Abstract
AbstractThrough conversion, Islam became the religion of the majority of the population in the medieval Middle East, but the process took centuries and remains poorly understood. Scholarship on demographic Islamization has postulated an “age of conversions,” during which the majority of the population converted relatively rapidly. Historians over the past century have continually pushed the Middle East's “age of conversions” later in time. A partial exception is Egypt, for which Wiet's early model still finds some supporters despite being based on misinterpreted evidence. I propose that even this continual revision fails to correct sufficiently for the elite bias of the surviving literary sources, which virtually ignore the agrarian population base of society. Common structures and cultural dynamics in agrarian societies suggest that even the current state of scholarship presumes too rapid a pace of conversion for the majority of the population in the Middle East.
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