Others have probably read the following already, reproduced here for the benefit of Jill, nix and like-minded:
Jihad, the Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->According to the Zafer Nameh, our main source of information for Tamerlane's campaigns, written at the beginning of the 15th century, Tamerlane set forth to conquer India solely to make war on the enemies of the Muslim faith. He considered the Muslim rulers of north India far too lenient towards pagans, that is to say, the Hindus. The Zafer Nameh tells us that, "The Koran emphasizes that the highest dignity to which man may attain is to wage war in person upon the enemies of the Faith. This is why the great Tamerlane was always concerned to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire merit as from love of glory."
At Delhi under the pretext that the hundred thousand Hindu prisoners presented a grave risk to his army, Tamerlane ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands, and had victory pillars built of the severed heads. On his way out of India, he sacked Miraj, pulled down the monuments and flayed the Hindu inhabitants alive, "an act by which he fulfilled his vow to wage the Holy War."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Tamerlane also spread islamic love in the Middle-East. See the same url.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>INDIA</b>
"On the evidence of Baladhuri's account of the conquest of Sind, there were certainly massacres in the towns of Sind when the Arabs first arrived..."C.E. Bosworth
The Muslim conquest of Sind was masterminded by Hajjaj, the Governor of Iraq, and effected by his commander Muhammad b. Qasim in 712 A.D. Qasim's instructions were to "bring destruction on the unbelievers...[and] to invite and induce the infidels to accept the true creed, and belief in the unity of God... and whoever does not submit to Islam, treat him harshly and cause injury to him till he submits."
After the capture of the port of Debal, the Muslim army took three days to slaughter the inhabitants, but thereafter Qasim is more tolerant allowing many to continue their professions and practise their religion. This is not acceptable to Hajjaj, who, on receiving Qsaim's report of his victory, wrote back :"My dear cousin, I have received your life -augmenting letter. On its receipt my gladness and joy knew no bounds. It increased my pride and glory to the highest degree. It appears from your letter that all the rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are strictly in accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you, for you go on giving pardon to everybody, high or low, without any discretion between a friend and a foe. The great God says in the Koran [xlvii.4]: O True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads. "The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act. Henceforth grant pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none of them, or else all will consider you a weak-minded man. Concluded with compliments. Written by Nafia in the year ninety three." Later, Hajjaj returns to the same theme: "My distinct orders are that all those who are fighting men should be assassinated, and their sons and daughters imprisoned and retained as hostages." Obedient to a fault, Qasim, on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad, "ordered all the men belonging to the military classes to be beheaded with swords. It is said that about 6000 fighting men were massacred on this occasion, some say 16000. The rest were pardoned."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>MAHMUD OF GHAZNI</i> (969 -The real conquest of India by the Muslims dates from the beginning of the 11th century. In 1000 A.D., the head of a Turco- Afghan dynasty, Mahmud of Ghazni first passed through India like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging and massacring, all of which he justified by constant references to the Koranic injunctions to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise every year of his life. As Vincent Smith put it, "Mahmud was a zealous Muslim of the ferocious type then prevalent, who felt it to be a duty as well as pleasure to slay idolaters. He was also greedy of treasure and took good care to derive a handsome profit from his holy wars." In the course of seventeen invasions, in the words of Alberuni the scholar brought by Mahmud to India,: "Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims." Mahmud began by capturing King Jaipal in the Punjab, then invaded Multan in 1004. On conquering the district of Ghur, he forcibly converted the inhabitants to Islam. Mahmud accumulated vast amounts of plunder from the Hindu temples he desecrated, such as that of Kangra. "Mathura, the holy city of Krishna, was the next victim. 'In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted'. The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would have been required to build it. The idols included 'five of red gold, each five yards high', with eyes formed of priceless jewels. 'The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and leveled with the ground. 'Thus perished works of art which must have been among the noblest monuments of ancient India." [VA Smith 207] At the battle of Somnath, the site of another celebrated Hindu temple, 50000 were killed as Mahmud assuaged his lust for booty.
