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Christians, since they were already believers in the one God. Islam teaches respect for the revelations of other prophets in other groups.
    But there is always a way to argue that a war is a case of self-defense. The Jewish rebels had to be slaughtered to teach a lesson and stop the uprisings. Alliances needed to be formed for defense, and then obligations had to be met. Along the way it was noticed that warfare gave a common purpose and united Arab peoples, though sometimes an individual warlord simply coveted a strip of land.
    Mohammed himself fought nineteen campaigns, but he taught that war was only a last resort and that God blessed those who took a nonviolent rather than a violent path—“God grants to gentleness what he does not grant to violence.”
    After the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632, Islam's character changed even more rapidly than that of Christianity following Jesus' death. Mohammed's Muslims took Palestine in 636 and conquered Jerusalem in 638, and then went on to Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. None of which erases one of the most important passagesof the Quran: “Whoever kills a human being should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind.”
    War between Muslims, like war between Christians, was both commonplace and morally unacceptable, except, again, in cases of defense. The Quran states: “Do not yield to the unbelievers. Fight them strenuously.” For centuries this quote has been used to imply that Muslims had an obligation to go to war with non-Muslims. But many Islamic scholars have stated that the Quran seems to have meant by the word “fight” the use of intellectual persuasion, since the suggested tool is the Quran and it can be assumed that a good Muslim is not being told to whack the unbeliever over the head with a large copy of the sacred book.
    In Islam, too, there is the concept of striving toward perfection. The Quran says that a good Muslim must “strive for the cause of Allah.” In Arabic this striving or struggle is called jihad. Jihad originally meant striving with great intensity. But this striving was meant to be an internal struggle to become the perfect Muslim that God—Allah—wanted each Muslim to be. Some scholars have even argued that when the Quran speaks of conquering unbelievers with jihad, it is saying to persuade them with the force of argument, and thus jihad means nonviolent activism. This is why numerous notable Islamic clerics have said that the prophet Jesus also instructed his followers to wage jihad.
    Islamic scholars have always debated the meaning of the thirty-five references to jihad in the Quran. But as medieval Muslims became engaged in a series of difficult wars, the word jihad began to be used to denote the struggle to prevail militarily in place of the original word for such a physical battle , qital. All successful leaders understand the importance of words, and it seemed a good Muslim would fight harder if the struggle were called jihad rather than qital. After the death of Mohammed, Muslims began speaking of two kinds of jihad — al jihad al akbar, greater jihad, and al jihad al asghar, lesser jihad. Greater jihad was the struggle to be a pure and good person, while lesser jihad referred to armed struggle.
    A century after the death of Mohammed, Muslim armies had crossed the Pyrenees and penetrated deeply into Europe, controllingmuch of the Mediterranean and ranging east as far as India. But any un-Mohammedan dreams of Islamic world dominance they may have had faded early in the eighth century when it became apparent that they were not going to be able to conquer Constantinople. After that, Islamic legal writing increasingly accepted the notion of the infidel state. Islam developed a peace concept that brought no more peace than had the Christian Peace of God. It was called dar al-suhl, the House of Peace, and it meant that Muslim states could honorably live in peace with non-Muslim neighbors.
    The House of Peace easily crumbled.