How did Islam get so popular?

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Tis_Bearself

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According to the rough Google statistics, Christianity has about 2.2 billion adherents, about 31 percent of the world’s population, while Islam has about 1.6 billion adherents, about 23 percent of the world’s population.

Given that Islam seems to be the only major world religion founded after Christianity, I’m wondering just why/ how it got so popular?

I realize that if you’re a Muslim, one argument might be that it’s the true religion and therefore people recognize that and are drawn to it by God etc. Since obviously a Christian is not going to agree with / accept that argument, I’m looking for other more practical arguments as to what made this religion so attractive that people accepted it in droves when they had Christianity as a viable option. What did it have that Christianity wasn’t offering? Or was it just forced on people by those in power and managed to hang on?
 
I believe that part of it was because people were forced but not just under the fear of death. In many cases, you were “taxed” extra if you weren’t Muslim, or the right type of Muslim, or completed excluded from doing certain types of business, business with other groups, education or guilds. I don’t think it’s much different then being excommunicated during the height of the Holy Roman Empire, although that really effected heads of governments then the common person.
 
Islam is simpler than Christianity.

No Trinity, which many Christians struggle to understand, makes Islam attractive to those Christians looking for a simpler, less philosophical faith.

Islam is also in vogue among the youth nowadays because it’s ‘all the rage’ and lots of major celebrities have converted to it.

The tangible rewards of prostitutes and gold and rivers of wine in Heaven also appealed to the Arab tribesmen of Muhammad’s time. (And doubtless appeal to many today). The Arab tribesmen couldn’t get on board with the concept of denying oneself for God as present in Judaism and Christianity, but boy were they in for an afterlife of whoring and drinking after killing their way though masses of unbelievers on earth.

Also, for many of those raised in the West, which has been Christian for much of its history, Islam is something “new” and this is a major factor why some people convert.

Some of course, genuinely believe in that religion
 
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Just to clarify, I’m mostly interested in how it got such a foothold in the early centuries, not why people today would convert to it.
 
Oh. Apologies, I only read the title of your thread and didn’t read your post thoroughly.

Well, like I said, the early Arab tribesmen (who weren’t the most civilized of peoples) were attracted to a religion that promised sex and wine in exchange for doing what they, as wandering tribesmen, did best: war. The only difference was that instead of warring for no reason other than over some oasis or a stolen camel (in pre-Islamic Arab history a forty year war was fought over a stolen camel- whole tribes were wiped out. I learned this in high school Arab history class), they were now warring in the name of Islam.

Gradually, as Islam spread from Arabia, conquering, Islamizing, and Arabizing the Near East (Syriac Lebanon, Byzantine Syria, Assyrian Iraq) the Arabs absorbed the cultures of the peoples of the Byzantine Empire, adopting and expanding Greek medicine and philosophy as Byzantium disintegrated. This lead to the Arabs experiencing a golden age (the Islamic Golden Age) while Europe was going through a period of decline following Byzantium’s collapse which lead to more conversions, since Islam was percieved as a religion that promoted science and philosophy while Christians were massacring one another in Europe.

Arab culture also became inherently tied to Islam, so the conquered peoples who wanted to be seen as “Arabic” which was the “prestigious” race in the Middle East at that time converted to Islam en masse.

I could go on and on about this, but it’s a long topic. We actually still live in the aftermath of the seventh century Arabizations- Lebanese people still struggle with throwing off the vestiges of Arabization.

Hope this helps.
Disclaimer: This is by no means comprehensive. Nor did I mention everything that can also be mentioned.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
According to the rough Google statistics, Christianity has about 2.2 billion adherents, about 31 percent of the world’s population, while Islam has about 1.6 billion adherents, about 23 percent of the world’s population.

Given that Islam seems to be the only major world religion founded after Christianity, I’m wondering just why/ how it got so popular?

I realize that if you’re a Muslim, one argument might be that it’s the true religion and therefore people recognize that and are drawn to it by God etc. Since obviously a Christian is not going to agree with / accept that argument, I’m looking for other more practical arguments as to what made this religion so attractive that people accepted it in droves when they had Christianity as a viable option. What did it have that Christianity wasn’t offering? Or was it just forced on people by those in power and managed to hang on?
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In India some people certainly converted to get out of the caste system (this is true of Buddhism as well; it can be seen as a protest against the caste-related aspects of Hinduism). In Indonesia the theory is that people converted as a way of joining a community of rules that fostered trade. I’ve never understood why more people in places like Egypt didn’t remain Christian, but no doubt escaping from dhimmi status probably served as an incentive for conversion. I would say in very general terms Islam and the culture around it appeared more ‘civilized’ to people in animistic societies across the globe, with its emphasis on monotheism and ‘the Book’, and to forming statelets it served a useful purpose as a world religion corresponding to higher social organization (but any ‘world religion’ such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism or even Buddhism would have sufficed, Islam just got to these places first).
 
