Child marriage is sanctioned in Islam.Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, an… - Robert Bruce Spencer

As they did in other lands they conquered, the Arabs made a clean sweep of the Persian Empire. Islam holds the achievements of all civilizations before their conquest by Muslims to be worthless trash, jahiliyya, products of the society of unbelievers. And so in the fourteenth century the pioneering Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had to ask, “Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest?” The answer was that they had been obliterated at the hands of those who believed, as in a quip attributed to the Caliph Umar, that if books agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it, they were heretical—in either case, of no account.

Around 1655, the Persian-language book Dabestan-e Mazaheb (School of Religions) was published in India, containing the texts of two chapters of the Qur’an, Sura al-Walaya (“The Guardian”) and Sura al-Nurayn (“The Two Lights”). These two chapters are clearly meant to bolster the Shi‘ite case. The guardian is Ali, and the two lights are obviously Muhammad and Ali. However, these two suras are almost certainly forgeries, and not only Sunnis, but Shi‘ites also consider them inauthentic.

In July 751, at the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the forces of the new caliphate met those of the Chinese Tang dynasty, in what was to be the decisive battle for hegemony over Central Asia. China’s Westward expansion was stopped, and the region was definitively secured for Islam. The Buddhist and Christian presence in Central Asia went into rapid decline. The area would be Islamic ever after.