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Another superb essay from Fjordman:
Europe, 480 BC:"Come and take them!"
Leonidas, King of Sparta, to the vastly more numerous Persian forces calling for the Greeks to lay down their arms during the battle of Thermopylae. Leonidas and his men died in battle after holding their ground for three days, but bought the Greek city-states enough time to defeat the Persians and permanently end Persian inroads into Europe.
Europe, 2004 AD:
"We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us."
Jens Orback, Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration and Gender Equality from the Swedish Social Democratic Party during a debate in Swedish radio.
Europe, 2006 AD:
You stone your mothers
Flog your sisters
Mutilate your daughters
Behind veils
But I want to be your friendNorwegian singer Åge Aleksandersen in his song "Æ vil vær din venn" ("I want to be your friend") about his relationship with Muslims. No irony was intended in the lyrics.
Henry Ford once famously said that "History is bunk." Personally, I subscribe more to the view of Edmund Burke: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." Knowing your people's history is crucially important when you want to shape your future. Unfortunately, especially in my native Europe, we are either suffering from a deliberate historical amnesia or are being spoon-fed a mixture of half-truths and outright lies.
One of the most persistent myths so eagerly promoted by Eurabians is that of the "shared Greco-Roman heritage" between Europeans and Arabs, which is now going to lay the foundations for a new Euro-Mediterranean entity, Eurabia. It is true that countries such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Algeria were just as much a part of the Roman Empire as were England or France. However, the Arab conquerors later rejected many elements of this Greco-Roman era once they invaded these nations.
As British philosopher Roger Scruton has explained, one of the most important legacies of the Roman Empire was the idea of secular laws, which were unconcerned with a person's religious affiliations as long as he accepted the political authority of the Roman state. This left a major impact on Christian Europe, but was neglected in the Arab Middle East because it clashed fundamentally with the basic principles of sharia, the law of Allah. Scruton calls this "the greatest of all Roman achievements, which was the universal system of law as a means for the resolution of conflicts." The Roman law was secular and "could change in response to changing circumstances. That conception of law is perhaps the most important force in the emergence of European forms of sovereignty."Likewise, it is true that Arabs translated some Greek classics, but they were highly particular about which ones to include or exclude. Historian Bernard Lewis writes in his book What Went Wrong?, page 139:
"In the vast bibliography of works translated in the Middle Ages from Greek into Arabic, we find no poets, no dramatists, not even historians. These were not useful and they were of no interest; they did not figure in the translation programs. This was clearly a cultural rejection: you take what is useful from the infidel; but you don't need to look at his absurd ideas or to try and understand his inferior literature, or to study his meaningless history."Iranian intellectual href="http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/4462" target="_blank">Amir Taheri agrees:
"To understand a civilisation it is important to understand its vocabulary. If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was not on their minds either. There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish. (...) It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963."In other words: There was a great deal of Greek knowledge that could never have been "transferred" to Europeans by Arabs, as is frequently claimed by Western Multiculturalists, because many Greek works had never been translated into Arabic in the first place. Arabs especially turned down political texts, since these included descriptions of systems in which men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This was considered blasphemous by Muslims, as laws are made by Allah and rule belongs to his representatives.
Lars Hedegaard, president of the Danish Free Press Society, believes that economic progress hinges on free speech. In the 1760s, a scientific expedition financed by the king of Denmark set out from Copenhagen destined for Egypt, today's Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey. The objective was to study all aspects of these lands, their culture, history and peoples. Only one participant survived, the German Carsten Niebuhr, whose notes have left us with important information from this period.
Notice that this expedition was partly arranged due to Western intellectual curiosity. Ibn Warraq has severely criticized Edward Said and his book Orientalism for ignoring what has been a hallmark of Western civilization: the seeking after knowledge for its own sake: "The Greek word, historia, from which we get our 'history,' means 'research' or 'inquiry,' and Herodotus believed his work was the outcome of research: what he had seen, heard, and read but supplemented and verified by inquiry."
This part of the Greek heritage was, again, carefully ignored by Muslims. Carsten Niebuhr's writings leave a powerful impression of a region that was primitive underdeveloped and steeped in Islamic fatalism. This was prior to European colonialism in the area and before the United States had even been created. Western influences thus had nothing had to do with it; the backwardness was caused by local cultural factors.
About Mesopotamia (Iraq), Niebuhr had this to say: "In Cairo there is at least still a store where the Muhammedans can buy old books. In Baghdad one will not find that sort of thing. If one collects books here, and is neither prepared to copy them oneself nor to let others copy them, one must wait till somebody dies and his books and clothes are carried to the bazar, where they are offered for sale by a crier. A European who wants to buy Arabian, Turkish or Persian manuscripts will find no better opportunity than in Constantinople for here at least there is a sort of bookstore where Christians – at least Oriental Christians – can buy books" (Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 305)
Printing had not been adopted in the Muslim Middle East due to religious resistance. Three centuries after Gutenberg had invented the movable type printing press in 15th century Europe, and a thousand years after the earliest versions of printing were invented in China, books were still rare in Muslim countries and could be bought most easily when somebody died.
Printing was reinvented in Europe at exactly the same time as the last vestige of the ancient Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire (Constantinople), fell to Turkish Muslims. It was a major stroke of historical luck that the classical texts that had been preserved by the Byzantines for a thousand years could now be rescued forever by printing instead of quietly disappearing. It was printing, introduced during the later stages of the Renaissance, that ensured that the Renaissance marked a permanent infusion of Greek knowledge into Western thought, not just a temporary one.
According to historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein and her celebrated book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, page 220:
"The classical editions, dictionaries, grammars and reference guides issued from print shops made it possible to achieve an unprecedented mastery of Alexandrian learning even while laying the basis for a new kind of permanent Greek revival in the West. (...) We now tend to take for granted that the study of Greek would continue to flourish after the main Greek manuscript centers had fallen into alien hands [Constantinople in 1453] and hence fail to appreciate how remarkable it was to find that Homer and Plato had not been buried anew but had, on the contrary, been disinterred forever more. Surely Ottoman advances would have been catastrophic before the advent of printing. Texts and scholars scattered in nearby regions might have prolonged the study of Greek but only in a temporary way."
Eisenstein also points out that printing greatly facilitated the Scientific Revolution in the West. Young students could rely on the wide diffusion of works by earlier masters, and could thus bypass their own teachers and educate themselves. The young Sir Isaac Newton took full advantage of available libraries, learned by himself from mathematicians, modern and ancient, and astronomers such as Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler in order to develop his ideas about gravity into his 1687 treatise Principia.In the notes from his travels, Carsten Niebuhr wrote about the state of the desert around the Syrian town of Aleppo: "Under the Muhammedan and especially Turkish administration the most beautiful areas have been turned into wastelands. This despotic government does not protect the inhabitants bordering the desert provinces against the Arabs, Kurds or Turkomen, who live under tents and wander about with their cattle and who like to reap what they have not sown.. ... Unconcerned whether the peasant is robbed of his grain or his cattle, they let the taxes be collected with all possible severity; little by little the peasants leave their ancestral dwellings where they can no longer secure their livelihood; the fields are no longer plowed but abandoned to wandering bands of people and thus the limits of the desert are expanding more and more" (Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 457).
The famous 14th century Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited Cairo, Egypt, and gave this description of the Great Pyramids: "The pyramid is an edifice of solid hewn stone, of immense height and circular plan, broad at the base and narrow at the top, like the figure of a cone." This grossly incorrect description of them as circular strongly indicates that he never actually saw them, possibly because he as a devout Muslim didn't find such infidel monuments worthy of attention. His attitude is indicative of the general view of many Muslims, who were at best uninterested in non-Muslim cultures, past or present, at worst actively hostile.