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Thank you all, this is quite enlightening. We don’t get much of this in US history classes or even church history classes. Keep the perspectives coming.
 
jrgmercado said:
I believe that part of it was because people were forced but not just under the fear of death. In many cases, you were “taxed” extra if you weren’t Muslim, or the right type of Muslim, or completed excluded from doing certain types of business, business with other groups, education or guilds. I don’t think it’s much different then being excommunicated during the height of the Holy Roman Empire, although that really effected heads of governments then the common person.
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It’s more complex than that. One of the chief factors in initial Muslim successes in the Middle East was Byzantine persecutions of Miaphysites and related groups. The theory goes that many people in the Syriac churches found more theological affinity with the Muslim invaders than with Byzantine Christianity, and the fact that the Empire had put a great deal of effort into suppressing them meant they had little or no loyalty to Constantinople.
 
tomarin said:
I would say in very general terms Islam and the culture around it appeared more ‘civilized’ to people in animistic societies across the globe, with its emphasis on monotheism and ‘the Book’, and to forming statelets it served a useful purpose as a world religion corresponding to higher social organization (but any ‘world religion’ such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism or even Buddhism would have sufficed, Islam just got to these places first).
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About how much would you say was just a matter of “Islam got to such and such country before Christianity did” and why didn’t Islam expand even farther east than Pakistan/ India?
 
Tis_Bearself said:
About how much would you say was just a matter of “Islam got to such and such country before Christianity did” and why didn’t Islam expand even farther east than Pakistan/ India?
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Well it did get farther east both to Indonesia and to places like Kazakhstan in Central Asia but it didn’t penetrate too much into China, Japan and Korea because (I’m guessing here) those places already had world religions associated with their civilizations, or to put it another way, they already had civilizations and the social organization that went with it. They didn’t need a new world religion and Islam would have had to push aside the dominant religions already there. Christianity when it finally got to East Asia also didn’t get very far except for in the Philippines where the Spanish brought it as the religion of the colonial masters (and forced the Filipinos to convert? I’m not really sure). If the Spanish hadn’t colonized the Philippines i would bet Islam would have become the dominant religion there (although again, I’m not too informed about the timeline here).
 
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Indeed. The Arians, who, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ, greeted the Arab armies of Muhammad as liberators and converted.

Some scholars believe that the Muslim prostrations were influenced by Syriac Christian prostrations, Muslim minarets by slender Syraic Christian church towers, and some even claim that Islam itself is Arabized Arianism.
 
I would say immigration and poor neighborhoods.
Muslim immigrants come in America/Europe and diffuse their religion by living with the natives in poor neighborhoods.
Internet also helps a lot to diffuse the religion. And Islam can also be considered as “exotic” from a Western point of view, explaining why people are interested in it.
 
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Salibi said:
Indeed. The Arians, who, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ, greeted the Arab armies of Muhammad as liberators and converted.

Some scholars believe that the Muslim prostrations were influenced by Syriac Christian prostrations, Muslim minarets by slender Syraic Christian church towers, and some even claim that Islam itself is Arabized Arianism.
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I’d go so far as to say that even Constantinople hadn’t gone off after Syriac Christians with such orthodox zeal, the populations in those provinces might have been a lot more willing to defend the Empire. As it was, many converted quite willingly, and even those that did not were, by and large permitted to practice their brand of Christianity far more freely than they had when they had been ruled by Constantinople. In a way, the Eastern Empire committed a kind of suicide in Anatolia and North Africa by its vile treatment of Miaphysites.
 
True.

The Islamic Empire was famed for its tolerance. Nestorians and Arians were believed to be the correct, uncorrupted form of Christianity and were protected.

I’m a Maronite, and a lot of our history from that time period is about how we and other less orthodox Syriacs were basically getting kicked around by the Greek Orthodox Byzantines. The Arians were saved by the Arabs. This is why Arab culture and language spread so easily in the Middle East. After the Arab Conquest, the French Crusaders hopped in to rescue us Maronites.

Take Coptic Egypt for example. Brutally persecuted by the Byzantines, they capitulated to Islam rather easily.
 
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The mistreatment of North African Christianity (once probably the most vibrant area of Christianity in the early years of the Church) by both Rome and Constantinople played an enormous role in the Muslim conquests. People nowadays seem to view the Islamic invasions as a bunch of crazed Mohammedans shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and slicing through Anatolian and North African Christianity and forcing everyone to convert with a sword to their throats, but in many cases it was Christian sects long punished for their unorthodox views preferring the Muslim invaders to the harsh ministrations of the defenders of Orthodoxy.
 
Salibi said:
The Arians, who, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ, greeted the Arab armies of Muhammad as liberators and converted.
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I understand Arianism was huge before the Church finally cracked down on it. Did they all go to Islam? That would have been a nice bump up in the numbers for Islam if so.
 
Except that wine is prohibited in Islam so that couldn’t have been a reason. The reward was “virgins” not “prostitutes” so that was incorrect also.
 
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