THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF AFRICA.
Islam was first introduced into Africa by the Arab army that invaded
Egypt under the command of ʻAmr b. al-ʻĀṣ in A.D. 640. Three years
later the withdrawal of the Byzantine troops abandoned the vast
Christian population into the hands of the Muslim conquerors. The rapid
success of the Arab invaders was largely due to the welcome they
received from the native Christians, who hated the Byzantine rule not
only for its oppressive administration, but also—and chiefly—on account
of the bitterness of theological rancour. The Jacobites, who formed the
majority of the Christian population, had been very roughly handled by
the Orthodox adherents of the court and subjected to indignities that
have not been forgotten by their children even to the present day.
[264] Some were tortured and then thrown into the sea; many followed
their Patriarch into exile to escape from the hands of their
persecutors, while a large number disguised their real opinions under a
pretended acceptance of the Council of Chalcedon. [265] To these Copts,
as the Jacobite Christians of Egypt are called, the Muhammadan conquest
brought a freedom of religious life such as they had not enjoyed for a
century. On payment of the tribute, ʻAmr left them in undisturbed
possession of their churches and guaranteed to them autonomy in all
ecclesiastical matters, thus delivering them from the continual
interference that had been so grievous a burden under the previous
rule; he laid his hands on none of the property of the churches and
committed no act of spoliation or pillage. [266] In the early days of
the Muhammadan rule then, the condition of the Copts seems to have been
fairly tolerable, [267] and there is no evidence of their widespread
apostasy to Islam being due to persecution or unjust pressure on the
part of their new rulers. Even before the conquest was complete, while
the capital, Alexandria, still held out, many of them went over to
Islam, [268] and a few years later the example these had set was
followed by many others. [269] In the reign of ʻUthmān (A.D. 643–655),
the revenue derived from Egypt amounted to twelve millions; a few years
later, in the reign of Muʻāwiyah (661–679), it had fallen to five
millions owing to the enormous number of conversions: under ʻUmar II
(717–720) it fell still lower, so that the governor of Egypt [270]
proposed that in future the converts should not be exempted from the
payment of the capitation-tax, but this the pious caliph refused to
allow, saying that God had sent Muḥammad to call men to a knowledge of
the truth and not to be a collector of taxes. [271]
But later rulers recognised that for fiscal reasons such a policy was
ruinous to the state, and insisted on the converts continuing to pay
taxes as before; there was, however, no continuity in such a policy,
and individual governors acted in an arbitrary and irregular manner.
[272] When Ḥafṣ b. al-Walīd, who was governor of Egypt in A.D. 744,
promised that all those who became Muslims would be exempted from the
payment of jizyah, as many as 24,000 Christians are reported to have
accepted Islam. [273] A similar proclamation is said to have been made
by al-Saffāḥ, the first of the ʻAbbāsid caliphs, soon after his
accession in A.D. 750, for “he wrote to the whole of his dominions
saying that every one who embraced his religion and prayed according to
his fashion, should be quit of the jizyah, and many, both rich and
poor, denied the faith of Christ by reason of the magnitude of the
taxation and the burdens imposed upon them.” [274] In fact many of the
Christians of Egypt seem to have abandoned Christianity as lightly and
as rapidly as, in the beginning of the fourth century, they had
embraced it. Prior to that period, a very small section of the
population of the valley of the Nile was Christian, but the sufferings
of the martyrs in the persecution of Diocletian, the stories of the
miracles they performed, the national feeling excited by the sense of
their opposition to the dictates of the foreign government, [275] the
assurance that a paradise of delights was opened to the martyr who died
under the hands of his tormentors,—all these things stirred up an
enthusiasm that resulted in an incredibly rapid spread of the Christian
faith. “Instead of being converted by preaching, as the other countries
of the East were, Egypt embraced Christianity in a fit of wild
enthusiasm, without any preaching, or instruction being given, with
hardly any knowledge of the new religion beyond the name of Jesus, the
Messiah, who bestowed a life of eternal happiness on all who confessed
Him.” [276]
In the seventh century Christianity had probably very little hold on a
great mass of the people of Egypt. The theological catchwords that
their leaders made use of, to stir up in them feelings of hatred and
opposition to the Byzantine government, could have been intelligible to
a very few, and the rapid spread of Islam in the early days of the Arab
occupation was probably due less to definite efforts to attract than to
the inability of such a Christianity to retain. The theological basis
for the existence of the Jacobites as a separate sect, the tenets that
they had so long and at so great a cost struggled to maintain, were
embodied in doctrines of the most abstruse and metaphysical character,
and many doubtless turned in utter perplexity and weariness from the
interminable controversies that raged around them, to a faith that was
summed up in the simple, intelligible truth of the Unity of God and the
mission of His Prophet, Muḥammad. Even within the Coptic Church itself
at a later period, we find evidence of a movement which, if not
distinctly Muslim, was at least closely allied thereto, and in the
absence of any separate ecclesiastical organisation in which it might
find expression, probably contributed to the increase of the converts
to Islam. In the beginning of the twelfth century, there was in the
monastery of St. Anthony (near Iṭfīḥ on the Nile), a monk named
Balūṭus, “learned in the doctrines of the Christian religion and the
duties of the monastic life, and skilled in the rules of the canon-law.
But Satan caught him in one of his nets; for he began to hold opinions
at variance with those taught by the Three Hundred and Eighteen (of
Nicæa); and he corrupted the minds of many of those who had no
knowledge or instruction in the Orthodox faith. He announced with his
impure mouth, in his wicked discourses, that Christ our Lord—to Whom be
glory—was like one of the prophets. He associated with the lowest among
the followers of his religion, clothed as he was in the monastic habit.
