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Conversion and Proselytization
The process of conversion to Islam in these former Byzantine regions of Syria
and beyond reveal a great deal about the political and cultural forces at work. As
we noted above, it is absurd to think in simplistic terms of “loyal Christians
falling to anti-Western Muslim forces,” the often-popular Western version of the
process. The Christians in these Semitic regions were not particularly loyal or
happy with Byzantium and were already quite anti-Western in predisposition.
Simple theories of “Islam versus West” dichotomies here simply collapse in the
face of the realities. Indeed, Islam at that point had had little direct encounter
with Western or Byzantine military power, so there was no preexisting historical
anti-Western predisposition, as had developed within many segments of the
Byzantine Empire. Other major cities in Syria soon fell to the Muslims, pushing
back the empire’s borders and beginning in the region a long process of
converting to Islam.
Again, popular Western images of Muslim conquest often portray
conversions to Islam at sword point. The realities of these processes are quite
different; they resemble processes of conversion familiar in most religious
cultures when political situations shift dramatically. First, in the very earliest
decades, Muslim political authority was of course immediately established after
military conquest. Muslim Arab armies within thirty years of the Prophet’s death
had swept west along the Mediterranean coast as far as today’s Tunisia, north to
the borders of the Caucasus and half of Anatolia, and east to the borders of
today’s Pakistan. Old regimes fell and were replaced by new Muslim rulers. But
the process of actual religious conversion at the individual and social levels was
greatly delayed. As the historian of Islam Ira Lapidus points out in his
monumental work on Muslim societies, “The conquests, then, were due to
military triumphs over militarily weakened powers, and were consolidated in the
first decades of Arab rule because local populations were content to accept the
new regime.” Elements of internal discontent within the Byzantine and Persian
empires—Monophysites and Nestorians in Syria, Christians and Jews within
Iran—facilitated the overthrow of both empires, city by city, as the Muslims
advanced. According to the Boston University professor of medieval Islam
Merlin Swartz, most of the Jewish population was discontented with their
persecuted status within the Byzantine Empire and welcomed the Muslim
armies, whose rule would turn out to facilitate a new flowering of Jewish
culture.
Furthermore, contrary to expectation, conversion of the conquered citizenry

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to Islam was not at all the immediate goal of the Arab conquerors; the extension
of Muslim power and authority was. We are really talking more about secular
change—change of rulers—than of religion itself at the social level. As Lapidus
points out, “The Arab conquerors did not require the conversion as much as the
subordination of non-Muslim peoples. At the outset, [the Arab conquerors] were
hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status
advantages of the Arabs.”
Indeed, for the new Arab administrators of these regions, there was a positive
incentive not to extend the special benefits of being Muslim to the population at
large. Arab forces had privileges and benefits that the conquered populations did
not, while the latter had to pay a tax (jizya) levied upon non-Muslims in lieu of
service in the army and in return for receiving protection. The minorities were
required to recognize Muslim political rule and to refrain from any efforts to
convert Muslims to Christianity. As Arnold Toynbee in his magisterial Study of
History points out:
In the first place we can discount the tendency—which has been
popular in Christendom—to over-estimate the extent of the use of force in
the propagation of Islam. The show of adherence to the religion exacted
by the Prophet’s successors was limited to the performance of a small
number of not very onerous external observances…. In the conquered
provinces of the Roman and Sassanian Empires the alternatives offered
were not “Islam or death” but “Islam or a super-tax”—a policy
traditionally praised for its enlightenment when pursued long afterwards
in England by a Laodicean [religiously disinterested] Queen Elizabeth.
The Arabs did not initially wish to share power. The new Muslim
administration maintained life more or less as before, only under new rule—a
process familiar to all peoples living in regions where power at the top often
changes hands through the fortunes of war, without necessarily changing life
below. In fact, few conversions took place at all. As Lapidus states:
The second principle of ‘Umar’s settlement was that the conquered
populations should be as little disturbed as possible. This meant that the
Arab-Muslims did not, contrary to reputation, attempt to convert people to
Islam. Muhammad had set the precedent of permitting Jews and
Christians in Arabia to keep their religions, if they paid tribute….

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At the time of the conquest, Islam was meant to be a religion of the
Arabs, a mark of caste unity and superiority. The Arabs had little
missionary zeal. When conversions did occur, they were an
embarrassment because they created status problems and led to claims for
financial privileges.
It’s noteworthy that at this point the early Arab conquerors were still strongly
ethnically oriented and perceived Islam to be an Arab religion of which they
were the privileged recipients; this outlook reflected Arab awareness of Moses’
revelations about a religion that was to be special for the Jewish people. Islam
was now perceived as the prized privilege of the Arabs. But it was this
privileged Arab position, and the second-class citizenship status of even non-