How kind were the Muslim occupations of North Africa?
Upvote:19
This Jewish source characterizes Muslim rule in Spain during the Middle Ages as being "kind" by contemporary standards, but not by modern standards. Jews and Christians in Spain lived in a "second class citizenship," denied certain prvileges, but also free of "ghettoes," forced conversions, and outright persecution. Their fate in Moslem Spain was much better than under the Reconquista and Inquisition of the "Catholic" Ferdinand and Isabella. In fact, after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many of them fled to North Africa.
The above was fairly "typical" of the millennium between 700 and 1700, although there were exceptions at various times and places. On the whole, however, it is reflective of how Jews "voted with their feet" during this period.
Upvote:41
The history is a bit sketchy about this period. The most well-known early source, Ibn Abd al-Hakam Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain, was written in 870. Being written about two centuries after the conquest, he had to rely a lot on oral traditions. In addition, many early sources focused on highlighting the Muslim victories and had little information on the conquered population and how they were treated.
That said, the Quran does prohibit forced conversions (Quran 2:256 explicitly says "There shall be no compulsion in religion"), and we do know that during the early Caliphates this prohibition was generally observed. That doesn't mean that the caliphates were fully tolerant by modern standard. Non-Muslim subjects were required to pay jizya, a special tax which also exempted them from military service. While jizya seems like a form of discrimination today, this served as an incentive for the rulers to keep the religious minorities thriving and not forcibly converted. This relative tolerance allowed indigenous non-Muslim minorities to exist today even in areas under millennia of Muslim rule, e.g. Egyptian Copts or Syriac Orthodox Church.
While Christians remained in a significant number in Egypt, in the Maghreb (Western North Africa) the number is much smaller, and even that might have been partially introduced by colonial powers. C. J. Speel's 1960 paper The Disappearance of Christianity from North Africa in the Wake of the Rise of Islam, argued that this was due to the fact that the Maghrebi Christians were Arians. They didn't believe that Jesus was God and thus were theologically closer to Islam than the mainstream Christianity of the Byzantine Empire.
Sources/further reading:
- Chapter 11: The Arab Conquest in Africa in Wilhite, David (2017). Ancient African Christianity: An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition, pp. 321–356
- Speel, C. (1960). The Disappearance of Christianity from North Africa in the Wake of the Rise of Islam. Church History, 29(4), pp. 379-397
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