Note 6 — Chapter XII · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO.

It is interesting to note that the propagation of Islam has not been the work of men only, but that Muslim women have also taken their part in this pious task. Several of the Mongol princes owed their conversion to the influence of a Muslim wife, and the same was probably the case with many of the pagan Turks when they had carried their raids into Muhammadan countries. The Sanūsiyyah missionaries who came to work among the Tūbū, to the north of Lake Chad, opened schools for girls, and took advantage of the powerful influence exercised by the women among these tribes (as among their neighbours, the Berbers), in their efforts to win them over to Islam.6 In German East Africa, the pagan natives who leave their homes for six months or more, to work on the railways or plantations, are converted by the Muhammadan women with whom they contract temporary alliances; these women refuse to have anything to do with an uncircumcised kāfir, and to escape the disgrace attaching to such an appellation, their husbands become circumcised and thus receive an entry into Muslim society.7 The progress of Islam in Abyssinia during the first half of the last century has been said to be in large measure due to the efforts of Muhammadan women, especially the wives of Christian princes, who had to pretend a conversion to Christianity on the occasion of their marriage, but brought up their children in the tenets of Islam and worked in every possible way for the advancement of that faith.8 On the western frontier of Abyssinia, there is a pagan tribe called the Boruns; some of these men who had enlisted in a negro regiment, under the Anglo-Egyptian government of the Sudan, were converted to Islam by the wives of the black soldiers while the battalion was returning to Khartum.9 The Tatar women of Kazan are said to be especially zealous as propagandists of Islam.10 The professed devotee, because she happens to be a woman, is not thereby debarred from taking her place with the male saint in the company of the preachers of the faith. The legend of the holy women, descended from ʻAlī, who are said to have flown through the air from Karbalāʼ to Lahore, and there by the influence of their devout lives of prayer and fasting to have won the first converts from Hinduism to Islam,11 could hardly have originated if the influence of such holy women were a thing quite unknown. One of the most venerated tombs in Cairo is that of Nafīsah, the great-granddaughter of Ḥasan (the martyred son of ʻAlī), whose theological learning excited the admiration even of her great contemporary, Imām al-Shāfiʻī, and whose piety and austerities raised her to the dignity of a saint: it is related of her that when she settled in Egypt, she happened to have as her neighbours a family of d͟himmīs whose daughter was so grievously afflicted that she could not move her limbs but had to lie on her back all day. The parents of the poor girl had to go one day to the market and asked their pious Muslim neighbour to look after their daughter during their absence. Nafīsah, filled with love and pity, undertook this work of mercy; and when the parents of the sick girl were gone, she lifted up her soul in prayer to God on behalf of the helpless invalid. Scarcely was her prayer ended than the sick girl regained the use of her limbs and was able to go to meet her parents on their return. Filled with gratitude, the whole family became converts to the religion of their benefactor.12