How did Islam get so popular?

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The difference here is that Muhammad was the founder of Islam whereas none of the seventh century Christians were Jesus. Granted, Christians have always done stuff that Jesus condemned, but Jesus Himself killed no one.
 
Aquinas11 said:
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niceatheist:
Well, as an example,…
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The claim was general (“the Islamic invasions”), that requires some kind of citation to a general study , not discussing of 1-2 examples.
niceatheist said:
the armies of Islam were brutal
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so now the Islamic invasions were “often” brutal? Lots of contradiction going on here…
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All invasions are brutal. The fact remains that the Muslim conquerors behaved far better towards Miaphysites and other non-Chalcedonian sects than the Byzantines were. There were no purges in conquered lands of Miaphysites (or anyone else the Byzantines decided was insufficiently Orthodox). If you were a Christian, you paid your tax and were free to conduct your affairs. Yes, there was brutality as cities fell and armies clashed, but how is that any different than the campaigns against the Arians a few centuries earlier by the Christian Roman Emperors?

You seem to want to try to slice off the Islamic invaders from the Byzantines, to somehow make Islam worse in its treatment of Christians, but the historical record is there. Miaphysites, save for brief periods of tolerance, were constantly being attacked by Byzantine authorities. The conquest of Byzantine territory was very brutal, as is any kind of war of conquest, and yes, on occasion Muslim armies treated Christians and Jews to indignities, but the Muslims were not bloodthirsty monsters (or no more so than their Byzantine or European counterparts). They had a vested interested in maintaining the peace in the lands they conquered, so no, there was not general campaigns to convert by the sword. By and large the conversions were simply a function of it being easier to convert to Islam than it was to be a Christian, but even by those standards, Oriental and North African Christian communities persisted for centuries, and much of the persecution of Jews in Christians in Muslim lands is a more recent phenomenon, rooted more in the Arab Nationalism that reared its head after the Ottoman Empire crumbled.
 
niceatheist said:
the Muslims were not bloodthirsty monsters
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So were they were just poor adherents of Muhammad who beheaded hundreds of non believers?
niceatheist said:
By and large the conversions were simply a function of it being easier to convert to Islam
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I’m sure it was, when followers of Islam can easily behead you if you don’t convert while pointing to Muhammad to justify their actions
 
Using the “Muslims are bloodthirsty” argument doesn’t work since we Christians aren’t any better to be honest. It would take too much time to enumerate in this post the number of pogroms, massacres, and wars perpetrated by Christians.
 
Simply because it was in God`s plan. The history of the Muslim peoples according to the Bible, begins with Abraham and his descendants through Ishmael, his firstborn son.

20 As for Ishmael, I am heeding you: I hereby bless him. I will make him fertile and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall become the father of twelve chieftains, and I will make of him a great nation.

21 But my covenant I will maintain with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you by this time next year.

GENESIS 17:20-21

https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/questions/what-does-bible-say-about-muslims-islam
 
From Andrew Wheatcroft’s ‘Infidels’:
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From Ian Morris’ ‘Why the West rules…For now’:

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Finally, from Richard Fletcher’s 'The Conversion of Europe:

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Apologies if some of the pictures are difficult to read, for some reason the quality of the photos go worse whenever I crop on my phone.
 
Aquinas11 said:
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niceatheist:
the Muslims were not bloodthirsty monsters
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So were they were just poor adherents of Muhammad who beheaded hundreds of non believers?
niceatheist said:
By and large the conversions were simply a function of it being easier to convert to Islam
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I’m sure it was, when followers of Islam can easily behead you if you don’t convert while pointing to Muhammad to justify their actions
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You keep saying this, but can’t explain why if that’s the case, so many Christian populations still persist in Muslim territory even today. If the Muslims were big on forced conversions, why did they only overtake Christians in Egypt in the 14th century?

