Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Islamisation

The Arab conquests of the Middle East and much of North Africa and Central Asia in the seventh century mark the beginning of a process of religious and cultural change which ultimately resulted in the present Muslim-majority populations of almost all of these regions (see Figure 1.1). Yet the countries with the greatest Muslim populations today exist outside the Middle East in South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia constitutes the largest Muslim-populated state in the world. Islam spread far into Africa and Europe too, and significant Muslim populations also arose in parts of the world which remained mostly non-Muslim, such as China and Ethiopia. This spread of Islam is often referred to as ‘Islamisation’, a term widespread in scholarship and in recent times in more popular media.

Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufis in the Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia

The figure of Ahmad Yasavi has taken on iconic status as a saint particularly associated with the Turks, and with their Islamisation; the notion that he was somehow instrumental in the spread of Islam among the nomadic Turks of Central Asia is one of the standard assumptions about his historical and religious role to be found in most of the longer or shorter accounts of him in the secondary literature. The notion of Yasavi as an Islamising saint rests on several foundations. In the first place, that reputation is now entrenched ‘on-site’, so to speak, namely at his shrine in southern Kazakhstan. To some extent this reflects a standard ‘latter-day’ motif in hagiological traditions, particularly in the post-Soviet world, where virtually any and every shrine may be linked with a saint who tends to be identifi ed as a bringer of Islam, in part as a result of the loss of any awareness of the historical role or legacy of the saint in question. ‘Who was such-and-such a saint, buried here?’ ‘He brought Islam here’ is now the default answer.

The Archaeology of Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Study

The archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa is remarkably diverse in relation to its material components, its geographical and chronological frameworks, and the life ways that were influenced by Islam, from settled and nomadic populations, peasants and kings, to merchants, farmers, warriors and townspeople. Islamisation processes were equally varied involving, for example, trade, proselytisation, jihad and prestige. Economically, new markets might be reached. Politically, the adoption of Arabic, of new forms of administration and of literacy could have a significant impact. Socially, material culture and ways of life could alter as manifest via diet and funerary practices, house types and settlement patterns. It is not possible to adequately summarise this diversity here.1 Instead emphasis will be placed upon selectively considering the evidence in order to indicate what archaeology can tell us about Islamisation processes in Africa, and to demonstrate the value and utility of archaeology for examining this Islamisation

The Role of the Domestic Sphere in the Islamisation of the Mongols

The Islamisation of the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exhibits some distinctive features compared with the adoption of Islam by other groups. Unlike the cases of the Christian communities of the Middle East during the initial Islamic conquest or the Zoroastrians of Iran, in which the native populations adopted the religion of their conquerors, for the Mongols in the Middle East and Central Asia, conversion followed the opposite trajectory: the conquerors adopted Islam from the native peoples.2 Thus the historical context within which the Mongols (or rather, some Mongols) adopted Islam was more akin to the Germanic peoples who adopted Christianity in the fifth century, or to the Hungarians in the ninth century, rather than to most populations that historically adopted Islam. This difference represents a shift in the power relationship between the converter and the convert that needs to be taken into account when approaching the Islamisation of the Mongols.

The Islamisation of Al-Andalus: Recent Studies and Debates

Describing al-Andalus – that is, the Muslim-ruled lands that now comprise Spain and Portugal – in the tenth century, the geographers al-Muqaddasi and Ibn Hawqal convey a landscape filled with Islamic markers such as mosques and religious scholars while lacking others such as storytellers (quṣṣāṣ). Ibn Hawqal refers to some rural areas where thousands of Christians ignorant of urban life resided. These rebelled from time to time, taking refuge in fortresses from which they fought ferociously and persistently against Muslim armies, and risking eventual extermination through their fierce resistance to being brought to obedience.1 This description fits the first decades of the tenth century, when the eighth Umayyad amir of Cordoba, ʿAbd al-Rahman III, proceeded to ‘pacify’ those territories of al-Andalus where not only Christians but also Arabs, Berbers and new converts defied Umayyad rule. This successful endeavour eventually led to his proclamation as caliph in the land that an army of Arab and mostly Berber Muslims had conquered back in 711.

