THE PREACHING OF ISLAM-- CHAPTER III. – THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN

After the death of Muḥammad, the army he had intended for Syria was despatched thither by Abū Bakr, in spite of the protestations 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 Muḥam­mad." 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 expansion of the Muslim faith that followed the Arab conquests, it is of importance to discover what were the circumstances that made such an expansion possible.

A great historian[1] 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. Khālid, 'that sword of the swords of God, exhibited in a very striking manner that mixture of force and persuasion whereby he and 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 offered them only a miserable subsistence, for the fruitful and luxuriant countries of Persia, Syria and

Egypt."

These stupendous conquests which laid the foundations of the Arab empire, were certainly not the outcome of a holy war, waged for the propagation of Islam, but they were followed by such a vast defection from the Christian faith that this result has often been supposed to have been their aim. Thus the sword came to be looked upon by Christian historians as the instrument of Muslim propa­ganda, and in the light of the success attributed to it the evidences of the genuine missionary activity of Islam were obscured. But the spirit which animated the invading hosts of Arabs who poured over the confines of the Byzantine and Persian empires, was no proselytising zeal for the conversion of souls. On the contrary, religious interests appear to have entered but little into the consciousness of the pro­tagonists of the Arab armies.[2] This expansion of the Arab race is more rightly envisaged as the migration of a vigorous and energetic people driven by hunger and want, to leave their inhospitable deserts and overrun the richer lands of their more fortunate neighbours.[3] Still the unifying principle of the movement was the theocracy established in Medina, and the organisation of the new state proceeded from the devoted companions of Muḥammad, the faithful depositaries of his teaching, whose moral weight and en­thusiasm kept Islam alive as the official religion, despite the indifference of those Arabs who gave to it a mere nominal adherence.[4] It is not, therefore, in the annals of the conquer­ing armies that we must look for the reasons which lead to the so rapid spread of the Muslim faith, but rather in the conditions prevailing among the conquered peoples.

The national character of this ethnic movement of migra­tion naturally attracted to the invading Arab hosts the outlying representatives of the Arab race through whom the path of the conquering armies lay. 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 Banū Ghassān, 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."[5] After the battle of Qādisiyyah (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."[6] Similarly, after the conquest of northern Syria, most of the Bedouin tribes, after hesitating a little, joined themselves to the followers of the Prophet.[7]

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. Muḥammad 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.[8] 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 same spirit of loyalty to the new government as had caused them to hold aloof from the great apostasy that raised the standard of revolt throughout Arabia immediately after the death of the Prophet.[9] It has been suggested that the Christian Arabs who guarded the frontier of the Byzantine empire bordering on the desert threw in their lot with the invading Muslim army, when Heraclius refused any longer to pay them their accus­tomed subsidy for military service as wardens of the marches.[10]

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 Banū Ṭayy 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 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 Banū 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 Muslim 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 Banū Taghlib. I am he that hath slain the chief."[11]

The tribe to which this young man boasted that he be­longed was one of those that elected to remain Christian, while other tribes of Mesopotamia, such as the Banū Namir and the Banū Quḍā'ah, became Muslim. The Banū Taghlib had sent an embassy to the Prophet as early as the year a.h. 9. The heathen members of the deputation embraced Islam and he made a treaty with the Christians according to which they were to retain their old faith but were not to baptise their children. A condition so entirely at variance with the usual tolerant attitude of Muḥammad towards the Christian Arabs, who were allowed to choose between conversion to Islam and the payment of jizyah and never compelled to abandon their faith, has given rise to the conjecture that this condition was sug­gested by the Christian families of the Banū Taghlib them­selves, out of motives of economy.[12] The long survival of Christianity in this tribe shows that this condition was certainly not observed. 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.[13] They were called upon to pay the jizyah[14] or tax imposed on the non-Muslim 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 Ṣadaqah or alms,[15]—which was a poor tax levied on the fields and cattle, etc., of the Muslims.[16] It especially irked the Muslims that any of the Arabs should remain true to the Christian faith. The majority of the Banū Tanūkh had become Muslim in the year a.h. 12, when with other Christian Arab tribes they submitted to Khālid b. al-Walīd,[17] but some of them appear to have remained true to their old faith for nearly a century and a half, since the caliph al-Mahdī (a.h. 158-169) is said to have seen a number of them who dwelt in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, and learning that they were Christians, in anger ordered them to accept Islam— which they did to the number of 5000, and one of them suffered martyrdom rather than apostatise.[18] But for the most part, details are lacking for any history of the dis­appearance of Christianity from among the Christian Arab tribes of Northern Arabia; they seem to have become absorbed in the surrounding Muslim community by an almost insensible process of "peaceful penetration"; had attempts been made to convert them by force when they first came under Muhammadan rule, it would not have been possible for Christians to have survived among them up to the times of the 'Abbāsid caliphs.[19]

The people of Ḥīrah had likewise resisted all the efforts made by Khalīd 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 themselves 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, Khalīd asked them, "Who are you? are you Arabs or Persians?" Then 'Adī, 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 (1) accept our faith, then your rights and obligations will be the same as ours, whether you choose to go into another country or stay in your own land; or (2) pay jizyah; or (3) war and battle. 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 you jizyah." Kh. "Ill-luck to you! Unbelief is a pathless desert 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 foreigner."[20]

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 converts. 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'ān 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 Ramaḍān. The importance attached to this work of instructing the new converts may be judged from the fact that in the city of Kūfah it was no less a personage than the state treasurer who was entrusted with this task.[21]

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 will.[22] 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 al-Karak, to the east of the Dead Sea, who differed in no way, either in dress or in manners, from the Muslim Arabs.[23] Burckhardt 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 convent.[24]

Many of the Arabs of the renowned tribe of the Banū Ghassān, Arabs of the purest blood, who embraced 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.[25]

If we turn from the Bedouins to consider the attitude of the settled inhabitants of the towns and the non-Arab population 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 still in large numbers cling.

