Quote Originally Posted by Lion View Post
Said pretty much everything I wanted to except...


It's not forbidden for them to convert, it's encouraged. However in the Quran, Islam recognizes the two religions. Regarding Islams views towards other faiths, there is only one line in the entire text that says anything about it which is that there should be no compulsion of religion, meaning anyone can decide their own faith and not have to justify it in the face of any other human.
I can't find a reference about it on wikipedia. But it was something like 1000 - 1200 AD when the Ottoman Sultan decreed for the first time in Islamic history that Christians and Jews where allowed to convert which went right against the explicit instructions of Mohammed.

And almost all Christians and Jews did convert since they could pay lower taxes. And this allowance was retained as the Ottoman empire grew until it finally encompassed the whole Islamic world. The Islamic tradition of letting non-muslims, (dimmis) pay higher taxes is because they're not expected to give a part of their earnings to charity. The lowered taxes is just a compensation, it's not because of any kind of heirarchy. This is also when wearing the Chador/Burkha becomes a Muslim tradition. This was earlier a purely Christian practice.

Mohammed not only had poetry readings, ie what is the Koran, but he also explained to people how to interpret it, (which did not make it into the Koran and was the basis of the Sharia). A lot of this is saved, and even letters written by Mohammed himself. They can be read at the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. We know quite a lot about Mohammed as a man.

But modern Islam is just like modern Christianity modern inventions. Islam retains very little from the original messages, and in the case of Christianity we don't even know what, if anything is retained from original Christianity.

edit: this is all described in great detail by Karen Armstrong in "the history of God". If you care about religion in the least I recommend it very much. It's a great book. She's extremely diligent when it comes to finding and evaluating evidence and has quickly become one of the worlds most respected authorities on religion. She's a former Catholic nun, and very much still a Christian so don't put her among the recent atheist attackers of religion. She's also the only Christian scholar who has received praise and plenty of prizes for her work on Islam by Middle Eastern religious institutions.