The Expansion of Islam  

THE OLD legend that Islam was born of the desert is taking a long time to die. Since Renan popularized the view that monotheism is the ‘natural religion of the desert’, it seemed a plausible argument that Mohammed’s insistence on the unity and unapproachable greatness of God was simply a reflection of the vast changeless wastes of Arabia. More recent research has shown up the falsity of this imaginative dogma. Neither in its origins nor in its early development had the desert any creative part in it. The Arabian colouring which has clung to Islam came not so much through the direct social influence of its early Arabian environment and Arab adherents as from the Arabic Quran and the intellectual bias which this gave to the nascent Muslim culture.  

            The word Islam, finally adopted by Mohammed as the distinctive name of the faith which he preached, means ‘submitting [oneself or one’s person to God]’. The adherent of Islam is usually designated by the corresponding adjective Muslim  (of which Moslem is a Western adaptation). The Persians adopted a different adjective Musalman, from which are derived the Anglo-Indian Mussulman and French Musulman.  Modern Muslims dislike the terms Mohammedan and Mohammedanism, which seem to them to carry the implication of worship of Mohammed, as Christian and Christianity imply the worship of Christ.

            Probably no well-informed person now shares the belief of our medieval forefathers that the ‘Turks and infidels’ worshipped ‘Mahomet’ in the form of an idol–a double error, since any image or visual symbol in religious worship is anathema to Muslims. Yet the term Mohammedan is not in itself unjustified, and in a less self-conscious age Muslims were proud to call their community al-umma al-Muhammadiya. Of the two articles of the basic professsion of the Muslim faith, ‘There is but one God and Mohammed is His Apostle’, the first may be assented to by many besides Muslims, whereas it is the second, which distinguishes Islam from all other faiths. For its implication is not that Mohammed was an Apostle, one amongst many, but that in Mohammed the series of Apostles reached its culmination and that the Quran revealed through him is the final and unchangeable revelation of the Divine Will, abrogating all previous records of revelation. No one since his time who does not hold this belief and all that follows from it is entitled to call himself a Muslim or to share the privileges of membership of the Brotherhood of Islam. Conversely, the orthodox exponents of Islam have generally maintained that no one who publicly professes these articles can be declared a non-Muslim.

             Although the beginnings of Islam go back to Mohammed’s preaching in his native city of Mecca, the latent characteristics of the faith were developed only after his move to Medina in the year A.D.  622. Before his death ten years later it had become clear that Islam was not simply a body of private religious beliefs, but involved the setting-up of an independent community, with its own system of government, laws, and institutions. That the ‘Emigration’ (Hijra) marked a turning point in history was recognized already by the first generation of Muslims, who adopted the year 622 as the first year of the new Mohammedan era.

            With a strong and skilful government and a faith to inspire its followers and its armies, it was not long before the new community controlled all Western Arabia and looked round for new worlds to conquer. After a slight backwash on the death of Mohammed, the wave of conquest swept over Northern and Eastern Arabia and broke audaciously upon the outposts of the Eastern Roman Empire in Transjordan and of the Persian Empire in Southern Iraq. The forces of the two gigantic Empires, exhausted by long warfare against one another, were defeated one after the other in a series of rapid and brilliant campaigns. Within six years of Mohammed’s death all Syria and Iraq were tributary to Medina, and in four years more Egypt was added to the new Muslim Empire.

            These astonishing victories, the precursors of still wider conquests which were to carry the Arabs in less than a century into Morocco, Spain, and France, to the gates of Constantinople, far across Central Asia and up to the Indus river, confirmed the character of Islam as a strong, self-confident, conquering faith. From this came its unyielding, and even hostile, attitude to everything that lay outside itself, but also its record of broad tolerance of diversity within its own community, refusal to persecute those of other communities, and the dignity with which it has endured moments of eclipse.

             But still more astonishing than the speed of the conquests was their orderly character. Some destruction there must have been during the years of warfare, but by and large the Arabs, so far from leaving a trail of ruin, led the way to a new integration of peoples and cultures. The structure of law and government which Mohammed had bequeathed to his successors, the Caliphs, proved its value in controlling these Bedouin armies. Islam emerged into the civilized outer world, not as the crude superstition of marauding hordes, but as a moral force that commanded respect and a coherent doctrine that could challenge on their own ground the Christianity of East Rome and the Zoroastrianism of Persia. It is true that the tribal instincts and traditions of the Bedouin broke out from time to time in revolts and civil wars; but in the end they served only to affirm more effectively the strength and the will to order of the new imperial power.

