IN HIS SEMINAL work, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, Richard Bulliet emphasizes that the “timetables of conversion differed from one region of the Islamic world to another and that these regional differences were reflected in political and institutional developments that depended to some degree upon the conversion process.” Basically, that statement voices the same fundamental attitude as I have presented in this study. However, Bulliet mostly deals with larger geographical units, such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria, whereas this study focuses on much smaller regions.

The historical review presented in the previous chapters clearly indicates that there were major variations in the character and the timetable of the Islamization process in different areas of the Holy Land, and that the conversion process varied among different religious groups. Those differences may even be discerned in neighbouring regions. For example, the Jewish communities of Lower Galilee converted to Islam much earlier than those in Upper Galilee.

Throughout this book, I have defined Islamization according to three criteria: religious conversion to Islam, Arabization, namely, transition from the use of local languages to Arabic, and the Islamization of the landscape, i.e., addition of Islamic elements such as mosques and shaykh tombs to the regional landscape. There were significant variations between the conversion in the different regions and Islamization of the landscape in those regions. In the next few pages, we will examine the spread of these phenomena in the Holy Land from the Muslim conquest to the end of the eighteenth century.

One phenomenon that apparently occurred continuously throughout the period was a contraction of the population of the Holy Land. According to leading scholars, the pre-modern period when the Holy Land's population was at its highest was the Byzantine period, before the outbreak of the bubonic plague. Yoram Tsafrir estimates that western Palestine's population at the time was around one million people; other scholars have suggested even higher figures. The destruction that presumably accompanied the Muslim conquest led, according to many scholars, to a sharp decline in the Holy Land's population. Based on the Ottoman census of 1596–7, the total population of the areas reviewed in this study was approximately 260,000 people. This study intentionally steers away from the quantitative debate to focus on the population's religious profile, without regard for its size.