When he was questioned as to his religion and his creed, he professed
himself a believer in the Unity of God. His doctrines prevailed during
a period which ended in the year 839 of the Righteous Martyrs (A.D.
1123); then he died, and his memory was cut off for ever.” [277]
Further, a theory of the Christian life that found its highest
expression in asceticism of the grossest type [278] could offer little
attraction, in the face of the more human morality of Islam. [279] On
account of the large numbers of Copts that from time to time have
become Muhammadans, they have come to be considered by the followers of
the Prophet as much more inclined to the faith of Islam than any other
Christian sect, and though they have had to endure the most severe
oppression and persecution on many occasions, yet the Copts that have
been thus driven to abandon their faith are said to have been few in
comparison with those who have changed their religion voluntarily,
[280] and even in the nineteenth century, when Egypt was said to be the
most tolerant of all Muhammadan countries, there were yearly
conversions of the Copts to the Muslim faith. [281] Still, persecution
and oppression have undoubtedly played a very large part in the
reduction of the numbers of the Copts, and the story of the sufferings
of the Jacobite Church of Egypt,—persecuted alike by their fellow
Christians [282] and by the followers of the dominant faith, is a very
sad one, and many abandoned the religion of their fathers in order to
escape from burdensome taxes and unendurable indignities. The vast
difference in this respect between their condition and that of the
Christians of Syria, Palestine and Spain at the same period finds its
explanation in the turbulent character of the Copts themselves. Their
long struggle against the civil and theological despotism of Byzantium
seems to have welded the zealots into a national party that could as
little brook the foreign rule of the Arabs as, before, that of the
Greeks. The rising of the Copts against their new masters in 646, when
they drove the Arabs for a time out of Alexandria and opened the gates
of the city to the Byzantine troops (who, however, treated the
unfortunate Copts as enemies, not having yet forgotten the welcome they
had before given to the Muhammadan invaders), was the first of a long
series of risings and insurrections, [283]—excited frequently by
excessive taxation,—which exposed them to terrible reprisals, and
caused the lot of the Jacobite Christians of Egypt to be harder to bear
than that of any other Christian sect in this or other countries under
Muhammadan rule. But the history of these events belongs rather to a
history of Muhammadan persecution and intolerance than to the scope of
the present work. It must not, however, be supposed that the condition
of the Copts was invariably that of a persecuted sect; on the contrary
there were times when they rose to positions of great affluence and
importance in the state. They filled the posts of secretaries and
scribes in the government offices, [284] farmed the taxes, [285] and in
some cases amassed enormous wealth. [286] The annals of their Church
furnish us with many instances of ecclesiastics who were held in high
favour and consideration by the reigning princes of the country, under
the rule of many of whom the Christians enjoyed the utmost
tranquillity. [287] To such a period of the peace of the Church belongs
an incident that led to the absorption of many Christians into the body
of the faithful.
During the reign of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) (1169–1193) over Egypt, the
condition of the Christians was very happy under the auspices of this
tolerant ruler; the taxes that had been imposed upon them were
lightened and several swept away altogether; they crowded into the
public offices as secretaries, accountants and registrars; and for
nearly a century under the successors of Saladin, they enjoyed the same
toleration and favour, and had nothing to complain of except the
corruption and degeneracy of their own clergy. Simony had become
terribly rife among them; the priesthood was sold to ignorant and
vicious persons, while postulants for the sacred office who were unable
to pay the sums demanded for ordination, were repulsed with scorn, in
spite of their being worthy and fit persons. The consequence was that
the spiritual and moral training of the people was utterly neglected
and there was a lamentable decay of the Christian life. [288] So
corrupt had the Church become that when, on the death of John, the
seventy-fourth Patriarch of the Jacobites, in 1216, a successor was to
be elected, the contending parties who pushed the claims of rival
candidates, kept up a fierce and irreconcilable dispute for nearly
twenty years, and all this time cared less for the grievous scandal and
the harmful consequences of their shameless quarrels than for the
maintenance of their dogged and obstinately factious spirit. On more
than one occasion the reigning sultan tried to make peace between the
contending parties, refused the enormous bribes of three, five, and
even ten thousand gold pieces that were offered in order to induce him
to secure the election of one of the candidates by the pressure of
official influence, and even offered to remit the fee that it was
customary for a newly-elected Patriarch to pay, if only they would put
aside their disputes and come to some agreement,—but all to no purpose.
Meanwhile many episcopal sees fell vacant and there was no one to take
the place of the bishops and priests that died in this interval; in the
monastery of St. Macarius alone there were only four priests left as
compared with over eighty under the last Patriarch. [289] So utterly
neglected were the Christians of the western dioceses, that they all
became Muslims. [290] To this bald statement of the historian of the
Coptic Church, we unfortunately have no information to add, of the
positive efforts made by the Musalmans to bring these Christians over
to their faith. That such there were, there can be very little doubt,
especially as we know that the Christians held public disputations and
engaged in written controversies on the respective merits of the rival
creeds. [291] That these conversions were not due to persecution, we
know from direct historical evidence that during this vacancy of the
patriarchate, the Christians had full and complete freedom of public
worship, were allowed to restore their churches and even to build new
ones, were freed from the restrictions that forbade them to ride on
horses or mules, and were tried in law-courts of their own, while the
monks were exempted from the payment of tribute and granted certain
privileges. [292]
How far this incident is a typical case of conversion to Islam among
the Copts it is difficult to say; a parallel case of neglect is
mentioned by two Capuchin missionaries who travelled up the Nile to
Luxor in the seventeenth century, where they found that the Copts of
Luxor had no priest, and some of them had not gone to confession or
communion for fifty years. [293] Under such circumstances the decay of
their numbers can readily be understood.
