Other than Spain and Portugal (and the Ottoman Empire), where were Muslims in Europe to a sufficient extent to be ethnically cleansed prior to the 18th century CE?
Sicily. Used to be a Muslim-majority island. In the 11th-12th centuries the Normans and Hohenstaufens appreciated and respected the Sicilian Muslims and learned much from them. It was the 13th-century Angevins who kicked the Muslims out of Sicily. They proceeded to make themselves so hated that the Sicilians rose up and threw *them *out (the Sicilian Vespers). When the Muslims took over Sicily they didn’t kick out the Christians and Jews. They let them stay and keep practicing their religions openly. Christians and Jews were held to an unequal sociopolitical status, which sucks, but the Islamic way was to have all three religions openly going at once, instead of one religion exterminating the others, as was also the case in the Reconquista.
My statement was primarily that Animist religious are effectively unpleasant ways of viewing the world. Your statement about the positive attractions of Islam and Christianity adds to my statement, but does not detract from it.
My statement about PNG is based on my personal Experience of PNG, and my analysis of Irian Jaya.
Your statement about Africa appears to be based on the historical spread of Islam into Africa, not it’s potential for continued spread.
No, strictly speaking it was the Hohenstaufen HRE Frederick II. Though seemingly a bit fascinated by Islamic theology and some of the cultural trappings of local Levantine/Mediterranean Islamic culture, he was a ruthless pragmatist. Which led to his elimination of the Sicilian Muslim communities and his transplanting them to the military colonies in mainland Italy typified by Lucera.
You are correct that it the Angevins that exterminated those vestiges however.
Crete of course is another example of an island province that has changed hands multiple times prior to the 18th century.
In my - admittedly limited - experience, this is not necessarily so.
The converts to Islam that I know (a Cuban and a Swede) follow some supposed rules and merrily ignore other supposed rules. One of them regularly listens to music (with and without stringed instruments); the other hardly ever prays. Didn’t stop them from converting.
I think the idea that “conversion” = “serious belief” = “strictly following the rules” makes intuitive sense, but it may be that the reality is a tid trickier and more complex.
A lot of the variation in Islam that have tended to appeal to educated westerners has been various flavors of Sufism. Which are generally by their very nature rather heterodox. Much like popular variants of Buddhism ( particularly Zen ) in the west, convert practitioners are not infrequently cherry-picking an approach that works best for their spiritual needs. Which I personally think is a perfectly fine way to go about things.