Converting To Muslim Quotes

He shook his head, but I kept flattering him, telling him how fine his beard was, how fair his skin was (ha!), how it was obvious from his nose and forehead that he wasn't some pig herd who had converted, but a true-blue Muslim who had flown here on a magic carpet all the way from Mecca, and he grunted with satisfaction

The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.

Whether most Muslims are peaceable is irrelevant. The fact is that fanatics rule Islam now & act-out what the Qur'an truly says ...maul, march, & murder every Infidel if they won't convert!

Some Christians pretend that Christianity was not established by the sword; but of what period of time do they speak? It was impossible that twelve men could begin with the sword: they had not the power; but no sooner were the professors of Christianity sufficiently powerful to employ the sword than they did so, and the stake and faggot too; and Mahomet could not do it sooner. By the same spirit that Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant (if the story be true) he would cut off his head, and the head of his master, had he been able. Besides this, Christianity grounds itself originally upon the [Hebrew] Bible, and the Bible was established altogether by the sword, and that in the worst use of it — not to terrify, but to extirpate. The Jews made no converts: they butchered all. The Bible is the sire of the [New] Testament, and both are called the word of God. The Christians read both books; the ministers preach from both books; and this thing called Christianity is made up of both. It is then false to say that Christianity was not established by the sword.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam—that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

From this base in the Maghreb (as the Arabs called North Africa), the Muslim force first made war on the desert-dwelling Berbers, many of whom had long ago converted to Judaism.

If a Muslim renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death.

Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world! By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior. The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.

Hamid notes that the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that this verse means “that Muslims must fight non-Muslims and offer them the following choices: Convert to Islam, pay a humiliating tax called jizyah or be killed.” Indeed, he adds, “A basic search of almost ALL approved interpretations for the Quran supports the same violent conclusion. The 25 leading approved Quran Interpretations (commentaries)—that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Quran—unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse.”15

The Afghanis converted from Buddhism and some of the greatest Muslims came out of that Buddhist tradition. In fact Balkh was a center for Buddhist logic and those logicians became Muslim and introduced interestingly enough into Islamic theology some Buddhist logical formations that dont exist in Greek logic. Greek logic does not have a "neither A nor B" type scenario whereas Nagarjunian logic which is Buddhist logic does. In traditional Islamic theology you have situations where they do have that "neither A nor B". [...] I can't say "definitely" but I really believe that it does come out of the influence that the Buddhist logicians had on Islam. I actually wrote a paper “how the Buddhists saved Islam” which was about that but somebody said [...] [do not submit it] as you will get too much flak. (audio)

Porcophilia can also be used for oppressive and repressive purposes. In medieval Spain, where Jews and Muslims were compelled on pain of death and torture to convert to Christianity, the religious authorities quite rightly suspected that many of the conversions were not sincere. Indeed, the Inquisition arose partly from the holy dread that secret infidels were attending Mass—where of course, and even more disgustingly, they were pretending to eat human flesh and drink human blood, in the person of Christ himself. Among the customs that arose in consequence was the offering, at most events formal and informal, of a plate of charcuterie. Those who have been fortunate enough to visit Spain, or any good Spanish restaurant, will be familiar with the gesture of hospitality: literally dozens of pieces of differently cured, differently sliced pig. But the grim origin of this lies in a constant effort to sniff out heresy, and to be unsmilingly watchful for giveaway expressions of distaste. In the hands of eager Christian fa-natics, even the toothsome jamón Ibérico could be pressed into service as a form of torture.

A newly converted Trinidad African Muslim, identifying with and being inspired by a Hollywood-made fantasy of a Libyan revolutionary being played by a white Italian-American actor, while engaged in an act of insurrection against his own freely-elected government in Trinidad, was surreal.

Dad’s church required so little of me. It was easy to be a Christian. The only affirmative teachings I remember drawing from church were that I shouldn’t cheat on my wife and that I shouldn’t be afraid to preach the gospel to others. So I planned a life of monogamy and tried to convert other people, even my seventh-grade science teacher, who was Muslim.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world.

If anything, the earliest Muslims were rather ambivalent about winning converts at all. Their hesitation owed to several factors, some ideological, others practical. For one, many early Muslims saw their religion as a special monotheism for the Arab people, and therefore, as we have seen, converts had to both embrace the Muslim faith and become clients of an Arab tribe. Naturally, tribal leaders looked warily upon non-Arabs who embraced the new religion.

If we suggest that it is okay to make fun of everything except certain aspects of Islam because Muslims are much more sensitive than the rest of the population, isn’t that discrimination? Shouldn’t we treat the second largest religion in France exactly as we treat the first? It’s time to put an end to the revolting paternalism of the white, middle-class, “leftist” intellectual trying to coexist with these “poor, subliterate wretches.” “'I’m educated; obviously I get that 'Charlie Hebdo' is a humor newspaper because, first, I’m very intelligent, and second, it’s my culture. But you—well, you haven’t quite mastered nuanced thinking yet, so I’ll express my solidarity by fulminating against Islamaphobic cartoons and pretending not to understand them. I will lower myself to your level to show you that I like you. And if I need to convert to Islam to get even closer to you, I’ll do it!” These pathetic demagogues just have a ravenous need for recognition and a formidable domination fantasy to fulfill.

