Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur’anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first hundred years after the Prophet’s death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a din for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham’s elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.
