Year of the Golden Pig Reading 20: "The Spread of Islam in the World 20: A History of Peaceful Preaching"

It might come as a surprise to many, but Islam wasn't spread by the sword. Sure there has been violence in its history but its success has mostly been through missionaries (which every man and woman in Islam can become) or through traders. This book clearly spells this out.

I must say I usually don't read books from 1913(the first edition was actually published in the 1890's), but I made an exception for this one by Thomas Arnold. He almost lost me at the beginning with the long passage in Latin, but I kept going and really enjoyed what I learned. He seems to have really had a deep respect for Islam and this shows in his analyse of all of the positive reasons there are so many Muslims in the world. I am not sure why he wrote this work, but it really seems like a call for Christian missionaries to do a better job at getting to know the locals better, something that Muslim traders always seemed to do. In comparison with Protestant and Catholic missions, this was quite a radical approach.


Today of course we are often presented by aspects of Islamic life which are if anything difficult to rationally support, like violence against non-believers. Arnold talks a lot about them in this book, but mostly to show that their brand of prostelitization was unsuccessful. It was only in peaceful ways which Islam spread.


It has been interesting to read a book like this since Arnold still use anachronistic terminology like Muhammadans for Muslims, and Negroland for parts of Africa. But it is still very readable. It could use an updated edition, since all of the sources (including much of the text) is in the original Latin, Dutch, German, French, etc. I think the modern reader might not have a command of this many languages. However, the Arabic is always translated. Reading books like this really show how scholarship has changed over the last 100 years. If you read books back then, then you were most likely highly educated. There were no casual readers of the day, unless they had a command of a variety of European languages.

I really liked a quotation near the end of the book by the French writer Ernest Renan, who wrote (I will translate): "When Muslims are in prayer, I see this without any emotions, except the sadness in knowing that I am not a Muslim myself." That was quite a liberal translation, but if somelike like me with two years of high school French can so freely translate a passage, then why can't authors more educated than me do the same. I still remember throwing down Edward Said's "Orientalism" in disgust after coming across a whole page in French (I never picked it up again). I will forgive Arnold, because of when he wrote the book, but it is hard to forgive a modern writer when he knows the world of readers no longer has a command of five or six European languages. I see it only as academic arrogance, when authors write in Latin or French in this manner. You would never see text like that in Japanese or Arabic, but authors still get a bit snoody when "nous ecriton en francaise."


You might be hard pressed to find this in the West, but it is readilly available in the Middle East. So if you need a copy let me know.