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Wernazuma III
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Decolonize!
Aug 2000
time: 06:17
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quote:
Originally posted by Albert Speer
insanely better off... aside from a tax, Christians and Jews were not at all ill-treated by their Muslim rulers. whereas Christian nations since Constantine's Rome have been rife with expulsions and progroms of Jews, Islamic nations never had any history of such things until the 20th century.
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I can only reiterate what mb said: What a crap. Go and read about the "insanely tolerant" muslim regime in Spain and Northern Africa under the Almohads after the fall of Almoravid dynasty. When jews start to emigrate to medieval Spanish Christian kingdoms, you know the place they've been has must have been VERY bad. And there's many other examples too. As in Christianity, there's always been more and less tolerant regions, more and less tolerant periods...
The thing that made situation in muslim countries often better than in Christian countries was that islam has a kind of standardized institution granting certain religious tolerance towards Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians : The dimma-system. Christianity lacked such a pattern which made Christian nations even less calculable, one day everything could be fine, the next day you'd have a pogrome. In islam, the same happened in those regions, where they dimma-system didn't really fit. While more tolerant rulers would extend the certain protection of the dimma over Hindus too, this could easily be changed the next day by pointing to them as "polytheists".
However, the dimma, I believe, maybe once was an advantage, but today this concept is useless, it's pribciples of tolerance are in no way comparable to our concepts of religious tolerance and freedom. Best example is the mullah regime in Iran, they exercise the dimma according to tradition...
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:17
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shouldn't half of yall be banned by now for hate postings? i thought apolyton doesn't tolerate hate postings against religious groups.
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Heresson
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of frogs
Jun 2000
time: 06:17
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quote:
Originally posted by Albert Speer
insanely better off... aside from a tax, Christians and Jews were not at all ill-treated by their Muslim rulers.
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A tax, wearing of special dress, sometimes wearing big wooden crosses, sometimes puting images of devils on their doors, sometimes being slaughtered, sometimes being taken away churches, sometimes forbidden to build new ones or repair old ones, sometimes given a choice convert or die etc
quote:
whereas Christian nations since Constantine's Rome have been rife with expulsions and progroms of Jews,
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Somehow, still majority of Jews lived in Christian states.
Also, Christian intolerance didn't start with Constantine.
Somewhere around Theodosius the Great would be more proper, and even then it was rather a work of fanatical monks.
quote:
Islamic nations never had any history of such things until the 20th century.
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Really?
Massacre of Banu Qurayza by Muhammad - entire Jewish tribe killed (but women and children, who were just enslaved)
Slaughter of Antioch under mamluk sultan Baybars and many other slaughters during Muslim conquests
Slaughters of Armenians at the end of XIX century...
quote:
Christians were the civilized world's intolerant, violent bastards until the Enlightenment |
In the first four centuries of their history too?
since Christianity became a state religion, its followers commited many crimes.
But as You've noticed, Christianity has a peacefull founder. Islam does not.
In its times, Islam could be considered a step forward in many ways, though we should not go too far in praises;
dhimma system
1) Was a necessarity in its times. Muslims would not be able to conquer a piece of Byzantium if its population would be hostile towards the conquest.
For a very long time, Islam was the attacking side, and it was conquering Christian lands, not the other way round.
2) Islam has an easier task accepting Christianity than vice versa. Simple because Christianity is older, Islam grew beside it, because Muhammad's followers had to flee to a Christian land himself once
3) Today, what was progressive in VII/VIII century,
is a mock of religious freedom.
4) It was not always respected, it was only for some religious groups, and there's a question of the population during the conquest.
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:17
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and of course what was a major reason for the Muslims' success? Religious minorities around the Byzantine Empire (Coptics, Nestorians, Monophysites, etc.), persecuted by the Byzantines for years, sided with the Arabs.
Last edited by Albert Speer on 15-12-2004 at 17:55
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:17
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Wernazuma:
you mentioned the Almohads and the Seljuks. both were barbarian muslims who conquered established and tolerant Arab Muslim kingdoms in Spain and the Middle East respectively. I think their actions were more telling of barbarian violence than Muslim violence.
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Wildbore
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Thunder Bay, ON
Jun 2002
time: 05:17
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What gives anyone to judge anothers religion. Its safe to say there are extremes for any ideology.
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problem_child
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State of the Animal
Mar 2000
time: 05:17
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quote:
Originally posted by lord of the mark
as someone who follows a text based tradition (Judaism, in my case) i dont think you can judge a religion by sitting and down and reading its core text, without taking into account how that text has been interpretated at different times and places. Ive seen too many people read the Hebrew bible, and then attacked a "Judaism" they found there, that bears no resemblance to any Judaism Ive ever seen. Religions are living entities, even when based on texts, and NO text has meaning without interpretation. And theres no reason to privilege so-called "literal" interpretations. |
See, prime example of what I was talking about in my last post. So a passage in The Religious Text says that:
'People who don't follow The Religion are beneath mention, they are unimportant, the fingernail of one Follower is worth the lives of a thousand Non-believers. It is alright to kill, rape and enslave them because they are not important to God like we are, or because they are foreign, or homosexual, or because they are women and therefore inherently Lesser etc etc'
So you mention some passage like this when a Follower is busy bragging about how they have higher morals or are more civilised or decent or whatever cr*p it is this time, and in response the Follower will tell you something like:
"Oh but that's just some book, yes it says 'The Book of This Religion' on the front, and yes we Followers call it sacred and read it every day and stuff... but it doesn't actually represent our beliefs or our point of view, even though we read prayers from it and study every day and place it at the centre of our faith."