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

Whoever believes in the myth of ‘peaceful coexistence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors’ should reread the stories of the burned convents and monasteries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian or Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems. He should ponder on the crucifixions of Cordoba, the hangings of Granada, the beheadings of Toledo and Barcelona, of Seville and Zamora. (The beheadings of Seville, ordered by Mutamid: the king who used those severed heads, heads of Jews and Christians, to adorn his palace). Invoking the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation or hanging or impalement. Ringing a bell, the same. Wearing green, the colour of Islam, also. And when a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside. To bow. And mind to the Jew or the Christian who dared react to the insults of a Muslim. As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam, not even encouraged to do so, do you know why they were not? Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes. Those who refused, on the contrary, did.

Julia, is everything all right?” her father said in a raspy voice. “It’s three in the morning, m’ija.” “I’m sorry. I have to talk to you; it’s something very important. Papá, Mamá, I’ve made a decision, and I wanted to share it with you. I’ve decided to convert to the Muslim religion.” “What?” Pilar screamed. “Are you out of your mind?” “Julia, what are you saying?” “I want to be a Muslim. I’ve even chosen a new Muslim name, Aliyah.” “Julia, are you drunk?” “No, Papá, I’m not drunk. I’ve thought about this for a very long time. I think it’s the right thing for me, a way to follow God.

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new ‘supertribe’ spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today. Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet. Islam and the New Millennium

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.

In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity. Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years. Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that. ... The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?

And mind you, Muslims would still regard this onslaught as essentially defensive—a defensive action against the aggressions of unbelief. If Muslims must fight until unbelief does not exist, the mere presence of unbelief constitutes sufficient aggression to commence hostilities. This is one of the foundations for the supremacist notion that Muslims must wage war against unbelievers until those unbelievers are either converted to Islam or subjugated under the rule of Islamic law, as verse 9:29 states explicitly. As Muhammad puts it in an Islamic tradition: “I have been commanded to fight against people, till they testify to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and believe in me (that) I am the messenger (from the Lord) and in all that I have brought. And when they do it, their blood and riches are guaranteed protection on my behalf except where it is justified by law, and their affairs rest with Allah.”16 Thus, if one does not accept Muhammad as a prophet, the sanctity of one’s life and possessions (“blood and riches”) is not guaranteed.

Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Allah. Hence, it is imperative to Islamize the nations within dar al-harb. There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel, and it has a sizeable non-Jewish minority. But there are fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

But the most remarkable aspect of India, and the one that defines it, is neither political nor economic, but religious: the coexistence of Hinduism and Islam. The presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. Between Islam and Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility. In one, the theology is rigid and simple; in the other, the variety of doctrines and sects induces a kind of vertigo. In one case, a creator god; in the other, the wheel of successive cosmic eras with its procession of gods and civilizations. India owes to Islam some sublime works of art, particularly in architecture and, to a lesser degree, in painting, but not a single new or original thought. . Hinduism is a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals; although it lacks missionaries, its power of assimilation is immense. It does not know conversion in the Christian or Muslim sense, but it practices, with great success, appropriation. Like an enormous metaphysical boa, Hinduism slowly and relentlessly digests foreign cultures, gods, languages, and beliefs. Hinduism does not convert individuals; it absorbs communities and tribes, their gods and rites.

On reading a translated copy of the covenant, Philip V was horrified. The Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, through his emissary, the viceroy of Islamic Granada, was extending to the Jewish people the hand of eternal peace and friendship. The gesture was occasioned by the recent discovery of the lost ark of the Old Testament and the stone tablets upon which God had etched the Law with His finger. Both were found in perfect condition in a ditch in the Sinai Desert and had awoken in the Muslims, who discovered them, a desire to be circumcised, convert to Judaism, and return the Holy Land to the Jews. However, since this would leave millions of Palestinian Muslims homeless, the King of Jerusalem wanted the Jews to give him France in return. The guilty homeowner Bananias told French authorities that after the Muslim offer, the Jews of France concocted the well-poisoning plot and hired the lepers to carry it out. After reading the translation and several corroborating documents, including a highly incriminating letter from the Muslim King of Tunisia, Philip ordered all Jews in France arrested for “complicity . . . to bring about the death of the people and the subjects of the kingdom.” Two years later, any Jewish survivors of the royal terror were exiled from the country.   The

Inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock proclaimed the mission of Islam, the truth of the new faith, and the surpassing of the old faith. These passages name Muhammad as the envoy of God, but they bless Jesus and acknowledge him as a prophet and messiah. They acknowledge blessings for the day when Jesus is raised up again but deny that he is the son of God. Is the mention of Jesus meant to include him in the Muslim pantheon and thus appeal to Christians? Or is the intention to refute the Christian doctrines of Jesus’s divinity and to convert them to Islam?

Then this Flemish convert, who is now the head of an influential Islamic organisation, praises the veil, criticises race-mixing in the name of a (morbid) Muslim puritanism and explains that Islam ‘cannot accept the division of the world into nations’. In other words, here is a frank profession of faith in the final objective of Islam, the Universal Caliphate, that is, the worldwide Islamic state.

Is faith just a human conception coming out of fear? As a matter of fact, the faithful people have lived in the most primitive civilizations as well as in the most recent times. Despite racism, bias, discrimination, genocide and even decimation of their native lands in some cases, the Muslims and Christian population alone would exceed 60% of the global population by 2050 as per Pew Research Centre. In UK alone, about 5,200 people convert to Islam every year. So, it is inappropriate to undermine conscious faithfulness by people who adopt faith even when it could result in bias, discrimination and racism.

Ash hadu an laa ilaaha illallaah he had written: There is no God but Allah wa ash hadu anna Muhammadan rasool-ullaah: And Muhammad is his Messenger. It was the Muslim shahādah, their most profound statement of faith. In some sects the recitation of this phrase was the first of the Five Pillars of Islam and was the only formal step required for non-Muslims to convert into the religion.