I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but it strikes me that you’ve bought into a rather one-sided narrative, one that may sound pleasing to those who want to demonize Islam as somehow more inherently violent, but this entire thread, or at least my contribution, was to demonstrate how the Byzantines persecutions of non-Chalcedonian populations basically robbed them of loyal subjects when the Muslims came knocking, and many of those groups, having absolutely no loyalty to Constantinople due to longstanding mistreatment, ended up if not outright welcoming the new bosses, certainly fared considerably better under the new Islamic regime.

If you want to have a useful historical conversation, that’s one thing. But if this is just “Muslims were barbarians that forced Christians to convert by the sword”, then I’m not interested, because that is inaccurate to the point of being a falsehood.
 
I think that’s my larger point. There was no sudden mass conversion, which would have indicated “conversion by the sword”. Obviously the Muslim rulers favored everyone being Muslims, and certainly there were advantages to conversion, and disadvantages to remaining Christian, and that’s not to say there weren’t persecutions on occasion. But all in all, the conversion of most populations to Islam took a considerable amount of time (my previously referenced majority of Egyptians being Copts until the 1300s). I suspect most accounts of Muslim invaders forcing conversions were distortions or fabrications by Christians.
 
Salibi said:
Using the “Muslims are bloodthirsty” argument doesn’t work since we Christians aren’t any better to be honest. It would take too much time to enumerate in this post the number of pogroms, massacres, and wars perpetrated by Christians.
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And indeed, much of our conversation today has been about how the Byzantine regime’s near-constant persecution of Miaphysites (and any other churches the rulers of Constantinople didn’t like) softened support for the Empire so badly that there was little local support as Byzantine armies were pushed back.
 
niceatheist said:
I suspect most accounts of Muslim invaders forcing conversions were distortions or fabrications by Christians.
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Keep in mind that even pope (Urban II?), claimed that Muslims forcibly circumcised Christians & sprinkled the blood from the circumcision onto altars. If that isn’t an exaggeration, I don’t know what is.
 
SalamKhan said:
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niceatheist:
I suspect most accounts of Muslim invaders forcing conversions were distortions or fabrications by Christians.
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Keep in mind that even pope (Urban II?), claimed that Muslims forcibly circumcised Christians & sprinkled the blood from the circumcision onto altars. If that isn’t an exaggeration, I don’t know what is.
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I had forgotten that one! As the first Crusades were ramping up, I’m sure all kinds of, um, urban myths were being disseminated about the horrors Muslims were committing. As I recall, one of the ironies of the Crusades is that when they came to the Holy Land, they still find Christian communities carrying much as they always had, and at least in some cases, Christians in the area were treated no better than the Muslims by their “liberators”.
 
I get the impression that Islam doesn’t require complicated beliefs and focuses on practice and ethical deliberation which has its attractions, religiously-speaking.

But I’m a Jew so I would say that. 😉
 
And what a joyous occasion for the ‘liberators’ it was, at the end of the first Crusade!

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Kaninchen said:
I get the impression that Islam doesn’t require complicated beliefs and focuses on practice and ethical deliberation which has its attractions, religiously-speaking.

But I’m a Jew so I would say that. 😉
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Well, to be fair, it hasn’t always been that much different for Christianity. When Christian missionaries first went into many lands, they started with the basics; baptism, with the notion that once the formal conversion happened, there was lots of time to disseminate the intricacies of Christian theology. Judging by how swiftly the Reformation happened, I have a feeling that most Christians in those territories were along for the ride, and if their local parish was Catholic on Monday and suddenly Lutheran on Tuesday, there wasn’t a lot of debate among the locals about the nature of salvation 🙂
 
You have a wonderful library! I’d love to get the names of some of these volumes.
 
Kaninchen said:
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Padres1969:
To be fair some versions of Christianity are similar.
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Christianity does tend to require a lot of belief stuff.
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So far as I understand it, as long as you understand the basics of the Nicene Creed, you’re good to go! A lot of the complexity of Christianity is more battles between theologians, and indeed Islam and Judaism both have plenty of those debates.
 
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