Early Christianity in Asia and Africa

[Regina]

As much as they might love this book for showing clear examples of muslim toleration of xtians and jews at least at the beginning it is analysis like this which will get the fatwas and rocks flying.  Muslims are no longer "tolerant."

And why do you think this came to be? The region we're talking about is centuries of Ottoman oppression, followed by Western oppression, turning right into dictatorships. Sometimes Western, sometimes Soviet puppets.

They never had a chance at forming their own identity and culture. And looking at the map with its straight lines, shows everyone with two brain cells to rub together that these aren't grown but forced countries. Same as Africa.

I don't know if that was necessarily the case in The Middle East. Although the modern, standardised borders were laid out by colonists, lots of the Middle Eastern nationalities have a existed for a long time and have strong historical identities. Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Oman and Iran (as "Persia") all go way back, for example. I think the straight-line borders, unlike in Africa, can mainly be attributed to the climate here. These are hot desert countries with large areas that are totally uninhabitable, so a lot of these artificial borders have been placed where there are just no people so there's never been a real need for official borders before. A lot of them also fall where the desert has historically been seen as a geographical barrier and border anyway (such as the Egypt-Libya and Saudi-Oman borders).

It's not as extreme a case as in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the colonists just threw borders down wherever convenient at the expense of indigenous heritage.

With that said I still think people are overplaying this utopian "tolerance" early Muslims are said to have had. However much they might have "tolerated" religious minorities, they were still a colonising culture themselves who took over places by conquest. I think it's interesting that we can have legitimate conversations about the effects of "Ottoman colonisation" and "European colonisation" on The Middle East, but we then forget that the whole region (outside of the Central Arabian Peninsula, where Arab culture originates) is a product of Arab/Islamic colonisation in the first place. That has effects on the culture too.