            To the peoples of the conquered countries the Arab supremacy signified at first little more than a change of masters. There was no breach in the continuity of their life and social institutions, no persecution, no forced conversion. But little by little Islam began to modify the old social structure of Western Asia and Egypt, and Arab elements to penetrate the old Hellenistic and Persian cultures. The Arab colonies planted in the newly-won territories were not merely garrison towns and headquarters of armies; they were also centres from which the new religion was propagated. Enriched by the wealth drawn from the subject provinces and swelled by the constant influx of converts, they became the matrices of the new Islamic civilization.

             Already in 660 the capital of the Arab Empire had shifted to Damascus, the seat of the new dynasty of Caliphs of the Umayyad House. While Medina remained the centre of Muslim religious learning, the government and public life of the Empire was influenced by the Hellenistic tradition of East Rome. This first stage of interaction with the older civilizations is symbolized by the two exquisite monuments of the Umayyad age, the Great Mosque of Damascus and the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, as well as by the sudden profusion of sects and heresies in the ‘new provinces’. But the ultimate consequence was a cleavage between the religious and secular institutions of the Muslim community, which sapped the foundations of the Umayyad Caliphate and, reinforced by the grievances of the non-Arab subjects and the outbreak of a civil war between the Arab tribes, brought about its downfall in A.D. 750.

            Such a conflict, however, demonstrates that in the century that had elapsed since the death of Mohammed the religious culture of Islam had itself undergone a considerable development and consolidation both inside and outside Arabia. A great religious teacher on the one hand represents the culmination of a spiritual process. He sums up its essentials and so vitalizes them by his personality and his insight that they come to his fellow-men as a revelation of new truth. On the other hand, he stands at the beginning of a new spiritual process, whose width and depth are determined not so much by his own vision as by the spiritual insight of his followers and their capacity to develop his teaching. Still more is this the case when the original teaching expands over wide areas outside its original home, and in contact with other deep-rooted cultures and civilizations is subjected to those interactions and pressures to which all living organisms are exposed.

            The new tensions which were created in and by Islam and the new spiritual standards and ideals which it set up will be analysed in their proper place. Here we are concerned only to note the immediate release of intellectual energies which paralleled the expansion of the Arabs into the outer world. The vitality of the imprint made by Mohammed on the minds of his followers is shown by the cultural stimulus which it gave–in the first instance, of course, within the field of the religious movement itself. In assimilating and expanding the new teaching, system and method were introduced into the intellectual life of the Arabs. New sciences were founded: the study of the Prophetic Tradition, philology, history, and above all law. The transformation is amazing when one looks back at the intellectual poverty and isolation of Medina a bare hundred years before, still more when it is remembered that this was in the main the work of Arabs themselves, building upon the foundations laid by Mohammed, self-evolved with none but the most meagre external influences.

            This was the fundamental and decisive contribution of the Arabs to the new Muslim culture. To its material civilization they contributed little. That began its brilliant career when the dynasty of Abbasid Caliphs succeeded to the Umayyads and founded their new capital of Baghdad in 762. The first age of external conquest was over, and to it succeeded an age of internal expansion. The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the climax of Islamic civilization in breadth and creative effort. Industry, commerce, architecture, and the minor arts flourished with immense vitality as Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt brought their contribution to the common stock.

            These new energies found an outlet in intellectual life as well. While the religious sciences continued to develop in a score of new centres strung out from Samarqand to North Africa and Spain, literature and thought, drawing upon Greek, Persian, and even Indian sources, broke out in new directions, often independent of the Muslim tradition and more or less in revolt against the narrow- ness of the orthodox system. Under the stimulus of the widening physical and intellectual horizons the material and the spiritual were interacting at the highest pressure.

            It is difficult to indicate in a few words the many-sided intellectual activities of this age. The older ‘Muslim sciences’ of history and philology broadened out to embrace secular history and belles- lettres. Greek medical and mathematical science were made accessible in a library of translations and were developed by Persian and Arab scholars, especially in algebra, trigonometry, and optics. Geography – perhaps the most sensitive barometer of culture–flowered in all its branches, political, organic, mathematical, astronomical natural science, and travel, and reached out to embrace the lands of civilizations of far-distant peoples.

