Just wanted to drop in with a third source for you palerider.
It is
http://www.masnet.org/history.asp?id=354
where you will find items such as the following ...which stands in stark contrast to the observation you made earlier in this thread about Islam having been spread by the sword:
Nothing is further from the truth and more inimical to Muslim - non-Muslim relations than the claim that Islam spread by the sword. Nothing could have been and still is more condemnable to the Muslims than to coerce a non-Muslim into Islam. As noted earlier, Muslims have been the first to condemn such action as mortal sin. On this point, Thomas Arnold, an English missionary in the Indian Civil Service of colonial days, wrote:
…of any organized attempt to force the acceptance of Islam on the non-Muslim population, or of
any systematic persecution intended to stamp out the Christian religion, we hear nothing. Had the caliphs chosen to adopt either course of action, they might have swept away Christianity as easily as Ferdinand and Isabella drove Islam out of Spain, or Louis XIV made Protestantism penal in France, or the Jews were kept out of England for 350 years. The Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut off from communion with the rest of Christendom throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical communions. So that the very survival of these Churches to the present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Mohammedan governments towards them.
