title: Textbook

text: The history of textbooks dates back to ancient civilizations. For example, Ancient Greeks wrote educational texts. The modern textbook has its roots in the mass production made possible by the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg himself may have printed editions of "Ars Minor", a schoolbook on Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus. Early textbooks were used by tutors and teachers (e.g. alphabet books), as well as by individuals who taught themselves.


title: Textbook

text: The Greek philosopher Socrates lamented the loss of knowledge because the media of transmission were changing. Before the invention of the Greek alphabet 2,500 years ago, knowledge and stories were recited aloud, much like Homer's epic poems. The new technology of writing meant stories no longer needed to be memorized, a development Socrates feared would weaken the Greeks' mental capacities for memorizing and retelling. (Ironically, we know about Socrates' concerns only because they were written down by his student Plato in his famous Dialogues.)


title: Textbook

text: The next revolution in the field of books came with the 15th-century invention of printing with changeable type. The invention is attributed to German metalsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who cast type in molds using a melted metal alloy and constructed a wooden-screw printing press to transfer the image onto paper.


title: Textbook

text: Gutenberg's first and only large-scale printing effort was the now iconic Gutenberg Bible in the 1450s — a Latin translation from the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. Gutenberg's invention made mass production of texts possible for the first time. Although the Gutenberg Bible itself was expensive, printed books began to spread widely over European trade routes during the next 50 years, and by the 16th century, printed books had become more widely accessible and less costly.


title: Textbook

text: While many textbooks were already in use, compulsory education and the resulting growth of schooling in Europe led to the printing of many more textbooks for children. Textbooks have been the primary teaching instrument for most children since the 19th century. Two textbooks of historical significance in United States schooling were the 18th century New England Primer and the 19th century McGuffey Readers.


title: Textbook

text: Recent technological advances have changed the way people interact with textbooks. Online and digital materials are making it increasingly easy for students to access materials other than the traditional print textbook. Students now have access to electronic books ("e-books"), online tutoring systems and video lectures. An example of an e-book is "Principles of Biology" from Nature Publishing.


title: Textbook

text: Most notably, an increasing number of authors are avoiding commercial publishers and instead offering their textbooks under a creative commons or other open license.


title: Textbook

text: As in many industries, the number of providers has declined in recent years (there are just a handful of major textbook companies in the United States). Also, elasticity of demand is fairly low. The term "broken market" appeared in the economist James Koch's analysis of the market commissioned by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.


title: Textbook

text: In the United States, the largest textbook publishers are Pearson Education, Cengage, McGraw-Hill Education, and Wiley. Together they control 90% of market revenue. Another textbook publisher is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.


title: Textbook

text: Some students save money by buying used copies of textbooks, which tend to be less expensive, and are available from many college bookstores in the US, who buy them back from students at the end of a term. Books that are not being re-used at the school are often purchased by an off-campus wholesaler for 0-30% of the new cost, for distribution to other bookstores. Some textbook companies have countered this by encouraging teachers to assign homework that must be done on the publisher's website. Students with a new textbook can use the pass code in the book to register on the site; otherwise they must pay the publisher to access the website and complete assigned homework.


title: Textbook

text: Students who look beyond the campus bookstore can typically find lower prices. With the ISBN or title, author and edition, most textbooks can be located through online used booksellers or retailers.


title: Textbook

text: Most leading textbook companies publish a new edition every 3 or 4 years, more frequently in math and science. Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices." A study conducted by The Student PIRGs found that a new edition costs 12% more than a new copy of the previous edition (not surprising if the old version is obsolete), and 58% more than a used copy of the previous edition. Textbook publishers maintain these new editions are driven by demand from teachers. That study found that 76% of teachers said new editions were justified “half of the time or less” and 40% said they were justified “rarely” or “never”. The PIRG study has been criticized by publishers, who argue that the report contains factual inaccuracies regarding the annual average cost of textbooks per student.


title: Textbook

text: The Student PIRGs also point out that recent emphasis on e-textbooks does not always save students money. Even though the book costs less up-front, the student will not recover any of the cost through resale.


title: Textbook

text: Another publishing industry practice that has been highly criticized is "bundling", or shrink-wrapping supplemental items into a textbook. Supplemental items range from CD-ROMs and workbooks to online passcodes and bonus material. Students often cannot buy these things separately, and often the one-time-use supplements destroy the resale value of the textbook.


title: Textbook

text: According to the Student PIRGs, the typical bundled textbook is 10%-50% more than an unbundled textbook, and 65% of professors said they “rarely” or “never” use the bundled items in their courses.


title: Textbook

text: A 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report in the United States found that the production of these supplemental items was the primary cause of rapidly increasing prices:


title: Textbook

text: While publishers, retailers, and wholesalers all play a role in textbook pricing, the primary factor contributing to increases in the price of textbooks has been the increased investment publishers have made in new products to enhance instruction and learning...While wholesalers, retailers, and others do not question the quality of these materials, they have expressed concern that the publishers’ practice


title: Textbook

text: of packaging supplements with a textbook to sell as one unit limits the opportunity students have to purchase less expensive used books...If publishers continue to increase these investments, particularly in technology, the cost to produce a textbook is likely to continue to increase in the future.


title: Textbook

text: Bundling has also been used to segment the used book market. Each combination of a textbook and supplemental items receives a separate ISBN. A single textbook could therefore have dozens of ISBNs that denote different combinations of supplements packaged with that particular book. When a bookstore attempts to track down used copies of textbooks, they will search for the ISBN the course instructor orders, which will locate only a subset of the copies of the textbook.


title: Textbook

text: Legislation at state and federal levels seeks to limit the practice of bundling, by requiring publishers to offer all components separately. Publishers have testified in favor of bills including this provision, but only in the case that the provision exempts the loosely defined category of "integrated textbooks." The Federal bill only exempts 3rd party materials in integrated textbooks, however publisher lobbyists have attempted to create a loophole through this definition in state bills.


title: Textbook

text: Given that the problem of high textbook prices is linked to the "broken" economics of the market, requiring publishers to disclose textbook prices to faculty is a solution pursued by a number of legislatures. By inserting price into sales interactions, this regulation will supposedly make the economic forces operate more normally.


title: Textbook

text: No data suggests that this is in fact true. However, The Student PIRGs have found that publishers actively withhold pricing information from faculty, making it difficult to obtain. Their most recent study found that 77% of faculty say publisher sales representatives do not volunteer prices, and only 40% got an answer when they directly asked. Furthermore, the study found that 23% of faculty rated publisher websites as “informative and easy to use” and less than half said they typically listed the price.


title: Textbook

text: The US Congress passed a law in the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act that would require price disclosure. Legislation requiring price disclosure has passed in Connecticut, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Publishers are currently supporting price disclosure mandates, though they insist that the "suggested retail price" should be disclosed, rather than the actual price the publisher would get for the book.


title: Textbook

text: Once a textbook is purchased from a retailer for the first time, there are several ways a student can sell his/her textbooks back at the end of the semester or later. Students can sell to 1) the college/university bookstore; 2) fellow students; 3) numerous online websites; or 4) a student swap service.


title: Textbook

text: As for buyback on a specific campus, faculty decisions largely determine how much a student receives. If a professor chooses to use the same book the following semester, even if it is a custom text, designed specifically for an individual instructor, bookstores often buy the book back. The GAO report found that, generally, if a book is in good condition and will be used on the campus again the next term, bookstores will pay students 50 percent of the original price paid. If the bookstore has not received a faculty order for the book at the end of the term and the edition is still current, they may offer students the wholesale price of the book, which could range from 5 to 35 percent of the new retail price, according to the GAO report.


title: Textbook

text: When students resell their textbooks during campus “buyback” periods, these textbooks are often sold into the national used textbook distribution chain. If a textbook is not going to be used on campus for the next semester of courses then many times the college bookstore will sell that book to a national used book company. The used book company then resells the book to another college bookstore. Finally, that book is sold as used to a student at another college at a price that is typically 75% of the new book price. At each step, a markup is applied to the book to enable the respective companies to continue to operate.


title: Textbook

text: Students can also sell or trade textbooks among themselves. After completing a course, sellers will often seek out members of the next enrolling class, people who are likely to be interested in purchasing the required books. This may be done by posting flyers to advertise the sale of the books or simply soliciting individuals who are shopping in the college bookstore for the same titles. Many larger schools have independent websites set up for the purpose of facilitating such trade. These often operate much like digital classified ads, enabling students to list their items for sale and browse for those they wish to acquire. Also, at the US Air Force Academy, it is possible to e-mail entire specific classes, allowing for an extensive network of textbook sales to exist.


title: Textbook

text: Online marketplaces are one of the two major types of online websites students can use to sell used textbooks. Online marketplaces may have an online auction format or may allow the student to list their books for a fixed price. In either case, the student must create the listing for each book themselves and wait for a buyer to order, making the use of marketplaces a more passive way of selling used textbooks. Unlike campus buyback and online book, students are unlikely to sell all their books to one buyer using online marketplaces, and will likely have to send out multiple books individually.


