Islamic missionary activity
[citation needed] The Arab Christian Bedouins embraced Islam following the wake of the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in which the Sassanids were routed.
Following the initial establishment of the empire and stabilization of borders and ruling elites, various missionary movements emerged during the ensuing Islamic Golden Age, with the express purpose of preaching to the non-Muslim populations in their midst.
[citation needed] These missionary movements also preached outside the borders of the Islamic empire taking advantage of the expansion of foreign trade routes, primarily into the Indo-Pacific and as far south as the isle of Zanzibar and the southeastern shores of Africa.
[citation needed] Thomas Walker Arnold suggests that the Zoroastrian figures Ahura Mazda and Ahriman were equated with Allah and Iblis.
[1] Later, the Samanids, whose roots stemmed from Zoroastrian theocratic nobility, propagated Sunni Islam and Islamo-Persian culture deep into the heart of Central Asia.
According to historians, through the zealous missionary work of Samanid rulers, as many as 30,000 tents of Turks came to profess Islam and later under the Ghaznavids higher than 55,000 under the Hanafi school of thought.
In the earlier stages of the Ottoman Empire, a Turkic form of Shamanism was still widely practiced in Anatolia, which soon started to give in to the mysticism offered by Sufism.
During the Ottoman presence in the Balkans, missionary movements were also taken up by people from aristocratic families hailing from the region, who had been educated in Constantinople or any other major city within the Empire, in famed madrassahs and kulliyes.
Rather Arnold concludes by quoting a 17th-century author who stated: Meanwhile he (the Turk) wins (converts) by craft more than by force, and snatches away Christ by fraud out of the hearts of men.
Other early notable missionaries include Abdallah ibn Yasin, who started a movement which caused thousands of Berbers to accept Islam.
At Muhammad's urging, a group of persecuted Muslims were received at the court of the Ethiopian Christian King Aṣḥama ibn Abjar, a migration known as the first Hijarat.
In praising the Africans' zealousness to Islam, the fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Battuta stated that mosques were so crowded on Fridays, that unless one went very early, it was impossible to find a place to sit.
Previously, the only connection to such areas was through Transsaharan trade, of which the Mali Empire, consisting predominantly of African and Berber tribes, stands as a strong proof of the early Islamization of the Sub-Saharan region.
[16] During Ikhtiyar Uddin Bakhtiyar Khilji's control of the Bengal, Muslim missionaries in India achieved their greatest success, in terms of number of converts to Islam.
However, the empire evolved into a mixed blessing for Islamic missionary work, with its two most powerful rulers taking a somewhat diametrically opposite view of religion.
Initially, Akbar the Great chose to follow a form of inter-faith dialogue somewhat contrary to the views of the traditional clergy, a stratagem that was to be totally reversed by his great-grandson Aurangzeb half a century later.
[1] The influence of Christian schools has caused significant interest among younger Indian and South Asian Muslims to study their faith, consequently sparking religious zeal.
The spread of Islam was driven by increasing trade links outside of the archipelago; in general, traders and the royalty of major kingdoms were the first to adopt the new religion.
By the end of the thirteenth century, Islam had been established in North Sumatra; by the fourteenth in northeast Malaya, Brunei, the southern Philippines and among some courtiers of East Java; and the fifteenth in Malacca and other areas of the Malay Peninsula.
At this time, only Bali retained a Hindu majority and the Lesser Sunda Islands remained largely animist but would adopt Islam and Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
[24] Some sources date the introduction of Islam in China to 650 AD, the third sojourn of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas,[25] when he was sent as an official envoy to Emperor Gaozong during Caliph Uthman's reign.
Following this conquest, the Umayyads of Córdoba promoted Islam in their newly conquered territories of what are today the modern-day European states of Spain and Portugal.
However, the Middle East oil crisis of 1973, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, followed by the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1980 dramatically raised the profile of Islam and Muslims in the North American media.
The new wave of Muslim immigrants were thus well-placed to begin a variety of small-scale missionary efforts across their communities to inform their fellow Americans about their religion.
