What proportion of the population was Muslim in different historical periods, and what did the process of conversion look like across the various regions of the Islamicate world? A common answer is to invoke Bulliet's conversion curve, which has become both influential and widely misunderstood. For decades, the curve has often been treated as an estimate of the proportion of Muslims within the total population. That, however, is not what Bulliet's model was designed to measure. Nevertheless, when many scholars and lay readers speak of the "gradual conversion to Islam," they often have Bulliet's chronology or something very similar in mind. Yet there is little compelling evidence that conversion proceeded at anything like that pace, while a body of considerations suggests that the process was considerably slower.
Even while this particular explication focuses on Muslim Spain, the critique may be applied to other countries and subjects that many people believe they know the solution to based on the premodern writers' useless historical records that were never grounded in fieldwork. The only thing that is clear is that in these regions, misconceptions such as the one regarding the rate of conversion would be completely untrue. People did not convert to Islam "that fast", it took much longer than a few centuries for many regions. The same holds true for comparable "population as a whole" estimations on numerous other subjects. The same analysis might be given, for instance, to the claims regarding the semi-nomad vs. settled villager divide in Kurdish history, if the argument is valid (which it is) in the case of claims of mass conversion and the deceptive character of historical sources.
Here is a brief summary of the main points from the paper that I believe are valuable for setting the stage for my own future blogposts on this subject. I highly recommend reading the paper in full for anyone interested in this topic:
1. Muslim authors are well known for their tendency to underrepresent or omit non-Muslim communities in their writings, which creates significant challenges when attempting to reconstruct the religious composition of past societies.
2. Arabization, whether reflected in increased interest in learning Arabic or the adoption of Arabic names does not necessarily indicate conversion to Islam. Arabic became the dominant language of administration and elite culture throughout many Islamicate polities, meaning that conquered populations often adopted Arabic linguistic and cultural practices without necessarily becoming Muslim.
3. The written evidence available on this subject is inherently limited, since we possess very little information about the lived experiences and religious identities of ordinary people, particularly rural populations who constituted the majority of society. The surviving sources disproportionately reflect elites and literate groups rather than the broader population.
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