EXPANSION

The expansion of Islam historically embraces two phenomena. The first is the expansion of Islamic states—that is, states whose ruling elite consisted of Muslims and which consciously aimed to extend Islamic rule to new regions. The second phenomenon is the spread of Islam as a religion or faith—that is, the actual process (often called "conversion") by which individuals and groups came to identify themselves as Muslims, both inwardly and publicly.

These two processes are not unrelated but are far from identical and must be carefully distinguished from one another. On the one hand, Islam historically first came to some (but not all) regions of the world through the expansion into those regions of states whose leading cadres were Muslims and which espoused a self-consciously Islamic view of the world. State expansion was justified by the doctrine of jihad, "striving" or "exerting oneself" (i.e., in God's service). Jihad embraced a variety of practices, including the moral struggle against sin (even within oneself), peaceful proselytization of others, the use of violence by believers in defense of their way of life when attacked, or aggressive warfare against nonbelievers (nonmonotheists) to force them to recognize God's oneness and to submit to Islam. All these interpretations of the sense of jihad are rooted in Qur?anic verses (for example, 25:48–52 on proselytization; 22:39–41 on self-defense; 9:29 on aggressive warfare). It was the last understanding of the meaning of jihad that was most germane to the process of Islamic state-expansion.

The most important instance of this process was the spread of the first Islamic state in the early years of the Islamic era (seventh to ninth centuries c.e.), but it also is visible in numerous later historical episodes, such as the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into the Christian Balkans in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, the Ghaznavid and Ghurid conquest of Sind and adjacent parts of South Asia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the conquests of the Delhi sultans in India during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the expansion of jihad states in the western Sudan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so on. In almost all such cases, the objective of these Muslim rulers or states was not immediate conversion of the local population to Islam, but rather the more mundane concerns of seizing booty or securing the tax revenues of the conquered lands, or gaining control of strategically important areas. In many instances, however, the conquerors were responding not only to these mundane incentives, but also (or, sometimes, exclusively) to a general desire to establish in the newly conquered territories an Islamic public order—that is, a social order in accord with Islamic law (shari?a). This they wished to do both in order to extend the glory of the faith they espoused, and in order to ensure that Muslims living in such areas could meet their religious obligations to God under Islamic law: open confession of their faith, regular public prayer, fasting during Ramadan, giving of alms, and performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca if that was within their means. In most cases, however, the establishment of an Islamic order in new areas was not accompanied by forced conversions to Islam or by official pressure on non-Muslims to convert; the image of Muslim warriors coming to an area and offering the conquered the stark choice between "Islam or the sword" is mostly a myth propounded by Western anti-Islamic polemicists.

The establishment of an Islamic public order in a hitherto non-Muslim area, however, particularly if sustained over the span of several generations, generally created the conditions under which many non-Muslims gradually embraced Islam. This is why it is said that the processes of state-expansion and of individual and group conversion, while distinct, are intimately related. Still, even under the aegis of an Islamic state, the converts' actual decisions to join the Islamic community openly (to "convert") seem to have been shaped primarily by individual factors that were also operative outside the realm of control of any Islamic state. These included social, economic, and other practical incentives, as well as the intrinsic appeal of Islam as a faith-system in its own right.

These historical processes can only be sketched here in the broadest outlines; their reconstruction by the historian is moreover bound to be somewhat uneven because of the nature of the sources, which are for many parts of this story seriously deficient or even nonexistent. In general, however, one can say that the process of state expansion is much better documented than is the process of Islam's adoption by new "converts," whether within or outside of Islamic states, for whose individual decisions, and the factors contributing to them, there is often no trace whatsoever.

The remainder of this article will examine first the general factors that have contributed historically to people's decision to embrace Islam, followed by a brief overview of the spread of Islam in various regions of the world, during which the relative importance of state-expansion and other factors will be noted.

Causes and Agents of Islamization

As with most complex social processes, the Islamization of a population that hitherto did not identify itself as Muslim normally involved a multitude of causes or factors. These factors impinged in differing degrees on various individuals in the population depending on their cultural, social, economic, and political situations and their personal temperament. It is therefore impossible to generalize from one person's conversion narrative what the relative importance of various factors in conversion was for his society as a whole, just as it is impossible to work back from the aggregate factors operative in a certain historical situation to deduce just which ones would have been most influential on a particular individual who chose to embrace Islam; the selection of factors that were most important to a given person can only be known if that person leaves some written record of his own reasons for embracing the new faith—something that happens only in a tiny minority of cases.

