by Ryan Yost

Created on: February 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

While it is impossible for historians to know exactly why something in the past happened the way it did, they still use what information they do have in order to make an educated guess as to how we got to where we are today. Interpretations of cultural phenomena can vary greatly from one historian to the next. Ultimately, interpretation is a tool that allows historians to view the same event as having different causes and outcomes. These different insights on history give each individual student (or other knowledge-seeker) something to think about; something that allows them to form their own opinions and follow their own beliefs.

Three historians, Jerry H. Bentley, Richard C. Foltz, and Richard W. Bulliet, have offered their interpretation of the spread of religion in the classical age. Bentley focused his essay on how and why religion spreads. He also ponders the question as to why people decided to convert to foreign religions. Foltz, looking at the same spread of religion, views it from a slightly different perspective. He delves into the role of economics in the religious conversion of local peoples, as well as discusses how and why Islam spread so quickly. He also suggests ways that non-Arab converts changed Islam. Finally, Bulliet takes a much different approach. Rather than focus on how social or political forces of the time prompt conversion, he looks merely at the rate of conversion of non-Arabs to Islam.

Jerry Bentley argues that the rapid spread of religion was due, at least in part, to merchants. Along the silk roads, oases were towns that had a transient population of merchants. According to Bentley, "The oases depended heavily on trade for their economic survival, and they quickly accommodated the needs and interests of the merchants whom they hosted. They became centers of high literacy and culture; they organized markets and arranged for lodging, care of animals, and storage of the merchandise; and they allowed their quests to build monasteries and bring large contingents of Buddhist monks and copyists into their communities. Before too long perhaps as early as the first or even the second century B.C.E. the oasis dwellers themselves converted to Buddhism" (Bentley, 206). His stance is obvious; merchants are highly responsible for the spread of religion.

He also believes that missionaries made such a rapid spread of religion possible. Specifically, Bentley mentions Fotudeng. A monk and missionary who traveled through Asia, Fotudeng used his ability

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