Relating his understanding of the reasons for conversion to Islam, the thirteenth century Baghdadi Jewish physician writes: "He [the convert] is moved by fear or ambition; he is liable to a heavy tax, or wishes to escape from humiliation, or is taken prisoner, falls in love with a Muslim woman, or some other motive like these." [M. Perlmann, ed. Sa`d b. Mansur Ibn Kammuna's Examination of the Inquiries into the Three Faiths, Berkeley 1967, p. 102.] How does modern scholarship understand conversion to Islam in the Middle Ages? How does it reconstruct and explain the great success of the dissemination of Islam and Islamic culture? The historiography of the Islamization of the Middle East and North Africa, from the great Arab conquests until the late Mamluk period, is the subject of this paper. I will trace more than a hundred years of research on this multi-faceted process, and highlight main paradigms, methods of work, topics of interest, periodizations and changes in attitude and scholarly discourse. I will present the models and methods suggested by Richard Bulliet and Nehemia Levtzion [R. Bulliet 1979; Nehemia Levtzion 1979], and the methodologies of studies focusing on particular communities (such as the Egyptian Copts [Studied by I. Lapidus in IOS 2 (1972), S. O'Sullivan in MSR 10 (2006); T. El-Leithy, PhD dissertation 2005], the Samaritans [M. Rubin in JESHO 43 (2000)], the Berbers of Ifriqiya [M. Brett, 1996, 2006]), or regions (Anatolia [S. Vryonis, 1971], Palestine). I will suggest a shift towards interdisciplinary studies on the Islamization of space [Such as N. Luz in MSR 6 (2002); Y. Frenkel in JSAI 25 (2001)], and assess varying degrees of interest in economic and social factors, preaching (da`wa) [The topic of T.W. Arnolds, The Preaching of Islam, New York 1913, which I will survey in length], gender (conversion of women), agents of islamization (the amsar, Sufis, merchants, ghazzis, nomads, the state), forced conversion, the acceptance and practices of converts, Arabization, polemical texts written by converts. I will also examine comparative ventures such as the collective volumes of Levtzion (Conversion to Islam, New York 1979) and Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Toronto 1990, and suggest further collaborative studies, such as the project I am currently engaged in.