The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Forced Conversions

Forced Conversions
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, December 5 2007, 21:39:44 (CET)
from 12.199.144.42 - mail.shpl.org Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

a.Ch 10, p. 194

Whereas his(Omar II, 717-20) predecessors had discouraged conversions to Islam on the ground that less poll taxes would come to the state, Omar speeded the acceptance of Islam by Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews; and when his fiscal agents complained that this policy was ruining the treasury, he replied: “ Glad would I be, by Allah, to see everybody become Moslem, so that you and I would have to till the soil with our hands to earn a living.” Clever councilors thought to stay the tide of conversions by requiring circumcision; Omar, another Paul, bade them dispense with it. Upon those who still refused conversion he laid severe restrictions, excluded them from governmental employment, and forbade them to build new shrines.

b.Ch 13, p. 289

The most striking of all effects produced by the Arab conquest of North Africa was the gradual but almost complete disappearance of Christianity. The Berbers not only accepted Mohammedanism, they became its most fanatical defenders. Doubtless economic considerations entered: non-Moslems paid a head tax, and converts were for a time freed from it. When in 744 the Arab governor of Egypt offered this exemption, 24,000 Christians went over to Islam. Occasional but severe persecutions of Christians may have influenced many to conform to the ruling faith.



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 1628
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: identity,gzip,deflate
Cache-control: max-age=259200
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?From_Will_Durant_On_Muslim_Christian_interaction-JKov.1689.REPLY
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060501 Epiphany/1.6.5
Via: 1.1 localhost:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE13)
X-forwarded-for: 127.0.0.1



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9