title: Textbook

text: Online book buyers buy textbooks, and sometimes other types of books, with the aim of reselling them for a profit. Like online marketplaces, online book buyers operate year-round, giving students the opportunity to sell their books even when campus "buyback" periods are not in effect. Online book buyers, who are often online book sellers as well, will sometimes disclaim whether or not a book can be sold back prior to purchase. Students enter the ISBN numbers of the books they wish to sell and receive a price quote or offer. These online book buyers often offer "free shipping" (which in actuality is built into the offer for the book), and allow students to sell multiple books to the same source. Because online book buyers are buying books for resale, the prices they offer may be lower than students can get on online marketplaces. However, their prices are competitive, and they tend to focus on the convenience of their service. Some even claim that buying used textbooks online and selling them to online book buyers has a lower total cost than even textbook rental services.


title: Textbook

text: In response to escalating textbook prices, limited competition, and to provide a more efficient system to connect buyers and sellers together, online textbook exchanges were developed. Most of today's sites handle buyer and seller payments, and usually deduct a small commission only after the sale is completed.


title: Textbook

text: According to textbook author Henry L. Roediger (and Wadsworth Publishing Company senior editor Vicki Knight), the used textbook market is illegitimate, and entirely to blame for the rising costs of textbooks. As methods of "dealing with this problem", he recommends making previous editions of textbooks obsolete, binding the textbook with other materials, and passing laws to prevent the sale of used books. The concept is not unlike the limited licensing approach for computer software, which places rigid restrictions on resale and reproduction. The intent is to make users understand that the content of any textbook is the intellectual property of the author and/or the publisher, and that as such, subject to copyright. Obviously, this idea is completely opposed to the millennia-old tradition of the sale of used books, and would make that entire industry illegal.


title: Textbook

text: Another alternative to save money and obtaining the materials you are required are e-textbooks. The article "E books rewrite the rules of education" states that, alternately to spending a lot of money on textbooks, you can purchase an e-textbook at a small amount of the cost. With the growth of digital applications for iPhone, and gadgets like the Amazon kindle, e-textbooks are not an innovation, but have been "gaining momentum". According to the article " Are textbooks obsolete?", publishers and editorials are concerned about the issue of expensive textbooks. "The expense of textbooks is a concern for students, and e-textbooks, address the face of the issue, Williams says " As publishers we understand the high cost of these materials, and the electronic format permit us diminish the general expense of our content to the market". E-textbook applications facilitate similar experiences to physical textbooks by allowing the user to highlight and take notes in-page. These applications also extend textbook learning by providing quick definitions, reading the text aloud, and search functionality.


title: Textbook

text: In-store rentals are processed by either using a kiosk and ordering books online with a third party facilitator or renting directly from the store's inventory. Some stores use a hybrid of both methods, opting for in-store selections of the most popular books and the online option for more obscure titles or books they consider too risky to put in the rental system. Rented items can be used for a set duration of time, then are required to be returned to the physical store or shipped back to the third party facilitator by the rental due date. Writing and highlighting is sometimes allowed in rented items, although excessive markup which makes the item unrentable is discouraged. Overdue items are often charged a fee up to the retail price of the rented item. Rented items typically do not include supplemental materials such as access codes, CDs, or loose-leafs.


title: Textbook

text: Using textbook sharing, students share the physical textbook with other students, and the cost of the book is divided among the users of the textbook. Over the life of the textbook, if 4 students use the textbook, the cost of the textbook for each student will be 25% of the total cost of the book.


title: Textbook

text: The latest trend in textbooks is "open textbooks." An open textbook is a free, openly licensed textbook offered online by the copyright holders. According to PIRG, a number of textbooks already exist, and are being used at schools such as MIT and Harvard. A 2010 study published found that open textbooks offer a viable and attractive means to meet faculty and student needs while offering savings of approximately 80% compared to traditional textbook options.


title: Textbook

text: Although the largest question seems to be who is going to pay to write them, several state policies suggest that public investment in open textbooks might make sense. To offer another perspective, any jurisdiction might find itself challenged to find sufficient numbers of credible academics who would be willing to undertake the effort of creating an open textbook without realistic compensation, in order to make such a proposal work. Currently, some open textbooks have been funded with non-profit investment.


title: Textbook

text: The other challenge involves the reality of publishing, which is that textbooks with good sales and profitability subsidize the creation and publication of low demand but believed to be necessary textbooks. Subsidies skew markets and the elimination of subsidies is disruptive; in the case of low demand textbooks the possibilities following subsidy removal include any or all of the following: higher retail prices, a switch to open textbooks, a reduction of the number of titles published.


title: Textbook

text: On the other hand, independent open textbook authoring and publishing models are developing. Most notably, the startup publisher Flat World Knowledge already has dozens of college-level open textbooks that are used by more than 900 institutions in 44 countries. Their business model was to offer the open textbook free online, and then sell ancillary products that students are likely to buy if prices are reasonable - print copies, study guides, ePub, .Mobi (Kindle), PDF download, etc. Flat World Knowledge compensates its authors with royalties on these sales. With the generated revenue Flat World Knowledge funded high-quality publishing activities with a goal of making the Flat World financial model sustainable. However, in January, 2013 Flat World Knowledge announced their financial model could no longer sustain their free-to-read options for students. Flat World Knowledge intends to have open textbooks available for the 125 highest-enrolled courses on college campuses within the next few years.


title: Textbook

text: CK-12 FlexBooks are the open textbooks designed for United States K-12 courses. CK-12 FlexBooks are designed to facilitate conformance to national and United States and individual state textbook standards. CK-12 FlexBooks are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. CK-12 FlexBooks are free to use online and offer formats suitable for use on portable personal reading devices and computers - both online and offline. Formats for both iPad and Kindle are offered. School districts may select a title as is or customize the open textbook to meet local instructional standards. The file may be then accessed electronically or printed using any print on demand service without paying a royalty, saving 80% or more when compared to traditional textbook options. An example print on demand open textbook title, "College Algebra" by Stitz & Zeager through Lulu is 608 pages, royalty free, and costs about $20 ordered one at a time (March, 2011). "(Any print on demand service could be used - this is just an example. School districts could easily negotiate even lower prices for bulk purchases to be printed in their own communities.)" Teacher's editions are available for educators and parents. Titles have been authored by various individuals and organizations and are vetted for quality prior to inclusion in the CK-12 catalog. An effort is underway to map state educational standards correlations. Stanford University provided a number of titles in use.


title: Textbook

text: Curriki is another modular K-12 content non-profit "empowering educators to deliver and share curricula." Selected Curriki materials are also correlated to U.S. state educational standards. Some Curriki content has been collected into open textbooks and some may be used for modular lessons or special topics.


title: Textbook

text: Similar to the issue of reimportation of pharmaceuticals into the U.S. market, the GAO report also highlights a similar phenomenon in textbook distribution. Retailers and publishers have expressed concern about the re-importation of lower-priced textbooks from international locations. Specifically, they cited the ability students have to purchase books from online distribution channels outside the United States at lower prices, which may result in a loss of sales for U.S. retailers. Additionally, the availability of lower-priced textbooks through these channels has heightened distrust and frustration among students regarding textbook prices, and college stores find it difficult to explain why their textbook prices are higher, according to the National Association of College Stores. Retailers and publishers have also been concerned that some U.S. retailers may have engaged in reimportation on a large scale by ordering textbooks for entire courses at lower prices from international distribution channels. While the 1998 Supreme Court decision Quality King v. L'anza protects the reimportation of copyrighted materials under the first-sale doctrine, textbook publishers have still attempted to prevent the U.S. sale of international editions by enforcing contracts which forbid foreign wholesalers from selling to American distributors. Concerned about the effects of differential pricing on college stores, the National Association of College Stores has called on publishers to stop the practice of selling textbooks at lower prices outside the United States. For example, some U.S. booksellers arrange for drop-shipments in foreign countries which are then re-shipped to America where the books can be sold online at used prices (for a "new" unopened book). The authors often getting half-royalties instead of full-royalties, minus the charges for returned books from bookstores.


title: Textbook

text: According to the National Association of College Stores, the entire cost of the book is justified by expenses, with typically 11.7% of the price of a new book going to the author's royalties (or a committee of editors at the publishing house), 22.7% going to the store, and 64.6% going to the publisher. The store and publisher amounts are slightly higher for Canada.


title: Textbook

text: Bookstores and used-book vendors profit from the resale of textbooks on the used market, with publishers only earning profits on sales of new textbooks.


title: Textbook

text: Following closely behind annual increases in tuition and fees at postsecondary institutions, college textbook and supply prices have risen at twice the rate of annual inflation over the last two decades.


title: Textbook

text: Rising at an average of 6 percent each year since academic year 1987-1988, compared with overall average price increases of 3 percent per year, college textbook and supply prices trailed tuition and fee increases, which averaged 7 percent per year. Since December 1986, textbook and supply prices have nearly tripled, increasing by 186 percent, while tuition and fees increased by 240 percent and overall prices grew by 72 percent. While increases in textbook and supply prices have followed increases in tuition and fees, the cost of textbooks and supplies for degree-seeking students as a percentage of tuition and fees varies by the type of institution attended. For example, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student for academic year 2003-2004 was $898 at 4-year public institutions, or about 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At 2-year public institutions, where low-income students are more likely to pursue a degree program and tuition and fees are lower, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student was $886 in academic year 2003-2004, representing almost three-quarters of the cost of tuition and fees.


title: Textbook

text: According to the 2nd edition of a study by the United States Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) published in February 2005: ""Textbook prices are increasing at more than four times the inflation rate for all finished goods, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index. The wholesale prices charged by textbook publishers have jumped 62 percent since 1994, while prices charged for all finished goods increased only 14 percent. Similarly, the prices charged by publishers for general books increased just 19 percent during the same time period.""


