- My understanding of religious conversion has been especially infl uenced by
the work of William James, A. D. Nock, Eugene Gallagher, Lewis Rambo, and Gauri
Viswanathan, and by conversations with converts to pietistic movements within their
given religion and those who have become Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and
Muslim.
1 0. Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (hereafter cited as EI² ), s.v. “Īmān,” by L. Gardet.
11. A. D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the
Great to Augustine of Hippo ( 1 933; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 998), 7.
1 2. Robert Hefner, “Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conver-
sion,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great
Transformation, ed. Robert Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 993), 1 7.
1 3. Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1 993), 11 6– 1 7.
1 4. Ibid., 1 37–4 1.
1 5. Ibid., 11 3–23.
1 6. For examples of this process, see Eliza Kent, Converting Women: Gender and
Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004).
1 7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
( 1 902; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1 985), 42.
1 8. Ibid., 38 1 ; Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Be-
lief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1 998), 83–86. See also Eugene Gallagher,
Expectation and Experience: Explaining Religious Conversion (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,
1 990), 11 –38.
1 9. Kent, Converting Women, 24 1.
- Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 66–75, 87– 101.
- On the role of the magistrates, see Marc Baer, “Islamic Conversion Narratives
of Women: Social Change and Gendered Religious Hierarchy in Early Modern Ottoman
Istanbul,” Gender and History 1 6, no. 2 (August 2004): 425–58.
- John Lofl and and Norman Skonovd, “Conversion Motifs,” Journal for the Sci-
entifi c Study of Religion 20 ( 1981 ): 379–80; Lorne Dawson, “Who Joins New Religious
Movements and Why: Twenty Years of Research and What Have We Learned?” in Cults
and New Religious Movements: A Reader, ed. Lorne Dawson (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2003), 11 6–30.
- Nock, Conversion, 77.
- Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and
the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 995), 6 1 , 99; Michael Khodark-
ovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2002), 1 93–96.
- Stewart Gordon, “A World of Investiture,” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval
World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 200 1 ), 1 5. - Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland, OR:
White Cloud Press, 1 999), 8. As Muhammad had bestowed his cloak on an early
convert, caliphs and then Persian and Turkish rulers, taking over where Sassanid and
258 notes to pages 13–15