Mahmud was equally ferocious with those whom he considered heretics such as Dawud of Multan. In 1010, Mahmud invaded Dawud 's kingdom and slaughtered a great number of his heretical subjects. While Muslim historians see him as one of the glories of Islam, in reality, Mahmud was little more than an avaricious bandit undeserving of admiration.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>FRUZ SHAH</i>
In 1351, Firuz Shah ascended the throne and became ruler of the North of India. Though in many ways an enlightened man, when it came to religion was a bigot of the first order. He is said to have made "the laws of the Prophet his guide." He indulged in wholesale slave -raiding, and is said to have had 180000 slaves in his city, all of whom "became Muslims." But, as Vincent Smith says, he could be most savage when his religious zeal was roused. He seized a number of Shias, some he executed, others he lectured, and their books he burnt. He caused the ulama to kill a man who claimed to be the Mahdi, "and for this good action", he wrote, "I hope to receive future reward." He went to visit a village where a Hindu religious fair was being held, which was even attended by some "graceless Musalmans." He wrote: "I ordered that the leaders of these people and the promoters of this abomination should be put to death. I forbade the infliction of any severe punishment on the Hindus in general, but I destroyed their idol temples and instead thereof raised mosques." Later a Brahman who had practised his rites in public was burnt alive. Firuz Shah was simply carrying on the tradition of the early Muslim invaders, and he sincerely believed "that he served God by treating as a capital crime the public practice of their religion by the vast majority of his subjects [i.e.Hindus]." Firuz Shah also bribed a vast number of Hindus into embracing Islam, by exempting those who converted from the jizya or poll-tax, which was otherwise rigorously enforced, even on Firuz Shah, when due allowance is made for his surroundings and education, could not have escaped from the theory and practice of religious intolerance. It was not possible for him to rise, as Akbar did, to the conception that the ruler of Hindustan should cherish all his subjects alike, whether Muslim or Hindu, and allow every man absolute freedom, not only of conscience but of public worship. The Muslims of the fourteenth century were still dominated by the ideas current in the early days of Islam, and were convinced that the tolerance of idolatry was a sin."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Those ideas are still current, because they are fundamental doctrines of that great religion of peace: islam.
[For the section on the muslim heretic Akbar the great - see the url]
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>AURANGZEBÂ (1618-1707)</i>
Akbar's great grandson, Aurangzeb, was, in total contrast, a Muslim puritan, who wished to turn his empire into a land of orthodox Sunni Islam, ruled in accordance with the principles laid down by the early Caliphs. Once again, we enter the world of Islamic intolerance -- temples are destroyed (during the campaigns of 1679_80, at Udaipur 123 were destroyed, at Chitor sixty-three; at Jaipur sixty-six); and non -Muslims become second class citizens in their own country. The imperial bigot, to use Smith's phrase, reimposed the "hated jizya, or polltax on non-Muslims, which Akbar had wisely abolished early in his reign." Aurangzeb's aim was to curb the infidels and demonstrate the "distinction between a land of Islam and a land of unbelievers." "To most Hindus Akbar is one of the greatest of the Muslim emperors of India and Aurangzeb one of the worst; to many Muslims the opposite is the case. To an outsider there can be little doubt that Akbar's way was the right one.... Akbar disrupted the Muslim community by recognising that India is not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as though it were." [Gascoigne 227]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
India and beyond:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>BUDDHISM AND BUDDHISTS</b>
"Between {the years} 1000 and 1200 Buddhism disappeared from India, through the combined effects of its own weaknesses, a revived Hinduism and Mohammedan persecution" Edward Conze [117] "[Buddhism in India] declined after Moslem conquest of Sindh, A.D. 712, and finally suppressed by Moslem persecution A.D.1200 " Christmas Humphreys
"It is partly, no doubt, because of the furor islamicus that post-Gupta remains are surprisingly few in Bihar..." J.C.Harle [199]
Qutb ud din Aibak, described as "merciless and fanatical", sent his general, Muhammad Khilji, to the northern state of Bihar to continue the Muslim conquests that began in late 12th century. Buddhism was the main religion of Bihar. In 1193,the Muslim general, considering them all idolaters, put most of the Buddhist monks to the sword, and a great library was destroyed. "The ashes of the Buddhist sanctuaries at Sarnath near Benares still bear witness to the rage of the image-breakers. Many noble monuments of the ancient civilisation of India were irretrievably wrecked in the course of the early Muslim invasions. Those invasions were fatal to the existence of Buddhism as an organized religion in northern India, where its strength resided chiefly in Bihar and certain adjoining territories. The monks who escaped massacre fled, and were scattered over Nepal, Tibet, and the south.."
