How the Islamic World was Forged: An Exercise in Common Sense How most of the non-Muslim ancestors of today’s Muslims were converted to Islam.

Excerpts:

Alongside these times of extreme persecution, the entrenched dhimmi system saw the increasingly impoverished Egyptian people slowly convert to Islam over the centuries, so that today only 10% remain Christian.  

Once all these Christians converted to Islam, all their progeny became Muslim in perpetuity, thanks to Islam’s apostasy law, which bans Muslims from leaving Islam on pain of death.  Indeed, according to Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading cleric in the Muslim world, “If the [death] penalty for apostasy was ignored, there would not be an Islam today; Islam would have ended on the death of the prophet.”

The long and short of all this is simple: Past and present, Islam has been a religion of coercion. More than half of the territory that once made up Christendom—including Egypt, Syria, Turkey, North Africa—converted to Islam due to bouts of extreme violence and ongoing financial bleeding.  The Islamic State and like organizations and Muslims around the world are not aberrations but continuations.

 

Cornelis Hulsman: Raymond Ibrahim is a master in painting black images instead of images with different shades of gray since such is the history of Christians in Muslim lands.  Many countries that were conquered by the early Arab armies were Christians. Christianity in those days was deeply divided (which Raymond Ibrahim prefers to ignore) which has made non-Orthodox Christians convert to Islam. Imam Fadel Soliman pointed out years ago at a forum meeting at the Center for Arab-West Understanding that Arians in Egypt rapidly embraced the Muslim faith. Prof. Harald Suermann, a German scholar about Christianity during early Islam, agreed but also pointed out that we have no way to know what the numbers of Arians in those days were.In the 9th-10th centuries many Christians converted due to extreme taxation but the demography also changed due to migration policies that brought in large numbers of Muslims from different Arab tribes. During the Fatimids Christians were treated well and also in later centuries there have been moments of persecution and moments of welfare as well as more migration of Muslims to Egypt. 

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