Dear quetzalcoatl9,
I agree that Muslims as any other community have ''harmful grass'' ... we have the same trouble with such extremists who wanted also to control our life and to convert our conflict with Zionism to religious wars. But they are not so powerful or popular. Just stupid decisions as war on Iraq or to consider USA and Israel fighting in the same war are enough to create strong opposite front, so those extremists can float on the top of the wave.
Iraq may be the best example, some terrorist groups got advantage of the crimes of the occupation so they succeeded to create strong networks and to attack in the name of ''revenge for Iraq".
Concerning Islamic history, I will present just few facts and I am willing to provide proofs up on request:
- 40% of Muslims exist in south East Asia (From Bangladesh till Indonesia) and in central Asia/Russia. No Muslim solider invaded that region; the people became Muslims by Muslims traders who invited them to this religion. Furthermore, 15% of Muslims live in Sub-Saharan Africa ... also no Muslims army reached that region. This means that majority of Islamic world became Muslims by peaceful relations not by sword as some people claim.
- After the end of Islamic Khilafa in 1924 and before the western colonial era, Christian represented: 25% of Palestine, 60% of Lebanon, 30% of Syria, 20% of Jordan, 20% of Egypt and 15% of Iraq ... Moreover 60% of the Jews came from Islamic world. If Islam force people to convert, how we can explain such high percentage of non Muslims who survived for 13 centuries under Islamic rule? May be you should read about the golden age of Jews in Andalusia (Spain under Islamic rule) for 800 years to understand how people from different religions succeeded to survive peacefully in spite of crusades and religious wars in that time.
The West declared Crusade in Middle Ages, but Muslims did not reply in that time by annihilation of Arab Christian, even they can do that easily after the failure of the crusaders.
-Problem of Muslims countries today is similar to any third world country. There are many horrible wars in Africa, South America and Asia. For example, one million people killed in Rwanda within 4 months, which is more than all the victims of violence in Islamic world in last 20 years.
quetzalcoatl9 said:
Bilal,
It is also a historical fact that the Muslims were able to amass large forces through forced conversion of the people they conquered, thus developing a large enough force to (unexpectedly) invade and conquer Byzantium.
