Charles Martel - The battle of tours

[Didz]

Didn't the Muslim convert people by the sword and slaughter countless of people while spreading like a wildfire? Think I read somewhere that Christian in Egypt’s were converted or killed.

No quite the opposite in fact. The Christian community in Egypt were actually protected by Muslim law and given the right to practice their own religion in peace. The only price for this was an additional level of taxation which theoretically was a penalty for being exempt from military service.

I only came across this fact because I was trying to trace the ancestry of the moors who invaded Spain and discovered all sorts of peripheral information in the process. The same laws applied to the Christian community in Al Andalusia (Spain) and protected the Christian and Jewish communities from Muslim persecution there too. That does not mean that Christians and Jews were not encouraged to convert to Islam, they were, and did, in large numbers because of the obvious benefits.

However, it’s worth mentioning that unlike Catholicism the Muslim faith has never been subjected to any form of central control or influence. It was and still is a fragmented religion and is therefore easy prey to the whims of many different and simultaneous leaders often with very different personal agenda's. Thus it was and is perfectly feasible for one sect of the Muslim faith to be living in tolerance and enlightment, whilst another is waging a vicious and fundamentalist war of hatred. This was certainly true in Al Andulsia where the existing Muslim regime was operating a culture of tolerance and learning whilst its brother Muslims from Morocco were pursuing a policy of hatred and fundamentalism. In most cases this has led to inter-religious war between opposing sects of Muslim's rather than the persecution of Christians, just as we see in Iraq today. But inevitably these fundamentalist sects are easy prey for the manipulation of powerful leaders with their own personal agenda's of hatred. As in any religion the sheep are most easy led went fired by some extreme vision.