Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

188 t CHAPTER EIGHT
Building the Umma: Conversion
Even during Muhammad’s lifetime, the armies of the community
of believers had passed north, west, and east out of Arabia into the
heartlands of the empire of Byzantium and Sassanian Islam. Their
successes were astonishingly rapid and, as it turned out, irreversible.
Most of the conquests of the first century of Islam are still
Muslim in their loyalties and Arab in their culture. The armies of
conquest were small; cadres of Arab camel troopers peeled off occupation
garrisons as they passed through their conquests, and
then replenished their ranks with new converts and old opportunists
as they pushed ever farther afield. Some of the garrisons of
occupation attempted to keep themselves apart from the local population
in Near Eastern camp towns, but eventually they moved
into the older and prosperous cities of Syria, Egypt, North Africa,
Iraq, and Iran with their overwhelmingly non-Muslim populations
of People of the Book. Those same Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians
converted in growing numbers to both the faith and culture
of their rulers in the ninth and tenth centuries and thus made the
conquered territories Muslim in faith and Arab in culture.
Conversion to Islam was readily done but difficult to realize.
The standard Life of Muhammad is filled with accounts of the
Prophet’s instructing delegates of this or that tribe on the new beliefs
and practices to be followed, but the process of substituting
the practice of the Prophet for the venerated “sunna of the ancestors”
was not accomplished quickly or easily. Surely the best that
could be hoped for in those early days was that the tribesmen
should stop sacrificing to and otherwise venerating their idols and
learn some verses of the Quran, which they could then use as
prayers. But the spread of Islam quickly passed beyond the Bedouin
into the sown lands of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq where their faith
did not sit so lightly on Jews and Christians who had been attacking
each others’—and variant versions of their own—faith for
centuries. We have little clue as to how the Muslim conversion
process proceeded here. It must have been slow, but some of its
results can be observed fairly soon in the career of Islam. The accounts
of early Muslim writers, chiefly historians and quranic