In order that we may fully appreciate their condition under the Muslim rule, and estimate the influences that led to occasional conversions, it will be well briefly to sketch their situation under the Christian rule of the Byzantine empire which fell back before the Arab arms.

A hundred years before, Justinian had succeeded in giving some show of unity to the Roman Empire, but after his death it rapidly fell asunder, and at this time there was an entire want of common national feeling between the provinces and the seat of government. Heraclius had made some partially successful efforts to attach Syria again to the central government, but unfortunately the general methods of reconciliation which he adopted had served only to in­crease dissension instead of allaying it. Religious passions were the only existing substitute for national feeling, and he tried, by propounding an exposition of faith, that was intended to serve as an eirenicon, to stop all further disputes between the contending factions and unite the heretics to the Orthodox Church and to the central government. The Council of Chalcedon (451) had maintained that Christ was "to be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation; the difference of the natures being in nowise taken away by reason of their union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved, and concurring into one person and one substance, not as it were divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and only begotten, God the Word." This council was rejected by the Monophysites, who only allowed one nature in the person of Christ, who was said to be a composite person, having all attributes divine and human, but the substance bearing these attributes was no longer a duality, but a composite unity. The controversy between the orthodox party and the Monophysites, who flourished particularly in Egypt and Syria and in countries outside the Byzantine empire, had been hotly contested for nearly two centuries, when Heraclius sought to effect a reconcilia­tion by means of the doctrine of Monotheletism: while conceding the duality of the natures, it secured unity of the person in the actual life of Christ, by the rejection of two series of activities in this one person; the one Christ and Son of God effectuates that which is human and that which is divine by one divine human agency, i. e. there is only one will in the Incarnate Word.[26] 

But Heraclius shared the fate of so many would-be peace-makers : for not only did the controversy blaze up again all the more fiercely, but he himself was stigmatised as a heretic and drew upon himself the wrath of both parties.

Indeed, so bitter was the feeling he aroused that there is strong reason to believe that even a majority of the orthodox subjects of the Roman Empire, in the provinces that were conquered during this emperor's reign, were the well-wishers of the Arabs ; they regarded the emperor with aversion as a heretic, and were afraid that he might commence a perse­cution in order to force upon them his Monotheistic opinions.[27]  They therefore readily — and even eagerly — received the new masters who promised them religious toleration, and were willing to compromise their religious position and their national independence if only they could free themselves from the immediately impending danger.

Michael the Elder, Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, writing in the latter half of the twelfth century, could approve the decision of his co-religionists and see the finger of God in the Arab conquests even after the Eastern churches had had experience of five centuries of Muhammadan rule. After recounting the persecutions of Heraclius, he writes: "This is why the God of vengeance, who alone is all-powerful, and changes the empire of mortals as He will, giving it to whomsoever He will, and uplifting the humble — beholding the wickedness of the Romans who, throughout their dominions, cruelly plundered our churches and our monasteries and condemned us without pity — brought from the region of the south the sons of Ishmael, to deliver us through them from the hands of the Romans. And, if in truth, we have suffered some loss, because the catholic churches, that had been taken away from us and given to the Chalcedonians, remained in their possession; for when the cities submitted to the Arabs, they assigned to each denomination the churches which they found it to be in possession of (and at that time the great church of Emessa and that of Harran had been taken away from us); never­theless it was no slight advantage for us to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans, their wickedness, their wrath and cruel zeal against us, and to find ourselves at peace."[28]

When the Muslim army reached the valley of the Jordan and Abū 'Ubaydah pitched his camp at Fiḥl, the Christian inhabitants of the country wrote to the Arabs, saying: "O Muslims, we prefer you to the Byzantines, though they are of our own faith, because you keep better faith with us and are more merciful to us and refrain from doing us injustice and your rule over us is better than theirs, for they have robbed us of our goods and our homes."[29] The people of Emessa closed the gates of their city against the army of Heraclius and told the Muslims that they preferred their government and justice to the injustice and oppression of the Greeks.[30]

Such was the state of feeling in Syria during the campaign of 633-639 in which the Arabs gradually drove the Roman army out of the province. And when Damascus, in 637, set the example of making terms with the Arabs, and thus secured immunity from plunder and other favourable con­ditions, the rest of the cities of Syria were not slow to follow. Emessa, Arethusa, Hieropolis and other towns entered into treaties whereby they became tributary to the Arabs. Even the patriarch of Jerusalem surrendered the city on similar terms. The fear of religious compulsion on the part of the heretical emperor made the promise of Muslim toleration appear more attractive than the connection with the Roman Empire and a Christian government, and after the first terrors caused by the passage of an invading army, there succeeded a profound revulsion of feeling in favour of the Arab conquerors.[31]

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.[32]  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 jizyah.[33]

The exact details of these agreements cannot easily be disentangled from the accretions with which they have become overlaid, but whether verbally authentic or not, they are significant as representing the historic tradition accepted by the Muslim historians of the second century of the Hijrah—a tradition that could hardly have become established had there been extant evidence to the contrary. As an example of such an agreement, the conditions[34] may be quoted that are stated to have been drawn up when Jerusalem submitted to the caliph 'Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb: "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate! This is the security which 'Umar, the servant of God, the commander of the faithful, grants to the people of Ælia. He grants to all, whether sick or sound, security for their lives, their possessions, their churches and their crosses, and for all that concerns their religion. Their churches shall not be changed into dwelling places, nor destroyed, neither shall they nor their appurtenances be in any way diminished, nor the crosses of the inhabitants nor aught of their possessions, nor shall any constraint be put upon them in the matter of their faith, nor shall any one of them be harmed." [35]

Tribute was imposed upon them of five dīnārs 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.

