Coercion was deemed necessary where Muslims held political power

Evidence

It would seem practicable to secure reunion with the Greeks and the conversion of the Tartars by the ‘necessary reasons’ he put forward in dispute; but it would be more useful in the case of the Muslims to ‘fight them and expel them from the land which is ours by right’. It would not be possible to convert them so long as they held power; it was only the conversion of subject Muslims that was practicable. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 673

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the ‘freedom to convert’ has historically been conditioned on political domination — only the conversion of the powerless counts as real conversion.