Montero y Vidal, vol. i. p. 86. 
 
 » J. H. Moor. (Appendix, pp. 32-3-) "■ P- 37- 
 
326 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 would long ere this have become professed Christians but from 
 the prescience, that such a change, by investing a predominating 
 influence in the priesthood, would inevitably undermine their 
 own authority, and pave the way to the transfer of their dominions 
 to the Spanish yoke, an occurrence which fatal experience has 
 too forcibly instructed all the surrounding nations that unwarily 
 embrace the Christian persuasion." Further, the aggressive 
 behaviour of the Spanish priests who established a mission in 
 Sulu has created in the mind of the people a violent antipathy to 
 the foreign religion.i 
 
 As has been already mentioned, Islam has been most favourably 
 received by the more civilised races of the Malay Archipelago, 
 and has taken but little root among the lower races. Such are 
 the Papuans of New Guinea, and the islands to the N.W. of it, 
 viz. Waigyu, Misool, Waigama and Salawatti. These islands, 
 together with the peninsula of Onin, on the N.W. of New 
 Guinea, were in the sixteenth century subject to the Sultan of 
 Batjan,2 one of the kings of the Moluccas. Through the influence 
 of the Muhammadan rulers of Batjan, the Papuan chiefs of these 
 islands adopted Islam,' and though the mass of the people in the 
 interior have remained heathen up to the present day, the 
 inhabitants of the coast are Muhammadans largely no doubt 
 owing to the influence of settlers from the Moluccas.'* In New 
 Guinea itself, very few of the Papuans seem to have become 
 Muhammadans. Islam was introduced into the West coast 
 (probably in the peninsula of Onin) by Muhammadan merchants, 
 who propagated their religion among the inhabitants, as early as 
 1606.5 But it appears to have made very little progress during 
 
 ' Dalrymple, p. 549- 
 
 ^ The first prince of Batjan who became a Muhammadan was a certain Zaynu- 
 I'Abidm, who was reigning in 1521 when the Portuguese first came to the 
 Moluccas. 
 
 ^ Robid^ van der Aa. pp. 350, 352-3. 
 
 " Id. p. 147 (Misool), " De strandbewoners zijn alien Mahomedanen. . . . De 
 bergbewoners zijn heidenen." 
 
 Id. p. 53 (Salawatti), " Een klein deel der bevolking van het eiland belijdt de 
 leer van Mahamed. Het grootste deel bestaat echter uit Papoesche heidenen 
 einige tot het Mahomedaansche geloof zijn overgegangen, althans den schijn 
 daarvan aannemen." 
 
 Id. p. 290 (Waigeoe). 
 
 Some of the Papuans of the island of Gebi, between Waigyu and Halemahera, 
 have been converted by the Muhammadan settlers from the Moluccas. Crawfurd 
 (1). P- 143- 
 
 ' Robide van der Aa. p. 352. 
 
THE PAPUANS. 327 
 
 the centuries that have elapsed since then,i and the Papuans have 
 shown as much reluctance to become Muhammadans as to accept 
 the teachings of the Christian missionaries, v?ho have laboured 
 among them without success since 1855. The Muhammadans of 
 the neighbouring islands have been accused of holding the Papuans 
 in too great contempt to make efforts to spread Islam among 
 them.^ The name of one missionary, however, is found, a certain 
 Imam Dikir (? Dhikr), who came from one of the islands on the 
 S.E. of Ceram about 1856 and introduced Islam into the little 
 island of Adi, south of the peninsula of Onin ; after fulfilling his 
 mission he returned to his own home, resisting the importuni- 
 ties of the inhabitants to settle among them.^ 
 
 Similar efforts are being made to convert the Papuans of the 
 neighbouring Kei Islands. Thirty years ago, there were hardly 
 any Muhammadans on these islands, with the exception of the 
 descendants of immigrants from the Banda Islands : some time 
 before, missionaries from Ceram had succeeded in making some 
 converts, but the precepts of the Qur'an were very little observed, 
 both forbidden meats and intoxicating liquors being indulged in. 
 The women, however, were said to be stricter in their adherence 
 to their faith than the men, so that when their husbands wished 
 to indulge in swine's flesh, they had to do so in secret, their 
 wives not allowing it to be brought into the house.* But more 
 recently there has been a revival of religious life among the Kei 
 islanders, and the number of Muhammadans is daily increasing. 
 Arab merchants from Madura, Java, and Bali have proved them- 
 selves zealous propagandists of Islam and have left no means 
 
 ' Captain Forrest however in 1775, '^"^ 11s that " Many of the Papuas turn 
 Musselmen." Voyage to New Guinea, p. 68. 
 
 ' Robide van der Aa. p. 71. " De Papoe is te woest van aard, om behoefte 
 aan godsdienst te gevoelen. Evenmin als de Christelijke leer tot nog toe ingang 
 bij hem heeft kunnen vinden, zou de Mahomedaansche godsdienst slagen, wanneer 
 daartoe bij deze volkstammen poging gedaan ward. Voorzoover mij is gebleken 
 op vijf reizen naar dit land, hebben noch Tidoreezen, noch Cerammers of 
 anderen ooit emstige pogingen gedaan, om de leer van IVIahomed hier in te 
 voeren. . . . Slechts zeer weinige hoofden, zooals de Radja Ampat van 
 Waigeoe, Salawatti, Misool en Waigama, mogen als belijders van die leer 
 aangemerkt worden ; zij en eenige hunner bloedverwanten vervuUen sommige 
 geloofsvormen, doordien zij meermalen te Tidor geweest zijn en daar niet gaarne 
 als gewone Papoes beschouwd worden. Onder de eigenlijke bevolking is nooit 
 gepoogd, den Islam intevoeren, misschien wel uit eerbied voor dien godsdienst, 
 die te verheven is voor de Papoes." 
 
 ' Robid^ van der Aa. p. 319- 
 
 ■* The Journal of the Indian Archipelago, vol. vii. pp. 64, 71. (Singapore 
 
 1853-) 
 
32« THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 untried to win converts, sometimes enforcing their arguments by 
 threats and violence, and at other times by bribes : as a rule new 
 converts are said to get 200 florins' worth of presents, while chiefs 
 receive as much as a thousand florins.^ 
 
 The above sketch of the spread of Islam from west to east 
 through the Malay Archipelago comprises but a small part of 
 the history of the missionary work of Islam in these islands. 
 Many of the facts of this history are wholly unrecorded, and what 
 can be gleaned from native chronicles and the works of European 
 travellers, officials and missionaries is necessarily fragmentary 
 and incomplete. Btrt there is evidence enough to show the 
 existence of peaceful missionary efforts to spread the faith of Islam 
 during the last six hundred years : sometimes indeed the sword 
 has been drawn in support of the cause of religion, but preaching 
 and persuasion rather than force and violence have been the main 
 characteristics of this missionary movement. The marvellous 
 success that has been achieved has been largely the work of 
 traders, who won their way to the hearts of the natives, by learn- 
 ing their language, adopting their manners and customs, and 
 began quietly and gradually to spread the knowledge of their 
 religion by first converting the native women they married and 
 the persons associated with them in their business relations. 
 Instead of holding themselves apart in proud isolation, they 
 gradually melted into the mass of the population, employing 
 all their superiority of intelligence and civilisation for the work of 
 conversion and making such skilful compromises in the doctrines 
 and practices of their faith as were needed to recommend it to the 
 people they wished to attract.^ In fact, as Buckle said of them, 
 " The Mahometan missionaries are very judicious."* 
 
 Beside the traders, there have been numbers of what may be 
 called professional missionaries — theologians, preachers, juriscon- 
 sults and pilgrims. The latter have, in recent years, been 
 especially active in the work of proselytising, in stirring up a 
 more vigorous and consistent religious life among their fellow- 
 countrymen, and in purging away the lingering remains of heathen 
 habits and beliefs. The number of Malays who make the pil- 
 
 > G. W. W. C. Baron von Hoevell, p. 120. 
 ^ Crav\furd (2), pp. 275, 307. 
 
 ' Buckle's Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works, edited by Helen Taylor, 
 vol. i. p. 594. (London, 1872.) 
 
THE MUSLIM PROPAGANDISTS. 329 
 
 grimage to Mecca from all parts of the Archipelago is yearly on 
 the increase, and there is in consequence a proportionate growth 
 of Muhammadan influence and Muhammadan thought. Up to 
 the middle of the present century the Dutch Government tried 
 to put obstacles in the way of the pilgrims and passed an order 
 that no one should be allowed to make the pilgrimage to the holy 
 city without a passport, for which he had to pay no florins ; and 
 any one who evaded this order was on his return compelled to 
 pay a fine of double that amount.i Accordingly it is not surprising 
 to find that in 1852 the number of pilgrims was so low as seventy, 
 but in the same year this order was rescinded, and since then, 
 there has been a steady increase — at a rate moreover that could 
 not possibly have been anticipated. For example, the number of 
 pilgrims that went from Java alone, in the single year 1874, was 
 larger than the whole sum of the pilgrims from all the Dutch 
 possessions in the Archipelago during the six years ending 1859, 
 when the order, referred to above, had only recently been 
 abolished.^ These numbers, moreover, show no tendency to 
 decrease, as may be seen from the following figures : in 1874 the 
 number of pilgrims from Java was 33,802, in 1886 it had risen to 
 48,237, showing an increase of 40 per cent, within twelve years. 
 From other islands the ratio of increase has been even higher, e.g. 
 in the case of Borneo and Celebes, of 66 per cent., and from 
 Sumatra of 83 per cent., in the same number of years. Such 
 an increase is no doubt largely due to the increased facilities of 
 communication between Mecca and the Malay Archipelago, but, 
 as a Christian missionary has observed, this by no means 
 " diminishes the importance of the fact, especially as the Hadjis, 
 whose numbers have grown so rapidly, have by no means lost 
 in quality what they gained in quantity ; on the contrary, there 
 are now amongst them many more thoroughly acquainted with 
 the doctrines of Islam, and wholly imbued with Moslem fanaticism 
 and hatred against the unbelievers, than there formerly were." s 
 The reports of the Dutch Government and of Christian mission- 
 aries bear unanimous testimony to the influence and the 
 
 ' Niemann, pp. 406-7. 
 
 " Namely 33,802 from Java alone in 1874 as opposed to 12,985 during 1854-9 
 from all the Dutch islands. 
 
 ^ Report of Centenary Conference on Protestant Missions, vol. i. p. 21. 
 Niemann, p. 407. 
 
330 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 proselytising zeal of these pilgrims who return to their homes as 
 at once reformers and missionaries.! Beside the pilgrims who 
 content themselves with merely visiting the sacred places and 
 performing the due ceremonies, and those who make a longer 
 stay in order to complete their theological studies, there is a large 
 colony of Malays in Mecca at the present time, who have taken 
 up their residence permanently in the sacred city. These are in 
 constant communication with their fellow-countrymen in their 
 native land, and their efforts have been largely effectual in purging 
 Muhammadanism in the Malay Archipelago from the contamina- 
 tion of heathen customs and modes of thought that have survived 
 from an earlier period. A large number of religious books is also 
 printed in Mecca in the various languages spoken by the Malay 
 Muhammadans and carried to all parts of the Archipelago. Indeed 
 Mecca has been well said to have more influence on the religious 
 life of these islands than on Turkey, India or Buldiara.^ 
 
 This recent growth of religious zeal has further resulted in a 
 rapid increase in the number of Muhammadan schools, which 
 constitute powerful adjuncts to the proselytising eiforts of the 
 Muhammadan missionaries^ In 1882 there were in Java 10,913 
 of such schools, in which 164,667 students received instruction in 
 the faith and practice of Islam ; but the three following years 
 brought about an increase of not less than 33 per cent., for in 
 1885 there were 16,760 schools with as many as 255,148 students.' 
 In certain cases the fame of some particular teacher attracts to 
 one place an unusually large number of students, one school being 
 mentioned where the lectures of a learned Arab were attended at 
 one time by as many as 1 50 students.* 
 
 As might be anticipated from a consideration of these facts, 
 there has been of recent years a very great awakening of missionarj' 
 activity in the Malay Archipelago, and the returned pilgrims, 
 whether as merchants or religious teachers, become preachers 
 of Islam wherever they come in contact with a heathen population. 
 The religious orders moreover have extended their organisation 
 to the Malay Archipelago,'' even the youngest of them— the 
 
 ' Med. Ned. Zendelinggen, vols, xxxii., xxxiv. passim. 
 ^ Snouck Hurgronje (3), vol. ii. pp. xv., 339-393. 
 
 ' Report of Centenary Conference on Protestant Missions, vol. i. p. 21. 
 '' L. W. C. van den Berg, pp. 22, 27. 
 
 * e.g. the Qadarlyah, Naqshibandlyah and Sammanlyah. (C. Snouck Hur- 
 gronje (2), p. 186.) Id. (3) vol. ii. p. 372, etc. 
 
THE MUSLIM PROPAGANDISTS. 331 
 
 Sanusiyah — finding adherents in the most distant islands,i one 
 of the signs of its influence being the adoption of the name Sanusi 
 by many Malays when in Mecca they change their native for 
 Arabic names.^ 
 
 The Dutch Government has been accused by Christian mis- 
 sionaries of favouring the spread of Islam ; however this may be, 
 it is certain that the work of the Muslim missionaries is facilitated 
 by the fact that Malay, which is spoken by hardly any but 
 Muhammadans, has been adopted as the official language of the 
 Dutch Government, except in Java ; and as the Dutch civil 
 servants are everywhere attended by a crowd of Muhammadan 
 subordinate officials, political agents, clerks, interpreters and 
 traders, they carry Islam with them into every place they visit. 
 All persons that have to do business with the Government, are 
 obliged to learn the Malay language, and they seldom learn it 
 without at the same time becoming Musalmans. In this way the 
 most influential people embrace Islam, and the rest soon follow 
 their example.^ Thus Islam is at the present time rapidly driving 
 out heathenism from the Malay Archipelago. 
 
 ' J. G. F. Riedel (i), pp. 7, 59, 162. 
 
 ' Snouck Hurgionje (3), vol. ii. p. 323. Hauri, p. 313. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 To the modern Christian world, missionary work implies mission- 
 ary societies, paid agents, subscriptions, reports and journals ; and 
 missionary enterprise without a regularly constituted and con- 
 tinuous organisation seems a misnomer. The ecclesiastical con- 
 stitution of the Christian church has, from the very beginning of its 
 history, made provision for the propagation of Christian teaching 
 among unbelievers ; its missionaries have been in most cases, 
 regularly-ordained priests or monks ; the monastic orders (from 
 the Benedictines downwards) and the missionary societies of more 
 modern times have devoted themselves with special and concen- 
 trated attention to the furthering of a department of Christian 
 work that, from the first, has been recognised to be one of the 
 prime duties of the church. But in Islam the absence of any 
 kind of priesthood or any ecclesiastical organisation whatever has 
 caused the missionary energy of the Muslims to exhibit itself in 
 forms very different to those that appear in the history of Christian 
 missions : there are no missionary societies, no specially trained 
 agents, very little continuity of effort. The only exception 
 appears to be found in the religious orders of Islam, whose organi- 
 sation resembles to some extent that of the monastic orders of 
 Christendom. But even here the absence of the priestly ideal, of 
 any theory of the separateness of the religious teacher from the 
 common body of believers or of the necessity of a special con- 
 secration and authorisation for the performance of religious 
 functions, makes the fundamental difference in the two systems 
 stand out as clearly as elsewhere. 
 
 Whatever disadvantages may be entailed by this want of a 
 priestly class, specially set apart for the work of propagating the 
 faith, are compensated for by the consequent feeling of responsi- 
 
MUSLIM MISSIONARIES. 333 
 
 bility resting on the individual believer. There being no inter- 
 mediary between the Muslim and his God, the responsibility of 
 his personal salvation rests upon himself alone : consequently he 
 becomes as a rule much more strict and careful in the perform- 
 ance of his religious duties, he takes more trouble to learn the 
 doctrines and observances of his faith, and thus becoming deeply 
 impressed with the importance of them to himself, is more likely 
 to become an exponent of the missionary character of his creed 
 in the presence of the unbeliever. The would-be proselytiser has 
 not to refer his convert to some authorised religious teacher of 
 his creed who may formally receive the neophyte into the body of 
 the church, nor need he dread ecclesiastical censure for com- 
 mitting the sin of Korah. Accordingly, however great an 
 exaggeration it may be to say, as has been said so often ,1 that 
 every Muhammadan is a missionary, still it is true that every 
 Muhammadan may be one, and few truly devout Muslims, living 
 in daily contact with unbelievers, neglect the precept of their 
 Prophet : " Summon them to the way of thy Lord with wisdom 
 and with kindly warning." ^ Thus it is that, side by side with the 
 professional propagandists, — the religious teachers who have de- 
 voted all their time and energies to missionary work, — the annals 
 of the propagation of the Muslim faith contain the record of men 
 and women of all ranks of society from the sovereign to the 
 peasant, and of all trades and professions, who have laboured for 
 the spread of their faith, — the Muslim trader, unlike his Christian 
 brother, showing himself especially active in such work. In a 
 list of Indian missionaries published in the journal of a religious 
 and philanthropic society of Lahore * we find the names of school- 
 masters, Government clerks in the Canal and Opium Depart- 
 ments, traders including a dealer in camel-carts, an editor of a 
 newspaper, a bookbinder and a workman in a printing establish- 
 ment. These men devote the hours of leisure left them after the 
 completion of the day's labour, to the preaching of their religion 
 in the streets and bazaars of Indian cities, seeking to win converts 
 both from among Christians and Hindus, whose religious beliefs 
 they controvert and attack. 
 
 ' Snouck Hurgronje (i), p. 8. Liittke (2), p. 30. 
 
 ' Qur'an, xvi. 126. 
 
 ' Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam ka mahwari risalah (Lahore.) (October, 1889), 
 
 PP- 5-13- 
 
334 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 It is interesting to note that the propagation of Islam has 
 not been the work of men only, but that Muslim women have 
 also taken their part in this pious task. Several of the Mongol 
 princes owed their conversion to the influence of a Muslim wife, 
 and the same was probably the case with many of the pagan 
 Turks when they had carried their raids into Muhammadan 
 countries. The Sanusiyah missionaries that came to work among 
 the Tubu, to the north of Lake Chad, have opened schools for 
 girls, and have taken advantage of the powerful influence exer- 
 cised by the women among these tribes (as among their neigh- 
 bours, the Berbers), in their efforts to win them over to Islam.i 
 The progress of Islam in Abyssinia during the first half of this 
 century has been said to be in large measure due to the efforts of 
 Muhammadan women, especially the wives of Christian princes, 
 who had to pretend a conversion to Christianity on the occasion 
 of their marriage, but brought up their children in the tenets of 
 Islam and worked in every possible way for the advancement of 
 that faith.2 In modern China, a woman of Kashgar who had 
 been taken prisoner and brought into the harem of the emperor, 
 is said to have almost induced him to embrace Islam, but the 
 weighty considerations of state set forth by his ministers 
 dissuaded him from openly adopting this faith and he contented 
 himself with showing great favour to his Muhammadan subjects, 
 keeping many of them about his person and building a mosque 
 for them in his palace.^ The professed devotee, because she 
 happens to be a woman, is not thereby debarred from taking her 
 place with the male saint in the company of the preachers of the 
 faith. The legend of the holy women, descended from 'Ali, who 
 are said to have flown through theiair from Karbala' to Lahore and 
 there by the influence of their devout lives of prayer and fasting 
 to have won the first converts from Hinduism to Islam,* could 
 hardly have originated if the influence of such holy women were a 
 thing quite unknown. One of the most venerated tombs in Cairo 
 is that of Nafisah, the great-granddaughter of Hasan (the 
 martyred son of 'Ali), whose theological learning excited the 
 
 ' Duveyrier, p. 17. 2 Massaja, vol. xi. pp. 124-5. 
 
 ■^ Sayyid Sulayman calls him Jifan and says that he was the grandfather of the 
 present emperor : Hienfung (1850-61) is probably the emperor referred to. 
 Thamaratu-1 Funun, 17th, Shawwal, 1311, (Bayrut, 1894.) 
 '' Ghwlam Sarwar : IChazTnatu-1 Ajflya, vol. ii. p. 407-8. 
 
