This is from the writing of Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani (1314-1385 CE), a tolerant Islamic Sufi spiritual leader, in “Zakhiratulmaluk”

“…The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book – Christians and Jews… Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death… The fact was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone; but their dependents were made slaves. They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time if not immediately after captivity…slave taking in India was the most flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity…Every Sultan, as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization of the country and countering native resistance….”
http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2475

http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2475

“…Although [he]acknowledges the forced conversion of pagans in Arabia, he ignores its Koranic source(s), in particular the timeless war proclamation (the Koran being the “uncreated word of Allah” for Muslims) on generic pagans (not simply Arabian pagans), Koran 9:5, which offers pagans the stark “choice” of conversion or death: “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” . Thus for the idolatrous Hindus (and the same applies to enormous populations of pagans/animists wherever Muslim jihadist armies encountered them in history, including, sadly, contemporary Sudan) for example, enslaved in vast numbers during the waves of jihad conquests that ravaged the Indian subcontinent for well over a half millennium (beginning at the outset of the 8th century C.E.), the guiding principles of Islamic law regarding their fate —derived from Koran 9:5—were unequivocally coercive. Jihad slavery also contributed substantively to the growth of the Muslim population in India. K.S. Lal elucidates both of these points:

The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book – Christians and Jews… Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death… The fact was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone; but their dependents were made slaves. They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time if not immediately after captivity…slave taking in India was the most flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity…Every Sultan, as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization of the country and countering native resistance.

The late Rudi Paret was a seminal 20th century scholar of the Koran, and its exegesis. Paret’s considered analysis of Koran 2:256, puts this verse in the overall context of Koranic injunctions regarding pagans, specifically, and further concludes that 2:256 is a statement of resignation, not a prohibition on forced conversion.

After the community which the Prophet had established had extended its power over the whole of Arabia, the pagan Arabs were forcefully compelled to accept Islam stated more accurately, they had to choose either to accept Islam or death in battle against the superior power of the Muslims (cf. surahs 8:12; 47:4). This regulation was later sanctioned in Islamic law. All this stands in open contradiction to the alleged meaning of the Quranic statement, noted above: la ikraha fi d-dini. The idolaters (mushrikun) were clearly compelled to accept Islam – unless they preferred to let themselves be killed. [Note-Koran 9:5];

In view of these circumstances it makes sense to consider another meaning. Perhaps originally the statement la ikraha fi d-dini did not mean that in matters of religion one ought not to use compulsion against another but that one could not use compulsion against another (through the simple proclamation of religious truth).

Lest one think such coercion applies only to “pagans”, Princeton scholar Patricia Crone makes the cogent argument that coercion may apply during any act of jihad resulting in captivity (i.e., jihad as the institution for extension of Islamic suzerainty, including, for our example, the jihad kidnapping of the two Fox reporters). Dr. Crone, in her recent analysis of the origins and development of Islamic political thought, makes an important nexus between the mass captivity and enslavement of non-Muslims during jihad campaigns, and the prominent role of coercion in these major modalities of Islamization. Following a successful jihad, she notes:

Male captives might be killed or enslaved, whatever their religious affiliation. People of the Book were not protected by Islamic law until they had accepted dhimma. Captives might also be given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid execution: jurists ruled that their change of status was to be accepted even though they had only converted out of fear.

An unapologetic view of Islamic history reveals that forced conversions to Islam are not exceptional—they have been the norm, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—for over 13 centuries. Orders for conversion were decreed under all the early Islamic dynasties—Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Mamluks. Additional extensive examples of forced conversion were recorded during the jihad campaigns and rule of the Berber Almoravids and Almohads in North Africa and Spain (11th through 13th centuries), under both Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish rule (the latter until its collapse in the 20th century), the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Persia/Iran, and during the jihad ravages on the Indian subcontinent, beginning with the early 11th century campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, and recurring under the Delhi Sultanate, and Moghul dynasty until the collapse of Muslim suzerainty in the 18th century following the British conquest of India.

