This core conceptual dyad of body and soul, flesh and spirit, also shaped one of Luther’s other central fixations with Islam—the fate of European Christians captured by the Ottomans. He erroneously believed that the Ottomans wanted to forcibly convert all Christians to Islam—which, as we have seen, was never the case. Luther either did not know or did not care that the empire’s population had become majority-Muslim only in 1517, after over two centuries of being a majority-Christian society. A Christian living happily, even willingly, under Muslim rule must have been inconceivable for him. He
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