            While these new sciences touched only the fringes of the religious culture, the inroads of Greek logic and philosophy inevitably produced a sharp and bitter conflict, which came to a head in the third Islamic century. The leaders of Islam saw its spiritual foundations endangered by the subtle infidelities of pure rationalism, and although they ultimately triumphed over the Hellenizing school, philosophy always remained an object of suspicion in their eyes, even when it came to be studied merely as an apologetic tool. More serious still, however, were the further consequences of their victory– the growth in theological circles of a kind of jealousy of any intellectual pursuit which was purely secular or ventured beyond the range of their control.

            Such a deliberate narrowing-down of intellectual interests had one peculiar effect. The religious sciences rested on a foundation of Arabic philology, and Arabic philology was based upon the old pre-Islamic poetry. Just as the learning of Western Christianity in the Middle Ages was based exclusively upon Latin, and thus preserved in uneasy partnership with the Christian tradition the poetry, mythology, and social heritage of Rome, so the Muslim scholar steeped himself in the literary and social heritage of the ancient Arabs. Their virtues were idealized, their proverbs supplied the staple of popular ethics. That the whole of Muslim literature in its first four formative centuries was written in Arabic, and that it was pervaded at all points by this Arab tradition, are the factors chiefly responsible for the enduring Arabian impress upon Islamic culture.

             The struggle to subordinate all intellectual life to the authority of religion went on for many centuries in successive regions of the Muslim world. Where no fresh stiumulus arose to prolong and revive flagging energies, the religious culture caught all other intellectual activities on the rebound, and by minor concessions held them and converted them into its own instruments. Those which it could not use, such as medicine and mathematics, stagnated or ultimately died away. But from time to time fresh outbursts of creative activity, like that in Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, bore witness to the continuing absorptive and expansive power of the Islamic civilization.

             Yet again, the assertion of the supremacy of the religious culture could not have succeeded had the culture not offered within itself enough scope for the active exercise of the intellectual faculties. The study which in some sense took the place of the discarded sciences was not, however, theology. The master science of the Muslim world was Law. Law, indeed, might be said to embrace all things, human and divine, and both for its comprehensiveness and for the ardour with which its study was pursued it would be hard to find a parallel elsewhere, except in Judaism.

            But apart altogether from its intellectual pre-eminence and scholastic function, Islamic Law was the most far-reaching and effective agent in moulding the social order and the community life of the Muslim peoples. By its very comprehensiveness it exerted a steady pressure upon all private and social activities, setting standard to which they conformed more and more closely as time went on, in spite of the resistance of ancient habits and time-honoured customs, especially amongst the more independent nomadic and mountain tribes. Moreover, Islamic Law gave practical expression to the characteristic Muslim quest for unity. In all essentials it was uniform, although the various schools differed in points of detail. To its operation was due the striking convergence of social ideals and ways of life throughout the medieval Muslim world. It went far deeper than Roman law; by reason of its religious bases and its theocratic sanctions it was the spiritual regulator, the conscience, of the Muslim community in all its parts and activities.

            This function of law acquired still greater significance as political life in the Muslim world swung ever further away from the theocratic ideal of Mohammed and his successors. The decline of the Abbasid Caliphate in the tenth and eleventh centuries opened the door to political disintegration, the usurpation of royal authority by local princes and military governors, the rise and fall of ephemeral dynasties, and repeated outbreaks of civil war. But however seriously the political and military strength of the vast Empire might be weakened, the moral authority of the Law was but the more enhanced and held the social fabric of Islam compact and secure through all the fluctuations of political fortune.

            At the end of the tenth century, the geographical area of Islam was but little wider than it had been in 750. But a great civilization had been built up, brilliant in intellectual life, wealthy and enterprising in economic life, powerfully cemented by an authoritative Law–the whole a visible embodiment of the temporal and spiritual might of Islam. As its military strength declined, it, like the Roman Empire six centuries before, fell gradually under the domination of the barbarians from beyond its frontiers, but also, like the Roman Empire, imposed upon the barbarians its religion, its law, and respect for its civilization.

            These barbarians were Turkish tribesmen from Central Asia. The same westward pressure that had carried the Bulgars, Magyars, Comans, and Patzinaks into Southern Russia and Eastern Europe carried other tribes into Persia and westward into Iraq and Anatolia. The work of conversion to Islam had begun while they were still in their Central Asian homelands; consequently, the establishment of Turkish Sultanates in Western Asia made at first little outward difference to the domestic life of the Muslim community. The first result was a fresh military expansion; south-eastwards into Northern India, north-westwards into Asia Minor. Simultaneously, in the far West, nomadic Berber tribesmen were carrying Islam into the fringes of Negro Africa in the Senegal and Niger basins, while nomadic Arab tribesmen, no longer controlled by the religious authority of the early Caliphs, were destroying by pillage and neglect the centres of civilization that their Arab predecessors had built on the debris of Roman and Byzantine Africa.