Moreover, during jihad—even the jihad campaigns of the 20th century [i.e., the jihad genocide of the Armenians during World War I, the Moplah jihad in Southern India [1921], the jihad against the Assyrians of Iraq [early 1930s], the jihads against the Chinese of Indonesia and the Christian Ibo of southern Nigeria in the 1960s, and the jihad against the Christians and Animists of the southern Sudan from 1983 to 2001], the dubious concept (see Paret, above) of “no compulsion” (Koran 2:256; which was cited with tragic irony during the Fox reporters “confessional”!), has always been meaningless. A consistent practice was to enslave populations taken from outside the boundaries of the “Dar al Islam”, where Islamic rule (and Law) prevailed. Inevitably fresh non-Muslim slaves, including children (for example, the infamous devshirme system in Ottoman Turkey, which spanned three centuries and enslaved 500,000 to one million Balkan Christian adolescent males, forcibly converting them to Islam), were Islamized within a generation, their ethnic and linguistic origins erased. Two enduring and important mechanisms for this conversion were concubinage and the slave militias—practices still evident in the contemporary jihad waged by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government against the southern Sudanese Christians and Animists. And Julia Duin reported in early 2002 that murderous jihad terror campaigns—including, prominently, forced conversions to Islam—continued to be waged against the Christians of Indonesia’s Moluccan Islands….”

“My Slave, My Infidel”

I am a Hindu who is often reminded of the caste system our ancestors had been following for millenia. But does that compare any where against this. Fine, Hindus had misinterpreted teachings of our Holy Vedas and started forcification of caste by birth not work, and made a hell lot of rituals like untouchability, barring inter caste marriages and banning many privileges for the downtrodden etc. But I don’t think that anything can be as bad as the enforced slavery, forced prostitution, forced castration of boys, Forced change of faith and mass slaughtering on the basis of the division : Free Muslim, Slave Muslim, Slave Non-Muslims and Free Non-muslims.

The report claims that others were flown across the country, where women were sold into forced marriages with soldiers and children were made to carry out domestic duties with no chance of escape.

The report, by the Darfur Consortium, a coalition of 50 African and international charities, said that the practice exactly mirrors the forced enslavement of 14,000 people from Sudan’s south during its 1983 to 2005 war with Khartoum.

As then, the government of President Omar al-Bashir has again “comprehensively failed in its duty to protect its citizens from abductions”, the report says, adding that its research showed “hundreds, but more likely thousands” of Darfuris had been abducted since the war there started in 2003.

“The government bears a direct responsibility for these violations as they have generally been carried out by government forces or militias which the government of Sudan established and supported,” said Dismas Nkunda, co-chair of the Darfur Consortium.

The report’s researchers documented the case of 16 teenage girls from Garsila in West Darfur who were kidnapped and then transported to the other side of the country and forced into marriage.

Their case only came to light when one was admitted to hospital for treatment to injuries brought on by repeated sexual assault. A lawyer took the case to court but it was thrown out because the judge ruled that the “marriage” had been “consensual”.

On another occasion, the Janjaweed abducted 14 men and seven women from a camp for people for displaced civilians.

“They used us like their wives in the night and during the day time we worked all the time – preparing food, collecting firewood and fetching water from nearby,” said one woman who managed to escape after three months.

“The men they abducted with us were used to look after their livestock. We worked all day, all week with no rest.” ”

Impact of the legacy of slavery…
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001970382_slavery02.html
“The vacationing Senegalese businessman strolling on a summer evening in a North African resort town could have forgotten he was anything but a Muslim among Muslims, an African among Africans. But a shouted insult from an Arab policeman set the black man straight: “Son of a slave.”

Along ancient Saharan trade routes, 1,300 years of shared history that have mingled the faiths, cultures and skin tones of Arabs and Africans have left another, more vicious legacy: Arab-African slavery that has endured as long as the two peoples have been together, leaving black Africans fighting perceptions of themselves as lesser beings and of Arabs as the civilizing, conquering force.

Today, the old roles are playing out at their most extreme in Sudan’s Darfur region, with murderous results: Arab horseman clutching AK-47s raze non-Arab African villages and drive off and kill the villagers, in what rights groups call an ethnic-cleansing campaign backed by Sudan’s Arab-led government.

Muhammad was keeping slaves and made trade in them. This means that slavery is part of Islam forever. Slavery has only been abolished in Muslim countries under Western pressure. Therefore, slavery can be reinstated at any time. Islamic legislation concerning slavery is being reprinted up till today by the main schools of Islam, so that scholars are aware of it. Furthermore Islam allows female slaves and female prisoners of war to be raped on condition that well-established rules are followed.

Muhammad himself encouraged this, see the following authentic tradition/hadith transmitted by Muslim. The title of chapter 29 is already very revealing:

Sahih Muslim 8:29: “IT IS PERMISSIBLE TO HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH A CAPTIVE WOMAN AFTER SHE IS PURIFIED (OF MENSES OR DELIVERY) IN CASE SHE HAS A HUSBAND, HER MARRIAGE IS ABROGATED AFTER SHE BECOMES CAPTIVE.”

