Islam Spread by Sword?

The material for this article has been taken from the articles of Dr. Zakir Naik, Gush Shalom and Chandra Muzaffar.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamise them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants started to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet (peace be upon him) decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

Muslims ruled Spain for about 800 years. The Muslims in Spain never used the sword to force the people to convert. Later the Christian Crusaders came to Spain and wiped out the Muslims. There was not a single Muslim in Spain who could openly give the adhan, that is the call for prayers.

When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the thousands of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "people of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcomed by many Jews. It has been said that some Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

The story about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

In the case of Islam, trade also played an important role in the spread of the faith especially between the 8th and 15th centuries. Traders assumed the mantle of missionaries. Some historians have observed that the honesty and integrity of these traders attracted a lot of people to their religion. In Southeast Asia, as in East and West Africa, trade was perhaps the most effective channel for the propagation of the religion.

Perhaps more than any of these influences, it is the socio-political and socio-economic environment that prevailed in various parts of the world in the centuries immediately after the advent of Islam that explains its rapid and dramatic growth. In settings dominated by hierarchical and often oppressive structures, the egalitarian justice offered by Islam came as a breath of fresh air. As the famous H.G. Wells put it, "Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found politically apathetic peoples, robbed, oppressed, bullied, uneducated and unorganized and it found selfish and unsound governments out of touch with any people at all. It was the broadest, freshest and cleanest political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the world and it offered better terms than any other to the masses of mankind."

It was partly because of what it offered humankind, that even when Muslims were conquered, their conquerors eventually adopted the religion of the conquered. Thus, the descendants of Hulagu, the Mongol conqueror of Baghdad in the 13th century, chose to embrace Islam. In this regard, it is significant that Islam today is spreading most rapidly in societies where Muslims are in a minority, in North America and Europe—and not in Muslim majority countries where they exercise power.

Muslims were the lords of Arabia for 1400 years. For a few years the British ruled, and for a few years the French ruled. Overall, the Muslims ruled Arabia for 1400 years. Yet today, there are 14 million Arabs who are Coptic Christians i.e. Christians since generations. If the Muslims had used the sword there would not have been a single Arab who would have remained a Christian.

The Muslims ruled India for about a thousand years. If they wanted, they had the power of converting each and every non-Muslim of India to Islam. Today more than 80% of the population of India are non-Muslims. All these non-Muslim Indians are bearing witness today that Islam was not spread by the sword.

Indonesia is a country that has the maximum number of Muslims in the world. The majority of people in Malaysia are Muslims. May one ask, “Which Muslim army went to Indonesia and Malaysia?”

Similarly, Islam has spread rapidly on the East Coast of Africa. One may again ask, if Islam was spread by the sword, “Which Muslim army went to the East Coast of Africa?”

Why has the lie about the sword and violence persisted for so long? The elites in the West who for the last few centuries have exercised overwhelming influence on the thinking of the rest of humankind have succeeded in transferring their terrible guilt about perpetrating unspeakable violence upon people everywhere through perpetual wars, conquests and persecutions on to their adversaries. Thus, their enemies have become the epitome and the embodiment of their own violence. Islam and Muslims--- the perennial nemesis of the West--- have borne the brunt of this transference of guilt.

There is no better example of this than the crusades blessed by the popes. When the crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred 30,000 Muslims and Jews. Contrast this with the compassion and magnanimity of the illustrious Salahuddin when he recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. He not only protected the Christian community---along with the Jews--- but also their places of worship.

And yet in medieval Christian literature it was the Muslim who was portrayed as a bloodthirsty warrior eager to embark upon 'holy wars'. The truth is the term 'holy war' does not even belong to Islam. As the Austrian Catholic philosopher, Hans Koechler points out, “Literally, "holy war" is the translation of the Latin term bellum sanctum which was used to describe a " crusade " against the "Saracens" in the Middle Ages; thus, this notion was part of the doctrine of the Roman-Catholic Church over many centuries."

The crusades are but one gory entry in the long and sordid catalogue of violent wars and conquests associated with elites in the West. There was the merciless slaughter of perhaps 30 million indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia; there was Western colonialism which claimed at least 40 million lives; there was the slave trade which robbed 25 million souls of their freedom; and there was the cruel violence of Apartheid in South Africa which stripped generations of human beings of their basic dignity. It is sad that in each and every one of these colossal catastrophes the Church had some role or the other. At the same time, however, there were some notable Christian figures who spoke out against the monumental crimes committed in their name.

The best reply to the misconception that Islam was spread by the sword is given by the noted historian De Lacy O’Leary in the book “Islam at the cross road” (Page 8): “History makes it clear however, that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islam at the point of the sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myth that historians have ever repeated.”

With which sword was Islam spread? Even if Muslims had it they could not use it to spread Islam because the Qur’an says in the following verse: “Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from error” [Al-Qur’an 2:256]

It is the sword of intellect. The sword that conquers the hearts and minds of people. The Qur’an says in Surah Nahl, “Invite (all) to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious.” [Al-Qur’an 16:125]

An article in Reader’s Digest ‘Almanac’, year book 1986, gave the statistics of the increase of percentage of the major religions of the world in half a century from 1934 to 1984. This article also appeared in ‘The Plain Truth’ magazine. At the top was Islam, which increased by 235%, and Christianity had increased only by 47%. May one ask, which war took place in this century which converted millions of people to Islam?

Today the fastest growing religion in America is Islam. The fastest growing religion in Europe in Islam. Which sword is forcing people in the West to accept Islam in such large numbers?

Dr. Joseph Adam Pearson rightly says, “People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs, fail to realise that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already, it fell the day MUHAMMAD (peace be upon him) was born”.