Apostate prophet accuses the caliphs; attackers or liberators?

In answer to the video "The "No Compulsion in Islam" Lie"

The early caliphate was actually a war of liberation of the oppressed people of the Roman, Persian and Egyptian nations from centuries of tyranny. There is a reason why the early Islamic state expanded with such speed, the local people did not resist and instead embraced the Muslim liberators that brought positive change in all aspects of their lives, whether they decided to convert or keep their own belief system.

For example the Judeo-Christian population of Syria preferred Muslim rule to that of the Christian Byzantine empire. Seeing this phenomenon occuring all throughout the Muslims territories is what made some medieval jurists argue that the Islamic System is a much better one than any man-made law as it opposed oppression. The purpose of waging Islamic war, became in their eyes to spread the sharia, which includes laws accomodating non-Muslim communities.

This supremacist view of the Islamic system is what made Ibn Khaldun argue that Islam had to ultimately spread globally, even by coercion. Throughout time, dominant powers viewed and still do, their societal order as superior, seeking to spread it by all means so as to safeguard their geopolitical interests. It is to be noted that Ibn khaldun maintained that warfare is intrinsic to human history, since immemorial times. He did not argue that cessation of warfare was something unthinkable to Islam. Prior to ibn Khaldun, other Muslim scholars the likes of  al-Turtushi described wars as “social anomalies”. Al-Hasan ibn ‛Abd Allah compared wars “to diseases of society”. The vast majority of Muslim scholars past and present, view war as a necessary remedy against aggression. Going back to ibn Rushd/Averoes, he reported the controversies of his time as to whether an enemy should be killed because of his hostility or solely for his religious difference and refusal to accept Islam.

As one goes through the various legal opinions of the Muslim scholars throughout time and up until the modern era, what transpires is that their understanding of what is required of the Quran and the prophet in terms of warfare reflects the political and ideological environements in which they formulated their ideas.

But the historical facts are clear; none of the wars in the times of the prophet and the early caliphs were done against a people solely because of their religious differences. The massive, but progressive conversions, as will be shown later, could by no means be due to the fear of being enslaved by the Arab Muslims during the early Islamic conquests. Otherwise, we should expect many people to have renounced Islam following the military and political decline of Muslim power in the world.

The fulgurant expansion of the Muslim empire and Islam itself as a religion, a mere century following the prophet's death, from modern-day Spain in the west to India in the east, the vast numbers of conquered people that eventually converted to Islam in the process has confounded observers for centuries, more particularily European Christendom. Islam, to these people was an inferior religion. The myth of forced conversions meant avoiding the difficult idea that Islam was the true religion and that God was on the side of the Muslims. The earliest Christian polemics against Islam cleverly twisted the idea. The Muslim invaders were indeed divinely sent, but not for their own righteousness, rather as a rod of punishment against sinful Christians and their leaders. John bar Penkaye writes in the 680s

"We should not think of their advent (of the sons of Hagar) as something ordinary, but as due to divine working:" When these people came, at God's command, and took over as it were both kingdoms ... , God put victory into their hands in such a way that the words written concerning them might be fulfilled, namely: "One man chased a thousand and two men routed ten thousand" (Deut32). How otherwise could naked men riding without armour or shield have been able to win, apart from divine aid, God having called them from the ends of the earth so as to destroy by them "a sinful kingdom" (Amos9) and to bring low through them the proud spirit of the Persians?"

Similarily to other 7th century texts, the Chronicler of Khuzistan says that

"the victory of the sons of Ishmael who subdued and enslaved these two strong empires was from God".

Ironically in the Chronicle of Fredegar, the Muslims are "the sword of God".

One overarching theme in 7th-8th century polemics against Islam is Christian crisis of faith and fear of apostasy. Christians of all spheres of life were rejecting their religion and converting Islam. We read in an apocalypse of the early 8th century

"many people who were members of the church will deny the true faith of the Christians, along with the holy cross and the awesome Mysteries, without being subjected to any compulsion, lashing or blows". 

The same is bitterly confirmed by a monk in Mesopotamia, in the Zuqnin Chronicle

"For without blows or torture they slid down in great eagerness toward denial. Forming groups of twenty, thirty and a hundred men, two and three hundred, without any kind of compulsion to this, they went down to Harran to the governors and became Muslims (mhaggnn) So acted numerous people from the regions of Edessa, Harran, Telia, Resh'aina, Dara, Nisibis, Shengar and Callinicum, and from these places both error and the devil gained immeasurable strength among them".