A similar neglect probably contributed to the decay of the Nubian
Church which recognised the primacy of the Jacobite Patriarch of
Alexandria, as do the Abyssinians to the present day. The Nubians had
been converted to Christianity about the middle of the sixth century,
and retained their independence when Egypt was conquered by the Arabs;
a treaty was made according to which the Nubians were to send every
year three hundred and sixty slaves, with forty more for the governor
of Egypt, while the Arabs were to furnish them with corn, oil and
raiment. [294] In the reign of al-Muʻtaṣim (833–842), ambassadors were
sent by the caliph renewing this treaty, and the king of Nubia visited
the capital, where he was received with great magnificence and
dismissed with costly presents. [295] In the twelfth century they were
still all Christian, [296] and retained their old independence in spite
of the frequent expeditions sent against them from Egypt. [297] In 1275
the nephew of the then king of Nubia obtained from the sultan of Egypt
a body of troops to assist him in his revolt against his uncle, whom he
by their help succeeded in deposing; in return for this assistance he
had to cede the two northernmost provinces of Nubia to the sultan, and
as the inhabitants elected to retain their Christian faith, an annual
tribute of one dīnār for each male was imposed upon them. [298] But
this Muhammadan overlordship was temporary only, and the Nubians of the
ceded provinces soon reasserted their independence. [299]
But settlements of Arabs had been established in Nubia for several
centuries earlier and the Arabs on the Blue Nile had so increased in
number and wealth in the tenth century that they were able to ask
permission to build a mosque in Soba, [300] the capital of the
Christian kingdom. [301] In the thirteenth and especially from the
beginning of the fourteenth century there began a general process of
interpenetration through the migration into Nubia of Arabs, especially
of the Juhaynah tribe, who intermarried with the women of the land and
gradually succeeded in breaking up the power of the Nubian princes.
[302] In the latter half of the fourteenth century Ibn Baṭūṭah [303]
tells us that the Nubians were still Christians, though the king of
their chief city, Dongola, [304] had embraced Islam in the reign of
Nāṣir (probably Nāṣir b. Qulāūn, one of the Mamlūk sultans of Egypt,
who died A.D. 1340); the repeated expeditions of the Muslims so late as
the fifteenth century had not succeeded in pushing their conquests
south of the first cataract, near which was their last fortified place,
[305] while Christianity seems to have extended as far up the Nile as
Sennaar.
The Christian Nubian kingdom appears to have come to an end partly
through internal dissensions and partly through the attacks of Arab and
Negro tribes on its borders, and finally by the establishment of the
powerful Fūnj empire in the fifteenth century. [306]
But it is probable that the progress of Islam in the country was all
this time being promoted by the Muhammadan merchants and others that
frequented it. Maqrīzī (writing in the early part of the fifteenth
century) quotes one of those missionary anecdotes which occur so rarely
in the works of Arabic authors; it is told by Ibn Salīm al-Aswāni, and
is of interest as giving us a living picture of the Muslim propagandist
at work. Though the convert referred to is neither a Christian nor a
Nubian, still the story shows that there was such a thing as conversion
to Islam in Nubia in the fifteenth century. Ibn Salīm says that he once
met a man at the court of the Nubian chief of Muqurrah, who told him
that he came from a city that lay three months’ journey from the Nile.
When asked about his religion, he replied, “My Creator and thy Creator
is God; the Creator of the universe and of all men is One, and his
dwelling-place is in Heaven.” When there was a dearth of rain, or when
pestilence attacked them or their cattle, his fellow-countrymen would
climb up a high mountain and there pray to God, who accepted their
prayers and supplied their needs before even they came down again. When
he acknowledged that God had never sent them a prophet, Ibn Salīm
recounted to him the story of the prophets Moses and Jesus and
Muḥammad, and how by the help of God they had been enabled to perform
many miracles. And he answered, “The truth must indeed have been with
them, when they did these things; and if they performed these deeds, I
believe in them.” [307]
Very slowly and gradually the Nubians seem to have drifted from
Christianity into Muhammadanism. [308] The spiritual life of their
Church had sunk to the lowest ebb, and as no movement of reform sprang
up in their midst, and as they had lost touch with the Christian
Churches beyond their borders, it was only natural that they should
seek for an expression of their spiritual aspirations in the religion
of Islam, whose followers had so long borne witness to its living power
among them, and had already won over some of their countrymen to the
acceptance of it. A Portuguese priest, who travelled in Abyssinia from
1520–1527, has preserved for us a picture of the Nubians in this state
of transition; he says that they were neither Christians, Jews nor
Muhammadans, but had come to be without faith and without laws; but
still “they lived with the desire of being Christians.” Through the
fault of their clergy they had sunk into the grossest ignorance, and
now there were no bishops or priests left among them; accordingly they
sent an embassy of six men to the king of Abyssinia, praying him to
send priests and monks to instruct them, but this the king refused to
do without the permission of the Patriarch of Alexandria, and as this
could not be obtained, the unfortunate ambassadors returned
unsuccessful to their own country. [309] The same writer was informed
by a Christian who had travelled in Nubia, that he had found 150
churches there, in each of which were still to be seen the figures of
the crucified Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and other saints painted on
the walls. In all the fortresses, also, that were scattered throughout
the country, there were churches. [310] Before the close of the
following century, Christianity had entirely disappeared from Nubia
“for want of pastors,” but the closed churches were to be found still
standing throughout the whole country. [311] The Nubians had yielded to
the powerful Muhammadan influences that surrounded them, to which the
proselytising efforts of the Muslims who had travelled in Nubia for
centuries past no doubt contributed a great deal; on the north were
Egypt and the Arab tribes that had made their way up the Nile and
extended their authority along the banks of that river; [312] on the
south, the Muhammadan state of the Belloos, separating them from
Abyssinia. These Belloos, in the early part of the sixteenth century,
were, in spite of their Muslim faith, tributaries of the Christian king
of Abyssinia; [313] and—if they may be identified with the Baliyyūn,
who, together with their neighbours, the Bajah (the inhabitants of the
so-called island of Meroe), are spoken of by Idrīsī, in the twelfth
century, as being Jacobite Christians, [314]—it is probable that they
had only a few years before been converted to Islam, at the same time
as the Bajah, who had been incorporated into the Muhammadan empire of
the Fūnj, when these latter extended their conquests in 1499–1530 from
the south up to the borders of Nubia and Abyssinia and founded the
powerful state of Sennaar. When the army of Aḥmad Grāñ invaded
Abyssinia and made its way right through the country from south to
north, it effected a junction about 1534 with the army of the sultan of
Maseggia or Mazaga, a province under Muhammadan rule but tributary to
Abyssinia, lying between that country and Sennaar; in the army of this
sultan there were 15,000 Nubian soldiers who, from the account given of
them, appear to have been Musalmans. [315] Fragmentary and insufficient
as these data of the conversion of the Nubians are, we may certainly
conclude from all we know of the independent character of this people
and the tenacity with which they clung to the Christian faith, so long
as it was a living force among them, that their change of religion was
a gradual one, extending through several centuries.
