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In the early days of the Islamic empire the Christian inhabitants of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were probably better off as dhimmis under Muslim Arab rulers than they had been under Byzantine Greeks.

— William Montgomery Watt Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts (1968)

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More quotes by William Montgomery Watt

I am not a Muslim in the usual sense, though I hope I am a “Muslim” as “one surrendered to God”; but I believe that embedded in the Qur’an and other expressions of the Islamic vision are vast stores of divine truth from which I and other occidentals have still much to learn.

Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Montgomery Watt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.