Did conquerors always wipe out local religions, sacred sites and history?

Zorestrianism survived as a majority religion in Persia for several hundred years after the conquest. And as far as culture is concerened, it not only survived, but thrived and and was adopted by the conquerers as their own. So you choose a throughly poor example.

One of the reasons that the conquest stayed put is that the Arabs (unlike the Sassanids) were pretty lax on the religion thing.

[QUOTE=bldysabba]
In fairness, AFAIK that’s more the result of persecution than destruction of places of worship. There is a provision for a separate tax for non-muslims in Islam, and I doubt that would be the only way non-muslim subjects were disadvantaged.
[/QUOTE]

While non muslims were disadvantaged, taxes were not one of them. Taxes on muslims were quite heavier and by giving jizya tax, during the Ummyad era, non muslims were exempt from conscription and Army service. When the Abassiads took over, they had a professional army and the point became mostly moot.

Cite?

Swamped out is more like it. There was certainly some early persecution, but Muslim authorities never really set out to eliminate the Zoroastrian faith. The Rashidun Caliph Umar I extended ‘People of the book’ status to them in the first generation of Muslim conquest. Indeed early on conversion was discouraged due to thorny issues of taxation ( the original Muslim Arab invaders lived very much as a parasitic, largely tax-free class ).

The problem was that unlike Christianity or Judaism, Zoroastrianism didn’t have much of an existence outside of Iran. It was functionally an ethnic faith with a minimal reservoir outside the Muslim conquest zone. And as Persia was wealthy, administratively sophisticated and centrally located to the new Muslim polity it quickly became politically central to the state. The nominally Arab-descended Abbasid dynasty that emerged from Eastern Iran to seize power in the 8th century was actually very Persian in character. Accordingly it was pretty advantageous to convert and as the Abbasids formally adopted a universalist stance ( something the Syrian-based Umayyads had hedged on ), there was little reason not to.

Yeah, that’s entirely erroneous I’m afraid. Non-Muslims were the tax-base in the early days. What they were was technically exempt from mandatory military service ( though there were certainly exceptions to that ). Muslims paid the zakat, but that was usually set around 2.5% and was nothing near the burden imposed on non-Muslims.

What you can say is that in some areas local non-Muslim populations benefited from lower taxes relative to their pre-conquest status - i.e. they were less heavily taxed than by the Byzantines or Sassanians. However that was highly disparate. Some areas went up, some went down and some were squeezed about equal ( Egypt being a prime example, a tax cow for everybody before and after the Muslim conquest and always squeezed until it bled ).

As to the OP, MHO ( and this is really closer to a GD topic than a GQ I think ), is that conquest-mediated attempts to wipe-out rival cultures were the exception rather than the rule.

But unfortunately one can cherry-pick plenty of exceptions in history - we don’t know a great deal about pre-Incan Andean societies, because the Incas were pretty successful at eliminating them. Or Charlemagne’s campaigns against the pagan Saxons. Or for that matter the Wendish Crusades in Northern Europe. Or the others mentioned examples in this thread and I’m sure we can find more.

Ah, I was hoping you would show up. Thanks.

Thats really misleading. Non muslims were the tax base because they were the overwhelming population.
Zakat is not the only tax which has to be paid by muslims. Ushr is another, which is at about 10%. Moreover, jizya was calculated on the basis of adult, males. Women and children were exempt from it as were the elderly at times. Not surprisingly, as it related to military service. Unlike the Zakat and Ushr which applies to all irregardless.

I’d thought only the excerpted part relevant. I realised later, when I went back to paste a link to that thread and re-read your post, that the paragraph immediately before was also directly related. Sorry!

If that was the only issue the Umayyad ruling class would not have had such a fight over Mawali tax status. It was the inequality of the tax status of Muslim converts that was one of the factors ( though hardly the only one ) that helped drive the Abbasid revolution. The reason being…

…that in those early decades Muslims did not pay kharaj. Ushr + zakat did not come close to equaling kharaj + jizya - non-Muslim land tax rates alone not infrequently reached 50% of annual income ( in heavily taxed districts, some areas enjoyed lesser burdens ). This is why by the time Islam finally settled on universalism Muslims had to start paying kharaj as well to keep that state tax revenue from bottoming out.

You can find all sorts of exceptions and inversions, but as a general rule non-Muslims ( and until the 8th century post-conquest converts to Islam ) were usually much more heavily taxed than Muslims in most areas. Which was a driver for all sorts of social tension in the early history of the Caliphate.

A simple wikipedia search shows - Muslims are recorded to have destroyed fire temples..

I’m not saying it didn’t happen, or didn’t contribute, but like in India, I’m saying destruction of places of worship wasn’t systematic, or the largest contributor to the spread of Islam or the Zoroastrian religion being wiped out.