Until now, western scholars and historians are making blunt observations such as "the success of the conquests is virtually beyond plausible historical explanation" (Webb) or "the dynamism of Islam’s expansion defies explanation in ordinary human terms" (Donner) or that we should “dissuade historians from striving vainly to explain the almost inexplicable in normal historical terms” (James Howard-Johnston). Christians also projected onto this phenomenon their own experience of ruthless conquests, looting, destructions and forced conversion and so Islam became a religion “spread by the sword”.

This medieval myth, picked up in the late 19th- early 20th centuries by Orientalist like William Muir, many actually being colonial officials and/or active Christian missionaries that benefited from the vilification of Islam to non-Muslim audiences, is a myth that finds echo in today's Islamophobia industry. Muslim behavior is presented as the latest episode of Islam being spread “by the sword".

Seeing a big part of the Muslim conquests assimilating Christian teritories and peoples, this spiritual, political, social, economic defeat resonated hard in the heart of the Christian elites, and still does today. As they tried throughout the centuries to roll back that humiliation through military and spiritual warfare, they only gained success in the former. Christianity, to Muslims, from the scholar to the layman, boiled down to worshiping a human being and God dying, both non appealing alternatives to the instinctive, natural, reasonable message of Islam. As time passed, Christian missionary strategy changed, from comforting the emotionally unstable in the name of the loving God of the Bible, to giving up mentioning Christianity alltogether; Islam is the religion of the devil and its prophet an anti-christ. If Christians cant have Muslims entering their fold, having them at the very least rejecting Islam is a satisfactory alternative. The reality of the matter however is that even if that strategy is far more successful in making Muslims abandon their religion instead of preaching Christianity directly, the desired results remain poor. The demographics remain from the short to long term heavily in favor of Islam, due firstly to Christianity dying out in the hearts, minds, practices of their societies, but also because the little number of apostates impressed by that demonizing effort, is offset by a radicalising effect; when insulted to his core, ancestral beliefs, the natural reaction of even the least traditional will be spiritual and intellectual "self-defence", seeking deeper knowledge and strengthening of his religious identity. That missionary tactic is also very unpopular among the Christian public, repulsed by the highly antagonizing rhetoric and painted as the aggressing party. Such Christians very often begin investigating Islam and end up finding it appealing. These factors, and others, pile up. The return on investment for those types of missionaries is negative if one weights the time, money, but especially emotional and spiritual degradation for having to dwell in dark pursuits. The best course of actions to the missionaries of that trend is to work on the betterment of their own souls first and foremost, then to strengthen their own communities' loss of faith in their ancestral beliefs.

As to Muslim interaction with the conquered peoples, there have been of course certain instances in history of Muslims disregarding Islamic teachings and behaving cruelly toward non-Muslims, including cases of forced conversion. Allthough the state and church sanctioned evil throughout Christian history, ie the background of the very people levelling these claims so as to demonize Islam, make these cases pale in comparison. This method of cherry picking incidents and leaping to the broad-sweeping, reductionist conclusion that Islam was “spread by the sword” is intellectually dishonest and doesnt stand the test of scrutiny. Practically, such a phenomenal endeavor would have been impossible to achieve for the Muslim conquerers. During the early Muslim conquests, Muslims were a small minority in newly-conquered areas, around 10% in Egypt or 20% in Iraq. That is why for at least two centuries the majority of the inhabitants of the Islamic empire were non-Muslims. The regions conquered up to a century after the prophet didnt become majoritarily Muslims until 850-1050. For example although Iran was entirely under Muslim dominion in 705, its Muslim population hadnt reached 50% prior to the mid 9th century, then 75% a century later.

One of the reasons for that miserable failure of Islam's "spreading by the sword" was that Muslim rulers actually preferred collecting Jizya which they could use at their discretion, than zakat which, although higher, had to be redistributed locally in the provinces and could only be used in certain ways. To corroborate, the Umayyad general al Hakami was removed from his post because of having prevented the local population of Khurasan from converting to Islam so that he could keep on collecting jizya. There were other such cases such as the Abasside general ibn Kawus who forbade Muslim proselytizing in his jurisdiction.