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St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012
On rare occasions, usually triggered by some prevailing political
conflict, forced conversion took place at the point of a sword. More
systematic under the Ottomans was the practice of turning Christian
child-slaves into Muslims to become troops for the imperial army.
But when does force become coercion, or coercion become mere
pressure The burden of the jizya tax varied under different rulers,
but in some periods became an oppressive burden, from which the
only means of escape was to convert to Islam and pay zakat instead.
Muslim family law also pervasively fostered a one-way expansion of
Islam, in that it permitted people to marry into the Muslim community
but not out of it. Thus, even if those wives themselves did not
convert, their offspring were automatically counted as Muslim.
Personal conviction certainly played a part in some Christians
converting to Islam. Some were attracted by Islamic apologetics, 82
some by Muslims’ lifestyle and some by the Sufis’ claim to offer
blessings and access to God. It seems that Christian populations
turned to Islam more quickly in regions where their faith was not
firmly rooted in local language and culture; this is one likely reason
why the Berber Christians in North Africa, compelled to follow Latin
rites under Roman priests, switched to Islam more quickly than did
the Egyptian Copts with their indigenous leadership and liturgy.
The “stick” of social discrimination for Christians, combined with
the “carrot” of social advancement for converts, was another factor in
some contexts. Although the so-called “Covenant of Umar” with its
heavy discriminatory burden on non-Muslims was not applied uniformly,
yet it reinforced a general sense of dhimmi status. Richard
Fletcher writes of Christians under Arab rule in Spain,
HarperCollins, 2008); also Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period:
An Essay in Quantitative History. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1979); N. Levtzion, (ed) Conversion to Islam. (New York and London: Holmes and
Meier, 1979); works by Bat Ye’or, etc.
82 Thus it has been argued that some of the Christian apologetics towards Islam in
the early Abbasid period was motivated by a desire not so much to draw Muslims to
Christianity as to stem the growing haemorrhage of Christians to Islam.
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