The Muslim conquests of Central Asia also put an end to its Buddhist art. As early as the 8th century, the monasteries of Kizil were destroyed by the Muslim ruler of Kashgar, and as Benjamin Rowland says, "by the tenth century only the easternmost reaches of Turkestan had escaped the rising tide of Mohammedan conquest. "The full tragedy of these devastations is brought out by the words of Rowland: "The ravages of the Mongols, and the mortifying hand of Islam that has caused so many cultures to wither for ever, aided by the process of nature, completely stopped the life of what must for a period of centuries have been one of the regions of the earth most gifted in art and religion."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The following is not India, but ancient Persia (Iran):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>ZOROASTRIANS</b>
According to the Tarikh-i Bukhara, a history of Bukhara written in about 944 A.D., Islam had to be enforced on the reluctant inhabitants of Bukhara. The Bukharans reverted to their original beliefs no less than four times: "The residents of Bukhara became Muslims. But they renounced [Islam] each time the Arabs turned back. Qutayba b. Muslim made them Muslim three times, [but] they renounced [Islam ] again and became nonbelievers. The fourth time, Qutayba waged war, seized the city, and established Islam after considerable strife....They espoused Islam overtly but practiced idolatry in secret."
Many Zoroastrians were induced to convert by bribes, and later, out of economic necessity. Many of these "economic converts" were later executed for having adopted Islam to avoid paying the poll tax and land tax. In Khurasan and Bukhara, Zoroastrian fire-temples were destroyed by the Muslims, and mosques constructed on these sites. The Tarikh-i Bukhara records that there was considerable outrage at these acts of sacrilege, and there was a concerted resistance to the spread of Islam. One scholar sums up the situation thus: "Indeed, coexistence between Muslims and Zoroastrians was rarely peaceful, cooperation was fleeting, and conflict remained the prime form of intercommunal contact from the initial Arab conquest of Transoxiana until the late thirteenth century A.D."A similar situation existed in Khurasan: "The violent military conflicts between the forces of the Arab commander Abd Allah b. Amir and the local Iranian lords, combined later with the destruction of Zoroastrian religious institutions, produced lasting enmity between Muslims and Zoroastrians in Khurasan. "The early conquests of Zoroastrian Iran were punctuated with the usual massacres, as in Raiy. If the town put up brave resistance to the Muslims, then very few men were spared, as for example, at Sarakh, only a hundred men were granted amnesty, the women were taken into captivity; the children taken into captivity were brought up as Muslims. At Sus a similar situation emerged - about a hundred men were pardoned, the rest killed. At Manadhir, all the men were put to the sword, and the women and children enslaved. At the conquest of Istakhr, more than 40000 Iranians were slaughtered. The Zoroastrians suffered sporadic persecution, as their fire-temples and priests were destroyed, as for example, at Kariyan, Kumm and at Idhaj. In a deliberate act of provocation the caliph al Mutawakkil had a tree putatively planted by Zoroaster himself cut down. Sometimes the fire temples were converted into mosques.The fiscal oppression of the Zoroastrians led to a series of uprisings against the Muslims in the 8th century. We might cite the revolts led by Bihafarid between 746 and 748; the rising of Sinbadh in 755.
Forced conversions were also frequent, and the pressures for conversion often led to conflict and riots as in Shiraz in 979.To escape persecution and the forced conversions many Zoroastrians emigrated to India, where, to this day, they form a much respected minority and are known as Parsis. Conditions for the Zoroastrians became even worse from the 17th century onwards. In the 18th century, their numbers, to quote the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2 ed),"declined disastrously due to the combined effects of massacre, forced conversion and emigration." By the 19th century they were living in total insecurity and poverty, and suffered increasing discrimination. Zoroastrian merchants were liable to extra taxes; houses were frequently looted; they had to wear distinctive clothing, and were forbidden to build new houses or repair old ones.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Further examples of islamic love are to be found at the same url.