The second principle of ‘Umar’s settlement was that the conquered populations should be as little disturbed as possible. This meant that the Arab-Muslims did not, contrary to reputation, attempt to convert people to Islam.

It is, therefore, a travesty of truth to say that Islam enjoyed an empire in India for six centuries. What happened really was that Islam struggled for six centuries to conquer India for good, but failed in the final round in the face of stiff and continued Hindu resistance. Haji was not at all wrong when he mourned that the invincible armada of Hijaz which had swept over so many seas and rivers met its watery grave in the Ganges. Iqbal also wrote his Shikwah in sorrowful remembrance of the same failure. In fact, there is no dearth of Muslim poets and politicians who weep over the defeat of Islam in India in the past, and who look forward to a reconquest of India in the future. Hindus have survived as a majority in their motherland not because Islam spared any effort to conquer and convert them but because Islamic brutality met more than its equal in Hindu tenacity for freedom.

Zevi, a seventeenth-century Jewish teacher who claimed to be Messiah but who converted to Islam after he was captured by hostile Muslim forces. Instead of abandoning their beliefs, a number of Zevi’s followers rationalized how he had only ‘temporarily converted’ or was ‘destroying Islam from within.

Of all the Balkan subject peoples, the Albanians were most inclined to convert to Islam. The majority of converts, however, were men, whilst women often retained their Christian beliefs even when married to Muslims, and were a factor in maintaining goodwill between the members of the two faiths.9 At various times whole villages voluntarily renounced the religion of their forefathers for political advantage. The ability to gain a timar or avoid donating a precious healthy son to the devshirme were but two of many reasons for abandoning Christianity. The majority of conversions took place in the lowlands, around the Shkumbi river, where direct Ottoman pressure could most easily be exerted. Amongst the Albanians of Kosova there appears to have been a far greater readiness to accept Islam, perhaps because of the pressure of their close proximity to the Serbs, who by the 1830s had achieved their own autonomous state. Albanians who wished to retain their Christian faith after the Ottoman conquest often found it difficult to compete with those who had converted. To make their already difficult lives easier, therefore, many Albanians gradually adopted at least the outer signs of the Islamic faith, thus obtaining such privileges as the right to bear arms.

The first Muslims to reach India were not the warriors who followed Mohamed Bin Kasim to Sind (A.D. 712). Muslim sailors and traders had visited India and settled on the coast of Kerala much earlier. The first Muslims in India were the newly converted Arab traders of Muscat and Ormuz who came and made their homes on the Malabar coast.

Among the more important letters written by Gandhi in the first half of 1926 was one to his son Manilal. Still based in Natal, running the Phoenix Ashram, Manilal had fallen in love with a girl named Fatima Gool, whose parents, based in Cape Town, were also of Gujarati descent, but Muslim rather than Hindu. Fatima loved Manilal too, and was even amenable to the idea of converting to Hinduism. When Manilal wrote to his father about the relationship, Gandhi conveyed his strong disagreement, writing to his son that 'what you desire is contrary to dharma. If you stick to Hinduism and Fatima follows Islam it will be like putting two swords in one sheath; or you both may lose your faith. And then what should be your children’s faith?... It is not dharma, only adharma if Fatima agrees to conversion just for marrying you. Faith is not a thing like a garment which can be changed to suit our convenience. For the sake of dharma a person shall forgo matrimony, forsake his home, why, even lay down his life; but for nothing may faith be given up. May not Fatima have meat at her father’s? If she does not, she has as good as changed her religion.' Gandhi continued: ‘Nor is it in the interests of our society to form this relationship. Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu–Muslim question. Intercommunal marriages are no solution to this problem. You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son.’ Manilal seems to have asked his father to speak to his mother on his behalf. ‘I cannot ask for Ba’s permission,’ said Gandhi. ‘She will not give it. Her life will be embittered for ever'.

This was indeed the case, especially among the non-Muslim populations. The current tensions across the Sahel can partly be traced to this history: people equate the rise of jihadism among the Fulani with them seeking to re-establish their empire and forcibly convert Christians.

The Spanish dictator, General Franco–who was widely believed to be descended from Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the Fifteenth Century–allowed the emigrants unimpeded transit. Ships crowded with Moroccan Jews travelled again and again, under cover of darkness, from Atlantic and Mediterranean ports in North Africa to France.

Raymond Lull, was the first Westerner to devise and carry out a full-fledged mission strategy among Muslims. Lull followed his own advice that Europeans learn Arabic in order to communicate the gospel in Islamic regions. His life ended during a fourth mission trip to Muslims, when again his actions matched his words. “Missionaries will convert the world by preaching, but also through the shedding of tears and blood and with great labour, and through a bitter death.”[48]

