Islam grows through conquest: why is this truth ignored?

It is true to some extent throughout history differences have resulted as a result of faith. Though moderation is the objective of many good people, it is the few that bring it to extremes. If those few are transformed to statesmanship, then there might be disturbances in the world. If a faith is a way of life where ethnicity is not brought into the equation, there is peace. True the previous thread mentioned that China had a great minority of this faith but in essence it is not used as a tool to divide and rule. The more liberal Gulf states are motivated to modernise and commercialise. However, with the disparities in wealth in those states, breeding grounds of discontent will certainly appear which is disturbing.

One must ask is faith used to integrate a multicultural society or to assimilate it? The latter unfortunately is used in most cases. The answer is a pluralistic form of educational system which encourages a sharing of knowledge and equity. Unfortunately, in the real world this is often idealistic. Poverty is the breeding ground of extremism which is often used as a tool to rule, control and indoctrinate. Fear and ignorance on both sides of the fence result in clashes of civilisations since time in memorial. Being apolitical and a free thinker I feel that as a world we are still going through teething problems and as the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer, extremism comes into the equation to everyone's disadvantage.

Tsunami in South Asia has begget the question in the local people's minds "Is this God' Wrath?" I am not certain what it is but certainly a natural calamity of this proportion has certainly brought two civil wars to a grinding halt.

 

Let's not get into a pissing contest over screwed up religions. How many Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians were slaughtered during the Crusades? Ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? Martin Luther, best known among Protestants as a courageous moral reformer, was more accurately an obsesed anti-Semite whose followers also murdered vast numbers of Anabaptists and Catholics. Some authorities estimate 1 in 6 priests is a pedophile. Don't get me started. Even today, self-righteous missionaries are screwing up peoples' cultures in Latin America and Asia. Everytime I pass a church/synogogue/mosque I cringe.

 

Jugador (what is it that you play, I wonder?):

Well, now, wait a minute. It was Christians acting on their faith that abolished slavery in the U.S. and the U.K. Christian missionarys ended foot binding in China, a practice so appalling that it nearly equates to FGM in the Muslim world.

Christianity preserved learing in the Dark Ages, maybe not very well, but without the monastaries very little indeed would have survived.

Christains built hosptials and schools, tended the sick, assisted the poor, buried the dead, and taught the children secular things, like reading and arithmetic, thoughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in this country and abroad.

Muslims, particularly Persians, actually INVENTED the University in their pursuit of science and the humanities.

As for Jews, I admit that the present Israeli government seems pig headed but it responds to deadly terrorism with minimum force (yes, it does, folks) and preserves undamaged the monuments and mosques of Islam, allowing access to all Muslims but frequently forbidding Jews to intrude. I can't say much else about Jews because we haven't been long in a position of power.

Religion acts, I think, as a brake upon the nastier tendencies of human government. Nazism managed to neutralize most of the Lutheran Church officials, had it failed to do so, the Shoah might not have happened. Religion reminds us of the worth and dignity of each INDIVIDUAL human, not merely as a cog in the apparatus of the State, but in his own right.

I do not like people substituting superstition for science in the name of religion. I REALLY do not like people using religious institutions to pour abuse and threats on those who do not share their particular beliefs. But I do believe that sincere religion calls forth the best instincts in most people. Entirely secular societies, such as Nazi Germany, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia, are free to murder and terrorize wholesale and without restraint. History shows they are willing to make good use of the opportunity.

 

Hmmmmm....

Using the Inquisition and other historic sins of Christianity to justify the current misdeeds of the Islamic Fundamentalist would be akin to justifying the murder of Germans because of what the Nazi's did in WWII. We are supposed to learn from our past not use it for justification for our current sins.

Also, Carl could you indicate to me where other than our very recent move into Iraq that we occupied large parts of the Arab world. A couple of hundred troops in Saudi Arabia at the invite of the Saudi government does not an occupation make...

 

Re: Hmmmmm....

I don't think that anyone is trying to justify the actions of Islamic fanatics.

What I, at least, was trying to do in this thread was argue against the thesis of the original post, which seemed to be that Islam is monolithic, malevolent, irredeemable, and bent on a violent collision with the West. I tried to argue that Islam is as many-stranded and diverse as any other religion, running the gamut from al-Quaida to mystical contemplatives, from modern secularists to hard-line mullahs who have never really emerged from the middle ages.

We shouldn't turn them into caricatures and we shouldn't put ourselves into a position where we believe that our only options are to either convert them or kill them.

I'm not Carl, but I'll answer.

Assuming 'our' and 'we' responds to the West generally and not to the US specifically, and broadening our view to Western occupation of Muslim areas...

France -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Chad

Britain -- Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States, Oman, South Yemen, the Muslim states in post-Moghul India, the Malay sultanates, Sudan, British Somalia

Italy -- Libya, Italian Somalia

Netherlands -- Indonesian sultanates

Spain -- The Muslims would include Spain itself, Spanish Sahara and Spanish Morocco

Put another way, the only Islamic states that were not turned into colonies by the West were Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. And they were very much on the defensive. My point is that, to many Muslim eyes, they are the innocent victims and we are the repeated serial aggressors.

Many of them see that aggression continuing today, in new subtle ways like the internet, pop culture and music videos, things that seek to lead their youth into depravity and ultimately to corrupt their culture.

I think that many Muslims are tremendously embarassed that the West could dominate them so effortlessly. They compare their weakness in modern times with their strength in the early Islamic centuries, and conclude that they have grown corrupt.