title: Textbook

text: According to the 2007 edition of the College Board's Trend in College Pricing Report published October 2007: ""College costs continue to rise and federal student aid has shown slower growth when adjusted for inflation, while textbooks, as a percentage of total college costs, have remained steady at about 5 percent.""


title: Textbook

text: In most U.S. K-12 public schools, a local school board votes on which textbooks to purchase from a selection of books that have been approved by the state Department of Education. Teachers receive the books to give to the students for each subject. Teachers are usually not required to use textbooks, however, and many prefer to use other materials instead.


title: Textbook

text: Textbook publishing in the U.S. is a business primarily aimed at large states. This is due to state purchasing controls over the books, most notably in Texas, where the Texas Education Agency sets curricula for all courses taught by the state's 1,000+ school districts, and therefore also approves which textbooks can be purchased.


title: Textbook

text: In recent years, high school textbooks of United States history have come under increasing criticism. Authors such as Howard Zinn ("A People's History of the United States"), Gilbert T. Sewall ("") and James W. Loewen (""), make the claim that U.S. history textbooks contain mythical untruths and omissions, which paint a whitewashed picture that bears little resemblance to what most students learn in universities. Inaccurately retelling history, through textbooks or other literature, has been practiced in many societies, from ancient Rome to the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People's Republic of China. The content of history textbooks is often determined by the political forces of state adoption boards and ideological pressure groups.


title: Textbook

text: Science textbooks have been the source of ongoing debates and have come under scrutiny from several organizations. The presentation or inclusion of controversial scientific material has been debated in several court cases. Poorly designed textbooks have been cited as contributing to declining grades in mathematics and science in the United States and organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) have criticized the layout, presentation, and amount of material given in textbooks.


title: Textbook

text: Discussions of textbooks have been included on creation and evolution in the public education debate. The "Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County" case brought forward a debate about scientific fact being presented in textbooks.


title: Textbook

text: In his book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", the late physics Nobel Prize laureate Richard P. Feynman described his experiences as a member of a committee that evaluated science textbooks. At some instances, there were nonsensical examples to illustrate physical phenomena; then a company sent — for reasons of timing — a textbook that contained blank pages, which even got good critiques. Feynman himself experienced attempts at bribery.


title: Textbook

text: In the U.S., college and university textbooks are chosen by the professor teaching the course, or by the department as a whole. Students are typically responsible for obtaining their own copies of the books used in their courses, although alternatives to owning textbooks, such as textbook rental services and library reserve copies of texts, are available in some instances.


title: Textbook

text: In some European countries, such as Sweden or Spain, students attending institutions of higher education pay for textbooks themselves, although higher education is free of charge otherwise.


title: Textbook

text: With higher education costs on the rise, many students are becoming sensitive to every aspect of college pricing, including textbooks, which in many cases amount to one tenth of tuition costs. The 2005 Government Accountability Office report on college textbooks said that since the 1980s, textbook and supply prices have risen twice the rate of inflation in the past two decades. A 2005 PIRG study found that textbooks cost students $900 per year, and that prices increased four times the rate of inflation over the past decade. A June 2007 Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance (ACSFA) report, “Turn the Page,” reported that the average U.S. student spends $700–$1000 per year on textbooks.


title: Textbook

text: While many groups have assigned blame to publishers, bookstores or faculty, the ACSFA also found that assigning blame to any one party—faculty, colleges, bookstores or publishers—for current textbook costs is unproductive and without merit. The report called on all parties within the industry to work together to find productive solutions, which included a movement toward open textbooks and other lower-cost digital solutions.


title: Textbook

text: Textbook prices are considerably higher in law school. Students ordinarily pay close to $200 for case books consisting of cases available free online.


title: Textbook

text: In cases of history, science, current events, and political textbooks, "the writer might be biased towards one way or another. Topics such as actions of a country, presidential actions, and scientific theories are common potential biases".


title: Sandra Knight

text: Knight acted in low-budget films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as "Frankenstein's Daughter" (1958) in which she played the titular role, "The Terror" (1963) starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, where she plays an evil spirit, and "Tower of London" (1962) with Vincent Price. Her most well-known film is the bootleg moonshine action epic "Thunder Road" (1958) starring Robert Mitchum.


title: Sandra Knight

text: She appeared as a guest star in numerous television series, including the episode "The Legacy" in the Western "Tales of Wells Fargo" , an episode of the science fiction anthology series "" called "The Burning Girl"; an episode titled "Knock on Any Tombstone" of the Warner Bros. detective show "Bourbon Street Beat"; the episode "The Search for Cope Borden" in the Western "The Man from Blackhawk"; the episode "Home Town", in the Western "Tate"; the Western "The Rebel"; the episodes "Drifter's Gold" and "The Last Journey" in the Western "Laramie"; the Western "Wagon Train" in the episode "The Bettina May Story"; the episode "Separate Checks" in the detective show "Surfside 6"; the episode "A Time to Run" of the Western "The Tall Man"; and the episode "The Yellow Badge of Courage" in a slapstick sitcom called "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster."


title: Sandra Knight

text: In 1962, Knight married fellow actor Jack Nicholson, with whom she had worked on "The Terror". They have a daughter, Jennifer. Knight retired from acting in 1966. Knight and Nicholson divorced in 1968, and she went on to marry John Arthur Stephenson in 1982.


title: Seven-segment display

text: A seven-segment display is a form of electronic display device for displaying decimal numerals that is an alternative to the more complex dot matrix displays.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Seven-segment displays are widely used in digital clocks, electronic meters, basic calculators, and other electronic devices that display numerical information.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Seven-segment representation of figures can be found in patents as early as 1903 (in ), when Carl Kinsley invented a method of telegraphically transmitting letters and numbers and having them printed on tape in a segmented format. In 1908, F. W. Wood invented an 8-segment display, which displayed the number 4 using a diagonal bar (). In 1910, a seven-segment display illuminated by incandescent bulbs was used on a power-plant boiler room signal panel. They were also used to show the dialed telephone number to operators during the transition from manual to automatic telephone dialing. They did not achieve widespread use until the advent of LEDs in the 1970s.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Some early seven-segment displays used incandescent filaments in an evacuated bulb; they are also known as numitrons. A variation (minitrons) made use of an evacuated potted box. Minitrons are filament segment displays that are housed in DIP packages like modern LED segment displays. They may have up to 16 segments. There were also segment displays that used small incandescent light bulbs instead of LEDs or incandescent filaments. These worked similarly to modern LED segment displays.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Many early (c. 1970s) LED seven-segment displays had each digit built on a single die. This made the digits very small. Some included magnifying lenses onto the design in an attempt to make the digits more legible.


title: Seven-segment display

text: The seven-segment pattern is sometimes used in posters or tags, where the user either applies color to pre-printed segments, or applies color through a seven-segment digit template, to compose figures such as product prices or telephone numbers.


title: Seven-segment display

text: For many applications, dot-matrix LCDs have largely superseded LED displays in general, though even in LCDs, seven-segment displays are common. Unlike LEDs, the shapes of elements in an LCD panel are arbitrary since they are formed on the display by photolithography. In contrast, the shapes of LED segments tend to be simple rectangles, reflecting the fact that they have to be physically moulded to shape, which makes it difficult to form more complex shapes than the segments of 7-segment displays. However, the high recognition factor of seven-segment displays, and the comparatively high visual contrast obtained by such displays relative to dot-matrix digits, makes seven-segment multiple-digit LCD screens very common on basic calculators.


title: Seven-segment display

text: The seven-segment display has inspired type designers to produce typefaces reminiscent of that display (but more legible), such as New Alphabet, "DB LCD Temp", "ION B", etc.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Using a restricted range of letters that look like (upside-down) digits, seven-segment displays are commonly used by school children to form words and phrases using a technique known as "calculator spelling".


title: Seven-segment display

text: Seven-segment displays may use a liquid crystal display (LCD), a light-emitting diode (LED) for each segment, an electrochromic display, or other light-generating or controlling techniques such as cold cathode gas discharge (Panaplex), vacuum fluorescent (VFD), incandescent filaments (Numitron), and others. For gasoline price totems and other large signs, vane displays made up of electromagnetically flipped light-reflecting segments (or "vanes") are still commonly used. A precursor to the 7-segment display in the 1950s through the 1970s was the cold-cathode, neon-lamp-like nixie tube. Starting in 1970, RCA sold a display device known as the "" that used incandescent filaments arranged into a seven-segment display. In USSR, the first electronic calculator "Vega", which was produced from 1964, contains 20 decimal digits with seven-segment electroluminescent display.


