Die "These", das der Islam sich ausschliesslich durch das Schwert verbreitet hat, und deshalb grundsätzlich eine verkommene, verachtenswerte Religion ist, ist ja inzwischen ein Dauerbrenner in gewissen Kreisen.
Hier steht es jedem frei ernsthafte Belege oder Ausführungen dafür oder dagegen zu bringen. Vor allem Zeta, der sich ja damit brüstet über all dies Bescheid zu wissen.
Um gleich einmal meine Meinung kurz und bündig zu dem Thema kund zu tun:
Jein. Nicht mehr und nicht weniger als jede andere Religion auch.
Fangen wir gleich einmal an:
Devin De Weese, Devin A, "Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde", Penn State Press, Sep 1, 1994, ISBN 0-271-01073-8The conceptualization is dominated by two stereotypes; the first popularized and captured by Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is of a fanatical Arab horseman riding forth from the desert with a sword in one hand and the Qur'an in the other offering victims a choice between one of the two,[3] however such "old notions of forced conversions have been abandoned, at least in scholarly literature."[2] The other image is one of an interfaith, interracial utopia where different races and peoples lived together in harmony. This has also been discredited for more shaded and complex views[3], such as an acculturation of Arab-Islamic social norms and language,[4] or a process of dialog between the monotheistic Arabs during the Muslim conquests with other faith traditions.
Increasing conversion to Islam paralleled the rapid growth of the Arab Empire in the first centuries after the Islamic prophet Muhammad's death. Muslim dynasties were soon established in North Africa, West Africa, throughout the Middle East and in Iran. Non-Muslims were not excluded from the economic elite during the Caliphate; but non-Muslims were subject to some restrictions on participation in political life.
In the first century the establishment of Islam upon the Arabian peninsula and the subsequent rapid expansion of the Arab Empire during the Muslim conquests, resulted in the formation of an empire surpassed by none before.[6] For the subjects of this new empire, formerly subjects of the greatly reduced Byzantine, and obliterated Sassanid, Empires, not much changed in practice. The objective of the conquests was more than anything of a practical nature, as fertile land and water were scarce in the Arabian peninsula. A real Islamisation therefore only came about in the subsequent centuries.
Lapidus, Ira M. 2002, A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.In contrast, for sedentary and often already monotheistic societies, "Islam was substituted for a Byzantine or Sassanian political identity and for a Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian religious affiliation."[8] Conversion initially was neither required nor necessarily wished for: "(The Arab conquerors) did not require the conversion as much as the subordination of non-Muslim peoples. At the outset, they were hostile to conversions because new Muslims diluted the economic and status advantages of the Arabs."[8]
Only in subsequent centuries, with the development of the religious doctrine of Islam and with that the understanding of the Muslim ummah, did mass conversion take place. The new understanding by the religious and political leadership in many cases led to a weakening or breakdown of the social and religious structures of parallel religious communities such as Christians and Jews.
http://histclo.com/chron/me/islam/is-spread.htmlWe know that Muslims have ruled over the Middle-East since 1400 years. How come there are any christians living in the region? Thirdly, we also know that the largest muslim populated country in the world is Indonesia. The question to ask is: which Muslim army went to Indonesia that converted the entire nation into Muslims? The same argument can be used for countries like Malaysia as well." HBC believes that our reader makes an important point, although we do not entirely agree with him. Even a basic historical survey reveals that Islam was indeed spread by the sword. It was the victories of Arab armies that brought Islam into the Middle East and North Africa, the heart of the Muslim world. Yet we would also say that military conquest was only part if the story. It is one thing to conquer a people and another matter to convert a people. Much of the population in conquered lands accepted Islam for a variety of social and economic reasons as well as the force and beauty of Isamic teachings. Forced conversions did occur, but were only part of the spread of Islam. And there were areas such as Southeast Asia where Islam was spread initially by sea-going traders.
Yet the Muslims’ esprit de corps, their desert-trained mobility and the cleverness of their generals still cannot explain how such astonishingly small armies — perhaps 30,000 men for the conquest of Syria, 10,000 for Iraq, 16,000 for Egypt — so swiftly overran these densely populated lands. Several other factors proved crucial. The most important was timing.
But the decades of war, in the manner of a Quentin Tarantino script, had left both Byzantium and Persia stunned and bleeding. The sudden Muslim advance found them completely unprepared. As Kennedy notes, “If Muhammad had been born a generation earlier and he and his successors had attempted to send armies against the great empires in, say, 600, it is hard to imagine they would have made any progress at all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books ... gewanted=2Worse yet, for Heraclius, schism among Christian sects led many Egyptians and Syrians to side with the Arab invaders against the Byzantines, who had tried to impose orthodoxy by brute force. To the Muslims’ further advantage, they demanded relatively lenient terms: those among the vanquished who did not embrace Islam could worship as they liked, on payment of an annual tax that was no more burdensome than what they had paid before.