Many other circumstances might be adduced that have contributed towards the missionary success of Islam—circumstances peculiar to particular times and countries. Among these may be mentioned the advantage that Muhammadan missionary work derives from the fact of its being so largely in the hands of traders, especially in Africa and other uncivilised countries where the people are naturally suspicious of the foreigner. For, in the case of the trader, his well-known and harmless avocation secures to him an immunity from any such feelings of suspicion, while his knowledge of men and manners, his commercial savoir-faire, gain for him a ready reception, and remove that feeling of constraint which might naturally arise in the presence of the stranger. He labours under no such disadvantages as hamper the professed missionary, who is liable to be suspected of some sinister motive, not only by people whose range of experience and mental horizon are limited and to whom the idea of any man enduring the perils of a long journey and laying aside every mundane occupation for the sole purpose of gaining proselytes, is inexplicable, but also by more civilised men of the world who are very prone to doubt the sincerity of the paid missionary agent.
The circumstances are very different when Islam has not to appear as a suppliant in a foreign country, but stands forth proudly as the religion of the ruling race. In the [[420]]preceding pages it has been shown that the theory of the Muslim faith enjoins toleration and freedom of religious life for all those followers of other faiths who pay tribute in return for protection, and though the pages of Muhammadan history are stained with the blood of many cruel persecutions, still, on the whole, unbelievers have enjoyed under Muhammadan rule a measure of toleration, the like of which is not to be found in Europe until quite modern times. Forcible conversion was forbidden, in accordance with the precepts of the Qurʼān:—“Let there be no compulsion in religion” (ii. 257). “Wilt thou compel men to become believers? No soul can believe but by the permission of God” (x. 99, 100). The very existence of so many Christian sects and communities in countries that have been for centuries under Muhammadan rule is an abiding testimony to the toleration they have enjoyed, and shows that the persecutions they have from time to time been called upon to endure at the hands of bigots and fanatics, have been excited by some special and local circumstances rather than inspired by a settled principle of intolerance.[31] [[421]]
At such times of persecution, the pressure of circumstances has driven many unbelievers to become—outwardly at least—Muhammadans, and many instances might be given of individuals who, on particular occasions, have been harassed into submission to the religion of the Qurʼān. But such oppression is wholly without the sanction of Muhammadan law, either religious or civil. The passages in the Qurʼān that forbid forced conversion and enjoin preaching as the sole legitimate method of spreading the faith have already been quoted above (Introduction, pp. 5–6), and the same doctrine is upheld by the decisions of the Muhammadan doctors. When Moses Maimonides, who under the fanatical rule of the Almohads had feigned conversion to Islam, fled to Egypt and there openly declared himself to be a Jew, a Muslim jurisconsult from Spain denounced him for his apostasy and demanded that the extreme penalty of the law should be inflicted on him for this offence; but the case was quashed by al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, ʻAbd al-Raḥīm b. ʻAlī,[32] one of the most famous of Muslim judges, and the prime minister of the great Saladin, who authoritatively declared that a man who had been converted to Islam by force could not be rightly considered to be a Muslim.[33] In the same spirit, when G͟hāzān (1295–1304) discovered that the Buddhist monks who had become Muhammadans at the beginning of his reign (when their temples had been destroyed) only made a pretence of being converted, he granted permission to all those who so wished to return to Tibet, where among their Buddhist fellow-countrymen they would be free once more to follow their own faith.[34] Tavernier tells us a similar story of some Jews of Ispahan who were so grievously persecuted by the governor “that either by force or cunning he caused them to turn Mahometans; but the king (Shāh ʻAbbās II) (1642–1667), understanding that only power and fear had constrained them to turn, suffer’d them to resume their own religion and to live in quiet.”