WOMEN MISSIONARIES. 335 
 
 admiration even of her great contemporary, Imam Ash Shafi'i, 
 and whose piety and austerities raised her to the dignity of a 
 saint : it is related of her that when she settled in Egypt, she 
 happened to have as her neighbours a family of dhimmis whose 
 daughter was so grievously afflicted that she could not move her 
 limbs, but had to lie on her back all day. The parents of the 
 poor girl had to go one day to the market and asked their pious 
 Muslim neighbour to look after their daughter during their 
 absence. Nafisah, filled with love and pity, undertook this work 
 of mercy ; and when the parents of the sick girl were gone, she 
 lifted up her soul in prayer to God • on behalf of the helpless 
 invalid. Scarcely was her prayer ended than the sick girl re- 
 gained the use of her limbs and was able to go to meet her 
 parents on their return. Filled with gratitude, the whole family 
 became converts to the religion of their benefactor. 1 
 
 Even the Muslim prisoner will on occasion embrace the oppor- 
 tunity of preaching his faith to his captors or to his fellow- 
 prisoners. The first introduction of Islam into Eastern Europe 
 was the work of a MusHm jurisconsult who was taken prisoner, 
 probably in one of the wars between the Byzantine Empire and 
 its Muhammadan neighbours, and was brought to the country of 
 the Pechenegs ^ in the beginning of the eleventh century. He 
 set before many of them the teachings of Islam and they embraced 
 the faith with sincerity, so that it began to be spread among this 
 people. But the other Pechenegs who had not accepted the 
 Muslim religion, took umbrage at the conduct of their fellow- 
 countrymen and finally came to blows with them. The Muslims 
 who numbered about twelve thousand successfully withstood the 
 attack of the unbelievers who were more than double their 
 number, and the remnant of the defeated party embraced the 
 religion of the victors. Before the close of the eleventh century 
 the whole nation had become Muhammadan and had among 
 them, men learned in Muslim theology and jurisprudence.^ In 
 
 ' Goldziher, vol. ii. pp. 303-4. 
 
 ' The Pechenegs at this time occupied the country between the lower Danube 
 and the Don, to which they had migrated from the banks of the Ural at the end 
 of the ninth century. (Karamsin, vol. i. pp. 180-1.) 
 
 ' Abu 'Ubaydu-1 Bakri (died 1094), p. 467-8. 
 
 It may not be out of place here to make mention of the establishment of another 
 Muslim community in mediaeval Europe as the result of missionary efforts, viz. 
 the Bashkirs of Hungary. The faith of Islam was introduced among these people 
 by seven Musulmans who came from Bulgaria (probably about the year 957 a.d.), 
 
336 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the reign of the Emperor Jahangir (1605-1628) there was a cer- 
 tain Sunni theologian, named Shay^ Ahmad Mujaddid, who 
 especially distinguished himself by the energy with which he 
 controverted the doctrines of the Shi'ahs : the latter, being at 
 this time in favour at court, succeeded in having him imprisoned 
 on some frivolous charge ; during the two years that he was 
 kept in prison he converted to Islam several hundred idolaters 
 who were his companions in the same prison. ^ In more recent 
 times, an Indian mawlawi, who had been sentenced to trans- 
 portation for life to the Andaman Islands by the British 
 Government because he had taken an active part in the Wahhabi 
 conspiracy of 1864, converted many of the convicts before his 
 death. 
 
 Such being the missionary zeal of the Muslim that he is ready 
 to speak in season and out of season, let us now consider some of 
 the causes that have contributed to his success. 
 
 Foremost among these is the simplicity of the Muslim creed, 
 
 There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of 
 God. Assent to these two simple doctrines is all that is de- 
 manded of the convert, and the whole history of Muslim dogmatics 
 fails to present any attempt on the part of ecclesiastical assemblies 
 to force on the mass of believers any symbol couched in more 
 elaborate and complex terms. This simple creed demands no 
 great trial of faith, arouses as a rule no particular intellectual 
 difficulties and is within the compass of the meanest intelligence. 
 Unencumbered with theological subtleties, it may be expounded 
 by any, even the most unversed in theological expression. The 
 first half of it enunciates a doctrine that is almost universally 
 accepted by men as a necessary postulate, while the second half 
 is based on a theory of man's relationship to God that is almost 
 equally wide-spread, viz. that at intervals in the world's history 
 God grants some revelation of Himself to men through the mouth- 
 
 and instructing tliem in the tenets of this religion, made converts of them all. An 
 Arab geographer who happened to meet a party of these Bashkirs that had'come 
 to study the Muhammadan law in Aleppo (about 1220 a.d.), learned from their 
 lips this tradition of their conversion, and has recorded several interesting details 
 regarding this little com pany of the faithful isolated in the midst of the countries 
 of the unbelievers. Islam kept its ground among the Bashkirs of Hungary until 
 1340, when King Charles Robert compelled all his subjects that were not yet 
 Chri-tians to embrace the Christian faith or quit the country. 
 
 Gecigraphie d'Aboulfeda, traduite par M. Reinaud. Tome ii. pp. 294-? 
 
 ' fibulam Sarwar: KhazInatu-1 Astiya, vol. i. p. 613. 
 
RATIONALISM OF ISLAM. 337 
 
 piece of inspired prophets. This, the rationaHstic character of 
 the MusHm creed, and the advantage it reaps therefrom in 
 its missionary efforts, have nowhere been more admirably 
 brought out than in the following sentences of I^ofessor 
 Montet : — 
 
 " Islam is a religion that is essentially rationalistic in the widest 
 sense of this term considered etymologically and historically. 
 The definition of rationalism as a system that bases religious 
 beliefs on principles furnished by the reason, applies to it exactly. 
 It is true that Muhammad, who was an enthusiast and possessed 
 too the ardour of faith and the fire of conviction, that precious 
 quality he transmitted to so many of his disciples, — brought 
 forward his reform as a revelation : but this kind of revelation is 
 only one form of exposition and his religion has all the marks of 
 a bundle of doctrines founded on the data of reason. To believers, 
 the Muhammadan creed is summed up in belief in the unity of 
 God and in the mission of His Prophet, and to ourselves who 
 coldly analyse his doctrines, to belief in God and a future life ; 
 these two dogmas, the minimum of religious belief, statements 
 that to the religious man rest on the firrri basis of reason, sum up 
 the whole doctrinal teaching of the Qur'an. The simplicity and 
 the clearness of this teaching are certainly among the most 
 obvious forces at work in the religion and the missionary activity 
 of Islam. It cannot be denied that many doctrines and systems 
 of theology and also many superstitions, from the worship of 
 saints to the use of rosaries and amulets, have become grafted on 
 to the main trunk of the Muslim creed. But in spite of the rich 
 development, in every sense of the term, of the teachings of the 
 Prophet, the Qur'an has invariably kept its place as the funda- 
 mental starting-point, and the dogma of the unity of God has 
 always been proclaimed therein with a grandeur, a majesty, an 
 invariable purity and with a note of sure conviction, which it is 
 hard to find surpassed outside the pale of Islam. This fidelity to 
 the fundamental dogma of the religion, the elemental simplicity 
 of the formula in which it is enunciated, the proof that it gains 
 from the fervid conviction of the missionaries who propagate it, 
 are so many causes to explain the success of Muhammadan 
 missionary efforts. A creed so precise, so stripped of all theo- 
 logical complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary 
 understanding, might be expected to possess and does indeed 
 
338 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 possess a marvellous power of winning its way into the consciences 
 of men." '■ 
 
 When the convert has accepted and learned this simple creed, 
 he has then to be instructed in the five practical duties of his 
 religion : (i) recital of the creed, (2) observance of the five 
 appointed times of prayer, (3) payment of the legal alms, (4) 
 fasting during the month of Ramadan, and (5) the pilgrimage to- 
 Mecca. 
 
 The observance of this last duty has often been objected to as a 
 strange survival of idolatry in the midst of the monotheism of the 
 Prophet's teaching, but it must be borne in mind that to him it 
 connected itself with Abraham, whose religion it was his mission 
 to restore.^ But above all — and herein is its supreme importance 
 in the missionary history of Islam — it ordains a yearly gathering 
 of believers, of all nations and languages, brought together from 
 all parts of the world, to pray in that sacred place towards 
 which their faces are set in every hour of private worship 
 in their distant homes. No fetch of religious genius could 
 have conceived a better expedient for impressing on the 
 minds of the faithful a sense of their common life and of their 
 brotherhood in the bonds of faith. Here, in a supreme act of 
 common worship the Negro of the West coast of Africa meets 
 the Chinaman from the distant East ; the courtly and polished 
 Ottoman recognises his brother Muslim in the wild islander from 
 the farthest end of the Malayan Sea. At the same time throughout 
 the whole Muhammadan world the hearts of believers are lifted 
 up in sympathy with their more fortunate brethren gathered 
 together in the sacred city, as in their own homes they celebrate 
 the festival of Idu-1 Adha or (as it is called in Turkey and Egypt) 
 the feast of Bayram. Their visit to the sacred city has been to 
 many Muslims the experience that has stirred them up to ' strive 
 in the path of God,' and in the preceding pages constant reference 
 has been made to the active part taken by the hajis in missionary 
 work. 
 
 Besides the institution of the pilgrimage, the payment of the 
 legal alms is another duty that continually reminds the Muslim 
 that " the faithful are brothers " ' — a religious theory that is very 
 
 ' Edouard Montet : La propaganJe chr^tienne et ses adversaires musulmans, 
 pp. 17-18. (Palis, 1890.) 
 
 2 Qitr'an, ii. 118-126. 3 Qui'an, xUx. 10. 
 
THE RITUALISM OF ISLAM. 339 
 
 strikingly realised in Muhammadan society and seldom fails to 
 express itself in acts of kindness towards the new convert.^ 
 Whatever be his race, colour or antecedents he is received in the 
 brotherhood of believers and takes his place as an equal among 
 equals. 
 
 Very effective also, both in winning and retaining, is the 
 ordinance of the daily prayers five times a day. Montesquieu ^ 
 has well said, " Une religion chargee de beaucoup de pratiques 
 attache plus a elle qu'une autre qui I'est moins ; on tient beau- 
 coup aux choses dont on est continueUement occupe." The 
 religion of the Muslim is continually present with him and in the 
 daily prayers manifests itself in a solemn and impressive ritual, 
 which cannot leave either the worshipper or the spectator un- 
 affected. If Renan could say, " Je ne suis jamais entre dans une 
 mosquee sans une vive emotion, le dirai-je ? sans un certain 
 regret de n'etre pas musulman," ^ — it can be readily understood 
 how the sight of the Muslim trader at prayer, his frequent 
 prostrations, his absorbed and silent worship of the Unseen, 
 would impress the heathen African, endued with that strong 
 sense of the mysterious such as generally accompanies a low 
 stage of civilisation. Curiosity would naturally prompt inquiry, 
 and the knowledge of Islam thus imparted might sometimes win 
 over a convert who might have turned aside had it been offered 
 unsought, as a free gift. Of the fast during the month of 
 Ramadan, it need only be said that it is a piece of standing 
 evidence against the theory that Islam is a religious system that 
 attracts by pandering to the self-indulgence of men. As Carlyle 
 has said, " His religion is not an easy one : with rigorous fasts, 
 lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and 
 abstinence from wine, it did not succeed by being an easy 
 religion." 
 
 Bound up with these and other ritual observances, but not 
 encumbered or obscured by them, the articles of the Muslim 
 creed are incessantly finding outward manifestation in the life of 
 
 '■ But if the unbeliever is the slave of a Muslim the fact of his conversion does 
 not procure for him his manumission, as has been stated by some European 
 writers for according to the Muhammadan law, the conversion of a slave does 
 not affect the prior state of bondage. (See W. H. Macnaghten : Principles and 
 precedents of Moohummudan Law, p. 312.) (Madras, 1S82.) 
 
 = De I'Esprit des Lois, livre xxv. chap. 2. 
 
 3 Ernest Renan, L'Islamisme et la Science, p. 19. (Pans, i»83.; 
 
 Z 2 
 
340 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 the believer, and thus becoming inextricably interwoven with the 
 routine of his daily life, make the individual Musalman an expo- 
 nent and teacher of his creed far more than is the case with the 
 adherents of most other religions. Couched in such short and 
 simple language, his creed makes but little demand upon the 
 intellect, and the definiteness, positiveness, and minuteness of the 
 ritual leave the believer in no doubt as to what he has to do, and 
 these duties performed, he has the satisfaction of feeling that he 
 has fulfilled all the precepts of the Law. In this union of 
 rationalism and ritualism, we may find, to a great extent, the 
 secret of the power that Islam has exercised over the minds 
 of men. " If you would win the great masses give them the 
 truth in rounded form, neat and clear, in visible and tangible 
 guise." 1 
 
 Many other circumstances might be adduced that have con- 
 tributed towards the missionary success of Islam — circumstances 
 peculiar to particular times and countries. Among these may be 
 mentioned the advantage that Muhammadan missionary work 
 •derives from the fact of its being so largely in the hands of traders, 
 especially in Africa and other uncivilised countries where the 
 people are naturally suspicious of the foreigner. For, in the case 
 of the trader, his well-known and harmless avocation secures to 
 him an immunity from any such feelings of suspicion, while his 
 knowledge of men and manners, his commercial savoir-faire, gain 
 for him a ready reception, and remove that feeling of constraint 
 which might naturally arise in the presence of the stranger. He 
 labours under no such disadvantages as hamper the professed 
 missionary, who is liable to be suspected of some sinister motive, 
 not only by people whose range of experience and mental 
 horizon are limited and to whom the idea of any man enduring 
 the perils of a long journey and laying aside every mundane 
 occupation for the sole purpose of gaining proselytes, is 
 inexplicable, but also by more civilised men of the world 
 who are very prone to doubt the sincerity of the paid missionary 
 agent. 
 
 The circumstances are very different when Islam has not to 
 appear as a suppliant in a foreign country, but stands forth 
 proudly as the religion of the ruling race. In the preceding 
 
 ' A. Kuenen : National Religions and Universal Religions, p. ■jc. f London, 
 1882.) ' t- .« I 
 
TOLERATIOxN OF ISLAM. 341 
 
 pages it has been shown that the theory of the MusHm faith 
 enjoins toleration and freedom of rehgious hfe for all those 
 followers of other faiths that pay tribute in return for protection, 
 and though the pages of Muhammadan history are stained with 
 the blood of many cruel persecutions, still, on the whole, un- 
 believers have enjoyed under Muhammadan rule a measure of 
 toleration, the like of which is not to be found in Europe until 
 quite modern times. 
 
 Forcible conversion was forbidden, in accordance with the pre 
 cepts of the Qur'an :— " Let there be no compulsion in religion " 
 (ii. 257). " Wilt thou compel men to become believers ? No soul 
 can believe but by the permission of God " (x. 99, 100). The 
 very existence of so many Christian sects and communities in 
 countries that have been for centuries under Muhammadan rule 
 is an abiding testimony to the toleration they have enjoyed, and 
 shows that the persecutions they have from time to time been 
 called upon to endure at the hands of bigots and fanatics, have 
 been excited by some special and local circumstances rather than 
 inspired by a settled principle of intolerance.! 
 
 ' e.g. The persecution, under Al llutawakkil, by the orthodox reaction against 
 all forms of deviation from the popular creed : in Persia and other parts of Asia 
 about the end of the thirteenth century in revenge lor the domineering and insulting 
 behaviour of the Christians in the hour of their advancement and power under the 
 early Mongols. (MagrlzT (2). Tome i. Premiere Partie, pp. gS, 106.) As- 
 semani (Tom. iii. Pars, p.c), speaking of the causes that have excited the 
 persecution of the Christians under Muhammadan rule, says : — " Non raro perse- 
 cutionis procellam excitarunt mutuae Christianorum ipsorum simultates, sacerdo- 
 tum licentia, praesulum fastus, tyrannica magnatum potestas, et medicorum 
 praesertim scribarumque de supremo in gentem suam imperio altercationes." 
 During the crusades the Christians of the East frequently fell under the suspicion 
 of favouring the invasions of their co-religionists from the West, and in modern 
 Turkey the movement for Greek Independence and the religious sympathies it 
 excited in Christian Europe contributed to make the lot of the subject Christian 
 races harder than it would have been, had they not been suspected of disloyalty 
 and disaffection towards their Muhammadan ruler. De Gobineau has expressed 
 himself very strongly on this question of the toleration of Islam : "Si Ton separe 
 la doctrine religieuse de la necessite politique qui souvent a parle et agi en son 
 nom, il n'est pas de religion plus tolerante, on pourrait presque dire plus indif- 
 ferente sur la foi des hommes que I'lslam. Cette disposition organique est si 
 forte qu'en dehors des cas ou la raison d'Etat mise en jeu a porte les gouveme- 
 ments musulmans a se faire arme de tout pour tendre a I'unite de foi, la tolerance 
 la plus complete a ete la r^gle fournie par le dogme. . . . Qu'on ne s'arrete pas 
 aux violences, aux cruautes commises dans une occasion ou dans une autre. Si 
 on y regarde de pres, on ne tardera pas a y decouvrir des causes toutes politiques 
 ou toutes de passion humaine et de temperament chez le souverain ou dans les 
 populations. Le fait religieux n'y est invoque que comme pretexte et, en realite, 
 il reste en dehors." 
 A. de Gobineau (i), pp. 24-5. 
 
342 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 At such times of persecution, the pressure of circumstances has 
 driven many unbelievers to become — outwardly at least — Muham- 
 madans, and many instances might be given of individuals who, 
 on particular occasions, have been harassed into submission to the 
 religion of the Qur'an. But such oppression is wholly without the 
 sanction of Muhammadan law, either religious or civil. The 
 passages in the Qur'an that forbid forced conversion and enjoin 
 preaching as the sole legitimate method of spreading the faith 
 have already been quoted above (Introduction, pp. 5-6), and the 
 same doctrine is upheld by the decisions of the Muhammadan 
 doctors. When Moses Maimonides, who under the fanatical rule 
 of the Almohades, had feigned conversion to Islam, fled to Egypt 
 and there openly declared himself to be a Jew, a Muslim juris- 
 consult from Spain denounced him for his apostasy and demanded 
 that the extreme penalty of the law should be inflicted on him 
 for this offence ; but the case was quashed by Al Qadi-1 Fadil,i 
 one of the most famous of Muslim judges, and the prime minister 
 of the great Saladin, who authoritatively declared that a man who 
 had been converted to Islam by force could not be rightly con- 
 sidered to be a Muslim.3 In the same spirit, when Ghazan 
 (1295-1304) discovered that the Buddhist monks that had become 
 Muhammadans at the beginning of his reign, (when their temples 
 had been destroyed,) only made a pretence of being converted, he 
 granted permission to all those who so wished to return to 
 Thibet, where among their Buddhist fellow-countrymen they 
 would be free once more to follow their own faith.* Tavernier 
 tells us a similar story of some Jews of Ispahan who were so 
 grievously persecuted by the governor " that either by force or 
 cunning he caused them to turn Mahometans ; but the king 
 (Shah 'Abbas II.) (i 642-1667) understanding that only power and 
 fear had constrained them to turn suffer'd them to resume their 
 own religion and to live in quiet." * A story of a much earlier 
 traveller ^ in Persia, in 1478, shows how even in those turbulent 
 times a Muhammadan governor set himself to severely crush an 
 outburst of fanaticism of the same character. A rich Armenian 
 
 ^ i.e. the talented qadi, the title by which Abu 'Ali 'Abdu-r RaliTm (i 135-1200) 
 as commonly known : for his biography, see Ibn Hiallikan, vol. ii pp. in-ni; 
 Abu-1 Faraj (2), p. 455. :i C. d'Ohsson, vol. iv. p. 281 
 
 Tavernier (i), p. 160. 
 * Viaggio di losafa Barbaro nella Persia. (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. m.) 
 
FORCED CONVERSION CONDEMNED. 343 
 
 merchant of the city of Tabriz was sitting in his shop one day when 
 a Haji,i with a reputation for sanctity, coining up to him impor- 
 tuned him to become a Musalman and abandon his Christian faith ; 
 when the merchant expressed his intention of remaining steadfast 
 in his religion and offered the fellow alms with the hope of getting 
 rid of him, he replied that what he wanted was not his alms but 
 his conversion ; and at length, enraged at the persistent refusal of 
 the merchant, suddenly snatched a sword out of the hand of a by- 
 stander and struck the merchant a mortal blow on the head and 
 then ran away. When the governor of the city heard the news, 
 he was very angry and ordered the murderer to be pursued and 
 captured ; the culprit having been brought into his presence, the 
 governor stabbed him to death with his own hand and ordered 
 his body to be cast forth to be devoured of dogs, saying : " What ! 
 is this the way in which the religion of Muhammad spreads ? " 
 At nightfall, the common people took up the body and buried it, 
 whereupon the Governor enraged at this contempt of his order, 
 gave up the place for three or four hours to be sacked by his soldiers 
 and afterwards imposed a fine as a further penalty ; also he called 
 the son of the merchant to him and comforted him and caressed 
 him with good and kindly words. Even the mad Al Hakim 
 {996-1020), whose persecutions caused many Jews and Christians 
 to abandon their own faith and become Musalmans, afterwards 
 allowed these unwilling converts to return again to their own 
 religion and rebuild their ruined places of worship.^ Neglected 
 as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren 
 in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it 
 would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to 
 have utterly rooted out their Christian subjects or banished them 
 from their dominions, as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the 
 English the Jews for nearly four centuries. It would have been 
 perfectly possible for Salim I. (in 1514) or Ibrahim (1646) to have 
 put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exter- 
 
 ' If indeed by Azi is meant Haji. 
 
