Beginning of Essay
When studying history, both in a professional and academic sense, we try to make connections between civilizations and time periods. Historians have attempted to discover universal constants of human nature, a bond that forms from continent to continent, human bei ....

Middle of Essay
.... Arab territorial conquests (Sudo, 4)." However, upon examination, it is not fair to make the generalization that Islam is a religion of violence, and one notices when looking at world religion on a whole, one finds that Islam was no more violent than any other religion. In fact, not only is Islam not a fundamentally violent philosophy, but we can also see that many other religions normally considered "non-violent," such as Christianity or Hinduism, have been spread through bloody conquest. Thus, in searching for a universal constant of history, we ought not fall into the "fallacy of abstractions," as Sydney J. Harris keenly puts it, and assume that ....