Sahih Muslim 8:3432: “Abu Sa’id al-Khudri (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that at the Battle of Hunain Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) sent an army to Autas and encountered the enemy and fought with them. Having overcome them and taken them captives, the Companions of Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) seemed to refrain from having intercourse with captive women because of their husbands being polytheists. Then Allah, Most High, sent down regarding that:” And women already married, except those whom your right hands possess (verse 4:24)” (i.e., they were lawful for them when their ‘Idda period came to an end).”
…
3. The killing of apostates

Most Muslims and non-Muslims think this is an anomaly. They are wrong. This practice is not only in the collective memory of the population in Muslim countries, but all shariah handbooks tell the same story. Everyone who has studied Islam seriously knows that Shariah prescribes the death penalty for apostates. This is based on the authentic traditions of Muhammad who said:

“If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.” (Bukhari, Book 52, Number 260)

and

“The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.” (Bukhari, Book 83 Number 17)

In most Islamic countries the death penalty for apostasy is not applied because this is an inhumane law. In these countries however apostates are harassed administratively by all possible means or are punished in one way or another. In the so-called moderate Muslim country Malaysia they have sent a woman to a psychiatric institution and her child has been taken away from her because she had turned away from Islam and became a Hindu. Fortunately she lives in “moderate” Malaysia. If she were living in Saudi-Arabia, she would be beheaded.”
http://www.islam-watch.org/LeavingIslam/Catholic-Convert-Leaves-Islam.htm

What Muslims call “tolerance,” others correctly identify as institutionalized discrimination. The consignment of Jews and Christians to dhimmis under Islamic rule means that they are not allowed the same religious rights and freedoms as Muslims. They cannot share their faith, for example, or build houses of worship without permission.

Historically, dhimmis have often had to wear distinguishing clothing or cut their hair in a particular manner that indicates their position of inferiority and humiliation. They do not share the same legal rights as Muslims, and must even pay a poll tax (the jizya). They are to be killed or have their children taken from them if they cannot satisfy the tax collector’s requirements.

For hundreds of years, the Christian population in occupied Europe had their sons taken away and forcibly converted into Muslim warriors (known as Jannisaries) by the Ottoman Turks.

It is under this burden of discrimination and third-class status that so many converted to Islam over the centuries. Those who didn’t often faced economic and social hardships that persist to this day and are appalling by Western standards of true religious tolerance and pluralism.

For those who are not “the People of the Book,” such as Hindus and atheists, there is very little tolerance to be found once Islam establishes political superiority. The Qur’an tells Muslims to “fight in the way of Allah” until “religion is only for Allah.” The conquered populations face death if they do not establish regular prayer and charity in the Islamic tradition (ie. the pillars of Islam).

Tamerlane and other Muslim warriors slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Buddhists, as well as displacing or forcibly converting millions more over the last thousand years.

One of the great ironies of Islam is that non-Muslims are to be treated according to the very standards by which Muslim would claim the right to violent self-defense were the shoe on the other foot. Islam is its own justification. Most Muslims therefore feel no need to question the ingrained arrogance and double standards.”

“There is not the least bit of intolerance for slavery anywhere in the Qur’an. In fact, the “holy” book of Islam explicitly gives slave-owners the freedom to sexually exploit their slaves – not just in one place, but in at least four separate Suras. Islamic law is littered with rules concerning the treatment of slaves, some of which are relatively humane, but none that prohibit the actual practice by any stretch.

The very presence of these rules condones and legitimizes the institution of slavery. Adding to this is the fact that Muhammad was an avid slave trader. After providing ample evidence of his activities according to the most reliable Muslim biographers, the Center of the Study of Political Islam summarizes their findings:

Muhammad captured slaves, sold slaves, bought slaves as gifts of pleasure, received slaves as gifts, and used slaves for work. The Sira is exquisitely clear on the issue of slavery. (Muhammad and the Unbelievers: a Political Life)

As such, this deeply dehumanizing horror has been a ubiquitous tradition of Islam since the days of Muhammad to the current plight of non-Muslims in the Sudan, Mali, Niger and Mauritania, as well as other parts of the Muslim world.

There has never been an abolitionary movement within Islam (just as the religion produces no organized resistance to present-day enslavement). The abolition of slavery was imposed on the Islamic world by European countries, along with other political pressures that were entirely unrelated to Islamic law.