 - Al Maliin, p. 260. Similarly, about a century before, Al Muqtadir (908-932 
 A.D.) gave orders for the rebuilding of some churches in Palestine that had been 
 destroyed by Muhammadans during a riot, the cause of which is not recorded. 
 (Eutychius. Tom. ii. pp. 513-4.) Abu Salih makes mention of the rebuilding of 
 a great many churches and monasteries in Egypt that had either been destroyed 
 in time of war (e.g. during the invasion of the Ghuzz and the Kurds in 1 164), (pp. 
 •gi, 96, 112, 120), been wrecked by fanatics, (pp. 85-6, 182, and Maqrizi quoted m 
 the Appendix p. 327-8), or fallen into decay, (pp. S, 87, 103-4.) 
 
344 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 minating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred 
 40,000 Shi'ahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious 
 belief among his Muhammadan subjects. The muftis who turned 
 the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose, did so as 
 the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.^ 
 
 Still, though the principle that found so much favour in Ger- 
 many in the seventeenth century ~ — Cuius regio eius religio, — 
 was never adopted by any Muhammadan potentate, it is obvious 
 that the fact of Islam being the state religion could not fail to 
 have some influence in increasing the number of its adherents. 
 Persons on whom their religious faith sat lightly would be 
 readily influenced by considerations of worldly advantage, and 
 ambition and self-interest would take the place of more laudable 
 motives for conversion. St. Augustine made a similar complaint 
 in the fifth century, that many entered the Christian church 
 merely because they hoped to gain some temporal advantage 
 thereby : " Quam multi non quaerunt lesum, nisi ut illis faciat 
 bene secundum tempus ! Alius negotium habet, quaerit inter- 
 cessionem clericorum ; alius premitur a potentiore, fugit ad 
 ecclesiam ; alius pro se vult interveniri apud eum apud quem 
 parum valet : ille sic, ille sic ; impletur quotidie talibus ec- 
 clesia." * 
 
 Moreover to the barbarous and uncivilised tribes that saw the 
 glory and majesty of the empire of the Arabs in the heyday of 
 its power, Islam must have appeared as imposing and have 
 exercised as powerful a fascination as the Christian faith when 
 presented to the Barbarians of Northern Europe, when " They 
 found Christianity in the Empire — Christianity refined and 
 complex, imperious and pompous — Christianity enthroned by 
 the side of kings, and sometimes paramount above them." * 
 
 But the recital of such motives as little. accounts for all cases 
 of conversion, in the one religion as in the other, and they 
 should not make us lose sight of other factors in the missionary 
 life of Islam, whose influence has been of a more distinctly 
 religious character. Foremost among these is the influence of 
 the devout lives of the followers of Islam. Strange as it may 
 
 ' A. de la Jonquiere, pp. 203, 213, 312. 
 
 ^ E. Charveriat: Histoire de la Guerre de Trente Ans. Tome ii. pp. 615, 625. 
 (Paris, 1878.) 
 ^ In loannis Evangelium Tractatus, xxv. § 10. 
 ■* C. Merivale: The Conversion of the Northern Nations, p. 102. (London, 1866.) 
 
PROSELYTISING INFLUENCES. 345 
 
 appear to a generation accustomed to look upon Islam as a cloak 
 for all kinds of vice, it is nevertheless true that in earlier times 
 many Christians who have come into contact with a living 
 Muslim society have been profoundly impressed by the virtues 
 exhibited therein ; if these could so strike the traveller and the 
 stranger, they would no doubt have some influence of attraction 
 on the unbeliever who came in daily contact with them. Ricoldus 
 de Monte Crucis, a Dominican missionary who visited the East 
 at the close of the thirteenth century, thus breaks out in praise 
 of the Muslims among whom he had laboured: " Obstupuimus, 
 quomodo in lege tante perfidie poterant opera tante perfectionis 
 inveniri. Referemus igitur hie breviter opera perfectionis Sarra- 
 cenorum. . . . Quis enim non obstupescat, si diligenter consideret, 
 quanta in ipsis Sarracenis sollicitudo ad studium, devocio in 
 oratione, misericordia ad pauperes, reverencia ad nomen Dei et 
 prophetas et loca sancta, gravitas in moribus, aflfabilitas ad 
 extraneos, concordia et amor ad suos ? " 1 This note of praise 
 and admiration finds many an echo in the works of Christian 
 travellers and others ; Sir John Mandevile e.g. bears testimony 
 that " the Sarazines ben gode and feythfulle. For thei kepen 
 entirely the Comaundement of the Holy Book Alkaron, that God 
 sente hem be his Messager Machomet ; to the whiche, as thei 
 seyne seynt Gabrielle the Aungel often tyme tolde the wille of 
 God." " The literature of the Crusades is rich in such appreci- 
 ations of Muslim virtues, while the Ottoman Turks in the early 
 days of their rule in Europe received many a tribute of praise 
 from Christian lips, as has already been shown in a former 
 chapter. 
 
 At the present day there are two chief factors (beyond such of 
 the above-mentioned as still hold good) that make for missionary 
 activity in the Muslim world. The first of these is the revival 
 of religious life which dates from the Wahhabi reformation at 
 the end of the last century : though this new departure has 
 long lost all political significance outside the confines of Najd, 
 as a religious revival its influence is felt throughout Africa, India 
 and the Malay Archipelago even to the present day, and has 
 given birth to numerous movements which take rank among 
 the most powerful influences in the Islamic world. In the pre- 
 ceding pages it has already been shown how closely connected 
 
 b 1 Laurent, p. 131- ' Mandevile, p. 139. 
 
346 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 many of the modern Muslim missions are with this wide-spread 
 revival : the fervid zeal it has stirred up, the new life it has 
 infused into existing religious institutions, the impetus it has 
 given to theological study and to the organisation of devotional 
 exercises have all served to awake and keep alive the innate 
 proselytising spirit of Islam. 
 
 Side by side with this reform movement, is another of an 
 entirely different character, — for, to mention one point of diifer- 
 ence only, while the former is strongly opposed to European 
 civilisation, the latter is rather in sympathy with modern thought 
 and offers a presentment of Islam in accordance therewith, — viz. 
 the Pan-Islamic movement, which seeks to bind all the nations 
 of the Muslim world in a common bond of sympathy around the 
 Sultan of Turkey as Khalifah and spiritual head of the faithful. 
 Though in no way so significant as the other, still this trend of 
 thought gives a powerful stimulus to missionary labours ; the 
 effort to realise in actual life the Muslim ideal of the brotherhood 
 of all believers reacts on collateral ideals of the faith, and the 
 sense of a vast unity and of a common life running through the 
 nations inspirits the hearts of the faithful and makes them bold 
 to speak in the presence of the unbelievers. 
 
 What further influence these two movements will have on the 
 missionary life of Islam, the future only can show. But their 
 very activity at the present day is a proof that Islam is not dead. 
 The spiritual energy of Islam is not, as has been so often main- 
 tained, commensurate with its political power.i On the contrary, 
 the loss of political power and worldly prosperity has served, to 
 bring to the front the finer spiritual qualities which are the truest 
 incentives to missionary work. Islam has learned the uses of 
 adversity, and so far from a decline in worldly prosperity being 
 a presage of the decay of this faith, it is significant that those 
 -very Muslim countries that have been longest under Christian 
 rule show themselves most active in the work of proselytising. 
 The Indian and Malay Muhammadans display a zeal and enthu- 
 siasm for the spread of the faith, which one looks for in vain in 
 Turkey or Morocco. 
 
 Frederick Denison Maurice was giving expression to one of the most com- 
 monly received opinions regarding this faith when he said, " It has been proved 
 that Mahometanism can only thrive whUe it is aiming at conquest." (The 
 Religions of the World, p. 28.) (Cambridge, 1852.) 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 JIHAD. 
 
 Any account of Muslim missionary activity would be incomplete 
 •without some mention of the Jihad, or religious war, as the word 
 is commonly translated, if only for the fact that the faith of Islam 
 is commonly said to have been propagated by the sword and the 
 typical Muslim missionary is represented as a warrior with the 
 sword in one hand and the Qur'an in the other offering to the 
 unbelievers the choice between the two. How inadequate is such 
 an account of the spread of Islam may be judged from the pre- 
 •ceding pages ; it remains now to see whether the teaching of the 
 Qur'an authorises forced conversion and exhorts the believer to an 
 armed and militant propaganda, — in fact whether Islam has been 
 missionary despite itself. 
 
 There are no passages to be found in the Qur'an that in any 
 way enjoin forcible conversion, and many that on the contrary 
 limit propagandist efforts to preaching and persuasion. It has 
 farther been maintained that no passage in the Qur'an authorises 
 unprovoked attacks on unbelievers,i and that, in accordance with 
 such teaching, all the wars of Muhammad were defensive. 
 
 It is further maintained that the common, popular meaning of 
 ' warfare against unbelievers ' attached to the word Jihad, is post- 
 •Qur'anic, and that the passages in which this word or any of the 
 derivatives from the same root occur, should be translated in 
 accordance with the primitive meaning. The meaning of the 
 simple verb, jahada is ' to strive, labour, toil, to exert oneself ; to 
 be diligent, or studious ; to take pains ' : it is applied to exertion 
 
 ' Maulavi Cheragh Ali : A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad showing 
 that all the wars of Mohammad were defensive ; and that aggressive war, or 
 compulsory conversion, is not allowed in the Koran. (Calcutta, 1885.) 
 
 " La guerre sainte n'est imposee comma devoir que dans le seul cas ou les 
 ■ennemis de I'islam ont ete les aggresseurs ; si on prend autrement les prescriptions 
 du Koran, ce n'est que par suite d'une interpretation arbitraire des theologiens." 
 Dozy (i), p. 152. 
 
 " No precept is to be found in the Kuran which, taken with the context can 
 justify unprovoked war." Lane, p. 93. 
 
348 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 in any kind of affair, even the churning of butter or the eating of 
 food,— in the 4th form ajhada, also to swearing, and (in the 
 case of things) to their becoming much and spreading : the 8th 
 form, ijtahada, denotes ' to take pains to form a right judgment,' 
 and the noun of action from the same form, ijtihad, 'a lawyer's 
 exerting the faculties of the mind to the utmost, for the purpose 
 of forming an opinion in a case of law, respecting a doubtful and 
 difficult point.' The meaning of the noun of action, jihad is " the 
 using, or exerting, one's utmost power, efforts, endeavour, or 
 ability, in contending with an object of disapprobation," and it is 
 obvious from the above account of the various meanings of different 
 forms that the root assumes, that primarily the word bears no 
 reference to war or fighting, much less to fighting against un- 
 believers or forcible conversion of them, but derives its particular 
 application from the context only. 
 
 In the following pages it is proposed to give all the passages in 
 which jihad or any other derivatives from the same root, occur ;• 
 arranging the passages in chronological order. 
 And, had We pleased. We had certainly raised up a warner in 
 
 every city ; 
 Give not way then to the unbelievers, but by means of this 
 
 (Qur'an) strive against them with a mighty strife (jahid hum 
 
 jihadan kabiran). (xxv. 53-4.) 
 (The reference is here clearly to preaching, as these verses were 
 revealed in Mecca, and to translate jihad ' warfare ' is as absurd 
 as it is illegitimate.) 
 And they swear by God with their most strenuous (jahda) oath. 
 
 (xvi. 40.) 
 Whoso after he hath believed in God denieth Him, if he were 
 
 forced to it and if his heart remain steadfast in the faith, 
 
 (shall be guiltless) : 
 Then to those who after their trials fled their country and strove 
 
 (jahadu) and endured with patience, verily thy Lord will 
 
 afterwards be forgiving, gracious, (xvi. 108, 1 11.) 
 (Verse 108 is said to refer to the tortures inflicted on some of 
 the converts, and verse 1 1 1 to the flight into Abyssinia ; the jihad 
 of these persons therefore was the great exertions and toils they 
 had to make through persecution and exile.) 
 And whosoever striveth (jahada), striveth (yujahidu) for his own 
 
 self only : verily God is independent of all creatures. 
 
 (xxix. 5.) 
 Moreover We have enjoined on man to show kindness to parents ; 
 
 but if they strive (jahada) with thee in order that thou join 
 
 that with Me of which thou hast no knowledge, then obey 
 
 them not. (xxix. 7.) 
 And those who have striven, (have exerted themselves, jahadu) for 
 
 us, in our path will We surely guide : for verily God is with 
 
 those who do righteous deeds, (xxix. 69.) 
 
APPENDIX I. 349 
 
 But if they (i.e. thy parents) strive (jahada) to make thee join 
 that with Me of which thou hast no knowledge, obey them 
 not. (xxxi. 14.) 
 They swore by God with their most strenuous (jahda) oath. 
 
 (xxxv. 40.) 
 And they have sworn by God with their most strenuous (jahda) 
 oath. (vi. 109.) 
 ' But they who beheve, and who fly their country, and strive 
 (exert themselves, jahadu) in the way of God, may hope for 
 God's mercy, and God is gracious and merciful, (ii. 215.) 
 Verily, they who believe and have fled their country and have 
 striven (jahadu) with their property and their persons in the 
 I way of God, and they who have given shelter to and have 
 
 1 helped (the Prophet), shall be near of kin the one to the 
 
 other. 
 But as for those who have believed and have fled their country 
 and have striven (jahadu) in the way of God, and have given 
 shelter to and have helped (the Prophet), these are the true 
 ( believers ; Mercy is their due and a noble provision, (viii. 
 
 f 73, 7S-) 
 
 L And they who have since believed and have fled their country and 
 
 have striven (exerted themselves jahadu) together with you, 
 K — these are of you. (viii. 76.) 
 I Verily those who have turned Ijack after the guidance hath been 
 
 made plain to them, — Satan hath beguiled them. . . . 
 Think these men of diseased hearts, that God will not bring out 
 
 their malice to light ? 
 And we will surely test you, until we know those who have striven 
 
 (mujahidina) and those who have been patient among you ; 
 
 and we will test the reports of you. 
 Verily they who believe not, and turn others from the way of God, 
 
 and separate themselves from the Apostle after that the 
 
 guidance hath been clearly shown them, shall in no way 
 
 injure God : but their works shall He bring to nought. 
 
 (xlvii. 27, 31, 33-4.) 
 Do ye think that ye could enter Paradise without God's taking 
 
 knowledge of those among you who have striven (exerted 
 
 yourselves jahadu) and have been patient? (iii. 136.) 
 Believe in God and His apostle, and strive (exert yourselves 
 
 tujahiduna) in the way of God with your property and your 
 
 persons. (Ixi. 11.) 
 i Those believers who sit at home free from trouble and those who 
 
 strive (exert themselves mujahiduna) in the way of God with 
 fc their property and their persons, are not equal. God has 
 it' assigned to those who strive (exert themselves mujahidina) 
 ; with their property and their persons a rank above those 
 
 who sit at home. Goodly promises hath God made to all : 
 
 but God hath assigned to those who strive (exert themselves 
 
3 so THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 mujahidina) a rich recompense above those who sit at home. 
 
 (iv. 97.) 
 And they swore by God with their most strenuous (jahda) oath. 
 
 (xxiv. 52.) 
 O behevers ! bow down and prostrate yourselves and worship 
 your Lord, and work righteousness. Haply ye shall fare 
 well ; 
 And strive in the Lord (exert 3rourselves jahidu in God), as it 
 behoveth you to do for Him. He hath elected you, and hath 
 not laid on you any hardship in religion, the faith of your 
 father Abraham, (xxii. 76-7.) 
 O Prophet, strive (jahid) with the unbelievers and hypocrites, and 
 be severe towards them. (Ixvi. 9; ix. 74.) 
 (As Muhammad never fought with the munafiqina or hypo- 
 crites, we cannot translate jahid as ' making war ' : the feeling 
 that guided his conduct towards them is rather indicated in 
 xxxiii. 47 : — " Obey not the infidels and hypocrites and take no 
 heed of their evil entreating, and put thy trust in God, for God is 
 a sufficient guardian ; " accordingly the verse is taken to mean 
 " exert thyself in preaching to, and remonstrating with, the un- 
 believers and hypocrites, and be strict towards them, — i.e. be not 
 smooth with them or be beguiled by them.") ^ 
 O ye who believe ! take not My foe and your foe for friends ; ye 
 show them kindness, although they believe not that truth 
 which hath come to you : they drive forth the Apostle and 
 yourselves because ye believe in God your Lord. If ye have 
 come out striving (jihadan) in My path and from a desire to 
 please Me and (yet) show them kindness in private, then I 
 well know what ye conceal, and what ye discover. And 
 whoso of you doth this hath verily therefore gone astray from 
 the right way. (Ix. i.) 
 The true believers are those only who believe in God and His 
 apostle and afterwards doubt not ; and who strive (iahadu) 
 with their property and their persons on the path of God. 
 These are the sincere, (xlix. 15.) 
 Think ye that ye shall be forsaken, and that God doth not yet 
 know those among you who strive (exert themselves jahadu) 
 and take none for their intimate friends besides God and His 
 apostle and the faithful? (ix. 16.) 
 Do ye place the giving drink to the pilgrims, and the visitation of 
 the sacred temple, on the same level with him who believeth 
 on God and the last day, and striveth (iahada) in the path of 
 God ? They are not equal before God : and God guideth not 
 the unjust. 
 They who have believed and fled their country, and striven 
 (jahadu) with their property and their persons on the path of 
 
 ' ChiragJi 'All, p. 186. 
 
APPENDIX I. 351 
 
 God, are of the highest grade with God : and these are they 
 who shall enjoy felicit}^. (ix. 19, 20.) 
 If your fathers and your sons and your brethren and your wives 
 and your kindred and wealth which ye have gained, and 
 merchandise which ye fear may be unsold, and dwellings 
 wherein ye delight, be dearer to you than God and His 
 apostle and striving (jihadin) in His path, then wait until 
 God shall Himself enter on His work ; and God guideth not 
 the impious, (ix. 24.) 
 March ye forth, the light and heavy armed, and strive (jahidu) 
 with your property and your persons on the path of God. 
 (ix. 41.) 
 Those who believe in God and in the last day will not ask leave 
 of thee to be excused from striving (yujahidu) with their 
 property and their persons, (ix. 44.) 
 They who were left in their homes were delighted (to stay) behind 
 God's apostle and were averse from striving (yujahidu) with 
 their property and their persons in the path of God and said, 
 " March not out in the heat." (ix. 82.) 
 Moreover when a SQrah was sent down with " Believe in God and 
 strive (exert yourselves jahidu) in company with His apostle," 
 those of them who are possessed of riches demanded exemp- 
 tion, and said, " Allow us to be with those who sit at home." 
 (ix. 87.) 
 But the apostle and those who have believed with him, strove 
 (exerted themselves jahadu) with their property and persons ; 
 and these ! good things await them and these are they who 
 shall be happy, (ix. 89.) 
 (The ninth Surah, from which the last nine verses have been 
 quoted, was revealed at the end of the ninth year of the Hijrah, 
 when the Meccans had violated the truce of Hudaybiyah and 
 attacked the Banu Khuza'ah, who were in alliance with Muhammad. 
 "Will ye not do battle with a people who have broken their 
 covenant and aimed to expel your apostle and attacked you first ? " 
 (ix. 13.) The timely submission of Mecca however removed the 
 necessity of this retaliation, which was to have been made after 
 the expiration of the four sacred months, (ix. 5.) In this case, 
 fighting in defence of their aggrieved allies would naturally be 
 implied in jihad, though forming no essential part of its meaning ; 
 and we can thus understand how jihad came in later times to be 
 interpreted as meaning fighting against unbelievers.) 
 ye who believe ! fear God, and desire union with Him, and 
 strive (exert yourselves jahidu) in His path : it may be that 
 ye will attain to happiness, (v. 39.) 
 And the faithful will say, " Are these they who swore by God 
 their most strenuous (jahda) oath, that they were surely on 
 your side?" (v. 58.) 
 ye who believe ! should any of you desert His religion, God 
 
352 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 will then raise up a people whom He loveth, and who love 
 
 Him, lowly towards the faithful, grievous to the unbelievers; 
 
 they will strive (exert themselves yujahiduna) in the path oi 
 
 God and will not fear the blame of the blamer. (v. 59.) 
 
