Tom Facchine – Answering the Misconceptions #07 – Forced To Become Muslim

			Some people think that Islam forces people to become Muslim. And that is completely false. We have
something very, very explicit in the Quran, Allah says law across the deen that there is no
compelling people to change their faith to become a certain religion or to convert into a certain
religion. And Islam has practiced the freedom of conscience for over 1000 years, which is why
usually, usually, even the secular Muslim empires that have existed, you've seen Muslims living side
by side with Christians with Jews, even with Hindus, with Zoroastrians, different sorts of faiths.
If you want to talk historically, Christian empires and Christian leaders have had a much harder
		

			time giving their subjects that sort of freedom of conscience. So if you're familiar with the wars
between Protestants and Catholics, there were places in Europe where if you lived in a certain
region, you had to be the religion of your Duke or your local lord, you weren't allowed to have your
own individual choice as to what fate that you follow. And so I think now in post Christian, North
America, I think that a lot of people have this cultural memory. And they look at Islam. And they
see these kinds of depictions, and they assume that Islam was the same way and that Muslim history
is the same way. And it wasn't. It wasn't. If you go back to Spain, the reconquering, or the
		

			Reconquista of Spain in the late 1400s. Who did they kick out of Spain, they kicked out Muslims and
Jews, and actually the leader of the Ottoman Empire sent ships to Spain to evacuate the Jews out of
Spain and bring them to Muslim territory in the Ottoman Empire. These things are normal for us. So
Islam never never forces anyone to become a Muslim. And another proof of this is that the most
populous nations, the most populous Muslim nations in the world, such as Indonesia, no Muslim army
has ever stepped foot there. Every single person in Indonesia, who's a Muslim today became Muslim,
just because they interacted with Yemeni traders, and they liked to slam and they really valued the
		

			customs and the honesty of the Muslims that came to them. Right. So you know, there's there's
fiction, and then there's reality Islam doesn't force anybody to convert