Well, let’s not go too far in the other direction. “Islam” wasn’t uniform even then and Song China was pretty awesome too, at that time. ‘Islamic Golden Age’ isn’t a much more accurate view of things than “Islam converting people by the sword.”
And don’t hate on Genghis! You know, you unite your tribe, another tribe feels threatened and takes you on, then nearby cities get uppity so you have to take them out; before you know it you’re leading an empire, and what’s a guy to do? And to do everything he did only to be played by John Wayne? He’s suffered enough.
Aside: I remember reading an unintentionally hilarious ‘History of the World’ book from the very early 20th century written by a Scot, and the only mention of Genghis Khan went something like: “About that murderous barbarian called Genghis Khan, such an unsavory beast does not deserve any further mention in my book.”
I will let Tamerlane defend his namesake, if he is of a mind to
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I’m not a Christian, so blind love is not in my purview. Though the pacifist, humanist teachings of Jesus are without a doubt of greater value to the world than the divisive, brutal, and Marsian ideas of the prophet Mohammed.
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Well, if you decide to start a pit thread on Muhammad, we can do that, but let’s be creative with it. Everyone always goes after the low-hanging fruit. No one talks about his hatred of geckos, or his awkward encounters with effeminate guys, or his inexplicable friendship with creepy Umar.
Muslim immigrants in both France & Britten are asking / demanding / having real spirited gatherings with the police about it.
They want to only have Sharia law for them and not have to be compliant with the French & British law. Self governing, their own little state or whatever. Or at least that is what several different news sources have been saying.
Are these the radicals only? I have no way of knowing myself.
Why do they think they should have this?
IMO, the religious or cultural causes are moot. They can see the world with the internet just as well as anybody else.
Good people of any kind are not the problem.
All the good people of the world do not have the will to stop the bad anymore.
Be headings, using children as shields, going to other countries and changing government by force, aiding this group against that group and then the ‘this’ group takes what they were given and use it against the original group.
Other groups are not directly affected so they just watch.
Yesterday is over.
So I ask all peaceful Muslims, should the world just go home and let the Middle East do its thing? No interference from anybody but those of the Middle East?
Are you such pacifist that you will let all those countries fall where they may if all the interlopers went home?
I guess I need to add India also.
I am doing all I can to change the parts of my government that I think are wrong.
What are the Muslims willing to do for their countries? Oh, you are an American now? Did you not give up your Jordan or where ever citizenship?
IMO, there is no easy answer but hanging what to day on what happened in the 18th century is silly.
News sources? Faux News? World News Daily? Is this one more case of a dozen nutcases wanting something and a slanted news source falsely portraying it as a “movement”?
The percentage of “fundamentalist Muslims” who are among the large number of immigrants is minuscule.
If one is discussing an immigrant group, relying on references to outliers is silly. When the “youth riots” in France were occurring several years ago we already demonstrated the claim that they had anything to do with Islam, much less radical Islam, was fiction.
Looking at high immigration European nations, we find a number of interesting attitude polls.
One study found that 73% of Muslim immigrants with voting rights had participated in national elections, only a bit lower than the 81% of the general population. Muslim women voted at the same rate as Muslim men. 50% of Muslims were involved in “mixed organizations rather than organizations based on their own ethnicity or religion.” Muslims in Europe: A Report on 11 EU Cities (New York: Open Society Institute, 2009)
62% of French Muslims claim that democracy is doing well in France, as opposed to only 58% of the general population. In the same poll, Muslims gave a 95% overall favorable rating to France and French institutions.
Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj, Francais comme les autres? Enquete sur les citoyen d’origine maghrebine, africaine et turque (Presses de Sciences Po, 2005)
Following the headscarf bans in schools, a U.S. State Department survey found that “large majorities of Muslims in France voice confidence in the country’s government, feel at least partly French, and support integrating into French society.” French Muslims Favor Integration into French Society (Washington, DC: Department of State, Office of Research, Opinion Analysis M-58-05, 2005).
A poll from 2005 found that around 80% of Muslims were “comfortable with people of different religions dating or marrying” while 59% would not object to their daughter marrying a non-Muslim. (This is born out in the fact that 25% of French Muslim women have married non-Muslim men.)
Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Changes in Contemporary Fance (Brookings Institution Pres, 2006), 43.
60% of French Muslims claim to have French friends and 45% to have Jewish friends.
A separate survey found that French Muslims felt comfortable with other French people at a rate of 85%, but felt comfortable with other Muslims at a rate of only 71% or with others of their immigrant nations at a rate of 77%. When the survey was narrowed to Muslims who self-identified as being Muslim before being French, the 85% figure jumped to 90%. (Among the French general population, this feeling of closeness for French people was only 84%.)
Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj, Francais comme les autres? Enquete sur les citoyen d’origine maghrebine, africaine et turque (Presses de Sciences Po, 2005)
In 2009, 77% of British Muslims identified “extremely strongly” or “very strongly” with Britain as their homeland, (vs only 50% of Britons in the general population). While lower, the numbers for French and German Muslims were 52% and 40%. The Gallup Coexist Index 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations, 21 - 24.