title: Seven-segment display

text: In a simple LED package, typically all of the cathodes (negative terminals) or all of the anodes (positive terminals) of the segment LEDs are connected and brought out to a common pin; this is referred to as a "common cathode" or "common anode" device. Hence a 7 segment plus decimal point package will only require nine pins, though commercial products typically contain more pins, and/or spaces where pins would go, in order to match standard IC sockets. Integrated displays also exist, with single or multiple digits. Some of these integrated displays incorporate their own internal decoder, though most do not: each individual LED is brought out to a connecting pin as described.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Multiple-digit LED displays as used in pocket calculators and similar devices used multiplexed displays to reduce the number of I/O pins required to control the display. For example, all the anodes of the A segments of each digit position would be connected together and to a driver circuit pin, while the cathodes of all segments for each digit would be connected. To operate any particular segment of any digit, the controlling integrated circuit would turn on the cathode driver for the selected digit, and the anode drivers for the desired segments; then after a short blanking interval the next digit would be selected and new segments lit, in a sequential fashion. In this manner an eight digit display with seven segments and a decimal point would require only 8 cathode drivers and 8 anode drivers, instead of sixty-four drivers and IC pins. Often in pocket calculators the digit drive lines would be used to scan the keyboard as well, providing further savings; however, pressing multiple keys at once would produce odd results on the multiplexed display.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Although to a naked eye all digits of an LED display appear lit, only one digit is lit at any given time in a multiplexed display. The digit changes at a high enough rate that the human eye cannot see the flashing (on earlier devices it could be visible to peripheral vision).


title: Seven-segment display

text: The seven segments are arranged as a rectangle of two vertical segments on each side with one horizontal segment on the top, middle, and bottom. Often the rectangle is "oblique" (slanted), which aids readability. In most applications, the segments are of nearly uniform shape and size (usually elongated hexagons, though trapezoids and rectangles can also be used), though in the case of adding machines, the vertical segments are longer and more oddly shaped at the ends in an effort to further enhance readability. The seven elements of the display can be lit in different combinations to represent the Arabic numerals.


title: Seven-segment display

text: The segments are referred to by the letters A to G, where the optional decimal point (an "eighth segment", referred to as DP) is used for the display of non-integer numbers. A single byte can encode the full state of a 7-segment-display including the decimal point. The most popular bit encodings are "gfedcba" and "abcdefg". In the "gfedcba" representation, a byte value of 0x06 would turn on segments 'c' and 'b', which would display a '1'.


title: Seven-segment display

text: The numerical digits 0 to 9 are the most common characters displayed on seven-segment displays. The most common patterns used for each of these is:


title: Seven-segment display

text: Alternate patterns: The numeral 1 may be represented with the left segments, the numerals 6 and 9 may be represented without a 'tail', and the numeral 7 represented "with" a 'tail':


title: Seven-segment display

text: In Unicode 13.0, 10 codepoints had been given for segmented digits 0–9 in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block, to replicate early computer fonts that included seven-segment versions of the digits. The official reference shows the less-common four-segment "7". The characters as displayed by your browser:


title: Seven-segment display

text: Four binary bits are needed to specify the numbers 0–9, but can also specify 10–15, so usually decoders with 4 bit inputs can also display Hexadecimal (Hex) digits. Today, a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters is commonly used for A–F; this is done to obtain a unique, unambiguous shape for each hexadecimal digit (otherwise, a capital 'D' would look identical to a '0' and a capital 'B' would look identical to an '8'). Also the digit '6' must be displayed with the top bar lit to avoid ambiguity with the letter 'b'.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Most letters of the Latin alphabet can be reasonably implemented using seven segments. Though not every letter is available, it is possible to create many useful words. By choosing better synonyms, it is possible to work around many shortcomings of seven-segment alphabet encodings. Some uppercase letters ('I', 'O', 'S', 'Z') look identical to numerical digits ('1', '0', '5', '2'), though it is possible to use lower-case 'o' and 'i', or putting 'I' on the left. Lowercase letters 'b' and 'q' are identical to the alternate numerical digits '6' and '9'. Depending on the situation, some of these problem characters can be used when no numeric values are used in the same word/phrase, see examples below.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Short messages giving status information (e.g. "no dISC" on a CD player) are also commonly represented on 7-segment displays. In the case of such messages it is not necessary for every letter to be unambiguous, merely for the words as a whole to be readable.


title: Seven-segment display

text: There are enough patterns to show all the letters but few representations are unambiguous and intuitive at the same time. When all letters need to be displayed on a device, sixteen-segment and dot matrix displays are better choices than seven-segment displays.


title: Seven-segment display

text: Seven segments are capable of displaying some punctuation glyph characters. The hex value for each Unicode character is shown, of which the lower 8-bits of most of these exist as ASCII characters too.


title: Seven-segment display

text: In the past, some seven-segment decoder ICs didn't output the following modern decimal/hexadecimal font.


title: Seven-segment display

text: There are also fourteen- and sixteen-segment displays (for full alphanumerics); however, these have mostly been replaced by dot matrix displays. Twenty-two-segment displays capable of displaying the full ASCII character set were briefly available in the early 1980s but did not prove popular.


title: Forced conversion

text: Forced conversion is the adoption of a different religion or the adoption of irreligion under duress. Someone who has been forced to convert to a different religion or irreligion may continue, covertly, to adhere to the beliefs and practices which were originally held, while outwardly behaving as a convert. Crypto-Jews, crypto-Christians, crypto-Muslims and crypto-Pagans are historical examples of the latter.


title: Forced conversion

text: In general, anthropologists have shown that the relationship between religion and politics is complex, especially when viewed over the expanse of human history. While religious leaders and the state generally have different aims, both are concerned with power and order; both use reason and emotion to motivate behavior. Throughout history, leaders of religious and political institutions have cooperated, opposed one another, and or attempted to co-opt each other, for purposes which are both noble and base, and they have implemented programs with a wide range of driving values, from compassion which is aimed at alleviating current suffering to brutal change which is aimed at achieving long-term goals, for the benefit of groups ranging from small cliques to all of humanity. The relationship is far from simple. But religion has often been used coercively, and it has also used coercion.


title: Forced conversion

text: People may express their faith through the act of taking refuge, and conversions usually require a recital of accepting the Triple Gems of Buddhism. However, they may always practice Buddhism without fully abandoning their own religion. According to Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO), Christians from the Chin ethnic minority group in Myanmar are facing coercion to convert to Buddhism by state actors and programme.


title: Forced conversion

text: Christianity was a minority religion during much of the middle Roman Classical Period, and the early Christians were persecuted during that time. When Constantine I converted to Christianity, it had already grown to be the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Already under the reign of Constantine I, Christian heretics were being persecuted; beginning in the late 4th century, the ancient pagan religions were also actively suppressed. In the view of many historians, the Constantinian shift turned Christianity from a persecuted religion into a religion which was capable of persecuting and sometimes eager to persecute.


title: Forced conversion

text: On 27 February 380, together with Gratian and Valentinian II, Theodosius I issued the decree "Cunctos populos", the so-called Edict of Thessalonica, recorded in the Codex Theodosianus . This declared Trinitarian Nicene Christianity to be the only legitimate imperial religion and the only one entitled to call itself Catholic. Other Christians he described as "foolish madmen". He also ended official state support for the traditional polytheist religions and customs.


title: Forced conversion

text: The "Codex Theodosianus" (Eng. Theodosian Code) was a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors since 312. A commission was established by Theodosius II and his co-emperor Valentinian III on 26 March 429 and the compilation was published by a constitution of 15 February 438. It went into force in the eastern and western parts of the empire on 1 January 439.


title: Forced conversion

text: It is Our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans... The rest, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative (Codex Theodosianus XVI 1.2.).


title: Forced conversion

text: Forced conversions of Jews were carried out with the support of rulers during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Gaul, the Iberian peninsula and in the Byzantine Empire.


title: Forced conversion

text: During the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, forcibly converted the Saxons from their native Germanic paganism by way of warfare, and law upon conquest. Examples are the Massacre of Verden in 782, when Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred for rebelling, and the "Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae", a law imposed on conquered Saxons in 785, after another rebellion and destruction of churches and killing of missionary priests and monks, that prescribed death to those who refused to convert to Christianity.


title: Forced conversion

text: Forced conversion that occurred after the seventh century generally took place during riots and massacres carried out by mobs and clergy without support of the rulers. In contrast, royal persecutions of Jews from the late eleventh century onward generally took the form of expulsions, with some exceptions, such as conversions of Jews in southern Italy of the 13th century, which were carried out by Dominican Inquisitors but instigated by King Charles II of Naples.


title: Forced conversion

text: Jews were forced to convert to Christianity by the Crusaders in Lorraine, on the Lower Rhine, in Bavaria and Bohemia, in Mainz and in Worms (see Rhineland massacres, Worms massacre (1096)).


title: Forced conversion

text: Pope Innocent III pronounced in 1201 that if one agreed to be baptized to avoid torture and intimidation, one nevertheless could be compelled to outwardly observe Christianity:


title: Forced conversion

text: [T]hose who are immersed even though reluctant, do belong to ecclesiastical jurisdiction at least by reason of the sacrament, and might therefore be reasonably compelled to observe the rules of the Christian Faith. It is, to be sure, contrary to the Christian Faith that anyone who is unwilling and wholly opposed to it should be compelled to adopt and observe Christianity. For this reason a valid distinction is made by some between kinds of unwilling ones and kinds of compelled ones. Thus one who is drawn to Christianity by violence, through fear and through torture, and receives the sacrament of Baptism in order to avoid loss, he (like one who comes to Baptism in dissimulation) does receive the impress of Christianity, and may be forced to observe the Christian Faith as one who expressed a conditional willingness though, absolutely speaking, he was unwilling ...