Let us now pass to the history of Islam among the Abyssinians, who had
received Christianity two centuries before the Nubians, and like them
belonged to the Jacobite Church.
The tide of Arab emigration does not seem to have set across the Red
Sea, the western shores of which formed part of the Abyssinian kingdom,
until many centuries after Arabia had accepted the faith of the
prophet. Up to the tenth century only a few Muhammadan families were to
be found residing in the coast towns of Abyssinia, but at the end of
the twelfth century the foundation of an Arab dynasty alienated some of
the coast-lands from the Abyssinian kingdom. In 1300 a missionary,
named Abū ʻAbd Allāh Muḥammad, made his way into Abyssinia, calling on
the people to embrace Islam, and in the following year, having
collected around him 200,000 men, he attacked the ruler of Amhara in
several engagements. [316] King Saifa Arʻād (1342–1370) took energetic
measures against the Muhammadans in his kingdom, putting to death or
driving into exile all those who refused to embrace Christianity. [317]
At the close of the same century the disturbed state of the country,
owing to the civil wars that distracted it, made it possible for the
various Arab settlements along the coast to make themselves masters of
the entire seaboard and drive the Abyssinians into the interior, and
the king, Baʼeda Māryām (1468–1478), is said to have spent the greater
part of his reign in fighting against the Muhammadans on the eastern
border of his kingdom. [318] In the early part of the sixteenth
century, while the powerful Muhammadan kingdom of Adal, between
Abyssinia and the southern extremity of the Red Sea, and some others
were bitterly hostile to the Christian power, there were others again
that formed peaceful tributaries of “Prester John”; e.g. in Massowah
there were Arabs who kept the flocks of the Abyssinian seigniors,
wandering about in bands of thirty or forty with their wives and
children, each band having its Christian “captain.” [319] Some
Musalmans are also mentioned as being in the service of the king and
being entrusted by him with important posts; [320] while some of these
remained faithful to Islam, others embraced the prevailing religion of
the country. What was implied in the fact of these Muhammadan
communities being tributaries of the king of Abyssinia, it is difficult
to determine. The Musalmans of Ḥadya had along with other tribute to
give up every year to the king a maiden who had to become a Christian;
this custom was in accordance with an ancient treaty, which the king of
Abyssinia has always made them observe, “because he was the stronger”;
besides this, they were forbidden to carry arms or put on war-apparel,
and, if they rode, their horses were not to be saddled; “these orders,”
they said, “we have always obeyed, so that the king may not put us to
death and destroy our mosques. When the king sends his people to fetch
the maiden and the tribute, we put her on a bed, wash her and cover her
with a cloth, and recite the prayers for the dead over her and give her
up to the people of the king; and thus did our fathers and our
grandfathers before us.” [321]
These Muhammadan tributaries were chiefly to be found in the low-lying
countries that formed the northern boundary of Abyssinia, from the Red
Sea westward to Sennaar, [322] and on the south and the south-east of
the kingdom. [323] What influence these Muhammadans had on the
Christian populations with which they were intermingled, and whether
they made converts to Islam as in the present century, is matter only
of conjecture. Certain it is, however, that when the independent
Muhammadan ruler of Adal, Aḥmad Grāñ—himself said to have been the son
of a Christian priest of Aijjo, who had left his own country and
adopted Islam in that of the Adals [324]—invaded Abyssinia from 1528 to
1543, many Abyssinian chiefs with their followers joined his victorious
army and became Musalmans, and though the Christian populations of some
districts preferred to pay jizyah, [325] others embraced the religion
of the conqueror. [326] But the contemporary Muslim historian himself
tells us that in some cases this conversion was the result of fear, and
that suspicions were entertained of the genuineness of the allegiance
of the new converts. [327] But such apparently was not universally the
case, and the widespread character of the conversions in several
districts give the impression of a popular movement. The Christian
chiefs who went over to Islam made use of their personal influence in
inducing their troops to follow their example. They were, as we are
told, in some cases very ignorant of their own religion, [328] and thus
the change of faith was a less difficult matter. Particularly
instrumental in conversions of this kind were those Muhammadan chiefs
who had previously entered the service of the king of Abyssinia, and
those renegades who took the opportunity of the invasion of the country
by a conquering Musalman army to throw off their allegiance at once to
Christianity and the Christian king and declare themselves Muhammadans
once more. [329]
One of these in 1531 wrote the following letter to Aḥmad Grāñ:—“I was
formerly a Muslim and the son of a Muslim, was taken prisoner by the
polytheists and made a Christian by force; but in my heart I have
always clung to the true faith and now I seek the protection of God and
of His Prophet and of thee. If thou wilt accept my repentance and
punish me not for what I have done, I will return in penitence to God;
and I will devise means whereby the troops of the king, that are with
me, may join thee and become Muslims;”—and in fact the greater part of
his army elected to follow their general; including the women and
children their numbers are said to have amounted to 20,000 souls. [330]
But with the help of the Portuguese, the Abyssinians succeeded in
shaking off the yoke of their Muhammadan conquerors and Aḥmad Grāñ
himself was slain in 1543. Islam had, however, gained a footing in the
country, which the troublous condition of affairs during the remainder
of the sixteenth and the following century enabled it to retain, the
rival Christian Churches being too busily engaged in contending with
one another, to devote much attention to their common enemy. For the
successful proselytising of the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic
missionaries and the active interference of the Portuguese in all civil
and political matters, excited violent opposition in the mass of the
Abyssinian Christians;—indeed so bitter was this feeling that some of
the chiefs openly declared that they would rather submit to a
Muhammadan ruler than continue their alliance with the Portuguese;
[331]—and the semi-religious, semi-patriotic movement set on foot
thereby, rapidly assumed such vast proportions as to lead (about 1632)
to the expulsion of the Portuguese and the exclusion of all foreign
Christians from the country. The condition of Abyssinia then speedily
became one of terrible confusion and anarchy, of which some tribes of
the Galla race took advantage, to thrust their way right into the very
centre of the country, where their settlements remain to the present
day.
