Word: christianize
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...vicar in Baghdad and a long-distance hostage negotiator in the case, told New Zealand?s National Radio that ?to be quite honest with you, [the conversion] was our suggestion.? That is, it had not been part of the kidnappers? program so much as a mechanism, suggested by a Christian cleric, to enable the abductors to save face in giving up their hostages. Now admittedly, they did go for it. But combined with the seemingly unanimous subsequent condemnation of the act by Muslims, it hardly seemed like the latest tool of Jihad. Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Middle Eastern...
...similar conversions on a mass scale, if the Ottomans took Constantinople. But if so, it turned out to be unwarranted. When the city finally fell, says Barber, the Muslims eliminated the political structure but kept the church up and running, using the Eastern Orthodox patriarch as spokesman for the Christian peoples within their own empire...
...this was consistent with what many (though not all) historians understand to be the larger pattern of Islamic conquest. Although treatment of "unbelievers"-notably those on the Indian subcontinent-could be brutal, ?People of the Book,? as Christians and Jews were known, often maintained their distinct religious communities. True, they were regarded as second class citizens and had to pay a poll tax and a land tax. It could be a demeaning life, and many converted, but others did not, as is indicated by large Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim states today...
...That was not an option that Chrisitianity granted to Islam when the roles were reversed in Southern Europe. The best-known forced conversion of Manuel?s century or any since was not executed by Muslims, but by the Spanish Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who served Spanish Moors (and Jews) a convert-or-leave edict in 1492 and then backed it up with the Spanish Inquisition...
...faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question...