Re: Should Islam be spread "By Sword"?
^ Man you are comparing spread of Buddhism with Islam....it's like comparing Mother Terresa with Britney Spears....Really two different thoughts with exactly opposite nature when it comes to violence.
The spread of Buddhism was just as coercive, however done from the "inside". When a tribal or regional ruler converted, all his subjects converted with him. There was no such thing as freedom of religion...I can’t think of an exception.
What gets the right-wing Hindu undies in a bunch is not that people were compelled, even if by the force of a state authority, to accept Islam...but that people not indigenous to the region were the ones doing the compelling.
The trauma of invasion is what the sperad of Islam is associated with; although (as mentioned before) the patterns of conversion do not closely correlate to any particular military campaign...and the influence of traders and wandering mystics is perhaps underplayed because it serves no contemporary political value.
If one has a conception that the spread of religion in that era was due to anything other than social or even physical force, they are living in a fantasy land. The spread of religious (or even anti-religious) sentiment almost always is done as a social movement, and is not the emergent result of people randomly accepting the faith coincidently...
To this day, our religious lives are governed and limited (or at the very least structured, if you want to use neutral terms) by the social elite, and within each respective society there is a preferred way to be religious (or irreligious), and that way is the dominant influence on “the street”.