Jacob Vigdor created an “assimilation index” that was based, not on attitudes, but on participation. He measured male and female employment, home ownership, and naturalization. Canada and the U.S. demonstrated very high rates of “assimilation” on his scale with rates of 77% and 60%. Most European countries rated much lower–Spain was at 38%, for example. However, when he looked behind his numbers, he did not find that the Muslim immigrants were refusing to buy homes or become naturalized, but that their general poverty and national restrictions on ownership precluded home ownership and high barrier laws prevented naturalization.
Jacob L. Vigdor, Comparing Immigrant Assimilation in North America and Europe (New York: Center for State and Local Leadership, May 2011)
Much has been made of the minority of Muslims who “support violence.” In fact, in the U.S. 7% of Muslims reported that violence against civilian targets is “sometimes justified” while another 1% say it is “often justified.” Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism
Of course, when similar questions were asked of the general American population, 24% said that bomb attacks aimed at civilians are “often or sometimes justified” while another 6% said they were “completely justified.”
John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think New York: Gallup Press, 2008), 95.
In a similar poll in Europe, the question [are] “attacks on civilians morally justified?” received affirmative responses of 1%, 1%, and 3% among the general populations of France, Germany, and Britain, but 2%, 0.5%, and 2% among the Muslim populations of the same countries. The Gallup Coexist Index 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations, 40 - 41.
The “elephant in the room” is not fanatical Fundamentalist Islam, it is the willingness of people to make bad assumptions about other people without considering evidence–or even in the face of evidence as we saw during the French youth riots. In fact, I would venture that there is no “elephant in the room” in the sense of a large, smelly, messy, potentially dangerous beast about which no one dare speak. Rather, there appears to be a mouse in the room about which all sorts of people are willing to talk at length while they and others leap on chairs to avoid it.
Given the number of times that Islam bashers have tried to claim that Islam has historically always been barbarous and violent, it may be expected that people responding to those claims will point out the errors in them.
Neither the Golden Age nor the initial wars of Mohammed have a direct bearing on today’s events, of course, but pointing out how lots of different cultures have waxed and waned in violence and cruelty puts current unrest in a context that should provide a cautionary reflection on claims that any culture is led by barbarism.
Various news sources that treat the opinions of tiny groups as though they were representative of an entire people are a problem today.
Google turned up the Satanic Church’s Nine Satanic Statements and the Church of England’s Nine Commandments of Twitter.
Neither of which makes any damn sense, so I assumed you made some inane reference to Christianity and how I am not following one of its Ten Commandments.
He’s saying that you’re lying about Islam, and seem to think that it’s ok to, so that that’s a commandment you don’t think you should have to follow. That’s where he was going with it.
Psst, that Tamerlane cat ? Muslim ;). Kind of undermines your otherwise valid point.
Fact is, without the Muslim dynasts you wouldn’t know what an Aristotle or a Socrates is or what it eats when it’s at home. They’re the ones who preserved and built upon classical knowledge & culture while the wheels of the Western Roman Empire were flying off into space.
They’re also the ones who were a beacon of religious tolerance while the Latins were busy blasting Constantinople all to shit, burning the Cathars or finding new and interesting applications of torque and kinetic force on the human anatomy (see fig.1 : a recanting Jew with his legs broken in 67 places and his right hand twisted 633 degrees, an improvement over the previous record).
What if Pew did a survey that found that 15% of all whites in the whole world supported said lynching? Because that would be a fairer comparison. Forget Kazakhstan. Take Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, which account for 38% of the world’s Muslims. Pew finds that 40% of the Muslims in those countries support making Sharia the law of the land AND death for apostasy/stoning for adultery. So that’s at least 15% of the world total, ignoring all other countries like Jordan etc. I don’t know why so many in this thread want to hand wave that away.
See, that’s part of the communication disconnect here. I don’t see anyone “hand waving” anything away. I see a lot of people who argue that the opinions of a minority of Muslims do not justify vilification of Islam as a whole.
You’ve already been called on the validity of that survey in this very thread. Post #77. Care to respond this time around ? Or will you just be back when *this *post is no longer on the last page of the thread and reiterate ?
I did respond. Someone said her friends in Indonesia didn’t believe the findings and called it stupid. I said that was a pretty unconvincing refutation of the survey. I asked for a more substantial rebuttal and never received it.
I mean, if you asked every Christian in the world “Do you feel that killing gays is justified in some cases ? In every case ?” or the like, I’m fairly confident you’d wind up with a 15-20% “Sure, why not ?” response too.
That’s because “the entire world” includes a lot of scary fucking backwards places, and “every Christian in the world” includes a lot of crazy people, a lot of mindlessly bloodthirsty people, a lot of pig ignorant people and a lot of all-of-this-applies people too.
As noted above, that one snuck right past me. My bad.
This! At its height, the Islamic Caliphate was one of the best places on earth. It’s no coincidence that so many of our terms in chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy are derived from the Arabic language. They were uncovering the secrets of the cosmos while we were still trying to figure out how to make water flow downhill.