            The resurgence of the nomadic elements in all parts of the Muslim world confronted the Muslim community with a problem which has close analogies with the problem of the Christian Church confronted by the Germanic kingdoms. Islam had grown up within the framework of an urban civilization. Its social background was the settled life of the centralized State, and so strong had this tradition become that, as the example just mentioned shows, its influence amongst even the Bedouin Arabs had dwindled away. It was now faced with the task of making the religious order and culture effective within a social structure in which tribalism predominated. The old solution (dating back to Mohammed himself), to force or beguile the tribesmen into settled life, could now be applied at most only to the small group of ruling tribes who formed the retinue and officers of the Sultan in the new capital cities. Although the Sultans themselves were often enthusiastic Muslims, and their governments within two or three generations conformed to the normal patterns of the settled communities into which they had come, they were seldom able to maintain complete control over their nomadic or semi-nomadic followers.

            This task of preventing the social and cultural disintegration of Islam and of bringing the tribesmen within the radius of its civilizing and cohesive forces was met by a new instrument which had been forged among the urban populations during the preceding centuries. By this time the pressure of Muslim doctrine and practice had mastered most of the resistances that had, at an earlier time, sought an outlet in heterodox and subversive movements. But this did not lead to stagnation. On the contrary, the devotional feeling of the townsmen, grinding a channel of its own, burst the bonds of the orthodox disciplines and found a new freedom in the ranges of mysticism. From the eleventh century onwards mysticism enlisted in its service a large proportion of the vital spiritual energies of the Muslim community, and created within Islam a fount of self- renewal which maintained its spiritual vigour through all the later centuries of political and economic decay.

            The growth and development of Sufism (to give this movement its proper name) display many of the characteristic features of Islamic culture. It welled up from below, by the spontaneous action of individual citizens, mostly of the urban artisan classes. No formal authorization or recognition was asked for or received – at first, indeed, there was much opposition from the learned and some persecution. It remained autonomous and personal and only after some centuries of growth began to organize itself in institutional forms. Above all, in the tension between the element of rigidity represented by the Sacred Law and the element of flexibility arising out of the spiritual intuition of the individual, it conformed to the pattern which runs through all the spiritual and cultural manifestations of Islam.

            The mystics, whether as individual missionaries or (later on) as members of organized brotherhoods, were the leaders in the task of conversion among the pagans and the superficially Islamized tribes. The most successful missions were often those of co-nationals of the tribesmen, uncouth, illiterate, and crude though many of them were. They laid the foundations upon which in later generations the refining influences of orthodox law and theology could be brought to bear. It was mainly due to them that through successive centuries the religious frontiers of Islam were steadily extended in Africa, in India and Indonesia, across Central Asia into Turkestan and China, and in parts of South-eastern Europe.

            All this activity offers a close parallel to the work of the monastic organizations in Northern and Central Europe. But Muslim missionary activity was always peculiarly individual and unregulated The Sufi movement was never fully co-ordinated with the orthodox scholastic organization, but jealously maintained independence of, and even some degree of antagonism towards it. There was no orthodox central authority to bring them together and to assume the control and direction of Sufi activities. True, there was at one time the Caliphate. But the Caliphate was not a Papacy, and from Umayyad times on the theologians and legists had resolutely refused to concede to it any spiritual authority. The Caliphs were the religious as well as secular heads of the Islamic community, in that they embodied the supremacy of the Faith and the Sacred Law. But an attempt by three Caliphs in the ninth century to define orthodox dogma was decisively defeated, and the attempt was never repeated.

            Furthermore, independent rulers, while outwardly acknowledging the religious authority of the Caliphs, were quick to resent and to suppress interference in the affairs of their kingdoms. Not infrequently they held their Sufi spiritual directors in higher esteem than the orthodox scholars and legists, who for their part also found themselves in a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the secular power.

            Since the tenth century the State had gradually diverged more and more from the path traced out by the Muslim theorists. It elaborated an ethic of its own, whose values were derived from the old imperial traditions of Asia and very far removed from the Islamic values. Against this inverted culture the Muslim legists waged an unceasing struggle, in the effort to reconvert the State into an embodiment of the principles of the Sacred Law. Later on, indeed, Muslim political theorists, accommodating themselves to the changed situation, began to distinguish Caliphate from Kingship, applying the former term in a new sense to denote any government which recognized and enforced the Sacred Law, as against a secular despotism which governed by arbitrary or natural law.

