Making of the Muslim World

Abstract

This concluding chapter considers the chronology of the martyrdoms as a way of measuring the pace of Islamization and Arabization in the postconquest period. It suggests that the apparent surge in violence between 750 and 800 may have come about as Muslims and Christians began interacting with each other for the very first time as members of a shared society, rather than as rulers and subjects in a divided world, as they had done for much of the immediate postconquest period. This, in turn, destabilized relations between the two communities, giving rise to new anxieties about social and religious differentiation. The chapter also considers the legacy of the martyrs from the Middle Ages to the present, as well as the role martyrs played in the process of community formation for various emergent sects in the early medieval period, Christian and Muslim alike.