Forgiveness,

The Blasphemy of Reason To understand the relationship between Islamic and scientific modes of thought, it's useful to contrast the emergence of Islam with that of Christianity. In its first four centuries, Christianity germinated gradually within the Roman Empire, with many of its leading theologians converting to the new religion only after having spent their formative years immersed in the classical learning of ancient Greece. Islam, by contrast, spread through military conquest, expanding mostly through conversion of conquered peoples. As a result, even when Muslim rulers welcomed classical Greek knowledge, it was perceived as something alien. Tellingly, Greek science and natural philosophy were known throughout Islam as the “foreign sciences,” in contrast to the “Islamic sciences,” such as the study of the Quran, which were considered to hold the highest place in Muslim life.9 In the early years of Islamic civilization, various groups vigorously competed for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community. Those who actively pursued the Greek classical tradition of knowledge were known as the faylasuf or “philosophers.” Another group, taking a more mystical approach to Islam, were the Sufis. However, the two principal groups that emerged were the Ash'arites, traditionalists who believed in the primacy of Islamic faith, and the Mu'tazilites, who believed in a rational explication of the Quran.10 The Mu'tazilites were devout followers of Islam, while applying rational thought to their interpretation of theology. When passages in the Quran referred to “the face of God” or described God sitting on his throne, the Mu'tazilites argued that these descriptions should be interpreted metaphorically. It seemed to them equally valid to use reason as theology to make important distinctions in their lives, such as between good and evil. The Ash'arites, on the other hand, based their viewpoint on the fundamental presumption that the Quran was the direct word of God transmitted through Muhammad. As such, they viewed the Quran as something eternal and uncreated, an indivisible part of God: it wasn't just the word of God; it literally was God. How, then, to interpret statements about God's face or God sitting on his throne? The Ash'arite position was to take these statements literally, and if reason were unable

Certainly, less than 1 per cent of non-Muslim Africans (outside Ethiopia) had been converted to Christianity by the early 1880s. It was largely because of this relative lack of initial success that European missionaries turned more and more to their European governments for assistance to help change African society and make it more amenable to missionary enterprise.

Islam is absolutely sweeping through the inner cities, a very sad commentary on the discontinuity and disunity of the American church. One Muslim authority estimates that by the year 2020 most American urban centers will be predominantly Muslim.11 But as the number of conversions increases, the face of the Muslim convert is changing as well.

BALANCING THE FACTS Now the point here is not to paint an overly dismal picture. I also need to point out that Muslims are converting to Christianity all over the world. Many Muslims repeatedly make the claim that no Muslim ever leaves Islam. This claim is refuted without much effort. One Muslim sheikh recently claimed that in Africa alone there are over six million Muslim converts to Christianity annually. That would break down to about 667 an hour, or sixteen thousand a day. From January of 2003 to the middle of 2004, the ministry of German evangelist Reinhardt Bonnke saw over ten million Africans make decisions to follow Jesus. A large percentage of those who made these decisions were Muslims. In fact, Muslims from all over the world are making decisions to become followers of Jesus.17 Many of these decisions follow a spiritual dream or a vision.18

You can live amicably with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is "I will not tolerate you'? How are you going to have unity with these people. Certainly, Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be arrived at on the basis that the Muslims will go on converting Hindus while the Hindus shall not convert any Mohamedan.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

The Islam I live speaks of love, The Islam I live is gentle as dove. The Islam I live claims no convert, The Islam I live warms all in hug. The Islam I live transcends doctrine, The Islam I live transcends the mosque. The Islam I live holds no faith foreign, The Islam I live finds good in every walk.

The Islam I Live (Sufi Sonnet 1640) The Islam I live speaks of love, The Islam I live is gentle as dove. The Islam I live claims no convert, The Islam I live warms all in hug. The Islam I live transcends doctrine, The Islam I live transcends the mosque. The Islam I live holds no faith foreign, The Islam I live finds good in every walk. The Islam I live is a walking azaan, living call to tolerance and acceptance. Muslim poet am I, from the valley of love, The Islam I live is the end of violence. The Islam I live is an act of peace, a promise of love, in a world of malice.

• I am now involved in planting churches in Muslim nations and I have noticed that sometimes, in the eagerness to see new converts added (because, to be frank, in many such places there are very few), foundational issues are not always thoroughly dealt with in those first new converts. For example, the issue of fear, while very understandable, needs to be addressed in order for a strong faith community to be established. • In all cultures there are strongholds associated with that particular culture. These cultural strongholds and other worldview issues need to be dealt with early on in the life of a new church, as we shall see later.

Thein Pe was the political writer par excellence. His very first work of fiction wove a nationalist message into a romance partly inspired by Romeo and Juliet.52 Khin Myo Chit is the story of a Burmese Muslim girl who is unable to give up her religion to marry the young Buddhist she loves. Nor can she ask the young man to convert to her religion as this would have an adverse effect on his nationalist activities. The couple decide to part and the girl dies of a broken heart, leaving a letter urging the young man to carry on with the struggle for Burma’s independence. Thein

works of Maryam Jamilah, a convert to Islam from Judaism. She had chosen to live as a co-wife to an assistant to Maulana Maududi, the prominent Pakistani commentator on the Quran. Jamilah argued that the Islamic version of gender equity greatly benefits society. Others, like Fatima Mernissi, had previously argued that Islam clearly discriminated against women. Look at polygamy, wife-beating and the segregation of women, she implored.

Killing "unbelievers" has been part of — of course not all of — Islam since its inception. Within 10 years of Muhammad's death Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.

Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation, but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E., will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina. There

Many scholars believe the Arab-Israeli conflict did not start out as a war between religions, but as a territorial dispute between two competing groups—Jews and Arabs—with nationalist claims and aspirations, and that religion was one of the characteristics that identified the competing nationalist groups. I will agree that that is what it might look like on the surface. But for these two particular groups whose religion, at least for the Muslims, is a significant daily part of their lives, it is hard to believe that religious beliefs do not influence their thinking and aspirations. All you have to do is read a few scriptures from the Koran about the Jews and hear the holy book recited weekly in every mosque and you’ll begin to understand where this resentment is coming from, regardless of what country this hate verbiage is coming out of. The major difference between the religions is that Judaism does not aspire to convert the world as Islam does. Jews can live within the context of a different society without seeking converts. Jews do not go to temple every Friday and read that God’s will is victory over all Muslims. They do not read that all Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Allah, which is what Muslims teach about Jews in their mosques. Muslims are out to convert everyone. Once they have the upper hand, they want to run the whole show and subject everyone to their own rules.

