Islamic Conquest & Christians

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[font="Times"][b]Islamic Conquest & Christians
Crusades - Pre/Post[/b][/font]

The one enduring mark of Islam's origins was the adoption of the Arabic language in the conquered lands. In sryia and Palestine, Arabic gradually replaced Greek as the official language in the course of the seventh century, and by around 800 was in common use, with Greek or Aramiac spoken only in parts of the north and Hebrew in parts of the south.

Although a basic tolerance of 'the people of the Book' remained a principle of Islamic governance, it did not ensure equal treatment before the Law, or the right to participate on equal terms in the civic life of the community. The early bias in favour of Christians as against Jews slowly altered so that, for example, the Calpih al-Mutawakkil who reigned between 847 and 851 expressed his dislike of Christians by making them 'bind bandlets of wool around their heads...and if any man among them had a slave, he was to sew two strips of cloth of different colours on his tunic from the front and behind.'

On occasions, the persecution was more extreme. Gibbon records how in southern Italy 'it was the amusement of the Saracens to profane, as well as to pillage, the monasteries and churches'; and how, at the siege of Salerno, 'a Musulman chief spread his couch at the communion table and on the altar sacrificed each night the virginity of a Christian nun.'

[b][u]Sources:[/b][/u]

[b] Piers Paul Read, [i] The Templars,[/i]London, 1999, p.53-54.[/b]
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[b]71[/b] Joshua Prawer, [i]The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages,[/i] London, 1973, p.4.
[b]72[/b] Von Gruenbaum, [i]Medievil Islam,[/i], p.182.
[b]73[/b] Gibbon, [i]The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,[/i]p. 721.

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[b]Part II[/b]

Christian proselytism was forbidden, and a public denunciation of Muhammad was punished by death, but such martyrdom seems only to have come to those who courted it, for example Peter of Capitolias, a hermit from Transjordan, who in 715 was stoned to death for preaching openly against Islam; and the fifty men and women who in Cordova in 850 publicly preached the superior truth of Christianity and suffered the same fate.

[b][u]Sources:[/b][/u]

[b] Piers Paul Read, [i] The Templars,[/i]London, 1999, p.53-54.[/b]