First and foremost, we must acknowledge that Islam, as a faith system, has significant intrinsic appeal to the intellect. The relative simplicity and transparency of its basic doctrines (monotheism, prophecy, last judgment, etc.) makes them easy to grasp and to defend in philosophical or theological discourse against religious systems with more convoluted doctrines (e.g., the Christian doctrine of the Trinity). The fact that Muslims developed over the first two centuries of their existence a strong tool for legitimizing some of these doctrines in the form of an elaborate origins narrative helped bolster the intellectual cogency of Islam's doctrines. Islam's emphasis on justice (frequently stressed in the Qur?an) and on the brotherhood of all believers—the latter made especially manifest in the daily communal prayers and in major ritual observances such as collective fasting during Ramadan—were also capable of exercising a strong intellectual attraction on many individuals (aside from their obvious possible social attractiveness).

As noted above, the establishment of states with Muslim rulers and an Islamic public order usually created the conditions under which many people came to embrace Islam. Many converted in response to the working of economic or social or other factors that the existence of an Islamic public order made possible. Some, however, embraced Islam for explicitly political reasons. Besides those who wished to enter government service (or who were already in it, and believed that openly confessing Islam would enhance their career chances), many others were doubtless attracted to the faith that was now "official," publicly proclaimed, and so increasingly prominent, and associated with success and victory. On the other hand, the use of political pressure or force by Muslim authorities to coerce people to embrace Islam, while not unknown in Islamic history, was very seldom practiced, even when politically dominant Muslims absorbed populations of nonmonotheists or "pagans."

At various times individuals or communities may have responded to economic incentives to embrace Islam. The structure of taxation under an Islamic regime—according to which non-Muslims paid a special tax, the jizya or poll-tax, to the Muslim authorities—sometimes seems to have encouraged individuals to embrace Islam. Generally, however, the tax inequities seem to have been minimal (Muslims, after all, were liable according to the shari?a to some taxes not levied on non-Muslims, such as the zakat or alms-tax) and not sufficient to generate waves of conversions to Islam. After all, the non-Muslim communities of the Near East embraced Islam only very slowly—a process taking hundreds of years. Far more important, probably, was the force of general economic (and social) dislocation caused by the policies of various Muslim states, which caused great flux in all communities under their rule—Muslim as well as non-Muslim—resulting in a shattering of the communal solidarity of some non-Muslim communities, in the aftermath of which the uprooted individuals may well have embraced Islam in order to find a secure place for themselves in some community. The agrarian distress of the middle Umayyad period in Egypt, for example, which led to widespread abandonment of lands by their peasant cultivators, many of whom fled to the (predominantly Muslim) towns, weakened or destroyed rural non-Muslim communities and doubtless led many such refugees to embrace Islam more or less out of desperation, as their only economic foothold became one dominated by Muslims among whom they now lived and worked.

Many social factors also contributed to the acceptance of Islam by individuals or groups. Non-Muslims from highly stratified societies who lived in contact with Muslims could not fail to observe the relative egalitarianism of Islam (reflected, for example, in the fact that all believers, from the wealthy merchant to the poorest laborer, prayed side-by-side in the mosque); this may have had an impact in societies with caste-like social restrictions, such as were found in Hindu society in South Asia or among Iran's Zoroastrians. More generally, the highly visible collective rituals of Islam, particularly communal prayer and fasting during Ramadan, created an obvious sense of solidarity among believers that could exercise a strong attraction on those non-Muslims who yearned for the security of a strong social matrix. These rituals also provided apparent popular affirmation for the cogency of Islam's doctrines. For some men, particularly of the wealthier classes, the relative ease of divorce and the toleration of polygamy may have been attractive features of Islam's social system. Perhaps most important of all, however, was the simple desire among some non-Muslims to attain fuller social integration (including intermarriage) with Muslims among whom they lived and worked, and with whom they had other business or social ties. (Since apostasy from Islam was punishable by death, according to Islamic law, Muslims rarely converted to other religions, even when they lived outside an Islamic state.) The fact that Muslim men could, according to Islamic law, marry non-Muslim women meant that a non-Muslim who converted to Islam did not even necessarily cut himself off from the possibility of marrying a woman of his former religious community.

Cultural factors at times also played an important role in the spread of Islam among new populations. During the first several centuries of the Islamic era (roughly eighth through twelfth centuries c.e.), the urban-based Arabic-Islamic civilization that developed in the Middle East was by far the most sophisticated cultural tradition of western Eurasia. As such it exercised a powerful attraction on many people, who both embraced Islam and adopted the Arabic language. (The adoption of Arabic and Arabo-Islamic cultural patterns by numerous people in Andalusia who remained Christian, on the other hand, reveals that the processes of Arabization and Islamization were not always congruent.)