The progress achieved by Islam during this period may be estimated from
the testimony of a traveller of the seventeenth century, who tells us
that in his time the adherents of this faith were scattered throughout
the whole of Abyssinia and formed a third of the entire population.
[332] During the following century the faith of the Prophet seems
steadily to have increased by means of the conversion of isolated
individuals here and there. The absence of any strong central
government in the country favoured the rise of petty independent
chieftains, many of whom had strong Muhammadan sympathies, though (in
accordance with a fundamental law of the state) all the Abyssinian
princes had to belong to the Christian faith; the Muhammadans, too,
aspiring to the dignity of the Abyssinian aristocracy, abjured the
faith in which they had been born and pretended conversion to
Christianity in order to get themselves enrolled in the order of the
nobles, and as governors of Christian provinces made use of all their
influence towards the spread of Islam. [333] One of the chief reasons
of the success of this faith seems to have been the moral superiority
of the Muslims as compared with that of the Christian population of
Abyssinia. Rüppell says that he frequently noticed in the course of his
travels in Abyssinia that when a post had to be filled which required
that a thoroughly honest and trustworthy person should be selected, the
choice always fell upon a Muhammadan. In comparison with the
Christians, he says that they were more active and energetic; that
every Muhammadan had his sons taught to read and write, whereas
Christian children were only educated when they were intended for the
priesthood. [334] This moral superiority of the Muhammadans of
Abyssinia over the Christian population goes far to explain the
continuous though slow progress made by Islam during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries; the degradation and apathy of the Abyssinian
clergy and the interminable feuds of the Abyssinian chiefs, have left
Muhammadan influences free to work undisturbed. Mr. Plowden, who was
English consul in Abyssinia from 1844 to 1860, speaking of the Ḥabāb,
three Tigrē tribes dwelling between 16° and 17° 30′ lat., the
north-west of Massowah, says that they have become Muhammadan “within
the last 100 years, and all, save the latest generation, bear Christian
names. They have changed their faith, through the constant influence of
the Muhammadans with whom they trade, and through the gradual and now
entire abandonment of the country by the Abyssinian chiefs, too much
occupied in ceaseless wars with their neighbours.” [335] They have a
tradition that one of their chiefs named Jāwej rejected Christianity
for Islam, in the belief that the latter faith brought good luck and
long life; he then said to his priest, “Break in pieces the Tābōt”;
[336] the priest answered, “I dare not break in pieces the Tābōt of
Mary”; so Jāwej seized the Tābōt with his own hands and cut it in
pieces with an axe; the Christian priests then adopted Islam, and all
their descendants are shaykhs of the tribe to the present day. [337]
Other sections of the population of the northern districts of the
country were similarly converted to Islam during the same period,
because the priests had abandoned these districts and the churches had
been suffered to fall into ruins,—apparently entirely through neglect,
as the Muhammadans here are said to have been by no means fanatical nor
to have borne any particular enmity to Christianity. [338] Similar
testimony to the progress of Islam in the early part of the nineteenth
century is given by other travellers, [339] who found numbers of
Christians to be continually passing over to that faith. The
Muhammadans were especially favoured by Ras ʻAlī, one of the
vice-regents of Abyssinia and practically master of the country before
the accession of King Theodore in 1853. Though himself a Christian, he
distributed posts and even the spoils of the churches among the
followers of Islam, and during his reign one half of the population of
the central provinces of Abyssinia embraced the faith of the Prophet.
[340] Such deep roots had this faith now struck in Abyssinia that its
followers had in their hands all the commerce as well as all the petty
trade of the country, enjoyed vast possessions, were masters of large
towns and central markets, and had a firm hold upon the mass of the
people. Indeed, a Christian missionary who lived for thirty-five years
in this country, rated the success and the zeal of the Muslim
propagandists so high as to say that were another Aḥmad Grāñ to arise
and unfurl the banner of the Prophet, the whole of Abyssinia would
become Muhammadan. [341] Embroilments with the Egyptian government
(with which Abyssinia was at war from 1875 to 1882) brought about a
revulsion of feeling against Muhammadanism: hatred of the foreign
Muslim foe reacted upon their co-religionists within the border. In
1878, King John summoned a Convocation of the Abyssinian clergy, who
proclaimed him supreme arbiter in matters of faith and ordained that
there should be but one religion throughout the whole kingdom.