title: Forced conversion

text: During the Northern Crusades against the pagan Balts and Slavs of northern Europe, forced conversions were a widely used tactic, which received papal sanction. These tactics were first adopted during the Wendish Crusade, but became more widespread during the Livonian Crusade and Prussian Crusade, in which tactics included the killing of hostages, massacre, and the devastation of the lands of tribes that had not yet submitted. Most of the populations of these regions were converted only after the repeated rebellion of native populations that did not want to accept Christianity even after initial forced conversion; in Old Prussia, the tactics employed in the initial conquest and subsequent conversion of the territory resulted in the death of most of the native population, whose language consequently became extinct.


title: Forced conversion

text: After the end of Islamic control of Spain, Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. In Portugal, following an order for their expulsion in 1496, only a handful were allowed to leave and the rest were forced to convert. Muslims were expelled from Portugal in 1497, and they were gradually forced to convert in the constituent kingdoms of Spain. The forced conversion of Muslims was implemented in the Crown of Castile from 1500 to 1502 and in the Crown of Aragon in the 1520s. After the conversions, the so-called "New Christians" were those inhabitants (Sephardic Jews or Mudéjar Muslims) who were baptized under coercion and in the face of execution, becoming forced converts from Islam (Moriscos, Conversos and "secret Moors") or from Judaism (Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos).


title: Forced conversion

text: After the forced conversion, when all former Muslims and Jews had ostensibly become Catholic, the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition targeted primarily forced converts from Judaism and Islam, who came under suspicion of either continuing to adhere to their old religion or having fallen back into it. Jewish conversos still resided in Spain and often practised Judaism secretly and were suspected by the "Old Christians" of being Crypto-Jews. The Spanish Inquisition generated much wealth and income for the church and individual inquisitors by confiscating the property of the persecuted. The end of Al-Andalus and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula went hand in hand with the increase of Spanish and Portuguese influence in the world, as exemplified in the Christian conquest of the Americas and their aboriginal Indian population. The Ottoman Empire and Morocco absorbed most of the Jewish and Muslim refugees, although a large majority remained as Conversos.


title: Forced conversion

text: During the European colonization of the Americas, forced conversion of the continents' indigenous, non-Christian population was common, especially in South America and Mesoamerica, where the conquest of large indigenous polities like the Inca and Aztec Empires placed colonizers in control of large non-Christian populations. According to some South American leaders and indigenous groups, there were cases among native populations of conversion under the threat of violence, often because they were compelled to after being conquered, and that the Catholic Church cooperated with civil authority to achieve this end.


title: Forced conversion

text: Upon converting to Christianity in the 10th century, Vladimir the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus', ordered Kiev's citizens to undergo a mass baptism in the Dnieper river.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the 13th century the pagan populations of the Baltics faced campaigns of forcible conversion by crusading knight corps such as the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Order, which often meant simply dispossessing these populations of their lands and property.


title: Forced conversion

text: After Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, the Muslim population faced slaughter, expulsion, forced resettlement and conversion to Christianity.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the 18th century, Elizabeth of Russia launched a campaign of forced conversion of Russia's non-Orthodox subjects, including Muslims and Jews.


title: Forced conversion

text: The Portuguese carried out the Christianisation of Goa in India in the 16th and 17th centuries. The majority of the natives of Goa had converted to Christianity by the end of the 16th century. The Portuguese rulers had implemented state policies encouraging and even rewarding conversions among Hindu subjects. The rapid rise of converts in Goa was mostly the result of Portuguese economic and political control over the Hindus, who were vassals of the Portuguese crown.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 1567, the conversion of the majority of the native villagers to Christianity allowed the Portuguese to destroy temples in Bardez, with 300 Hindu temples destroyed. Prohibitions were then declared from December 4, 1567, on public performances of Hindu marriages, sacred thread wearing and cremation. All persons above 15 years of age were compelled to listen to Christian preaching, failing which they were punished. In 1583, Hindu temples at Assolna and Cuncolim were also destroyed by the Portuguese army after the majority of the native villagers there had also converted to Christianity.


title: Forced conversion

text: "The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshiped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers", wrote Filippo Sassetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 1858, Edgardo Mortara was taken from his Jewish parents and raised as a Catholic, because he had been baptized by a maid without his parents' consent or knowledge. This incident was called the Mortara case.


title: Forced conversion

text: During World War II in Yugoslavia, Orthodox Serbs were forcibly converted to Catholicism by the Ustashe.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2009, the "Assam Times" reported that a group of Hmar militants with about 15 members calling themselves the Manmasi National Christian Army, tried to force Hindu residents of Bhuvan Pahar, Assam to convert to Christianity.


title: Forced conversion

text: During the rule of Pushyamitra Shunga, Buddhist art was patronised. In the 13th century, Buddhists faced forced conversion from Hindu ruler Kalinga Magha, who destroyed many stupas.


title: Forced conversion

text: Indian Christians have alleged that Hindu groups in Odisha have forced Christian converts from Hinduism to revert to Hinduism. In the aftermath of the violence, American Christian evangelical groups have claimed that Hindu groups are forcibly reverting Christian converts from Hinduism back to Hinduism. It has also been alleged that these same Hindu groups have used allurements to convert poor Muslims and Christians to Hinduism against their will.


title: Forced conversion

text: Post 2014 in India, several radical Hindu groups have been accused of converting Christians and Muslims to Hinduism. In December 2014, 57 Muslim families were reportedly converted to Hinduism. In 2020, several Muslim families were forcibly converted to Hinduism. In other states like Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, Christians were converted to Hinduism by Hindu nationalist groups.


title: Forced conversion

text: Islamic law prohibits forced conversion, following the Quranic principle that there is "no compulsion in religion" (). However, episodes of forced conversions have occurred in the history of Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: According to Ye'or, upon payment of the "jizya" tax, the "dhimmi (jizya paying resident of Islamic state or country)" would receive a receipt of payment, either in the form of a piece of paper or parchment or as a seal humiliatingly placed upon their neck, and was thereafter compelled to carry this receipt wherever he went within the realms of Islam. Failure to produce an up-to-date "jizya" receipt on the request of a Muslim could result in death or forced conversion to Islam of the "dhimmi" in question. Jews and Christians were required to pay the "jizyah" while pagans depending on the four Madhhabs were either required to accept Islam, pay the jizya, be exiled, or be killed. Some historians believe that forced conversion was rare in Islamic history, and most conversions to Islam were voluntary. Muslim rulers were often more interested in conquest than conversion. Ira Lapidus points towards "interwoven terms of political and economic benefits and of a sophisticated culture and religion" as appealing to the masses. He writes that:The question of why people convert to Islam has always generated the intense feeling. Earlier generations of European scholars believed that conversions to Islam were made at the point of the sword, and that conquered peoples were given the choice of conversion or death. It is now apparent that conversion by force, while not unknown in Muslim countries, was, in fact, rare. Muslim conquerors ordinarily wished to dominate rather than convert, and most conversions to Islam were voluntary. (...) In most cases, worldly and spiritual motives for conversion blended together. Moreover, conversion to Islam did not necessarily imply a complete turning from an old to a totally new life. While it entailed the acceptance of new religious beliefs and membership in a new religious community, most converts retained a deep attachment to the cultures and communities from which they came.Muslim scholars like Abu Hanifa and Abu Yusuf stated that the "jizya" tax should be paid by Non-Muslims ("Kuffar") regardless of their religion, some later and also earlier Muslim jurists did not permit Non-Muslims who are not People of the Book or Ahle-Kitab (Jews, Christians, Sabians) pay the "jizya". Instead, they only allowed them (non-Ahle-Kitab) to avoid death by choosing to convert to Islam. Of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, the Hanafi and Maliki schools allow polytheists to be granted "dhimmi" status, except Arab polytheists. However, the Shafi'i, Hanbali and Zahiri schools only consider Christians, Jews, and Sabians to be eligible to belong to the "dhimmi" category.


title: Forced conversion

text: Wael Hallaq states that in theory, Islamic religious tolerance only applied to those religious groups that Islamic jurisprudence considered to be monotheistic "People of the Book", i.e. Christians, Jews, and Sabians if they paid the "jizya" tax, while to those excluded from the "People of the Book" were only offered two choices: convert to Islam or fight to the death. In practice, the "People of the Book" designation and "dhimmi" status were even extended to the non-monotheistic religions of the conquered peoples, such as Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and other non-monotheists.


title: Forced conversion

text: The Druze have frequently experienced persecution by different Muslim regimes such as the Shia Ismaili Fatimid State, Mamluk, Sunni Ottoman Empire, and Egypt Eyalet. The persecution of the Druze included massacres, demolishing Druze prayer houses and holy places and forced conversion to Islam. Those were no ordinary killings and massacres in the Druze's narrative, they were meant to eradicate the whole community according to the Druze narrative.


title: Forced conversion

text: The wars of the Ridda (lit. apostasy) undertaken by Abu Bakr, the first caliph of the "Rashidun" Caliphate, against Arab tribes who had accepted Islam but refused to pay Zakat and Jizya Tax, have been described by some historians as an instance of forced conversion or "reconversion". The rebellion of these Arab tribes was less a relapse to the pre-Islamic Arabian religion than termination of a political contract they had made with Muhammad. Some of these tribal leaders claimed prophethood, bringing themselves in direct conflict with the Muslim Caliphate. Although, the exact reason according to other sources are not only that these tribes refused to pay Zakat, which is one of the five main pillars of Islam, but were also responsible for leading rebellious campaigns against the Muslim state.


