bcrt2000 said:
There was still relative peace between Muslims and Jews for hundreds of years if not a thousand. In the golden age of Islam, the Jews and Muslims lived in peace, and the Muslims protected the Jews from Christian persecution. And even there were times where there was peace with Christianity as well, and all 3 religions lived in harmony and had healthy debates and the like.
I don't think one can characterize Islamic-Jewish-Christian history with a general statement as "relative peace." Because there's such a long history, there were periods of peace, periods of violence and intolerance, etc. (mostly between Christians and Moslems, the "empiring" religions or nations, with Jews and others caught in the middle). Neither the Christian empires/nations nor the Islamic ones can say they were better than the other. Of course it all depended upon the ruler. In short, a "Golden Age of Islam" may have been good for Moslems, not so good for others.
Moslems love to propagate the fact that Islam is the most tolerant religion, allowing other religions freedom of worship, etc., throughout history. (Their favorite example being the true story of Crusaders' first take over of Jerusalem and how all the Moslem inhabitants were massacred by the Christians. When the Moslems retook the city, they spared the Christians.) But history records otherwise on many other occasions.
Here's a website that discusses some specific historical events (about halfway down the page). Yes, sounds like a fairly biased-against-Islam website, so, obviously, you gotta look at various other sources regarding the true facts. I've read up on some of this stuff, but not in any grave detail, so i'll be looking for more evidence. I've read a few sources about the Moslem rulers of India, and they (the sources) have all reported how on countless occasions throughout their hundreds of years of rule, Moslems destroyed Hindu temples and majorly oppressed Hindus.
http://www.islamreview.com/articles/islamicintolerance.shtml
"Christians, for at least three hundred years, suffered one other humiliation not often discussed: a process known as devshirme.(11) It was introduced by the Ottoman Sultan Orkhan (1326-1359) and consisted of periodically taking a fifth of all Christian children in the conquered territories. Converted to Islam, these children aged between fourteen and twenty were trained to be janissaries or infantry men. These periodic abductions eventually became annual. Children were taken from among the Greek aristocracy, Serbs, Bulgarians, Armenians, and Albanians, and often included children of priests. At a fixed date, all the fathers were ordered to appear with their children in the public square. The recruiting agents chose the most sturdy and handsome children in the presence of a Muslim judge. Any father who shirked his duty to provide children was severely punished. The recruiting agents often took more than the prescribed number of children and sold the "surplus" back to their parents. Those unable to buy back their children had to accept their being sold into slavery. This institution was abolished in 1656, though a parallel system where young children between six and ten were taken to be trained in the seraglio of the sultan continued until the eighteenth century.
...
"Each century has its own, full account of the horrors of Muslim intolerance.
"In the ninth, there were the massacres of Spanish Christians in and around Seville; in the tenth, the persecutions of non-Muslims under the Caliph al-Hakim are well known; in the eleventh, the entire community of Jews (about three thousand people) in Grenada was exterminated and a further five thousand were killed in Fez in 1033; in the twelfth, the Almohads of North Africa spread terror everywhere they went.
"In the thirteenth century, the Christians of Damascus were killed or sold into slavery; their churches burnt to the ground. In the fourteenth, we have the terror spread by the infamous Timur the Lame, otherwise known as Tamerlane or the "Bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine" of Marlowe's play. As Rene Grousset put it in his Empire des Steppes, in Timur we had a symbiosis of Mongolian barbarism and Muslim fanaticism; Timur killed out of "Koranic piety." Timur systematically destroyed the Christians, and as a result the Nestorians and Jacobites of Mesopotamia have never recovered. At Sivas, 4,000 Christians were buried alive; at Tus there were 10,000 victims. Historians estimate the number of dead at Saray to be 100,000; at Baghdad 90,000; at Isfahan 70,000; at Delhi under the pretext that the 50,000 Indian prisoners presented a grave risk to his army, Timur ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands and had victory pillars or towers of their heads and skulls built.
"So far we have been concentrating on the fate of the People of the Book, that is to say, on the Jews and Christians. In their encounter with "heathens and idolators," the Muslims were merciless, with their implacable moral certainty, arrogance, encouraged by the ferocious words of God Himself, as given in the Koran, to kill unbelievers. In the ninth century, the persecutions of the Zoroastrians of Persia pushed them to migrate to the more tolerant lands of Hindu India, where to this day they form a respected minority known as Parsis.
"We shall now turn to the spread of Islam beyond Persia, and its arrival in the land of "idolators," India."
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Hanging around with Moslems all my life, what i can say is that we spend a lot of time and energy NOT looking at our history...or, rather, being very choosy with our history. There's a sense that "overall" Moslem rulers were better than Christian ones and, would, of course have to be because ours is a superior religion...one of tolerance. This blinkered approach can't be good. How are we to improve if we don't learn from the past? Yes, you may have a case if you say "on paper, our religion is more tolerant than others" (though that is also thoroughly debatable) but that means nothing when throughout history that tenet hasn't been followed particularly consistently.