I am reading about Islam in India. The wiki article states it was initially spread through trade, and Islam is now the second largest religion in India. But how? How does trade influence the spread of religion? Did these early traders talk about religion and the Indian traders like it better than theirs? Or did they get deals with Islamic traders?
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It’s a lot like what you assume. As trade crosses borders, so too does culture – including religion. Back in the time when this was happening, people had to manually transport their wares to other places and have relationships with their trading partners. Also, the Arabic world was very powerful for a long time (until the Mongols came about and set them back.) A major catalyst of the Crusades was more about a power struggle similar to the US/USSR and Rome/Carthage. Religion played a major role, granted. But it was more about those religions power than “reclaiming the holy land for Christ/Allah.” Having that kind of influence means it’s easier to spread your culture’s dominant faith, thus increasing the origin power’s influence. Think of the Catholic church and how much it dominated European politics around the same time. The Muslim world also sought to expand it’s influence on it’s neighbors, and trade works as well as conquest.
Trade doesn’t just involve the movement of goods, but also people. People need to physically move and sell the goods, so you will often times see traders settling in an area temporarily before moving back to get more goods to sell. Over time some might settle more permanently. Some might set up temporary shops. Some might even help fund churches/mosque/temple etc because they want a place to practice their religion while there. Eventually you get converts or simply the traders that decide to stay in town have kids. Over time population grows and your religion is spreading.
Because they didn’t just trade physical goods, they traded ideas, art, culture, ect. Also, I’m not a historian, but I’m sure Islam gained a lot of followers during the end of the Mughal Empire when Hindus were being forcibly converted. It was under this oppression that sparked the creation of Sikhism.
People move with trade, back in the old days trade was done by people who had limited ability to move quickly. So when you going to go “trade” what you really mean is you are going to move some number of people to that new place and many of them will get married, start lives and stay there permanently.
Trade was the catalyst to move the people and with them came their culture including religion.
A lot of answers are saying that traders established what amounts to trade factorías in other countries, which is understandable. However, what I don’t understand is these are temporary immigrants. Why is it that these temporary immigrants were able to get Islam to become the 2nd most dominant religion in India? Why weren’t these temporary immigrants adopting their host country’s culture instead? Possibly making the Middle East more Hindu, as was Indonesia prior to the Muslim trading conversions.
Traders spend a lot of time gathered round the camp fire telling one another stories before going to sleep, the better the stories the more they are retold, evenually the best stories become religions.
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