Note 9 — Chapter III · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF WESTERN ASIA.
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But later rulers recognised that for fiscal reasons such a policy was ruinous to the state, and insisted on the converts continuing to pay taxes as before; there was, however, no continuity in such a policy, and individual governors acted in an arbitrary and irregular manner.9 When Ḥafṣ b. al-Walīd, who was governor of Egypt in A.D. 744, promised that all those who became Muslims would be exempted from the payment of jizyah, as many as 24,000 Christians are reported to have accepted Islam.10 A similar proclamation is said to have been made by al-Saffāḥ, the first of the ʻAbbāsid caliphs, soon after his accession in A.D. 750, for “he wrote to the whole of his dominions saying that every one who embraced his religion and prayed according to his fashion, should be quit of the jizyah, and many, both rich and poor, denied the faith of Christ by reason of the magnitude of the taxation and the burdens imposed upon them.”11 In fact many of the Christians of Egypt seem to have abandoned Christianity as lightly and as rapidly as, in the beginning of the fourth century, they had embraced it. Prior to that period, a very small section of the population of the valley of the Nile was Christian, but the sufferings of the martyrs in the persecution of Diocletian, the stories of the miracles they performed, the national feeling excited by the sense of their opposition to the dictates of the foreign government,12 the assurance that a paradise of delights was opened to the martyr who died under the hands of his tormentors,—all these things stirred up an enthusiasm that resulted in an incredibly rapid spread of the Christian faith. “Instead of being converted by preaching, as the other countries of the East were, Egypt embraced Christianity in a fit of wild enthusiasm, without any preaching, or instruction being given, with hardly any knowledge of the new religion beyond the name of Jesus, the Messiah, who bestowed a life of eternal happiness on all who confessed Him.”13