There were 1.6 billion Muslims in the world as of 2010—roughly 23% of the global population—according to a Pew Research Center estimate. But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion after Christianity, it is the fastest growing one. The growth of Islam ought to be concerning for liberals. Here is a religion that sanctions forcing women into submission, a religion that sanctions the execution of gays, a religion that sanctions the killing of non-believers. And they’re spreading. Islam preys on the most vulnerable in society, offering them a sense of higher purpose. It’s no wonder gingers (ahem Lindsay Lohan) convert to Islam in such high numbers. They also have especially high conversion rates in jails,

Quite so: the choice, as laid out by Muhammad himself, is conversion, subjugation as dhimmis, or the sword.49 Qutb accordingly denies any contradiction between the injunction that “there is no compulsion in religion” and the imperative to fight until “religion is for Allah” (2:193). He says that “Islam has not used force to impose its beliefs.” Rather, jihad’s “main objective has been the establishment of a stable society in which all citizens, including followers of other religious creeds, may live in peace and security”—although not with legal equity, as 9:29 emphasizes. For Qutb, that “stable society” is the “Islamic social order,” the establishment of which is a chief objective of jihad.50 In this light, the verse saying there is no compulsion in religion and the one ordering Muslims to fight until religion is for Allah go together without any trouble. Muslims must fight until “religion is for Allah,” but refrain from forcing anyone to accept Allah’s religion. They enforce subservience upon those who refuse to convert, such that many of them subsequently convert to Islam so as to escape the humiliating and discriminatory regulations of dhimmitude—but when they convert, they do so freely.

Who’s that?” Barney asked. Pedro answered, having returned his attention to his daughter’s suitor. “Father Alonso,” he said. “He’s the new inquisitor.” Carlos, Ebrima, and Betsy appeared alongside Barney, moving forward to get a closer look at the preacher. Alonso began by speaking of the shivering fever that had killed hundreds of citizens during the winter. It was a punishment from God, he said. The people of Seville had to learn a lesson from it, and examine their consciences. What terrible sins had they committed, to make God so angry? The answer was that they had tolerated heathens among them. The young priest became heated as he enumerated the blasphemies of heretics. He spat out Jew, Muslim, Protestant as if the very words tasted foul in his mouth. But who was he talking about? Barney knew the history of Spain. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella—“the Catholic monarchs”—had given the Jews of Spain an ultimatum: convert to Christianity or leave the country. Later the Muslims had been offered the same brutal choice. All synagogues and mosques had since been turned into churches. And Barney had never met a Spanish Protestant, to his knowledge.

Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources. As well as exotic produce like spices, peacocks, pearls, diamonds, ivory and ebony, the ‘Hindu country’ was renowned for its skilled manufactures and its bustling commerce. India’s economy was probably one of the most sophisticated in the world. Guilds regulated production and provided credit; the roads were safe, ports and markets carefully supervised, and tariffs low. Moreover capital was both plentiful and conspicuous. Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments. Gold and silver had been accumulating long before the ‘golden Guptas’, and they continued to do so. Figures in the Mamallapuram sculptures and the Ajanta frescoes are as strung about with jewellery as those in the Sanchi and Amaravati reliefs. Divine images of solid gold are well attested and royal temples were rapidly becoming royal treasuries as successful dynasts endowed them with the fruits of their conquests. The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.

If large numbers of Hindus converted then the majority of Muslims were indigenous Hindus and cannot be regarded as alien.

Worldly success was a potent force in the growth of Islam, and in the shriveling of Christianity. That fact may be troubling to Christians, whose faith so often extols the triumph of the meek and humble while rejecting worldly success, and who are so familiar with the concept of defeat as the root of long-term victory. In practice, though, Christians often had used material successes as proofs of their faith. As we have seen, church writers pointed to miracles and healings to vouch for the power of Christ, and such events often explained important conversions. Though such claims continued to be made, they were increasingly outweighed by the obvious successes of Muslim states and armies. At several critical moments, Muslim victories proved enormously damaging to the Christian cause, from the early triumphs over the Byzantine Empire onward. As the early Islamic convert 'Ali Tabari explained, “[Muhammad’s] victory over the nations is also by necessity and by undeniable arguments a manifest sign of the prophetic office.”20 If God had not been on his side, how could Muhammad’s followers possibly have won such stunning victories over ancient empires?

As a Muslim author crowed a few years afterward, Christianity was self-evidently the religion of losers: “[Islam] has blotted out their strong and well defended kingdoms, and their lofty and towering fortifications, and has turned them into refugees in hiding.” When Latin Christians invited Kublai Khan to convert, he scoffed: “How do you wish me to make myself a Christian? You see Christians in these parts are so ignorant that they do nothing and have no power.”21

During the early Islamic period between the 7th and 11th centuries, Bethlehem came under the dominion of the Muslim caliphates, and in 634, Modestus, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, failed to celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem for the first time in three centuries.[69] During this time, parts of the southern transept of Justinian’s church were converted to be used as prayer areas for Muslims.[70] Bethlehem was an important site for Muslims, who considered it the birthplace of Issa, the Islamic equivalent of Jesus who was seen as a prophet for the coming of Muhammad. In 1009, Caliph Hakim ordered that Christian monuments and structures around the Holy Land be destroyed, but the Church of the Nativity managed to survive this widespread destruction

