Chapter XXIX: Appendix: II

CONTROVERSIAL LITERATURE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND THE FOLLOWERS OF OTHER FAITHS.

Although Islam has had no organised system of propaganda, no tract societies or similar agencies of missionary work, there has been no lack of reasoned presentments of the faith to unbelievers, particularly to Christians and Jews. Of these it is not proposed to give a detailed account here, but it is of importance to draw attention to their existence if only to remove the wide-spread misconception that mass conversion is the prevailing characteristic of the spread of Islam and that individual conviction has formed no part of the propagandist schemes of the Muslim missionary. The beginnings of Muhammadan controversy against unbelievers are to be found in the Qurʼān itself, but from the ninth century of the Christian era begins a long series of systematic treatises of Muhammadan Apologetics, which has been actively continued to the present day. The number of such works directed against the Christian faith has been far more numerous than the Christian refutations of Islam, and some of the ablest of Muslim thinkers have employed their pens in their composition, e.g. Abū Yūsuf b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (A.D. 813–873), al-Masʻūdī (ob. A.D. 958), Ibn Ḥazm (A.D. 994–1064), al-Ghazālī (ob. A.D. 1111), etc. It is interesting also to note that several renegades have written apologies for their change of faith and in defence of the Muslim creed, e.g. Ibn Jazlah in the eleventh century, Yūsuf al-Lubnānī and Shaykh Ziyādah b. Yaḥyạ̄ in the thirteenth, ʻAbd Allāh b. ʻAbd Allāh in the fifteenth, Darwesh ʻAlī in the sixteenth, Aḥmad b. ʻAbd Allāh, an Englishman born at Cambridge, in the seventeenth century, etc. These latter were all Christians before their conversion, but Jewish renegades also, though fewer in number, have been among the apologists of Islam. In India, besides many Muhammadan books written against the Christian religion, there is an enormous number of controversial works against Hinduism: as to whether the Muhammadans have been equally active in other heathen countries, I have no information.

The reader will find a vast store of information on Muslim controversial literature in the following writings: Moritz Steinschneider: Polemische und apologetische Litteratur in arabischer Sprache, zwischen Muslimen, Christen und Juden. (Leipzig, 1877); Ignaz Goldziher: Über Muhammedanische Polemik gegen Ahl al-kitâb (Z.D.M.G., vol. 32, p. 341 ff. 1878); Martin Schreiner: Zur Geschichte der Polemik zwischen Juden und Muhammedanern (Z.D.M.G., vol. 42, p. 591 ff. 1888); W. A. Shedd: Islam and the Oriental Churches, pp. 252–3; Carl Güterbock: Der Islam in Lichte der byzantinischen Polemik. (Berlin, 1912.)