Around the 7th and 8th centuries AD, as Arab merchants began settling along the East African coast, they brought with them the religion that had swept the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Islam took root among the coastal Swahili communities not through conquest but through commerce. Merchants married into local families. Mosques were built alongside existing structures. The faith wove itself into the fabric of coastal life so thoroughly that by the 11th century, the Kenyan coast was dotted with Muslim communities that were neither fully Arab nor fully African but something uniquely their own.