Originally posted by Albert Speer
insanely better off... aside from a tax, Christians and Jews were not at all ill-treated by their Muslim rulers. whereas Christian nations since Constantine's Rome have been rife with expulsions and progroms of Jews, Islamic nations never had any history of such things until the 20th century.
insanely better off... aside from a tax, Christians and Jews were not at all ill-treated by their Muslim rulers. whereas Christian nations since Constantine's Rome have been rife with expulsions and progroms of Jews, Islamic nations never had any history of such things until the 20th century.
The thing that made situation in muslim countries often better than in Christian countries was that islam has a kind of standardized institution granting certain religious tolerance towards Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians : The dimma-system. Christianity lacked such a pattern which made Christian nations even less calculable, one day everything could be fine, the next day you'd have a pogrome. In islam, the same happened in those regions, where they dimma-system didn't really fit. While more tolerant rulers would extend the certain protection of the dimma over Hindus too, this could easily be changed the next day by pointing to them as "polytheists".
However, the dimma, I believe, maybe once was an advantage, but today this concept is useless, it's pribciples of tolerance are in no way comparable to our concepts of religious tolerance and freedom. Best example is the mullah regime in Iran, they exercise the dimma according to tradition...
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