            But while the conflict to maintain the Muslim ideals preserved the spiritual and intellectual life of Islam from stagnation, the legists were fighting on the whole a losing battle. The fault lay partly in themselves, that the more scrupulous were loth to hold any religious office under the Sultans and, in rejecting public service, left the field to their more time-serving and less scrupulous brethren. While the purity of their motives may be respected, their withdrawal weakened their power to combat effectively the vices which were taking firm root amongst the governing classes in every province of the Muslim world. The middle classes in general, on the other hand, accepted–if they did not always live up to–the Islamic ideal, and as time went on both they and the theologian-legists were more and more permeated by Sufi influences. Thus one may say, with some little exaggeration, that in the Muslim world, concealed by common out-ward profession of Islam, there were two distinct societies living side by side and interacting to some extent but in their basic principles opposed to one another.

            The evolution sketched above was greatly accelerated by the disasters which followed one another in Western Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A first invasion of heathen Mongols devastated the north-eastern provinces between 1220 and 1225. The second wave occupied Persia and Iraq, put an end to the historic Caliphate of Baghdad in 1258, and made the whole eastern Muslim world, except Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, tributary to the vast Mongol Empire. The remnants were saved by the military caste of Turkish and Kipchak ‘slaves’, the Mamluks, who had seized the political power in Egypt. Under Mamluk rule the old Arabic Muslim civilization continued for some two and a half centuries to flourish in the material arts (especially in architecture and metal-work), but with a gradual decay of spiritual and intellectual vigour.

            Meanwhile, a revived and in some respects brilliant Persian Muslim civilization grew up in the Mongol dominions. It too excelled in architecture and the fine arts, including the art of miniature painting; spiritually it was rooted in Sufism. In spite of two virulent ‘Black Deaths’ and the destructive campaigns of Timur (Tamerlane) in the fourteenth century, which reduced Persia itself to a state of extreme physical exhaustion, Persian culture moulded the intellectual life of the new Islamic empires that were growing up on either side–in Anatolia and the Balkans, and in India.

            The expansion of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and North Africa and the establishment of the Mughal Empire in India in the sixteenth century brought the greater part of the Muslim world once more under the government of powerful and highly centralized civil States. A marked feature of both Empires was the strong emphasis laid on Muslim orthodoxy and the Sacred Law; Church and State were not indeed unified, since the military and higher civil polity was constructed on independent non-Islamic lines, but buttressed one another by a sort of concordat that endured into the nineteenth century.

            Yet of the two channels of Muslim religious life the mystical was the broader and deeper. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the apogee of the Sufi brotherhoods. The greater orders spread a network of congregations from end to end of the Islamic world, while smaller local orders and sub-orders grouped the members of different classes and occupations into compact communities. Apart from this, Islamic culture in both Empires lived on the heritage of the past, preserving, but scarcely adding to, its intellectual patrimony. The primary task to which its representatives felt themselves called was not to expand, but rather to conserve, to unify, and to stabilize social life on Muslim standards. Within these limits, the measure of unity which they achieved and the social stability which they maintained was indeed remarkable.

            To this unification there was one conspicuous exception. Early in the sixteenth century a new dynasty, supported by Turkish tribes from Azerbaijan, conquered Persia, revived the long-decaying Shi‘ite heterodoxy, and established it as the religion of the Persian State. Through the long series of wars with the Ottomans, the Central-Asian Turks, and the Mughals, all of whom were Sunnis, Shiasm became identified with Persian national feeling. The consequences of this double rift between Persia and its neighbours were serious for all. It broke the orthodox Muslim community into two separate halves between whom effective cultural communication, though not entirely cut off, was sporadic and small. And it forced Persia into a self-imposed political and religious isolation, which ultimately impoverished its spiritual and cultural life. Moreover, as its political strength declined, the Afghan tribesmen broke away in the eighteenth century to form an independent orthodox Sunni State.

            The eighteenth century witnessed also the decline of Ottoman and Mughal military power. The Mughal State was undermined by a Hindu revolt under the Mahrattas, which led up to the British conquest. The Ottomans succeeded in reasserting their authority in their Asiatic territories in the first half of the nineteenth century, but only by the application of European techniques which gradually sapped the old Muslim society. When, as a result of the first World War, the Arab lands slipped from their grasp, they gave way to a new and secularized Turkish Republic in the smaller but more homogeneous Turkish lands in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace.