Christians of all sects other than the Jacobite were given two years in
which to become reconciled to the national Church; the Muhammadans were
to submit within three, and the heathen within five, years. A few days
later the king promulgated an edict that showed how little worth was
the three years’ grace allowed to the Muhammadans; for not only did he
order them to build Christian churches wherever they were needed and to
pay tithes to the priests resident in their respective districts, but
also gave three months’ notice to all Muhammadan officials to either
receive baptism or resign their posts. Such compulsory conversion
(consisting as it did merely of the rite of baptism and the payment of
tithes) was naturally of the most ineffectual character, and while
outwardly conforming, the Muslims in secret protested their loyalty to
their old faith. Massaja saw some such go straight from the church in
which they had been baptised to the mosque, in order to have this
enforced baptism wiped off by some holy man of their own faith. [342]
These mass conversions were rendered the more ineffectual by being
confined to the men, for as the royal edict had made no mention of the
women they were in no way molested,—a circumstance that probably proved
to be of considerable significance in the future history of Islam in
Abyssinia, as Massaja bears striking testimony to the important part
the Muhammadan women have played in the diffusion of their faith in
this country. [343] By 1880 King John is said to have compelled about
50,000 Muhammadans to be baptised, as well as 20,000 members of one of
the pagan tribes and half a million of Gallas, [344] but as their
conversion went no further than baptism and the payment of tithes, it
is not surprising to learn that the only result of these violent
measures was to increase the hatred and hostility of both the Muslim
and the heathen Abyssinians towards the Christian faith. [345] The king
of the petty state of Kafa (which had almost always acknowledged the
supremacy of Abyssinia),—Sawo-Teheno,—took advantage of the
embarrassment of King John, who was threatened at once by the Italians
and the followers of the Mahdī, to assert his independence, and became
a Musalman, in order to do so more effectively. He successfully
resisted all attacks until 1897, when his state was reconquered and he
himself taken prisoner by the Emperor Menelik, the former king of Shoa,
who had established his authority over the whole of Abyssinia after the
death of King John in 1889. Christianity was re-established as the
state religion throughout Kafa and Christian worship renewed in the
churches, which had been left uninjured, being either shut up or turned
into mosques. [346] But these violent measures taken in the interests
of the Christian faith have failed to arrest the growing power of Islam
during the nineteenth century. Whole tribes that were once Christian
and still bear Christian names, such as Taklēs (“Plant of Jesus”),
Hebtēs (“Gift of Jesus”) and Temāryām (“Gift of Mary”), have become
Muslim. The two Mänsaʻ tribes which were entirely Christian about the
middle of the nineteenth century had become Muslim, for the most part,
at the beginning of the twentieth century; the propagandist efforts of
the Muslims who converted them appear to have been facilitated through
the ignorance of the Christian clergy. A similar Muhammadanising
process has been going on for some time among other tribes also. [347]
We must return now to the history of Africa in the seventh century,
when the Arabs were pushing their conquests from East to West along the
north coast. The comparatively easy conquest of Egypt, where so many of
the inhabitants assisted the Arabs in bringing the Byzantine rule to an
end, found no parallel in the bloody campaigns and the long-continued
resistance that here barred their further progress, and half a century
elapsed before the Arabs succeeded in making themselves complete
masters of the north coast from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean. It was not
till 698 that the fall of Carthage brought the Roman rule in Africa to
an end for ever, and the subjugation of the Berbers made the Arabs
supreme in the country.
The details of these campaigns it is no part of our purpose to
consider, but rather to attempt to discover in what way Islam was
spread among the Christian population. Unfortunately the materials
available for such a purpose are lamentably sparse and insufficient.
What became of that great African Church that had given such saints and
theologians to Christendom? The Church of Tertullian, St. Cyprian and
St. Augustine, which had emerged victorious out of so many
persecutions, and had so stoutly championed the cause of Christian
orthodoxy, seems to have faded away like a mist.
In the absence of definite information, it has been usual to ascribe
the disappearance of the Christian population to fanatical persecutions
and forced conversions on the part of the Muslim conquerors. But there
are many considerations that militate against such a rough and ready
settlement of this question. First of all, there is the absence of
definite evidence in support of such an assertion. Massacres,
devastation and all the other accompaniments of a bloody and
long-protracted war, there were in horrible abundance, but of actual
religious persecution we have little mention, and the survival of the
native Christian Church for more than eight centuries after the Arab
conquest is a testimony to the toleration that alone could have
rendered such a survival possible.
The causes that brought about the decay of Christianity in North Africa
must be sought for elsewhere than in the bigotry of Muhammadan rulers.
But before attempting to enumerate these, it will be well to realise
how very small must have been the number of the Christian population at
the end of the seventh century—a circumstance that renders its
continued existence under Muhammadan rule still more significant of the
absence of forced conversion, and leaves such a hypothesis much less
plausibility than would have been the case had the Arabs found a large
and flourishing Christian Church there when they commenced their
conquest of northern Africa.
