Note 5 — Chapter VI · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS IN EUROPE UNDER THE TURKS.

To the distracted Christian Church in Persia the change of government brought relief from the oppression of the Sāsānid kings, who had fomented the bitter struggles of Jacobites and Nestorians and added to the confusion of warring sects. Some reference has already5 been made to earlier persecutions, and even during the expiring agony of the Sāsānid dynasty, K͟husrau II, exasperated at the defeat he had suffered at the hands of the Christian emperor, Heraclius, ordered a fresh persecution of the Christians within his dominions, a persecution from which all the various Christian sects alike had to suffer. These terrible conditions may well have prepared men’s minds for that revulsion of feeling that facilitates a change of faith. “Side by side with the political chaos in the state was the moral confusion that filled the minds of the Christians; distracted by such an accumulation of disasters and by the moral agony wrought by the furious conflict of so many warring doctrines among them, they tended towards that peculiar frame of mind in which a new doctrine finds it easy to take root, making a clean sweep of such a bewildering babel and striving to reconstruct faith and society on a new basis. In other words the people of Persia, and especially the Semitic races, were just in the very mental condition calculated to make them welcome the Islamic revolution and urge them on to enthusiastically embrace the new and rugged creed, which with its complete and virile simplicity swept away at one stroke all those dark mists, opened the soul to new, alluring and tangible hopes, and promised immediate release from a miserable state of servitude.”6