Although horrible abuses of slaves in the Muslim world were recorded, there has been little inclination toward the documentation and earnest contrition that one finds in the West. The absence of a guilty conscience often leads to the mistaken impression that slavery was not as bad under Islam… when it is actually indicative of the tolerance that the religion has for the practice

So narcissistic is the effect of Islam on the devoted, that to this day many Muslims believe in their hearts that the women and children carried off in battle, and their surviving men folk, were actually done a favor by the Muslim warriors who plucked them from their fields and homes and relegated them to lives of demeaning servitude.

Shame and apology, no matter how appropriate, are almost never to be found in Dar al-Islam. Caliphs, the religious equivalent of popes, maintained harems of hundreds, sometimes thousands of young girls and women captured from lands as far away as Europe and consigned to sexual slavery. Hungarians were hunted like animals by the Turks, who carried 3 million into slavery over a 150 year period.

African slaves were often castrated by their Muslim masters. Few survived to reproduce, which is why there are not many people of African descent living in the Middle East, even though more slaves were taken out of Africa in the 1300 years of Arab slave trading than in the 300 years of European slavery. The 400,000 slaves brought to America, for example, have now become a community of 30 million, with a much higher standard of living than their African peers.

There is no William Wilberforce or Bartoleme de las Casas in Islamic history as there is in Christianity. When asked to produce the name of a Muslim abolitionist, apologists sometimes meekly suggest Muhammad himself. But, if a slave owner and trader, who commanded the capture and sexual exploitation of slaves, and left a 13-century legacy of religiously-based slavery, is the best that Islam can offer, then no amount of sophistry will be enough to convince any but the most ignorant.”

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/Myths-of-Islam.htm

Companions of Muhammad lived to see Islam declare war on every major religion in the world in just the first few decades following his death – pressing the Jihad against Hindus, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists.

By the time of the Crusades (when the Europeans began fighting back), Muslims had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world by sword, from Spain to Syria, and across North Africa.

Millions of Christians were enslaved by Muslims, and tens of millions of Africans. The Arab slave-trading routes would stay open for 1300 years, until pressure from Christian-based countries forced Islamic nations to declare the practice illegal (in theory). To this day, the Muslim world has never apologized to the victims of Jihad and slavery.

There is not another religion in the world that consistently produces terrorism in the name of religion as does Islam. The most dangerous Muslims are nearly always those who interpret the Qur’an most transparently. They are the fundamentalists or purists of the faith, and believe in Muhammad’s mandate to spread Islamic rule by the sword, putting to death those who will not submit.”

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/Myths-of-Islam.htm

“However, the principle has always been adopted in Muslim law and usually in practice that Christians and Jews – but not atheists, polytheists, or idolaters – are entitled to the tolerance and protection of the Muslim State.”

Iran:
“The Zoroastrians, seen by secular nationalists as the custodians of the true Iranian national identity, are viewed with corresponding suspicion by devout Muslims and are in any case too few to matter. The Baha’is, followers of a post-Muslim dispensation, are as such excluded from the tolerance prescribed by the Shari’a. Under the shah, they flourished and achieved a palce of some consequence in Iran. Under the republic, those who persist in their faith are proscribed outlaws.”

“For Jews and Christians, followers of religions recognized by Islamic law, this status is one of protected subordination, with some but not all of the rights of the Muslim compatriots. For those who practice nonrecognized religions, like the Baha’is in Iran, the Ahmadis in Pakistan, and the followers of African religions in the southern Sudan, the strict application of shari’a law would give them the choice between conversion and death, with the latter possibly commuted to enslavement.”

Bernard Lewis – The Multiple Identities of the Middle East – has a more in depth explanation of Dar al-Islam, Dar al-Harb, who gets to be Dhimmis and what happens to those who don’t get to be dhimmis.

“Zimmi [dhimmi}
A member of the Ahulu ‘z’Zhimmah, non-Muslim subject of a Muslim government, belonging to the Jewish, Christian, or Sabean creed, who, for the payment of a poll or capitation tax enjoys the security of his person and property in a Muhamadan country….Infidelity, however, admits of degrees. Its worst shape is idolatry, that is, the worship of idols instead of or besides the One true God; and this again is a crime most abominable on the part of Arabs, “since the Prophet was sent amongst them, and manifested himself in the midst of them, and the Quran was delivered down in their language.” Of an equally atrocious character is the infidelity of apostates, “because they have become infidels, after having been led into the way of the faith, and made acquainted with its excellence.” In the of neither, therefore is a compromise admissible; they must accept or re-embrace the faith or pay with their lives the full penalty of their crime.

