Islamic Thoughts

Rulers' roles in promotion of christianity.

7. RULERS' ROLES IN PROMOTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Jesus, at his death in 33 A.D., left behind only a handful of Christian disciples. Now, his religion enjoys the largest number of followers, about 2 billion of 7 billion of the world population as of 2011. This large gap was made up by the active role of millions of dedicated preachers like St. Peter, St. Paul as well as many devoted Christian rulers over the last two millennia. Now we would like to mention names of some of them.

(i) Roman emperor Constantine, before his death in 337 A.D., was baptized as a Christian and stopped Roman persecution of the Christians by making it legal to be a Christian.

(ii) Another Roman emperor Theodosius I, went one step further by making it illegal not to be a Christian and making Christianity the official religion of his empire.

(iii) Charlimagne, the great Christian emperor (800-814 A.D.) brought the Roman empire under Christian rule, drove the Muslims out of Barcelona (Spain) and forced the Germans to convert to Christianity.

(iv) Queen Isabela of Spain, during 15th century, forced the Muslims and the Jews to convert to Catholic Christianity under pain of eviction or death. She also arranged the trip of Columbus that led to discovery of the Americas. Then thousands of Christian missionaries followed his heels whose active roles for centuries now find South America a catholic (over 90%) dominated continent.

(v) Prince Vladimir, the Russian ruler at about 10th century, chose Byzantine Christianity as the official religion of his kingdom.

The above examples show that historically different rulers made heavy-weight contributions to the Christianity. By comparison, most Muslim governments following the death of the Prophet and his 4 Caliphs did not or could not use up their potentials for promotion of Islam.