Early Christianity in Asia and Africa

[Regina]

No it did, I don't see how it couldn't have been violent personally. But there wasn't this extreme "convert to Islam or die" sentiment behind it that has become fashionable among modern jihadists.

So... what about the ninth Sura of the Qur'an (and in much of it elsewhere), where Muhammad explicitly gives the pagans four months to evacuate with the ultimatum that those who refuse will be summarily executed... Or the hadith in which, as one of his final statements, he signaled the desire that Islam be the only religion on the Arabian Peninsula... Or the 8th Muslim historian In Ishaq, who graphically describes the various assassinations, sieges, murders, etc. of Muhammad and his gang of degenerates?

What the Quran says Muhammad did, and what the Islamic expansionists in the following centuries did, are separate things.

And of course a lot the conquests were violent, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any conquest in history with absolutely no violence. The sieges, assassinations, rape and pillage and piracy of foreign lands did happen, I'm not refuting that.

However they were not walking into places literally saying to common people "you must convert to Islam, leave, or die". That's the argument here. We can see that didn't happen en masse because the survival of indigenous Middle Eastern and North African Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews into modern times suggests that didn't happen. We can talk all day about the violence of the expansions, they were violent, but it's not balanced to focus on early-period Islam as this unprecedently bloodthirsty violent civilisation in a time where pretty much everyone was very violent. Nothing was happening in a vaccuum, these were violent times.

By the same token though, yes I can recognise bullshit historical revisionism when I see it. I'm not down with pretending any medieval civilisation was a utopian beacon of peace, which is becoming fashionable among revisionist historians and cultural relativists in regard to Islam. That's silly as well. There's no balance here, you've got people on one end claiming this was the most perfect, civilised form of society ever to come out of humanity, while at the other end you've got others arguing it was literal Hell on Earth.