It is in harmony with the same spirit of kindly considera­tion for his subjects of another faith, that 'Umar is recorded to have ordered an allowance of money and food to be made to some Christian lepers, apparently out of the public funds.[36]  Even in his last testament, in which he enjoins on his suc­cessor the duties of his high office, he remembers the dhimmīs (or protected persons of other faiths): "I commend to his care the dhimmīs, who enjoy the protection of God and of the Prophet; let him see to it that the covenant with them is kept, and that no greater burdens than they can bear are laid upon them."[37]

A later generation attributed to 'Umar a number of restrictive regulations which hampered the Christians in the free exercise of their religion, but De Goeje[38]  and Caetani[39] have proved without doubt that they are the invention of a later age; as, however, Muslim theologians of less tolerant periods accepted these ordinances as genuine, they are of importance for forming a judgment as to the condition of the Christian Churches under Muslim rule. This so-called ordinance of 'Umar runs as follows:—"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate! This is a writing to 'Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb from the Christians of such and such a city. When you marched against us, we asked of you protection for ourselves, our posterity, 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;[40] 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'ān;[41]  that we will not make a show of the Christian religion nor invite any one to embrace it; that we will 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 will not make use of their expressions of speech,[42] nor adopt their surnames; that we will not ride on saddles, or gird on swords, or take to ourselves arms or wear them, or engrave Arabic inscriptions 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 will 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 market­places;[43] that we will strike the bells[44]  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 will 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. All 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."[45]

The earliest mention of this document is made by Ibn Ḥazm, who died in the middle of the fifth century of the Hijrah; its provisions represent the more intolerant practice of a later age, and indeed were regulations that were put into force with no sort of regularity, some outburst of fanaticism being generally needed for any appeal to be made for their application. There is abundant evidence 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—a word which originally denoted tribute of any kind paid by the non-Muslim subjects of the Arab empire, but came later on to be used for the capitation-tax as the fiscal system of the new rulers became fixed;[46] but this jizyah was too moderate to constitute a burden, seeing that it released them from the compulsory military service that was incumbent on their Muslim fellow-subjects. Conversion to Islam was certainly attended by a certain pecuniary advantage, but his former religion could have had but little hold on a convert who abandoned it merely to gain exemption from the jizyah; and now, instead of jizyah, the convert had to pay the legal alms, zakāt, annually levied on most kinds of movable and immovable property.[47]

The pecuniary temptation to escape the incidence of taxation by means of conversion was considerably lessened when financial considerations compelled the Arab government, towards the end of the first century, to insist on the new converts continuing to pay jizyah even after they had been received into the community of the faithful.[48] On the other hand it must be remembered that the non-Muslim sections of the population always ran the risk of becoming the victims of fiscal oppression when the state was in need of revenue.

The rates of jizyah levied by the early conquerors were not uniform,[49] and the great Muslim doctors, Abū Ḥanīfah and Mālik, are not in agreement on some of the less im­portant details;[50]  the following facts taken from the Kitāb al-Kharāj, drawn up by Abū Yūsuf at the request of Hārūn al-Rashīd (a.d. 786-809) may be taken as generally repre­sentative of Muhammadan procedure under the 'Abbāsid Caliphate. The rich were to pay forty-eight dirhams[51] a year, the middle classes twenty-four, while from the poor, i. e. the field-labourers and artisans, only twelve 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.[52] 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 happened 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.[53]

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 dhimmīs 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 Musalmans. When the people of Hīrah contributed 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."[54] Again, in the treaty made by Khālid with some towns in the neighbourhood of Hīrah, he writes: "If we protect you, then jizyah is due to us; but if we do not, then it is not due."[55] 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 of the Muslims, who had in consequence to concentrate all their energies on the impending encounter. The Arab general, Abū '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."[56]

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 al-Jurājimah, a Christian tribe in the neighbourhood 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.[57] 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.[58]

We find similar instances of the remission¹ 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 Cithæron and Geranea, which lead to the Isthmus of Corinth; the Christians who served as pioneers of the advance-guard of the Turkish army, repairing the roads and bridges, were likewise exempt from tribute and received grants of land quit of all taxation;[59] and the Christian inhabitants of Hydra paid no direct taxes to the Sultan, but furnished instead a contingent of 250 able-bodied seamen to the Turkish fleet, who were supported out of the local treasury.[60]

The Southern Rumanians, the so-called Armatoli,[61] who constituted so important an element of strength in the Turkish army during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and 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.[62] In the same spirit, in consideration 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,[63] nor on those who had charge of the powder-magazine in that city.[64] 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.[65]

Living under this security of life and property and such toleration of religious thought, the Christian community— especially in the towns—enjoyed a flourishing prosperity in the early days of the Caliphate.

Mu'āwiyah (661-680) employed Christians very largely in his service, and other members of the reigning house followed his example.[66] Christians frequently held high posts at court, e.g. a Christian Arab, al-Akhṭal, was court poet, and the father of St. John of Damascus, counsellor to the caliph 'Abd al-Malik (685-705). In the service of the caliph al-Mu'taṣim (833-842), there were two brothers, Christians, who stood very high in the confidence of the Commander of the Faithful: the one, named Salmūyah, 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, Ibrāhīm, was entrusted with the care of the privy seal, and was set over the Bayt al-Māl 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 Ibrāhīm, 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.[67]

