Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Islam in Palestine" in English language version.
The western coastline and the eastern deserts set the boundaries for the Levant ... The Euphrates and the area around Jebel el-Bishrī mark the eastern boundary of the northern Levant, as does the Syrian Desert beyond the Anti-Lebanon range's eastern hinterland and Mount Hermon. This boundary continues south in the form of the highlands and eastern desert regions of Transjordan.
To the Arabs, this same territory, which the Romans considered Arabian, formed part of what they called Bilad al-Sham, which was their own name for Syria. From the classical perspective however Syria, including Palestine, formed no more than the western fringes of what was reckoned to be Arabia between the first line of cities and the coast. Since there is no clear dividing line between what are called today the Syrian and Arabian deserts, which actually form one stretch of arid tableland, the classical concept of what actually constituted Syria had more to its credit geographically than the vaguer Arab concept of Syria as Bilad al-Sham. Under the Romans, there was actually a province of Syria, with its capital at Antioch, which carried the name of the territory. Otherwise, down the centuries, Syria like Arabia and Mesopotamia was no more than a geographic expression. In Islamic times, the Arab geographers used the name arabicized as Suriyah, to denote one special region of Bilad al-Sham, which was the middle section of the valley of the Orontes river, in the vicinity of the towns of Homs and Hama. They also noted that it was an old name for the whole of Bilad al-Sham which had gone out of use. As a geographic expression, however, the name Syria survived in its original classical sense in Byzantine and Western European usage, and also in the Syriac literature of some of the Eastern Christian churches, from which it occasionally found its way into Christian Arabic usage. It was only in the nineteenth century that the use of the name was revived in its modern Arabic form, frequently as Suriyya rather than the older Suriyah, to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham: first of all in the Christian Arabic literature of the period, and under the influence of Western Europe. By the end of that century it had already replaced the name of Bilad al-Sham even in Muslim Arabic usage.
According to Kedar, at the arrival of the Crusaders the distribution of the Muslims would therefore have varied from area to area. While some parts of Palestine were still mainly occupied by their former inhabitants, in others most of the residents were Muslim. Kedar's approach is followed by Ellenblum, who describes the spread of Islam in Palestine as the result of both resettlement by nomadic tribes and individual conversion. The coexistence of these two processes has also been described by Levtzion. Together with Speros Vryonis, who studied the importance of the process of sedentarization for the Islamization of Anatolia, Levtzion pointed out that whereas Islamization of areas due to sedentarization was a rapid process, conversely the spread of Islam among the local population through individual conversion was slow. ... Research on the topic has also highlighted the role played by Sufis and prominent local families in the spread of Islam in Palestinian villages once inhabited by Christians. This is the case for example with Dayr al-Sheykh and Sharafāt, both near to Jerusalem.
According to Kedar, at the arrival of the Crusaders the distribution of the Muslims would therefore have varied from area to area. While some parts of Palestine were still mainly occupied by their former inhabitants, in others most of the residents were Muslim. Kedar's approach is followed by Ellenblum, who describes the spread of Islam in Palestine as the result of both resettlement by nomadic tribes and individual conversion. The coexistence of these two processes has also been described by Levtzion. Together with Speros Vryonis, who studied the importance of the process of sedentarization for the Islamization of Anatolia, Levtzion pointed out that whereas Islamization of areas due to sedentarization was a rapid process, conversely the spread of Islam among the local population through individual conversion was slow. ... Research on the topic has also highlighted the role played by Sufis and prominent local families in the spread of Islam in Palestinian villages once inhabited by Christians. This is the case for example with Dayr al-Sheykh and Sharafāt, both near to Jerusalem.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)From the data given above it can be concluded that the Muslim population of Central Samaria, during the early Muslim period, was not an autochthonous population which had converted to Christianity. They arrived there either by way of migration or as a result of a process of sedentarization of the nomads who had filled the vacuum created by the departing Samaritans at the end of the Byzantine period [...] To sum up: in the only rural region in Palestine in which, according to all the written and archeological sources, the process of Islamization was completed already in the twelfth century, there occurred events consistent with the model propounded by Levtzion and Vryonis: the region was abandoned by its original sedentary population and the subsequent vacuum was apparently filled by nomads who, at a later stage, gradually became sedentarized