In 610 C.E. a local merchant named Muhammad went to Mount Hira to meditate and free himself from stress, but instead met the angel Gabriel who told him about Allah (God) and his messages. This interaction between them led to Muhammad sharing Allah’s messages and creating Islam, a monotheistic religion. Many people have wondered why Islam spread quickly and argue about their contrasting opinions due to different pieces of evidence supporting a diverse amount of ideas. To answer this question once and for all, Islam spread quickly due to merchant trade routes and treaties/taxes/tolerance.
To begin with, one important reason that helped Islam spread quickly is trade. What this means is that since Mecca, the holy city of Islam, was a huge trade center, many merchants learned about Islam while trading and spread the religion across many continents. For instance, in McDougal Littell World
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As Muslim forces took over other empires, citizens became Muslims in order to avoid punishments. As an illustration, the authors ‘Abd al-’Aziz, the commander of the Muslim forces invading Spain, and Theodemir, the Christian King of a region in southern Spain, agreed on a treaty that states “He [Theodemir] and [each of] his men shall [also] pay one dinar every year, together with four measures of wheat, four measures of barley, four liquid measures of concentrated fruit juice, four liquid measures of vinegar, four of honey, and four of olive oil.” This means that when Muslims conquered empires of other religions, such as Christianity, most of the civilians living there switched their religion to Islam in order to avoid paying taxes. Furthermore, this document is very trustworthy because it was created by reliable authors and has many specific details. To conclude, people conquered by Muslims switched religions to Islam in order to be able to not receive taxes, quickly spreading