outwardly conforming, the Muslims in secret protested their loyalty to their old faith. Massaja saw some such go straight from the church in which they had been baptised to the mosque, in order to have this enforced baptism wiped off by some holy man of their own faith. [342] These mass conversions were rendered the more ineffectual by being confined to the men, for as the royal edict had made no mention of the women they were in no way molested,—a circumstance that probably proved to be of considerable significance in the future history of Islam in Abyssinia, as Massaja bears striking testimony to the important part the Muhammadan women have played in the diffusion of their faith in this country. [343] By 1880 King John is said to have compelled about 50,000 Muhammadans to be baptised, as well as 20,000 members of one of the pagan tribes and half a million of Gallas, [344] but as their conversion went no further than baptism and the payment of tithes, it is not surprising to learn that the only result of these violent measures was to increase the hatred and hostility of both the Muslim and the heathen Abyssinians towards the Christian faith. [345] The king of the petty state of Kafa (which had almost always acknowledged the supremacy of Abyssinia),—Sawo-Teheno,—took advantage of the embarrassment of King John, who was threatened at once by the Italians and the followers of the Mahdī, to assert his independence, and became a Musalman, in order to do so more effectively. He successfully resisted all attacks until 1897, when his state was reconquered and he himself taken prisoner by the Emperor Menelik, the former king of Shoa, who had established his authority over the whole of Abyssinia after the death of King John in 1889. Christianity was re-established as the state religion throughout Kafa and Christian worship renewed in the churches, which had been left uninjured, being either shut up or turned into mosques. [346] But these violent measures taken in the interests of the Christian faith have failed to arrest the growing power of Islam during the nineteenth century. Whole tribes that were once Christian and still bear Christian names, such as Taklēs (“Plant of Jesus”), Hebtēs (“Gift of Jesus”) and Temāryām (“Gift of Mary”), have become Muslim. The two Mänsaʻ tribes which were entirely Christian about the middle of the nineteenth century had become Muslim, for the most part, at the beginning of the twentieth century; the propagandist efforts of the Muslims who converted them appear to have been facilitated through the ignorance of the Christian clergy. A similar Muhammadanising process has been going on for some time among other tribes also. [347]