 It is due to the Muhammadan legists and commentators that 
 
 jihad came to be interpreted as a religious war waged against 
 
 unbelievers, who might be attacked even though they were not 
 
 the aggressors ; but such a doctrine is wholly unauthorised by the 
 
 Qur'an and can only be extracted therefrom by quoting isolated 
 
 portions of different verses, considered apart from the context 
 
 and the special circumstances under which they were delivered 
 
 and to which alone they were held to refer, being in no way 
 
 intended as positive injunctions for future observance or religious 
 
 precepts for coming generations. But though some Muhammadan 
 
 legists have maintained the rightfulness of unprovoked war 
 
 against unbelievers, none (as far as I am aware) have ventured to 
 
 justify compulsory conversion but have always vindicated for the 
 
 conquered the right of retaining their own faith on payment of 
 
 jizyah. 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 LETTER OF AL HASHIMl INVITING AL KIND! TO EMBRACE ISLAM. 
 
 The following is the text of Al Hashimi's letter inviting Al Kindi 
 to embrace Islam : — 
 
 " In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, I have 
 begun this letter with the salutation of peace and blessing after 
 the fashion of my lord and the lord of the prophets, Muhammad, 
 the messenger of God (may the peace and mercy of God be upon 
 him !). For those trustworthy, righteous and truthful persons 
 who have handed down to us the traditions of our Prophet (peace 
 be upon him !) have related this tradition concerning him that 
 such was his habit and that whenever he began to converse with 
 men he would commence with the salutation of peace and blessing 
 and made no distinction of dhimmis and illiterate, between 
 Muslims and Idolaters (mushriq), saying " I am sent to be kind 
 and considerate to all men and not to deal roughly or harshly 
 with them," and quoting the words of God, " Verily God is kind 
 and merciful to believers." Likewise I have observed that those 
 of our Klialifahs that I have met, followed the footsteps of their 
 Prophet in courtesy, nobility, graciousness and beneficence, and 
 made no distinctions in this matter and preferred none before 
 another. So I have followed this excellent way and have begun 
 my letter with the salutation of peace and blessing, that I be 
 blamed of none who sees my letter. 
 
 I have been guided therein by my affection towards you 
 because my lord and prophet, Muhammad (may the peace and 
 mercy of God be upon him !) used to say that love of kinsmen is 
 true piety and religion. So I have written this to you in obe- 
 dience to the messenger of God (may the peace and mercy of God 
 be upon him !), feeling bound to show gratitude for the services 
 you have done us, and because of the love and affection and incli- 
 nation that you show towards us, and because of the favour of my 
 lord and cousin the Commander of the Faithful (may God assist 
 him !) towards you and his trust in you and his praise of you. 
 So in all sincerity desiring for you what I desire for myself, my 
 family and my parents, I will set forth the religion that we hold, 
 and that God has approved of for us and for all creatures and for 
 which He has promised a good reward in the end and safety from 
 
354 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 punishment when unto Him we shall return. . . . So I have sought 
 to gain for you what I would gain for myself; and seeing your 
 high moral life, vast learning, nobility of character, your virtuous 
 behaviour, lofty qualities and your extensive influence over your 
 co-religionists, I have had compassion on you lest you should 
 continue in your present faith. Therefore I have determined to 
 set before you what the favour of God has revealed to us and to 
 expound unto you our faith with good and gentle speech, following 
 the commandment of God, " Dispute not with the men of the 
 book except in the best way." (xxix. 45.) So I will discuss with 
 you only in words well-chosen, good and mild ; perchance you 
 may be aroused and return to the true path and incline unto the 
 words of the Most High God which He has sent down to the last 
 of the Prophets and lord of the children of Adam, our Prophet 
 Muhammad (the peace and blessing of God be upon him !). I 
 have not despaired of success, but had hope of it for you from 
 God who showeth the right path to whomsoever He willeth, and 
 I have prayed that He may make me an instrument to this end. 
 God in His perfect book says "Verily the religion before God is 
 Islam" (iii. 17), and again, confirming His first saying, "And 
 whoso desireth any other religion than Islam, it shall by no means 
 therefore be accepted from him, and in the next world he shall 
 be among the lost " (iii. 79), and again He confirms it decisively, 
 when He says, " O believers, fear God as He deserveth to be 
 feared ; and die not without having become Muslims " (iii. 97). 
 
 And you know — (May God deliver you from the ignorance of 
 unbelief and open your heart to the light of faith !) — that I am 
 one over whom many years have passed and I have sounded the 
 depths of other faiths and weighed them and studied many of 
 their books especially your books." (Here he enumerates the 
 chief books of the Old and New Testaments, and explains how he 
 has studied the various Christian sects.) " I have met with many 
 monks, famous for their austerities and vast knowledge, have 
 visited many churches and monasteries, and have attended their 
 prayers. ... I have observed their extraordinary diligence, their 
 kneeling and prostrations and touching the ground with their 
 cheeks and beating it with their foreheads and humble bearing 
 throughout their prayers, especially on Sunday and Friday 
 nights, and on their festivals when they keep watch all night 
 standing on their feet praising and glorifying God and con- 
 fessing Him, and when they spend the whole day standing in 
 prayer, continually repeating the name of the Father, Son, 
 and Holy Ghost, and in the days of their retreats which they 
 call Holy Week when they stand barefooted in sackcloth and 
 ashes, with much weeping and shedding of tears continually, 
 and wailing with strange cries. I have seen also their sacrifices, 
 with what cleanliness they keep the bread for it, and the long 
 prayers they recite with great humiHty when they elevate it over 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 355 
 
 the altar in the well-known church at Jerusalem with those cups 
 full of wine, and I have observed also the meditations of the 
 monks in their cells during their six fasts, — i.e. the four greater 
 and the two less, etc. On all such occasions I have been present 
 and observant of the people. Also I have visited their Metro- 
 politans and Bishops, renowned for their learning and their 
 devotion to the Christian faith and extreme austerity in the 
 world, and have discussed with them impartially, seeking for the 
 truth, laying aside all contentiousness, ostentation of learning 
 and imperiousness in altercation and bitterness and pride of race. 
 I have given them opportunity to maintain their arguments and 
 speak out their minds without interruption or browbeating, as is 
 done by the vulgar and illiterate and foolish persons among our 
 co-religionists who have no principle to work up to or reasons on 
 which to rest, or religious feeling or good manners to restrain 
 them from rudeness ; their speech is but browbeating and proud 
 altercation and they have no knowledge or arguments except 
 taking advantage of the rule of the government. Whenever I 
 have held discussions with them and asked them to speak freely 
 as their reason, their creed and their conclusions prompted, they 
 have spoken openly and without deception of any kind, and their 
 inward feelings have been laid bare to me as plainly as their out- 
 ward appearance. So I have written at such length to you (may 
 God show you the better way !) after long consideration and pro- 
 found inquiry and investigation, so that none may suspect that I 
 am ignorant of the things whereof I write and that all into whose 
 hands this letter may come, may know that I have an accurate 
 knowledge of the Christian faith. 
 
 So, now (may God shower His blessings upon you !) with this 
 "knowledge of your religion and so long-standing an affection (for 
 you), I invite you to accept the religion that God has chosen for 
 me and I for myself, assuring you entrance into Paradise and 
 •deliverance from Hell. 
 
 And it is this, — You shall worship the one God, the only God, 
 the Eternal, He begetteth not, neither is He begotten, who hath 
 no consort and no son, and there is none like unto Him. This is 
 the attribute wherewith God has denominated Himself, for none 
 •of His creatures could know Him better than He Himself. I 
 have invited you to the worship of this the One God, whose 
 attribute is such, and in this my letter I have added nothing to 
 that wherewith He has denominated Himself (high and exalted 
 be His name above what they associate with Him !). This is the 
 religion of your father and our father, Abraham (may the blessings 
 i of God rest upon him !), for he was a Hanif and MusHm. 
 
 Then I invite you (may God have you in His keeping !) to 
 bear witness and acknowledge the prophetic mission of my lord 
 and the lord of the sons of Adam, and the chosen one of the God 
 •of all worlds and the seal of the prophets, Muhammad . . . 
 
 A a 2 
 
356 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 sent by God with glad tidings and warnings to all mankiiad. 
 " He it is who hath sent His Apostle with the guidance and a 
 religion of the truth, that He may make it victorious over every 
 other religion, albeit they who assign partners to God be averse 
 from it." (ix. 33.) So he invited all men from the East and from 
 the West, from land and sea, from mountain and from plain, with 
 compassion and pity and good words, with kindly manners and 
 gentleness. Then all these people accepted his invitation, bearing 
 witness that he is the apostle of God, the Creator of the worlds, 
 to those who are willing to give heed to admonition. All gave 
 willing assent when they beheld the truth and faithfulness of his 
 words, and sincerity of his purpose, and the clear argument and 
 plain proof that he brought, namely the book that was sent down 
 to him from God, the like of which cannot be produced by men 
 or Jinns. " Say : Assuredly if mankind and the Jinns should 
 conspire to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce 
 its Uke, though the one should help the other." (xvii. 91.) And 
 this is sufficient proof of his mission. So he invited men to the 
 worship of the One God, the only God, the Self-sufficing, and 
 they entered into his religion and accepted his authority without 
 being forced and without unwillingness, but rather humbly 
 acknowledging him and soliciting the light of his guidance, and 
 in his name becoming victorious over those who denied his divine 
 mission and rejected his message and scornfully entreated him. 
 So God set them up in the cities and subjected to them the necks 
 of the nations of men, except those who hearkened to them and 
 accepted their religion and bore witness to their faith, whereby 
 their blood, their property and their honour were safe and they 
 were exempt from humbly paying jizyah." He then enumerates 
 the various ordinances of Islam, such as the five daily prayers, the 
 fast of Ramadan, Jihad ; expounds the doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the dead and the last judgment, and recounts the joys of 
 Paradise and the pains of Hell. " So I have admonished you : if 
 you believe in this faith and accept whatever is read to you from 
 the revealed Word of God, then you will profit from my admo- 
 nition and my writing to you. But if you refuse and continue in 
 your unbelief and error and contend against the truth, I shall 
 have my reward, having fulfilled the commandment. And the 
 truth will judge you." He then enumerates various religious 
 duties and privileges of the Muslim, and concludes. " So now in 
 this my letter I have read to you the words of the great and high 
 God, which are the words of the Truth, whose promises cannot 
 fail and in whose words there is no deceit. Then give up your 
 unbelief and error, of which God disapproves and which calls for 
 punishment, and speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, 
 these words that you yourself admit to be so confusing : and give 
 up the worship of the cross which brings loss and no profit, for I 
 wish you to turn away from it, since your learning and nobility 
 
APPENDIX II. 357 
 
 of soul are degraded thereby. For the great and high God says : 
 "Verily, God will not forgive the union of other gods with Him- 
 self ; but other than this will He forgive to whom He pleaseth. 
 And whoso uniteth gods with God, hath devised a great wicked- 
 ness." (iv. 51.) And again ; " Surely now are they infidels who 
 say, " God is the Messiah, Son of Mary ;" for the Messiah said, 
 " children of Israel ! worship God, my Lord and your Lord." 
 Verily, those who join other gods with God, God doth exclude 
 from Paradise, and their abode the Fire ; and for the wicked no 
 helpers ! They surely are infidels who say, " God is a third of 
 three " : for there is no God but one God ; and if they refrain 
 not from what they say, a grievous chastisement shall assuredly 
 befall such of them as beheve not. Will they not, therefore, 
 turn unto God, and ask pardon of Him ? since God is Forgiving, 
 Merciful ! The Messiah, Son of Mary, is but an Apostle ; other 
 Apostles have flourished before him ; and his mother was a just 
 person ; they both ate food." (v. 76-9.) Then leave this path 
 of error and this long and stubborn clinging to your religion and 
 those burdensome and wearisome fasts which are a constant 
 trouble to you and are of no use or profit and produce nothing 
 but weariness of body and torment of soul. Embrace this faith 
 and take this, the right and easy path, the true faith, the ample 
 law and the way that God has chosen for His favoured ones and 
 to which He has invited the people of all religions, that He may 
 show His kindness and favour to them by guiding them into the 
 
 , true path by means of His guidance, and fill up the measure of 
 His goodness unto men. 
 
 So I have advised you and paid the debt of friendship and 
 sincere love, for I have desired to take you to myself, that you 
 and I might be of the same opinion and tlae same faith, for I have 
 found my Lord saying in his perfect Book : " Verily the un- 
 
 ' believers among the people of the Book and among the poly- 
 theists, shall go into the fire of Hell to abide therein for ever. 
 Of all creatures they are the worst. But they verily who believe 
 and do the things that are right— these of all creatures are the 
 best. Their recompense with their Lord shall be gardens of 
 
 ^ Eden, 'neath which the rivers flow, in which they shall abide 
 for evermore. God is well pleased with them, and they with 
 
 ' Him. This, for him who feareth his Lord." (xcviii. 5-8.) "Ye 
 are the best folk that hath been raised up for mankind. Ye 
 enjoin what is just, and ye forbid what is evil, and ye believe in 
 God : and if the people of the book had believed, it had surely 
 
 • been better for them. Believers there are among them, but most 
 
 fofthem are disobedient." (iii. 106.) So I have had compassion 
 upon you lest you might be among the people of Hell who are 
 the worst of all creatures, and I have hoped that by the grace of 
 
 • God you may become one of the true believers with whom God 
 ; is well pleased and they with Him, and they are the best of all 
 
358 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 creatures, and I have hoped that you will join yourself to that 
 religion which is the best of the religions raised up for men. 
 But if you refuse and persist in your obstinacy, contentiousness 
 and ignorance, your iniidelity and error, and if you reject my 
 words and refuse the sincere advice I have offered you (without 
 looking for any thanks or reward,) — then write whatever you 
 wish to say about your religion, all that you hold to be true and 
 established by strong proof, without any fear or apprehension, 
 without curtailment of your proofs or concealment of your beliefs ; 
 for I purpose only to listen patiently to your arguments and to 
 yield to and acknowledge all that is convincing therein, submitting 
 willingly without refusing or rejecting or fear, in order that I 
 maj' compare your account and mine. You are free to set forth 
 your case ; bring forward no plea that fear prevented you from 
 making your arguments complete and that you had to put a 
 bridle on your tongue, so that you could not freely express your 
 arguments. So now you are free to bring forward all your 
 arguments, that you may not accuse me of pride, injustice or 
 partiality : for that is far from me. 
 
 Therefore bring forward all the arguments you wish and say 
 whatever you please and speak 3'our mind freely. Now that you 
 are safe and free to say whatever you please, appoint some 
 arbitrator who will impartially judge between us and lean only 
 towards the truth and be free from the empery of passion : and 
 that arbitrator shall be Reason, whereby God makes us responsible 
 for our own rewards and punishments. Herein I have dealt justly 
 with you and have given you full security and am ready to accept 
 whatever decision Reason may give for me or against me. For 
 " there is no compulsion in religion " (ii. 257) and I have only 
 invited you to accept our faith willingly and of your own accord 
 and have pointed out the hideousness of your present belief. 
 Peace be with you and the mercj'- and blessings of God ! " 
 
 There can be very little doubt but that this document has 
 come down to us in an imperfect condition and has suffered 
 mutilation at the hands of Christian copyists : the almost entire 
 absence of any refutation of such distinctively Christian doctrines, 
 as that of the Blessed Trinity, and the references to such attacks 
 to be found in AI Kindi's reply, certainly indicate the excision 
 of such passages as might have given offence to Christian 
 readers.! 
 
 ' Similarly, the Spanish editor of the controversial letters that passed between 
 Alvar and "the transgressor " (a Christian convert to Judaism), adds the follow- 
 ing note after Epist. xv. : " Quatuordecim in hac pagina ita abrasae sunt liniae, 
 ut nee verbum unum legi posit. Folium subsequens exsecuit possessor codicis, ne 
 transgressoris deliramenta legerentur." (Migne, Patr. Lat. Tom. cxxi. p. 483.) 
 
APPENDIX III, 
 
 CONTROVERSIAL LITERATURE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND THE 
 FOLLOWERS OF OTHER FAITHS. 
 
 Although Islam has had no organised system of propaganda, no 
 tract societies or similar agencies of missionary work, there has 
 been no lack of reasoned presentments of the faith to unbehevers, 
 particularly to Christians and Jews. Of these it is not proposed 
 to give a detailed account here, but it is of importance to draw 
 attention to their existence if only to remove the wide-spread 
 misconception that mass conversion is the prevailing character- 
 istic of the spread of Islam and that individual conviction has 
 formed no part of the propagandist schemes of the Muslim 
 missionary. The beginnings of Muhammadan controversy 
 against unbelievers are to be found in the Qur'an itself, but from 
 the ninth century of the Christian era begins a long series of 
 systematic treatises of Muhammadan Apologetics, which has 
 been actively continued to the present day. The number of 
 such works directed against the Christian faith has been far more 
 numerous than the Christian refutations of Islam, and some of 
 the ablest of Muslim thinkers have employed their pens in their 
 composition, e.g. Abu Yusuf ibn Ishaq al Kindi (a.d. 813-73), 
 Mas'udi (ob. 958 a.d.), Ibn Hazm (a.d. 994-1064), Al Ghazzali 
 (ob. 1 1 II A.D. ), etc. It is interesting also to note that several 
 renegades have written apologies for their change of faith and 
 in defence of the Muslim creed, e.g. Ibn Jazlah in the eleventh 
 century, Yusufu-1 Lubnani and Shaykh Ziyadah ibn Yahya in the 
 thirteenth, 'Abdu-llah ibn 'Abdu-llah (of whom an account is 
 given in Appendix IV.) in the fifteenth, Darwesh 'Ali in the 
 sixteenth, Ahmad ibn ' Abdi-Uah, an Enghshman born at Cam- 
 bridge, in the seventeenth century, etc., etc. These latter were all 
 Christians before their conversion, but Jewish renegades also, 
 though fewer in number, have been among the apologists of 
 Islam. In India, besides many Muhammadan books written 
 against the Christian religion, there is an enormous number of 
 controversial works against Hinduism : as to whether the 
 Muhammadans have been equally active in other heathen 
 countries, I have no information. 
 
36o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 The reader will find a vast store of information on Muslim 
 controversial literature in the following writings : Moritz Stein- 
 schneider : Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer 
 Sprache, zwischen Muslimen, Christen und Juden. (Leipzig, 
 1877.) Ignatius Goldziher : Ueber Muhammedanische Polemik 
 gegen Ahl al-kitab. (Z.D.M.G. Vol. 32, p. 341 fF. 1878.) Martin 
 Schreiner : Zur Geschichte der Polemik zwischen Juden Tind 
 Muhammedanern. (Z.D.M.G. Vol. 42, p. 591 ff. 1888.) 
 
APPENDIX IV. 
 
 CONVERTS TO ISLAM THAT HAVE NOT COME UNDER DIRECT 
 MISSIONARY INFLUENCES, 
 
 Any account of the spread of Islam would be incomplete without 
 some mention of those persons who have embraced this faith 
 without ever having been brought under any proselytising 
 influences and without even (in some cases) having come into 
 personal contact with Musalmans at all before their conversion, 
 but have enrolled themselves among the followers of the Prophet 
 after study of some of the documents of Muslim theology. The 
 number of such persons is probably by no means inconsiderable, 
 but the records we possess of these conversions are very scanty. 
 In the following pages the narratives of some of these converts 
 have been given at length, as possessing an individual interest 
 quite apart from any connection with the general history of the 
 spread of Islam. 
 
 Probably one of the earliest of such conversions is that of a 
 Greek named Theodisclus, who succeeded St. Isidore (who died 
 A.D. 636) as Archbishop of Seville ; he was accused of heresy, for 
 maintaining that Jesus was not one God in unity with the Father 
 and the Holy Spirit but was rather son of God by adoption ; he 
 was accordingly condemned by an ecclesiastical synod, deprived 
 of his archbishopric and degraded from the priesthood. Where- 
 upon he went over to the Arabs and embraced Islam among 
 them.i 
 
 Whether or not the knowledge of Islam that came into 
 Europe from Spain or later through the constant communication 
 with Muhammadan countries in the time of the Crusades, 
 attracted any persons in Christian Europe to the faith of the 
 Prophet, or whether any of the adherents of the many heretical 
 sects of the Middle Ages sought to find greater freedom of 
 thought in the pale of Islam, I have been unable to determine. 
 Of the subjects of the Byzantine Empire or the Crusaders who 
 came under the immediate influence of Muhammadan thought 
 and society, it is not the place to speak here, and some account 
 
 Lucae Diaconi Tudensis Chronicon Mundi. (Andreas Schottus : Hispaniae 
 lUustratae. Tom. iv. p. 53.) (Francoftirti, 1603-8.) 
 