With regard to the idolaters of a non-Arabic or ‘Ajam country, which latter expression in the times of early Islam, particularly applied to the Persian Empire, ash-Shafi’i maintains that destruction is incurred by them also; but the other learned doctors agree that it is lawful to reduce them to slavery, thus allowing them, as it were, a respite during which it may please God to direct them into the right path, but making, at the same time, their persons and substance subservient to the cause of Islam.

The least objectionable form of infidelity in the eyes of Muhammed and his followers, is that of the Kitabis or people of the Book (ahlu ‘lkitab), i.e. the Jews, as possessors of the Old Testament, or Taurat, and teh Christians, to whom, moreover, the Injil (Gospel) was revealed. As they are not guilty of an absolute denial, but only of a partial perversion of the truth, only part of the punishment for disbelief is their due, and it is imposed upon them in the shape of a tribute, called poll or capitation tax (jizyah), by means of which they secure protection for their property, personal freedom, and religious toleration from the Muslim government. The same privilege is extended to the Majusi or Sabeans, whose particular form of worship was more leniently judged by Muhammed and the Traditionalists than that of the idolaters of Persia.”

“Dar
A house, dwellin, habitation, land, country.”

“Daru ‘L-Islam
“Land of Islam.” According to the Raddu ‘l-Mukhtar, vol. iii, p. 391, it is a country in which the edicts of Islam are fully promulgated.

In a state brought under Muslims, all those who do not embrace the faith are placed under certain disabilities. They can worship God according to their own customs, PROVIDED THEY ARE NOT IDOLATERS; but it must be done without any ostentation, and, whilst churches and synagogues may be repaired NO NEW PLACE OF WORSHIP CAN BE ERECTED. “The construction of churches, or synagogues, in Muslim territory is unlawful, this being forbidden in the Traditions; but if places of worship belonging to Jews, or Christians, be destroyed, or fall into decay, they are at liberty to repair them, because buildings cannot endure forever.”

Idol temples must be destroyed, and idolatry suppressed by force in all countries ruled according to strict Muslim law. (Hidayah, vol. ii. p.219)”

“Daru ‘L-Harb
“The land of warfare.” According to the Dictionary Ghiyasu ‘l-Lughat, Daru ‘l-harb is “a country belonging to infidels which has not been subdued by Islam.” According to the Qamus, it is “a country in which peace has not been proclaimed between Muslims and unbelievers.”

In the Fatawa ‘Alamgiri, vol. ii. p854, it is written that a Daru ‘l-harb becomes a Daru ‘l-Islam on one condition, namely, the promulgation of the edicts of Islam. The Imam Muhammed, in his book called the Ziyadah, says a Daru ‘l-Islam becomes a Daru ‘l-harb, according to Abu Hanifah, on three conditions, namely: (1) That the edicts of the unbelievers be promulgated, and the edicts of Islam be suppressed; (2) That the country in question be adjoining a Daru ‘l-harb and no other Muslim country lie between them (that is, when the duty of Jihad or religious warfare becomes incumbent on them, and they have not the power to carry it on). (3) That no protection (aman) remains for either a Muslim of a zimmi; viz. that amanu ‘lawwal, or that first protection which was given them when the country was first conquered by Islam. The Imans Yusuf and Muhammed both say that when the edicts of unbelievers are promulgated in a country, it is sufficient to constitute it a Daru ‘l-harb.

In the Raddu ‘lMukhtar, vol. iii. p. 391, it is stated, “if the edicts of Islam remain in force, together with the edicts of the unbelievers, then the country cannot be said to be a Daru ‘l-harb….

…The Sunnis and Shi’ahs alike believe in the eventual triumph of Islam, when the whole world shall become the followers of the Prophet of Arabia; but whist the Sunnis are, of course, ready to undertake the accomplishment of this great end, “whenever there is a probability of victory to Musulmans,” the Shi’ahs, true to the one great principle of their sect, must wait until the appearance of the rightful Imam. [JIHAD]”

“Shi’ah
‘(C) With regard to the persons who may legally be slaves, there seems to be little, if any, difference between the two sects [Shi'ah and Sunni]. According to the Shi’ahs slavery is the proper condition of the HARABIS, or enemies, with the exception only of Christians, Jews, and Majusis, or fire-worshipers, so long as they continue in a state of zimmah, or subjection, to the Musulman community. If they renounce their zimmah, they fall back into the condition of ordinary HARABIS…”

Dictionary of Islam, Thomas Hughes