Let’s begin with ISIS. As of the writing of this book, the terrorists of ISIS—once known as al-Qaeda in Iraq—control territory as large as an entire nation-state, with much of northern Syria and northern Iraq under its control. It is threatening Baghdad and the Kurdish capital city of Erbil, and it recently controlled (and still threatens) a poorly constructed dam near Mosul (one of Iraq’s largest cities). If that dam is blown, it would drown an entire region in a wall of water, killing hundreds of thousands. ISIS is brutal beyond imagination to anyone—Christian, Jew, Yazidi, and even Shiite Muslim—who is not aligned with its jihadist form of Sunni Islam. In Syria, ISIS has slaughtered Shiites, Christians, and Alawites (an obscure Islamic sect). In Iraq, it has done the same, giving Christians in conquered territories a chilling ultimatum: “Convert, leave your homes, or die.

The Islamic mindset is: if a Muslim is dwelling in nations or areas along with Kafir, then their death, along with the infidels, is permitted. Since 9/11, tens of thousands of Americans have converted to Islam (New York Times, October 21, 2001).

Before killing a kafir, an unbeliever/infidel, a Muslim must first invite the kafir to embrace Islam. Osama bin Laden has now done so, inviting Americans to convert to Islam. In addition, a Fatwa (a religious opinion on Islamic law) is necessary.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

Religion mattered at a deep level, which must help to explain why none of these people went over to Islam; but in most cases it did not direct their lives, nor did it prevent some of them from cultivating their connection with a powerful relative who was a Muslim convert. Whilst the fact that they were Catholics from one of Christendom’s frontier zones may have given them an enhanced sense of their Catholicism, the fact that they were Albanians, connected by language, blood and history to Ottoman subjects and Ottoman territory, gave them an ability to see things also from something more like an Ottoman perspective

The statement serves as the basis for what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery, the teaching that whatever Christians “discover,” they can take and use as they wish. It is breathtaking in its theological horror. Muslims (then called Saracens) and all other non-Christians are reduced to “enemies of Christ.” Christians, even as they plunder, enslave, and kill, count themselves friends of Christ by contrast. Christian global mission is defined as to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” non-Christians around the world, and to steal “all movable and immovable goods” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”—and not only them, but their descendants. And notice the stunning use of the word convert: “to convert them to his and their use and profit.

In August 2011, in distant Uganda, a Muslim father imprisoned and starved his fourteen-year-old daughter, Susan Ithungu, because she converted to Christianity.

[M]osques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions of Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors. In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagra, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizeable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, in as much as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.

Obviously, any Muslim who openly converts to Christianity and seeks to live as an acknowledged Christian is going to be seen as one who “openly commit[s] apostasy,” and when he talks to Muslims about Christianity he will be accused of proselytizing and blaspheming—for then he is perceived as “call[ing] for fitna, or voic[ing] harmful things against Allah and His Prophet.”26

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them.

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them. One of the husband’s best friends abducted and tortured him and beat his wife. “[One] should have the freedom to choose the religion one wishes to follow,” lamented the husband.36

Maryam Jameelah’s significance [lies] in the manner with which she articulates an internally consistent paradigm for [Islamic] revivalism’s rejection of the West,” her entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World reads. “In this regard, her influence far exceeds [that of] the Jamaat [e-Islami] and has been important in the development of revivalist thought across the Muslim world.

Vali Nasr, Mawdudi’s biographer and an authority on political Islam (also referred to as Islamic revivalism), describes Maryam Jameelah as broadly responsible for cementing the global cultural divide between Islam and the West.

Muslim sciences should not be viewed by the scholar as a mere forerunners of modern science but as an alternative. The contemporary science of the West and the sciences developed by the Muslims are totally different and conflict with each other in aims and ideals." ~Modern Technology and Dehumanization of Man

But most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empire’s inhabitants. China’s ruling class treated their country’s neighbours and its foreign subjects as miserable barbarians to whom the empire must bring the benefits of culture. The Mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon the emperor not in order to exploit the world, but in order to educate humanity. The Romans, too, justified their dominion by arguing that they were endowing the barbarians with peace, justice and refinement. The wild Germans and painted Gauls had lived in squalor and ignorance until the Romans tamed them with law, cleaned them up in public bathhouses, and improved them with philosophy. The Mauryan Empire in the third century BC took as its mission the dissemination of Buddha’s teachings to an ignorant world. The Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet’s revelation, peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary. The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.

proselytism can be disregarded: 1) when they are broken under duress—for example, a Muslim is threatened with torture and death if he does not curse Muhammad and apostatize from Islam (see Koran 3:28 and 16:106); or 2) as a stratagem of war, as when Muhammad permitted a Muslim to feign apostasy and to blaspheme his name to win the confidence of the poet Ka’b in order to assassinate him. Likewise, Muhammad once commanded Na’im bin Mas’ud, a young convert from a tribe that refused to submit to Muhammad, to conceal his new Muslim identity, go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with a perfidious “You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me”—only to betray them to Muhammad’s waiting jihadis.21

Consider the modern-day case of the Egyptian Muhammad Hegazy. Not only did he convert to Christianity, but he also took the unprecedented step of trying to update his government I.D. card to reflect his conversion. (In Egypt and many other Muslim countries, a person’s religion is indicated on his I.D.) Both family and clerics alike threatened him with death. Then in February 2008, a judge ruled that Hegazy “can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can’t convert”—in other words, he cannot rock the boat.25