title: Forced conversion

text: A well-known classical scholar, Allama Badr al-Din al-Aini (1360–1453), writes in his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari:Hazrat Abu Bakr al-Siddiq fought those who refused to pay Zakat because they had taken up the sword and started a war against the Muslim community … Hazrat Abu Hanifa took the ground that he who refuses to pay Zakat must neither be killed nor even fought. However, he must be forced to pay it without the use of the sword, and must only be killed if he rose up to attack. This is exactly what Hazrat Abu Bakr did with those who refused to pay Zakat during his caliphate. He did not fight them until they rose up to attack himTwo out of the four schools of Islamic law, i.e. Hanafi and Maliki schools, accepted non-Arab polytheists to be eligible for the "dhimmi" status. Under this doctrine, Arab polytheists were forced to choose between conversion and death. However, according to perception of most Muslim jurists, all Arabs had embraced Islam during the lifetime of Muhammad. Their exclusion therefore had little practical significance after his death in 632.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the 9th century, the Samaritan population of Palestine faced persecution and attempts at forced conversion at the hands of the rebel leader ibn Firāsa, against whom they were defended by Abbasid caliphal troops. Historians recognize that during the Early Middle Ages, the Christian populations living in the lands invaded by the Arab Muslim armies between the 7th and 10th centuries suffered religious discrimination, religious persecution, religious violence, and martyrdom multiple times at the hands of Arab Muslim officials and rulers. As People of the Book, Christians under Muslim rule were subjected to "dhimmi" status (along with Jews, Samaritans, Gnostics, Mandeans, and Zoroastrians), which was inferior to the status of Muslims. Christians and other religious minorities thus faced religious discrimination and religious persecution in that they were banned from proselytising (for Christians, it was forbidden to evangelize or spread Christianity) in the lands invaded by the Arab Muslims on pain of death, they were banned from bearing arms, undertaking certain professions, and were obligated to dress differently in order to distinguish themselves from Arabs. Under "sharia", Non-Muslims were obligated to pay "jizya" and "kharaj" taxes, together with periodic heavy ransom levied upon Christian communities by Muslim rulers in order to fund military campaigns, all of which contributed a significant proportion of income to the Islamic states while conversely reducing many Christians to poverty, and these financial and social hardships forced many Christians to convert to Islam. Christians unable to pay these taxes were forced to surrender their children to the Muslim rulers as payment who would sell them as slaves to Muslim households where they were forced to convert to Islam. Many Christian martyrs were executed under the Islamic death penalty for defending their Christian faith through dramatic acts of resistance such as refusing to convert to Islam, repudiation of the Islamic religion and subsequent reconversion to Christianity, and blasphemy towards Muslim beliefs.


title: Forced conversion

text: There were forced conversions in the 12th century under the Almohad dynasty of North Africa and al-Andalus, who suppressed the "dhimmi" status of Jews and Christians and gave them the choice between conversion, exile, and being executed. The treatment and persecution of Jews under Almohad rule was a drastic change. Prior to Almohad rule during the Caliphate of Córdoba, Jewish culture experienced a Golden Age. María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University, has argued that "tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society", and that the Jewish "dhimmi"s living under the Caliphate, while allowed fewer rights than Muslims, were still better off than in Christian Europe. Many Jews migrated to "al-Andalus", where they were not just tolerated but allowed to practice their faith openly. Christians had also practiced their religion openly in Córdoba, and both Jews and Christians lived openly in Morocco as well.


title: Forced conversion

text: The first Almohad ruler, Abd al-Mumin, allowed an initial seven-month grace period. Then he forced most of the urban "dhimmi" population in Morocco, both Jewish and Christian, to convert to Islam. In 1198, the Almohad emir Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur decreed that Jews must wear a dark blue garb, with very large sleeves and a grotesquely oversized hat; hs son altered the colour to yellow, a change that may have influenced Catholic ordinances some time later. Those who converted had to wear clothing that identified them as Jews since they were not regarded as sincere Muslims. Cases of mass martyrdom of Jews who refused to convert to Islam are recorded.


title: Forced conversion

text: Many of the conversions were superficial. Maimonides urged Jews to choose the superficial conversion over martyrdom and argued, "Muslims know very well that we do not mean what we say, and that what we say is only to escape the ruler's punishment and to satisfy him with this simple confession." Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164), who himself fled the persecutions of the Almohads, composed an elegy mourning the destruction of many Jewish communities throughout Spain and the Maghreb under the Almohads. Many Jews fled from territories ruled by the Almohads to Christian lands, and others, like the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands. However, a few Jewish traders still working in North Africa are recorded.


title: Forced conversion

text: The treatment and persecution of Christians under Almohad rule was a drastic change as well. Many Christians were killed, forced to convert, or forced to flee. Some Christians fled to the Christian kingdoms in the north and west and helped fuel the Reconquista. Christian martyrs who refused to convert to Islam under Almohad rule included:


title: Forced conversion

text: Christians under the Almohad rule generally chose to relocate to the Christian principalities (most notably the Kingdom of Asturias) in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, whereas Jews decided to stay in order to keep their properties, and many of them feigned conversion to Islam, while continuing to believe and practice Judaism in secrecy.


title: Forced conversion

text: During the Almohad persecution, the medieval Jewish philosopher and rabbi Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), one of the leading exponents of the Golden Age of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula, wrote his "Epistle on Apostasy", in which he permitted Jews to feign apostasy under duress, though strongly recommending leaving the country instead. There is dispute amongst scholars as to whether Maimonides himself converted to Islam in order to freely escape from Almohad territory, and then reconverted back to Judaism in either the Levant or in Egypt. He was later denounced as an apostate and tried in an Islamic court.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the late 1160s, the Yemenite ruler 'Abd-al-Nabī ibn Mahdi left Jews with the choice between conversion to Islam or martyrdom. Ibn Mahdi also imposed his beliefs upon the Muslims besides the Jews. This led to a revival of Jewish messianism, but also led to mass-conversion. The persecution ended in 1173 with the defeat of Ibn Mahdi and conquest of Yemen by the brother of Saladin, and they were allowed to return to their Jewish faith.


title: Forced conversion

text: According to two Cairo Genizah documents, the Ayyubid ruler of Yemen, al-Malik al-Mu'izz al-Ismail (reigned from 1197 to 1202) had attempted to force the Jews of Aden to convert. The second document details the relief of Jewish community after his murder, and those who had been forced to convert reverted to Judaism. While he did not impose Islam upon the foreign merchants, they were forced to pay triple the normal rate of poll tax.


title: Forced conversion

text: A measure listed in the legal works by Al-Shawkānī is of forced conversion of Jewish orphans. No date is given for this decree by modern studies nor who issued it. The forced conversion of Jewish orphans was reintroduced under Imam Yahya in 1922. The Orphans' Decree was implemented aggressively for the first ten years. It was re-promulgated in 1928.


title: Forced conversion

text: A form of forced conversion became institutionalized during the Ottoman Empire in the practice of devşirme, a human levy in which Christian boys were seized and collected from their families (usually in the Balkans), enslaved, forcefully converted to Islam, and then trained as elite military unit within the Ottoman army or for high-ranking service to the sultan. From the mid to late 14th, through early 18th centuries, the devşirme–janissary system enslaved an estimated 500,000 to one million non-Muslim adolescent males. These boys would attain a great education and high social standing after their training and conversion.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the 17th century, Sabbatai Zevi, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were welcomed in the Ottoman Empire during the Spanish Inquisition, proclaimed himself as the Jewish Messiah and called for the abolition of major Jewish laws and customs. After he attracted a large following, he was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and given a choice between execution or conversion to Islam. Zevi opted for a feigned conversion solely to escape the death penalty, and continued to believe and practice Judaism along with his followers in secrecy. The Byzantine historian Doukas recounts two other cases of forced or attempted forced conversion: one of a Christian official who had offended Sultan Murad II, and the other of an archbishop.


title: Forced conversion

text: Speros Vyronis cites a pastoral letter from 1338 addressed to the residents of Nicaea indicating widespread, forcible conversion by the Turks after it was conquered: “And they [Turks] having captured and enslaved many of our own and violently forced them and dragging them along alas! So that they took up their evil and godlessness.”


title: Forced conversion

text: After the Siege of Nicaea (1328–1331) The Turks began to force the Christian inhabitants who had escaped the massacres to convert to Islam. The patriarch of Constantinople John XIX wrote a message to the people of Nicea shortly after the city was seized. His letter says that "The invaders endeavored to impose their impure religion on the populace, at all costs, intending to make the inhabitants followers of Muhammad". Patriarch advised the Christians to "be steadfast in your religion" and not to forget that the "Turks are masters of your bodies only, but not of your souls.


title: Forced conversion

text: According to historian Demetrios Constantelos, “Mass forced conversions were recorded during the caliphates of Selim I (1512–1520),…Selim II (1566–1574), and Murat III (1574–1595). On the occasion of some anniversary, such as the capture of a city, or a national holiday, many rayahs were forced to apostacize. On the day of the circumcision of Mohammed III great numbers of Christians (Albanians, Greeks, Slavs) were forced to convert to Islam.”


title: Forced conversion

text: During the genocide and persecution of Greeks in the 20th century, there were cases of forced conversion to Islam (see also Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide, and Hamidian massacres).


