Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

190 t CHAPTER EIGHT
frequently referred to the members of that community as submitters
(muslimun), an even more frequent designation for them was
“those who have faith (iman),” thus, the “faithful,” or muminun.
Later some who drew on this distinction between islam and iman,
“submission” and “faith,” to further distinguish the community’s
true and marginal members, but, as a matter of actual fact, becoming
a Muslim depended directly and exclusively on making the
profession of faith (shahada)—“There is no god but The God and
Muhammad is his envoy”—and a consequent sharing in the Friday
community prayer and annual contribution of the alms-tithe,
though in the beginning failure to pay the zakat seems to have had
more serious consequences than the neglect of prayer, presumably
because it was more willful.
Those adults who renounced paganism at Mecca and Medina
had presumably to do nothing more than pronounce the shahada
as an affirmation of monotheism and an acceptance of the divine
mission of Muhammad and, by implication, of the divine origin of
the Quran. There were baleful social consequences of such a profession
in hostile Mecca—the Quran clearly reflects them—but
notably less so in Medina, where the community moved inexorably
to a Muslim majority. Where we begin to understand the longterm
problem in conversion, however, is in the instance of a Medinese
Jew choosing, as some did, to become a Muslim and leaving
his highly marked Jewish community for the equally distinct society
of Muslims. Until Muslims became the majority over the entire
Abode of Islam, leaving one’s original community and joining the
umma carried with it a profound social dislocation and often painful
consequences.
Though we can broadly calculate and weigh some of the social
and economic incentives to conversion, it is impossible to measure
the spiritual ones, except in the rare individual cases where someone
undertakes to explain. We do know that Muslims were at first
a very small minority in the lands they so rapidly conquered but
that eventually, after two or three centuries perhaps, they became
the majority. We know too that the people who became Muslims
from Spain to Iraq were originally Christians and some Jews, and
farther east, Zoroastrians. Muslims were the rulers of those peo-