Quote:
Originally Posted by troung
The Arab invaders of the Middle East avoided forced conversion of the entire population for numerous reasons - the small size of their own forces (some historians put it at some 20-30 thousand), leaving well enough alone and of course the most important, money. Taxes mixed with the somewhat simpler one god issue (ever wonder why they say there is no god but god so much - its a slam at the trinity) got it spread in the Middle East after the conquest. And the Ummayads problem with converts got them overthrown. There was initially an issue over converting anyone. Indonesia and Malaysia picked it up off of trade. And heads were cut in India. And of course there are still Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in the Middle East. Treatment of religious groups differed from dynasty to dynasty but if they all had some official policy to make them all Muslims by the sword then there would not have been a single non-Muslim there today. So the spread was mixed.
And how did Christianity spread? You will find plenty of headless corpses as well as people who thought Christ was the man.
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Great post troung. Ain't history awkward.
Just a small point - I'm pretty sure 'there is no God but God' had little to do with the Trinity, at least in the beginning. The major religious opposition to Islam when first formulated were the polytheistic religions of the Arabian peninsular. Initially Mohammed was also keen to be accepted as part of Judaism - another 'one god only' religion. I think these probably had a stronger impact on the 'there is no god but god' formulation.
When Islam began to expand it hit 2 major religions - Byzantine Christianity & a sort of renewed Zoroastrianism. The latter looked a great deal more polytheistic than the former - part of the reason (though only part) why Zoroastrianism was so comprehensively driven from the former Persian empire.
Byzantine Christians were a different matter. Eastern rite churches have never really accepted the Trinity & the veneration of Mary. There was, by all accounts, a great deal of resentment at the Latin Church for effectively forcing these ideas onto their eastern cousins. This also had an ethnic component of sorts. Byzantine Christians saw themselves as inheritors of the Greek philosophical traditions, and condisidered themselves the intellectual superiors of Latin Christians.
This meant that the first Christians encountered in large numbers by Islam were not particularly enthusuastic defenders of the Trinity. It also meant that in those Christian areas Islam first conquered there was a ready-made audience for the 'there is no god but god' message. This helped Islam gain a large base of believers with conversion that they could not have gained so easily by force. The 'there is no god but god' message may heve been emphasised to help play on Eastern Rite resentment at the Latin Church, but the message pre-dated contact with committed Trinitarian communities.