362 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 has already been given in preceding pages of the converts won 
 from these sources. 
 
 One of the most remarkable and circumstantial accounts of a 
 conversion of this kind is found in a controversial work entitled 
 " The book of the present of the scholar to refute the people of 
 the cross " : — which contains an attack upon Christianity and a 
 defence of the Muslim faith. This book was written in 1420 
 A.D. by a Christian priest who after his conversion to Islam took 
 the name of 'Abdu-llah ibn 'Abdi-llah : in the preface he gives 
 an autobiographical sketch of his life, from which we learn that 
 he was born in Majorca, of well-to-do parents ; that from his 
 childhood he was destined for the priesthood ; at the age of six 
 he was set to study the Gospels and learned the greater part by 
 heart ; then after studying grammar and logic, was sent to the 
 University of Lerida in Catalonia, where after going through a 
 course of physics and astronomy for some time, he devoted him- 
 self exclusively for four years to the study of theology. From 
 Lerida he went to the famous University of Bologna, which was 
 at that time at the zenith of its fame and popularity. " I lived 
 (he tells us) in the house of an aged priest who was highly 
 respected, named Nicolas Martil.i This priest occupied a very 
 high position in Bologna on account of his learning, his piety and 
 his ascetic life, in respect of which he was unsurpassed by any of 
 the Christians of his time. Difficult points of theology were 
 continually being submitted to him for solution, from all parts, 
 by kings and others, who also sent him large presents. . . . With 
 this priest I studied the principles and ordinances of the Christian 
 faith ; I served him for a long time, attending on him continually, 
 so that at length he made me the most intimate of his intimate 
 friends. As I continued to serve him devotedly, he went so far 
 as to entrust me with the keys of his house and of his store- 
 rooms. In this way I spent ten years in the service of this 
 priest and in study. Now one day it happened that the priest 
 fell ill and was unable to go to the lecture hall. The students 
 who attended his lectures, while waiting for him to come, began 
 to discuss various learned topics, and in the course of their dis- 
 cussions there happened to come up the words that God spoke 
 by the mouth of His prophet, Jesus : "There shall come after 
 me a prophet whose name is the Paraclete." An animated dis- 
 cussion followed lasting for some time, but in the end they broke 
 up without having settled the difficulty. 
 
 When I returned to the house of our professor, he asked me, 
 " What was the subject of your disputation to-day, during my 
 absence ? " I told him how we had been unable to come to an 
 agreement on the question of the name of the Paraclete ; that 
 
 ' Professor Guidi has suggested to me that the Italian form of this name was 
 very probably Martello. 
 
APPENDIX IV. 363 
 
 one had expressed one opinion and another another, and I told 
 him of the various suggestions that had been offered. " And 
 what solution did you offer ? " said he. " That of such and such 
 a theologian, as given in the commentary on the Gospels." 
 " How near and yet how far you are from the truth 1 " he cried, 
 " so and so was quite wrong and so and so nearly guessed right, 
 but yet not one of you has arrived at the true meaning. Besides, 
 no one can rightly interpret this illustrious name except those 
 who are deeply versed in knowledge and, so far, none of you have 
 made much progress in knowledge." 
 
 At these words I threw myself at his feet and kissed them and 
 said to him : " O Sir, you see that I have come to you from a far 
 country ; for these ten years I have served you, and have learned 
 of you more than I can tell ; now fill up the measure of this 
 kindness towards me by expounding to me this illustrious name." 
 The old man began to weep, saying, " My son, of a surety you 
 are very dear to me for the services you have rendered me and 
 for your devotion to me. Assuredly, there is great advantage to 
 be gained from the knowledge of this illustrious name, but I fear 
 that if I reveal it to you, the Christians will at once put you to 
 death." 
 
 " By the most High God, by the truth of the Gospel and by 
 Him who brought it ! " I cried, " I promise that I will reveal your 
 secret to no one, except with your permission." 
 
 " My son, when you first came to me, T asked you for informa- 
 tion about your native land, for I wished to know whether it was 
 near to the Muslim country, whether your fellow-countrymen 
 went to war with them or they with you, in fact I wanted to find 
 out what hatred you felt towards Islam. Then know, my son, 
 that the Paraclete is one of the names of the prophet of the 
 Muslims, Muhammad, to whom has been revealed the fourth 
 book of which the prophet Daniel 1 speaks when he announces 
 that this would be revealed to him. Of a surety, his religion is 
 the true religion and his doctrine is the glorious doctrine of which 
 the Gospel speaks." 
 
 " If this is so. Sir," (I asked) " what is your opinion about the 
 Christian faith ? " 
 
 "My child," (he answered) "if the Christians had reniained 
 faithful to the religion of Jesus, they would be in possession of 
 the religion of God, for the religion of Jesus, like that of all the 
 prophets, is the religion of God." 
 
 " Then what remedy is there, Sir ? " I asked. 
 
 He replied : " Embrace Islam, my child." 
 
 "But," (I asked) "will he who embraces Islam obtain salva- 
 tion ? " 
 
 "Yes," (he answered) "he obtains salvation in this world and 
 
 the next." 
 
 ' Daniel xii. 4. 
 
364 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 " But, Sir, the wise man chooses for himself that only which 
 he has recognised to be the best : then when you maintain the 
 superiority of Islam, what hinders you from embracing it ?" 
 
 " My son," (he replied) " God has revealed to me the truth of 
 what I have just told you with regard to the superiority of the 
 religion of Islam and the greatness of the Prophet of Islam, only 
 in my old age. Now I am burdened with years and my body is 
 weak. I do not mean that this can serve as an excuse ; on the 
 contrary, the argument of God is strong against me. If God had 
 guided me to this path when I was your age, I would have given 
 up everything and embraced the true religion. But love of the 
 world is the source of all sin. You know what a high position I 
 hold among the Christians and the respect and consideration they 
 show me. Now, if they were once to perceive how things really 
 stood and my tendency towards Islam, they would all unite to 
 slay me at once. But let us suppose that I succeeded in escaping 
 them and in making my way safely to the Muslims, this is what 
 would happen : I should say to them, " I am come to live among 
 you, as a Mushm," and they would answer, " In entering into the 
 true faith, you have done good to yourself but you have conferred 
 no benefit on us. For by entering into the religion of Islam you 
 have escaped the chastisement of God." Then I should remain 
 among them, an old man of seventy years, poor, ignorant of their 
 language and doomed to die of hunger, while they would know 
 nothing of the high position I had held. Well, thanks be to 
 God, I have remained faithful to the religion of Jesus and the 
 revelation he brought, God be my witness ! " 
 
 " Then, Sir," (said I) " your advice to me is to go to the country 
 of the Muslims and embrace their religion ? " 
 
 " Yes," (he replied) " if you are wise and seek salvation, make 
 haste to do so, for thereby you will gain this world and the next. 
 Now up to the present no one knows anything of this matter of 
 ours and do you be most careful to keep it secret, for if it should 
 get abroad ever so little, you would at once be put to death and I 
 could do nothing for you. It would be of no avail for you to throw 
 the blame on me, for while what I said against you would be 
 believed, no one would believe what you said against me. If 
 then you say a word of this matter, I am innocent of your 
 blood." ^ 
 
 " May God preserve me," I cried, " from the very thought of 
 
 Having promised him what he wished, I got ready for my 
 journey and bade him farewell ; he blessed me and gave me fifty 
 dinars for the expenses of my journey. 
 
 I set out for the city of Majorca, my birthplace, where I 
 stayed six months ; then sailed to the island of Sicily, where I 
 waited five months for a ship to set sail for the country of the 
 Muslims. A ship going to Tunis having arrived, I went on 
 
APPENDIX IV. 365 
 
 board : we left Sicily in the evening twilight and cast anchor in 
 the harbour of Tunis at mid-day. 
 
 When I disembarked at the custom-house, some of the Chris- 
 tian soldiers heard of me and took me to their houses ; some mer- 
 chants too residing in Tunis accompanied them. I passed four 
 months with them enjoying the most liberal hospitality. 
 
 At the end of this time, I made inquiries among them as to 
 whether there was anyone in the Sultan's court who could 
 speak the language of the Christians. The Sultan at that time 
 was his late Majesty, Abu-1 'Abbas Ahmad. They informed me 
 that at the court there was a learned man named Yusuf, the 
 Physician, one of the chief servants of the Sultan, whose physician 
 and favourite he was. 
 
 This information gave me great pleasure and having inquired 
 where he lived I was shown the way to his house. When I came 
 before him, I explained to him my situation and told him that my 
 desire to embrace Islam was the reason of my coming. The 
 physician was exceedingly glad to hear this news, more especially 
 as this happy event was to take place through his intervention. 
 So he mounted his horse and took me with him to the palace, and 
 going in, told the Sultan my story and begged him to give me an 
 audience. This request being granted, I was admitted into the 
 presence of the Sultan. 
 
 He first asked me my age, to which I replied that I was thirty- 
 five. Then he inquired what studies I had pursued and I told 
 him. 
 
 " You are welcome," (he said) " become a Muslim, and the 
 blessing of the High God be upon you." 
 
 I said to the interpreter, the physician above mentioned, 
 "Tell our Lord, the Sultan, that no man ever abandons his 
 religion without many persons crying out against him and 
 calumniating him ; I beg you to grant me the favour of summon- 
 ing the Christian merchants and the Christian soldiers and 
 of making inquiries from them regarding me, so that you may 
 hear what they have to say of me ; after that I will embrace 
 Islam." 
 
 The Sultan replied through the interpreter : " Your request is 
 the same as 'Abdu-Uah ibn Salam made of the Prophet when he 
 embraced Islam." Then he sent for the Christian soldiers and 
 some of the merchants and put me into a room close to the place 
 where he sat ; and asked them, " What is your opinion of the 
 priest who recently came, by such and such a ship ? " They 
 answered, " He is a man of great learning in our religion, and our 
 men of learning have not met with any one of greater eminence 
 in learning and piety than he is." 
 
 " What would you say of him," asked the Sultan, " if he were 
 to become a Muslim ? " 
 
 " God forbid ! " they cried, " he will never do that." 
 
366 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 When he had heard the opinion of the Christians, the Sultan 
 sent for me. Then, at that very time and in the presence of the 
 Christians, I repeated the profession of faith. The Christians 
 made the sign of the cross on their faces and said, " It is only the 
 desire of getting married (for among us priests do not marry) that 
 has driven him to this act," and they left the palace in great 
 distress." i 
 
 After his conversion he received an allowance of four dinars a 
 day from the Sultan, Abu-1 'Abbas Ahmad (1370-1394) and was 
 shortly afterwards placed in charge of the custom-house. His 
 tomb is still shown at Tunis, where it is an object of peculiar 
 veneration.3 
 
 It has already been shown that during the Reformation period, 
 the Protestants of Hungary and other places preferred the rule of 
 the Turks to that of the Catholics, and cases occurred of Protes- 
 tants who fled into Turkish territory to find there the freedom of 
 religious worship and opinions which was denied them in 
 Christian Europe. The common points of doctrine in the teach- 
 ings of some of these sects and in the Muslim creed, were so many, 
 and the points of difference so few, that it is not surprising to learn 
 that in the sixteenth century " not a few Socinians passed over to 
 Muhammadanism." ^ 
 
 As to the numerous Christian renegades, belonging to various 
 nations of Europe, whose names occur in Turkish history, often 
 occupying high and responsible posts, there seems very little in- 
 formation to be gained regarding their religious life, beyond the 
 fact that they were once Christians and afterwards became Musal- 
 mans : whether there were any among them who left their native 
 country solely from a desire to embrace Islam and join a Muham- 
 madan community, I have been unable to discover. As for the 
 numerous renegades who went to swell the numbers of the 
 Barbary corsairs, there is probably not a single instance to be 
 found in which religious conviction had anything to do with their 
 apostasy, for such a lawless life of bloodshed and piracy could offer 
 no attractions except to the escaped convicts, deserters and 
 scoundrels of all kinds who made their way to the North coast of 
 Africa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.* Towards the 
 close of the eighteenth century, when the influence of freethinking 
 literature— especially in France — had weakened in many minds 
 their old belief in the doctrines of the Christian faith, and some 
 
 ' Kitfibu tuhfati-1 arib fi-r raddi 'ala ahli-s salib, pp. 5-8 (a.h. 1290) (s.l.ettyp.) 
 Le present de Thomme lettre pour refuter les partisans de la Croix, par 'Abd- 
 
 AUah ibn 'Abd-Allah, le Drograan, Traduit par M. N. . . . (Revue de 
 
 I'Histoire des Religions. Tome xii. (1885) pp. 75-9.) 
 - Id, pp. 69, 80-81. 
 
 •^ J. II. Hottinger, Historia Orientalis, p. 363. (Zurich, 1660.) 
 ■* The Adventures of Thomas Fellow, edited by Dr. Robert Brown, pp. 12-13, 
 
 32-3. (London, iSgo.) 
 
APPENDIX IV. 367 
 
 works 1 had appeared from the pens of writers of the free-thought 
 school, in which the Muhammadan rehgion was belauded to the 
 disparagement of Christianity, several Europeans, and among 
 them even some French Abbgs left their own country and 
 migrated to Turkey, there to embrace Islam.3 
 
 It is rare that any news of such conversions has reached Chris- 
 tian Europe and rarer still that any of these renegades has com- 
 mitted to print any account of himself, as, for example, was done 
 by a French mihtary officer who became a Musalman in the be- 
 ginning of the present^ century, taking the name of Isma'il, after- 
 wards changed to Ibrahim Mansur : ^ during his student days in 
 Paris, he had learned to read, write and speak the Turkish lan- 
 guage, so presumably he had some knowledge of the Muslim faith 
 before he left his native country. 
 
 In recent years there have been several conversions of this kind, 
 for the history of which some materials are available ; such for 
 example is the case of a Mr. Schumann of Hanover, who embraced 
 Islam in 1888 after a correspondence with the Shayjdiu-1 Islam at 
 Constantinople. The following letter addressed to the new convert 
 by this important ecclesiastical functionary was published in the 
 newspapers of Constantinople and thence translated into French 
 and English ; at the present day when efforts are being made to 
 present Islam to the Christian world in as attractive a form as pos- 
 sible, and the conversion of England and America forms the sub- 
 ject of many a Muslim prayer, it is of considerable interest as a 
 
 ' Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers : Vie de Mahomet. (1730 ) 
 Anacharsis Cloots : La certitude des preuves du Mahometisme. (1780.) 
 ^ The following account is given of such persons by a Protestant clergyman who 
 was for nine years (1759-1768) pastor of the Evangelical community in Smyrna 
 and during this period visited Constantinople. Speaking of the renegades, he 
 says : — " AUein man soUte denken, dass es wenigstens nicht leichtlich geschahe, 
 dass Leute mit kaltem Blute, und denen man einen gesunden Verstand zuschreiben 
 soUte, die sich auch wohl einer grossen Belesenheit riihmen, dergleichen Unbe- 
 sonnenheit oder vielmehr Gottlosigkeit begehen soUten. Ich habe verschiedene 
 Petit-Maitres und Abbes, auch sonst andre Personen ihr Vaterland verlassen und 
 nach der Turkey kommen sehen, um Muhamedaner zu werden. Man ist 
 vielleicht begierig, die Bewegungsursachen und die Verleitungen dieser Witzlinge 
 2U einem solchen Unternehmen zu erfahren, Solche waren zweyfach. Das 
 Lesen der freygeisterischen Schriften, zumal von den Franzosen, welche fast stets 
 (larch witzig eingekleidete Vorstellungen von den Tiirken, das Christenthum 
 herabsetzen, hatte den wenigen Verstand, den diese Leute noch hatten, bis zu 
 diesem Grade zerriittet. Nachstdem war ihnen die Freyheit zu denken, diess 
 Lieblings- und Losungswort der vermeynten starken Geisier, aber auch die Freyheit, 
 Oder besser zu sagen, die Frechheit zu leben und bey den Tiirken in den liebsten 
 Fleischesliisten ungestrafet und ohne Gewissensbisse sich herumzuvvalzen, so 
 reizend abgeschildert worden, dass sie als Muhamedaner hier ein Paradiess zu 
 erlangen trachteten, wozu ihnen der Unglaube keine Hoffnung fUr die Zukunft 
 uberliess." 
 
 C. M. Liideke : Glaubwurdige Nachrichten von dem Turkischen Reiche, p. 183. 
 (Leipzig, 1770.) 
 
 ^ Mimoires sur la Grece et I'Albanie par Ibrahim-Manzour-Efendi. (pp. i.-lx.xvi. 
 Notice sur I'autenr des ces memoires.) (Paris, 1827.) 
 
368 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 statement of Muslim doctrine emanating from so authoritative a 
 source, and evidently intended to create as favourable an impres- 
 sion as possible on the minds of Christians : it is therefore signifi- 
 cant in the missionary history of Islam and is accordingly given 
 here at length : — " Dear Sir, The letter by which you ask to be 
 received into the heart of the Musalman reUgion has been received 
 and has caused us lively satisfaction. The reflections which you 
 make on this occasion appear to us worthy of the highest praise. 
 
 At the same time we ought to call your attention to the fact 
 that your conversion to Islam is not subordinated to our consent, 
 for Islam does not admit of any intermediary, like the clergy, 
 between God and His servants. Our duty consists only in teach- 
 ing the people religious truths. Consequently, conversion to 
 Islam demands no religious formality and depends upon the 
 authorisation of no one. It is sufficient to believe and to proclaim 
 one's belief. 
 
 In fact, Islam has for its base, faith in the unity of God and in 
 the mission of his dearest servant Muhammad (may God cover 
 him with blessings and grant him salvation) ; i.e. to accept con- 
 scientiously this faith and to avow it in words, as expressed by 
 the phrase : " There is only one God and Muhammad is His 
 prophet." He who makes this profession of faith becomes a 
 Musalman, without having need of the consent or approbation 
 of any one. If, as you promise in your letter, you make this 
 profession of faith, that is to say, you decla^re that there is only 
 one God and that Muhammad is His prophet, you become a 
 Musalman without having need of our acceptance ; and we, for 
 our part, felicitate you with pride and joy for having been touched 
 by divine grace, and we shall testify in this world and the other 
 that you are our brother. Believers are all brothers. 
 
 Such is a summary definition of faith. Let us enter now upon 
 some developments of it. Man, who is superior to the other 
 animals by his intelligence, was created out of nothing to adore 
 his Creator. This adoration may be summed up in two words — 
 to honour the commands of God and to sympathise with his 
 creatures. This double adoration exists in all religions. As to its 
 practice — religions differ as to their rules, forms, times, places, the 
 greater or less number of their rites, etc. But the human in- 
 telligence does not suffice to assure us of the manner of praying 
 which is most worthy of the divine glory ; so God in His mercy, 
 in according to certain human beings the gift of prophecy, in 
 sending to them, by angels, inspiration, writings and books, and 
 in so revealing the true religion, has overwhelmed his servants 
 with blessings. 
 
 (The letter then goes on to speak of the Qur'an, the Prophets, 
 the Last Judgment, and other articles of~'belief ; next, of the 
 practical duties of prayer, almsgiving, etc.) 
 
 A sinner who repents and in person asks God's forgiveness 
 
APPENDIX IV. 369 
 
 obtains pardon. Only the rights of his neighbour are an ex- 
 ception to this rule ; for the servant of God who cannot obtain 
 justice in this world, reclaims his rights at the Day of Judgment, 
 and God, who is just, will then compel the oppressor to make resti- 
 tution to the oppressed. Even the martyrs are no exception to 
 this rule. To avoid this responsibility the only means is to get a 
 quittance from your neighbour whom you have wronged. In all 
 cases, however, there is no need of the intercession of a spiritual 
 director. 
 
 All this no doubt seems strange to people accustomed to a 
 sacerdotal regime. When a Christian child is born, to make 
 part of society he must be baptized by a priest ; when he grows 
 up he needs a priest to marry him ; if he would pray he must go 
 to a church and iind a priest ; to obtain forgiveness for his sins 
 he must confess to a priest ; and he must have a priest to bury 
 him. 
 
 In the Musalman religion, where there is no clergy, such 
 obligations have no place. The infant is born a Musalman, and 
 his fether, or the chief of the family, gives him a name. When 
 they wish to contract a marriage, the man and the woman or 
 their agents make the contract in presence of two witnesses ; the 
 contracting parties are the only ones interested and others cannot 
 intervene or take part. 
 
