Western commentators blamed Eastern sensuality, not coercion, for early Muslim conversions

Evidence

When commentators did not attribute coercion as the cause of conversion, they blamed Muslim success on some negative quality of the proselytized. In his review of world religions (1842), Haywood blamed Islam’s early gains not only on “the terror of Mahomet’s arms” but also Islamic law, which suited “the manners and opinions of the Eastern nations.” Islam’s few doctrines were simple, its duties easy, and nothing was “incompatible with the empire of appetites and passions” that characterized Arabs and most Easterners. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 150