The Ottoman state was extraordinarily tolerant of Catholic evangelization efforts in cities like Istanbul and Aleppo. The greatest challenge that missionaries faced in the Levant was
not death, but failure. Comparisons certainly did not help matters. While missionaries in the New World were reporting spectacular numbers of conversions, their confreres in the Near East failed consistently to convert Muslims to Christianity. Today their failure does not surprise us. Islam was and is a compelling monotheistic faith, and despite what Thomas á Jesu might tell us, there is no reason why anyone “should” convert to Christianity.[1] ........
Early modern missionaries, however, believed fervently in the superiority of their own particular creed. They found it difficult to understand why the “superior” religion failed to win out. Why were “Oriental” peoples so resistant to conversion? Why, when given the opportunity to convert to Roman Catholicism, did they refuse? Why, in fact, were far more Christians converting to Islam than the other way around?
Missionaries faced two sources of failure in the Near East. First was the issue of Muslim resistance to conversion. Secondly, and far more serious to early modern missionaries, was the issue of Christian conversion to Islam. Of all the belief systems which Catholic missionaries encountered in the early modern period, Islam was the only one which was also engaging in global proselytization. The results of Islamic proselytization were as obvious to early modern missionaries as they are to early modern historians today.[5] .....
For Catholic missionaries, understanding the failure of their message to take root in the Near East meant primarily understanding why men and women chose to convert to Islam and to remain Muslims. Thomas considered a number of explanations for Islamic resistance to conversion, before presenting his own, definitive answer. As we shall discover, Thomas’ answer was not specific to Christian converts to Islam, nor to the particular difficulties which missionaries faced in the Ottoman Empire. For Thomas, the problem of failure was at heart a theological one. Thomas solved the problem of failure by redefining conversion itself. He detached missionaries’ individual successes and failures from the actual process of conversion, which he attributed exclusively to the predestined will of God.
De Procuranda Salute was not simply a handbook to the world’s religions and cultures, but also included more theoretical reflections on evangelization. Were public disputations effective in converting Protestants to Catholicism?[6]
Should missionaries assume disguises? Is it sinful for a missionary to eat meat on a fast day
to conceal his identity?[7] What role should Christian princes play in the conversion of their subjects?
Can they force their subjects to convert to Christianity?
Like any textbook, De Procuranda Salute was not perfect, and not simply because Thomas approved of the use of force in converting peoples to Christianity. Over time, increased contact with Eastern Christians and Muslims revealed the limits of Thomas’ knowledge.
Contrary to what Thomas wrote, Muslim clerics did not wear images of Muhammad around their necks.[9] Nor did the Qur’an commend homosexuality as an act pleasing to God.[10] It is not surprising that Thomas made so many mistakes.
Early modern missions to Muslim-majority communities, whether in Spain, North Africa, or the Levant, were unique because such missionaries were not confronting an Islamic “Other” for the first time...
One possibility for obtaining conversions was through publication. Thomas’ belief in the importance of publication was one shared by the Propaganda Fide, and was in fact one of the explicit justifications for its money-losing press. Books could travel and present arguments in ways in which missionaries could not.[18] If provided with access to the “true Scriptures,” Thomas believed that Muslim readers would “see the light” and realize how unfavorably Islam compared to Christianity.[19]
Thomas saw conversion as a
two-part process in the case of converting a Muslim to Catholic Christianity. First, the missionary must convince the convert that Islam is a false religion. Once the missionary has demolished the Muslim’s former belief system through
logical proofs, he must then work to convince the Muslim that Christianity is the true religion. Thomas himself believed that the first step was the easiest.
Convincing a convert of the truth of Christianity was the far more difficult step, as “the doctrines of the Christian faith
exceed all capacities of our intellect, and cannot be investigated by any light of natural reason.”[21]
The primary challenge which the missionary faced in “proving” the truth of Christianity was in explaining mysteries which were by their very nature ineffable. The Christian faith was a
mystery that could only be revealed by God.[22]
For a true conversion to take place, God had to move the heart of the convert to recognize the truths of faith and long to cling to them.
Conversion was both a rational and emotional process, directed by God.
Needless to say, the Muslim convert did not play much of a role in Thomas’ process. The Muslim convert, like converts in the New World, played a largely passive role, as the person acted upon, rather than as
the actor.[23]
Thomas acknowledged that all people had an instinctive longing for truth, but considered the Christian faith to be so transcendent that it could not be grasped unaided by the seeker, no matter how sincere he or she might be. Seekers in fact were predisposed to delusion and error, because the Christian faith transcended human understanding, which was all that seekers had upon which to rely. Seekers could not discover the truth unaided.
Truth could only be known from an inward experience of God. The initiative, in fact, did not lie with the missionary as much as it lay with God.[24]
Even if missionaries
did not have the opportunity to present their rational arguments against Islam, however, they always had recourse to assiduous prayer and the allure of an “upright life:”
Despite all of their linguistic training and theological preparation, missionaries found little success. Conversions did happen, but they were exceedingly rare. The handful of accounts in the Roman archives of Muslims converting to Christianity were occasioned by native evangelists or, in the case of Thomas da Novara, by a European whose unusual language skills and deep sympathy for local customs erased the boundary which many other missionaries scrupulously maintained between the European, Catholic self and the “Oriental Other,” both Christian and Muslim. Missionaries’ inability to achieve conversions was very obvious. Sooner or later, each missionary in the Levant needed to come to terms with the reality of failure.
Missionaries in the Near East were not only confronted by Muslims’ unwillingness to exchange their own religion for Christianity, but also by the far greater scandal of Christian conversion to Islam.
Eric Dursteler has characterized the
seventeenth-century as “
the golden age of the renegade,” of Christian converts to Islam. While numbers of renegades are difficult to come across, he estimates that they may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, certainly far more than the handful of Islamic converts to Christianity.[58]
Christian converts to Islam were highly visible in Ottoman society, in part because conversion to Islam was one mechanism of upward mobility for men.
While some may have initially converted to Islam for more secular motives, Eric Dursteler’s collection of case histories suggests that many converts became quite fervent in their new beliefs. They often attempted toconvert their Christian relatives to Islam. Tijana Krstic has also demonstrated how new converts to Islam nurtured their spirituality by reading, copying, and collecting devotional works on ‘Isa (the Islamic Jesus), among other topics.
Theologies of Failure: Islamic Conversion
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Originally Posted by Gunny