'Abd al-Malik appointed a certain Athanasius, a Christian scholar of Edessa, tutor to his brother, 'Abd al-'Azīz. Athanasius accompanied his pupil, when he was appointed governor of Egypt, and there amassed great wealth; he is said to have possessed 4000 slaves, villages, houses, gardens, and gold and silver " like stones "; his sons took a dīnār from each of the soldiers when they received their pay, and as there were 30,000 troops then in Egypt, some idea may be formed of the wealth that Athanasius accumulated during the twenty-one years that he spent in that country.[68] At the close of the eighth century, a certain Abū Nūḥ al-Anbārī was secretary to Abū Mūsā b. Muṣ'ab, governor of Mosul, and used his powerful influence for the benefit of his Christian co-religionists.[69]

In the reign of al-Mu'tadid (892-902), the governor of Anbār, 'Umar b. Yūsuf, was a Christian, and the caliph ap­proved of the appointment on the ground that if a Christian were found to be competent, a post might well be given to him, as there were better reasons for trusting a Christian than either a Jew, a Muslim or a Zoroastrian.[70] ^cAl-Muwaffaq, who was virtual ruler of the empire during the reign of his brother al-Mu'tamid (870-892), entrusted the administra­tion of the army to a Christian named Israel, and his son, al-Mu'taḍid, had as one of his secretaries another Christian, Malik b. al-Walīd. In a later reign, that of al-Muqtadir (908-932), a Christian was again in charge of the war office.[71]

Naṣr b. Hārūn, the Prime Minister of 'Aḍud al-Dawlah (949-982), of the Buwayhid dynasty of Persia, who ruled over Southern Persia and 'Iraq, was a Christian.[72] For a long time, the government offices, especially in the depart­ment of finance, were filled with Christians and Persians;[73] to a much later date was such the case in Egypt, where at times the Christians almost entirely monopolised such posts.[74] 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 Hārūn al-Rashīd, 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 Christian, received 22,000 dirhams a year.[75] 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 communities enjoyed an almost complete autonomy, for the government 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.[76] Their churches and monasteries were, for the most part, not 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.

Recent historical criticism has demonstrated the im­possibility of the legend that when Damascus was taken by the Arabs, the churches were equally divided between the Christians and the conquerors, on the plea that 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 submission of the governor of the city; a similar scrutiny of historical documents as well as of the topography of the building has shown that the great cathe­dral of St. John could never have been used in the manner described by some Arabic historians as a common place of worship for both Christians and Muslims.[1] But the very fact that these historians should have believed that such an arrangement continued for nearly eighty years, testifies to the early recognition of the liberty granted to the Christians of practising the observances of their religion.

The opinion of the Muhammadan legists is very diverse on this question, from the more liberal Ḥanafī doctrine, which declares that, though it is unlawful to construct churches and synagogues in Muhammadan territory, those already existing can be repaired if they have been destroyed or have fallen into decay, while in villages and hamlets, where the tokens of Islam do not appear, new churches and synagogues may be built—to the intolerant Ḥanbalite view that they may neither be erected nor be restored when damaged or ruined. Some legists held that the privileges varied according to treaty rights: in towns taken by force, no new houses of prayer might be erected by dhimmīs, but if a special treaty had been made, the building of new churches and synagogues was allowed.[2] But like so many of the lucubrations of Muhammadan legists, these prescrip­tions bore but little relation to actual facts.[3] Schoolmen might agree that the dhimmīs could build no houses of prayer in a city of Muslim foundation, but the civil authority permitted the Copts to erect churches in the new capital of Cairo.[4] In other cities also the Christians were 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,[5] and that rather more than a century later, the fanatical al-Mutawakkil (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.[6] We have numerous instances recorded, both by Christian and Muhammadan historians, of the building of new churches : e.g. in the reign of 'Abd al-Malik (685-705), a wealthy Christian of Edessa, named Athanasius, erected in his native city a fine church dedicated to the Mother of God, and a Baptistery in honour of the picture of Christ that was reputed to have been sent to King Abgar; he also built a number of churches and monasteries in various parts of Egypt, among them two magnificent churches in Fusṭāṭ.[7] Some Christian chamber­lains in the service of 'Abd al-'Aziz b. Marwān (brother of 'Abd al-Malik), the governor of Egypt, obtained permission to build a church in Ḥalwān, which was dedicated to St. John,[8] though this town was a Muslim creation. In a.d. 711 a Jacobite church was built at Antioch by order of the caliph al-Walīd (705-715).[9] In the first year of the reign of Yazīd II (a.d. 720), Mār Elias, the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, made a solemn entry into Antioch, accompanied by his clergy and monks, to consecrate a new church which he had caused to be built; and in the following year he conse­crated another church in the village of Sarmada, in the dis­trict of Antioch, and the only opposition he met with was from the rival Christian sect that accepted the Council of Chalcedon.[10] In the following reign, Khālid al-Qasrī, who was governor of Arabian and Persian 'Irāq from 724 to 738, built a church for his mother, who was a Christian, to worship in.[11] In 759 the building of a church at Nisibis was completed, on which the Nestorian bishop, Cyprian, had expended a sum of 56,000 dīnārs.[12] From the same century dates the church of Abū Sirjah in the ancient Roman fortress in old Cairo.[13] In the reign of al-Mahdī (775-785) a church was erected in Baghdād for the use of the Christian prisoners that had been taken captive during the numerous campaigns against the Byzantine empire.[14] Another church was built in the same city, in the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786-809), by the people of Samālū, who had submitted to the caliph and received protection from him;[15] during the same reign Sergius, the Nestorian Metropolitan of Baṣrah, received permission to build a church in that city,[16] though it was a Muslim foundation, having been created by the caliph 'Umar in the year 638, and a magnificent church was erected in Babylon in which were enshrined the bodies of the prophets Daniel and Ezechiel.[17] When al-Ma'mūn (813-833) was in Egypt he gave permission to two of his chamber­lains to erect a church on al-Muqaṭṭam, a hill near Cairo; and by the same caliph's leave, a wealthy Christian, named Bukām, built several fine churches at Būrah in Egypt.[18] The Nestorian Patriarch, Timotheus, who died a.d. 820, erected a church at Takrīt and a monastery at Baghdād.[19] In the tenth century, the beautiful Coptic church of Abū Sayfayn was built in Fusṭāṭ.[20] A new church was built at Jiddah in the reign of al-Ẓāhir, the seventh Fāṭimid caliph of Egypt (1020-1035).[21] New churches and monasteries were also built in the reign of the 'Abbāsid, al-Mustaḍī (1170-1180).[22] In 1187 a church was built at Fusṭāṭ and dedicated to Our Lady the Pure Virgin.[23]