 A Musalman prays all alone in any place which suits his 
 convenience, and to merit the remission of his sins he goes 
 directly to God. He does not confess them to others, nor ought 
 he to do so. At his death the Musalman inhabitants of the town 
 are obliged to put him in a coffin and bury him. Any Musalman 
 can do this ; the presence of a religious chief is not necessary. 
 
 In a word, in all religious acts there is no intermediary between 
 God and His servants. It is necessary to learn the will of God, 
 revealed by the Prophet, and to act in conformity with it. 
 
 Only the accomplishment of certain religious ceremonies, such 
 as the prayers on Friday and at Bairam, is subordinated to the 
 will of the Caliph, since the arrangement of ceremonies for Islam 
 is one of his sacred attributes. Obedience to his orders is one of 
 the most important religious duties. As to our mission, it con- 
 sists in administering, in his name, the religious affairs which he 
 deigns to confide to us. 
 
 One of the things to which every Musalman ought to be very 
 attentive is righteousness in character ; vices, such as pride, 
 presumption, egotism and obstinacy, do not become a Musalman. 
 To revere the great and to compassionate the insignificant are 
 precepts of Islam." 1 ., 
 
 A few years before the date of the above letter an English 
 solicitor, Mr. William Henry Quilliam by name, had embraced 
 
 1 The Independent, New York, Feb. 9th, 1888. 
 
370 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Islam after an independent study of the Qur'an and various works 
 on Muhammadanism. His attention had first been drawn to this 
 faith, while on a visit to Morocco in 1884, where he was espe- 
 cially struck by the apparent sincerity of the followers of Islam 
 and the absence of drunkenness and other vices that so forcibly 
 obtrude themselves in the great cities of England. He instituted 
 a Muslim mission in the city of Liverpool, where after five years' 
 labour he gained about thirty converts. More vigorous and 
 active methods of propaganda were then adopted, public lectures 
 were delivered, pamphlets circulated, a magazine published and 
 the doctrines of Islam vindicated by open-air preachers. Ten 
 years after Mr. Quilliam's conversion, the number of the English 
 converts had risen to 137. This missionary movement has 
 attracted considerable attention in the Muhammadan world, 
 especially in India, where every incident connected with the 
 religious life of the English converts is chronicled in the Muham- 
 madan newspapers. In 1891 Mr. Quilliam was invited by the 
 Sultan of Turkey to visit him in Constantinople, and three years 
 later he was commissioned to be the bearer of a decoration from 
 the Sultan to a Muslim merchant who had erected a mosque in 
 Lagos on the West Coast of Africa. 
 
 In America another convert named Muhammad Alexander 
 Russell Webb, who had been led to embrace Islam through 
 private and independent study, started a mission in the year 
 1893.1 Brought up as a Presbyterian, he early abandoned Chris- 
 tianity, and became a materialist ; afterwards becoming interested 
 in the study of Oriental religions, he was particularly attracted 
 towards Islam, and entered into correspondence with a gentleman 
 of Bombay, named Badru-d Din 'Abdu-Uah Kur. At this time Mr. 
 Webb was American Consul at Manilla, where he was visited 
 (after this correspondence had been carried on for nearly two 
 years) by a wealthy merchant of Jiddah, Haji 'Abdu-llah 'Arab, 
 who guaranteed the payment of a large sum of money towards 
 the establishment of a Muslim mission in America. After visit- 
 ing India and lecturing in some of the chief cities with large 
 Muhammadan populations, Mr. Webb proceeded to New York, 
 where he opened a mission and advocated the cause of Islam in a 
 periodical entitled ' The Moslem World.' 2 
 
 These two movements in England and in America are among 
 the most recent expressions of missionary activity in Islam ; they 
 are particularly noticeable as presenting certain features of 
 
 ' This was not the first attempt to preach Islam in America, as in 1875 * 
 Methodist preacher, named Norman, who had gone to Constantinople as a 
 Christian missionary, embraced Islam there and began to preach it in America. 
 (Garcin de Tassy, La langue et litterature hindoustanies en 1875, p. 92. (Paris, 
 1876.) 
 
 ^ Islam; a lecture by Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb, published by 
 Badruddin Abdulla Kur. (Bombay, 1892.) 
 
APPENDIX IV. 
 
 371 
 
 accommodation in order to recommend this religion to the 
 modern civilised world. The missions in England and America 
 are conducted by men who are profoundly ignorant of the vast 
 literature of Muhammadan theologians, and derive their know- 
 ledge of Islam mainly from English translations of the Qur'an 
 and the works of its modern, rationalising exponents and apolo- 
 gists. They have introduced into their religious worship certain 
 practices borrowed from the ritual of Protestant sects, such as 
 the singing of hymns, praying in the English language, etc. We 
 have thus a presentment of Islamic doctrine and practice that 
 differs from all others, and strikingly illustrates the power of this 
 religion to adapt itself to the peculiar characteristics and the stage 
 of development of the people whose allegiance it seeks to win. 
 
 b 2 
 
TITLES OF WORKS 
 CITED BY ABBREVIATED REFERENCES. 
 
 {Tfu Titles^ etc., of books quoted once only, are given in full 
 in the foot-notes.) 
 
 Aa (V. J. B. Robide van derj : Reizen naar Nederlandsch Nieuw-Guinea, 
 
 met Geschied- en Aardrijkskundige Toelichtingen. (The Hague, 
 
 1879.) 
 Abh.f. d. K. d. M. hrsg. v. d. D M G : Abhandlungen fiir die Kunde 
 
 des Morgenlandes, herausgegeben von der Deutschen Morgenlan- 
 
 dischen Gesellschaft. (Leipzig.) 
 
 Abu,-l Faraj : (i) Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon Ecclesiasticum, ed. 
 
 J. B. Abbeloos et T. J. Lamy. (Louvain, 1872.) 
 
 (2) Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum,authoreGregorio 
 
 Abul-Pharajio, ed. ab Eduardo Pocockio. 
 
 (O.xoniae, 1663.) 
 
 Abii-l Fida : Geographic d'Aboulfeda, traduite par M. Reinaud. (Paris. 
 
 1848.) 
 Aiil-l Ghazi: Histoire des Mogols et des Tartares par Aboul-Ghazi 
 
 Behadour Khan, traduite par le Baron Desmaisons. (St. Peters- 
 burg, 1871-4.) 
 Abu Salih : The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, edited and trans- 
 lated by B. T. A. Evetts. (Oxford, 1895.) 
 Abu Shaniah : Arabische Quellenbeitrage zur Geschichte der Kreuzziige 
 
 iibersetzt und herausgegeben von E. P. Goergens und R. Rohricht. 
 
 Erster Band. Zur Geschichte Salah ad-dtn's. (Berlin, 1879.) 
 Abil ' Ubaydu-l Bakri : Fragments de geographes et d'historiens Arabes 
 
 et Persans inedits, relatifs aux anciens peuples du Caucase et de la 
 
 Russie meridionale, traduits par C. Defremery. (J. A. iv.™' s^rie. 
 
 Tome xiii., 1849.) 
 Abu YHsuf: Kitabu-1 Kharaj. (Cairo, A.H. 1302.) 
 AlBaladhurl: Liber Expugnationis Regionum, auctore Imimo Ahmed 
 
 ibn Jahja ibn DjAbir al-BeUdsori, ed. M. J. de Goeje. (Leiden, 1866.) 
 Al Kindi: Risalatu 'Abdi-Uahi-bni Isma'ili-l Hashimi ila 'Abdi-1 
 
 Masihi-bni Ishaqi-1 Kindt. (London, 1885.) 
 Al Makln : Historia Saracenica, arabice olim exarata a Georgio Elma- 
 
 cino et latine reddita opera Thomae Erpenii. (Lugduni Batavorum, 
 
 1625.) 
 AlMakkarl: The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spam, by 
 
 Ahmed ibn Mohammed Al-Makkari, translated by Pascual de 
 
 Gayangos. (London, 1840-43.) 
 Al Murtada (Ahmad ibn Yahya) : Kitabu-1 minyati wa-1 amali fi sharhi 
 
 kitabi-1 milali wa-n nihal. (M.S.) 
 
374 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Alvar: (i) Alvari Cordubensis Epistolae. (Migne, Patr. Lat. torn, cxxi.) 
 
 (2) Indiculus Luminosus. (id. ib.) 
 Alvarez : Viaggio nella Ethiopia al Prete lanni fatto par Don Francesco 
 
 Alvarez Portughese. (1520-27.) (Ramusio. Tom. i.) 
 Ainari (Michele) : Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia. (Florence, 1854-72.) 
 Amilineau (E.) : tx\x&& sur le Christianisme en Egypte au septi^me 
 
 si^cle. (Paris, 1887.) 
 Anderson (John) : Chinese Mohammedans. (Journal of the Anthropo- 
 logical Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. I. (London, 
 
 1872.) 
 Andriessen (W. F.) : De Islam in Nederlandsch Indie. (Vragen van den 
 
 Dag. Amsterdam, 1889.) 
 Argensola (B. Leonardo de) : Conquista de las Islas Malucas. (Madrid, 
 
 i6og.) 
 Asboth (J. de) : An official tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
 
 (London, 1890.) 
 Asse?nani (J. S.) : Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana. (Rome, 
 
 1719-28.) 
 Ai Tijdni: Voyage du Scheikh Et-Tidjani dans la regence de Tunis, 
 
 pendant les annees 706, 707 et 708 de I'hegire (1306-1309) ; traduit 
 
 de I'arabe par M. Alphonse Rousseau. (J. A. iv.™° serie, tome xx., 
 
 1852.) 
 Bahdu-d-Din: Vita et res gestae Saladini, auctore Bohadino filio 
 
 Sjeddadi. Edidit A. Schultens. (Lugduni Batavorum, 1732.) 
 Barbara: Viaggio di losafa Barbaro nella Persia. (Ramusio, Tom. ii.) 
 Barbosa (Odoardo) : Libro di Odoardo Barbosa Portoghese dell' Indie 
 
 Orientali, 15 16. (Ramusio, Tom. i.) 
 Barros (J. de) : Da Asia. (Lisbon, 1777-8.) 
 Bastian (A.) : Die Volker des ostlichen Asien. (Leipzig, 1866.) 
 Baudissin (W. W. Graf von) : Eulogius und Alvar. Ein Abschnitt 
 
 spanischer Kirchengeschichte aus der Zeit der Maurenherrschaft. 
 
 (Leipzig, 1872.) 
 Baumgarten (Martin) : The travels of. (A Collection of Voyages and 
 
 Travels. London, 1752.) 
 Beke (T. C.^ : Routes in Abyssinia. (J. R. Ggr. Soc, Vol. xiv., 1844.) 
 Belin : Fetwa relatif k la condition des Zimmis et particuliferement des 
 
 Chretiens, en pays musulmans, depuis I'etablissement de I'islamisme, 
 
 jusqu' au milieu du viii." si^cle de 1' hegire, traduit de I'arabe par 
 
 M. Belin. (J. A. iv"" serie, tome xviii., 1851.J 
 Belle-w CH. W.) : The races of Afghanistan. (Calcutta, 1880.) 
 Benedict of Peterborough: Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti 
 
 Abbatis. Edited by William Stubbs. CLondon, 1867.) 
 Berg (L. W. C. van den) : (i) De Mohamedaansche geestelijkeid en de 
 
 geestelijke goederen op Java en 
 Madoera. (Ts. ind. t.-l.-vk. Vol. 
 xxvii., 1881.) 
 „ (2) Le Hadhramout et les Colonies Arabes 
 
 dans I'Archipel Indien. (Batavia, 
 1886.) 
 Bizzi: Relatione della visita fatta da me, Marino Bizzi, Arcivescovo 
 
 d'Antivari, nelle parti della Turchia, Antivari, Albania e Sprvia, alia 
 
 Santitk di Nostro Signore Papa Paolo Quinto. 1610. (Bibliotheca 
 
 Barberina, Rome. N'- LXIIL, 13.) 
 Blau: Chronik der Sultane von Bornu, bearbeitet von Otto Blau. 
 
 (ZDMG. Vol 6. 1852.) 
 
LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 375 
 
 Blount: A voyage into the Levant ; a brief relation of a journey lately 
 performed by Master Henry Blount, Gentleman. 1634-36. (A 
 Collection of Voyages and Travels. London, 1745.) 
 Blunt (W. S.) : The Future of Islam. (London, 1883.) 
 Blyden (E. W.) : Christianity, islam and the Negro Race. (London, 
 
 1888.) 
 Bokemeyer (H) : Die Molukken. (Leipzig, 1888.) 
 
 Bonaventura di S. Antonio : Informatione di Fra Bonaventura di S. 
 Antonio, Reformato di S. Francesco, Miss''" d'Albania (Assisi, li 
 30 Luglio, 1652.) (Bibliotheca Chigiana, Rome. G. iii., 94.) 
 Bouche (Pierre) : La Cote des Esclaves at le Dahomey. Paris, 1885.) 
 Bretschndder (E.) : (i) Mediseval Researches from Eastern Asiatic 
 
 Sources. (London, 1888.) 
 „ (2) On the Knowledge possessed by the Ancient 
 
 Chinese of the Arabs and Arabian Colonies. 
 (London, 1871.) 
 Brosset (M. F.): Histoire de la Georgie. (St. Petersburg, 1849-58.) 
 Brumund (J. F. G.) : Bijdragen tot de kennis van het Hindoe'isme op 
 
 Java. (Verh. Bat. Gen. van K. en W. Deal xxxiii. 1868.) 
 Burchard: Burchardi de Monte Sion Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. (Pere- 
 grinatores Medii Aevi Quatuor. Ed. J. C. M. Laurent. Lipsiae, 1864.) 
 Burckhardt (J. L.) : (i) Travels in Nubia. (London, 1819.) 
 
 „ (2) Travels in Syria and the Holy Land. (London, 
 
 1822.) 
 Burton (Richard F.) : (i) Abeokuta and the Camaroon Mountains. 
 
 (London, 1863.) 
 „ (2) First Footprints in East Africa. (London, 
 
 1856.) 
 Busbecq (Augier Ghislen de) : Omnia quae extant. (Amstelodami, 1660.) 
 Businello (P.) : Historische Nachrichten von der Regiarungsart der 
 
 osmanischen Monarchic. (Leipzig, 1778.) 
 Campen (C. F. H.) : Nalezingen op het opstel oxex de godsdienstbegrippen 
 der Halemaherasche Alfoaran. (Ts. ind. t.-l.-vk. Deel xxviii. 1883.) 
 Canne (H. D.) : Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Lampongs. (Ts. ind. 
 
 t.-l.-vk. Deel xi. 1862.) 
 Cantacuzenos : Trattato di Theodoro Spandugino Cantacusino de' costumi 
 
 de'Turchi. (Venice, 1573) 
 Chirdgh 'All : Maulavi Cheragh Ali : A Critical Exposition of the 
 
 Popular Jihdd. (Bombay, 1885.) 
 Chwohohn (D.) : Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus. (St. Petersburg, 1856.) 
 Chytraeus (David) : Oratio de statu ecclesiarum hoc tempore in Graecia, 
 
 Asia, Africa, Ungaria, Boemia, etc. (Wittebergae, 1580.) 
 C/a^/i (E. L.) : The Races of European Turkey. (New York, 1878.) 
 Comuleo : Instruttioni al Rev""" Don Alessandro Comulao Archiprete di 
 S. Girolamo di Roma mandato da Papa Clemente Ottavo al Gran 
 Duca di Moscovia, et altri Principi, et Potentati delle Parti Setten- 
 trionali. Con una Relatione del Medesimo Comuleo fatta A. S. 
 Santitk sopra le cose del Turco. (Bibliotheca Barbenna, Rome, 
 
 N'- Iviii. 33.) ,- /ir • \ 
 
 Cornaro (F.) : Creta Sacra, authore Flammio Cornalio. (Venice, 17550 
 Crawfurd (John) : (i) A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands 
 and adjacent Countries. (London, 1856.) 
 (2) History of the Indian Archipelago. (Edinburgh, 
 1820.) 
 Creasy (Sir Edward S.) : Histor> of the Ottoman Turks. (London 1878. 
 
376 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Crisio : Summario della Relatione della Visita di Albania, fattaper ordine 
 
 della Sac. Cong'" da Don Marco Crisio Sacerdote Albanese. 1651. 
 
 (Bibliotheca Chigiana, Rome. G. iii. 94.) 
 Crz^j-/«j (Martin) : Turcograecia. (Basileae, 1584.) 
 Dalrymple (A.) : Essay towards an account of Sulu. (Journal of the 
 
 Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia. Vol. iii. Singapore, 1849.) 
 Dalton (E. T.) : Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. (Calcutta, 1872.) 
 Dollinirer (J. J. T.) : Mohammed's Religion nach ihrer inneren Entwick- 
 
 lung und ihrem Einflusse auf das Leben der Volker. (Munich, 1838.) 
 Dousa: Georgii Dousae de Itinere suo Constantinopolitano epistola. 
 
 (Lugduni Batavorum, 1599.) 
 Dozy (R. P. A.) : (i) Essai sur I'histoire de I'lslamisme. (Leiden, 1879.) 
 (2) Histoiredes Musulmans d'Espagne. (Leiden, 1861.) 
 Driesch (G. C. von den) : Historische Nachricht von der Rom. Kayserl. 
 
 Gross-Botschaft nach Constantinopel, welche der Graf Damian 
 
 Hugo von Virmondt nihmlichst verrichtet. (Nurnberg, 1723.) 
 Dulaurier (M. E.) : Addition au memoire intitule Liste des pays qui 
 
 relevaient de I'empire javanais de Madjapahit. (J. A. iv."" serie, 
 
 tome xiii. 1849.) 
 Duveyrier (H.) : La confrerie musulmane de Sidi Mohammed Ben 'Alt 
 
 Es-Senoiasi. (Paris, 1886.) 
 East (D. J.) : Western Africa. (London, 1844.) 
 Elias of Nisibis : F. Baethgen : Fragmente syrischer und arabischer 
 
 Historiker. (Abh. f. d. K. d. M. hrsg. v. d. DMG. Vol. iii. No. 3. 
 
 1884.) 
 Elliot (Sir H. M.) : The History of India, as told by its own historians. 
 
 The Muhammadan Period. Edited by Prof. John Dowson. (London, 
 
 1872-7.) 
 Enhueber (J. B.) : Dissertatio de haeresi Elipandi et Felicis. (Migne, 
 
 Patr. Lat., tom. ci.) 
 Eulogius : Memoriale Sanctorum. (Migne, Patr. Lat., tom. cxv.) 
 Eutychius : Annales ed. I. Selden. (Oxoniae, 1654.) 
 Evans (A. J.) : Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina. (London, 1876.) 
 y^2>-toz (Daniel) : Illyricum Sacrum. (Venice, 1769 — 1819.) 
 Finlay (G.) : A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to 
 
 the Present Time. (Oxford, 1877.) 
 Firishtah : History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, trans- 
 lated from the Persian of Mahomed Kasim Ferishta by John Briggs. 
 
 (London, 1829.) 
 Forrest (T.) : A Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas. (London, 
 
 I779-) 
 Frere (Sir Bartle) : (i) Eastern Africa as a field for Missionary Labour. 
 (London, 1874.) 
 (2) Indian Missions. 3rd. ed. (London, 1874.) 
 Gaetan : Relatione di Ivan Gaetan del discoprimento dell' Isole Molucche. 
 
 (Ramusio. Tom. i.) 
 Garneit (L. M. J.) : The Women of Turkey and their Folklore. The 
 
 Jewish and Moslem Women. (London, 1891.) 
 Gazetteer of Bombay. (Bombay, 1877-86.) 
 
 Gazetteer of the North- Western Provinces of India. (Allahabad, 1874-84.) 
 Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh. (Lucknow, 1877.) 
 Gazetteer of Raj putana. (Calcutta, 1879.) 
 
 C eorgieviz {'Ba.nhoXomsi&us) : De Turcarum Moribus Epitome. (1598.) 
 Georgirenes (Joseph) : A Description of the Present State of Samos, 
 
 Nicaria, Patmos and Mount Athos. (London, 1678.) 
 
LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 377 
 
 Gfrorer (A. F.) : Byzantinische Geschichten, hrgs. von J. B. Weiss 
 
 (Graz, 1872-7.) 
 Ghuldm Sanuar: Khazlnatu-l Asfiya. (Lahore, n. d.) 
 Gibbon (Edward) : The History of the Dechne and Fall of the Roman 
 
 Empire. (London, i88i.) 
 Ginelin (M. F.) : Christensclaverei und Renegatenthum unter den Volkern 
 
 des Islam. (Berlin, 1873.) 
 Gobineatt (A. de) : (i) Les Religions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie 
 Centrale. (Paris, 1865.) 
 (2) Trois Ans en Asia. (Paris, 1859.) 
 Goidzt'/ier {Ignaz) : Muhammedanische Studien. (Halle, 1889-90.) 
 Groeneveldt (\V. P.) : Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca, 
 compiled from Chinese sources. (Verh. Bat. Gen. van K. en W. 
 Deelxxxix. 1880.) 
 Guignes (C. L. J. de) : Histoire generale des Huns, des Turcs, des 
 
 Mogols. (Paris, 1756-8.) 
 Hageman (J.) : Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis van Borneo. (Ts. ind. t.- 
 
 l.-vk. Deel vi. 1856.) 
 Hammer-Purgstall (Joseph von) : (i) Geschichte des osmanischen 
 
 Reiches. (Pesth, 1827-35.) 
 „ „ (2) Des o.smanischen Reichs Staats- 
 
 verfassung und Staatsverwal- 
 tung. (Wien, 1815.) 
 „ „ (3) Geschichte der Goldenen Horde 
 
 in Kiptschak. (Pesth, 1840.) 
 „ „ (4) Geschichte der Ilchanen. 
 
 (Darmstadt, 1842-3.) 
 Haiieberg (B.) : Das muslimische Kriegsrecht. (Munich, 1871.) 
 /^ajj?/^(A. L. von): Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra. (Leiden, 1882.) 
 ffauriQ.) : Der Islam in seinem Einfluss auf das Leben seiner Bekenner. 
 
 (Leiden, 1883.) 
 Hefele (C. J.) : Beitrage zur Kirchengeschichte, Archaologie und Liturgilc 
 
 (Tubingen, 1864.) 
 Helfferich (Adolf) : Der Westgothische Arianismus und die Spanische 
 
 Ketzer-Geschichte. (Berlin, i860.) 
 Hertzberg (G. F.) : Geschichte der Byzantiner und des Osmanischen 
 
 Reiches. (Berlin, 1882-3.) 
 Hidayah : The Hedaya, or Guide ; A Commentary on the Mussulman 
 
 Laws, translated by Charles Hamilton. (London, 1791-) 
 Hdevell(G. W. W. C. Baron von) : De Kei-eilanden. (Ts. ind. t.-l.-en 
 
 vk. Deel xxxiii. 1890.) 
 Hollander (J. J. de) : Handleiding bij de Beoefening der Land- en 
 
 Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Oost-Indie. (Breda, 1884.) 
 Hoveden : Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Hovedene, edited by William 
 
 Stubbs. (London, 1868-71.) 
 Howorth (Sir H. H.) : History of the Mongols. (London, 1876-80.) 
 Hurgronie (C. Snouck) : (i) De beteekenis van den Islam voor zijne 
 
 belijders in Oost-Indie. (Leiden, 1883.) 
 
 (2) De Sjattarijjah-secte. (Med. Ned. Zende- 
 
 linggen. Vol. x-xxii. 1888.) 
 
 (3) Mekka. (The Hague, 1888-9.) 
 
 Ibhetson (D. C. J.) : The Musulmans of the Panjab. (Indian Evangelical 
 
 Review. Vol. x. Calcutta, 1884.) 
 Ibn Batutah : Voyages d' Ibn Batoutah, texte arabe, accompagne d une 
 
 traduction par C. Defr^mery et B. R. Sanguinetti. (Pans, 1853-8.) 
 
378 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Ibn Khaldun : Kitabu-1 'ibri wa dIwanu-1 mubtada wa-1 J^abaru ft 
 
 aiyani-1 'Arabi wa-1 Barbar. (Bulaq, 1867.) 
 /in Khallikdn: Biographical Dictionary, translated by Baron Mac 
 
 Guckin de Slane. (Paris, 1843-71.) 
 Ibn Munqidh: Ousama Ibn Mounkidh, par Hartwig Derenbourg. 
 
 (Paris, 1886-9.) 
 Ibn Sn'd: Die Schreiben Muhammads und die Gesandtschaften an ihn. 
 
 (Skizzen und Vorarbeiten von J. Wellhausen. Viertes Heft. Berlin, 
 
 1889.) 
 Ibnu-l Ath'ir : Tarikhu-1 Kamil. (Cairo, a.h. 1301.) 
 Idnsi: Description de TAfrique et de I'Espagne, publiee par R. Dozy et 
 
 M. J. de Goeje. (Leiden, 1866.) 
 Informatione del Segretario de propaganda fide circa la missione 
 
 d' Albania de fratri Riformati di S. Francesco. (Bibliotheca Chigiana, 
 
 Rome. G. iii., 94.) 
 henberg (C. M.) : Abessinien. (Bonn, 1844.) 
 Isidori Pacensis Chronicon. (Migne, Patr. Lat., torn, xcvi.) 
 J. A.: Journal Asiatique. (Paris.) 
 Jacques de Vitry : Jacobi de Vitriaco Libri Duo. Quorum prior 
 
 Orientalis, sive Hierosolymitanae : Alter, Occidentalis Historiae 
 
 nomine inscribitur. Opera D. Francisci Moschi editi. (Duaci, 1597.) 
 Jadrinzew (N.) : Sibirien : Geographische, ethnographische und his- 
 
 torische Studien, bearbeitet von Ed. Petri. (Jena, 1886.) 
 J. A. S. B. ; Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. (Calcutta.) 
 Jesstip (H. H.) : The Mohammedan Missionary Question. (Philadelphia, 
 
 1879.) 
 JohnofGorz: Vita loannis Abbatis Gorziensis, auctore loanne Abbate 
 
 S. Amulfi. (Migne, Patr. Lat., torn, cxxxvii.) 
 John ofNikiu; Chronique de Jean, Eveque deNikiou. Publid et traduit 
 
 par H. Zotenberg. (Notices et extraits des Manuscrits de la Biblio- 
 
 theque Nationale. Tome xxiv. Premiere Partie. Paris, 1883.) 
 Joinville : Oeuvres de Jean, Sire de Joinville, ed. N. de Wailly. (Paris, 
 
 1867.) 
 Joselian (Plato) : A Short History of the Georgian Church, translated 
 
 by S. C. Malan. (London, 1866.) 
 J. R. Ggr.Soc. : Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. London.) 
 Kaniiz (F.) : Die fortschreitende Arnautisirung und Muhamedanisirung 
 
 Alt-Serbiens. (Oesterreichische Monatsschrift fur den Orient. 
 
 Vienna, March, 1888.) 
 Kara??isin (N. M.) : Histoire de PEmpire de Russie. (Paris, 1819-26.) 
 Keane (A. H.) : Asia, edited by Sir Richard Temple. (London, 1882.) 
 Kern ("H.) : Over den invloed der Indische, Arabische en Europeesche 
 
 beschaving op de volken van den Indischen Archipel. (Leiden, 
 
 1883.) 
 Khojd Vrttdnt hy Sachedina Nanjlani. (Ahmadabad, 1892.^ 
 A7/a/5«-/ i^j'/zrzj/ herausgegeben von G. Fliigel. (Leipzig, 187 1-2.) 
 Klaproik (J. von^ : Aper^u des entreprises des Mongols en Georgie et 
 
 en Armenie dans le xiii sifecle. (J. A. S^rie ii. Tome xii. 1833.) 
 Krehl (Ludolf) : Das Leben des Muhammed. (Leipzig, 1884.) 
 Krevicr (A. von): (i) Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen. 
 (Vienna, 1875.) 
 
 „ „ (2) Culturgeschichtliche Streifziige auf dem Gebiete 
 
 des Islams. (Leipzig, 1873.) 
 , „ (3) Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams. 
 
 (Leipzig, 1868.) 
 
LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 379 
 
 Kremer (A. von) : (4) Notizen gesammelt auf einem Ausfluge nach 
 
 Palmyra. (Sitzb. d. Akad. d. Wiss., Philos.- 
 hist. CI. Vol. V. 1850.) 
 La Chaielier (A.) : (i) Les Confreries musulmanes da Hedjaz. (Paris, 
 1887.) 
 „ „ (2) L'lslani au xix' siecle. (Paris, 1888.) 
 
 La Jonquiere (A. de) : Histoire de I'Empire Ottoman. (Paris, 1881.) 
 Lane (E. W.) : The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. 
 
 5th ed. (London, i860.) 
 La Saussaye (P. D. Chantepie de) : Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte. 
 
 (Freiburg, I. B., 1887-9.) 
 Laurent {]. C. M.) : Peregrin atores Medii Aevi Quatuor. (Lipsiae, 1864.) 
 Leake (W. M.) : Researches in Greece. (London, 1814.) 
 Leo Africanus: Delia Descrittione dell' Africa, par Giovani Lioni 
 
 Africano. (Ramusio. Tom. i.) 
 Le Quten (Michael) : Oriens Christianus. (Paris, 1740.) 
 Leslie (Gaultier de) : L'Ambassade k la Porte Ottomane, ordonnee par 
 
 Sa Majesty Imperiale, Leopold I., executee par Gualtier de Leslie, 
 
 Comte du S. Empire. (1665-66.) (Rycaut, Tome ii.) 
 Liefrinck (F. A.) : Bijdrage tot de kennis van het eiland Bali. (Ts. ind. 
 
 t.-l.-vk. Deel xxxiii. 1890.) 
 Low (Col. James) : A Translation of the Keddah Annals. (Journal of the 
 
 Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia. Singapore, 1849.) 
 Luca (Jean de) : Relations des Tartares. (Thevenot.) 
 Ludolf de Suchem : Ludolphi, Rectoris Ecclesiae Parochialis in Suchem, 
 
 de Itinera Terrae Sanctae Liber, herausgegeben von F. Deycks. 
 
 (Stuttgart, 1851.) 
 LiiMe (Moritz) : (i) Aegyptens Neue Zeit. (Leipzig, 1873.) 
 
 (2) Der Islam und seine Volker. (Giitersloh, 1878.) 
 Luiiprandi (Pseudo-) Chronicon. (Migne, Patr. Lat. torn, cxxxvi.) 
 Lyall (Sir Alfred C.) : Asiatic Studies. (London, 1882.) 
 Macarius (Patriarch of Antioch) : Travels of, from the Arabic of the 
 
 Archdeacon Paul, translated by F. C. Belfour. (London, 1829-34.) 
 Mackenzie (G. Muir) and Irby (A. P.) : Travels in the Slavonic Provmces 
 
 of Turkey-in-Europe. (London, 1867.) 
 Mackenzie {K. R. H.) ; Schamyl and Circassia. Chiefly from 
 
 materials collected by Dr. Friedrich Wagner, edited by. (London, 
 
 1854.) 
 ilfcA^azV (F.) : Perak and the Malays. (London, 1878.) 
 Mandevile (Sir John) : The Voiage andTravaile of, edited by J. O. Halh- 
 
 well. (London, 1866.) , a t,- 
 
 Magnzl: (i) A short history of the Copts, translated from the Arabic 
 by S. C. Malan. (London, 1873.) , 
 „ (2) Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de I'Egypte, traduite par 
 
 M. Quatremere. (Paris, 1837-45.) 
 ilfarjflfcw (William) : History of Sumatra. (London, 181 1.) 
 Mas Latrie (J. M. J. L. de) : (i) Histoire de I'lle de Chypre sous le 
 
 rfegne des princes de la maison de 
 Lusignan. (Paris, 1852-61.) 
 (2) Relations et commerce de I'Afrique 
 " septentrionale avec les nations 
 
 chretiennes au moyen age. (Paris, 
 1886.) 
 Massaja (Guglielmo) : I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell" Alta 
 Etiopia. (Roma, 1885-93.) 
 
38o THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
 Massimiliano Transilvano : Epistola di, della ammirabile et stupenda 
 
 nauvigatione fatta per gli Spagnuoli lo anno MDXIX. attorno il 
 
 mondo. (Ramusio, Tom. i.) 
 Mas^iicB.: Les Prairies d'Or. Texte et traduction par C. Barbier de Mey- 
 
 nard et Pavet de Courteille. (Paris, 1861-77.) 
 Med. Ned. Zendelinggen : Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche 
 
 Zendelinggenootschap. (Rotterdam. ) 
 Menavino (G. A.) : Vita et Legge Turchesca. (Venice, 1573.) 
 Metzger i^.) : Die Baduwis auf Java. (Globus, Vol. xliii. Braunschweig, 
 
 1883.) 
 Michel le Grand, Patriarche des Synens Jacobites : Chromque, traduite 
 
 par Victor Langlois. (Venice, 1868.) 
 Migne. Pair. Gr.: Patrologia Graeca. (Paris, 1857-66.) 
 „ Patr.Lat.: Patrologia Latina. (Paris, 1844-55.) 
 Milman (H. H.) : History of Latin Christianity. (London, 1872.) 
 Monterey Vidal (D. Jose) : Historia de la Pirateria Malayo-mahometana 
 
 en Mindanao, J0I6 y Borneo. (Madrid, 1888.) 
 Moor {]. H.) : Notices of the Indian Archipelago. (Singapore, 1837.) 
 Moore (Francis) : Travels in the Inland Parts of Africa. (The World 
 
 displayed ; or a curious collection of voyages and travels. London, 
 
 1760.) 
 Morgajt (J.) : Mahometism explained. (London, 1723-5.) 
 Muller (August): Der Islam im Morgen- und Abendland. (Berlin, 
 
 1885-7.) 
 Muller {G. F.) : Sammlung Russischer Geschichte. (St. Petersburg, 
 
 1761.) 
 il/Mz> (Sir William) : (i) The Caliphate ; its rise, decline and fall. (Lon- 
 don, 1891.) 
 „ (2) Life of Mahomet. (London, 1858-61.) 
 
 Neander (K.) : (i) General History of the Christian Religion and Church. 
 (London, 1851-8.) 
 (2) Memorials of Christian Life. (London, 1852.) 
 Nerazzini (Cesare) : La Conquista Mussulmana dell' Etiopia nel secolo 
 
 xvi. Traduzione d'un manoscritto arabo. (Rome, 1891.) 
 Netscher (E.) : Kronijk van Sambas en van Soekadana. (Ts. ind. t.-l.- 
 
 vk. Deel i. 1852.) 
 Newboldl^. J.) : Political and Statistical Account of the British Settle- 
 ments in the Straits of Malacca. (London, 1839.) 
 Niemann (G. K.) : Inleiding tot de kennis van den Islam. (Rotterdam, 
 
 1861.) 
 Ohsson {C. d") : Histoire des Mongols. (The Hague, 1834-5.) 
 Ohsson (M. d') : Tableau general de I'Empire Othoman. (Paris, 1820.) 
 Oppel (A.) : Die religiose Verhaltnisse von Afrika. (Zeitschrift der 
 
 Gesellschaft fiir Erdkunde zu Berlin. Vol. xxii. 1887.) 
 Orderici Vitalis Historia Ecclesiastica. (Migne, Patr. Lat. torn. 
 
 clxxxviii.) 
 Pa7iciera (B.) : I Musulmani. (Florence, 1877.) 
 Pashley ("Roljert) : Travels in Crete. (London, 1837.) 
 Paulitschke (Philipp) : Harar. Forschungsreise nach den Somal- und 
 
 Galla-landern Ost-Afrikas. (Leipzig, 1888.) 
 Pavy: Oeuvres de I\Igr. L.- A.- A. Pavy, I^veque d'Alger. (Paris, 1858.) 
 Perceval (A. P. Caussin de) : Essai sur I'histoire des Arabes avant 
 
 r I slamisme, pendant I'epoque de Mahomet, et jusqu' k la reduction 
 
 de toutes les tribus sous la loi musulmane. (Paris, 1847-8.) 
 Perrot (Georges) : L'ile de Crete. (Paris, 1867.) 
 
LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 381 
 
 Phrantzes {Geor^mi) : Annales, ed. B. G. Niebuhr. (Bonnae, 1838.) 
 PicAler (A.) : Geschichte der Protestantismus in der orientalischen 
 
 Kirche im 17. Jahrhundert oder Der Patriarch Cyrillus Lucaris und 
 
 seine Zeit. (Munich, 1862.) 
 Pigafetta (iM. Antonio) : Viaggio atorno il mondo fatto et descritto per. 
 
 (Ramusio, Tom. i.) 
 Pitzipios (J. G.) : Leglise oiientale. (Rome, 1855.) 
 Plowden (W. C.) : Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla Country. 
 
 London, 1868.) 
 Poensen (C.) : Brieven over den Islam uit de Binnenlanden van Java. 
 
 (Leiden, 1886.) 
 Prutz (H.) : Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzziige. (Berlin, 1883.) 
 PadlqfCW.): Aus Siberien. (Leipzig, 1884.) 
 
 Raffies (Thomas Stamford) : The History of Java. (London, 1817.) 
 Ramusio (G. B.) : Navigationi et Viaggi. (Venice, 1559.) 
 Reade (W. Wimvood) : African Sketch Book. (London, 1873.) 
 Reclus (Elisee) : Nouvelle Geographie Universelle. (Paris, 1876-91.) 
 Renaudot (E.) : Historia Patriarcharum Alexandrinorum Jacobitarum. 
 
 (Paris, 1713.) 
 Report of Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World, 
 
 held in London, 1888, edited by Rev. J. J. Johnston. (London, 1889.) 
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 (2) The Island of Flores or Pulan Bunga. The Tribes 
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 Rinn (Louis) : Marabouts et Khouan. (Algiers, 1884.) 
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 desire to know what Use may be made of, or if there be danger in 
 
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 Rubrouck (Guillaunie de). ambassadeur de Saint Louis, en Orient : Recit 
 
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 Ruppell {¥.(l\ax&) : Reise in Abyssinien. (Frankfurt am Main, 1838.) 
 Rycaut (Sir Paul) : Histoire de I'etat present de I'empire ottoman, traduit 
 
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 Sacy (Le Bon Silvestre de) : Expose de la Religion des Druzes. (Paris, 
 
 1838.) 
 Salih ibn 'Abdi-l HaKm: Roudh el-Kartas. Histoire des Souverains 
 
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 1882.) 
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382 THE PREACHING OF ISLAM. 
 
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 Semper (C.) : Die Philippinen und ihre Bewohner. (Wurzburg, 1869.) 
 Sitz. d. Akad. d. Wiss., Philos.-hist. CI. : Sitzungberichte der philoso- 
 
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 1861.) 
 Steinschneider (Moritz) : Polemische und apologetische Literatur in 
 
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 Stirling-Maxwell (Sir William) : Don John of Austria. (London, 1883.) 
 Tabari: Annales quos scripsit Abu Djafar Mohammed ibn DJarir .•\t- 
 
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LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 383 
 
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 1867.) 
 „ „ (2) Het Heidendom en de Islam 
 
 in Bolaang-Mongondou. 
 (id. id.) 
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 Vol. Ixiii., Part iii., 1894.) 
 Wistenfeld (F.) : Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke. 
 
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 Yaqut: Kitabu Mu'jami-1 Buldan. Jacut's Geographisces Worterbuch, 
 
 herausgegeben von F. Wiistenfeld. (Leipzig, 1866-73.) 
 Yule (H.) : (i) The Book of Marco Polo, concerning the Kingdoms and 
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 ZDMG : Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenliindischen Gesellschaft. 
 
 (Leipzig.) 
 Zmaievich : Notizie universal! dello stato di Albania e dell' operate da 
 Monsig. Vincenzo Zmaievich, arcivescovo di Antivari, esaminate 
 nelle Congregation! Generali di propaganda fide di 3 Debr. 1703—12 
 Febr. 1704. (Bibliotheca Barberina, Rome, N'- L. 126.) 
 Zollinger (H.) : (i) The Island of Lombok. (Journal of the Indian 
 Archipelago. Vol. v. Singapore, 1851.) 
 (2) Verslag van eene reis naar Bima en Soembawa. 
 (Verb. Bat. Gen. van K. en W. Deel xxiii. 
 1850.) 
 
INDEX. 
 
 'Abdu-llah IBN 'Ar.DI-LLAH, 362-6. 
 'Abdu-1 Qadiri-1 Jilani, 222, 268-9. 
 Abu Bakr, 9-10, 42, 50. 
 Abyssinia, 97-i03> 282, 334. 
 
 „ Bilal, the first-fruits of, 11. 
 Achin, see Atjih. 
 Adoptionism, 119. 
 Af^anistan, 183, 184. 
 Africa, 87-111, 258-292. 
 
