Sure; if war booty and money was the case, then Prophet Muhammad SAWS had no need to claim prophethood nor a new religion. Prophet Muhammad SAWS was from Banu Hashim, and the most noble a ruling clan of the Quraysh. He already had enough influence among the other rulers with his previous title of Amin and Siddique to accumulate more troops and resources to take over Arabia a lot earlier. His own paternal ancestors were generals of old Meccan armies. In fact, he was even offered absolute rule over the Quraysh many times, and in return for 1-2 non-Islamic holidays.
At this point I will prefer to discuss actions rather than motives which are too subjective and not easy to confirm. I do know for fact that till he started getting the "revelations", he was known more for being the husband of a wealthy woman than anything else.
A lot of Islamic History has been fudged since the height of Western colonialism. Fact is...Christianity is still in the Middle East; Hinduism is still in India; Jews are still around; the words sugar, lemon, algebra, etc, entered the Latin dictionary; Jerusalem will stand witness TWICE to how Muslims treated locals when they captured the city...i.e. once under Hazrat Umar ibn Khattab RA and again under Salahuddin. A little bit different when Babu Raju and his Thugs entered Gujrat.
You can always quote selected incidents to make your points. I can do the same.
Let's take Mahmud Gazani and his 2 million murders, massacres by Timur Lame and Nadir Shah, desecration of Golden temple by Abdali, routine genocides by the Bahamani rulers, the cruel murder of the ninth Sikh Guru and his young kids by Aurangzeb and so on. I can recount hundreds and hundreds of incidents which paint not a very tolerant picture of Muslims and Islam. This continues to this day with the genocides in Bangladesh, Afghanistan during the Taliban rule and Darfur, Sudan.
Even the invasion by Bin Qasim has been glorified in Pakistan while the reality as accepted by the Arabs and known to every Sindhi is a lot different with thousands of murders of innocents and sending thousands of Sindhi women to Harems back home.
Even to have sex with a slave woman you need her permission, and impregnating her makes her a full member of your household. There are even hadiths of slaves filing anything from rape charges to even complaining that their masters couldn't "satisfy them" properly. Whether wife or slave, rape is something that was punishable by death.
Did you know that in pre-Islamic customs, it was expected of a man to yield his wife to a noble (or nobles) of the higher caste clans such as Banu Hashim? If the Prophet Peace Be Upon Him and his followers were fixated on such things, trust me...it would have been done without the need of Islam.
So the Islam indeed permitted slavery! Not very egalitarian, I guess!
Permission from a slave for sex! You must be joking.
I have no reason to believe any fables created by Arabs about their pre-Islamic society without independent corroboration. They had a vested interest in denigrating it to show their own version in better light! The reality suggests otherwise. The prophet's wife was a rich women independently running her business and employing men! That suggests a better status for women, pre-Islam!
Did you know that providing girls education and letting women roam free within their residential city is part of Shariah? So how close were the Taliban to Shariah? BTW, it is also allowed in Shariah for a doctor to treat victims of the opposite gender, this was shown many times in the Sunnah in many situations. Male physicians had to treat issues pertaining to birth complications to women physicians treating soldiers on the battlefield. So how close were the Taliban to Islamic Law?
That is for Muslims to answer. How come the Taliban who professed to follow the Islam literally did all this without inviting any censor from the Afghan clergy? Mullah Omar obviously knows Islam and Shariah, does he not? The Talibs were students of Islam. They must have known how Shariah worked. Are you claiming they didn't? That all those years spent in the Madressah were for nothing!
Right on. Spain, Persia & North Africa...take a look at Jewish history.
Since you're so fixated on colonialism...also remember the Late Victorian Holocaust.
Let's not get into comparative games here. You guys claim Islam to be the one shot medicine for all ills and the perfect religion for all people at all times.
You can't get away by claiming that others were worse than you! You have to be perfect at all times or give up the pretense to perfection!
About Persia, I know that the followers of Zoroastrianism were kicked out of their land on the pain of death and took refuge in India. What did you want to say here?
Spain and North Africa, Jewish history. Possibly those rules were good in parts and the Jews claimed that the Muslims rulers in those areas were more tolerant than the Christians of Europe. There are theories that they did so to shame the Europeans but it could well be true. It doesn't take away from the other acts that were not so great. Does it?