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.[24] 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 Tatars.[25]

If the other Christian sects failed to exhibit the same vigorous life, it was not the fault of the Muhammadans. All were tolerated alike by the supreme government, and furthermore were prevented from persecuting one another.[26] In the fifth century, Barsauma, 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.[27] Another persecution was instituted against the Orthodox by Khusrau II, after the invasion of Persia by Heraclius, at the instigation of a Jacobite, who persuaded the King that the Orthodox would always be favourably inclined towards the Byzantines.[28] But the principles of Muslim toleration forbade such acts of injustice 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.[29]

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.[30] In an age so prolific of theological speculation, there may well have been some thinkers whose trend of thought had prepared them for the acceptance of the Muhammadan position. Such were those Shahrīghān or landed proprietors in Persia in the eighth century, who were nominally Christians, but maintained that Christ was an ordinary man and that he was as one of the Prophets.[31] They appear at times to have given a good deal of trouble to the Nestorian clergy, who were at great pains to draw them into the paths of orthodoxy;[32] but their theological position was more closely akin to Islam than to Christian doctrine, and they probably went to swell the ranks of the converts after the Arab conquest of the Persian empire.

Many Christian theologians[33] have supposed that the debased condition—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 to them in all the vigour of new-born zeal.[34] For example, Dean Milman[35] 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 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." Similarly, Caetani sees in the spread of Islam, among the Christians of the Eastern Churches, a revulsion of feeling from the dogmatic subtleties introduced into Chris­tian theology by the Hellenistic spirit." For the East, with its love of clear and simple concepts, Hellenic culture was, from the religious point of view, a misfortune, because it changed the sublime and simple teachings of Christ into a creed bristling with incomprehensible dogmas, Pull of doubts and uncertainties; these ended with producing a feeling of deep dismay and shook the very foundations of religious belief; so that when at last there appeared, coming out suddenly from the desert, the news of the new revela­tion, this bastard oriental Christianity, torn asunder by internal discords, wavering in its fundamental dogmas, dismayed by such incertitudes, could no longer resist the temptations of a new faith, which swept away at one single stroke all miserable doubts, and offered, along with simple, clear and undisputed doctrines, great material advantages also. The East then abandoned Christ and threw itself into the arms of the Prophet of Arabia."[36]

Again, Canon Taylor[37] 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 of 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,[38] 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 judgment, 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 follies, 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 recognition to the fundamental facts of human nature."

Islam has, moreover, been represented as a reaction against that Byzantine ecclesiasticism,[39] which looked .upon the emperor and 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.[40] 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."[41] 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.[42] 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 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 teachings contradictory and mutually destructive, for they are repugnant to reason and revolting to the intellect, on account of their inconsistency and mutual contrariety. No reflection can strengthen them, no discussion can prove them; and however thoughtfully we may investigate them, neither the intellect nor the senses can provide us with any argument in support of them. Notwithstanding this, I have seen that many nations and mighty 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." [43]

On the other hand, it should be remembered that those who passed over from Christianity to Islam, under the influence of the rationalistic tendencies of the age, would find in the Mu'tazilite 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 clear 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 treatises of St. John of Damascus and other Christian fathers.[44] The oldest Arab Sūfīism, the trend of which was purely towards the ascetic life (as distinguished from the later pantheistic Ṣūfīism) originated largely under the influence of Christian thought.[45] Such influence is especially traceable in the doctrines of some of the Mu'tazilite sects,[46] who busied themselves with specu­lations on the attributes of the divine nature quite in the manner of the Byzantine theologians: the Qadariyyah or libertarians of Islam probably borrowed their doctrine of the freedom of the will directly from Christianity, while the Murji'ah 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 Muslims.[47] 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 Imām Ibn Ḥanbal died.[48] A celebrated doctor of the same sect, Abu'l-Faraj b. al-Jawzī (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.[49]

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.[50] 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, still as " clients " of the various Arab tribes to which at first they used to be affiliated, they received 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 recognition in the state.[51]

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 dhimmīs), 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-Manṣūr (754-775), al-Mutawakkil (847-861), al-Muqtadir (908-932), and in Egypt by al-Āmir (1101-1130), one of the Fāṭimid caliphs, and by the Mamlūk Sultans in the fourteenth century.[52] But the very fact that these decrees excluding the dhimmīs 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 generally be traced either to popular in­dignation excited by the harsh and insolent behaviour of Christian officials,[53] or to outbursts of fanaticism which forced upon the government acts of oppression that were contrary to the general spirit of Muslim rule and were consequently allowed to lapse as soon as possible.

The beginning of a harsher treatment 8f the native Christian population dates from the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786-809) who ordered them to wear a distinctive dress and give up the government posts they held to Muslims. The first of these orders shows how little one at least of the ordinances ascribed to '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 Hārūn.[54] 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 fanaticism is, however, responsible for many of such persecutions, as in the reign of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (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,[55] and which was eager to exact vengeance for the persecutions it had itself suffered in the two preceding reigns;[56] he sought to curry their favour by persecuting the Mu'tazilites, forbidding all further discussions on the Qur'ān and declaring the doctrine that it was created, to be heretical; he had the followers of 'Alī imprisoned and beaten, pulled down the tomb of Husayn at Karbalā’ 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 dhimmīs 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.

