I’ve only briefly looked into this, just now, so apologies if there are any inaccuracies in the following:
The founder of the Mughal Empire, Akbar, seems to have come from a tradition that extended from the Mongols (e.g. Genghis Khan) in believing something like that all religions are (in my words) different views into the other world and that there’s something to learn from all of them. So, even though he was Muslim, he was largely fine with letting others practice different religions. (And, one should note, Mohammed was also pretty cool with the co-existence at times. You can find both messages of coexistence and intolerance in the Quran.)
That said, there was probably some amount of incentive among those below the Emperor to match suit, so it’s also worth noting that the Mughal Empire was largely confined to Northern India until…
The Emperor, Aurangzeb broke with both of the above during his reign. He expanded the Mughal Empire down into nearly all but the tip of the Indian subcontinent and, during that, I take it that he used a practice of forced conversion against groups who fought against him, and tolerance towards those who submitted and accepted Mughal dominion.
Following his death, though, Southern India revolted and allied into the Maratha Confederacy. So, to the extent that this region might have been partially forcibly converted to Islam, it was only for a few decades at the most.
One observation with a question - the difference between North America vs. South America.
The British colonizing North America brought their women with them and largely didn’t interbreed with the Native Amercans, but the Spanish and Portuguese did heavily interbreed.
Did this have something to do with their different European cultures? Or was it a case that the Spanish and Portuguese had to fight to destroy opposing armies, so sent a lot more unnatural unmarried soldiers to the region, who bred native women out of necessity as well a desire to crush the culture. Whereas the British encountered heavily depopulated regions, so there weren’t vast armies to defeat first, and thus started colonies with settlers?
Or was it more a case that the Noth American tribes weren’t as unified into an Empire, so individual tribes could be bartered with or battled in much smaller scales?
That doesn’t make it tolerant. Christianity did a great job of absorbing pagan elements, too. Doesn’t make it overall any more tolerant than Hinduism currently is, or has been in certain past periods. Syncreticism isn’t tolerance.
Yeah, I’m going to have to backpedal: India currently has a number of Hindu nationalist parties some of whose activities I condemn. As for the more distant past, I’m frankly ignorant. (Thanks to Sage_Rat for poking around wikipedia).
But haven’t the various streams of Hinduism always been unified to some degree by the Vedas and other texts and traditions? Maybe that’s one reason they resisted conversion.
The appeals to tolerance are almost exclusively found in the early Meccan Suwar, when the Muslim community was small and weak.
The later Medinan Suwar, dating from after the Hijra, the first victorious battles and the failure at peacefully converting the three main Jewish tribes of the area are much more intolerant, militant and supersessionist.
Most moderate Muslims present the earlier verses as proof that Islam can coexist with other religions, ignoring the theory of abrogation (naskh) that explicitely state that the most recent verses at best ‘suspend’, at worst ‘nullify’ the earlier ones.
My personal read of the Quran would be that Mohammed had the special divine right to make promises to people, punish people, and to put people under Allah’s control. I don’t see any text that extends that right to others so when we see a conflict between Mohammed’s actions and e.g. 2:256 and 6:108, that’s because he’s Mohammed and you’re not. 2:256 and 6:108 are what apply to you.
At least here in what would become the United States, there were some concerns about allowing slaves to convert to Christianity because people weren’t sure it was okay to keep Christian slaves. Obviously it didn’t take very long for slave owners to get over that particular quandry.
Without challenging the overall accuracy of this paragraph, it should be noted that the conversion of the majority of North Africa from Christianity to Islam was more based on proselytization and economics than warfare. The Byzantine taxation system was quite heavy, (possibly as a need for taxes to support their military), and, even taxed as dhimmi, the peasants and merchants were taxed less under the new Muslim rulers than they had been under the Byzantines. The Muslim invaders were interested in control, but did not demonstrate any serious desire to convert the locals to Islam. However, the locals chose Islam as a more desirable way of life.
Yes, of course. For one thing, in order to find Islam desirable you first of all have to be exposed to Islam and to Muslims, which of course is greatly facilitated if the social and political establishment is or becomes Muslim.
