It also says something about the insecurity of some Islamic nations that they’d make conversions in this day and age illegal, given the near impossibility of keeping information of any kind out. That may be simply habit, but it’s also the case that arguments about conversion rates ring somewhat hollow when comparing societies that do not seek to restrain them with those that have severe penalties, expressed or not, for openly converting.
First of all, the only reason the West has such great freedom of choosing your own religion is because it is SECULAR, not Christian.
When the West was Christian, it was actually much more repressive of other faiths than any Muslim country today. Compare Catholic Europe in the 15th century with any Muslim nation out there. The traditional Christian West make even the most intolerant Muslim nations of today seem like hippie communes (not that I have anything against hippies
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Second, as history has shown us, Christian societies have been just as repressive of other faiths as you make Muslim countries of today out to be.
The OT sentences apostates to public execution. The inquisition carried out by the Catholics in late medieval Europe is perhaps the worst case of religious intolerance in human history. I mean, they actually
tortured you and then they killed you.
And I’m not saying that the Protestants are innocent from religious intolerance either. Read up about how John Calvin ran Geneva during the Reformation. Or how he sentenced Michael Servetus to death. History books are filled with atrocities that took place during the Reformation.
And the Protestants were just as guilty as the Catholics.
And don’t even get me started on the Crusades. Or the ethnic cleansing carried out by European Christian colonizers in the New World.
My point is, it is unfair for Christians, who have a much larger and much more prolific history of religious intolerance and religious violence, to condemn us for such things.
Also, to compare the liberal West to Muslim countries and then claim that they are ‘backward’ is like me comparing Muslim countries to the liberal West and then claiming the West is ‘perverted’ or ‘corrupt’ or ‘evil’ for its acceptance of homosexuality and fornication.
So to impose your values on an alien culture and judge them according to your values is basically cultural imperialism, imo. The West continues to do this today, failing to realize that it is perpetuating the same myth of ‘Western superiority’ to ‘Eastern primitiveness’.
Secularism is not a universal virtue. It’s a specific ideology which is held in dear regard by a large number of nations. Just like how Islamic law is a specific ideology which is held in dear regard by other nations.
Put another way, if Saudi Arabia announced tomorrow that it would allow churches to be built there, I wonder what we’d see? If Mosques can be built in France, and they can, then churches should be capable of being built, in 2010, in Saudi Arabia, but it’s unlikely we’ll see that anytime soon.
That’s a flawed comparison. Saudi Arabia is a self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’. France is a secular nation. In fact, secularism was BORN in France.
A better comparison would be - there are no mosques in the Vatican, just as there are no churches in Saudi Arabia.
That being said, the Prophet Muhammad did explicitly recognize the rights of non-Muslims in the Charter of Medina where he gave them the right to practice their own religion without fear. And this was in 600 CE. Almost 900 years before the inquisition.
I’ll be the first to admit, there are a lot of things Saudi Arabia does which aren’t in accordance with Muhammad’s injunctions. But then again, what Muslim nation today DOES truly follow Islamic law?
And let’s not forget: as a general rule, Islam never spread by the sword. The Islamic Empire did, but not Islam. The Christian Middle East converted to Islam out of its own choosing over the course of a few centuries. Nobody forced them to convert.
Even in India, where Muslims ruled it for almost 1000 years, if Islam DID spread by the sword then wouldn’t all of India be Muslim?
Whereas large tracts of Europe (the Baltic, Eastern Europe, Germania, etc), not to mention virtually the entire native population of the Americas, were forced to convert to Catholicism.
I don’t wanna sound like I’m ragging on Catholicism or anything, but facts are facts.