title: Forced conversion

text: Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, decreed Twelver Shiism to be the official religion of state and ordered executions of a number of Sunni intellectuals who refused to accept Shiism. Non-Muslims faced frequent persecutions and at times forced conversions under the rule of his dynastic successors. Thus, after the capture of the Hormuz Island, Abbas I required local Christians to convert to Twelver Shia Islam, Abbas II granted his ministers authority to force Jews to become Shia Muslims, and Sultan Husayn decreed forcible conversion of Zoroastrians. In 1839, during the Qajar era the Jewish community in the city of Mashhad was attacked by a mob and subsequently forced to convert to Shia Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: In an invasion of the Kashmir valley (1015), Mahmud of Ghazni plundered the valley, took many prisoners and carried out conversions to Islam. In his later campaigns, in Mathura, Baran and Kanauj, again, many conversions took place. Those soldiers who surrendered to him were converted to Islam. In Baran (Bulandshahr) alone 10,000 persons were converted to Islam including the king. Tarikh-i-Yamini, Rausat-us-Safa and Tarikh-i-Ferishtah speak of construction of mosques and schools and appointment of preachers and teachers by Mahmud and his successor Masud. Wherever Mahmud went, he insisted on the people to convert to Islam. The raids by Muhammad Ghori and his generals brought in thousands of slaves in the late 12th century, most of whom were compelled to convert as one of the preconditions of their freedom. Sikandar Butshikan (1394–1417) demolished Hindu temples and forcefully converted Hindus.


title: Forced conversion

text: Aurangzeb employed a number of means to encourage conversions to Islam. The ninth guru of Sikhs, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was beheaded in Delhi on orders of Aurangzeb for refusing to convert to Islam. In a Mughal-Sikh war in 1715, 700 followers of Banda Singh Bahadur were beheaded. Sikhs were executed for not apostatizing from Sikhism. Banda Singh Bahadur was offered a pardon if he converted to Islam. Upon refusal, he was tortured, and was killed with his five-year-old son. Following the execution of Banda, the emperor ordered to apprehend Sikhs anywhere they were found.


title: Forced conversion

text: 18th century ruler Tipu Sultan persecuted the Hindus, Christians and Mappla Muslims. During Sultan's Mysorean invasion of Kerala, hundreds of temples and churches were demolished and ten thousands of Christians and Hindus were killed or converted to Islam by force.


title: Forced conversion

text: In Bangladesh, the International Crimes Tribunal tried and convicted several leaders of the Islamic Razakar militias, as well as Bangladesh Muslim Awami league (Forid Uddin Mausood), of war crimes committed against Hindus during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. The charges included forced conversion of Bengali Hindus to Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: Coptic women and girls are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. In 2009, the Washington, D.C.-based group Christian Solidarity International published a study of the abductions and forced marriages and the anguish felt by the young women because returning to Christianity is against the law. Further allegations of organised abduction of Copts, trafficking and police collusion continue in 2017.


title: Forced conversion

text: In April 2010, a bipartisan group of 17 members of the U.S. Congress expressed concern to the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office about Coptic women who faced "physical and sexual violence, captivity ... exploitation in forced domestic servitude or commercial sexual exploitation, and financial benefit to the individuals who secure the forced conversion of the victim."


title: Forced conversion

text: In the 1998 Prankote massacre, 26 Kashmiri Hindus were beheaded by Islamist militants after their refusal to convert to Islam. The militants struck when the villagers refused demands from the gunmen to convert to Islam and prove their conversion by eating beef.


title: Forced conversion

text: During the Noakhali riots in 1946, several thousand Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam by Muslim mobs.


title: Forced conversion

text: The rise of Taliban insurgency in Pakistan has been an influential and increasing factor in the persecution of and discrimination against religious minorities, such as Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and other minorities.


title: Forced conversion

text: The Human Rights Council of Pakistan has reported that cases of forced conversion are increasing. A 2014 report by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace (MSP) says about 1,000 women in Pakistan are forcibly converted to Islam every year (700 Christian and 300 Hindu).


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2003, a six-year-old Sikh girl was kidnapped by a member of the Afridi tribe in Northwest Frontier Province; the alleged kidnapper claimed the girl was actually 12 years old, had converted to Islam, and therefore could not be returned to her non-Muslim family.


title: Forced conversion

text: In May 2007, members of the Christian community of Charsadda in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, close to the border of Afghanistan, reported that they had received letters threatening bombings if they did not convert to Islam, and that the police were not taking their fears seriously. In June 2009, International Christian Concern (ICC) reported the rape and killing of a Christian man in Pakistan for refusing to convert to Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: Rinkle Kumari, a 19-year Pakistani student, Lata Kumari, and Asha Kumari, a Hindu working in a beauty parlor, were allegedly forced to convert from Hinduism to Islam. They told the judge that they wanted to go with their parents. Their cases were appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The appeal was admitted but remained unheard ever after. Rinkle was abducted by a gang and "forced" to convert to Islam, before being head shaved.


title: Forced conversion

text: Sikhs in Hangu district stated they were being pressured to convert to Islam by Yaqoob Khan, the assistant commissioner of Tall Tehsil, in December 2017. However, the Deputy Commissioner of Hangu Shahid Mehmood denied it occurred and claimed that Sikhs were offended during a conversation with Yaqub though it was not intentional.


title: Forced conversion

text: Many Hindu girls living in Pakistan are kidnapped, forcibly converted and married to Muslims. According to the Pakistan Hindu Council, religious persecution, especially forced conversions, remains the foremost reason for migration of Hindus from Pakistan. Religious institutions like Bharchundi Sharif and Sarhandi Pir support forced conversions and are known to have support and protection of ruling political parties of Sindh. According to the National Commission of Justice and Peace and the Pakistan Hindu Council (PHC) around 1000 Christian and Hindu minority women are converted to Islam and then forcibly married off to their abductors or rapists. This practice is being reported increasingly in the districts of Tharparkar, Umerkot and Mirpur Khas in Sindh. According to another report from the Movement for Solidarity and Peace, about 1,000 non-Muslim girls are converted to Islam each year in Pakistan. According to the Amarnath Motumal, the vice chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every month, an estimated 20 or more Hindu girls are abducted and converted, although exact figures are impossible to gather. In 2014 alone, 265 legal cases of forced conversion were reported mostly involving Hindu girls.


title: Forced conversion

text: A total of 57 Hindus converted in Pasrur during May 14–19. On May 14, 35 Hindus of the same family were forced to convert by their employer because his sales dropped after Muslims started boycotting his eatable items as they were prepared by Hindus as well as their persecution by the Muslim employees of neighbouring shops according to their relatives. Since the impoverished Hindu had no other way to earn and needed to keep the job to survive, they converted. 14 members of another family converted on May 17 since no one was employing them, later another Hindu man and his family of eight under pressure from Muslims to avoid their land being grabbed.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2017, the Sikh community in Hangu district of Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province alleged that they were "being forced to convert to Islam" by a government official. Farid Chand Singh, who filed the complaint, has claimed that Assistant Commissioner Tehsil Tall Yaqoob Khan was allegedly forcing Sikhs to convert to Islam and the residents of Doaba area are being tortured religiously. According to reports, about 60 Sikhs of Doaba had demanded security from the administration.


title: Forced conversion

text: Many Hindus voluntarily convert to Islam in order to acquire Watan Cards and National Identification Cards. These converts are also given land and money. For example, 428 poor Hindus in Matli were converted between 2009 and 2011 by the Madrassa Baitul Islam, a Deobandi seminary in Matli, which pays off the debts of Hindus converting to Islam. Another example is the conversion of 250 Hindus to Islam in Chohar Jamali area in Thatta. Conversions are also carried out by Ex Hindu Baba Deen Mohammad Shaikh mission which converted 108,000 people to Islam since 1989.


title: Forced conversion

text: Within Pakistan, the southern province of Sindh had over 1,000 forced conversions of Christian and Hindu girls according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in 2018. According to victims' families and activists, Mian Abdul Haq, who is a local political and religious leader in Sindh, has been accused of being responsible for forced conversions of girls within the province.


title: Forced conversion

text: More than 100 Hindus in Sindh converted to Islam in June 2020 to escape discrimination and economic pressures. Islamic charities and clerics offer incentives of jobs or land to impoverished minorities on the condition that they convert. "New York Times" summarised the view of Hindu groups that these seemingly voluntary conversions "take place under such economic duress that they are tantamount to a forced conversion anyway."


title: Forced conversion

text: In October 2020, the Pakistani High Court upheld the validity of a forced marriage between 44-year-old Ali Azhar and 13-year-old Christian Arzoo Raja. Raja was abducted by Azhar, forcibly wed to Azhar and then forcibly converted to Islam by Azhar.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2012, over 1000 Catholic children in East Timor, removed from their families, were reported to being held in Indonesia without consent of their parents, forcibly converted to Islam, educated in Islamic schools and naturalized. Other reports claim forced conversion of minority Ahmadiyya sect Muslims to Sunni Islam, with the use of violence.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2001 the Indonesian army evacuated hundreds of Christian refugees from the remote Kesui and Teor islands in Maluku after the refugees stated that they had been forced to convert to Islam. According to reports, some of the men had been circumcised against their will, and a paramilitary group involved in the incident confirmed that circumcisions had taken place while denying any element of coercion.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2017, many members of the Orang Rimba tribe, especially children, were being forced to renounce their folk religion and convert to Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: There have been a number of reports of attempts to forcibly convert religious minorities in Iraq. The Yazidi people of northern Iraq, who follow an ethnoreligious syncretic faith, have been threatened with forced conversion by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who consider their practices to be Satanism. UN investigators have reported mass killings of Yazidi men and boys who refused to convert to Islam. In Baghdad, hundreds of Assyrian Christians fled their homes in 2007 when a local extremist group announced that they had to convert to Islam, pay the jizya or die. In March 2007, the BBC reported that people in the Mandaean ethnic and religious minority in Iraq alleged that they were being targeted by Islamist insurgents, who offered them the choice of conversion or death.