It is noteworthy that the historians of the Nestorian Church—which had to suffer most from this persecution describe it as something new and individual to al-Mutawakkil, and as ceasing with his death.[57] One of His successors, al-Muqtadir (a.d. 908-932), renewed these regu­lations, which the lapse of half a century had apparently caused to fall into disuse.

Other outbursts of fanaticism led to the destruction of churches and synagogues,[58] and the terror of such persecution led to the defection of many from the Christian Church.[59] But such oppression was contrary to the tolerant spirit of Islam, and to the teaching traditionally ascribed to the Prophet;[60] and the fanatical party tried in vain to 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 had the power of putting down these criminal abuses only shut their eyes to them."[61] 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-Manṣūr (754-775), al-Mahdī (775-785), al-Ma'mūn (813-833), al-Mutawakkil (847-861), al-Muqtadir (908-932), and many of their successors.[62] They also incurred the odium of many Muhammadans by acting as the spies of the 'Abbāsid dynasty and hunting down the adherents of the displaced Umayyad family.[63] At a later period, during the time of the Crusades they were accused of treasonable correspondence with the Crusaders[64] 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 themselves from their miseries, by the words, " There is no god but God : Muḥammad is the Apostle 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 unendurable, and conversions to Islam increased in the same proportion. The dreary record of scandals, with which the pages of the Christian historians of this later period are filled, would suggest that the Christian Churches had failed to develop a moral fibre strong enough to endure the stress of adverse conditions, and when persecution came, the reason for the defection that followed might—as the historian of the Nestorian Church suggests[65] —be sought for in the prevailing negligence in the performance of religious duties and the evil life of the clergy.

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 purchasing 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 off from communion with the rest of Christendom, throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical com­munions. 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..[66]

Of the ancient Churches in Western Asia at the time of the Muhammadan conquest, there still survive about 150,000 Nestorians,[67] and their number would have been larger but for the proselytising efforts of other Christian Churches; the Chaldees who have submitted to the Church of Rome number 70,000, in 1898 the Nestorian Bishop Mār Jonan, with several of the clergy and 15,000 Nestorians were re­ceived into the Orthodox Russian Church; and numbers of Nestorians have also become Protestants.[68] The Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch exercises jurisdiction over about 80,000 members of this ancient Church, while 25,000 families of Uniat Jacobites obey the Syrian Catholic Patriarch.[69] Belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church, there are 28,836 families under the Patriarch of Antioch and more than 15,000 persons under the Patriarch of Jerusalem,[70] while the Melchites or Greek-Catholics number about 130,000.[71] The Maronite Church, which has been in union with the Roman Catholic Church since the year 1182, has a following of 300,000.[72]

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,[73] living in a country that was for 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[74]. 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.[75]

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 'Irāq for example may be formed from the fact that the income from taxation in the reign of 'Umar was from 100 to 120 million dirhams, while in the reign of 'Abd al-Malik, about fifty 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 large numbers of the population had become Muhammadan and consequently could no longer be called upon to pay the capitation-tax.[76]

This same period witnesses the conversion of large numbers of the Christians of Khurāsān, as we learn from a letter of a contemporary ecclesiastic, the Nestorian Patriarch Ishō'-yabh III, addressed to Simeon, the Metropolitan of Rev-Ardashīr and Primate of Persia. We possess so very few Christian documents 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 headlong 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 Kirmān 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 purchased 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 even less."[77] The reign of the caliph 'Umar II (a.d. 717-720) particularly was marked with very extensive conversions : he organised a zealous missionary movement and offered every kind of inducement to the conquered peoples to accept Islam, even making them grants of money; on one occasion he is said to have given a Christian military officer the sum of 1000 dīnārs to induce him to accept Islam.[78] He instructed the governors of the provinces to invite the dhimmīs to the Muslim faith, and al-Jarrāḥ b. 'Abd Allāh, governor of Khurāsān, is said to have converted about 4000 persons.[79] He is even said to have written a letter to the Byzantine Emperor, Leo III, urging on him the acceptance of the faith of Islam.[80] 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; even though the dhimmī apostatised the very day before his yearly payment of the jizyah was due or while his contribution was actually being weighed, in the scales, it was to be remitted to the new convert.[81] He no longer exacted the kharāj 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 themselves among the Muslims.[82]

It must not, however, be supposed that such worldly considerations 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 them an air of vraisemblance and make them appear as if they were intended to provide the Christians with ready answers to the numerous objections which their Muslim neighbours brought against the Christian creed.[83] 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 Abū Qurrah, also wrote several controversial dialogues[84]  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," 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."[85] The Nestorian Patriarch, Timotheus, used to hold discussions on religious matters in the presence of the caliphs, al-Hādī and Hārūn al-Rashīd, and embodied them in a work that is now lost.[86] Timotheus had secured his election to the patriarchate in the face of the active opposition of many of the most powerful ecclesiastics of his own Church; among these was Joseph, the metropolitan of Merv, who intrigued against him with the caliph, al-Mahdī (775-785), but was persuaded by the caliph to accept Islam and was rewarded for his apostasy with rich presents and an official appointment in Basrah.[87]

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'mūn (813-833), and takes the form of a letter[88] 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'mūn 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.[89] 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.[90] 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'mūn himself was very zealous in his efforts to spread the faith of Islam, and sent invitations to unbe­lievers even in the most distant parts of his dominions, such as Transoxania and Farghānah.[91] At the same time he did not abuse his royal power, by attempting to force his own faith upon others : when a certain Yazdānbakht, a leader of the Manichæan sect, came on a visit to Baghdād[92] and held a disputation with the Muslim theologians, in which he was utterly silenced, the caliph tried to induce him to embrace Islam. But Yazdānbakht 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 bodyguard, that he might not be exposed to insult from the fanatical populace.[93]