Another cultural development of importance to the spread of Islam was the rise of Islamic literary traditions in languages other than Arabic; this helped to make the faith more accessible and familiar to speakers of those languages, once Islam had begun to spread beyond the Arabic-speaking lands of its beginnings. Usually, the language in which an Islamic discourse was newly developing adopted the Arabic script as an outward marker of its Islamic character, to distinguish such writings from earlier, non-Islamic writings in the same base language. The first appearance of Islamic writings in Persian but using a modified form of the Arabic script, for example, which began in the tenth century c.e., contributed significantly to the consolidation of Islam in the Iranian cultural zone over the next several centuries, against its local rivals, especially Zoroastrianism, which continued to write in a form of Persian using the older Pahlavi script. Similar processes accompanied the rise of Islamic literary traditions in various dialects of Turkish, among Indic languages for which Urdu became the vehicle of Islamic literary culture and identity, and in Indonesian-Malay; the rise of each of these contributed significantly to the consolidation of Islam in areas where these languages were spoken.

It is important to note that the spread of Islam often has followed a pattern of initial superficial Islamization followed after a generation or more by a "reform" movement. The initial Islamization may be little more than nominal and marked by much syncretism and the survival of older, non-Islamic beliefs and practices; the "reform" along the lines of a more rigorous variant of Islam is sometimes carried out by indigenous Muslims (not infrequently led by returning pilgrims), sometimes by revivalist preachers from outside the area. Examples of this can be seen in historical contexts as disparate as the Maghrib in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries (Almoravid and Almohad movements), Anatolia during the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, the puritanical Wahhabi movement in the Arabian peninsula beginning in the sixteenth century, the revitalization of Islamic practice in nineteenth-century Indonesia at the hands of returning pilgrims, and the transformation of the Black Muslim movement in the United States into a form of orthodox Sunni Islam during the second half of the twentieth century. Islamic reformers naturally decry the laxity and heterodox character of the superficially Islamized communities they strive to reform, but it must be recognized that these communities' loose initial affiliations with Islam, however unorthodox in practice and belief, nonetheless represent a decisive turn on the part of these people toward identification with the broader Islamic community. This early identification with Islam may be an easier step for individuals to take precisely because it is still tentative, tolerant of some cherished pre-Islamic practices of the local community, or associated with political or other programs that are not those of Islam in general (for example, black separatism in the case of the Black Muslim movement); yet it results in a fundamental reorientation of the individual's identity toward Islam, and so offers the base on which later reformers can subsequently build.

The agents of Islamization are of course almost infinite in variety, as in principle people of any kind can, under appropriate conditions, proselytize others or serve as positive models that attract nonbelievers to the faith. Historically, however, three groups of people in Islamic society have been especially important to the spread of the faith: merchants, popular preachers, and mendicant Sufis (mystics). Muslim merchants, who often established themselves as self-contained colonies in non-Muslim areas, historically were the first to bring awareness of Islam to many new areas. Because of the nature of their work, they usually established close personal ties with the non-Muslims among whom they lived, which gave them many opportunities to engage in patient proselytization among their associates. Moreover, their prosperity, general reputation for honest dealing and upright behavior, and powerful sense of collective identity as Muslims made them strong positive examples of the Islamic way of life that quietly drew many converts.

In some situations, popular preachers also were important to the spread of Islam. Motivated solely by personal piety, these individuals were especially effective in situations where Islam was already known but not yet embraced by many people. The impact of mendicant Sufis was not dissimilar to that of preachers, although the form of Islam they popularized was in some cases less rigorous than that espoused by the preachers; as such it appealed to people who were unwilling to give up all aspects of their former belief-system, and initiated that kind of superficial Islamization that, as has been seen, was often an important first step down the road to full immersion in the faith.

