Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional 

Revolution, 1906–1911 (New York: Columbia University 

Press, 1996); Mangol Bayat, Iran’s First Revolution: Shi-

ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1909 (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Hamid Enayat, 

Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of 

Texas Press, 1982); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots 

and Results of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1981); Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Religion and 

Politics in Iran: Shiism from Quietism to Revolution (New 

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983).

conversion

Conversion to Islam is a remarkably simple pro-

cess, normally entailing no more than saying, with 

the proper intent, the 

shahada

: I declare that there 

is no god but God, and that m

Uhammad

 is the 

messenger of God. The q

Uran

 explicitly rejects 

imposition of religious belief, and Islam has his-

torically allowed other religions great freedom.

Islam has always been a proselytizing religion; 

Muhammad converted his earliest followers in the 

seventh century from the pagan ways of m

ecca

 to 

the worship of a single God, a

llah

. After suffering 

Meccan persecution, the small community moved 

to m

edina

, where the small band of Muslims grew 

to form the nucleus of the Islamic community, or 

umma

. After the death of the Prophet in 632, the 

Arab Muslim armies burst out of the Arabian Pen-

insula, conquering enormous swathes of territory 

of the Byzantine Empire and utterly destroying 

the Persian empire of the Sassanians. In the resul-

tant Islamicate empire, Islam was the religion of 

the state, but members of other religious groups 

were allowed freedom of worship as 

dhimmi

s, or 

“protected subjects.” As a result of the military 

expansion of the Islamicate empire, the errone-

ous notion of “conversion by the sword” has his-

torically taken root among non-Muslims. In fact, 

there was little attempt to convert non-Muslims 

during the early conquests. In some cases, conver-

sion was actively discouraged, for it deprived the 

state of a source of revenue, as dhimmis were taxed 

differently from Muslims. The empire itself, how-

ever, clearly emerged through the use of military 

power, and the dominance of Muslims within that 

empire should be considered a major, if partial, 

motivation for later conversion. Nonetheless, it 

is important to note that non-Muslims living in 

Islamicate polities generally had freedoms and 

rights that non-Christians could only dream of in 

medieval Europe.