I believe that the title of the thread speaks for itself. Thinking on a large scale, I believe that Islamic civilization is one of the more peaceful of Earth’s major civilzations. There has been no Muslim invasion of a western country since the days of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Muslims have endured quite a lot of violence from western civilzation:
During WWI, the Allies made an agreement with Arab forces. The Arab world would be granted independence in exchange for rebelling against the Ottoman Empire. After the end of the war, the British and French betrayed the Arabs and seized colonies in the Middle East.
The Britsh took a region, Palestine, that had been inhabited by Arabs for over a thousand years and declared that they would form a new country there. The native population was forced off the best land. Several times Palestine was divided between Jewish settlers and Muslims natives. In each case, the Jewish settlers broke the agreement and took more of the land that they had previously not claimed.
The Soviet Union, which included Muslim areas that had been conquered by Russia in the 19th century, spent decades trying to reorganize those areas at gunpoint. Millions of people were killed or forcibly relocated. Almost all mosques were shut down by force.
In 1953 the British and American backed a military coup that brought General Zahedi to power against the will of the Iranian people. Contracts for Iranian oil were given to British and American companies, which broke their promise to share half their profits.
France, which had conquered Algeria in the late 19th century, repeatedly surpressed a movement for independence there, culminating in a bloody revolution during the late 1950’s and early 60’s.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the United States backed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with money, weapons, and intelligence, despite knowing full well that Saddam was murdering certain ethnic groups in Iraq.
For decades the United States has backed the tyrannical Saud monarchy in Saudi Arabia, even stationing troops in the country to defend against revolt. The Sauds have been routinely abusive to the people of Saudi Arabia; the United States has refused to make even a modest effort for human rights there.
In 2003 a coalition of western nations led by the United States launched an invasion of Iraq based on bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. The invasion launched a bloody civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to become refugees.
In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and occupied the country for ten years, killing millions of inhabitants and leaving the country with the worst standard of living of any place on Earth.
This list, which includes only some of the abuses that western nations, certainly proves that western civlization is a violent civilization that refuses to make peace with the Muslim world. What’s more remarkable, however, is that the Muslim world has endured all of this with very little attempt to fight back. While there have been Muslim terrorist groups from time to time, they’ve been sporadic and–with a single exception–small in scale. Overall the Muslim world has displayed remarkable restraint and an extraordinary willingness to react peacefully to a neverending barrage of invasion, subversion, and genocide by western forces.
Therefore claims that Islamic civilization is a violent civilization rest on two fallacies. One is dredging up ancient history, but that’s absurd. No one would accept judgement of any other civilization based on centuries-old events. The other is a consistent attempt to find Islamic violence in non-violent events. One instance is last year’s cartoon crisis. Many people cited the death toll from this without mentioning that the majority of the deaths were Muslims who died while protesting, killed by westerners or secular Arabs. In general, the Muslim world’s reaction was with protests, petitions, and boycotts. None of these are violent; in fact they’re all favored by western civilization. (Protected in the U.S. Constitution, for instance.)
Further, many attacks of Muslims for their supposed violence are remarkably hypocritical. For instance, some Americans point to Ahmadinejad’s demand that Israel be wiped off the Earth. Yet people all across America, from leaders and opinion makers down to Straight Dope Message Board users, constantly demand that America slaughter civilians in the Muslim world. George W. Bush, for instance, demanded the destruction of three countries in his 2002 State of the Union Address. Moreover, he actually carried through on one of those threats, while Ahamdinejad never did so with his threat.
So how about it? Where’s the evidence that Islamic civilization is a violent one?
You have some excellent points but I also believe their are a few factual errors.
Islamic Iraq attempted to invade Islamic Kuwait. Islamic Malaysia has caused some major grief for Brunei. Several Wars of aggression were launched and lost against Israel.
I am no expert on the Middle-East so I image there are many more in the last 60 years.
I would say that much of the failure to invade has been related to the Islamic world falling behind the Europeans in the ability to wage war.
Well, Israel is certainly a westernized country (liberal democracy, universal suffrage, capitalism) and its neighbors have gone after it several times since 1948. Their lack of military prowess is a function of less access to technology and less patience for the training of effective foot-soldiers.
With the possible exception of Turkey (and sometimes, not even them), all Muslim-dominated nations are one coup away from regime change, with all the chaos and slaughter that entails. Had I to engage in wild speculation and bull-shooting (an SDMB first!), I’d guess the critical flaw is the mix of a religion that demands by definition submission to authority, combined with a Bedouin-romanticized culture that rewards ruthlessness, with a strong mix of tribalism in which loyalties to one’s family/clan matter more than loyalty to a nation or a system of secular laws that at least make some effort at fairness.
That said, Islam can be a religion of peace. It just jumps to war rather rapidly, driven by flowery rhetoric about honour and whatnot.
