Tolerance In Islam

TOLERANCE IN ISLAM In Spain under the Umayyads and in Baghdad under
the Abbasid Khalifas, Christians and Jews, equally with Muslims, were
admitted to the Schools and universities - not only that, but were
boarded and lodged in hostels at the cost of the state. When the Moors
were driven out of Spain, the Christian conquerors held a terrific
persecution of the Jews. Those who were fortunate enough to escape
fled, some of them to Morocco and many hundreds to the Turkish empire,
where their descendants still live in separate communities, and still
speak among themselves an antiquated form of Spanish. The Muslim
empire was a refuge for all those who fled from persecution by the
Inquisition. The Western Christians, till the arrival of the
Encyclopaedists in the eighteenth century, did not know and did not
care to know, what the Muslim believed, nor did the Western Christian
seek to know the views of Eastern Christians with regard to them. The
Christian Church was already split in two, and in the end, it came to
such a pass that the Eastern Christians, as Gibbon shows, preferred
Muslim rule, which allowed them to practice their own form of religion
and adhere to their peculiar dogmas, to the rule of fellow Christians
who would have made them Roman Catholics or wiped them out. For the
Muslims, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are but three forms of one
religion, which, in its original purity, was the religion of Abraham:
Al-Islam, that perfect Self-Surrender to the Will of God, which is the
basis of Theocracy. The Jews, in their religion, after Moses, limited
God's mercy to their chosen nation and thought of His kingdom as the
dominion of their race. Even Christ himself, as several of his sayings
show, declared that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of
Israel and seemed to regard his mission as to the Hebrews only; and it
was only after a special vision vouchsafed to St. Peter that his
followers in after days considered themselves authorized to preach the
Gospel to the Gentiles. The Christians limited God's mercy to those
who believed certain dogmas. Every one who failed to hold the dogmas
was an outcast or a miscreant, to be persecuted for his or her soul's
good. In Islam only is manifest the real nature of the Kingdom of God.
The two verses (2:255-256) of the Qur'an are supplementary. Where
there is that realization of the majesty and dominion of Allah (SWT),
there is no compulsion in religion. Men choose their path - allegiance
or opposition - and it is sufficient punishment for those who oppose
that they draw further and further away from the light of truth. In
Egypt the Copts were on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims
in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms
at closest friendship with the Muslims at the present day. In Syria
the various Christian communities lived on terms of closest friendship
with the Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and
they are on terms of closest friendship with the Muslims at the
present day, openly preferring Muslim domination to a foreign yoke....
From the expulsion of the Moriscos dates the degradation and decline
of Spain. San Fernando was really wiser and more patriotic in his
tolerance to conquered Seville, Murcia and Toledo than was the later
king who, under the guise of Holy warfare, captured Grenada and let
the Inquisition work its will upon the Muslims and the Jews. And the
modern Balkan States and Greece are born under a curse. It may even
prove that the degradation and decline of European civilization will
be dated from the day when so-called civilized statesmen agreed to the
inhuman policy of Czarist Russia and gave their sanction to the crude
fanaticism of the Russian Church. There is no doubt but that, in the
eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of
culture in a people. Let no Muslim, when looking on the ruin of the
Muslim realm which was compassed through the agency of those very
peoples whom the Muslims had tolerated and protected through the
centuries when Western Europe thought it a religious duty to
exterminate or forcibly convert all peoples of another faith than
theirs - let no Muslim, seeing this, imagine that toleration is a
weakness in Islam. It is the greatest strength of Islam because it is
the attitude of truth.

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