Upon discovering the man’s conversion to Christianity, Boko Haram members invaded his home, kidnapped his two children and informed him that they were going to execute them in retribution for his disloyalty to Islam. Clutching his phone, the man heard the sound of the guns that murdered his children [emphasis added].”29 Islam’s anti-freedom laws target people of all or no religions. Many outspoken Muslim apostates in the West, for example, who never converted to Christianity, must fear execution should they ever fall into the hands of their former coreligionists.

in May 2011 in Algeria, a judge “stunned the Christian community” by sentencing Siaghi Krimo, a Muslim convert to Christianity (an apostate), to a five-year prison term and a fine of $200,000 Algerian dinars—even though prosecutors had only asked for a two-year imprisonment and a $50,000 dinar fine. Krimo’s crime was to give a CD about Christianity to a Muslim (proselytism), who later claimed the CD insulted Muslim prophet Muhammad (blasphemy).37 Even

On December 24, 2011—Christmas Eve—Muslims in Christian-majority Uganda threw acid on a church pastor outside his church, severely disfiguring him, blinding one eye and damaging the other. Pastor of the ten-thousand-strong Gospel Life International Pentecostal church, Umar Mulinde, formerly a Muslim, explained his ordeal: “I was attacked by a man who claimed to be a Christian. He called out to me shouting ‘pastor, pastor,’ and as I turned to see who he was, he poured acid which burnt part of my face. As I turned away from the attacker, another man poured the liquid on my back and ran away shouting ‘Allah Akbar.’” Mulinde originally “came from a strict Muslim family and his father was an imam.” Umar was the fifty-second child to be born to the polygamist Muslim leader. The son went on to become a sheikh himself before converting to Christianity in 1993,

It [Islam] likely began as an Arab monotheism, but empire catalyzed its contact with non-Arabs, who in due course converted, integrated themselves into Islamic polities, and eventually ruled them. As a result, Islam neither totally detached itself from its founders' ethnicity (as did Christianity) nor elevated its identity and language to exclusive status (as did Judaism). Instead, it ended up a hybrid, privileging its ethnic origins even as non-Arab Muslims began to outnumber Arab ones.

For example, “according to the Maldives Religious Unity Regulations, it is illegal in the Maldives to propagate any faith other than Islam or to engage in any effort to convert anyone to any religion other than Islam. It is also illegal to display in public any symbols or slogans belonging to any religion other than Islam, or creating interest in such articles.”16 Violating the Religious Unity Act carries stiff penalties—fines and imprisonment for two to five years. This is the position of a modern and moderate Muslim nation.

Since its founding in the seventh century, Islam has subjugated, converted, or killed hundreds of millions of people. The FBI maintains a global list of its most wanted global terrorists. Twenty-six out of the current twenty-eight member that compose this infamous group are connected to Islamic groups. Though Muslims make up roughly 25 percent of the world's population, they comprise 92.9 percent of terrorists on the FBI list.

Hindu girls were often reportedly kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam before being coerced into marrying Muslims.

Jews fled deep into the Sahara and lived there among the Berber tribes, some of whom they later converted to Judaism. Ironically, it was a Cyrenaican Jew, Mark–the St. Mark of the Gospels–who converted to Christianity and founded

In the Fifth Century, Yemen adopted Judaism as its religion. King Ab Karib As’ad, the ruler of the Himyarite kingdom, introduced the change after converting to Judaism himself under the influence of Jews at his court. Many south Arabian converts to Judaism followed; Jewish rule in Yemen lasted almost a hundred years.

Diagnosing this alleged antipathy of the Muslims, he elaborated: The Moslems in general and Indian Moslems in particular have not as yet grown out of the historical stage, of intense religiosity and the theological concept of state. Their theology and theocratical [sic] politics divide the human world into two groups only—The Moslem land and the enemy land. All lands which are either entirely inhabited by the Moslems or are ruled over by the Moslems are Moslem lands. All lands, which are mostly inhabited by non-Moslem power are enemy lands and no faithful Moslem is allowed to bear any loyalty to them and is called upon to do everything in his power by policy or force or fraud to convert the non-Moslem there to Moslem faith, to bring about its political conquest by a Moslem power. It is no good quoting sentences here or there from Moslem theological books to prove the contrary. Read the whole book to know its trend. And again it is not with books that we are concerned here but with the followers of the book and how they translate them in practice. You will then see that the whole Moslem history and their daily actions are framed on the design I have outlined above. Consequently, a territorial patriotism is a word unknown to the Moslem—nay is tabooed, unless in connection with a Moslem territory. Afghans can be patriots for Afghanisthan is a Moslem territory today. But an Indian Moslem if he is a real Moslem—and they are intensely religious as a people—cannot faithfully bear loyalty to India as a country, as a nation, as a State, because it is today ‘an Enemy Land’ and doubly lost; for non-Moslems are in a majority here and to boot it is not ruled by any Moslem power, Moslem sovereign. Add to this that of all non-Moslems the Hindus are looked upon as the most damned by Moslem theologians. For Christians and Jews are after all ‘Kitabis’, having the holy books partially in common. But the Hindus are totally ‘Kafirs’ as a consequence their land ‘Hindusthan’ is pre-eminently an ‘enemy’ and as long as it is not ruled by Moslems or all Hindus do not embrace Islam . . . What wonder then that the Muslim League should openly declare its intention to join hands with non-Indian alien Moslem countries rather than with Indian Hindus in forming a Moslem Federation? They could not be accused from their point of view of being traitors to Hindusthan. Their conscience was clear. They never looked upon our today’s ‘Hindusthan’ as their country, nation. It is to them already an alien land, and enemy land—‘a Dar-ul-Harb’ and not a ‘Dar-ul-Islam!!

