On Bernard Lewis, I would urge anyone who has not done so already to read his essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” IIRC, it was first published in The Atlantic in the mid-90s. Read post 9/11 it seems eeriely prophetic.

Early Arab conquerers were not in the business of “convert or die” outside of Arabia. That choice would be offered to pagans, but others could live under Muslim rule provided they cringed properly and paid the high poll tax, the jizya “with humiliation”. They signed agreements with communities of non-Muslims for this, who then becoma dhimmis because the contract was called a dhimma in Arabic. In fact early caliphs were a bit discouraging of conversion since at first Muslims did not pay taxes while dhimmis did, so every conversion lowered their revenues. Eventually though many converted to avoid the social and political disadvantages of being dhimmis, as well as the jizya. Richard Fletcher, in his book “Moorish Spain”, discusses research that shows the maximum conversio rate was around a century and a half after the Moorish conquest there.

Medieval Islam was more advanced and economically developed than Medieval Christendom. Greek philosophers were translated from by Eastern Christians Greek into Aramaic, then into Arabic, then Latin Christians translated them into Latin. The result was what has been called the 12th Century Renaissance. Great thinkers like Aquinas worked to integrate Greek thinking, especially Aristotle to Christianity, based on the transmitted works from the Muslim world. Muslim and Jewish scholars had already done such work (Avicenna and Maimonides were two of them)

This Muslim advantage started to change in the early modern period, although it did not become apparent until the late 17th Century. Over the next three centuries Europe hammered the Muslim world back in a steady advance that culminated in the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the elimination of the last caliph by Ataturk in 1924. It was a reversal of the previous Arab and Turkish advances that hammered Christendom for so many centuries, and the Muslims did not like being on the receiving end, any more than Christians had liked it previously. Muslims have been trying to recover their superior place (which they think is natural) ever since then. With the rise of radical Islam over the last few decades the persecution of non-Muslims in Muslim lands has gotten worse, probably worse than it has ever been before. And of course the Jews have been driven out of the Muslim world almost completely.

Parenthetically there was a little enclave of non-Muslims in Afghanistan up until the 1890s. The Afghans called it Kaffiristan. It was in the northeast. Probably under the influence of Wahhabism (which has influenced Afghanistan and Indian Islam since the early 1800s) the Afghans made a jihad against the non-Muslims, in about 1895 I think. then there were no more non-Muslims, so it was remaned Nuristan (Land of Light or of Enlightenment). So this jihad revival has been going on for some time.

It is our misfortune that we are living through one of Islam’s periodic reformations, where a bunch of fanatics from out of the desert somewhere decide to purify Islam of culture more advanced than memorizing the Qur’an, and wage jihad while they are about it. With oil wealth and modern communications and weaponry the fanatics are able to make a bigger mess than they did in the past, and be a pain in the rear to more of us than ever before. This coincides with a dramatic loss of civilizational self-confidence in the West. These movements tend to burn out in a century or so, and the descendents of the fanatics are corrupted into civilized life again, but that is no consolation to those of us who have to endure it.

If you want to find out more, and if you have not read them already, I recommend books by Bernard Lewis, especially “What Went Wrong”, “The Crisis In Islam”, and “The Middle East: A History of the Last 2,000 Years”. His little book on “The Assassins” is also very interesting. For Arab/Muslim political culture a good book is David Pryce-Jones’ “The Closed Circle”.

Excuse me for the length of this comment post.

I think the latter is actually more common among “progressives.”

Wish I had got to hear it.

More of the same I reckon.

Give the muslims a chance. Just give them everything they want, and they promise to only kill those Jews in Israel. Er, I mean Palestine…..

It’s odd….

When muslims FIRST came to “power” they were a war mongering, and conquering people. You converted to islam or died.

Then when they got their butts handed to them islam became a religion of peace….

Suddenly after oil is discovered, and the middle east becomes “important” islam returns to it’s roots as a war mongering conquering, convert or die cult.

How can a book that reads “Infidels are to be converted or KILLED.” be ANY kind of religion of peace?