The Expansion of Islam in Various World Regions

Islam began in western Arabia with the preaching of the prophet Muhammad (ca. 570–632 c.e.). Under the caliphs, or successors to Muhammad as temporal leaders of the Muslims, the community he had founded in Medina and Mecca expanded quickly to control all of the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Syria-Palestine, Iran, and Egypt; most of these areas were seized through military action from the two great powers of the day, the Byzantine and Sassanian Persian empires. While the early Islamic conquests remain difficult to explain in full as a historical phenomenon, they are probably best seen as an example of state-formation followed by rapid state expansion. Once firmly established, the Islamic state, led by the Umayyad caliphs (660–750 c.e.), established major garrison towns in newly conquered areas (Kufa and Basra in Iraq; Hims in Syria; Fustat in Egypt; Qayrawan in Tunisia; Qom, Marv, and others in Iran). These became important urban centers where Islamic literary culture developed, particularly under the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258 c.e.). From these garrison towns the caliphs launched further campaigns of conquest that brought ever-wider areas under their sway. North Africa was conquered in a series of campaigns sent from Egypt in the middle and later decades of the seventh century, and Muslim armies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711 c.e. and quickly seized most of the Iberian peninsula, followed in subsequent decades by raids deep into Gaul and occupation of significant areas of what is now southern France. All these areas have ever since remained part of the Islamic world, with the exception of southern France and Iberia, from which Muslims were expelled in 1492 by a resurgent Spanish monarchy, and some islands in the Mediterranean, notably Sicily, where Muslims established themselves during the ninth and tenth centuries c.e. In the east, Muslim forces defeated the last armies of the Sassanian Great Kings in western Iran already in the middle of the sixth century, and within several more decades Muslim forces had seized areas far to the east, particularly Khurasan, although some areas of Iran (Sistan, Gilan) resisted Muslim encroachment stubbornly for many more years. From Khurasan, the caliphs dispatched armies into other parts of eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and areas beyond the Oxus River in Central Asia.

The caliphs not only organized and maintained the conquering armies that carried out this remarkable expansion of the first Islamic state, they also benefited from the conquests in the form of a share of booty and captives and subsequently in the form of regular taxes imposed on the conquered areas. But it is important to note that for at least two centuries, Muslims constituted a minority (at first, indeed, a very small minority) of the population of the vast area controlled by the early Islamic empire between Spain and Afghanistan; it is estimated that the population of the caliphal domains only became 50 percent Muslim around the middle or end of the ninth century. The conversion of the population of the Middle East, then, even in lands like Syria, Egypt, and Iran, was clearly something that happened very gradually.

It was also during the early Islamic centuries that certain peoples living adjacent to the caliphal empire, but outside its borders, embraced Islam. The Bulgars, who lived along the Volga, had embraced Islam by the ninth century, probably under the influence of Muslim merchants coming from the south. The pastoral nomadic Turkish peoples of the Central Asian steppes were also increasingly converted to Islam during the ninth and tenth centuries; some may have embraced Islam on the advice of itinerant preachers or Muslim merchants to avoid being preyed upon by slave-raiders coming from the fringes of the caliphal empire in Khurasan. Their conversion was to prove of great importance, for in the eleventh century the Turks began their epic migration westward through northern Iran and into Azerbaijan, the Caucasus region, and Anatolia; this folk migration, which their political leaders the Seljuks partly orchestrated and partly followed, brought both the Turkish language and Islam for the first time to many parts of Anatolia. Under the aegis of various rival Turkish-Islamic states, much of the formerly Christian population of what we today call Turkey gradually embraced Islam between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries c.e.—in this case, a process in which both merchants and syncretistic Sufi fraternities played a significant part. Eventually, this Turkish-Islamic matrix gave rise to the Ottoman state, which in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries conquered vast new territories for Islam in the Balkans and created the conditions under which the faith spread there, particularly in Albania and Bosnia.

The first Muslim presence in South Asia was established already in the early eighth century c.e. in the Indus river valley (Sind and Punjab) by the conquest of key towns in the region, but although this community survived for many centuries little is known about it. The real beginning of the extensive spread of Islam in South Asia came in the late tenth and the eleventh centuries c.e., when the Ghaznavid dynasty began to launch raids from its main base in Afghanistan into the Indus valley and beyond, in order to secure the rich plunder the area offered. Eventually, some of these raids resulted in the establishment of permanent Ghaznavid outposts in Sind, especially as the Ghaznavids's control of their original base in Afghanistan was challenged and then taken away by others; their Indian possessions thus became a refuge for the Ghaznavids. The Ghaznavids were succeeded by the Ghurids, who in the later twelfth century held not only Sind and Punjab but also came to control most of northern India as far east as western Bengal. With the fall of the Ghurids in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century under pressure of the Khwarizmshahs and Mongols, some Ghurid commanders in India established the first Delhi Sultanate, which engaged in constant campaigning to spread its control against local Hindu and rival Muslim princes. By the fourteenth century, the Delhi sultans had brought an intermittent patchwork of areas under their control, extending all the way to south India and to Orissa in the southeast, and continued battling other Muslim and Hindu principalities. The degree of Islamization resulting from this political control varied, however, from region to region in South Asia; in general, Islamization was (and remains) much more extensive in the regions of Sind, Punjab, Bengal, and, by the fourteenth century, Kashmir in the north and Deccan in the south, than it was in other areas of India, including the Ganges plain.

