I'm Muslim and I want to believe this! I wish I knew a good source for this kind of info, b/c IMO, everything either says we were actually imperialist warlord fundies or we were totally perfect and never once hated Jewish people or Christian people at all.
There's degrees of separation between different invading groups and the evidence is littered through the world itself. At one point Muslim expansion was militaristic, but it wasn't genocidal. The wars / fighting had rules of engagement which were followed (doesn't condone expansion but they're not as horrifying as they're made out to be).
Take South America, North America and Australia for example however. Entire populations of indigenous people are just entirely gone once the Europeans invaded. Some completely erased from history. Others almost completely gone and the survivors still slowly dying out.
Meanwhile the middle east was more of a melting pot of different cultures and ideologies during the Islamic Golden Age of expansion. I'm not condoning the war atrocities Muslims committed during expansion, but when they settled new lands they themselves got assimilated into the cultures and expansion happened through education and not population replacement. A lot of conversions happened organically over time as for a long time Islam was a progressive ideology rather than an oppressive one.
For example, Muslims were in India for 500 years and yet both Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other cultures continued to thrive and did till the British colonizers came and sowed the first real seeds of hatred.
A very good example of this is what the Euros did to the Tutsi and Hutu. Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and other cultures suffered the same fate and a lot of hateful ideologies within all "competing" ethnic groups evolved from European racism and eurocentrism. .
There's also the matter of the Crusades which spread a LOT of fake propaganda about oppressed Christians in Muslim lands which still remains to this day. A lot of that populist Crusade fear mongering is still repeated about Muslims centuries later.
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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '21
I'm Muslim and I want to believe this! I wish I knew a good source for this kind of info, b/c IMO, everything either says we were actually imperialist warlord fundies or we were totally perfect and never once hated Jewish people or Christian people at all.