“Therefore bring forward all the arguments you wish and say whatever you please and speak your mind freely. Now that you are safe and free to say whatever you please, appoint some arbitrator who will impartially judge between us and lean only towards the truth and be free from the empery of passion: and that arbitrator shall be Reason, whereby God makes us responsible for our own rewards and punishments. Herein I have dealt justly with you and have given you full security and am ready to accept whatever decision Reason may give for me or against me. For ‘there is no compulsion in religion’ (ii. 257) and I have only invited you to accept our faith willingly and of your own accord and have pointed out the hideousness of your present belief. Peace be with you and the mercy and blessings of God!” There can be very little doubt but that this document has come down to us in an imperfect condition and has suffered mutilation at the hands of Christian copyists: the almost entire absence of any refutation of such distinctively Christian doctrines as that of the Blessed Trinity, and the references to such attacks to be found in al-Kindī’s reply, certainly indicate the excision of such passages as might have given offence to Christian readers. [1392] APPENDIX II. CONTROVERSIAL LITERATURE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND THE FOLLOWERS OF OTHER FAITHS. Although Islam has had no organised system of propaganda, no tract societies or similar agencies of missionary work, there has been no lack of reasoned presentments of the faith to unbelievers, particularly to Christians and Jews. Of these it is not proposed to give a detailed account here, but it is of importance to draw attention to their existence if only to remove the wide-spread misconception that mass conversion is the prevailing characteristic of the spread of Islam and that individual conviction has formed no part of the propagandist schemes of the Muslim missionary. The beginnings of Muhammadan controversy against unbelievers are to be found in the Qurʼān itself, but from the ninth century of the Christian era begins a long series of systematic treatises of Muhammadan Apologetics, which has been actively continued to the present day. The number of such works directed against the Christian faith has been far more numerous than the Christian refutations of Islam, and some of the ablest of Muslim thinkers have employed their pens in their composition, e.g. Abū Yūsuf b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (A.D. 813–873), al-Masʻūdī (ob. A.D. 958), Ibn Ḥazm (A.D. 994–1064), al-Ghazālī (ob. A.D. 1111), etc. It is interesting also to note that several renegades have written apologies for their change of faith and in defence of the Muslim creed, e.g. Ibn Jazlah in the eleventh century, Yūsuf al-Lubnānī and Shaykh Ziyādah b. Yaḥyạ̄ in the thirteenth, ʻAbd Allāh b. ʻAbd Allāh in the fifteenth, Darwesh ʻAlī in the sixteenth, Aḥmad b. ʻAbd Allāh, an Englishman born at Cambridge, in the seventeenth century, etc.