title: Forced conversion

text: Allegations of Coptic Christian girls being forced to marry Arab Muslim men and convert to Islam in Egypt have been reported by a number of news and advocacy organizations and have sparked public protests. According to a 2009 report by the US State Department, observers have found it extremely difficult to determine whether compulsion was used, and in recent years no such cases have been independently verified.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2006, two journalists of the Fox News Network were kidnapped at gunpoint in the Gaza Strip by a previously unknown militant group. After being forced to read statements on videotape proclaiming that they had converted to Islam, they were released by their captors.


title: Forced conversion

text: In August 2009, International Christian Concern reported that four Christians working to help orphans in Somalia were beheaded by Islamist extremists when they refused to convert to Islam.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the early 2010s, the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram is reported to have forced a kidnapped Christian woman to convert to Islam at knifepoint. A Christian woman in 2018 was raped repeatedly by a Boko Haram terrorist for refusing to convert to Islam and her son was killed.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2015, a Christian girl named Ese Oruru was kidnapped in Bayelsa State and transported to Kano where she was forced to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man in the palace of the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.


title: Forced conversion

text: According to the UK prison officers' union, some Muslim prisoners in the UK have been forcibly converting fellow inmates to Islam in prisons.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2007, a Sikh girl's family claimed that she had been forcibly converted to Islam, and they received a police guard after being attacked by an armed gang, although the "Police said no one was injured in the incident".


title: Forced conversion

text: In response to these news stories, an open letter to Sir Ian Blair, signed by ten Hindu academics, argued that claims that Hindu and Sikh girls were being forcefully converted were "part of an arsenal of myths propagated by right-wing Hindu supremacist organisations in India". The Muslim Council of Britain issued a press release pointing out there is a lack of evidence of any forced conversions and suggested it is an underhand attempt to smear the British Muslim population.


title: Forced conversion

text: An academic paper by Katy Sian published in the journal "South Asian Popular Culture" in 2011 explored the question of how "'forced' conversion narratives" arose around the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom. Sian, who reports that claims of conversion through courtship on campuses are widespread in the UK, indicates that rather than relying on actual evidence they primarily rest on the word of "a friend of a friend" or on personal anecdote. According to Sian, the narrative is similar to accusations of "white slavery" lodged against the Jewish community and foreigners to the UK and the US, with the former having ties to antisemitism that mirror the Islamophobia betrayed by the modern narrative. Sian expanded on these views in 2013's "Mistaken Identities, Forced Conversions, and Postcolonial Formations".


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2018, a report by a Sikh activist organisation, Sikh Youth UK, entitled "The Religiously Aggravated Sexual Exploitation of Young Sikh Women Across the UK" made allegations of similarities between the case of Sikh Women and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. However in 2019, this report was criticised by researchers and an official UK government report lead by two Sikh academics for false and misleading information. It noted: "The RASE report lacks solid data, methodological transparency and rigour. It is filled instead with sweeping generalisations and poorly substantiated claims around the nature and scale of abuse of Sikh girls and causal factors driving it. It appealed heavily to historical tensions between Sikhs and Muslims and narratives of honour in a way that seemed designed to whip up fear and hate".


title: Forced conversion

text: In individual historical cases, there was a limited policy of forced mass conversion in connection with the struggle for freedom.


title: Forced conversion

text: Under the Hasmonean Kingdom, the Idumeans were forced to convert to Judaism, by threat of exile or death, depending on the source.


title: Forced conversion

text: In "Eusebíus, Christianity, and Judaism", Harold W. Attridge claims that Josephus' account was accurate and that Alexander Jannaeus (around 80 BCE) demolished the city of Pella in Moab, because the inhabitants refused to adopt Jewish national customs. Maurice Sartre writes of the "policy of forced Judaization adopted by Hyrcanos, Aristobulus I and Jannaeus", who offered "the conquered peoples a choice between expulsion or conversion," William Horbury postulates that an existing small Jewish population in Lower Galilee was massively expanded by forced conversion around 104 BCE.


title: Forced conversion

text: In 2009, the BBC claimed that in 524 CE the Himyarite Kingdom, who had adopted Judaism as the "de facto" state religion two centuries earlier, led by King Yusuf Dhu Nuwas, had offered residents of a village in what is now Saudi Arabia the choice between conversion to Judaism or death, and that 20,000 Christians had then been massacred. During the reign of Dhu Nuwas, a power-political process began that made the Himyarite kingdom tributary to the Kingdom of Aksum, who had adopted Christianity as the "de facto" state religion two centuries earlier. This process was completed by the time of the reign of Ma'dīkarib Yafur (519-522), a Christian appointed by the Aksumites. A coup d'état ensued, with Dhu Nuwas assuming authority after killing the Aksumite garrison in Zafar. A general was send against Najrān, a predominantly Christian oasis, with a good number of Jews, who refused to recognize his authority. The general blocked the caravan route connecting Najrān with Eastern Arabia and persecuted the Christian population of Najrān. Dhu Nuwas campaign eventually killed between 11,500 and 14,000, and took a similar number of prisoners. A severe drought in the 6th century weakened the Himyarite kingdom and contributed to its eventual conquest by the Kingdom of Aksum in 525.


title: Forced conversion

text: Under the doctrine of state atheism in the Soviet Union, there was a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" conducted by communists. This program included the overarching objective to establish not only a fundamentally materialistic conception of the universe, but to foster "direct and open criticism of the religious outlook" by means of establishing an "anti-religious trend" across the entire school. The Russian Orthodox Church, for centuries the strongest of all Orthodox Churches, was violently suppressed. Revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote that every religious idea and every idea of God "is unutterable vileness... of the most dangerous kind, 'contagion of the most abominable kind". Many priests were killed and imprisoned. Thousands of churches were closed, some turned into hospitals. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution.


title: Forced conversion

text: Christopher Marsh, a professor at Baylor University writes that "Tracing the social nature of religion from Schleiermacher and Feurbach to Marx, Engels, and Lenin... the idea of religion as a social product evolved to the point of policies aimed at the forced conversion of believers to atheism."


title: Forced conversion

text: Jonathan Blake of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University elucidates the history of this practice in the USSR, stating that:


title: Forced conversion

text: Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of the Nazi Empire conquered by the Soviet Red Army, and Yugoslavia became one party communist states and the project of coercive conversion continued. The Soviet Union ended its war time truce against the Russian Orthodox Church, and extended its persecutions to the newly communist Eastern bloc: "In Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, Catholic leaders who were unwilling to be silent were denounced, publicly humiliated or imprisoned by the communists. Leaders of the national Orthodox Churches in Romania and Bulgaria had to be cautious and submissive", wrote Blainey. While the churches were generally not as severely treated as they had been in the USSR, nearly all their schools and many of their churches were closed, and they lost their formerly prominent roles in public life. Children were taught atheism, and clergy were imprisoned by the thousands.


title: Forced conversion

text: In the Eastern Bloc, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques were forcibly "converted into museums of atheism." Historical essayist expounds upon this situation, specifically in the Socialist Republic of Romania, writing that scientific atheism was "aggressively applied to Moldova, immediately after the 1940 annexation, when churches were profaned, clergy assaulted, and signs and public symbols of religion were prohibited"; he provides an example of this phenomenon, further writing that "St. Theodora Church in downtown Chişinău was converted into the city's Museum of Scientific Atheism". Marxist-Leninist regimes treated religious believers as subversives or abnormal, sometimes relegating them to psychiatric hospitals and reeducation. Nevertheless, historian Emily Baran writes that "some accounts suggest the conversion to militant atheism did not always end individuals' existential questions".


title: Forced conversion

text: During the French Revolution, a campaign of dechristianization happened which included removal and destruction of religious objects from places of worship; English librarian Thomas Hartwell Horne and biblical scholar Samuel Davidson write that "churches were converted into 'temples of reason,' in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service".


title: Forced conversion

text: Unlike later establishments of state atheism by communist regimes, the French Revolutionary experiment was short (seven months), incomplete and inconsistent. Although brief, the French experiment was particularly notable for the influence upon atheists Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.


title: Forced conversion

text: The emergence of communist states across East Asia after World War Two saw religion purged by atheist regimes across China, North Korea and much of Indo-China. In 1949, China became a communist state under the leadership of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party. Prior to this takeover, China itself was previously a cradle of religious thought since ancient times, being the birthplace of Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhists arrived in the first century AD. Under Mao, China became an officially atheist state, and though some religious practices were permitted to continue under State supervision, religious groups which are deemed a threat to law and order have been suppressed—such as Tibetan Buddhism from 1959 and Falun Gong in recent years. Religious schools and social institutions were closed, foreign missionaries were expelled, and local religious practices were discouraged. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao instigated "struggles" against the Four Olds: "old ideas, customs, culture, and habits of mind". In 1999, the Communist Party launched a three-year drive to promote atheism in Tibet, saying that intensifying atheist propaganda is "especially important for Tibet because atheism plays an extremely important role in promoting economic construction, social advancement and socialist spiritual civilization in the region".