Our watan is now known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. These are the laws that we will enforce and you will obey: All citizens must pray five times a day. If it is prayer time and you are caught doing something other, you will be beaten. All men will grow their beards. The correct length is at least one clenched fist beneath the chin. If you do not abide by this, you will be beaten. All boys will wear turbans. Boys in grade one through six will wear black turbans, higher grades will wear white. All boys will wear Islamic clothes. Shirt collars will be buttoned. Singing is forbidden. Dancing is forbidden. Playing cards, playing chess, gambling, and kite flying are forbidden. Writing books, watching films, and painting pictures are forbidden. If you keep parakeets, you will be beaten. Your birds will be killed. If you steal, your hand will be cut off at the wrist. If you steal again, your foot will be cut off. If you are not Muslim, do not worship where you can be seen by Muslims. If you do, you will be beaten and imprisoned. If you are caught trying to convert a Muslim to your faith, you will be executed. Attention women: You will stay inside your homes at all times. It is not proper for women to wander aimlessly about the streets. If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative.

I do convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu. I convert you to be a better Catholic, a better Muslim or Jain or Buddhist. I would like to help you find God. She you find Him, it is up to you to do what you want with him.

At breakfast we had an interesting discussion on the various Christian workers in Pakistan. I was understandably gratified to notice that everyone to whom I have spoken is very appreciative of the fact that no attempt at conversion is ever made by the Catholic teachers or medical workers. In the past thirty-five years, during which they have educated thousands of Muslim girls, the Presentation nuns haven't had one convert; I've spoken by now to over twenty of their past pupils and the nuns are universally loved and admired. On the other hand, all the Protestant Missions (educational and medical) stink in Muslim nostrils because their teaching and medical treatment is always accompanied by what the Muslims call 'insulting propaganda. In their schools the children have to study the Bible and Christian doctrine and with their medicines they also dispense leaflets and pamphlets on the 'Good Path to God'. I know that this is true because I visited a Protestant Mission Hospital the other day and the matron showed me the 'literature' they distribute—awful sickly stuff that would put a Pope off Christianity for life. My host summed it up pretty well this morning when he said, 'The Protestants seem to come here because they hate Islam and the Catholics because they love God.' No doubt it's a matter of opinion which attitude is correct, but personally I'm entirely with the Catholics who have the good sense and good manners to admit in practice, if not in theory, that Islam is a different, but not necessarily inferior or wrong 'Path to God'. And, of course, the result is that in Pakistan a genuine good feeling exists between educated Muslims and Catholics, though here, as elsewhere, the semi-illiterate Mullahs hate any form of Christianity.

I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to be a Christian missionary in a Muslim country where one daren't ever attempt to convert anybody, except by the vague method of 'example'. But then to me Christian missionaries in Muslim countries, however genuine their fervour, are at best unattractive manifestations of self-righteousness and at worst an impertinence. Yet that attitude is narrow too in its own way. If you are convinced of your duty to spread the gospel there is obviously a certain nobility in settling in a place like Peshawar, without hope of any material gain whatsoever, and in patiently leading a Christian life for the purpose of influencing those around you.

The civil war was supposed to be a war for freedom, but only one thing united the Sunni and Shia Muslims: hatred of Christians and Jews. One could be “born” a Christian and that was tolerated, but those Muslims who converted to Christ and turned from the Qur’an to the Bible were considered by radical Muslims to be traitors, worthy of a horrible death.

was brought up in a blend of two cultures: Middle Eastern and Western. My homeland was westernized because of the influence of modern industrial cultures. Orthodox Christians and Jews lived in our neighborhood, but the vast majority of our people were born Muslim, which meant they were expected to remain faithful to the Islamic beliefs and the Qur’an for their lifetimes. It is written in the Qur’an that if a Muslim leaves Islam and converts to any other religion, the penalty is death. I understood from an early age that, because I was born a Muslim, I would die a Muslim.

These articles urged the gradual adoption of the Latin alphabet and prophesied that the change was bound to come. The writer propounded a problem, and invited a reply from the $eyhulislatn or the Fetva Emini:7 Franstzlar lslamiyetin esaslarnu pek makul bularak millet4e ihtida etmek istiyorlar! Acaba onlari Miisluman addedebilmek icin o pek zarif dillerinin Arap harfleriyle yazthnasi tart-t esasi mi ittihaz edilecek? 'Evet' cevabini beklemedigim halde alusam kemal-i cesar- etle'Siz bu zihniyetle diinyayi Musluman edemezsiniz' mukabelesinde bulunurum,'Hayir, beis yok' cevabtnt alirsam:'Biz Turklerin de Latin harflerini kullamnamiza miisaade bah. eder bir fetva veriniz' ricastnt serdedecegitn. Hayir, Fransizlar ne kadar az Arap iseler, biz de o kadar az Arabiz. The French, finding the principles of our religion very reasonable, wish to convert en masse to Islam! Before they can be accepted as Muslims, will it be obligatory for that very elegant language of theirs to be written in the Arabic letters? I do not expect the answer to be'Yes', but if it is I shall make so bold as to reply,'With this mentality you cannot make the world Muslim.' If I am given the answer'No, there is no harm in it' l shall make this request:'Give a fetva permitting us Turks also to use the Latin letters.' No, we are no more Arab than the French are.