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Raymond Ibrahim: Were conquered Christians really liberated Muslims?

Apr 30, 2011 7:34 am By Robert Spencer

Over the years at Jihad Watch we have seen many times how Islamic supremacists rewrite both history and contemporary reality in order to absolve Islam of any wrongdoing. Some of these efforts have been quite successful — notably, the whitewashing of medieval Muslim Spain. In this piece, our friend Raymond Ibrahim examines another.

“Were Conquered Christians Really Liberated Muslims?,” by Raymond Ibrahim in FrontPageMagazine.com (via RaymondIbrahim.com), April 24:

Imagine if a top American historian appeared on the MSM insisting that the only reason Europeans conquered the Americas was to “defend” the Native Americans””who somehow had adopted Christianity centuries before Jesus was born””from being persecuted by heathen tribes.

While that would create a maelstrom of outrage and derision in the West, in the Arab world””where some think bewitched animals work as infidel operatives””such absurdities regularly pass for “truth.”

Consider the case of Fadel Soliman, a celebrated Sharia expert and Arab media darling. Director of the Bridges Foundation“”which teaches Muslims “how to present Islam” to non-Muslims””Soliman also lectures at Western universities, churches, and governmental agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Defense.

His new Arabic book, Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad, which he has been promoting all over the media, including al-Jazeera, asserts that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt (c. 640), the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, or muwahidin, who were actually being oppressed by Christians: hence, the Muslim conquest of Egypt was really about “liberating” fellow Muslims. Soliman’s evidence is that the Arian sect, which rejected the claim that Jesus was coequal with God, was present in 4th century Egypt. Therefore, according to Soliman, the indigenous Egyptians were practicing “proto-Islam” hundreds of years before it was founded in the 7th century.

As with much of modern academia’s approach to Islam, this thesis is based on pure fiction. While the Arians were pronounced heretics at the Council of Nicea (325) for their interpretation of the Trinity, they nonetheless accepted all of Christianity’s core tenets””including original sin, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation””all of which directly contradict Islam’s teachings. What an imaginative stretch, then, for Soliman to portray the Arians as prototypical Muslims, simply because they did not believe Jesus was coequal with God (a standard that would make many people today “Muslims”).

Needless to say, no historian has ever suggested that Muslims invaded Egypt to liberate “proto-Muslims.” Rather, the Muslim historians who wrote our primary sources on Islam, candidly and refreshingly present the conquests as they were””conquests, for the glory and empowerment of Islam and its followers at the expense of unbelieving infidels….

Read it all.

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Filed Under: Coptic Christians, Egypt


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