Perhaps it’s the heritage thing. Christianity started out as a group of pacifist and powerless religious outlaws, worshipping underground, suffering occasional martyrdom, until they finally by very gradual stages converted a significant minority of the Roman Empire and won control of the state. Islam started with a process of conversion by the sword until Arabia was united, then burst forth on the world as a new conquering empire, and then a civil war over the succession broke out not long after Mohammed was dead, and the resulting Sunni-Shi’a split has continued to this day.
Also, despite Mohammed’s admonition that “Every Muslim is the brother of every other Muslim,” Muslims are not enjoined to turn the other cheek, and have never really repudiated the pre-Islamic Arab traditions of revenge and tribal vendettas.
So is the issue that of the violent cultures/tribal groups that embrace the religion and the religion is merely the scapegoat? In other words, they practice what they preach but only when it suits them?
They made similar arrangements with the Jews in the region (yeah, the Jews were there too)…as they did with both factions during WWII. What do you expect? They are Europeans after all. I fail to see the point however…is it your contention that only the Europeans violated treates and promisses? Have you ever studied the Ottoman Empire…out of curiosity?
Some rather blatant factual errors in this paragraph. Rather than point them out in the face of what will most likely be stuborn denial (I’ve been in a few of these thread in the past you see), how about you cite some sources for this, er, interesting interperetation of history?
Um…so? Again, a rather shallow view of history if you think the Russians (later the Soviets) were universally the bad guys in this play.
Blah blah blah. Anyway, most of your contentions are either one sided propaganda or at the least are very narrow viewpoints of a complex situation. WRT your OP’s main question…why is Islamic Civilization thought of in terms of violence, its pretty self evident…because they have a very violent and very visible minority. And they have carried through with the violence with a DELIBERATE association with their religion (again by said minority) into modern times. Such things tend to gain attention due to the press picking up on it…especially when you have supposed representatives of a given faith doing some of that violent ranting and egging on the faithful. You can see how people would jump to such conclusions, no?
Christianity can and has been just as violent and blood thirsty (arguably more so, though Islam has been no slouch in this regard if you actually look at its history)…however, by and large most of that blood thirstyness was left behind well before the last century…at least violent acts associated deliberately with Christianity. You don’t have, say, the Pope and his church hierarchy egging on the faithful to violent acts, or calling for the deaths of writers because they pissed off the faithful with what they wrote. You don’t have violent protests leading to multiple deaths over, say, some cartoons generally when the subject is Christianity.
Simple. Because humans, despite their fantasies of self as being intellectually sophisticated, still insist on extrapolating the exceptional actions of a small subgroup of people to every single member of the larger group.
True scholars would never accept such shoddy thinking as valid. There are over one billion Muslims on the planet. A very small portion of them are violent. People predisposed to prejudice can use that very small proportion as an exemplar that ‘proves’ that their belief that ‘them furrners ain’t no good’ and then gleefully enjoy their prejudices in the conviction that their negative opinions have been vindicated.
Some, of course, will, on pretext of being learned, trot out the (still proportionally insiginifican) examples of when ‘them furrners’ did actually wreak violence on others. But it’s all so much smoke and mirrors.
In fact, Jews inhabited Palestine before the Arabs, and Jewish lands were taken by force by the Romans. Shimon bar Kokhbah was a Jew who, in 132 AD, declared himself the Messiah, and raised a force to remove the Romans, which he did very successfully, destroying an entire Roman legion in the war. He then established a Jewish state, named Israel, which lasted for three years. The Romans sent twelve full legions and annihilated every Jewish person they could round up, lining every highway in and out of the region with crucified Jews, and scattering the remainder to the winds.
As a final insult, they decided to rename the place after the Jews’ greatest historical enemy, the Philistines. In Latin, this translates as “Terra Palestinia.”
So, like it or not, the Jews do indeed have a valid historical claim to the region as a homeland. They were driven out by force.
Anyone can cut off someone’s head. I mean, hell, the French probably have the world record for it. That doesn’t mean the whole civilization is violent. If you’re going to base it off of one incident, you could call any culture violent, except maybe Quakers.
That’s a pretty demeaning depiction by any standard. Doesn’t Christianity also demand that one submits to God? What makes Islam any different in this regard? And what do you mean when you say that the Cedouin culture “rewards ruthlessness?” Leaving aside the fact that only a small percentage of the World’s Muslims are Arabs (and thus “Bedouins”), are you saying that Muslims are inherently cruel?
I’m guessing because, let’s face it, with most groups, they only make the news when something bad or violent happens. We don’t hear about the good things, because they’re not considered exciting or interesting enough.
Nowadays, claiming that Islam is uniquely violent excuses political & military action. Especially when so many of those “violent” Muslims are sitting atop pools of oil.
Islamic civilization is violent, however one of the results of this violent society is that they have less stable governments and less advanced technology. Because of this they have fallen behind in terms of military strength, and it is only for this reason that they have either lost wars or not started them because they knew they would lose.
I fail to see the point however…is it your contention that only the Europeans violated treates and promisses? Have you ever studied the Ottoman Empire…out of curiosity?