Modern day Muslims and other apologists—primarily in academia, government, and mainstream media—reject this idea.  They argue that the non-Muslims who embraced Islam did so from sheer conviction; that the ancestors of today’s 1.5 billion Muslims all converted to Islam due to its intrinsic appeal; that the modern day coercion and persecution committed by the Islamic State and other organizations is an aberration.

Of course, as mentioned, the primary texts of history are full of anecdotes demonstrating the opposite.  However, because ours is an increasingly ahistorical society, in this essay I endeavor to show that sheer common sense alone validates what history records, namely, that the Islamic world and its populace was forged through violent coercion. To do so, I will use Egypt—one of the most important Muslim majority nations and my ancestral homeland—as a paradigm. 

I will show how a historic fact that Islam’s apologists habitually boast of—that there are still millions of Christians in Egypt (approximately 10% of the population)—is not proof of Islam’s tolerance but rather its intolerance.For an objective answer to this question, a completely overlooked factor must be considered…

One telling example: in Muslim historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) authoritative history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving their women and children. The only escape then—as it is increasingly today—was for Christians to convert to Islam.

After recording one particularly egregious bout of persecution, where countless Christians were slaughtered, enslaved, and raped, and where reportedly some 30,000 churches in Egypt and Syria were destroyed—a staggering number that further indicates how Christian the Near East was before Islam—the pious Muslim historian makes clear why Christians converted: “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims” (emphasis added).[6]