Plus, apart from finding Islam inherently attractive, there are social, economic and community advantages to identifying with the leading or established group in society. Christianity grew rapidly after obtaining official endorsement and support in the Roman world; this wasn’t because of forced conversion but because converting to Christianity as an approved and high-status religion was much more advantageous than converting to Christianity as a marginal and somewhat suspect religion. The same would be true of converting to Islam some centuries later.
Whether Muhammad the real dude resembles anything about Muhammad the religious figure is, of course, up for debate. If you discount the Islamic self-mythology that wasn’t written down until 100 years later, the evidence about Muhammad and the origins of Islam is very, VERY scant. The hypothesis that “Islam” per se didn’t even exist until Abd al-Malik tried to end an ethnic war between different Arab factions has a pretty compelling argument.
That Muhammad was a warlord who oversaw the first period of Arab success at unifying and raiding the larger powers of the day is about the only thing we do know about him for sure. Whether he founded Islam, any of the details about how that happened, and even whether he really came from Mecca is all basically a religious belief.
Akbar was not the founder of the Mughal Empire, but rather it’s third ruler. The founder was his grandfather, Babur, who was not notably tolerant. Anything but, really - the emergence of Sikhism as a militant faith (rather than its original pacifistic tendencies) is occasionally laid at his feet. But at any rate the Mughals were very late arrivals in the early 16th century. The first political/military penetration (as opposed to even earlier trade settlements) of India dates back the late 7th century, ~850 years earlier.
The reasons Islam did not swamp out Hinduism probably come down to two:
1.) Incomplete conquest - no Muslim polity ever conquered the entire subcontinent. You can find maps of the Sultanate of Delhi under Muhammed bin Tughluq and the Mughal state under Aurangzeb with peak boundaries that look impressively huge. But those were very, very mayfly-brief snapshots in time that included the loosest of acknowledged sovereignty in many areas and were rapidly contracting within a year or so. Even then you can see gaps. Functionally Muslim rule never extended south of the Deccan in any significant sense for any extended length of time and even there was limited to a small minority elite.
2.) There were just too many Hindus. Even in classical times northern India in particular was relatively densely populated. Enforcement of Muslim rule was simply impossible without co-opting local elites and de facto co-dominion became the rule. Dhimmi status with its relative (however discriminatory in modern eyes) tolerance was soon extended to Hindus for purely pragmatic reasons. As nationalism wasn’t really a thing back then, this worked well enough at least some of the time. It was mostly a revolving door of periodic sectarian repression/violence followed by grudging tolerance and then back again as the aggressive piety of individual rulers and the shifting socio-political situation wavered back and forth.
As with many other areas settled by tiny Muslim minorities (Egypt for example, where Christians formed the majority of the population for centuries after the Islamic conquest), large-scale conversion was not a sudden thing or in the “large-scale” sense even necessarily a thing at all. It proceeded in fits and spurts, sometimes from religious pressure, often for economic or political gain.
Just got back from a trip to Kenya. It somewhat surprised me that I encountered quite a bit of residual resentment against the English colonizers, yet some form of christianity seemed by far the most common religion. As I understand it, they also kept on several aspects of British bureaucracy, etc. Just seemed odd that faith (which I personally reject) would have such staying power, when received from a colonizer.
It was clear that individuals’ visions of God were somewhat different than the traditional western Protestant sects. And many churches seemed to lack direct relation to any one of those sects.
The Muslims conquered North Africa in the 600s. Eventually the Caliphates converted the Amazigh (Berber) population, as mentioned above this was a gradual process. These Barbary kingdoms and caliphates were then the masters of the trans-Saharan trade routes. Mali’s founders were not Muslims, but Islam was influential in their court, and eventually Mali’s leaders converted, leading to the famous pilgrimage by Mansa Musa.
One of the goods brought back and forth across the Sahara was slaves. Europe had a taste for slaves who weren’t Christian; at the time, that was the main determining factor, rather than race. So Christians enslaved Muslims and pagans from Sub-Saharan Africa as well as pagan slavs, captured by the Crimean Khannate and ferried across the Black Sea to be sold by the Ottomans; and Muslims enslaved Christians, as well as the aforementioned pagans.
When the Portugese started sailing down the coast of Africa, they were able to access the slave markets from the west, leading to the trans Atlantic slave trade.