Some scanty references are made by Christian historians to cases of ecclesiastical dignitaries who became Muhammadans, e. g. George, Bishop of Bahrayn, about the middle of the ninth century, having been deposed from his office for some ecclesiastical offence, exchanged the Christian faith for that of Islam,[94] and the conversion of a brother of Gabriel, metropolitan of Fārs about the middle of the tenth century, only receives mention because the fact of his having become a Muslim was alleged as disqualifying Gabriel for election to the patriarchate of the Nestorian church.[95]

In the early part of the same century, Theodore, the Nestorian Bishop of Beth Garmai, became a Muslim, and there is no mention of any force or compulsion by the ecclesi­astical historian[96] who records the fact, as there undoubtedly would have been, had such existed. Some years later (between a.d. 962 and 979), Philoxenos, a Jacobite Bishop of Ādharbayjān, also became a Muslim,[97] and in the following century, in 1016, Ignatius,[98] the Jacobite Metropolitan of Takrīt, who had held this office for twenty-five years, set out for Baghdād and embraced Islam in the presence of the caliph al-Qādir, taking the name of Abū Muslim.[99] It would be exceedingly interesting if an Apologia pro Vita Sua had survived to reveal to us the religious development that took place in the mind of either of these converts. The Christian chronicler hints at immorality in the last three cases, but such an accusation uncorroborated by any further evidence is open to suspicion,[100] much as it would be if brought forward by a Roman Catholic when recording the conversion of a priest of his own communion to the Protestant faith. It is doubtless owing to their exalted position in the Church that the conversion of these prominent ecclesiastics of two hostile Christian sects has been handed down to us, while that of more obscure individuals has not been recorded. As Barhebræus brings his ecclesiastical chronicle nearer to his own time, he gives fuller details of the career of such converts, e. g. in recording the public lapse of some of the Jacobite bishops, in the middle of the twelfth century he makes particular mention of Aaron, bishop of a town in Khurāsān, as having become a Muhammadan after having been convicted of some moral fault; repenting of this change, he wished to regain his episcopal status, and when this was refused him, went to Constantinople and abjured the Monophysite doctrines of the Jacobite Church; then apparently dissatisfied with the reception he received in Constantinople, he returned to the Jacobite Patriarch, but a second time went over to Islam " without any reason "; then repenting again, he finally ended his days among the Maronites of Mount Lebanon.[101] A contemporary of Bar­hebræus, in the middle of the thirteenth century—Daniel, Bishop of Khabur—who is said to have been proficient in secular learning, sought to be appointed to the diocese of Aleppo, but disappointed in this ambition, he abandoned the Christian faith and to the grief and shame of all Christian people " became a Muslim; but God (praise be to His grace!) soon consoled his afflicted people and took away the shame from the redeemed, the redeemed of the Lord; for a few months later that unhappy wretch died miserably in a caravanserai; his name perished, he was taken away out of our midst, and no man knoweth his abiding place."[102]

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 dunghills."[103]

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 existence for nearly two centuries. During this period, occasional con­versions to Islam were made from among these foreign immigrants. In the first Crusade, for example, a body 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 Saljūq Sultan, Arslān; 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.[104]

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 at the hands of the Turks in the mountain-passes of Phrygia (a.d. 1148), 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."[105]

The increasing intercourse between Christians and Muslims, 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,[106] 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 Usāma b. Munqidh, a Syrian Amīr of the twelfth century, visited Jerusalem, during a period of truce, the Knights Templar, who had occupied the Masjid al-Aqṣā, 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.[107] 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.[108] 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.[109]

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, 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.[110]

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 Muslims; such was the case, for example, with a certain English Templar, named Robert of St. Albans, who in a.d. 1185 gave up Christianity for Islam and after­wards married a grand-daughter of Saladin.[111] Two years later, Saladin invaded Palestine and utterly defeated the Christian army in the battle of Ḥiṭṭīn, Guy, king of Jeru­salem, 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.[112] At the same time Saladin seems to have had an understanding with Raymund III, Count of Tripoli, according to which he was to induce his followers to abandon the Christian faith and go over to the Muslims; but the sudden death of the Count effectually put a stop to the execution of this scheme.[113]

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 (A.D.nSg-1191). 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 Muslims; 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 Muslims.[114] The con­version of these deserters is recorded also by the chronicler who accompanied 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."[115]

From this time onwards references to renegades are not infrequently 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;[116] 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 1219 and had remained in Egypt, married a Muhammadan wife and become a great lord in that country.[117] The danger of the pilgrims to the Holy Land becoming converts to Islam was so clearly recognised at this time that in a " Remembrance," 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 were taken prisoners by the Saracens or turned renegades.[118] Ludolf de Suchem, who travelled in the Holy Land from 1336 to 1341, 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 princes.[119]

These scattered notices are no doubt significant of more extensive conversions of Christians to Islam, of which no record has come down to us : e. g. there were said to be about 25,000 renegades in the city of Cairo towards the close of the fifteenth century,[120] 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.