The Roman provinces of Africa, to which the Christian population was
confined, never extended far southwards; the Sahara forms a barrier in
this direction, so that the breadth of the coast seldom exceeds 80 or
100 miles. [348] Though there were as many as 500 bishoprics just
before the Vandal conquest, this number can serve as no criterion of
the number of the faithful, owing to the practice observed in the
African Church of appointing bishops to the most inconsiderable towns
and very frequently to the most obscure villages, [349] and it is
doubtful whether Christianity ever spread far inland among the Berber
tribes. [350] When the power of the Roman Empire declined in the fifth
century, different tribes of this great race, known to the Romans under
the names of Moors, Numidians, Libyans, etc., swarmed up from the south
to ravage and destroy the wealthy cities of the coast. These invaders
were certainly heathen. The Libyans, whose devastations are so
pathetically bewailed by Synesius of Cyrene, pillaged and burnt the
churches and carried off the sacred vessels for their own idolatrous
rites, [351] and this province of Cyrenaica never recovered from their
devastations, and Christianity was probably almost extinct here at the
time of the Muslim invasion. The Moorish chieftain in the district of
Tripolis, who was at war with the Vandal king Thorismund (496–524), but
respected the churches and clergy of the orthodox, who had been
ill-treated by the Vandals, declared his heathenism when he said, “I do
not know who the God of the Christians is, but if he is so powerful as
he is represented, he will take vengeance on those who insult him, and
succour those who do him honour.” [352] There is some probability that
the nomads of Mauritania also were very largely heathen.
But whatever may have been the extent of the Christian Church, it
received a blow from the Vandal persecutions from which it never
recovered. For nearly a century the Arian Vandals persecuted the
orthodox with relentless fury; sent their bishops into exile, forbade
the public exercise of their religion and cruelly tortured those who
refused to conform to the religion of their conquerors. [353] When in
534, Belisarius crushed the power of the Vandals and restored North
Africa to the Roman Empire, only 217 bishops met in the Synod of
Carthage [354] to resume the direction of the Christian Church. After
the fierce and long-continued persecution to which they had been
subjected the number of the faithful must have been very much reduced,
and during the century that elapsed before the coming of the
Muhammadans, the inroads of the barbarian Moors, who shut the Romans up
in the cities and other centres of population, and kept the mountains,
the desert and the open country for themselves, [355] the prevalent
disorder and ill-government, and above all the desolating plagues that
signalised the latter half of the sixth century, all combined to carry
on the work of destruction. Five millions of Africans are said to have
been consumed by the wars and government of the Emperor Justinian. The
wealthier citizens abandoned a country whose commerce and agriculture,
once so flourishing, had been irretrievably ruined. “Such was the
desolation of Africa, that in many parts a stranger might wander whole
days without meeting the face either of a friend or an enemy. The
nation of the Vandals had disappeared; they once amounted to an hundred
and sixty thousand warriors, without including the children, the women,
or the slaves. Their numbers were infinitely surpassed by the number of
Moorish families extirpated in a relentless war; the same destruction
was retaliated on the Romans and their allies, who perished by the
climate, their mutual quarrels, and the rage of the barbarians.” [356]
In 646, the year before the victorious Arabs advanced from Egypt to the
subjugation of the western province, the African Church that had
championed so often the purity of Christian doctrine, was stirred to
its depths by the struggle against Monotheletism; but when the bishops
of the four ecclesiastical provinces in the archbishopric of Carthage,
viz. Mauritania, Numidia, Byzacena and Africa Proconsularis, held
councils to condemn Monotheletism, and wrote synodal letters to the
Emperor and the Pope, there were only sixty-eight bishops who assembled
at Carthage to represent the last-mentioned province, and forty-two for
Byzacena. The numbers from the other two dioceses are not given, but
the Christian population had undoubtedly suffered much more in these
than in the two other dioceses which were nearer to the seat of
government. [357] It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the bishops
were absent on an occasion that excited so much feeling, when zeal for
Christian doctrine and political animosity to the Byzantine court both
combined in stimulating this movement, and when Africa took the most
prominent part in stirring up the opposition that led to the convening
of the great Lateran Council of 648. This diminution in the number of
the African bishops certainly points to a vast decrease in the
Christian population, and in consideration of the numerous causes
contributing to a decay of the population, too great stress even must
not be laid upon the number of these, because an episcopal see may
continue to be filled long after the diocese has sunk into
insignificance.
From the considerations enumerated above, it may certainly be inferred
that the Christian population at the time of the Muhammadan invasion
was by no means a large one. During the fifty years that elapsed before
the Arabs assured their victory, the Christian population was still
further reduced by the devastations of this long conflict. The city of
Tripolis, after sustaining a siege of six months, was sacked, and of
the inhabitants part were put to the sword and the rest carried off
captive into Egypt and Arabia. [358] Another city, bordering on the
Numidian desert, was defended by a Roman count with a large garrison
which bravely endured a blockade of a whole year; when at last it was
taken by storm, all the males were put to the sword and the women and
children carried off captive. [359] The number of such captives is said
to have amounted to several hundreds of thousands. [360] Many of the
Christians took refuge in flight, [361] some into Italy and Spain,
[362] and it would almost seem that others even wandered as far as
Germany, judging from a letter addressed to the diocese of St. Boniface
by Pope Gregory II. [363] In fact, many of the great Roman cities were
quite depopulated, and remained uninhabited for a long time or were
even left to fall to ruins entirely, [364] while in several cases the
conquerors chose entirely new sites for their chief towns. [365]
As to the scattered remnants of the once flourishing Christian Church
that still remained in Africa at the end of the seventh century, it can
hardly be supposed that persecution is responsible for their final
disappearance, in the face of the fact that traces of a native
Christian community were to be found even so late as the sixteenth
century. Idrīs, the founder of the dynasty in Morocco that bore his
name, is indeed said to have compelled by force Christians and Jews to
embrace Islam in the year A.D. 789, when he had just begun to carve out
