Conversion of Christians Islam

[rami....@gmail.com]

Dear All,

I am searching for material concerning the conversion of Christians to
Islam in the Near East since
the Islamic invasions till the the fall of Baghdad.

Rami.

[John Lamoreaux]

Dear Rami,

For hard numbers, there's R.W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1980?), which is based on the statistical analysis of Muslim biographical dictionaries. I think his conclusions must be off by a significant factor, however. His data is strictly urban, and yet more than 90% of the people would have lived in villages, and it seems likely that both arabization and islamization would have taken place at a much slower rate in the countryside. At any rate, I'd think it safe to cut his rates by a factor of ten.

If so, in Syro-Palestine Christians may have still been a majority into the Crusade period, perhaps even into the Mongol period. But who knows....

As for hard numbers, there have also been some studies based on Ottoman tax records. If I remember, most dealt with fairly limit geographical regions. I'll see if I can dig the references up.

There are also some anecdotal studies, mostly on the Coptic church.

Is there a particular region of interest?

Best,
John

_________________________________

John Lamoreaux
Department of Religious Studies
Southern Methodist University

jc...@mail.smu.edu

www.johnlamoreaux.org
christianarabic.org

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[William Hume]

Dear Sayyid Tanous,

If you are open to nonqualitative evidence about patterns of conversion, then all the data which you need for a 15-volume work can be found in the medieval Arabic geographers.  [After all, wasn't the circa-1900 series of editions of the Arab geographers about 12 volumes??]

 

I told the same thing to Sebastian Brock and his crew in summer, 1991 at the Syriac Conference at Brown, but the focus of their question was which portions of the populations continued to speak a pre-Arabic language such as Coptic or Syriac.

 

The geographers write at different decades and centuries, so you frequently get reliable diachronic evidence.  On the other hand, they are strictly comparativist, so you get exhaustive synchronic evidence. And, of course, you hear a lot about towns whose names have transformed in the last 1000 years beyond any way to explain it in terms of phonology.  And there are the dried-up oases, and changed riparian patterns, and the resulting disappeared communities.

 

Now, if you want to do Avant-cutting edge research, you might track the fluctuations for legal confessions among Muslims during the same time periods, and try to see if there are any discernible patterns.  Wouldn't you just love to be the person who statistically proves that Egyptian urban Christians disproportionately became Hanafi and Maliki confessors, rather than, say Shafi'ite?  Would Christians be more drawn to Asharite kalaam-theology rather than Maturidite?  Do the numbers bear that out??

 

I realize that most scholars would hope to find some microhistorical account by an inhabitant of a moderately large urban area, which discusses conversion patterns in terms of ecomonic incentive, class membership, ethnicity, and so on.  But if you are willing to "crunch the numbers", the resulting story will be more systematic and verifiable.  Just a thought.

 

I am sure that I don't need to address the issue of a genre of Islamic apologetic literature that glorifies individuals, tribes and towns that converted from Christianity to Islam.... especially church officials, such as Usqufs, and the like.  Now that I think about it, I cannot recall anything from the similar genre, with respect to conversions of Jews to Islam.  But it seems to me that this material is "tainted" because it is apologetic... and of dubious use for historical sociology.  But, that is just my opinion. 

As for Byzantine and other non-Arabic materials, I do believe that you will spend many more hours sifting through the cat box, for a rather negligible result.  If the Byzantines had any sort of substantial and reliable intelligence or geograpical data for the period 650-1000, that would surely impact the scholarly debate about the Radical German School that believes Islam to be an Abbassid fabrication. 

 

Well, OK, that is my pitch for you to consult and use the Arab geographers, both Big Name and Published, as well as those who are "jetzt noch im hss.," as GRAF or SEZGIN would put it.

 

Best wishes, WSH

---

From: "rami....@gmail.com" <rami....@gmail.com>
To: North American Society for Christian Arabic Studies <nas...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, November 4, 2010 6:08:27 PM
Subject: [nascas] Conversion of Christians Islam

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[Thomas A Carlson (tcarlson@Princeton.EDU)]

Dear Rami & John,

The other methodological problem with Bulliet's analysis is that his data is drawn exclusively from Muslim biographical dictionaries, which therefore presumes a 100% conversion rate by the date of the dictionary he uses, and because the people in there are generally from the `ulama, it pushes the conversion rate even earlier. It was a very clever and provocative study, but it's hard to see how to get a better control on the numbers over the real population base.

I don't know if there is anything in J.-M. Fiey, "Chrétiens syriaques sous les Abbassides surtout à Bagdad, 749-1258" (1980), but that would be one place to check, which covers most of the period that interests you.

Best,
Thomas.

[Sergey Minov]

Hi Rami,

These might be useful -

Fiey, J.-M., “Conversions à l’Islam de Juifs et de Chrétiens sous les
Abbassides d’après les sources arabes et syriaques,” in: J. Irmscher
(ed.), Rapports entre Juifs, Chrétiens et Musulmans. Eine Sammlung von
Forschungsbeiträgen (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1995), 13-28.
Levtzion, N., “Conversion to Islam in Syria and Palestine and the
Survival of Christian Communities,” in: M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi
(eds.), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in
Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Papers in Mediaeval
Studies 9; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990),
289-311.
Tamcke, M., “Vom Dialog, interreligiös und intrareligiös: zwei
syrische Lieder zur Konversion,” in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and
Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beiruter
Texte und Studien 117; Beirut: Orient-Institut / Würzburg: Ergon
Verlag, 2007), 9-18.

best
Sergey Minov

On Nov 5, 3:08 am, "rami.tan...@gmail.com" <rami.tan...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Gregory Kessel]

to add to the list of Sergey:

ZABOROWSKI, JASON R., The Coptic Martyrdom of John of Phanijōit : assimilation and conversion to Islam in thirteenth-century Egypt (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2005)
SHABAN, M, 'Conversion to Early Islam', Conversion to Islam. Ed. Nehemia Levtsion. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979. 24-29.
REININK, G.J., 'Following the Doctrine of the Demons. Early Christian Fear of Conversion to Islam', J.N.Bremmer, W.J.van Bekkum, A.L.Molendijk (eds), Cultures of Conversion (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 18; Louvain, 2005), 127-38.
MENAGE, V.L, 'The Islamization of Anatolia', Conversion to Islam. Ed. Nehemia Levtsion. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979. 52-67.
LAPIDUS, I.M, 'The Conversion of Egypt to Islam', Israel Oriental Studies 2, (1972), 248-62.
FRANTZ-MURPHY, GLADYS, 'Conversion in early Islamic Egypt: the economic factor', Muslims and others in early Islamic society / edited by Robert Hoyland (The Formation of the Classical Islamic World, 18). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004 pp. 323-329
BRETT, M., 'Population and Conversion to Islam in Egypt in the Mediaeval Period', Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras (Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras,, 2005), 1-32.

Hopefully, you'll find something useful.
Grigory Kessel

--- On Fri, 11/5/10, Sergey Minov <sergey...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: