Gee, why are you backpedaling? That communication does not necessarily lead to mutual respect could be demonstrated in any number of ways, and it was hardly “the point you raised.” It was more an aside to rationalize your more direct claim of which my response was hardly a caricature:
Neither The Weird One (nor you) made any reference to new technologies for communication, so I am not sure why you are introdcing one more red herring. I would tend to agree that communication does not guarantee more tolerance, but it is certainly a better effort than open hostility. On the other hand, if you are going to whine about caricatures, you might want to clean up that utter rubbish you posted as some sort of absolute declaration of how Muslims see other people. (I’ve looked a couple of times and found no references in your post to Wahabbism or other strains of Fundamentalist Islam, where you might, indeed, find that sort of belief. Attributing that sort of belief to all billion Muslims is just silly.)
You’re still shifting the talk to avoid admitting what you said. Your “analogy” did not rely on technology. Your question did not refer to it, at all. I missed the tech reference that was pretty much an aside in The Weird One’s post, but you ignored it completely to ask why communicating would lead to better relations, then went on to make a big deal about how Muslims could only see everyone else as the enemy.
Your suspicion is correct, but I’m not asking or expecting Muslims to adopt my beliefs or let me teach my beliefs to their children or preach to them at work. I’m asking them to learn to tolerate me holding my beliefs, and in fact the vast majority of them already do. I suspect that as time goes by and we learn more about each other, ancient animosities will cool, we’ll both become more tolerant of each other, and Muslims will see that, unlike NAMBLA or the KKK, we’re not organized for the express purpose of harming people we don’t like (or like too much).
Anyway, it’s a bit of a backwards analogy, isn’t it? I mean, aren’t the Ku Klux Klan more analogous to Islamic extremism then they are to modern Western society? And as society has become more integrated, black and white people have learned to deal with each other, racism has finally started to fade and the KKK has been pushed to the far fringes of society.
There are LOTS of people to whom my beliefs and practices are anathema – I’m a socialist atheist kinky bisexual, for Chrissakes. There’s a big difference between hating what someone believes and how they live, and actively seeking to harm them or force them to act they way you think they should. I’m not seeking an end to the former, only the latter.
Modern Muslim–Christian/Middle-East–Western relations began with the Crusades, which is not exactly the best start to a congenial relationship. More recently, Western countries have colonized Middle-Eastern Muslim countries, sent in Christian missionaries to convert them, and fought local powers and each other over Middle-Eastern oil. It’s not particularly surprising that relationships are less than stellar. (This book is a long read, but gives a very good history of U.S.-Middle East relations.)
I’m very concerned about Muslim tolerance towards other Muslims, particularly the treatment of women and homosexuals, but it’s a lot harder to change deep-seated religious/cultural attitudes and beliefs, particularly from outside of that religion/culture.
Muslim/Christian relations began with the Islamic conquest of the Christian cultures of the Mid-East, North Africa, and Spain, and continued through the ongoing Islamic expansion and Christian Crusades/Reconquista periods. Modern Muslim–Christian/Middle-East–Western relations began with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1.
I do not see why the method used for killing people is important rather than the fact of the killing itself. And if there is any group of people who kill and justify killing and violence it is Americans. They love violence as a means to resolve conflicts. America is pretty much alone among civilized nations in using the death penalty. The fact that they do not behead people is quite irrelevant. Dead is dead.
America as a country is quite willing to invade foreign nations and kill large quantities of people for the purpose of imposing its own view of how things should be done. This practice is supported by about 50% of Americans which I would say is a large number. I do not know what percentage of Muslims supports violence but I know about 50% of Americans support violence as a tool to extend their points of view in the world and that seems pretty high to me. The fact that Americans use high tech bombs rather than crude knifes to carry out their killings does not in any way make it better for me. Again, dead is dead.
So give me a break with the theme that Muslims are violent people. Americans are in no position to be calling other peoples violent.
And when someone was killed by a lethal injection or from a high-tech bomb fired from a drone or a missile fired from a high-tech missile fired from a high-tech ship or airplane you can rest assured most of the time the killer was American and acting for the American government and his actions were supported by about half the American people.
Yup. When America could not get its way with the UN it just resorted to invading Iraq which resulted in untold deaths and destruction. That’s American culture for you.
Yeah, most Americans don’t kill or support killing other people but a very large percentage do and they are pretty savage if you ask me.
The treatment of us infidels is spelled out in the Koran. Either you convert to Islam, or they tax the shit out of you. Historically, this has generally been accompanied by discrimination of all types, in employment, in choice of profession, in government, across the board.
Of course, taxing the shit out of poor people and discriminating against them unless they convert to Islam is perfectly fine in Tomndebbland, because they’re not forcibly converting anyone …
I must say, Tomndebb, that your incessant insistence that everything is fine in this the best of all possible Islamic worlds is getting … well, it’s getting to be an odd combination of hilariously funny and terribly sickening. That is to say, reading your words, I want to laugh, but I’m afraid I’ll puke.
If some nation said “OK, we’re introducing the Muslim Tax, every Muslim has to either pay an additional 25% per year in taxes and be banned from working in most professions or convert to Christianity”, you would be leading the charge to say this is terribly unfair.
But when it’s done to Christians, you just say well, nobody is forcibly converting them to Islam, so it’s perfectly fine.
So oddly, yes, in your failed attempt at satire you are actually correct.* “The fact that Muslims held most of the Iberian peninsula for over 600 years and Greece for over 300 years without forcibly converting or murdering the Christians in those places”* does in fact mean nothing. During that time Christians and Jews were tortured, massacred, enslaved, repressed, deported, and harassed by the Islamic Rulers. Maimonides saw it up close and personal, and he said the Muslim persecution was the worst he knew of … but no, Tomndebb says all that never happened. Maimonides would recognize you for what you are: a dhimmi who doesn’t recognize his own chains, a craven apologist for Islam. I hate to break it to you, and I realize you may not be able to see it from up in your tower d’ivoire, but here in the real world, imposing punitive taxes and punitive discrimination unless someone converts to Islam is forcible conversion.
Right, it was a golden age … that’s why Maimonides had to flee from Muslim Spain, saying:
Knock the golden scales from your eyes and you might see what Maimonides not only saw, but lived through. Some of the Muslims might have looked good compared to the Christians of the time … but looking good compared to Christians has never been very hard, Christians persecuted, enslaved, and killed Jews for millennia.
Nice job of mixing slight errors of ommission and commision in your quotes, intention, (with a noticeble avoidance of dates).
Maimonides grew up in a Spain that had been under Muslim rule for 400 years, but he had the misfortune to be born just as a particulr band of conquerors invaded in a typical empire building conquest common to humanity through the ages. The Muslims among whom he grew up were Moors and his condemnation is launched against Almohades Arabs (as the recent band of conquerors happened to be). Note, however, that when he fled Iberia, he went first to Palestine and later to Egypt–Muslim lands. His oft-quoted condemnation of the Arabs was not actually written against the Muslims, per se, but against the Arabs who harried him in Iberia and the Arabs of Yemen who were persecuting the Yemeni Jews to whom he was writing. This is not to claim that Maimonides looked kindly on either the Muslims or Christians who harrassed Jews, but he still chose to live among Muslims and he condemned Arabs, not Muslims, in his letter.
In attempting to rebut carnivorousplant, it is interesting that you (mis)use the words of man born as that age ended.
This is great. I say that people were in fact murdered and forced to convert in Spain.
You ignore that issue entirely, too tough for you, you want to talk about dates and whether Arabs are Muslims or not and when Maimonides lived … an excellent method for avoiding the issue, Tomndebb. You’ve done a very nice job of mixing slight errors of omission and commission (please note the spelling for your future use, you misspelled not one word but both) to try to make everyone forget that you naively think no one was murdered for their religion or forced to convert in Islamic Spain or Greece …
Returning to the other issue, as you point out, Maimonides lived after what was called the “Golden Age”. This “Golden Age” stopped in the 11th century … so why is the 12th century not part of the “Golden Age”? Not to put it too bluntly, because it wasn’t golden, it was ugly. Things got hard. A new bunch of Muslims came in, that were not anywhere near as nice as the previous bunch … and that was the end of the Golden Age.
So what? That just proves my point, that it was by no means sweetness and light for the 600 years of Muslim rule … which is what I said to start off this whole nonsense. You want to paint the Muslim rule of Spain as some kind of wonderful time, with benevolent rulers who didn’t murder anyone or force anyone to convert … but it wasn’t a wonderful time. Your claim about Muslim Spain just as childishly foolish as your claim that no Christians were murdered or forced to convert in Muslim Greece …
Eleven Patriarchs murdered, a hundred bishops, thousands of priests, who knows how many of the laity … you sure you still want to claim nobody was murdered or forced to convert in Muslim Greece? Spain is no better. Kenneth Wolf wrote a whole book on “Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain” … I’m sure you’ll be able to explain how there were enough Xtian martyrs to write a book about when you claim nobody was murdered for their faith … here’s a typical citation:
Heck, let’s have a 3-for-1 sale, here’s another:
and the third:
I could go on, but I’m sure that everyone but you has gotten the point by now. Nobody was murdered because of their religion … right …
Finally, let me repeat my earlier quotation:
I post this because you obviously missed the part about “massacre, captivity, and forced conversion”. Yes, you are right, this was not during the Golden Age. So what? It was in Spain during the 600 years when you claim there were no murders or forced conversion.
I’m sure you’ll be along shortly to hand-wave away the hundreds of Greek and Spanish Christian martyrs and forced conversions … I await your next theatrical production with bated breath.
Your attempts to make it appear that Islam is the source of all evil is rather less accurate than my point that different peoples at different times have committed evil, but that often the “good guys” were Muslims and sometimes the “bad guys” were Muslims, despite your claims that islam can only produce evil. In the last 200 years of the Muslim presence in Iberia, there was far less peace than in the first four hundred years, although the amount of harrassment varied by location and the disposition of the ruler. So how do you explain the four hundred years of peace that preceded the Almohad invasion, (and the Christian reconquista and all the savagery that those conflicts engendered), along with the periods of intermittent peace that still happeed during those 200 years? Since Islam can only be violent, how did the Golden Age ever occur?
And so will you, I hope … and so will the others, I hope. It’s called a discussion. Snide comments don’t help, however.
Tomndebb, a simple "I was wrong when I said “The fact that Muslims held most of the Iberian peninsula for over 600 years and Greece for over 300 years without forcibly converting or murdering the Christians in those places means nothing …” would be quite sufficient for a start. They did murder and forcibly convert Christians. That is what we were discussing, not whether Islam is evil.
You are the one who is bringing “evil” into the discussion. I defy you to find one place on the boards where I have said Islam is evil. It is a word I very, very, very rarely use, because it is so subjective and means such different things to different people.
Your whole rap about me and Islam and “evil” is a straw man. Please quote what I said about Islam that you object to. Here’s an example you can quote me on if you wish.
*Islam is a violent and cruel and barbaric religion. *
Any religion that not only condones but actually commands its followers to publicly stone women to death in the 21st century is a violent and cruel and barbaric religion in my books.
If you have a problem with that, tell me where I’m wrong there. Deal with that, don’t go on about “evil”, I don’t even know what that is.
That, however, is the religion, not the people. And I am very clear on the difference.
At various times in history the people following Islam have have done both amazingly wonderful things and unimaginably cruel things, as have the people following every religion I know of. You are right that there was a golden age in Spain for Jews compared to the surrounding countries, and I was wrong to say that what Maimonides wrote contradicted that. And yes, there have been times in history when the Islamic world was in advance of its neighbors, occasionally well in advance.
That, however, is the people, not the religion.
But that was then and this is now. All of that stoning and beheading and chopping off hands and feet and heads is soooo sixteenth century … doing that now is rightly seen as violent and cruel and barbaric. And it follows wherever Sharia Law goes … it is part and parcel of the religion.
While the Koran was being collected and collated from bits of paper and pieces of bark, some verses were not allowed into the Koran. The story goes that among the ones excluded were the “satanic verses” … the ones that got Salman Rushdie a death sentence for messing with. Instead of being inspired by the angel who gave the Koran to Muhammed, they were inspired by He Who Must Not Be Named. They were banished from paradise, they were thrown out of the Koran.
My fervent hope is that Islam go through a Reformation, that it abjures the violent and the cruel and the barbaric verses and parts of Islam and that it cleaves to the gentle and supportive and peaceful parts of the Koran. In the process, my hope would be that like before, a whole bunch of other verses of the Koran and the Hadiths would get repudiated and thrown out for being truly satanic.
So no, Tomndebb. I don’t hate Islam. I don’t hate Muslims. I don’t think that either one is evil. I wish no harm on Muslims, quite the opposite. My wish for Islam is reformation, not retribution.
