Christian versus Muslim Violence in History
The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths. Even so, Muslims will never associate this violence and blood bath with the teachings of Isa (Jesus) (peace be on him).
| Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“lead them in”—i.e. “force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ). Augustine’s frightening idea that all must be compelled to “conform” to the “true Christian faith” has unleashed centuries of unparalleled bloodshed. Indeed, Christians have suffered more under the rule of Christian civilization than under pre- Christian Roman rule or any other rule in history. | Millions were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies |
| The Crusades | The European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.” |
| Europe's Reformation and Counter Reformation Era | Two thirds of the Christian population of Europe was slaughtered by Christians |
| The African slave trade | Claimed the lives of 10 million |
| The Colonial Conquests | Estimates for the number of Native Americans slaughtered by the Europeans in North, Central and South America run as high as 20 million within three generations. |
| The 20 th century's Western Civilization took warfare to new extremes | A conservative estimate puts the total number of brutal deaths in the 20 th century at more than 250 million. Of these, Muslims are responsible for less than 10 million deaths. Christians, or those coming from Christian backgrounds account for more than 200 million of these! The greatest death totals come from World War I (about 20 million, at least 90 % of which were inflicted by “Christians”) and World War II ( 90 million, at least 50% of which were inflicted by “Christians,” the majority of the rest occurring in the Far East). Given this grim history, it appears that we Europeans must all come to grips with the fact that Islamic civilization has actually been incomparably less brutal than Christian civilization. Did the Holocaust of over 6 million Jews occur out of the background of a Muslim Civilization? |
| In the 20th century alone
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Western and/or Christian powers have been responsible for at least twenty times more deaths than have Muslim powers. In this most brutal of centuries, we created incomparably more civilian casualties than have Muslims in the whole of Islamic history. |
| In the 20th century, Rawanda, 1994 | Witness the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandans in 1994 in a population that was over 90 % Christian |
| 1992-1995 Bosnia | The genocide of over 300,000 Muslims and systematic rape of over 100,000 Muslim women by Christian Serbs |
| Western popular culture | It should also be mentioned that although Islam has the concept of legitimate war in self-defense (as does Christianity, and even Buddhism), nowhere in Islamic culture (or in other cultures that survive today) is there latent the idealization, and perhaps idolization, of violence that exists in Western Culture. Westerners think of themselves as peaceful, but in fact the gentleness and sublimity of the New Testament, and the peace-loving nature of the principles of democracy, are scarcely reflected in Western popular culture. Rather, the entire inclination of popular culture— Hollywood movies, Western television, video games, popular music and sports entertainment—is to glorify and inculcate violence. Accordingly, the relative rates of murder (especially random and serial murder) are higher in the Western World (particularly in the U.S., but even in Europe, taken as a whole) than they are in the Islamic world in counties that are not suffering civil wars, and this true despite the much greater wealth of the West. |