More on how islam genocided Zoroastrians: Islamic era history of Zoroastrians of Iran through political analysis and historical letters, which is a paper on The systematic genocide of Zoroastrians in post-Islamic Iran
Jihad, the Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->According to the Zafer Nameh, our main source of information for Tamerlane's campaigns, written at the beginning of the 15th century, Tamerlane set forth to conquer India solely to make war on the enemies of the Muslim faith. He considered the Muslim rulers of north India far too lenient towards pagans, that is to say, the Hindus. The Zafer Nameh tells us that, "The Koran emphasizes that the highest dignity to which man may attain is to wage war in person upon the enemies of the Faith. This is why the great Tamerlane was always concerned to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire merit as from love of glory."
At Delhi under the pretext that the hundred thousand Hindu prisoners presented a grave risk to his army, Tamerlane ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands, and had victory pillars built of the severed heads. On his way out of India, he sacked Miraj, pulled down the monuments and flayed the Hindu inhabitants alive, "an act by which he fulfilled his vow to wage the Holy War."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Tamerlane also spread islamic love in the Middle-East. See the same url.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>INDIA</b>
"On the evidence of Baladhuri's account of the conquest of Sind, there were certainly massacres in the towns of Sind when the Arabs first arrived..."C.E. Bosworth
The Muslim conquest of Sind was masterminded by Hajjaj, the Governor of Iraq, and effected by his commander Muhammad b. Qasim in 712 A.D. Qasim's instructions were to "bring destruction on the unbelievers...[and] to invite and induce the infidels to accept the true creed, and belief in the unity of God... and whoever does not submit to Islam, treat him harshly and cause injury to him till he submits."
After the capture of the port of Debal, the Muslim army took three days to slaughter the inhabitants, but thereafter Qasim is more tolerant allowing many to continue their professions and practise their religion. This is not acceptable to Hajjaj, who, on receiving Qsaim's report of his victory, wrote back :"My dear cousin, I have received your life -augmenting letter. On its receipt my gladness and joy knew no bounds. It increased my pride and glory to the highest degree. It appears from your letter that all the rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are strictly in accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you, for you go on giving pardon to everybody, high or low, without any discretion between a friend and a foe. The great God says in the Koran [xlvii.4]: O True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads. "The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act. Henceforth grant pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none of them, or else all will consider you a weak-minded man. Concluded with compliments. Written by Nafia in the year ninety three." Later, Hajjaj returns to the same theme: "My distinct orders are that all those who are fighting men should be assassinated, and their sons and daughters imprisoned and retained as hostages." Obedient to a fault, Qasim, on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad, "ordered all the men belonging to the military classes to be beheaded with swords. It is said that about 6000 fighting men were massacred on this occasion, some say 16000. The rest were pardoned."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>MAHMUD OF GHAZNI</i> (969 -The real conquest of India by the Muslims dates from the beginning of the 11th century. In 1000 A.D., the head of a Turco- Afghan dynasty, Mahmud of Ghazni first passed through India like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging and massacring, all of which he justified by constant references to the Koranic injunctions to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise every year of his life. As Vincent Smith put it, "Mahmud was a zealous Muslim of the ferocious type then prevalent, who felt it to be a duty as well as pleasure to slay idolaters. He was also greedy of treasure and took good care to derive a handsome profit from his holy wars." In the course of seventeen invasions, in the words of Alberuni the scholar brought by Mahmud to India,: "Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims." Mahmud began by capturing King Jaipal in the Punjab, then invaded Multan in 1004. On conquering the district of Ghur, he forcibly converted the inhabitants to Islam. Mahmud accumulated vast amounts of plunder from the Hindu temples he desecrated, such as that of Kangra. "Mathura, the holy city of Krishna, was the next victim. 'In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted'. The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would have been required to build it. The idols included 'five of red gold, each five yards high', with eyes formed of priceless jewels. 'The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and leveled with the ground. 'Thus perished works of art which must have been among the noblest monuments of ancient India." [VA Smith 207] At the battle of Somnath, the site of another celebrated Hindu temple, 50000 were killed as Mahmud assuaged his lust for booty.
