Forced conversion

The rest, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative (Codex Theodosianus XVI 1.2.).

[11] Forced conversions of Jews were carried out with the support of rulers during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Gaul, the Iberian peninsula and in the Byzantine Empire.

According to some South American leaders and indigenous groups, there were cases among native populations of conversion under the threat of violence, often because they were compelled to after being conquered, and that the Catholic Church cooperated with civil authority to achieve this end.

[28] Upon converting to Christianity in the 10th century, Vladimir the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus', ordered Kiev's citizens to undergo a mass baptism in the Dnieper river.

They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshiped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers", wrote Filippo Sassetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588.

[63] The Druze have frequently experienced persecution by different Muslim regimes such as the Shia Ismaili Fatimid State,[64] Mamluk,[65] Sunni Ottoman Empire,[66] and Egypt Eyalet.

I am chief of Taghlib, and I fear lest I become a cause of destruction to them all if I and they cease to believe in christ" Enraged Al-Walid had him dragged away on his face and tortured; afterward he commanded him again to convert to Islam or else prepare to "eat his own flesh."

The Christian Arab again refused, and the order was carried out: Walid's servants "cut off a slice from Shamala's thigh and roasted it in the fire, and they thrust it into his mouth" and he was blinded during this as well.

María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University, has argued that "tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society", and that the Jewish dhimmis living under the Caliphate, while allowed fewer rights than Muslims, were still better off than in Christian Europe.

[87] In 1198, the Almohad emir Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur decreed that Jews must wear a dark blue garb, with very large sleeves and a grotesquely oversized hat;[88] his son altered the colour to yellow, a change that may have influenced Catholic ordinances some time later.

Maimonides urged Jews to choose the superficial conversion over martyrdom and argued, "Muslims know very well that we do not mean what we say, and that what we say is only to escape the ruler's punishment and to satisfy him with this simple confession.

[95] In order to increase their numbers in Anatolia, the newly arrived Seljuk Turks took Christian children and forcibly converted them to Islam and turkified them, acts specifically mentioned in Antioch, around Samosata, and in western Asia Minor.

It is impossible to say with certainty how many men of the cloth were forced to apostasize.For strategic reasons, the Ottomans forcibly converted Christians living in the frontier regions of Macedonia and northern Bulgaria, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries.

[121] During his travels through the Salt lake region of central Anatolia, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier observed in the town of Mucur, "there are numbers of Greeks who are forced everyday to become Turks".

[161] In Pakistan's Sindh province, a distressing pattern of crimes has emerged, including the abduction, coerced conversion to Islam, and subsequent marriage to older Muslim men who are often abductors.

[172] According to the Amarnath Motumal, the vice chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every month, an estimated 20 or more Hindu girls are abducted and converted, although exact figures are impossible to gather.

Farid Chand Singh, who filed the complaint, has claimed that Assistant Commissioner Tehsil Tall Yaqoob Khan was allegedly forcing Sikhs to convert to Islam and the residents of Doaba area are being tortured religiously.

According to victims' families and activists, Mian Abdul Haq, who is a local political and religious leader in Sindh, has been accused of being responsible for forced conversions of girls within the province.

[184] Pakistan has been found in breach of its international commitments to safeguard non-Muslim girls from exploitation by influential factions and criminal elements, as forced conversions have become commonplace within the nation.

[194] In March 2007, the BBC reported that people in the Mandaean ethnic and religious minority in Iraq alleged that they were being targeted by Islamist insurgents, who offered them the choice of conversion or death.

[196] Allegations of Coptic Christian girls being forced to marry Arab Muslim men and convert to Islam in Egypt have been reported by a number of news and advocacy organizations[197][198][199] and have sparked public protests.

[208] An academic paper by Katy Sian published in the journal South Asian Popular Culture in 2011 explored the question of how "'forced' conversion narratives" arose around the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom.

[214][215] In Eusebíus, Christianity, and Judaism, Harold W. Attridge claims that Josephus' account was accurate and that Alexander Jannaeus (around 80 BCE) demolished the city of Pella in Moab, because the inhabitants refused to adopt Jewish national customs.

[218] Yigal Levin, conversely, argues that many non-Jewish communities, such as Idumeans, voluntarily assimilated in Hasmonean Judea, based on archaeological evidence and cultural affinities between the groups.

"[233] Jonathan Blake of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University elucidates the history of this practice in the USSR, stating that:[234] God, however, did not simply vanish after the Bolshevik revolution.

[234]Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of the Nazi Empire conquered by the Soviet Red Army, and Yugoslavia became one party communist states and the project of coercive conversion continued.

"[238][239] Historical essayist Andrei Brezianu expounds upon this situation, specifically in the Socialist Republic of Romania, writing that scientific atheism was "aggressively applied to Moldova, immediately after the 1940 annexation, when churches were profaned, clergy assaulted, and signs and public symbols of religion were prohibited"; he provides an example of this phenomenon, further writing that "St. Theodora Church in downtown Chişinău was converted into the city's Museum of Scientific Atheism".

[242] During the French Revolution, a campaign of dechristianization happened which included removal and destruction of religious objects from places of worship; English librarian Thomas Hartwell Horne and biblical scholar Samuel Davidson write that "churches were converted into 'temples of reason,' in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service".

Prior to this takeover, China itself was previously a cradle of religious thought since ancient times, being the birthplace of Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhists arrived in the first century CE.

[260] Due to the strict enforcement of anti-clerical laws, people in strongly Catholic areas, especially the states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Colima and Michoacán, began to oppose him, and this opposition led to the Cristero War from 1926 to 1929, which was characterized by brutal atrocities on both sides.