You see, far as I'm concerned all religion are Transendental Nationalist Egotism, full of the hypocracy, inconsistancy and lack of responsability common amongst the personality types that lead them.
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Ancyrean
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Back to Ankara, Turkey
Feb 2003
time: 12:17
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First of all, there is a difference between the message and spirit of Quran and the practice of Muslims today.
The problem with the Muslim world today is there's not enough distinction between the teaching of Quran and the practice of Muslims. In that practice, tradition (often parochial) often passes as Islam itself. Many values which are in fact based on tradition are thus protected by the guise of religion.
The result of this unfortunate situation is that non-Muslims, not having the luxury, the will, the time or the effort or any combination of these to make a comprehensive study of the religion itself, take the disagreeable practices of Muslims as Islam itself. The more dramatic of those practices drown out the positive sides of the religion itself.
On top of this, if you have a generally distorted perspective of history, you can author comments like the following:
quote:
Originally posted by problem_child
Could this be because Islam is a relentlessly expansionistic and imperialistic religion that conquored and subdued its way through hundreds of cultures throughout Africa and Asia and parts of Europe, from Morocco to Indonesia and from Bosnia to Nigeria, the many diverse ways of life practised by the peoples of these lands exterminated forever when the Islamic armies of conquest came knocking, forcefully converting and enslaving untill the vast unmittigated monoculture of chauvanism, backwardness and nature-hatred that we today know as the 'Islamic World' came into being. |
I guess you are totally clueless about Islam, already hate it despite whatever anybody has to say for it, and therefore usually regard the topic from that narrow prism. You give the impression from your comments that you think the 'Islamic World' (quote marks imitated) is a monolithic body that can be subjected to yet more reckless generalisations such as:
quote:
'Islam' means 'Peace'. That my friend, is what we call Orwellian Irony, like Freedom is Slavery. |
From where you stand, I don't see how there can be any kind of healthy debate. 
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Wernazuma III
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Decolonize!
Aug 2000
time: 06:17
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Ancyrean, I know it's not directed to me, just let me make some remarks.
quote:
Originally posted by Ancyrean
First of all, there is a difference between the message and spirit of Quran and the practice of Muslims today. |
That's a problem of most religions at most times of history. Most of us would agree that there's a difference between the message of the bible and witchhunts or even crusades. But that doesn't free religions from responability. Of course, there's always a range between very liberal interpretations and times and brutal ones, depending on economic conditions, general brutalization after /during wars etc. But it's often something from within religions that is the focus and religious issues canalize hate and violence. Thus I can't hear anymore, that wherever violence happens, religion is "taken hostage" or simply "abused" by society. Religion is part of a society and not simply a tool used and twisted by it.
It is always very easy in discussion for muslims to push away topics they don't like by saying: "This is not islam". Well, I know many muslims don't support violence from a religious viewpoint, but the ways, they deal with it can most often be subsummed in 2 sentences:
"But hey, look at Christian history."
"I'm muslim, I don't like violence and intolerance, so it must not be part of islam" (I've often heard denials like "that must be a lie. this cannot be in Quran.", even after I showed the very verses)
Honest reflection has to analyze the internal elements in a religion that may lead to fundamentalism, hate and intolerance.
quote:
The problem with the Muslim world today is there's not enough distinction between the teaching of Quran and the practice of Muslims. In that practice, tradition (often parochial) often passes as Islam itself. Many values which are in fact based on tradition are thus protected by the guise of religion. |
That's in many parts true. But it's nonetheless also true that Wahabits and fundamentalists go back to the very roots of what islam "is", namely Quran, sunna and hadith. It's not like in the Catholic church, where, after so many centuries, you'd have to dig very deep sometimes to find the bible. It's just too easy, again, to say "this is not islam". This is not MY islam maybe, but that's a bit muslims have a difficult time with as there can be only ONE islam. That's part of the problem in internal discussion.
quote:
The result of this unfortunate situation is that non-Muslims, not having the luxury, the will, the time or the effort or any combination of these to make a comprehensive study of the religion itself, take the disagreeable practices of Muslims as Islam itself. The more dramatic of those practices drown out the positive sides of the religion itself. |
The problem is that we're not discussing the overall islam, but it's affintiy towards violence here. Otherwise, I fully agree that there are many positive sides too.
I agree about the rest of your post. 
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:17
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problem_child:
are you an angry atheist or are you singling out Islam (which means submission, not peace, by the way) as bad but not Christianity?
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13-12-2004 16:16
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