Evidence · Case 10 · Islam
The early Muslim conquests
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Historical records show that within roughly a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim armies had conquered vast territories from Spain to Persia. Muslims fairly note that forced conversion was not always imposed and that many conversions were gradual, so the picture is not one of conversion at swordpoint everywhere. Still, expansion by military conquest is well documented.
Sources
Objections & responses
- Christianity spread under persecution for three centuries and then by state power for fourteen: Charlemagne, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Americas. Isn’t comparing Islam’s first century with Christianity’s first three cherry-picking?
The comparison is limited to the founders’ generation on purpose, but the concern is fair: Christianity’s record after Constantine includes conquest and coercion, and that must be said with equal force. The narrow point is that Jesus and his first followers did not use force, whereas Muhammad and his immediate successors did, and that difference in the founders’ examples is what each tradition’s later coercers had to work with or against. Christians who used force violated their founder’s example. That is the claim, and it is as much a concession as a contrast.
- Early Christian persecution was sporadic and local until Decius in 250, and Muslim conquest was mostly political rule over populations who weren’t forced to convert. After both admissions, what’s left of the contrast?
What is left is the founders’ models, which is what the claim is really about. Jesus refused political power and told Peter to put away his sword; Muhammad led armies and governed a state. That is a real and uncontroversial difference between the two founders, and it is the whole content of the point. Spread by conquest versus spread under persecution is the looser framing, and the founders’ relationship to force differed is the accurate one.
- The Old Testament records God commanding Israel to conquer Canaan and destroy its populations. If the founders’ model is the test, Christianity’s own Scriptures contain a conquest model that Christians have invoked for crusades and colonization.
The Christian reply is that the conquest narratives are tied to a specific, unrepeatable moment in Israel’s history and are not presented as a model for the church, which is given no mandate to conquer and whose founder explicitly renounced the sword; Christians who used Joshua as a warrant misread their own Scripture. Whether the conquest narratives are themselves defensible is a separate, hard question that this case does not answer. It is fair to hold that asymmetry against it.