Note 32 — Chapter XIII · CONCLUSION.

At such times of persecution, the pressure of circumstances has driven many unbelievers to become—outwardly at least—Muhammadans, and many instances might be given of individuals who, on particular occasions, have been harassed into submission to the religion of the Qurʼān. But such oppression is wholly without the sanction of Muhammadan law, either religious or civil. The passages in the Qurʼān that forbid forced conversion and enjoin preaching as the sole legitimate method of spreading the faith have already been quoted above (Introduction, pp. 5–6), and the same doctrine is upheld by the decisions of the Muhammadan doctors. When Moses Maimonides, who under the fanatical rule of the Almohads had feigned conversion to Islam, fled to Egypt and there openly declared himself to be a Jew, a Muslim jurisconsult from Spain denounced him for his apostasy and demanded that the extreme penalty of the law should be inflicted on him for this offence; but the case was quashed by al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, ʻAbd al-Raḥīm b. ʻAlī,32 one of the most famous of Muslim judges, and the prime minister of the great Saladin, who authoritatively declared that a man who had been converted to Islam by force could not be rightly considered to be a Muslim.33 In the same spirit, when G͟hāzān (1295–1304) discovered that the Buddhist monks who had become Muhammadans at the beginning of his reign (when their temples had been destroyed) only made a pretence of being converted, he granted permission to all those who so wished to return to Tibet, where among their Buddhist fellow-countrymen they would be free once more to follow their own faith.34 Tavernier tells us a similar story of some Jews of Ispahan who were so grievously persecuted by the governor “that either by force or cunning he caused them to turn Mahometans; but the king (Shāh ʻAbbās II) (1642–1667), understanding that only power and fear had constrained them to turn, suffer’d them to resume their own religion and to live in quiet.”35 A story of a much earlier traveller36 in Persia, in 1478, shows how even in those turbulent times a Muhammadan governor set himself to severely crush an outburst of fanaticism of the same character. A rich Armenian merchant of the city of Tabrīz was sitting in his shop one day when a Ḥājī,37 with a reputation for sanctity, coming up to him importuned him to become a Musalman and abandon his Christian faith; when the merchant expressed his intention of remaining steadfast in his religion and offered the fellow alms with the hope of getting rid of him, he replied that what he wanted was not his alms but his conversion; and at length, enraged at the persistent refusal of the merchant, suddenly snatched a sword out of the hand of a bystander and struck the merchant a mortal blow on the head and then ran away. When the Governor of the city heard the news, he was very angry and ordered the murderer to be pursued and captured; the culprit having been brought into his presence, the governor stabbed him to death with his own hand and ordered his body to be cast forth to be devoured by dogs, saying: “What! is this the way in which the religion of Muḥammad spreads?” At nightfall, the common people took up the body and buried it, whereupon the Governor, enraged at this contempt of his order, gave up the place for three or four hours to be sacked by his soldiers and afterwards imposed a fine as a further penalty; also he called the son of the merchant to him and comforted him and caressed him with good and kindly words. Even the mad al-Ḥākim (996–1020), whose persecutions caused many Jews and Christians to abandon their own faith and become Musalmans, afterwards allowed these unwilling converts to return again to their own religion and rebuild their ruined places of worship.38 Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out their Christian subjects or banished them from their dominions, as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the English the Jews for nearly four centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Salīm I (in 1514) or Ibrāhīm (in 1646) to have put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred 40,000 Shīʻahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious belief among his Muhammadan subjects. The muftis who turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose, did so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.39