"Muslim-Christian relations were at a low ebb when the Ottomans arrived in the Arab lands [in 1516]. The Mamluk sultans of Egypt, the previous rulers of the area, had embarked on an ideological as well as a military campaign against the various Christian communities still living in the Middle East. . . . In the aftermath of this disaster, Christianity in the Arab east was in psychological and numerical decline. Jewish communities in the region fared somewhat better than their Christian neighbors but could hardly be characterized as flourishing on the eve of the Ottoman conquest. The Jews and Christians in the region were at first probably ambivalent, if not indifferent or hostile, to the change in the dynastic succession from Mamluk to Ottoman sultans who exercised sovereignty over their lives, but their fortunes were about to improve under the new regime. The Ottoman sultans were still winning victories against European armies on the battlefield, and the presence of Christians so distant from the war zone in Central Europe must not have felt particularly threatening or indeed important (beyond the collection of their taxes) to most Ottoman officials posted in the Arab lands. In the case of the Sephardic Jews,* the Ottoman sultans welcomed them into their realm as potentially revenue-producing subjects. Most importantly, the political tradition honored by the Ottoman sultans was to grant autonomy to the various religious groups of their empire. This afforded the Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East fairly wide-ranging freedoms and allowed them to recover some of the losses they had endured under the Mamluks, including the right to repair damaged churches and synagogues and, in a few cases, permission to build new ones."

*Jewish communities from the Iberian Peninsula who were forced to leaveafter the Christian reconquest of what became Spain and Portugal

Bruce Masters, historian, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, book published in 2001

All of the following statements are factually accurate. Which would best support the author's argument in the first paragraph of the passage?