Mahmud was equally ferocious with those whom he considered heretics such as Dawud of Multan. In 1010, Mahmud invaded Dawud 's kingdom and slaughtered a great number of his heretical subjects. While Muslim historians see him as one of the glories of Islam, in reality, Mahmud was little more than an avaricious bandit undeserving of admiration.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>FRUZ SHAH</i>
In 1351, Firuz Shah ascended the throne and became ruler of the North of India. Though in many ways an enlightened man, when it came to religion was a bigot of the first order. He is said to have made "the laws of the Prophet his guide." He indulged in wholesale slave -raiding, and is said to have had 180000 slaves in his city, all of whom "became Muslims." But, as Vincent Smith says, he could be most savage when his religious zeal was roused. He seized a number of Shias, some he executed, others he lectured, and their books he burnt. He caused the ulama to kill a man who claimed to be the Mahdi, "and for this good action", he wrote, "I hope to receive future reward." He went to visit a village where a Hindu religious fair was being held, which was even attended by some "graceless Musalmans." He wrote: "I ordered that the leaders of these people and the promoters of this abomination should be put to death. I forbade the infliction of any severe punishment on the Hindus in general, but I destroyed their idol temples and instead thereof raised mosques." Later a Brahman who had practised his rites in public was burnt alive. Firuz Shah was simply carrying on the tradition of the early Muslim invaders, and he sincerely believed "that he served God by treating as a capital crime the public practice of their religion by the vast majority of his subjects [i.e.Hindus]." Firuz Shah also bribed a vast number of Hindus into embracing Islam, by exempting those who converted from the jizya or poll-tax, which was otherwise rigorously enforced, even on Firuz Shah, when due allowance is made for his surroundings and education, could not have escaped from the theory and practice of religious intolerance. It was not possible for him to rise, as Akbar did, to the conception that the ruler of Hindustan should cherish all his subjects alike, whether Muslim or Hindu, and allow every man absolute freedom, not only of conscience but of public worship. The Muslims of the fourteenth century were still dominated by the ideas current in the early days of Islam, and were convinced that the tolerance of idolatry was a sin."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Those ideas are still current, because they are fundamental doctrines of that great religion of peace: islam.
[For the section on the muslim heretic Akbar the great - see the url]
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>AURANGZEBÂ (1618-1707)</i>
Akbar's great grandson, Aurangzeb, was, in total contrast, a Muslim puritan, who wished to turn his empire into a land of orthodox Sunni Islam, ruled in accordance with the principles laid down by the early Caliphs. Once again, we enter the world of Islamic intolerance -- temples are destroyed (during the campaigns of 1679_80, at Udaipur 123 were destroyed, at Chitor sixty-three; at Jaipur sixty-six); and non -Muslims become second class citizens in their own country. The imperial bigot, to use Smith's phrase, reimposed the "hated jizya, or polltax on non-Muslims, which Akbar had wisely abolished early in his reign." Aurangzeb's aim was to curb the infidels and demonstrate the "distinction between a land of Islam and a land of unbelievers." "To most Hindus Akbar is one of the greatest of the Muslim emperors of India and Aurangzeb one of the worst; to many Muslims the opposite is the case. To an outsider there can be little doubt that Akbar's way was the right one.... Akbar disrupted the Muslim community by recognising that India is not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as though it were." [Gascoigne 227]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
India and beyond:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>BUDDHISM AND BUDDHISTS</b>
"Between {the years} 1000 and 1200 Buddhism disappeared from India, through the combined effects of its own weaknesses, a revived Hinduism and Mohammedan persecution" Edward Conze [117] "[Buddhism in India] declined after Moslem conquest of Sindh, A.D. 712, and finally suppressed by Moslem persecution A.D.1200 " Christmas Humphreys
"It is partly, no doubt, because of the furor islamicus that post-Gupta remains are surprisingly few in Bihar..." J.C.Harle [199]
Qutb ud din Aibak, described as "merciless and fanatical", sent his general, Muhammad Khilji, to the northern state of Bihar to continue the Muslim conquests that began in late 12th century. Buddhism was the main religion of Bihar. In 1193,the Muslim general, considering them all idolaters, put most of the Buddhist monks to the sword, and a great library was destroyed. "The ashes of the Buddhist sanctuaries at Sarnath near Benares still bear witness to the rage of the image-breakers. Many noble monuments of the ancient civilisation of India were irretrievably wrecked in the course of the early Muslim invasions. Those invasions were fatal to the existence of Buddhism as an organized religion in northern India, where its strength resided chiefly in Bihar and certain adjoining territories. The monks who escaped massacre fled, and were scattered over Nepal, Tibet, and the south.."
