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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

The first one's fine: no objections there. The second comment is just misleading in so many ways it's hard to pick one.

Dividing the world into "Pagan countries" and "Christian countries" is both inaccurate (Jews weren't considered pagans) and overly-simplistic (state religions aren't a solid, fixed thing, especially over large areas before modern communication). While the Arab conquests were significant, not every Muslim country was converted "by the sword": there's even debate over whether the Muslim citizens of the early caliphates were, since such a small group, while large enough to conquer, would surely find it tricky to police the day-to-day behaviour and practices of so many people. (The Mongol Empire didn't manage to eliminate the practice of Islam in the areas under its control, despite ritual washing being punishable by summary execution, so it's plausible that Islam is just that persuasive.)

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> (The Mongol Empire didn't manage to eliminate the practice of Islam in the areas under its control, despite ritual washing being punishable by summary execution, so it's plausible that Islam is just that persuasive.)

When/where did the Mongol empire ever try to eliminate the practice if Islam? They definitely shed a lot of blood and destruction in the Muslim world, but afaik the point was never to eliminate Islam, but just territorial conquest. The Mongols were famously tolerant of diverse religions within their borders. Many Mongol rulers even converted to Islam.

Of course, history is vast and multifaceted, so you might be talking about a different time/place than I am.

I don't know they ever did try to eliminate Islam, but the particular issue of washing was a conflict between their religious practices. I learned this from https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/hfsnrYC2aGbr1HEehhwrqZ?start=6m3... by Premodernist, which quotes and discusses 長春真人西遊記:

> Now the subtext here, which Li doesn't come right out and say, but is kinda understood for a contemporary: when the Mongols forbade people from washing in the rivers, that means that if they caught you going into the river to wash, they would kill you on the spot; because that was a taboo in the Mongol religious system. Now that was a problem if you were a Muslim who had come under Mongol rule, because Muslims of course do ritual washings before prayers, and in central Asia they would very often just go down to the local stream or river to do the washings. But if a Mongol saw them doing that, they would go over there and strike them down and kill them. And there are accounts – not in this account, but there are accounts in other historical works from the period, particularly from Muslim writers – that talk about, it was not uncommon for Muslims to be killed by Mongols in this way.

You might wanna look into the history of this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Taymiyya

> Dividing the world into "Pagan countries" and "Christian countries" is both inaccurate

That's not what the post said. Just that, before Islam was even a thing, those countries that Jews lived in which these days are considered "Muslim countries" were broadly "pagan" and/or "christian", depending on time and location.

As for your assertion of no christian countries thousands of years ago, where you state yourself "Armenia converting about 1715-ish years ago": That's thousands of years (as in: more than 1000)

> those countries that Jews lived in which these days are considered "Muslim countries"

Is irrelevant, since we're talking about the 11th century. (I can't find a good 11th-century map to point at, but the article describes enough to give the impression of how different it was back then.)

Three posts above the goal post stood at "inaccurate" and "overly-simplistic," now we're at irrelevant. Okay.

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