I am going to need a cite for that. I am of Indian origin - and grew up seeing several temples that were defaced by Muslims within a radius of 50 miles - so it makes me harder to accept that this was not systematic without seeing any cites.
As per wikipedia -

[Quote]
(Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques - Wikipedia)- “The conversion of non-Muslim places of worship into mosques occurred primarily during the life of Muhammad and continued during subsequent Islamic conquests and under historical Muslim rule. As a result, numerous Hindu temples, churches, synagogues, the Parthenon and Zoroastrian temples were converted into mosques.”

I think there’s a big difference, though, between selected temples being defaced, destroyed or converted into mosques and all temples in the conquered region being so treated. Only the latter would point to an attempt to “wipe out” the non-Muslim religion, which is what the OP is asking about.

Agreed - there is a big difference. Where is the evidence that it was the former and not the latter ?

When I look at most of middle east today, I don’t exactly see a plurality of religions flourishing there. And the minorities seem to be doomed. So you are saying that this was not so back in the old days - is that correct ? If so, please provide some cites/evidence.

You know, I figured the obvious counterpoint would be old large, surviving temples in Muslim occupied territories. It turns out that overwhelmingly, old large, surviving temples are located in South India, where there was no period of Muslim rule, and C. Asian invasions were buffered by North India.
Either this means North India had no large temples, or that they didn’t survive Muslim rule. It’s an interesting data point that I hadn’t considered before. I’ll want to dig into that aspect a bit more.

But as for the evidence, I’ll point you to this article by Richard Eaton, which makes some of the points nani made earlier. I’m not thoroughly convinced by the analysis, though I was convinced enough that I made the response to you that I did. Draw your own conclusions.

You’ll know more about this than I do, but when you said that you “grew up seeing several temples that were defaced by Muslims within a radius of 50 miles”, I kind of assumed that “several” did not mean “all the temples within a radius of 50 miles”, and that a good number had survived. Did I understand that wrongly?

Substantial minority religions survived for centuries under Ottoman rule. It’s only in modern times with, ironically, the arrival of western ideas like nationalism and socialism that many centuries-old Christian and Jewish communities in former Ottoman territories across the middle east have declined. Turkey, for instance, is full of the ruins of Byzantine churches that were descrated in the 1920s; consider the implications of that. Into modern times, a quarter of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. And so forth.

If the Ottomans had a policy of eradicating minority religions, they were extraordinarily inept at implementing it. You’ll know more about the history of Mughal rule in India than I do, but it is not the case that large parts of the the former Mughal territories are are, and always were, substantially Hindu?

One important thing to note about Mughal rule in India is that the most powerful and successful Mughal ruler, the one who expanded Mughal rule to most of the Indian subcontinent - Akbar - was heterodox enough that he founded a new religion.

And every other preceding dynasty. Regions like Egypt remained majority Christian into the 10th century. And still to this day Egypt is 10-20% Christian, almost 14 centuries after the Islamic conquests. Syria is still 10-15% Christian. Lebanon is still ~40% Christian. Iraq was ~6% Christian prior to 1991 ( a lot fewer now ) and figures are about the same internationally for the Palestinians. Prior to WW I the Ottoman state was probably ~20% Christian. Prior to the 17th century the Ottoman state may have been close to majority Christian ( owing to its large Balkan territories ).

Few Muslim polities ( I won’t go so far as to say none ) ever made an attempt to wholesale eradicate other faiths. Treat them as second class? Definitely. Eliminate? Not usually. There are exceptions, some Muslim-on-Muslim as with the conversion of Iran from majority Sunni to majority Twelver Shi’a in the 16th/17th centuries. But as a rule, it wasn’t common.

Certainly not in India. There was persecution and exploitation galore, but usually little attempt to force conversion ( sometimes the exact opposite, as the Mughals were known to censure governors for pushing the issue ). The Delhi Sultanate mostly consisted of a network of Muslim-controlled towns in a Hindu sea ( indeed they often had little direct control of the countryside ). Indeed much of the growth of Muslim populations may not have been by formal conversion per se at all, but local population growth of previously adopted Muslim folk religion ( much of it syncretic ). Such seems to be the case particularly in Bengal, where only passingly/partially Hinduized populations on the frontier adopted folk-versions of Islam then experienced a population explosion with shifting hydrology of the Ganges-Brahmaputra system.

UDS pointed out the modern origin of some of the trends. Otherwise, religious tolerance was a complicated issue ‘in the old days’ in different ways that it was now. Interested people should check outthis paper by the always interesting Patricia Crone (WARNING: PDF) for some background that quickly goes over the “no compulsion in religion” verse (2:256) from the Qur’an and the history of its interpretations. And who could resist reading that article with quotes like these:

I am surprised that such a rosy picture of religious tolerance is being portrayed. The evidence in India seems to be contrary. For example - take the practice of Johar (Jauhar - Wikipedia) in India - where women and kids will commit mass suicides by burning themselves if their side lost the battle with the Muslims. They would rather burn themselves than be abused by the conquering Muslims due to the atrocious acts to follow. I see the same thing happening in Syria today with their women and kids. this certainly raises doubt to the claim that Muslim conquests were more respectful/tolerant in the old days.