[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 13:59 +0200, Joy Vriens wrote:

> Thanks for the historic summary.

If you would like to see another version of history, you might look for
the book that is my source on these things. It is not, as Dan guessed,
Hodgson's three-volume Venture of Islam, but Derryl MacLean's Religion
and Society in Arab Sind. 

There is no reason to prefer one of these views to the other. What I
would tend to guess is that both the voluntary conversion and the
coerced conversion accounts are probably accurate reports of things that
happened in particular places at particular times. I presuppose that the
past was about as complex as the present is and that one-size-fits-all
analysis and conspiracy theorizing miss out on some of the subtleties of
historical reality.

-- 
Richard Hayes