Although military expansion was important to the spread of Islam in India, however, it was far from the only factor. Perhaps equally important was the establishment, no later than the twelfth century, of numerous trading colonies of Muslim merchants, usually of Arab or Persian origin, particularly along the west coast of India. These merchant colonies brought to the rulers (usually Hindu) in whose territories they established themselves not only important economic benefits, but also an exposure to some aspects of Islamic high culture, and a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. The Muslim merchant colonies were therefore important catalysts for the conversion to Islam of many people in India, even before a Muslim prince or the Delhi sultans brought their area under the domination of an officially Muslim state. Also important to the spread of Islam in South Asia were members of various orders of Sufis (mystics), such as the Chishtiyya. Some Sufi saints were closely associated with a Muslim ruler, while others avoided such ties and operated independently; whatever the case, their egalitarianism, emphasis on the spiritual life, and eagerness to welcome new adepts made them powerful magnets for the faith.

In China, Muslims have always been a minority. Already by the ninth century c.e. there was a large colony of Muslim (presumably Arab and Persian) merchants in Canton; it was largely massacred or expelled by the Chinese in 878, though some Muslims remained. The largest communities of Muslims in China were established in Xinjiang in the west during the thirteenth and following centuries, during the period of Mongol rule of China (the Yuan dynasty), when the Mongols, who cared little about religion, allowed Muslim merchants free access to the country. The Mongol Golden Horde conquered parts of central Asia and southern Russia, destroying the Muslim Bulghar kingdom, but by 1290 the khans of the Horde had themselves embraced Islam.

The first Muslims in Southeast Asia seem to have been Arab merchants who established a colony in Palembang in the trading state of Shrivijaya in eastern Sumatra in the seventh century c.e. In the subsequent centuries, colonies of Arab, Persian, and Indian Muslim merchants established themselves along the coasts of the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, some fleeing the Chinese destruction of the large Muslim trading colony at Canton in 878. As in coastal India and East Africa, Muslim merchants established a foothold in most of the trading ports of Malaysia and Indonesia. The important colony of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra is mentioned already in the thirteenth century by Marco Polo as having a Muslim ruler. The trading entrepot of Malacca, which controlled the crucial shipping lane through the narrow strait separating Malaya and Sumatra, seems to have had a Muslim ruler by the early fifteenth century. In both cases, the wealth and commercially based assertiveness of these trading entrepots resulted in the spread of Islam to neighboring areas. The sultans of Malacca extended their control over nearby areas of the Malay peninsula, bringing to Islam local populations that had not already been attracted to Islam by the glittering prosperity of Malacca's rulers; but after Malacca's conquest by the Portuguese in 1511, its commerce declined sharply, particularly because Muslim merchants preferred to take their commerce to Muslim Aceh. The sultans of Aceh eventually expanded their influence and control southward in Sumatra and in adjacent areas at the expense of other local chieftains, particularly in the seventeenth century c.e.; they continued to ply their traditional occupations of commerce and piracy, and the sultanate ended only in the late nineteenth century during the war against Dutch colonial occupation. The spread of Islam to other parts of Southeast Asia—in particular Java, Borneo, and the Moluccas—was carried out through a combination of peaceful commerce, proselytization, and warfare launched against their neighbors by local Muslim princes. In Java, Islam became influential at the court of Majapahit around the mid-fifteenth century, and subsequently spread widely through the island. Similar patterns can be traced in Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and Luzon during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rivalry between Muslim preachers and Christian missionaries (Portuguese and later Dutch) in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries sharpened the effort of Muslim proselytizers, who presented their cause increasingly as one of jihad against Christian aggression. In the nineteenth century, Muslim pilgrims returning to Indonesia from extended stays in Arabia were instrumental in fueling a revivalist or purification movement that did much to deepen the local commitment to Islam.

