> Absolutely wrong; it was the single biggest factor in the spread of Islam; even today forced conversions are a reality in Islamic countries.
Perhaps you do not know so I will give you a history lesson.
Firstly, some of the early Umayyads were reluctant to encourage conversion to Islam for tax reasons, as a tax was levied on the non-Muslim minorities under protection of the Umayyad empire. The concept of Dhimmah let non-Muslims live peacefully under protection of the empire in exchange for recognizing their authority and paying a poll tax, jizyah. However, many people willingly converted to Islam, and the result is that some of the greatest Islamic scholars came from non-Arab lineage.
Next, Islamic conversions occurred in the Indian subcontinent in large part due to Sufis and merchants. This is similar for Indonesia and China which contacts with Islam came through merchants.
Next, the much of the Middle East converted to Islam far later than the original conquests by Islamic empires. You can read more here in this Oxford news article, so certainly you won’t be making accusations of apologism: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/how-did-christian-middle...
> Laughable! In every Muslim majority state, minorities have been persecuted/forcibly converted almost to extinction. You just have to look at the data for some Islamic countries.
The fact that religious minorities survived to the modern day in the Middle East is proof that Islamic conversions by and large did not happen by force. Nearly 20% of Egypt is Christian, as a result of the Coptic community that remains in Egypt. You can compare this to European conquests of the Americas, where indigenous religions were nearly wiped out forcibly. Or see the Spanish Inquisition where Spain expelled, interrogated, and executed Jews and Muslims.
Similarly, in the Balkans ruled by the Ottomans, there was no large scale systematic genocide of non-Muslims over hundreds of years of history. Early nationalism caused a lot of strife in the region and ethnic cleansing, but the fact that Balkan Christians remained is because forced conversion to Islam was not the primary cause of conversion to Islam. In fact, Bosnians converted to Islam probably because their form of Christianity was closer to Islamic teachings, compared to the others Balkan folk around them.
Yes, there were cases of forced conversion in different places, but in no way was this the primary way for people to become Muslims over history.
Anyways, your main argument was based around forced conversion being the primary way people entered Islam, but this is without a doubt false.
As for the sources you sent, these are very biased sources and this is outside of the topic at hand. Islam has remained relevant for hundreds of years, and will remain relevant for Muslims, regardless of what some people engaged in presentism will say.
I hope you can learn to leave your ignorance and accept truth, I think I have decisively sent you a lot of examples on why forced conversions were not the main cause to enter Islam. Let’s be honest.