>Islam wasn't spread by the sword
What's the logic behind this? I can't even grasp it in meme terms. Is it because of the pseudo-tolerance imposed on the conquered? Or conveniently ignoring anything that isn't Malaysia?
>>382048
Because Western historiography uses Islam to mean three different things: Islam the religion, Islam the culture, and Islam the geopolitical power. More accurately these would be called Islamic, Islamicate, and Islamdom respectively, but just like how the ERE is the Byzantine Empire it's hard to change convention.
The Arabs of Islamdom's expansion conquered for vague and not yet fully understood reasons, but the spread of Islamic faith seems to have been far from their minds at the time. Instead the religion (and the Islamicate culture that developed around it) spread through two other means: the slaves, clients, bureaucrats, and in-laws of elite Arab households and courts, and also through itinerant missionary work by early heterodox and rebel Muslims in defiance of the political order of the Umayyad Caliphate.
>>382048
>Or conveniently ignoring anything that isn't Malaysia?
explain?
>>382311
muh peaceful trade
>Quiz
How Islam brought in Malaysia
1. Arabia
2. China
3. India
>>382048
Some want to say that during the Arab conquests, that Muslims literally held a sword to the neck of the conquered and told them "convert or die." Generally that did not happen (there might have been a few instances of captured soldiers).
As >>382276 said, the reasons for the Arab conquests are not fully understood, but after crushing the armies of the Romans and the Sassanids the Muslims often negotiated a peaceful surrender with cities and left local leadership in place.
>>382276
>vague and not yet fully understood reasons
They were spreading control of the Caliphate. That's the reason those missionaries existed BEYOND the borders of the Caliphate. To beat them to the punch.
>>382311
East of Bengal, islam actually didn't arrive by the sword. No arab or turk conqueror that conquered and islamized Malaysia or Indonesia like they did in Inda, North Africa or the Middle East.
Anyways I don't think that anyone who isn't some leftist obsessed with political correctness will deny that the empire of the caliphs was spread by the sword. I mean, it's against the word of Muhammad to say it wasn't unless you wanna do a lot of mental gymnastics.
>>382401
>They were spreading control of the Caliphate.
Maybe. Or maybe the Caliphate was just following along after Arab generals whenever they were successful in a private adventure. Many of these same missionaries arrived after the fact as well, and successfully united rebellions against the Caliphate under the banners of Shia or Kharijite Islam. Besides, the idea of the Caliphate didn't seem to exist until Muawiya I or his son.
>>382404
I don't know. Muhammad was dead by the time there was an empire of the caliphs.
>>382048
It wasn't spread by the sword.
Muslim rulers conquered a lot of land, yes, but they didn't forcefully convert the conquered people or anything, that happened peacefully. The political entity of Islam spread by force - the religion itself did not.
>>382048
What were the Arabs doing before and after Muhammad?
Muhammad, Lawrence of Arabia and Saudi's with oil it virtually all I know about them.
>>383029
>they didn't forcefully convert the conquered people or anything
That's correct - Up to a certain point in history.
>>383058
Nomads fucking around in the desert, they mostly kept to themselves except for occasional raids on Byzantine and Persian land.
>>383066
So they're just largely irrelevant desert nomads who just happen to have a lot of dosh due to oil?
Why is it their religion that spread around so much, surely the Persians, Egyptians, various turkic rulers or Ottomans could have come up with something better.
>>383081
>So they're just largely irrelevant desert nomads who just happen to have a lot of dosh due to oil?
No, they were largely irrelevant desert nomads up until Islam, then they became the major political force in the Middle East until the Mongols and Turks fucked their shit up from the 13th to 16th centuries.
>Why is it their religion that spread around so much, surely the Persians, Egyptians, various turkic rulers or Ottomans could have come up with something better.
Islam unified the various Arab tribes together, and like any other group of nomadic cavalrymen they proceeded to fuck shit up, only they did it in the Middle East instead of Central Asia.
They went to shit again because Islam divided them just as quickly as it unified them, once sects like Shia and Sunni started popping up.
>>383092
What did the rest of the Middle East initially think of the religion of a bunch of Arabs?
>>383081
>>383202
After a certain amount of time, Islam wasn't seen as the Arab's religion the same way Christianity eventually moved away from being a Jew's religion. The legal and spiritual tradition that forms Islam as we know it today comes out of Iraq and Syria, not Arabia, by Syriac, Iranian, and Turkish theologians. To them, Muhammad just happened to be an Arab because it was a matter of course for someone born in the distant, spiritually pure desert rather than a decadent, cosmopolitan center of civilization. This followed also for followers of Ali or the many contemporaries of Muhammad that appear in oral tradition. This spiritual characteristic should not be underestimated - when the many major anti-Arab, anti-Umayyad revolts burned across North Africa and Iran, they were usually led by heterodox or syncretic forms of proto-Islam rather than native Zoroastrian or Christian particularists. People did sincerely believe a divine event took place in Arabia, and that their masters and enemies happened to be Arabs themselves didn't get in the way of that belief.
>>383279
Ah thanks for the reply, that clears up a few things.
>>382048
Im pretty sure islam was spread the same way as christianity
by the ruling factions deciding it was the religion its people should follow
the only difference is that rome hade already conqured a bunch of shit before the switched to christianity and the muslims conqured after the switch to islam
>>382276
I got two words for you.
FORCED
CONVERSIONS
>>383458
Something which doesn't figure into the general trend of conversions until the Samanids, and by then because of native Iranian and Turkish Muslims rather than the Abbasids.
>>382276
>There are people on /his/ right now that are willing to do this amount of mental gymnastics to justify Islamic expansionism
Remarkable
Islam was actually spread much further and much more quickly by traveling merchants. The Caliphate may have expanded it's borders by the sword, especially at the expense of Persia and Byzantium, but the religion itself spread most far and most wide by mercantilism. This is true of most of Africa and well into Asia.
People like to pretend that this isn't the case.
>>383493
That was pretty straightforward to be even mental Tai-Chi, and it had nothing to do with justifying the Arab Conquests.
