Posted on 09/18/2001 8:13:31 PM PDT by Petronski
You're joking right? I'm sure the Catholic Encyclopedia's view of Islam is as objective and balanced as it's view of Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII. Or the Albigensians or the Monophysites.
Again, I recommend you read the Qu'ran and form your own opinions. A Muslim evaluation
will be as biased (in the other direction) as the Catholic encyclopedia.
How nice to have a modern perspective.
This website was a Yahoo! daily pick.
Re-read post #2. Read and heed.
Thus saith this old man.
Quite the opposite.
According to the Qu'ran, Allah is the creator of the world and he alone has complete and direct knowledge of the reality of man and of the world. Only he can guide man through the complicated course of life and instruct him regarding good and evil. Since Allah alone is the creator and the master he has exclusive authority over the universe and man.
It is an act of blasphemy for man to become independent or claim authority over other men. His law has the status of the supreme law. Man can legislate subjects to Allah's supreme law, however.
Now - have the church-states of Islam followed what the Qu'ran says regarding this? Hell no. Not any more than the church-states of Europe followed the Bible.
I'll say a prayer for your conversion ;)
At-Taubah 9:30
And the Jews say: 'Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allâh, and the Christians say: Messiah is the son of Allâh. That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allâh's Curse be on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!
Al-Mâ'idah 5:69
Surely, those who believe (in the Oneness of Allâh, in His Messenger Muhammad SAW and all that was revealed to him from Allâh), those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, - whosoever believed in Allâh and the Last Day, and worked righteousness, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve
Islam is a false religion.
Allah is a false God who does not exist in reality.
The Koran is a collection of incoherant, discombobulated rantings from that moron Mohammed.
His followers are a bunch of losers who are so bitter at their failure in life that they have no goals other than to strike out at America and the Western world with hatred.
They are miserable.
That's so factually incorrect it is pathetic.
Another who judges a book by its cover. You haven't read it, have you?
It is for this reason that arabic language and concepts are extremely pervasive at the root of western thought. Take the stars for example - they have arabic roots in their names (Polaris, Sirius etc). The Arabic world was on the forefront of many sciences from shortly after its creation up into the 1000's.
Islam's philosophical contributions cannot be understated, as it is likely we would not have many of the texts of key western philosophers like Aristotle were it not for Islam. Aristotle was basically assimilated into an extremely scholarly community of Islam where it emerged most notably in the late 900's with Ibn Sina, known as the philosopher Avicenna to the west, and then Ibn Rushd, or the philosopher Averroes as he is know under his western name. Averroes lived from the early 1100's to about 1200 and basically gave Europe neo-aristotelean thought by way of Spain.
But just before him, Islam started to implode on itself into a deep fundamentalist theocracy under which it exists to this day. In a few years, the Islamic world basically went from the forefront of human knowledge and thought to the backwoods of an extreme fundamentalist sect not unlike some of the radical groups that exist today. A key factor was the theologian Algazel, or Al Ghazali in the arabic world, who spread the call for an ultra-orthodox theocratic state in Islam around the later end of the 11th century. Algazel began the movement that is known as Sufism, an Islamic movement that came out the Shiites of Persia (Algazel's home), which is known today as Iran.
So basically, the Islam fundamentalism that is familiar to many today was not always such. The Islamic world has, for better or worse depending on who you ask, undergone a huge turnaround from a culture at one time tied heavily to western post-Rome ideas into a culture of fundamentalist theocracy unique onto itself.
I appreciate the thought.
But judging Islam by how it is practiced in these modern theocracies is like
judging Christianity by the Inquisition.
The question is not "How is Islam Often Practiced Today?" but simply "What is Islam?"
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