Islam’s tolerant past

The Chairman over on Maggie’s Farm has a list of “what 9/11 revealed to me” about Islam and the West. Although I can sympathize with much of what he’s writing, he’s simply misinformed in statements such as:

Unlike Christianity, which is commanded to spread the good news via example and preaching, Islam is commanded to spread their word via submission or death.

Alas, it wasn’t always thus. When Islam was a more successful and confident religion, Jews and other “infidels” were allowed to live among Muslims, tolerated as second-class citizens:

In the lands under Muslim rule, Islamic law required that Jews and Christians be allowed to practice their religions and run their own affairs, subject to certain disabilities, the most important being a poll tax that they were required to pay. In modern parlance, Jews and Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by law and the Koran and recognized by public opinion, was far better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West. The jihad also did not prevent Muslim governments from occasionally seeking Christian allies against Muslim rivals—even during the Crusades, when Christians set up four principalities in the Syro-Palestinian area.

Then came, as Bernard Lewis called it, “the great change” in 1683 when Ottoman invaders were turned back at the siege of Vienna. From then on “jihad” no longer denoted the original meaning of “striving” but instead came to mean “holy war.”