Christians under early Islamic rule faced real but strictly limited tolerance

Evidence

The hostility that pervades John’s account of Islam should be understood within the context of the time. Christians living under Islamic rule were tolerated, but there were strict limits to that tolerance. Under the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) Arabic replaced Greek as the administrative language. Under Yazid II (r. 720–24) Christians were actively persecuted and Christian images and crosses were destroyed throughout the caliphate. The Church of St John in Damascus was demolished to make way for the Umayyad Mosque. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s theme of cross-cultural limits on tolerance and the class/identity signals behind persecution.

Related

• Islam alone tolerated other religions while Christendom expelled or converted its Muslim enclaves (similarity 0.79)
• Christians under Islamic rule wrote polemics as hostile as free Byzantine academics. (similarity 0.79)
• Christians under Islamic rule bred hostility as intense as Byzantine polemicists’. (similarity 0.79)