denunciation of unbelievers actually militates against this
idea. It even portrays Jews and Christians as having been
cursed by Allah and transformed into detested beasts, as
evidenced by the notorious ‘‘apes and swine’’ verse quoted
previously (see Sura 5:59– 60).
- How did Islam spread throughout the world?
Where are the largest concentrations of Muslims today?
Islam has spread by the word and by the sword. Mass
conversions to Islam followed the Muslim conquests of the
Middle East, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa. Muslims
also led incursion eastward from Arabia, conquering large
portions of India and converting many Indians to Islam.
On the other hand, Islam spread by largely peaceful
means into Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as large areas of
sub Saharan Africa. In recent years, however, both of these
areas have been flashpoints of violence between Muslims
and nonMuslims.
Most of the conquests Muslim forces made were
permanent. Only in Spain were they rolled back on a large
scale, and that took a 700 year struggle. But most of the
lands of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the
Arabian home of Islam, are virtually 100 percent Muslim
today — although there are still significant (but rapidly
dwindling) Christian minority communities in many of these
countries, especially in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Christians
long formed a majority in Lebanon, but now the situation in
that wartorn nation is quite volatile. From the mid 1970s
until the early 1990s a bloody civil war raged in Lebanon.