Chapter VIII · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE MONGOLS AND TATARS.

There is no event in the history of Islam that for terror and desolation can be compared to the Mongol conquest. Like an avalanche, the hosts of Chingīz K͟hān swept over the centres of Muslim culture and civilisation, leaving behind them bare deserts and shapeless ruins where before had stood the palaces of stately cities, girt about with gardens and fruitful corn-land. When the Mongol army had marched out of the city of Herāt, a miserable remnant of forty persons crept out of their hiding-places and gazed horror-stricken on the ruins of their beautiful city—all that were left out of a population of over 100,000. In Buk͟hārā, so famed for its men of piety and learning, the Mongols stabled their horses in the sacred precincts of the mosques and tore up the Qurʼāns to serve as litter; those of the inhabitants who were not butchered were carried away into captivity and their city reduced to ashes. Such too was the fate of Samarqand, Balk͟h and many another city of Central Asia, which had been the glories of Islamic civilisation and the dwelling-places of holy men and the seats of sound learning—such too the fate of Bag͟hdād that for centuries had been the capital of the ʻAbbāsid dynasty.

Before entering on a recital of this struggle, it will be well in order to the comprehension of what is to follow briefly to glance at the partition of the Mongol empire after the death of Chingīz K͟hān, when it was split up into four sections and divided among his sons. His third son, Ogotāy, succeeded his father as K͟hāqān and received as his share the eastern portion of the empire, in which Qūbīlāy afterwards included the whole of China. Chag͟hatāy the second son took the middle kingdom. Bātū, the son of his first-born Jūjī, ruled the western portion as K͟hān of the Golden Horde; Tulūy the fourth son took Persia, to which Hūlāgū, who founded the dynasty of the Īlk͟hāns, added a great part of Asia Minor.

To the student of the history of the Mongols it is a relief to pass from the recital of nameless horrors and continual bloodshed to a document emanating from a Mongol prince and giving expression to such humane and benevolent sentiments, which sound strange indeed coming from such lips.

Thus Christianity became the national religion of the Russian people, and after the Mongol conquest, the distinctive national characteristics of Russians and Tatars that have kept the two races apart to the present day, the bitter hatred of the Tatar yoke, the devotion of the Russians to their own faith and the want of religious zeal on the part of the Tatars, kept the conquered race from adopting the religion of the conqueror. Especially has the prohibition of spirituous liquors by the laws of Islam been supposed to have stood in the way of the adoption of this religion by the Russian people.

This is probably the only instance of a Christian government co-operating in the promulgation of Islam, and is the more remarkable inasmuch as the Russian government of this period was attempting to force Christianity on its Muslim subjects in Europe, in continuation of the efforts made in the sixteenth century soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan.

After the conquest of Kazan by the Russians in the sixteenth century, the occupation of the former Tatar Khanate was followed up by an official Christian missionary movement, and a number of the heathen population of the Khanate were baptised, the labours of the clergy being actively seconded by the police and the civil authorities, but as the Russian priests did not understand the language of their converts and soon neglected them, it had to be admitted that the new converts “shamelessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and neither hold nor know the Christian faith.” When spiritual exhortations failed, the government ordered its officials to “pacify, imprison, put in irons, and thereby unteach and frighten from the Tartar faith those who, though baptised, do not obey the admonitions of the Metropolitan.”

In the eighteenth century the Russian government made fresh efforts to convert the heathen tribes and the relapsed Tatars, and held out many inducements to them to become baptised. Catherine II in 1778 ordered that all the new converts should sign a written promise to the effect that “they would completely forsake their infidel errors, and, avoiding all intercourse with unbelievers, would hold firmly and unwaveringly the Christian faith and its dogmas.” But in spite of all, these so-called “baptised Tartars” were Christians only in name, and soon began to try to escape from the propagandist efforts of the Orthodox Church and abandoned Christianity for Islam, their so-called conversion merely serving as a stepping-stone to their entrance into the faith of the Prophet.