ABSTRACT
Brutal as he was, pagan Odysseus never tried to change the worship of his adversaries or friends, inflicting torture or threatening death if they resisted sacrifices to Athena. Differently, and from the start, Christianity was a missionary religion, and Islam followed suit. Both Jesus/Paul and the Qu’rān saw their religions as trans-regional and called for spreading their messages to other people: “Preach to the ends of the world,” were the last words of Jesus, and “There shall be no coercion in [preaching the] religion [of Islam],” cautioned the Qur’ān. 1 Although the communities of Christendom and Dar al-Islam met in battlefields, in marts and harbors stretching from Istanbul to Alexandria, Aleppo to Salé, and in the holy cities of Christian pilgrimage in Palestine, they strained, sometimes with force, to bring the unbeliever to their version of salvation.
