Posted on 09/15/2012 2:24:20 PM PDT by neverdem
Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.
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In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored — poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day.
If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book “What Went Wrong?” The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects of others...
--snip--
President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The standard line. Yawn!
It leaves out the fact that the brief tolerant periods of Islam, like the middle of the Islamic occupation of what had been the kingdom of the Visigoths, were the exceptions and coincided with periods when the Caliphs or other Muslim princes were pragmatic and not particularly pious Muslims, and that the “Golden Age” of Andalusia was destroyed not by the Reconquista, but by the Almohad Caliphate whose religious fervor revived vigorous persecution of Christians and Jews, and from whom the Western Europeans learned the idea of making heresy a capital crime — before that in both East and West Christians followed the Greek fathers who wrote urgently against the execution of heretics.
And, just as the Almohads killed off Islamic tolerance, the universal Muslim rejection of the Islamic Aristotelianism of Avicenna and Averroes in favor of the occasionalism of Ghazali — the piously Muslim ontological position that every event happens by the direct will of Allah — killed of Islamic science.
Normally I defer to the likes of Mr. Ajami but his argument here is faulty. He is clearly on target with his descriptions of Arabs and their self inflicted inferiority but Arabs representonly 30% of Muslims yet the culturally immature behaviors are not limited to Arabs but are found thoughout the Muslim world. Only the religion can be the reason for these behaviors.
Their society was dependent upon a never-ending supply of loot, and slaves who knew how to run a civilization. When they finally ran out of places to loot, they went into decline, until they had a new source of unearned wealth: oil.
They’re not offended; they’re opportunists. Islam is a war plan.
What concept is more modern than the normality of homosexuality? Yet they are as intolerant as Moslems, just less numerous. And just as intolerant to any effort at "conversion."
They imported the concept of zero from India, but they invented the calculus, which originally took the form of a contemplation of divine infinity.
Really? Where? I didn't notice any.
The enthusiasm for effacing and looting/melting/selling the patrimony of antiquity is a Wahhabist tic. That sort of vandalism and mass-murder, which was rampant in southwestern Asia, was and is almost unheard of in Malaya and the East Indies. Only recently with the establishment of Saudi madrassas has that kind of behavior appeared among SE Asian Musselmen -- as one local mufti of the old tradition in the Comoros Islands was quick to point out to PBS and Frontline a few years ago.
The stupas and wats and temples of Buddhist medieval Indonesia and Malaysia are largely undisturbed, and some of them are still occupied and tended by Buddhist monks.
A very wise observation I've heard nowhere else. They've been influenced by us so much that they have the freedom to be outraged by the freedom to be outraged.
Because they are too stupid!!!
Yep, I’ll buy that...
What amazes me is that we actually asked for permission to send 50 marines into the Sudanese capitol to our own embassy, qand the government there said NO!...
What I don’t get is why did we even ask...And then not send them in anyway...What do they we think they’ll could do about it???
I believe we should expell every single delegation from our country, that is attacking our facilities within their own borders...And pull every penny of aid to the same...
I bet some of that nonsense will be quelled, if not stopp pretty damn quick...
But then again, I am not a diplomat, so how could I know or understand how it “really” works, I suppose.../sarc
Your welcome...
Yer here all week, right???
;-)
Outside of Europe, polygamy was the rule, until modernizing natives decided to ape European customs wholesale. The problem with Islam has nothing to do with social mores and everything to do with Muhammad's statement to his followers that the most sacred form of Muslim religious worship is to make war on the infidel.
Thanks for the ping!
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