Some of them seek to emulate the West, modernizing for all they are worth. The 'Young Turks' and Ataturk transformed the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey on that impetus. The Arab Socialists that were so influential in the 1960's are more anti-Western examples of modernist reformers. Many looked to Marxism as a way to get all the goodies of industrial civilization while rejecting their Western origin. Saddam and his Baathists in Iraq were representatives of this kind of anti-Western modernism. The Baathists in Syria still are.

Others seek to distance themselves from everything we stand for, reforming Islam using its own internal resources. So they look to an idealized early Muslim community, sweeping across the world fired by man's faith and by God's favor. So they call for the reimposition of divinely revealed Islamic Law, because it indicates God's will for man and man's submission to God, because it disciplines their corrupt population enticed by dissolute Western lifestyles, and because it sets their civilization on a new course from which compromise with the West becomes more difficult.

I think that this medieval-revival mode is currently very popular among the more alienated and disaffected elements in many Islamic countries. It entices young Muslims like the the new left did French radicals in 1968. And while the number of individuals willing to commit themselves to violent jihad (and even to blowing themselves up as an expression of their faith and dedication) is probably relatively small, I expect that they do get the admiration of many armchair Islamic intellectuals, just as many Western intellectuals affected trendy Marxism.

Bottom line, this surge of Islamic militancy is only one single facet within Islam. I think that it's one that we have had a hand in creating in reaction to our perceived arrogance. It's a reaction that's currently popular among more disaffected and dissatisfied Muslim circles. And because it seeks to strike at us, to hurt us and ultimately to destroy us, it's one that we pay great attention to.

I'm sure that the Islamic militants would love it if we treated them as if they represented all of Islam and then struck at the entire Islamic community as if it were the enemy. That, people like Osama bin Ladin fervently hope, would expose the untenable position of the Islamic modernizers and cultural compromisers, and drive all of Islamic civilization into the fundamentalist camp.

 

Very correct. For a long period of time the Muslim world lead the rest of the world in science and humanities, especially literature.

 

Interesting points mentioned by BillDayson. Alot of the emotional baggage brought along by previous "cantankerous" elderly stateman of the faith so called mentioned and centred upon in this thread, was indeed fuelled by his hatred of the colonist by imperial Western country. So much so that votes for him were garnered by using this line of argument. Indeed, many undergraduates that left for the West were often placed under strict observation when they were abroad or when they returned for any signs of pro-Westernisation. There was so much mistrust that graduates from the West unless politically connected with the ruling elite, were reprogrammed to think of the faith. The constitution was also aligned with the faith and minority groups observed the shrinkage of their own beliefs and places of worship. Hope is that minority groups are not persecuted because of their faith and the answer lies in how much give and take each community is willing to put up with to live in harmony without sacrificing identity. Problem is when the elite of the faith enjoy the excesses that comes with the privilege and abuse is rampant and the legal instruments are challenged. Corruption is a major obstacle at all levels. Monetary gains is of great importance and there is almost a love hate relationship with the Western civilisation. Love because they see the wonderous creations and the beautiful homes in the West and hate because they seem to be left behind and there is the question of the divisions and the creation of a state in the middle of West Asia that is of conflicting interest.

Both great religions indeed has encouraged monopoly over the subjugated people of that colony. The scars have not healed and remains imprinted in the older generation who inturn try to influence the youth. If the youth are disenfranchised then they are easily swayed by extremism and by politicians bent on using them for their own gains.

 

Re: Hmmmmm....

I see that Bill Dayson answered you much more adequately than my poor skills possibly could have. However, I completely agree with his answer in every aspect.

The one comment I will make is the fact that you have to even ask the question points to the paucity of education in this country regarding history. For you to only know that "a couple of hundred troops in Saudi Arabia" is the sum total of the West's colonization of Muslim countries over the past two centuries is appalling and a real indictment of the technical education that so many of our students are receiving these days in "universities".

These are things you should have known by the time you were a Sophomore in High School, not asking now as a graduate student on a discussion board.

No offense - just an observation of the lack of any real education beyond technical in so many of our "graduates" these days.... No wonder we have problems interacting with the rest of the world!

 

Re: Hmmmmm....

I see that Bill Dayson answered you much more adequately than my poor skills possibly could have. However, I completely agree with his answer in every aspect. Memories in the Middle East are MUCH longer than US memories, and include a history of political and military domination (since the 1600s anyway) by the expanding West, and therefore by default its religion, Christianity.

The one comment I will make is the fact that you seem ignorant of this historical perspective points to the failure of education, specifically technical education, in this country. For you to only know that "a couple of hundred troops in Saudi Arabia" is the sum total of the West's colonization of Muslim countries over the past two centuries is appalling and a real indictment of the engineering/technical education track that so many of our students are receiving these days in "universities".

These are things you should have known by the time you were a Sophomore in High School, not asking now as a graduate student on a discussion board regardless of your interests or background. One can only assume that many Bush supporters are equally ignorant, including cabinet level appointees.

No offense intended - just an observation. I'm sure you are a great DBA and techie - just like the ones I manage who also show little or no real interest in or understanding of the world around them beyond the bits and bytes they control from their workstations.

 

You seem pretty condescending, Carl, especially when one considers your first post in this thread.

How did you achieve such wisdom in a period of only three weeks?

 

Fast learner? LOL