 ,, Church of North, 107-111. 
 AI Azhar, 287-8. 
 Albanians, 56-7, 152-165, 167. 
 Alfurs, 316, 318. 
 Al Ma'mun, 59, 68, 73, 183. 
 Almohades, 261-2. 
 Almoravides, 122, 261-2. 
 Al Mu'tasim, 57, 93, 179, 183, 223. 
 Al Mutawakkil, 58, 66, 67, 68. 
 America, Islam in, 370. 
 Amir^aniyah, 268. 
 Amiroutzes, George, 13S. 
 Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam, 235, 333. 
 Antivari, 155, 159, 161, 162. 163, 165. 
 Arab society in the time of Muhammad, 
 
 26, 39-41. 
 Arabs in Africa, 87-S, 91, 97, 103, 
 
 106-7, III) 258-260, 262, 263, 271, 
 
 281, 286. 
 Arabs in China, 246, 247, 250-1. 
 Arabs in the Malay Archipelago, 293-4, 
 
 296, 300, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 
 
 314, 316, 318, 322-3, 327. 
 Aria Damar, 307-8, 309. 
 Arianism, 105, 114. 
 Armenia, 82-3, 151-2, 188, 189. 
 Ashanti, 276-7. 
 Assam, 232. 
 Atjih, 296, 302-3, 319. 
 Aurangzeb, 208, 213-15. 
 
 Baduwis, 312. 
 Baele, 274. 
 Bagirmi, 264. 
 Bali, 311, 327. 
 Bambara, 271. 
 
 Bambuk, 271. 
 
 Banjarmasin, 316. 
 
 Banten, 311, 312. 
 
 Banu Ghassan. 44, 47. 
 
 Banu Ta^lib, 45. 
 
 Baraka Khan, 191-2, 199. 
 
 Bashkirs, 336. 
 
 Bengal, 227-230. 
 
 Berbers, 258-262. 
 
 Bilal, II, 24. 
 
 Bogorailes, 169-172. 
 
 Bolaang-Mongondou, 322-3. 
 
 Borahs, 226-7. 
 
 Borneo, 316-18, 329. 
 
 Bomu, 263, 266, 287. 
 
 Bosnia, 144, 169-172. 
 
 Brunai, 316. 
 
 Buddhists converted to Islam, 191, 241, 
 
 247, 304. 
 Bugis^ 318, 321-2, 323. 
 Bukhara, 183, 184, 185, igi, 205, 
 
 206-7, 230, 245, 246, 330. 
 Bulgarians, 201-2. 
 
 Cape Coast Colony, 284-5. 
 
 Capitation-tax, see Tax. 
 
 Celebes, 318-323, 329. 
 
 Ceram, 327. 
 
 Ceylon, 219, ° -. 
 
 Chalcedon, Council of, 48, 87. 
 
 Clieribon, 307, 309, 311. 
 
 China, 24, 189, 241, 242-257, 306, 
 
 325 " \ 334- 
 Chinese in the Malay Aichipelago, 298, 
 
 306, 318. 
 Christian Arabs converted to Islam, 44. 
 ,, Clergy converted to Islam, 
 74, 86, 89, 90, 98, 137, 
 142. 
 ,, Officials and soldiers in Mu- 
 hammadaii service, 57"^i 
 82, 91, 153.4. 
 Christians preferring Muslim to Chris- 
 tian rule, 49, 56, 82, 127, 134, 135. 
 166-7, 170- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 385 
 
 Christians serving in the Muslim army 
 exempted from the payment of capi- 
 tation-tax, 56-7 
 
 Churches built in Muhammadan 
 countries, 52, 58-9, 115, 343 n =. 
 
 Circassians, 86. 
 
 Controversies between Christians and 
 Muslims, 72, 93, 191 n ', 359-60. 
 
 Conversion, forced, absence of, vindi- 
 cated by contemporaries, 71, 135-6, 
 149. 
 
 Conversion, forced, condemned, 5-6, 
 
 74 ", 341-3- 
 ,, ,, to Christianity in 
 
 Abyssinia, 102. 
 ,, ,, to Christianity in 
 
 Europe, 6-7, 
 
 336- 
 „ ,, to Christianity in 
 
 the Malay 
 
 Archipelago, 7, 
 
 325- 
 ,, ,, to Islam in India, 
 
 210, 213-4,215. 
 ,, ,, to Islam in North 
 
 Africa, 107. 
 ,, of Mongols to Christianity, 
 
 188, 192, 193. 
 „ of Muslims to Christianity, 
 
 80, 172. 
 Copts, 87-93. 
 Crete, 131-2, 141, 172-6. 
 Crusaders, 75-80. 
 Cutch, 225-6. 
 
 Dahomey, 277. 
 
 Damascus, So-51, 64. 
 
 Danfodio, Shaykh 'Uthman, 265-7. 
 
 Darfur, 263-4, 287. 
 
 Daylam, 180. 
 
 Deccan, 221-2. 
 
 Dongola, 94, 267, 268. 
 
 Dyaks, 3 1 8. 
 
 Egypt, churches built in. 58-9, 93. 
 „ Jacobite Christians of : see 
 Copts. 
 English Muslims, 3, 359, 369-70. 
 
 Falaba, 271. 
 
 Finns, 204. 
 
 Firiiz Shah Tug^laq, 212. 
 
 Flores, 321. 
 
 Fulahs, 265-7, 271, 273, 277, 286. 
 
 Funj, 276. 
 
 Futah Tore, 270, 285. 
 
 Gallas, 99-100, 102, 275, 282-3. 
 
 Gennadios, 126. 
 
 Georgia, 83-6, 142. 
 
 Gerganos, 141. 
 
 Ghazan. 195-6, 342. 
 
 Gold Coast, 277. 
 
 Golden Horde, 186, 191, 199-201. 
 
 Gragne, Ahmad, 98-9, 101. 
 
 Greece, 56-7, 127, 142. 
 
 „ the first-fruits of, 21. 
 Greeks in the Crimea, 203. 
 Gresik, 305-6, 308, 309, 31O, 315. 
 Guinea Coast, 276. 
 Gujarat, 226-7. 
 
 IlAjis, 270, 286, 313, 328-330, 338. 
 
 Halemahera, 316. 
 
 Harar, 275. 
 
 Hausa, 264, 273, 277. 
 
 Heraclius, 23, 48-9. 
 
 Heythoum, king of Armenia, 188. 
 
 Hindus converted to Islam in India, 
 
 208-9, 211-241. 
 Hindus converted to Islam in the 
 
 Malay Archipelago, 304-312. 
 Hoey-hu, 246-7. 
 Hungary, 134, 137 " ^ 166, 336. 
 Hunyady, John, 166-7. 
 
 Ilkhans. 189-190, 192-7. 
 
 Ilorin, 267. 
 
 India, 182, 208-241, 294, 297. 
 
 Intermarriages between Christians and 
 
 Muslims, 116, 155, 160, 197, 334. 
 Islam, a missionary religion, I, 39-41, 
 
 333- 
 ,, a universal religion, 23-5. 
 ,, the brotherhood of, 27-8, 38, 
 40 65-6, 289-290, 338-9. 
 IsmaTlians, 181-2, 225-6. 
 
 Jacobite Church in Abyssinia, see 
 
 Abyssinia. 
 Jacobite Church in Egypt : see Copts. 
 J, ,, in Nubia : see Nubia. 
 
 ,, Patriarch,letterof Jesujab III., 
 
 71-2. 
 „ Patriarchs, converted to Islam, 
 
 74- 
 Jaghbub, 274-5. 
 Janissaries, 129-131, 133, 143- 
 Java, 294, 304-313. 3271 329- 
 Jerusalem, 51, 77. 
 Jews, Chinese, 249. 
 ,, Spanish, 113, 134. 
 
 C C 
 
386 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Jihad, 270, 271-3, 285-6, 300, 347- 
 
 .352- 
 Jizyah, see Tax. 
 Justinian, 48, 63, 105. 
 
 Kabils, 109, no. 
 
 Kanem, 263. 
 
 Kano, 264, 288. 
 
 Kashgar, 197. 
 
 ICashmir, 240- 1. 
 
 Katsena, 264. 
 
 Kei Islands, 327-8. 
 
 Khadriyah, 267. 
 
 Khalid, 42-3, 46, 55, 183. 
 
 Siazars, 202. 
 
 Khojahs, 225. 
 
 Khubilay Sian, 186, 187, 190, 195, 
 
 248. 
 Khurasan, 70-71, 180, 1S4, 245. 
 Kiloa, 278, 279. 
 Kirghiz, 204-5. 
 Kordofan, 263, 268. 
 KUchum Khan, 206-7. 
 
 Laccadive Islands, 220-221. 
 Lagos, 277, 370. 
 Leger, 139, 141. 
 Liberia, 269, 276. 
 Lithuania, Muslims in, 3. 
 Lombok, 323. 
 
 LouisVII., 75-6, 79, 188, 192. 
 Lucaris, Cyril, 139-141. 
 
 Macarius, 134-5. 
 
 Macassar, 319-321. 
 
 Madura, 309, 327. 
 
 Maimonides, Moses, 342. 
 
 Majapahit, 306-312, 316. 
 
 Malacca, 300. 
 
 Malay Archipelago, 274. 
 
 Malay Peninsula, 300-304. 
 
 Maldive Islands, 220-1. 
 
 Mandingos, 263, 271, 277, 286, 287. 
 
 Mappila, 216, 219, 220. 
 
 Mecca, 22, 265, 270, 297, 299, 302, 
 
 303, 312, 317, 325, 329-30, 338. 
 Merchants, Muslim, as missionaries, 
 
 loi, 191, 201, 207, 217, 221, 224, 
 
 246, 262, 270, 277, 283, 286, 294-5, 
 
 300, 304, 313, 321, 322-3, 325, 326, 
 
 327. 333. 340. 
 Metaras, Nicodemus, 141. 
 Minahassa, 318. 
 Missionaries, Muslim : — 
 
 'Abdu-llah ibn Yassln, 260- 1, 270. 
 
 Abu 'Abdi-Uah Muhammad, '97. 
 
 Abu 'All Qalandar, 231. 
 
 Abu-1 Faraj lbnu-1 Jawzi, 65. 
 
 Abu Sayda, 183. 
 
 Ahmad Mujaddid, 336. 
 
 Ahmadu Samudu, 271-2. 
 
 Al Ma'mun, 73-4. 
 
 'Amr ibn Murrah, 34-5. 
 
 'Ayyash, 37. 
 
 Baba Faridu-d Din, 231. 
 
 Eahau-1 Ilaqq, 231. 
 
 Darwesh Bulbul Shah, 240. 
 
 Darwesh MansEr, 86. 
 
 pimam ibn Tha'labah, 34. 
 
 Firuz Shah Tughlaq, 212. 
 
 IlajT Muhammad, 232. 
 
 Hakim Bagus, 322. 
 
 Hasan ibn 'All, 180. 
 
 Hasham Pir Gujarat!, 222. 
 
 Ibnu-1 Hudhayl, 65 ". 
 
 Ibrahim Abu Zarbay, 284. 
 
 Imam Dikir, 327. 
 
 Imam Tuweko, 322. 
 
 Jalalu-d Din, 232. 
 
 Khallfah Husayn, 309. 
 
 Kh atib Tungal, 320. 
 
 Kh wajah Khunmir Husayni, 222. 
 
 Khwajah Mu'Inu-d Din ChistI, 231. 
 
 Malik 'Abdu-1 Latif, 226. 
 
 Malik ibn Dinar, 217-19. 
 
 Malik ibn Habib, 217-19. 
 
 Mawlana Hasanu-d Din, 31 1. 
 
 Mawlana Ishaq, 308. 
 
 Mawlana Jamada-1 Kubra, 308. 
 
 Mawlana Malik Ibrahim, 305-6. 
 
 Mawlawi Baqa Husayn Khan, 234. 
 
 Mawlawl Hasan 'All, 234. 
 
 Mawlawi 'Ubaydu-llah, 232-3. 
 
 Mir Shamsu-d Din, 241. 
 
 Muhammad, 9-25, 28, 33-9. 
 
 Muhammad Ghorl, 212. 
 
 Muhammad ibn Sayyid 'All, 222. 
 
 Muhammad 'Uthmanu-1 AmirGJjani, 
 
 267-8. 
 MuUa 'All, 226. 
 
 Mus'ab ibn 'Umayr, 12, 18-19, 20. 
 Nasiru-1 Haqq Abu Muhammad, 
 
 I'So. 
 Nur Satagar, 225-6. 
 Nuru-d Din, 302. 
 Niini-d Din Ibrahim, 309, 311. 
 PirMahabir Khandayat, 221-2. 
 PIr §adru-d Din, 225. 
 Safdar 'All, 234. 
 Salahu-d Din, 78. 
 Sayyid 'All, 325. 
 Sayyid ^usayn Gaysudaraz, 222. 
 Sayyid Sa'adat, 225-6. 
 Sayyid Shah Farldu-d Din, 24I. 
 Sayyid Yusufu-d Din, 224-5, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 387 
 
 ShSh Muhammad Sadiq Sarmast 
 
 I!u5aynl, 222. 
 Sharif ibn Malik, 2:7-18. 
 Shayli 'Abdu-Uah, 30I-3. 
 Shaykh Babu Sahib, 222. 
 Shaykh Isma'TI, 230. 
 Shaykh Jalal, 227. 
 Shaykh Mansiir, 314. 
 Tufayl, 35-6. 
 'Umar ibn 'Abdi-1 'Aziz, 78, 183, 
 
 210°. 
 'Umar Idrus Basheban, 222. 
 'Urwah ibn Mas'ud, 36. 
 'Uthman Danfodio, 265-7. 
 Wathilah ibnu-1 Asqa', 37-8. 
 Missionaries, women, 102, 197, 334-5. 
 Missionary activity enjoined in the 
 Qur'an, 3-4, 333. 
 ,, „ in times of poli- 
 
 tical weakness, 
 2, 124, 190.1, 
 318, 322-3, 
 
 324- 
 ,, ,, instances of un- 
 
 successful, 20, 
 199, 200, 305. 
 
 Mindanao, 324-5. 
 
 Misool, 326. 
 
 Moassina, 271. 
 
 Moluccas, 313-316, 326. 
 
 Mongols, 83, 84, 185-201, 203, 247-t), 
 252. 
 
 Montenegro, 169. 
 
 Moriscoes, 123-4. 
 
 Mujiammad, 8-18, 20-44. 
 
 „ the wars of, 28-33. 
 
 Mu'tazilites, 64-5, 67. 
 
 Muwallads, 120. 
 
 Muzarabes, 117. 
 
 NafIsah, 334-5. 
 
 Nestoriaus, 50, 60-61, 74, 188-9, 242, 
 
 247. 
 New Guinea, 326-7. 
 Nubia, 93-6, 267-8, 276. 
 
 Pajajaran, 305, 307, 311-12. 
 
 Palembang, 307-8, 316. 
 
 Panjab, 230-31, 232-3, 235-6. 
 
 Papuans, 326-7. 
 
 Paulicians, 82, 138. 
 
 Pechenegs, 335-6. 
 
 Persia, 24, 60, 177 l8z, 186, 189-190, 
 
 ■ t9'-S> 245. 294. 297- 
 
 Persecution forbidden in the Qur'an, 
 5-6. 
 ,, of Christians by Muslims, 
 
 66-8, 83, 90, 120-123, 
 
 195. 341 " '• 
 ,, of Christians by their co- 
 
 religionists, 60-1, 90, 92, 
 102, 113, 143-4, 16S, 
 169-170, 174. 
 ,, of the early Muslims, 11 • 
 
 15, 21, 29-30. 
 „ of Muslims by the Mongols, 
 
 190. 
 ,, ,, by the Russians, 
 
 205-6. 
 Philippine Islands, 315, 324-5. 
 Pilgrims to Mecca : see Ilajis. 
 Pope Gregory 11. , 107. 
 
 ,, Gregory VII., 108, III. 
 „ Hadrian I., 114'"^ 116-17." 
 ,, Innocent IV., in, 169, 188. 
 „ John XXII., 169, 201. 
 ,, Leo III., 119. 
 ,, Leo IX., 108. 
 Portuguese in the Malay Archipelago, 
 
 293. 314,315. 3i8> 319- 
 Prester John (used of the King of 
 Abyssinia), 97. 
 ,, ,, (used of the chief of the 
 
 Karaits), 188. 
 Protestants converted to Islam, 140, 
 142, 370-71. 
 
 Qadkiyah, 268-9. 
 
 Raden Husayn, 310-311. 
 
 Raden Patah, 307, 310-312. 
 
 Kaden Rahmat, 307-310. 
 
 Rajputana, 231, 237. 
 
 Religious orders, influence of the, 267- 
 
 275. 332. 
 Rubruquis : see William of Rubrouck. 
 Russians, 134, 199-207. 
 
 Sahara, no, 260, 262, 268, 274. 
 Saladin, 78, 91. 
 Salawatti, 326. 
 Saman, 1 80. 
 Samarqand, 182-3, 245. 
 Sambawa, 323. 
 §amudu, 271-2. 
 Sanusiyah, 273-5, 33'. 334- 
 Scanderbeg, 152. 
 Segu, 271, 288. 
 Senegal, 260, 270-271. 
 Senegambia, 271, 273, 274, 276. 
 Sennaar, 96, 98, 268, 276. 
 Servia, 166-9. 
 
388 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Shamanism, 187. 
 
 Shi'ahs, 179, 181, 260, 294. 
 
 SI Ahmad ibn Idris, 267. 
 
 Siam, 304. 
 
 Siberia, 206-7. 
 
 Sierra Leone, 276. 
 
 Silesia, 134. 
 
 Sind, 222-225. 
 
 Slavery under the Muslims, 148-151, 
 
 338, 339 " '. 
 Socimans converted to Islam, 366. 
 Sokoto, 266. 
 Somaliland, 274, 284. 
 Sonrhay, 262. 
 Sophroiiius, Metropolitan of Athens, 
 
 141. 
 Spain, 109, I12-124. 
 Spaniards in the Malay Archipelago, 
 
 295.314, 315- 324-6- 
 Sudan, 262-276, 278, 289-292. 
 Suhayb, 21, 24. 
 Sukkadana, 316-7. 
 Sulu Islands, 324-6. 
 Sumatra, 307-8, 316, 329. 
 
 Tabaristan, 180. 
 
 Ta'if, 15, 36. 
 
 Tartars, 203-7. 
 
 Tax, capitation, paid by non-Mus- 
 lims, 45, 54-7, 81, 
 115, 131-2, 157, 
 163.4, 177-8, 212. 
 „ „ Christians in mili- 
 
 tary service ex- 
 empt from pay- 
 ment of, 56-7- 
 ,, ,, imposed on Mus- 
 
 lims when ex- 
 empt from mili- 
 tary service, 57- 
 
 Tcheremiss, 204. 
 
 Tchuvash, 204. 
 
 Tedas, 274. 
 
 Ternate, 314-15. 
 
 Theodisclus, 361. 
 
 Thibet, 241. 
 
 Tibesti, 274. 
 
 Tidor, 314. 
 
 Tijanlyah, 269-273. 
 
 Timbuktu, 262-3, 266, 268. 
 
 Tlmfir, 210. 
 
 Tokudar, 192.3. 
 
 Toleration enjoined in the Qur'an, etc., 
 
 5-6, 67. 
 „ of Muslims acknowledged 
 
 by Christians, 71, 123-4, 
 
 341"'. 
 „ towards the Christian Arabs, 
 
 44, 45. 47- 
 „ towards the Christians of — 
 Egypt, 87-8, 93. 
 North Africa, in. 
 Russia, 200-1. 
 Spain, 1 15-16. 
 Syria and Palestine, 50-1, 
 
 8i. 
 Turkey, 126-7, 134-5, 
 153. 165. 
 Traders, Muslim : see Merchants. 
 Transoxania, 73, 183, 246. 
 Transylvania, 134. 
 Tripolis, 287. 
 
 Turkistan, 184, 243, 247, 249. 
 Turks, Saljiiq, 75, 82, 184. 
 
 ,, Ottoman, 125-136, 142, 145- 
 
 153, 157. i63->76. 
 ,, see Uigurs. 
 
 Uigurs, 247. 
 
 'Umar ibn 'Abdi-1 'Aziz, 58, 72, 88, 
 . 183, 210, 222, 259. 
 'Umar ibnu-1 Khattab, 13, 39, 45, 46, 
 51-2, 70. 
 „ „ the ordinance 
 
 of, 52-3. 
 'Umaru-1 Hajl, 270-3. 
 UzbegHl5.n, 199-201. 
 
 Venetians, 127, 162, 172-4. 
 Vladimir, 201-3. 
 
 Wauai, 264, 275, 287. 
 
 Wahhabi reformation, influence of, 
 
 230, 265, 299, 345-6. 
 Waigama, 326. 
 Waigyu, 326. 
 Walata, 268. 
 
 William of Rubrouck, 188-9. 
 Women, Muslim, as missionaries, 102, 
 
 197, 334-5- 
 
 Yunnan, 242, 248, 255. 
 
 Zanzibar, 278, 282. 
 Zoroastrians, 177-180. 
 
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