[35] A story of a much earlier traveller[36] in Persia, in 1478, shows how even in those turbulent times a Muhammadan governor set himself to [[422]]severely crush an outburst of fanaticism of the same character. A rich Armenian merchant of the city of Tabrīz was sitting in his shop one day when a Ḥājī,[37] with a reputation for sanctity, coming up to him importuned him to become a Musalman and abandon his Christian faith; when the merchant expressed his intention of remaining steadfast in his religion and offered the fellow alms with the hope of getting rid of him, he replied that what he wanted was not his alms but his conversion; and at length, enraged at the persistent refusal of the merchant, suddenly snatched a sword out of the hand of a bystander and struck the merchant a mortal blow on the head and then ran away. When the Governor of the city heard the news, he was very angry and ordered the murderer to be pursued and captured; the culprit having been brought into his presence, the governor stabbed him to death with his own hand and ordered his body to be cast forth to be devoured by dogs, saying: “What! is this the way in which the religion of Muḥammad spreads?” At nightfall, the common people took up the body and buried it, whereupon the Governor, enraged at this contempt of his order, gave up the place for three or four hours to be sacked by his soldiers and afterwards imposed a fine as a further penalty; also he called the son of the merchant to him and comforted him and caressed him with good and kindly words. Even the mad al-Ḥākim (996–1020), whose persecutions caused many Jews and Christians to abandon their own faith and become Musalmans, afterwards allowed these unwilling converts to return again to their own religion and rebuild their ruined places of worship.[38] Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out [[423]]their Christian subjects or banished them from their dominions, as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the English the Jews for nearly four centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Salīm I (in 1514) or Ibrāhīm (in 1646) to have put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred 40,000 Shīʻahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious belief among his Muhammadan subjects. The muftis who turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose, did so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.[39]
Still, though the principle that found so much favour in Germany in the seventeenth century[40]—Cuius regio eius religio,—was never adopted by any Muhammadan potentate, it is obvious that the fact of Islam being the state religion could not fail to have had some influence in increasing the number of its adherents. Persons on whom their religious faith sat lightly would be readily influenced by considerations of worldly advantage, and ambition and self-interest would take the place of more laudable motives for conversion. St. Augustine made a similar complaint in the fifth century, that many entered the Christian Church merely because they hoped to gain some temporal advantage thereby: “Quam multi non quaerunt Iesum, nisi ut illis faciat bene secundum tempus! Alius negotium habet, quaerit intercessionem clericorum; alius premitur a potentiore, fugit ad ecclesiam; alius pro se vult interveniri apud eum apud quem parum valet: ille sic, ille sic; impletur quotidie talibus ecclesia.”[41]
Moreover, to the barbarous and uncivilised tribes that saw the glory and majesty of the empire of the Arabs in the heyday of its power, Islam must have appeared as imposing and have exercised as powerful a fascination as the Christian faith when presented to the Barbarians of Northern Europe, when “They found Christianity in the Empire—Christianity refined and complex, imperious and pompous—Christianity [[424]]enthroned by the side of kings, and sometimes paramount above them.”[42]
Added to this must often have been the slow, persistent influence of daily contact with Muslim life and thought, such as led even a Nestorian writer of the twelfth century to add words of blessing to the mention of the name of the Prophet and the early caliphs,[43] and to pray for the mercy of God on the caliph ʻUmar b. ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz.[44] In modern times Christian missionaries complain that the system of public instruction in Egypt under the British occupation, according to which “Christian boys are often compelled to sit and listen to the Koran and Dîn (religious teaching) being taught to their Moslem companions when there is no room where they can be separated,”[45] tends to give the Muhammadans a preponderating influence over their Christian fellow-students. One of the most active of the followers of the late Muftī Muḥammad ʻAbduh was originally a Coptic medical student, who had been won over to Islam through the influence of the religious instruction he had heard given in school hours.[46]
