No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

contained warriors called mamluks, slave children who were trained to ultimately become young professional fighters. These slave warriors were first used by Muslim caliphs in the ninth century, and for the next thousand years they were ubiquitous in Islamic lands. According to one scholar, sixteen of the seventeen preeminent Muslim dynasties in history systematically used slave warriors.6 These slave boys were often captured from places like Egypt, where Christian territories had been conquered by Muslims. This means Muslim rulers were capturing Christian boys and turning them into slave warriors to fight against other Christians.7 The records indicate that Muslims had been conquering Egyptian Christians and taking their children since the early days of Islam. Amr ibn al-As, one of Muhammad’s companions, brutally swept through Northern Egypt in AD 640, just eight years after Muhammad’s death. John of Nikiu, a bishop in the Nile delta, records one such conquest: “[W]hen with great toil and exertion they had cast down the walls of the city, they forthwith made themselves masters of it, and put to the sword thousands of its inhabitants and soldiers, and they gained an enormous booty, and took the women and children captive and divided them amongst themselves, and they made that city a desolation.”8 Reading through John’s chronicles, I found that this was one of Amr’s more merciful conquests. He records the capture of Nakius, a city left defenseless when its soldiers fled the ...