Up to roughly the eleventh century, the expansion of Islam was largely ‘confined’ to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, and some of Central Asia – the territories that had been conquered in the Arab-Islamic conquests (c. 632-750 CE). Gradual conversion to Islam continued for centuries until these core areas became decisively ‘Muslim’ by the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries. Beyond these heartlands, beginning in roughly in the eleventh century, Islam advanced into India, western China, Southeast Asia, and southern China, as well as into Anatolia, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa. Though Islamization turned out to be uneven in varied settings, by around the year 1700, a trans-regional religio-political Muslim ecumene had been established from Senegal to Indo-Malaysia. We are given glimpses of this emerging ‘Muslim world’ in the writings of Ibn Ba??u?a (d. 1369), who visited nearly every corner of the Muslim ecumene (as it existed in the 1300s), and in the seventeenth-century scholarly career of N?r al-D?n Ran?r? (d 1658), who spent time in India, Egypt, Arabia, and Aceh. In short, it is between roughly 1100 and 1700 CE that Islam became a truly global phenomenon. This paper, based in part on a chapter of a forthcoming book with Edinburgh University Press, provides a fresh perspective on the spread of Islam during these centuries. Balancing the perspectives of Islamic sources with those of more recent scholarship (e.g., regarding the ‘missionary’ roles of Sufi saints and brotherhoods), and building on the work of scholars like Bulliet, Levtzion, Green, and others, the paper discusses six sets of ‘agents and patterns of Islamization’: (1) Peoples on the Move: Islamization through In-Migration; (2) Rulers and Ruler-Converts: Islamization by Royal Example or Decree; (3) ‘Ulama: Islamization through Knowledge Transmission; (4) Sufis: Islamization through Indigenization; (5) Preachers and Storytellers: Islamization through Popularization; and (6) Merchants: Islamization through Networking. While the pre-modern ‘ulama and Sufis come nearest to embodying what many today understand by the word ‘missionary,’ the paper demonstrates that this period furnishes few examples of organized Islamic missionary outreaches. In most cases, gradual processes of Islamization followed more or less indirectly from dynamics such as conquest, migration, trade, and quests for knowledge and union with God. By describing Islamization from c. 1100-1700 in this way, the paper not only takes into account a wide array of the available historical evidence, it also serves to counter prevalent stereotypes about Islamization (e.g., the ‘spread-by-the-sword’ notion).

The course of the Islamic conquests of the Middle East, particularly the arena of the initial conquests in Bilad ash-Sham and al-Iraq, has been the subject of many studies. Many of these previous studies have focused on the 10th century narratives of the conquests, sometimes augmented by modern studies of Arabic epigraphy and correctives offered by the Syriac, Armenian, and Persian sources. However, the majority of the attention has been on the background of the conquests in Mecca and Medina and within the nascent Muslim community (Donner, Crone, etc.). Even when a greater context has been considered and incorporated into the studies (Hoyland), this has been mostly in the context of the former Byzantine territories in Syria and North Africa. The sudden and complete fall of the Sasanian Empire, the subsequent 'lands of the Eastern Caliphate' has been of less interest to many studies. This is mainly because the number of languages required for contextualising the Sasanian fall and the Islamic conquests of the Iranian lands has been daunting, and that information such as archaeological evidence has been scarce. Newer information and updated evaluation of the sources, however, make it possible to understand the conquests from a Sasanian viewpoint as well. This paper, relying on textual, archaeological, and numismatic evidence, studies the late Sasanian army and its engagement in the conquest of the Near East in the wars of 602-628. It then places these forces within the context of the 634-642 conquests that follow the Sasanian-Byzantine wars, aiming to particularly understand the role of mercenary forces. By providing a more nuanced narrative of the Sasanian-Byzantine Wars and focusing on the socio-economic aspects of the military engagement, the paper would suggest a more local theatre of engagement for the early Muslim conquerors and their paths of advancement in the former Sasanian and Byzantine lands.

The Mongol conquest of the Armenia and the Middle East in the late 13th century was marked by large-scale sociopolitical upheaval and the union of formerly petty principalities into a single political entity. Diversity in primary source documents is a potentially invaluable tool for a historical inquiry of this period because of its ability to enhance our understanding of the different methods of knowledge production and dissemination. In light of this potentiality, the poetry of the author known as “Frik” has emerged as a particularly enlightening source because of its stylistically detailed discussions of intrigues in the Ilkhanid court, and Frik’s own tragic experiences at the hands of the Mongols. In spite of the wealth of information that this source offers, it is only in recent years that Frik has undergone a critical review in Anglophone scholarship. Although Frik’s poetry discusses the events immediately following the Mongol conquests of the 13th century in the first person, the oldest extant book with his poetry is a printed book of miscellaneous Armenian verse from the early 16th century. In light of this, definitively placing the author as a contemporary of Arghun, and his poetry as an eyewitness account, seems to be a dubious prospect at best. Instead, this paper will conduct a close reading of one of Frik’s poems and argue for its utility in the creation of a new, hybridized form of legitimacy for the Mongol rule in Armenia.

The paper is largely theoretical, supported by data on conversion to Islam in the Balkans from secondary and primary sources. The paper proposes a theoretical framework connecting religious conversion with the evolution of the Ottoman imperial formula, based on the dichotomy between social homogeneity and complexity. It argues that the Ottoman imperial model emerged in the inclusive environment of late 13th century Asia Minor and became firmly established by the middle of the 15th century by converging the multiple sociopolitical units it absorbed upon a new cultural norm upheld by the ruling institution. The role of the Ottoman elite in maintaining this “unity of complexity” was crucial. The paper also argues that one of the benchmarks to evaluate changes in the original imperial model is conversion to Islam. Based on that criterion, the original imperial model continued to be the main political paradigm through the first half of the 17th century. Respectively, conversion to Islam in the Balkans picked in the 17th century. The emergence of fundamentalist powers in the second half of the 17th century and regionalization of the Ottoman political elite in the 18th, however, seemed to have changed the model to be less inclusive. As a result, conversion to Islam in the Balkans largely stopped in the first quarter of the 18th century. The paper concludes that the victory of the centralist powers at the beginning of the 19th century over the ayans should not be interpreted as a re-establishment of the original Ottoman concept but rather as the opposite—as a victory of a new political model, which emphasized the “unity of homogeneity” over the “unity of complexity.” The paper also raises the question, whether that change may have also triggered a native to the Balkans proto-nationalistic development that parallels the development of western nationalism, put precedes the latter’s dominating influence in the 19th century.