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The Moslems defeated both, swept forward so rapidly that they could not possibly stop to convert or even to govern the people they conquered. They applied the Aylah treatment: tribute and religious freedom. In some periods, the tribute from unbelievers poured in so fast that the Caliphs were not interested a conversion. The religious leaders of Islam formed a body called the Ulema, learned in the Koran and the Sharia [law]. They tended to be manuscript-eaters, verbal hair-splitters, not a type useful in missionary work. So far as the official religious leadership was concerned, the victories of Islam might have added up to no more than an ephemeral Arab conquest.
But Mohammed had been not only a businessman, but a businessman who saw visions. Thousands of his followers had the same mysticism, the same zeal.
As the centuries passed, these mystical Moslems became known as sufis (from their garb of suf, or undyed wool). They were loosely organized around leaders, or saints, who sought from the Koran not learning, but direct "experience" of God.
Sufism, loosely parallel to the monastic movement in Christen dom, provided the driving power of internal and external missionary work.
No sticklers for the letter of the law, the sufis met the un believer as near as they could to his own doctrinal ground. No doubt Islam suffered some theological dilution in this process, but its tribes increased wonderfully. Followers of sufism converted the animist Berbers of North Africa, and later the Turks, who broke out of Asia conquering the Arabs and great Constantinople as well. Sufism, carried largely by Moslem merchants, converted Sumatra, Java, Malaya, all without any military help from the centers of Islam.
The Rejection of the West
Simple theology, plural marriage, the promise and threat of mystics — judgment, the these were all military part of a tradition, the beautifully toleration and balanced the sufi machine which made converts faster and more smoothly than Christianity ever did in its most blessed days. In most areas where Moslems conquered Christians, the bulk of the people eventually be came Moslem.* Where Christians conquered Moslems few of the people embraced Christianity.
By 732, the Moslems reached their high-water mark in the West when Charles Martel beat them at Tours, 135 miles south west of Paris. For centuries more they held Spain, Portugal, Sicily. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna.
Neither Mohammed nor any of his "Companions" had much contact with the world of Greek thought; there was no St. Paul among them. But many of the converts in Syria and North Africa were thoroughly Hellenized. At first, Islam allowed the Hellenists to apply reason to problems of law and ethics. Islam, — indeed, especially renewed with Aristotle — Christendom's and out contact of with this Greek renewal philosophy flowed Aquinas' philosophy and, later, the Renaissance. From the first the Ulema had been suspicious of all legal and ethical judgments based upon reason. The learned doctors held that the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet were the only sources of truth.