[GCFL-discuss]Hijacking books

[gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net]

Before I say anything else, I want to state that anything in your missive
that I don't address explicitly, I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with.
I do not have the time, the scholarship or the eloquence to do you justice.
I do want to correct one misunderstanding.

I did not mean to imply that Islam has a monpoly on these matters.  What I
meant to say was that from its very inception, conversion by conquest was
part of the religion.  Who better to define what Islam stands for than
Mohammed himself?  So, how can you call his imitators "hijackers"?

greenBubble


Subject: Re: [GCFL-discuss]Hijacking books


greenBubble, you are being selective in your reference to history. I
infer that you are less than pleased with Islam because, as it happened,
a majority of the people living in what the Romans called Palestine, at
the time significant numbers of Jewish people began to return, were
Muslim, and, as the two groups were baited to fight each other, which
they still do, other Muslims in other parts of the world have given their
sympathy to one side. Your skepticism is only natural.

What most Muslims, most Jews, and most Christians conveniently forget, is
that prior to the last century, for almost 1000 years, the safest place
in the world for Jews to live was in the Islamic Caliphates, and some
(though not all) of their weaker and less cultured successors. In Europe,
Jews were penned up in ghettos (for those who don't know, that is the
original meaning of the word, not until after World War II was "ghetto"
applied to the parts of American cities where Americans of known African
descent were more or less required to live before open housing laws and
other measures). In Europe, Jews were barred from most professions and
trades (which is how they got a reputation for money-lending, which
Christians were not allowed to do, but Christian monarchs needed done by
someone). In Europe, Jews were periodically murdered, raped, driven out
of the country wholesale, or young men from the university would go out
with pliers to find an old Jewish man and pull his teeth out as an
afternoon's recreation.

[greenBubble, I am not reciting this out of any assumption it is not
familiar to you -- but I need to contrast it with my next reference, and
others in the group may be less familiar]

In Islamic lands, particularly under the Caliphate, Jews paid a small
tax, as did Christians and all other non-Muslims. They were allowed to
practice any profession or trade, were respected members of the
community, and only in a few of the later and more fanatical kingdoms,
like the Almoraves, were they under pressure to convert. Maimonides made
his mark in medicine under the Ummayad Caliphate of Cordoba.

So either hostility between Jews and Muslims, or friendship between Jews
and Christians, is a very new event in history. It wasn't Islam that
chased most Jewish people out of Israel, it was the Emperor Trajan, and
later the gentile Christians who became arrogant even toward Jewish
Christians, much less Jews who remained within the original covenant.
(See "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Chapter 13 -- even the
abridged versions, which is all I've had time to read, are very
informative).

It is only natural that Islam spread first through military conquest,
because it was first preached to a collection of tribes who practiced
warfare as a form of recreation, mostly on each other. Once united by a
faith that denied them warfare with other converts, they naturally made
war on all who were not of the new faith. But, unlike many Christian
conquests, they did not kill all those who declined to convert, they
simply taxed them and left them alone. Many Jews served in the government
of the Caliphs in high positions, as they had in Persia, and even
Babylon. The Byzantine Empire was in a period of corruption and decline,
which made the Caliphate a welcome relief to many of the peoples in the
middle east -- most of whom were not privileged to bear arms anyway, and
were going to be ruled by someone who was. The sheeple, as Layne
describes them, cheerfully converted to the winning side, and those who
had some reason not to, remained Christian or Jewish.

It is also natural that Judaism did not begin in a wave of conquest,
because God made his covenant with a weak tribe of nomads, often
dependent on their neighbors, or pagan relations, or Egypt. Likewise,
Christianity began among a people conquered by the Roman Empire, and
spread through other parts of the empire as the faith of subjects and
slaves. After Constantine, and in many forms afterward, Christianity
showed itself perfectly capable of inspiring genocide, rape, mass murder,
torture, slavery -- not because the Gospel was bad, but because those who
want to find a justification to conquest will find it wherever they look.

Jews have had fewer opportunities to inflict the same on their fellow
man, but there are Old Testament references to slaughtering all who were
not of the Twelve Tribes, and not a few who were, including innocent
wives and children. Some modern criticisms of Israel are really only the
product of the fact that, having a state to call their own, Jews in
leadership positions act very much like any other kind of human being
with some power in their hands.

Islam has had its pacifists, its military glories, its periods of
advanced science and culture, its periods of decadence, like every
religion in the world. If you hear a defeaning silence, I suspect Osama
bin Laden does too, because he hardly has a billion faithful soldiers
clamouring for him. He may have a few thousand. Well, since our infantile
president made his foolhardy plunge into Iraq, maybe a few tens of
thousands.

Originally it was not Islam that made war on Jewish settlements. It was
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the King of Iraq (later deposed and
murdered by those who were deposed and murdered by those who were deposed
and murdered by Hussein al-Takriti), the King of Egypt (later deposed and
exiled by Gamel Abdel Nasser) and the King of Jordan (later assassinated
and succeeded by his son, Hussein). It was a convenient foil for
political power struggles -- when the movie Exodus shows Arab villages
who had no desire at all to make war against the Jews, it was not made up
by Hollywood.

I've alread made this a long story, so I can't say I'm going to make it
short. But whenever religion is used as a weapon of politics, it profanes
whatever faith is cited as justification, whether the politician is Osama
bin Laden, Meir Kahane, or Pat Robertson. In no case does it commit all
those faithful to that religion to support of the demagogues who wrap
themselves up in it.

Siarlys


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