A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Chapter 12/118
[Sidenote: 118. Mr. Bosworth Smith quoted.]
Mr. Bosworth Smith says:—
"The free toleration of the purer among the creeds around him, which the Prophet had at first enjoined, gradually changes into intolerance. Persecuted no longer, Mohammed becomes a persecutor himself; with the Koran in one hand, the scymitar in the other, he goes forth to offer to the nations the threefold alternative of conversion, tribute, death."[1]
Mohammad never changed his practice of toleration nor his own teachings into intolerance; he was always persecuted at Mecca and Medina, but, for all we know, he himself never turned a persecutor. The three-fold alternative so much talked of, and so little proved, is nowhere to be found in the Koran. This subject has been fully discussed in paras. 34-39.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ Mohammed and Mohammedanism. Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February and March 1874, by R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., Second Edition, page 137; London, 1876.