Religions Spread Through Conquest

When studying history, both in a professional and academic

sense, we try to make connections between civilizations and time

periods. Historians have attempted to discover universal constants of

human nature, a bond that forms from continent to continent, human

being to human being. Is there a constant quality that all peoples

posses, and is reflected in all civilizations? Indeed, it is

extremely difficult to make generalizations about centuries of modern

history. To say that something is true of all of history is virtually

impossible, as a counter-example exists for just about anything that

can be said of any group of civilizations. To say that all religions

are spread by violence is equally unfair and untrue - because

contrasted religions has been spread in exceedingly diverse regions of

the world, by vastly different cultures. Islam, as a prime example,

has been characterized inequitably by historians and the media as a

religion of violence. To put it bluntly, as this article does, "Islam

was mainly spread through Arab territorial conquests (Sudo, 4)."

However, upon examination, it is not fair to make the generalization

that Islam is a religion of violence, and one notices when looking at

world religion on a whole, one finds that Islam was no more violent

than any other religion. In fact, not only is Islam not a

fundamentally violent philosophy, but we can also see that many other

religions normally considered "non-violent," such as Christianity or

Hinduism, have been spread through bloody conquest. Thus, in

searching for a universal constant of history, we ought not fall into

the "fallacy of abstractions," as Sydney J. Harris keenly puts it, and

assume that bec...

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...lam as good and Christianity as bad. Truly, Islam, when

closely examined, is a rather tolerant and non-violent religion - it

has no history of imperialism, nor has it ever forced the conversion

of mass people. Whatever violence it has created, it is at least not

any worse than any other religion. In summary, it is not fair to say

that religions are fundamentally violent, nor does it do justice the

study of history, which indeed proves to us that often religion had a

far nobler purpose. Would our world perhaps have been a better place?

That question can never be answered We do know, however, that

religion was both violent and beneficial - to classify it as one or

the other would not do it justice. However, we will continue our

search for the universal constant, and perhaps the study of religion

will someday bring us closer to the truth.