ABSTRACT
Thomas W. Arnold composed The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith 1 at the behest of the Pakistani philosopher Syed Ahmad Khan. In his apologia, Arnold defended Islam as a missionary religion against western polemical claims that it was a religion “spread by the sword.” The British Orientalist argued that Islam owed its “missionary success” to the “simplicity” and “rationalism” of its creed and to the fact that missionizing was mainly “in the hands of well-known and harmless traders.” 2 He argued that because “every simple, untaught Moslem is a missionary of his religion,” 3 most conversions resulted from quotidian contacts between non-Muslims and Muslims, the latter of whom eagerly heeded the Qur’anic precept to “Summon to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and with kindly warning.’” 4 Moreover, not only was the message of Islam simple, so too its conversion process. Unlike their Christian counterparts, Muslim proselytizers were not obliged to refer their converts “to some organized religious teacher of the creed who [formally received] the neophyte into the body of the Church.” 5
Islam was designated by Arnold as the quintessential missionary religion on the basis of its almost ad hoc proselytization and conversion processes. Surprisingly, then, the author offers few examples of conversion preaching. This absence is especially puzzling in view of the fact that the Arabo-Islamic world inherited and further developed a sophisticated oratorical tradition comprised of diverse homiletic genres. Since the earliest days of Islam, orations were pronounced routinely in mosques and elsewhere as part of the obligatory rituals and extracanonical celebrations. Orators received
* This article is based on a paper delivered at the conference “Texts of Conversion,” held at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Interreligious Encounters at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in 2014. It forms part of my ongoing research as a Ramón y Cajal scholar and as principal investigator of the research project, “Estudios interdisciplinarios y comparativos sobre identidades religiosas . . . en la Península Ibérica y el Mediterráneo medieval” MEC/FEDER FFI2015-63659-C2-2-P.
