Quote:
Originally Posted by Ara T.
Were Americans dissuaded from slavery by mere talking? Historically (during the time of the expansion of Islam) Muslims had been pretty fair with Christians and Jews. They'd let them worship and pray as they would where the Christian crusaders SOP was to slaughter every inhabitant of Muslim cities, probably because the Catholic church promised them bogus glory, riches and such.
The Muslims probably saw it as you do, that they had been doing this for centuries and thats just how they were.
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That's not even closet to accurate. During the Islamic expansion they often killed anybody who did not convert to Islam, other than Christians or Jews, who merely had to pay a heavy tax and who lad less civil rights than Muslims. If anybody once converted, reverted to their former religion they were killed.
During later years when the caliphate was up for grabs the various factions would often persecute minority religions in pursuit of consolidating political power.
Remember that before the Islamic expansion into the Levant and eastward across north Africa, many religions lived in relative peace with each other. Due to the complete upset of the previous balance, one faction, Christians, raised armies to re-establish the status quo anti -- military-political-religious ventures that became known as crusades. Eventually the crusades devolved into the same savagery that the Islamic expansion became, resulting in periodic slaughter from one side or the other for several centuries.
Curiously, the people of those areas, especially the levant, if left alone, tended to get along rather well despite religious, ethnic, political, social, and economic differences.