Islamisation in the Southern Levant after the End of Frankish Rule: Some General Considerations and a Short Case Study

Two major trends in the development of the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean basin since the Islamic conquests of the mid-seventh century have been Arabisation and Islamisation. This is neither a trivial statement nor a tautology. History is full of examples of invaders who left little or no linguistic or religious impact on the conquered peoples: one need only think of the various Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire, many of whom were eventually Latinised while accepting Christianity. The Bulghars coming into the Balkans in the seventh and eighth centuries soon lost their Turkic language and accepted Christianity in its Greek guise. The Mongols left a great impact on the Middle East in the thirteenth century, but neither their language nor their traditional religion survived in the region (although many words from Mongolian can still be found in Turkish, Persian and occasionally even Arabic). The Franks ruled much of the Levant for almost two centuries, but left the country with little religious and even less linguistic impact. Thus the linguistic and religious success of the Arabs might be considered something of a historical exception.

What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-Century Arabia?

In a late seventh- or very early eighth-century Coptic homily anachronistically attributed to the church father Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), it is lamented that, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the early 640s, ‘many Christians, Barbarians, Greeks, Syrians and from all tribes will go and join them in their faith’.1 This prophecy comes across as somewhat hysterical to many modern observers – at least within its seventh-or eighth-century context – since it is now the generally accepted consensus of historians that the processes through which the inhabitants of the conquered territories of the Middle East converted to Islam were extremely gradual and persisted for centuries. Monumental changes to the political, social and religious life of many communities in this region came in the decades and centuries after the conquests – developments to which many non-Muslims fully contributed – but Muslim-majority populations are not thought to have emerged widely until the ninth or tenth centuries at the very earliest.

The Islamisation of Ottoman Bosnia: Myths and Matters

As Colin Heywood notes in his work on Ottoman Bosnia, the question of Islamisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one ‘that historians approach at their peril’.1 He refers to the debates among scholars and nationalists regarding the causes, circumstances and effects of the process. While historians eschew nationalist debates, they generally agree that the Islamisation of Bosnia was remarkable. The primary reason is its comprehensiveness in comparison with the remainder of the Balkans, even when taking into account substantial Muslim populations in Albania and Kosovo (Figure 14.1). Various explanations have been posited for this comprehensiveness, but to contextualise them we should fi rst examine the pre-Ottoman history of the Kingdom of Bosnia.

Global Patterns of Ruler Conversion to Islam and the Logic of Empirical Religiosity

The first great expansion of Islam owed little to the conversion of rulers but instead followed, albeit slowly, in the footsteps of strikingly rapid military conquest. Yet, in the second millennium, Islam expanded further and faster by means of ruler conversions than its proselytising rivals, Christianity and Buddhism. The principal regions where this held true were Sub-Saharan Africa and maritime Southeast Asia, though Central Asia also saw numerous conversions of the Mongol and Turkic elites that poured into the region.1 This was the period, then, in which Islam broke out of its Mediterranean and West Asian base to penetrate new territories to the south and the far east of the old world.

Persian Kings, Arab Conquerors and Malay Islam: Comparative Perspectives on the Place of Muslim Epics in the Islamisation of the Chams

In 1906 the French ethnographer E. M. Durand noted that the most important work of cosmogony among the Cham people of coastal South Vietnam was the so-called Book of Nosirwan.1 Indeed, local tradition holds that the Cham royal line once began with Po Nosirwan, son of the creator of the universe, Po Aulah (Allah). Correctly identifying Nosirwan with the Sasanian king Khusrau (Pers. Anushirvan), Durand was understandably puzzled by the fact that the last great Sasanian king before the Muslim conquest of Persia2 should end up as mythical progenitor of a partly Brahmanist (Cham Jat) and partly Muslim (Cham Bani) Indochinese people. Yet, by noting that the Persian ruler was also an important fi gure in classical Malay literature, the French scholar was defi nitely pointing in the right direction.