What are we to make of the glaring contradiction between the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) and the many other verses that call for war, slavery, and death to those who refuse to submit to Islam (9:5, et al)—to say nothing of the militant behavior of the prophet of Allah, Muhammad? This is the question Stephen M. Kirby examines in his new book, Islam’s Militant Prophet: Muhammad and Forced Conversion to Islam.
Rather than offer speculations or cite nearly 1,400 years of Islamic history that is heavy laden with forced conversions, Kirby answers the question in an objective and meticulous fashion—in a fashion that any Muslim will be hard pressed to counter: he focuses exclusively on the career of Muhammad, from its beginnings in 610 till his death in 632, as recorded in Islam’s primary sources, the Koran and Hadith, and as understood or interpreted by Islam’s most authoritative scholars, such as Ibn al-Kathir. Along the way, readers are provided useful explanations—again, directly from Islam’s learned scholars themselves—of arcane or misunderstood doctrines, such as abrogation, which is essential for any exegesis.
The long and short of it all?
The command of “no compulsion in Islam” was a unique command that had doctrinal authority for only a little over two years. It was abrogated both by the Sunnah and the Koran. Its short lifetime was preceded and followed by commands that non-Muslims were to be given the option of converting to Islam, fighting to the death, or, at times, paying the Jizyah. Muhammad was indeed the militant prophet of a militant religion that supported forced conversions to Islam.
Before reaching this conclusion, Kirby offers example after example of Muhammad giving non-Muslims—pagan Quraysh, Jews, and Christians, almost always people who had no quarrel with him aside from rejecting his prophetic authority—two choices: convert or suffer the consequences, the latter of which often manifested as wholesale massacres.
It’s also noteworthy that, according to Islam’s earliest histories, sincere belief in Muhammad’s prophet claims is lacking. The overwhelming majority of those who converted to Islam did so either under duress—literally to save their heads—or else to be part of Muhammad’s “winning team.” Conversion was the price for one man, Malik bin Auf, to get his kidnapped family back from Muhammad.
Insincere, coerced conversion is especially evident in Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca. When Islam’s prophet, at the head of a vast army—which had already put several tribes to the sword for refusing to convert—was approaching the polytheists of Mecca, the latter were warned: “Embrace Islam and you shall be safe. You have been surrounded on all sides. You are confronted by a hard case that is beyond your power.” When the leader of Mecca, Abu Sufyan—who had long mocked Muhammad as a false prophet—approached the Muslim camp to parley, he too was warned: “‘Embrace Islam before you lose your head.’ Abu Sufyan then recited the confession of faith and thus he entered Islam.” The Meccans soon followed suit.
Rather tellingly, the Muslim historians who recorded these non-Muslim conversions to Islam saw no contradiction between the coerced and insincere nature of the conversions and the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion.” For instance, in Muslim historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) multivolume history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving their women and children. After each incident, the pious Muslim historian concludes with, “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.” (One can almost detect in inaudible “Allahu Akbar.”)
Aside from sporadic bouts of persecution, the entrenched dhimmi system (see Koran 9:29)—itself a form of coercion—saw the increasingly impoverished Christians slowly convert to Islam over the centuries, so that today they remain a steadily dwindling minority. In The Arab Conquest of Egypt, Alfred Butler, a 19th century historian writing before the age of political correctness, highlights this “vicious system of bribing the Christians into conversion”:
[A]lthough religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation, it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory. For a religious freedom which became identified with social bondage and with financial bondage could have neither substance nor vitality. As Islam spread, the social pressure upon the Copts became enormous, while the financial pressure at least seemed harder to resist, as the number of Christians or Jews who were liable for the poll-tax [jizya] diminished year by year, and their isolation became more conspicuous. . . . [T]he burdens of the Christians grew heavier in proportion as their numbers lessened [that is, the more Christians converted to Islam, the more the burdens on the remaining few grew]. The wonder, therefore, is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream, nor have all the storms of thirteen centuries moved their faith from the rock of its foundation.
In short, the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” seems more of an assertion, a statement of fact, than a command for Muslims to uphold. After all, it is true: no Muslim can make a non-Muslim say the words “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” But that doesn’t mean they can’t enslave, extort, plunder, torture, and slaughter those who refuse.
The Doctrine of Demons….
NUMBERS chapter 31 is The Doctrine of Demons!
Islam is an Invader or the Middle East. When Christ was born the entire Middle East was Jewish. 300 years later Islam was born in Mecca when a bright light was seen in the sky and a Meteorite was found in the desert and announced to be a sign from God. From then on people were forced to convert to Islam or Die.
PUT DOWN THE COMICS AND LEARN REAL HISTORY:
There were many religions in the Middle East at the birth of Jesus, 30 BC and Muhammad was born 600 years later!