The Muslim conquests of Central Asia also put an end to its Buddhist art. As early as the 8th century, the monasteries of Kizil were destroyed by the Muslim ruler of Kashgar, and as Benjamin Rowland says, "by the tenth century only the easternmost reaches of Turkestan had escaped the rising tide of Mohammedan conquest. "The full tragedy of these devastations is brought out by the words of Rowland: "The ravages of the Mongols, and the mortifying hand of Islam that has caused so many cultures to wither for ever, aided by the process of nature, completely stopped the life of what must for a period of centuries have been one of the regions of the earth most gifted in art and religion."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The following is not India, but ancient Persia (Iran):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>ZOROASTRIANS</b>
According to the Tarikh-i Bukhara, a history of Bukhara written in about 944 A.D., Islam had to be enforced on the reluctant inhabitants of Bukhara. The Bukharans reverted to their original beliefs no less than four times: "The residents of Bukhara became Muslims. But they renounced [Islam] each time the Arabs turned back. Qutayba b. Muslim made them Muslim three times, [but] they renounced [Islam ] again and became nonbelievers. The fourth time, Qutayba waged war, seized the city, and established Islam after considerable strife....They espoused Islam overtly but practiced idolatry in secret."
Many Zoroastrians were induced to convert by bribes, and later, out of economic necessity. Many of these "economic converts" were later executed for having adopted Islam to avoid paying the poll tax and land tax. In Khurasan and Bukhara, Zoroastrian fire-temples were destroyed by the Muslims, and mosques constructed on these sites. The Tarikh-i Bukhara records that there was considerable outrage at these acts of sacrilege, and there was a concerted resistance to the spread of Islam. One scholar sums up the situation thus: "Indeed, coexistence between Muslims and Zoroastrians was rarely peaceful, cooperation was fleeting, and conflict remained the prime form of intercommunal contact from the initial Arab conquest of Transoxiana until the late thirteenth century A.D."A similar situation existed in Khurasan: "The violent military conflicts between the forces of the Arab commander Abd Allah b. Amir and the local Iranian lords, combined later with the destruction of Zoroastrian religious institutions, produced lasting enmity between Muslims and Zoroastrians in Khurasan. "The early conquests of Zoroastrian Iran were punctuated with the usual massacres, as in Raiy. If the town put up brave resistance to the Muslims, then very few men were spared, as for example, at Sarakh, only a hundred men were granted amnesty, the women were taken into captivity; the children taken into captivity were brought up as Muslims. At Sus a similar situation emerged - about a hundred men were pardoned, the rest killed. At Manadhir, all the men were put to the sword, and the women and children enslaved. At the conquest of Istakhr, more than 40000 Iranians were slaughtered. The Zoroastrians suffered sporadic persecution, as their fire-temples and priests were destroyed, as for example, at Kariyan, Kumm and at Idhaj. In a deliberate act of provocation the caliph al Mutawakkil had a tree putatively planted by Zoroaster himself cut down. Sometimes the fire temples were converted into mosques.The fiscal oppression of the Zoroastrians led to a series of uprisings against the Muslims in the 8th century. We might cite the revolts led by Bihafarid between 746 and 748; the rising of Sinbadh in 755.
Forced conversions were also frequent, and the pressures for conversion often led to conflict and riots as in Shiraz in 979.To escape persecution and the forced conversions many Zoroastrians emigrated to India, where, to this day, they form a much respected minority and are known as Parsis. Conditions for the Zoroastrians became even worse from the 17th century onwards. In the 18th century, their numbers, to quote the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2 ed),"declined disastrously due to the combined effects of massacre, forced conversion and emigration." By the 19th century they were living in total insecurity and poverty, and suffered increasing discrimination. Zoroastrian merchants were liable to extra taxes; houses were frequently looted; they had to wear distinctive clothing, and were forbidden to build new houses or repair old ones.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Further examples of islamic love are to be found at the same url.
More on how islam genocided Zoroastrians: Islamic era history of Zoroastrians of Iran through political analysis and historical letters, which is a paper on The systematic genocide of Zoroastrians in post-Islamic Iran