Islam came to North Africa, as we have seen, as part of the rapid expansion of the first caliphal state in the seventh century c.e. South of the Sahara, Islam spread more slowly, arriving by several different routes: up the Nile, across the Sahara to the Niger region of West Africa, and by sea to the East African coast. From Egypt, caliphal control, and with it Islam, spread already in the seventh and eighth centuries southward up the Nile into Nubia and from there into the northern parts of the modern state of Sudan and to the fringes of Ethiopia. Farther west, Muslim merchants from North Africa were by 1000 c.e. crossing the Sahara in caravans via key oasis towns such as Sijilmasa, Tadmekka, and Awdaghast, and had established merchant colonies near the great bend of the Niger River, particularly at the trading center of Timbuktu. The revivalist Almoravid movement established a Muslim state in Mauretania in the eleventh century, and began attacking the Soninke kingdom of Ghana before expanding rapidly northward again. By the thirteenth century, these initial seeds of Islamization had grown into several powerful Muslim kingdoms in the western Sudan: Mali and Gao in the Niger valley, and Kanam, in the vicinity of Lake Chad. These kingdoms and other smaller ones periodically waged jihad against neighboring non-Muslims, and also encouraged commerce, which drew local tribal peoples into closer contact with Muslim merchants and their cosmopolitan vision of the world.

The spread of Islam in East Africa, along the Indian Ocean littoral, resembled in some ways Islam's penetration of Southeast Asia. The first agents of Islamization were Muslim merchants from Arabia, Iran, and India, who came with the monsoon and founded or established colonies in the major coastal trading ports from Somalia southward, particularly in Zanzibar, where sectarian (Khariji) Muslims from Oman established ties that endured in political form until the mid-twentieth century. Other Muslim colonies remained subject to local rulers, but retained close communal and family ties to their coreligionists in Arabia or India. From the coastal trading ports, Islam gradually penetrated some distance into the hinterlands from which came the goods exchanged at the ports of trade.

Muslim communities became prominent in Western Europe and North America only during the middle and latter decades of the twentieth century. In Western Europe, Muslim communities became established in some cases as an unforeseen by-product of a European country's possession of Asian or African colonies or protectorates with large Muslim populations. Whether in search of work, education, or (after the colony's independence) sanctuary from oppression, migrants from these colonial or ex-colonial possessions sometimes found a way to move to the metropolitan country, whose language and sometimes culture they had often learned. Salient examples are the large communities of Muslims of North or West African origin in France, those of South Asian origin in Great Britain, and those of Southeast Asian origin in the Netherlands. Other Muslim migrants to Europe came to countries with no colonial connections to the Islamic world, mainly for economic reasons, such as the many Turkish guest workers in Germany, or for political reasons (Iranians after the overthrow of the shah in 1979, Bosnians during the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s). Whatever the cause, many of these Muslim migrants to Europe settled there permanently, so that the large and growing Muslim communities of Western Europe are now in their third and fourth generations.

In North America, large numbers of immigrants from majority-Muslim lands in Asia and Africa came to pursue economic opportunities or education, or to escape political oppression or economic deprivation (such as the large influx of Iranians of middle- or upper-class backgrounds who came after 1979). The Islamic community in the United States, however, also includes a sizable number of indigenous African-Americans. Beginning in the 1930s, some African-Americans joined Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, originally a black separatist movement. The Nation of Islam espoused many ideas that were not part of traditional Islam and most of them identified only weakly with mainstream Muslim communities around the world. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, this movement underwent an internal transformation (led by such figures as Malcolm X) that led increasing numbers of its members to adopt mainstream Islamic values and to abandon the movement's black separatist origins. The American Muslim Movement that emerged from the Nation of Islam after Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975 is thoroughly orthodox in its doctrines.

See alsoConversion ; Da?wa ; Jihad ; Tasawwuf .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Thomas. The Preaching of Islam. A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith. (1896). Reprint, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1961.

Bulliet, Richard. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantative History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Chaudhuri, K. N. Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Donner, Fred M. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Holt, P. M.; Lambton, Ann K. S.; and Lewis, Bernard, eds. The Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 2: Indian Sub-continent, South-East Asia, and Africa. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Levtzion, Nehemia, ed. Conversion to Islam. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1979.

McCloud, Aminah Beverly. African American Islam. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husein. The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, 610–1947: A Brief Historical Analysis. Karachi: Ma?aref, 1977.

Richards, D. S., ed. Islam and the Trade of Asia. Oxford, U.K.: Bruno Cassirer, 1970.

Risso, Patricia. Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.

Schimmel, Annemarie. Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980.

Smith, Jane I. Islam in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Trimingham, J. Spencer. A History of Islam in West Africa. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Trimingham, J. Spencer. Islam in East Africa. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Fred M. Donner