Were Conquered Christians Really Liberated Muslims?

by Raymond Ibrahim:

Imagine if a top American historian appeared on the MSM insisting that the only reason Europeans conquered the Americas was to “defend” the Native Americans—who somehow had adopted Christianity centuries before Jesus was born—from being persecuted by heathen tribes.

While that would create a maelstrom of outrage and derision in the West, in the Arab world—where some think bewitched animals work as infidel operatives—such absurdities regularly pass for “truth.” Consider the case of Fadel Soliman, a celebrated Sharia expert and Arab media darling, who regularly appears on al-Jazeera. Director of the Bridges Foundation—which teaches Muslims “how to present Islam” to non-Muslims—Soliman also lectures at Western universities, churches, and governmental agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Defense.

His new Arabic book, Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad, asserts that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt (c. 640), the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, or muwahidin, who were actually being oppressed by Christians: hence, the Muslim conquest of Egypt was really about “liberating” fellow Muslims. Soliman’s evidence is that the Arian sect, which rejected the claim that Jesus was coequal with God, was present in 4th century Egypt. Therefore, according to Soliman, the indigenous Egyptians were practicing Islam hundreds of years before it was founded in the 7th century.

As with much of modern academia’s approach to Islam, this thesis is based on pure fiction.

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