Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.

Why did non-Muslims convert to Islam during Muhammad's life and under his immediate successors? How did Muslim historians portray these conversions? Why did their portrayals differ significantly? To what extent were their portrayals influenced by their time of writing, religious inclinations, and political affiliations? These are the fundamental questions that drive this study. Relying on numerous works, including primary sources from over a hundred classical Muslim historians, Conversion to Islam is the first scholarly study to detect, trace, and analyze conversion themes in early Muslim historiography, emphasizing how classical Muslims remembered conversion, and how they valued and evaluated aspects of it. Ayman S. Ibrahim examines numerous early Muslim sources and wrestles with critical observations regarding the sources' reliability and unearths the hidden link between historical narratives and historians' religious sympathies and political agendas. This study leads readers through a complex body of literature, provides insights regarding historical context, and creates a vivid picture of conversion to Islam as early Muslim historians sought to depict it.

The topic of religious conversion into and out of Islam as a historical phenomenon is mired in a sea of debate and misunderstanding. It has often been viewed as the permanent crossing of not just a religious divide, but in the context of the early modern Mediterranean also political, cultural and geographic boundaries. Reading between the lines of a wide variety of sources, however, suggests that religious conversion between Christianity, Judaism and Islam often had a more pragmatic and prosaic aspect that constituted a form of cultural translation and a means of establishing communal belonging through the shared, and often contested articulation of religious identities. The chapters in this volume do not view religion simply as a specific set of orthodox beliefs and strict practices to be adopted wholesale by the religious individual or convert. Rather, they analyze conversion as the acquisition of a set of historically contingent social practices, which facilitated the process of social, political or religious acculturation. Exploring the role conversion played in the fabrication of cosmopolitan Mediterranean identities, the volume examines the idea of the convert as a mediator and translator between cultures. Drawing upon a diverse range of research areas and linguistic skills, the volume utilises primary sources in Ottoman, Persian, Arabic, Latin, German, Hungarian and English within a variety of genres including religious tracts, diplomatic correspondence, personal memoirs, apologetics, historical narratives, official documents and commands, legal texts and court records, and religious polemics. As a result, the collection provides readers with theoretically informed, new research on the subject of conversion to or from Islam in the early modern Mediterranean world.

This book explores the role of conversion to Islam in the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, its imperial ideology and Sunni identity, and its relationship with its Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, in the context of the early modern Mediterranean.

First Published in 1996. Religious conversion is an immensely complex phenomenon. The term comprises such diverse experiences as increased devotion within the same religious structure, a shift from no religious commitment to a devout religious life, or a change from one religion to another. This study focuses on the conversion experiences of 70 native British converts to Islam. It addresses the following questions - why do people become Muslims, what are the backgrounds of the converts, what are the patterns of conversion to Islam, and how far are existing conversion theories applicable to the group under study. The full range of social and psychological forces at work in the conversion experience are examined with reference to the converts, whose whole life history - childhood, adolescent experiences and the conversion process itself - were examined in detail. Chapter 1 deals with the history and present situation of both life-long Muslims and converts living in Britain. Chapter 2 focuses on childhood and adolescent experiences reviewing the psychological and sociological theories of conversion and attempts to find out how far these theories are applicable to the converts to Islam. Chapter 3 examines the backgrounds of the converts regarding religion. It then analyzes the immediate antecedents of the conversion as well as the conversion process, focussing on version motifs. A conversion process model is also developed in this chapter. Chapter 4 looks at the post-conversion period to find out what changes the converts underwent. It also examines the relationship between converts, their parents and society at large. Chapter 5 reveals the findings on conversion through Sufism. Comparisons between conversion through Sufism and through new religious movements in the West are also made. This study should be an important addition to the study of religious conversion, as conversion to Islam either from outside or within Islam is widely neglected in the literature.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.

In A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1: White American Muslims before 1975, Patrick D. Bowen offers an account of white Muslims and Sufis and the movements they produced between 1800 and 1975.