No such thing as forced conversions ever happened in history, these are all lies and propaganda by the enemies of Islam because if forced conversions had been true, then there would be no hindu in India, no Christian in large parts of Europe, no Christians or Jews in the Middle East, and on and on, secondly, so if there were forced conversions, when the sword was removed people should go back to their original religions, they did not, why? I mean look at the USSR, after the fall of communism, churches and temples and mosques started to flourish. These are lies, the conversions would only last until the sword is there, once the sword is gone, people would go back…Islam spread through its highest moral and Gods law, its is the word of our Creator, the truth is clear from falsehood as the Quran says, it needs no help.
truthseeka, you are truly a fool. You deserve to be a Muslim.
Your ‘logic’ is totally illogical.
THERE IS NO LOGIC IN ISLAM, JUST BLIND JINN POSSESSED FANATICISM.
YOU are a moronic cretin and all you are doing here is FARTING your ignorance!
REAL ISLAM & JIHAD
The Truth about ISLAM: in its own words
In the words of the prophet Muhammad.
Bukhari:V4B52N220
“Allah’s Apostle said, ‘I have been made victorious with terror. The treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand.”
Bukhari:V4B52N260
“The Prophet said, ‘If a Muslim discards his religion, kill him.”
Bukhari:V7B67N427
“The Prophet said, ‘If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.”
EARLY HISTORY OF PEACEFUL ISLAM:
Islamic leaders and politicians constantly tell us in English that “Islam is a peaceful religion”, but one can’t help wondering if they would say it quite so often if they were absolutely sure it was true.
SOME RECORDED MASSACRES OF MUSLIM HISTORY:
On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughtered its 5,000 inhabitants. The riot was apparently incited by Muslim preachers that had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power. Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated
a Muslim woman in “an offensive manner.” The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco. Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were
massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300
hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.
Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Qur’an’s purported prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344). Some escaped, but the Jews of Arabia who remained were pretty much completely wiped out. Islamic revisionists claim they were killed because they were literally asking for it, is their apologetic rubbish propaganda. These Islamic revisionists (Islamaniacs) claim that the Jews demanded it as per their own law. I mean that’s like the Nazis claiming they were only accommodating the Jews demand to get warm by the ovens. Like Goebbels said, the bigger the lie, the easier it is for others to believe it.
In the violent, nearly 1,400-year relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, Jihad and Dhimmitude were firmly established by the 8th century.
Perhaps the pre-eminent Islamic scholar in history, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), summarized five centuries of prior Muslim jurisprudence with regard to the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad:
In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force… The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense… Islam is under obligation to gain
power over other nations.
Between 1894-96, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 (Dhimmi) Christian Armenians, followed by the first formal genocide of the 20th century, in 1915, at which time they slaughtered an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians. Contemporary accounts from European diplomats confirm that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal Jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of Dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy. Regarding the 1894-96 massacres, the Turkish-speaking interpreter of the British embassy reported:
…[The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the “rayah” [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their Mussulman [Muslim]
masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians…”
The scholar Bat Yeor confirms this reasoning, noting that the Armenian quest for reforms invalidated their “legal status,” which involved a “contract” (i.e., with their Muslim Turkish rulers).
This …breach…restored to the umma [the Muslim community] its initial right to kill the subjugated minority [the dhimmis], [and] seize their property…
there is no forced conversion in Islam. people usually cherry pick Quran verses to decide and interpret according to their own thinking. At the end of the this is book of God. if some one want to follow the right path, he should do for him or herself. please don’t give favor to Islam or Muslim.
There’s NO cherries in the Quran and neither are there any in the Jewish Bible!
If you Read the Book of Numbers chapter 31, you will see where Muhammad got his inspiration.
MUHAMMAD: THE PROPHET LIKE UNTO MOSES
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A PROPHET LIKE UNTO MOSES:
MUHAMMAD WAS A WAR CRIMINAL, JUST LIKE MOSES
VIOLENCE IN THE QURAN:
Quran (2:244) – “Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah Heareth and knoweth all things.”
Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”
Not only does this verse establish that violence can be virtuous, but it also contradicts the myth that fighting is intended only in self-defense, since the audience was obviously not under
attack at the time. From the Hadith, we know that this verse was narrated at a time that Muhammad was actually trying to motivate his people into raiding merchant caravans for loot.
Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”
Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”. This speaks directly of polytheists, yet it also includes Christians, since they believe in the Trinity (ie. what Muhammad incorrectly believed to be ‘joining companions to Allah’).
Quran (4:74) – “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” These Muslims are killed in battle as they attempt to inflict death and destruction for the cause of Allah. This is the theological basis for today’s suicide bombers
You need to Google:
HISTORY OF PALESTINE
614-1096 C.E.
From the Accession of the Mahomedans to that of the Europeans.
By Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, 1850
COME ON!
Either the “gods” are DEAD or they don’t give 2 f–ks what goes on in the world!
In the TANACH/Old Testament, a poor bugger got sapped for attempting to steady the tabernacle and you are trying to tell people – GOD IS LOVE, while he watched men, women and children being butchered for 3000 years and YOUR “GOD OF LOVE” did NOTHING??????????????
Get the f–k outta here!
You sound aggressive and rude. Your language is disrespectful.