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Good morning Many people in the West would have been surprised to hear that there were numerous towns and villages in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, which were mainly or wholly non-Muslim and at peace with their Muslim neighbours. Suddenly all that has changed. The media has been reporting the most brutal kind of ethnic cleansing in those places captured by the jihadist forces of the so-called Islamic State, which claims to be fighting to establish a new caliphate across Iraq and Syria. Those who did not comply with their extremist jihadist ideology were being told to convert, leave, or be put to death. I say "so-called Islamic State" because if I were a Muslim I would be horrified to hear the sacred name of my religion misused in this way. Indeed, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said on Radio 4's Sunday programme yesterday, the great majority of Muslims and their religious leaders are appalled by what is happening. It is a complete misreading of the situation, therefore, to assume that this represents Islam reverting to primitive type - showing its true intolerant colours. On the contrary, Muslim countries had long practised their own form of peaceful co-existence with non-Muslim minorities. The Greek Orthodox branch of the Christian religion, and various ancient forms of Catholicism, would hardly have survived in the region if the Ottoman empire hadn't tolerated and protected them - even though they were sometimes a source of instability. The notion of the "Terrible Turk", who represented the ultimate in human cruelty, was largely a figment of the imagination of the 19th century European mass media. Indeed as a Catholic I have to acknowledge that the Muslim historical record on religious tolerance was far superior to that of my own faith. The large Jewish and Muslim populations in 16th century Catholic Spain, for instance, were forcibly expelled without mercy, and the ferocious cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition was unleashed against those who tried to remain. Compare that with the treatment of Christian and Jewish minorities over the same period under the Ottoman empire - where many Spanish Jews took refuge. They were exempt from sharia law and even had their own legal system. They were allowed to marry whoever they wished, to drink alcohol, and if they were Christians, to eat pork. They didn't have full political equality and they were taxed differently, but by and large they prospered. As People of the Book, as the Prophet Muhammad had named them, Christians and Jews had rights. Allah, he declared, didn't wish them to be harmed but respected. Muslim rulers elsewhere often used the same approach towards other non-Muslim groups they governed. So the actions of a group of extremists should not blind us to the truth which history demonstrates: that Islam teaches tolerance of other religions, not the sort of persecution we are witnessing today.