            But the decay of Muslim political power did not carry with it a corresponding weakening in the forces of Islamic society. Church and State had long since become, as we have seen, separate entities, and it would almost seem that the decline of the latter injected a new vitality into the former. The evolution of Islam during the last two centuries will be treated in fuller detail in the final chapter of this book, and it remains only to add here a few words on its expansion in the outlying Muslim territories.

            In North-West Africa the prevalence of tribalism amongst both Arabs and Berbers heavily handicapped cultural activities, and orthodoxy as well as the Sufi orders were contaminated by the local cults of living saints (‘marabouts’). But in Tunis and a few other towns something of the legacy of Spanish-Arabic culture was maintained, even when Tunisia and Algeria became piratical semi-dependencies of the Ottoman Empire. In Morocco also, under the Sultans (who preserved their independence until 1912), and even under some lesser chiefs in the Western Sahara, the traditional orthodox studies continued to be cultivated and were from time to time reinforced by influences transmitted from the East.

            In West Africa Islam made little progress during the centuries that followed the decline of the medieval Mandingo negro empires. In the first half of the nineteenth century a succession of warring negro chieftains created ephemeral kingdoms by conquest among the pagan tribes. But a more enduring impress was and continues to be made by the missionary orders who followed in their wake and by peaceful propaganda succeeded to a large extent in mitigating the hostility aroused by their savagery. In East Africa there was little Muslim penetration into the interior in spite of ancient and flourishing settlements on the coast. The main cause of their failure was apparently the slave trade, since its suppression was followed by an outburst of missionary activity, conducted mainly by Swahilis. In South Africa Islam is represented chiefly by Malay and Indian immigrants.

            In the Malay Archipelago itself Islam gained a footing in Sumatra and Java through traders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and gradually spread, partly by the exploits of military chieftains but more effectively through peaceful penetration, especially in Java. From Sumatra it was carried by colonists to the Malay Peninsula, and from Java to the Moluccas, and it has gained a more or less Firm footing in all the islands eastwards to the Sulu Archipelago and Mindanao in the Philippines.

            The spread of Islam in China is still shrouded in obscurity. The first extensive settlement of Muslims probably dates from the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Under the Manchus their numbers greatly increased in spite of the hostility aroused by occasional (and sometimes formidable) Muslim risings, but it is impossible to reach at present even an approximate estimate of their strength.

            The net result of this expansion over thirteen centuries is that Islam is today the dominant religion in a wide belt of territory which extends across North Africa and Western Asia up to the Pamirs and thence eastwards through Central Asia into China proper and south-wards to Pakistan. Reduced in India to one-tenth of the population, it becomes predominant again in the Malay Peninsula and through the chain of the East Indies till it tapers away in the Philippines. On the western coast of the Indian Ocean it extends down a narrow strip of the African coast to Zanzibar and Tanganyika, with discontinuous groups continuing into the Union of South Africa. In Europe Muslim communities exist in most of the Balkan countries and in Southern Russia, and it is represented in both North and South America by small groups of immigrants from the Middle East.

            Of all the great religions of the world, Islam embraced–prior to the expansion of Christian missionary activity in the nineteenth century–the widest variety of races. Originating amongst Arabs and other ‘Semitic’ peoples, it spread among Iranians, Caucasians, Mediterranean Whites, Slavs, Turks and Tatars, Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Bantus, and West African Negroes. The largest contingent today are the Muslims of Pakistan and India, numbering some 120,000,000 After them come the Malays and Indonesians with some 110,000,000 The Arabs and Arabic-speaking communities run them close with about 30,000,000 Muslims in Western Asia, 40,000,000 in Egypt and the Eastern Sudan, and 32,000,000 of mixed Arab and Berber descent in the rest of North Africa. Persia has 25,000,000 Afghanistan about 18,000,000, and Turkey (where Islam, though disestablished, is still the religion of the people) 30,000,000 The size of the Muslim communities in the Asiatic territories of the U.S.S.R., in Chinese Turkestan, and in China proper is difficult to estimate, but they must number 4000,000 at the least. The Muslims of Negro and East Africa can only be roughly estimated at 72,000,000. Finally, the Muslims in the Balkans and South Russia number some 3,000,000. In all, therefore, Islam may claim some 500,000,000 adherents, or about one-seventh of the total estimated population of the world.