a kingdom for himself with the sword, [366] but, as far as I have been
able to discover, this incident is without parallel in the history of
the native Church of North Africa. [367]
The very slowness of its decay is a testimony to the toleration it must
have received. About 300 years after the Muhammadan conquest there were
still nearly forty bishoprics left, [368] and when in 1053 Pope Leo IX
laments that only five bishops could be found to represent the once
flourishing African Church, [369] the cause is most probably to be
sought for in the terrible bloodshed and destruction wrought by the
Arab hordes that had poured into the country a few years before and
filled it with incessant conflict and anarchy. [370] In 1076, the
African Church could not provide the three bishops necessary for the
consecration of an aspirant to the dignity of the episcopate, in
accordance with the demands of canon law, and it was necessary for Pope
Gregory VII to consecrate two bishops to act as coadjutors of the
Archbishop of Carthage; but the numbers of the faithful were still so
large as to demand the creation of fresh bishops to lighten the burden
of the work, which was too heavy for these three bishops to perform
unaided. [371] In the course of the next two centuries, the Christian
Church declined still further, and in 1246 the bishop of Morocco was
the sole spiritual leader of the remnant of the native Church. [372] Up
to the same period traces of the survival of Christianity were still to
be found among the Kabils of Algeria; [373] these tribes had received
some slight instruction in the tenets of Islam at an early period, but
the new faith had taken very little hold upon them, and as years went
by they lost even what little knowledge they had at first possessed, so
much so that they even forgot the Muslim formula of prayer. Shut up in
their mountain fastnesses and jealous of their independence, they
successfully resisted the introduction of the Arab element into their
midst, and thus the difficulties in the way of their conversion were
very considerable. Some unsuccessful attempts to start a mission among
them had been made by the inmates of a monastery belonging to the
Qādiriyyah order, Sāqiyah al-ḥamrāʼ, but the honour of winning an
entrance among them for the Muslim faith was reserved for a number of
Andalusian Moors who were driven out of Spain after the taking of
Granada in 1492. They had taken refuge in this monastery and were
recognised by the shaykh to be eminently fitted for the arduous task
that had previously so completely baffled the efforts of his disciples.
Before dismissing them on this pious errand, he thus addressed them:
“It is a duty incumbent upon us to bear the torch of Islam into these
regions that have lost their inheritance in the blessings of religion;
for these unhappy Kabils are wholly unprovided with schools, and have
no shaykh to teach their children the laws of morality and the virtues
of Islam; so they live like the brute beasts, without God or religion.
To do away with this unhappy state of things, I have determined to
appeal to your religious zeal and enlightenment. Let not these
mountaineers wallow any longer in their pitiable ignorance of the grand
truths of our religion; go and breathe upon the dying fire of their
faith and re-illumine its smouldering embers; purge them of whatever
errors may still cling to them from their former belief in
Christianity; make them understand that in the religion of our lord
Muḥammad—may God have compassion upon him—dirt is not, as in the
Christian religion, looked upon as acceptable in the eyes of God. [374]
I will not disguise from you the fact that your task is beset with
difficulties, but your irresistible zeal and the ardour of your faith
will enable you, by the grace of God, to overcome all obstacles. Go, my
children, and bring back again to God and His Prophet these unhappy
people who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance and unbelief. Go, my
children, bearing the message of salvation, and may God be with you and
uphold you.”
The missionaries started off in parties of five or six at a time in
various directions; they went in rags, staff in hand, and choosing out
the wildest and least frequented parts of the mountains, established
hermitages in caves and clefts of the rocks. Their austerities and
prolonged devotions soon excited the curiosity of the Kabils, who after
a short time began to enter into friendly relations with them. Little
by little the missionaries gained the influence they desired through
their knowledge of medicine, of the mechanical arts, and other
advantages of civilisation, and each hermitage became a centre of
Muslim teaching. Students, attracted by the learning of the new-comers,
gathered round them and in time became missionaries of Islam to their
fellow-countrymen, until their faith spread throughout all the country
of the Kabils and the villages of the Algerian Sahara. [375]
The above incident is no doubt illustrative of the manner in which
Islam was introduced among such other sections of the independent
tribes of the interior as had received any Christian teaching, but
whose knowledge of this faith had dwindled down to the observance of a
few superstitious rites; [376] for, cut off as they were from the rest
of the Christian world and unprovided with spiritual teachers, they
could have had little in the way of positive religious belief to oppose
to the teachings of the Muslim missionaries.
There is little more to add to these sparse records of the decay of the
North African Church. A Muhammadan traveller, [377] who visited
al-Jarīd, the southern district of Tunis, in the early part of the
fourteenth century, tells us that the Christian churches, although in
ruins, were still standing in his day, not having been destroyed by the
Arab conquerors, who had contented themselves with building a mosque in
front of each of these churches. Ibn Khaldūn (writing towards the close
of the fourteenth century), speaks of some villages in the province of
Qastīliyyah, [378] with a Christian population whose ancestors had
lived there since the time of the Arab conquest. [379] At the end of
the following century there was still to be found in the city of Tunis
a small community of native Christians, living together in one of the
suburbs, quite distinct from that in which the foreign Christian
merchants resided; far from being oppressed or persecuted, they were
employed as the bodyguard of the Sultan. [380] These were doubtless the
same persons as were congratulated on their perseverance in the
Christian faith by Charles V after the capture of Tunis in 1535. [381]
This is the last we hear of the native Christian Church in North
Africa. The very fact of its so long survival would militate against
any supposition of forced conversion, even if we had not abundant
evidence of the tolerant spirit of the Arab rulers of the various North
African kingdoms, who employed Christian soldiers, [382] granted by
frequent treaties the free exercise of their religion to Christian
merchants and settlers, [383] and to whom Popes [384] recommended the
care of the native Christian population, while exhorting the latter to
serve their Muhammadan rulers faithfully. [385]