But the recital of such motives as little accounts for all cases of conversion in the one religion as in the other, and they should not make us lose sight of other factors in the missionary life of Islam, whose influence has been of a more distinctly religious character. Foremost among these is the influence of the devout lives of the followers of Islam. Strange as it may appear to a generation accustomed to look upon Islam as a cloak for all kinds of vice, it is nevertheless true that in earlier times many Christians who have come into contact with a living Muslim society have been profoundly impressed by the virtues exhibited therein; if these could so strike the traveller and the stranger, they would no doubt have some influence of attraction on the [[425]]unbeliever who came in daily contact with them. Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, a Dominican missionary who visited the East at the close of the thirteenth century, thus breaks out in praise of the Muslims among whom he had laboured: “Obstupuimus, quomodo in lege tante perfidie poterant opera tante perfectionis inveniri. Referemus igitur hic breviter opera perfectionis Sarracenorum.… Quis enim non obstupescat, si diligenter consideret, quanta in ipsis Sarracenis sollicitudo ad studium, devocio in oratione, misericordia ad pauperes, reverencia ad nomen Dei et prophetas et loca sancta, gravitas in moribus, affabilitas ad extraneos, concordia et amor ad suos?”[47] William Petit of Newburgh in similar manner, towards the end of the twelfth century, praised the sobriety of the Saracens as the outcome of the teaching of their Prophet and as inspiring them with a sense of moral superiority over the Christians: “Gulosos vero atque ebriosos, orbi terrarum graves abominatus, sobrietatem docuit, ciborum delicias sugillavit, vini usum, praeterquam paucis certisque diebus solemnibus, interdixit [Macometus]. Inde est, quod cum Sarraceni in fluxu libidinum de sui, ut dictum est, seductoris indulgentia probentur esse spurcissimi; nostris, proh dolor! in frugalitate superiores esse videntur, nobisque, proh pudor! comessationum et ebrietatum sordes improperant. Denique malleus Christiani nominis Saladinus ante annos aliquot, cum nostrorum mores explorans, audisset quod pluribus in prandio ferculis uterentur, dixisse fertur, ‘tales Terra Sancta indignos esse.’ Unde constat, quod luxus nostrorum conspectus Agarenos, de frugalitate gloriantes, contra nos incitet animetque tanquam dicentes; ‘Deus dereliquit crapulatos istos, persequamur et comprehendamus, quia non est qui eripiat.’”[48]
The literature of the Crusades is rich in such appreciations of Muslim virtues, while the Ottoman Turks in the early days of their rule in Europe received many a tribute of praise from Christian lips, as has already been shown in a former chapter.
At the present day there are two chief factors (beyond such of the above-mentioned as still hold good) that make for [[426]]missionary activity in the Muslim world. The first of these is the revival of religious life which dates from the Wahhābī reformation at the end of the eighteenth century; though this new departure has long lost all political significance outside the confines of Najd, as a religious revival its influence is felt throughout Africa, India and the Malay Archipelago even to the present day, and has given birth to numerous movements which take rank among the most powerful influences in the Islamic world. In the preceding pages it has already been shown how closely connected many of the modern Muslim missions are with this wide-spread revival: the fervid zeal it has stirred up, the new life it has infused into existing religious institutions, the impetus it has given to theological study and to the organisation of devotional exercises, have all served to awake and keep alive the innate proselytising spirit of Islam.
Side by side with this reform movement, is another of an entirely different character—for, to mention one point of difference only, while the former is strongly opposed to European civilisation, the latter is rather in sympathy with modern thought and offers a presentment of Islam in accordance therewith,—viz. the Pan-Islamic movement, which seeks to bind all the nations of the Muslim world in a common bond of sympathy. Though in no way so significant as the other, still this trend of thought gives a powerful stimulus to missionary labours; the effort to realise in actual life the Muslim ideal of the brotherhood of all believers reacts on collateral ideals of the faith, and the sense of a vast unity and of a common life running through the nations inspirits the hearts of the faithful and makes them bold to speak in the presence of the unbelievers.