As an example of the rare instances of such a conversion being recorded, the account may here be cited which Fürer von Haimendorf, who was in Cairo in 1565, gives of the conversion of a German scholar who had studied in the University of Leipzig. " Sed dum nos hanc moram Cairi nectimus, accidit ut Justus quidam Stevenius Germanus Hamelensis qui in iisdem ædibus nobiscum habitaverat, fide Christianorum abnegata Turcarum religioni se initiandum atque circumcidendum obtulerit. Vir erat doctus, qui diu se Witebergæ ac Lipsiæ studiis operam dedisse sæpe nobis narrabat: verum de hoc facto interrogatus, peculiarem nunc sibi Spiritum adesse ajebat, sine cujus instinctu nihil vel facere sibi, vel cogitare fas esset; quæ hominis apostasia nimium quantum animos nostros commovit, et ad fugam quasi excitavit. Eodem quoque die Judæus quidam, qui paucis diebus ante religionem Mahumetanam amplexus fuerat, triumphali pompa per urbem circumducebatur; quod idem cum Stevenio isto futurum esse, Janissarii quidam nobis affirmabant."[121]

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. A motive frequently assigned for going over to Islam is the desire to escape the death penalty by means of apostasy. European travellers make frequent mention of such cases. A late example of such an account may be selected, for the picturesqueness of its language, from the report of a Jesuit, who was in Cairo in 1627; he saw a Copt who, having allowed himself to be carried away " partly by passion and partly by the violence of an indiscreet zeal, had killed his brother with his own hand, in detestation of his having in a dastardly manner left Jesus Christ to embrace Mahometanism, in order to deliver himself from the vexation of the Turks. The poor man was at once seized in the heat of his crime, and he boldly confessed that the renegade, unworthy of being his brother, could only wipe out so black a spot by his blood. He was urged to abandon his faith in order to save his life," but he declared that he was resolved to die a Christian; the cruel torments, however, inflicted on him by the executioners, weakened his resolution and he yielded at the last moment. " This disaster changed him in a moment from a confessor into a renegade, from a martyr into an apostate, from a saint into one of the damned, and from an angel into a veritable devil. He made the pro­fession of faith or rather of perfidy, after the manner of the Mahometans ... he was set at liberty, the liberty not of the sons of God, but of the sons of perdition." Later on, the reproaches of his conscience caused him again to recant and he was put to death by the Muhammadans for his apostasy.[122]

The monk Burchard,[123] 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 undoubtedly 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 widespread 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 presumption is that the conversions that took place were of individual Christians, who were persuaded in their own minds before they took the final step. Instances have already been given of Christians who took service under Muhammadan masters, in the full enjoyment of their own faith, and the Assises of Jerusalem made a distinction between "those who have denied God and follow another law " and " all those who have done armed service to the Saracens and other miscreants against the Christians for more than a year and a day."[124]

The native Christians certainly preferred the rule of the Muhammadans to that of the Crusaders,[125] 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.[126]

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 Saljūq 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.[127]

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 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 Muhammadans. 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 Baghdād, but in the eleventh century was overthrown by the Saljūq 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, under the pressure of cruel persecution, have embraced Islam, yet the bulk of the race has remained true to its ancient faith. As Tavernier[128]  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 uninterrupted 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 change of faith implied 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 devastating 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 Christianity began to lose ground.[129] 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.[130]

In 1400 the invasion of Tīmūr 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 but 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 independence. 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 Akhaltsikhé and other districts to the west of it became Muhammadans.[131] 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.[132] 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 inhabitants of which embraced the creed of the conquerors.[133] From this period Samtzkhé, 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 many of the chiefs and the aristocracy followed their example.

Christianity retained its hold upon the peasants much longer, but when the clergy of Samtzkhé 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.[134]

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.[135] 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.[136] 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.[137]

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.[138] From this period there seems to have been a widespread apostasy, especially among the higher classes and those who sought to win the favour of the Persian court.[139] In 1701 the occupant of the throne of Georgia, Wakhtang VI, 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 apostasy, it is said that his younger brother, although he was the Patriarch of Georgia, offered 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.[140]

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 Darvīsh Manṣūr 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.[141] But in 1791 he was taken prisoner, and in 1800 Georgia was formally incorporated in the Russian empire.

Darvīsh Manṣūr was not alone in his efforts to convert the Circassians. When the treaty of Kūchak-Qaïnarji in 1774 had recognised the independence of the Crimea and opened the Black Sea to Russian vessels, the Turkish govern­ment became alarmed at the prospect of a further movement of Russian domination along the eastern coast of the Black Sea and resolved to make an attempt to stir the Circassians to resistance. A Turkish officer, named Faraḥ 'Alī, was sent in 1782 to establish a military colony at Anāpa, near the outlet of the sea of Azov, and to enter into relations with the Circassian tribes. Faraḥ 'Alī's first care was to seek the hand of a daughter of one of the Circassian beys, offering rich presents of arms, horses, etc., to her father; the marriage was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony, and Faraḥ 'Alī encouraged his soldiers to follow his example, by promis­ing to defray the expenses of their nuptials. The result was that a number of Circassian women joined the little colony and accepted the religion of their husbands, and with the zeal of new converts won over to Islam their fathers and brothers. An active movement of proselytism began, and the Circassians who came in contact with the Turkish colony appear readily to have abandoned their pagan beliefs for the religion of the Qur'ān, the mollas were kept busy in in­structing the new Muslims, and help had to be sought from Constantinople to deal with the increasing number of con­versions.[142] But the work of Faraḥ 'Alī was short-lived; he died in 1785 and his tomb was reverenced as that of a saint, but his work perished with him. Anāpa passed into the hands of the Russians in 1812, and when the resistance of the Circassians was finally overcome in 1864, more than half a million Circassian Muhammadans migrated into Turkish territory.

Under Russian law conversions to any faith other than that of the Orthodox Church were illegal, and the further progress of Islam was stayed until the promulgation of the edict of toleration in 1905. One of the results of this in the Caucasus was a large accession to Islam from among the Abkhazes, who had long been nominal converts to Christi­anity, but now became Muhammadans in such numbers that the Orthodox clergy became alarmed and founded a special society for the distribution of religious tracts among them, in the hope of combating Muhammadan influences.[143]