Saladin or Salah al-Din, the twelfth century general loved by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned even in Western history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to remember that his son Al-Aziz Uthman, the second sultan of the Ayyubid Dynasty founded by Saladin and presumably influenced by his father's religious convictions, actually tried to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza only three years after his father's death in 1193. The reason why we can still visit them today is because the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt. He did, however, manage to inflict significant damage to Menkaure's Pyramid, the smallest of the Great Pyramids, which contains scars clearly visible to this day. It is tempting to view this as a continuation of his father's Jihad against non-Muslims:
"When king Al-Aziz Othman, son of [Saladdin] succeeded his father, he let himself be persuaded by some people from his Court, who were devoid of good sense, to demolish the pyramids. One started with the red pyramid, which is the third of the great pyramids, and the smallest. (...) They brought there a large number of workmen from all around, and supported them at great cost. They stayed there for eight whole months (...) This happened in the year 593 [ i.e. 1196 AD)."Such vandalism has been a recurring feature of Islamic nations throughout the ages. Guarding the pyramids at the Giza Plateau is the Great Sphinx. However, sphinxes in ancient times usually appeared in pairs, and there are indications in both classical and medieval sources that the Sphinx used to have a twin. According to archaeologist Michael Poe, there was another sphinx facing the famous one on the other side of the Nile, but it was damaged during a Nile flood, and then completely dismantled by Muslims using it as a quarry for their villages.
The legend that the missing nose of the Great Sphinx was removed by
Napoléon Bonaparte's artillery during the French expedition to Egypt
1798-1801 is not only factually incorrect, it's ludicrous to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history. Sketches indicate that the nose was gone long before this. The Egyptian fifteenth century historian al-Maqrizi attributes the act to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. According to al-Maqrizi, in the fourteenth century, upon discovering that local peasants made offerings to the Sphinx to bless their harvest, al-Dahr became furious at their idolatry and decided to destroy the statue, managing only to break off its nose. It is hard to confirm whether this story is accurate, but if it is, it demonstrates that Sufis are not always the soft and tolerant Muslims they are made out to be.Far from damaging the Sphinx, the French expedition brought large numbers of scientists to Egypt to catalog the ancient monuments, thus founding modern Egyptology. The trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered by the French in 1799, was employed by philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. In this task, Champollion made extensive use of the Coptic language, which in modern times survives only as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Coptic is a direct descendant of the language spoken in ancient Egypt, and might have been understood by pharaohs such as Tutankhamun or Ramses II, although they would no doubt have considered it a rather strange and difficult dialect.
Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years, yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part displayed much interest in doing so. Westerners did so in a single generation after they reappeared in force in Egypt. So much for "Arab science." And they did so with the help of the language of the Copts, the Egyptian Christians, the only remnant of ancient Egypt that the Arab invaders hadn't managed to completely eradicate.
According to Andrew G. Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, the contrast between jihad and British imperialism was equally pronounced on the Indian subcontinent. Lord Curzon, who served as Viceroy and Governor-General of India from 1898-1905, stated:"If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of pagan art or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Mohammedan Musjid as the Christian Cathedral…To us the relics of Hindu and Mohammedan, of Buddhist, Brahmin, and Jain are, from the antiquarian, the historical, and the artistic point of view, equally interesting and equally sacred. One does not excite a more vivid and the other a weaker emotion. Each represents the glories or the faith of a branch of the human family. Each fills a chapter in Indian history."
As Hugh Fitzgerald writes, "One opens 'The World of Islam' by Ernst J. Grube and finds on p. 165 a picture of the 'Kutb Mosque (Quwaat al-Islam) Delhi' shown and described: 'Built by Kutb al-din Aibak in his fortress of Lallkot near Old Delhi in 1193. This mosque is the earliest extant monument of Islamic architecture in India and its combination of local, pre-Muslim traditions and imported architectural forms is typical of the earliest period. The mosque is built on the ruins of a Jain temple.' So the earliest 'extant monument of Islamic architecture in India' was 'built on the ruins of a Jain temple.'"
Sita Ram Goel and other writers have tracked this massive cultural vandalism in the book Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them.
Infidels would be well-advised not to believe that such cultural Jihad is a thing of the past. In the early 21st century, a religiously motivated attack on statues at a museum in Cairo by a veiled woman screaming, "Infidels, infidels!" shocked the outside world. She had been inspired by Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, who quoted a saying of the prophet Muhammad that sculptors will be among those receiving the harshest punishment on Judgment Day. The influential Sheikh Youssef Al Qaradawi agreed that "Islam prohibits statues and three-dimensional figures of living creatures" and concluded that "the statues of ancient Egyptians are prohibited."
Within a few years, thousands of churches have been destroyed in Indonesia, and many more Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries have been damaged or destroyed by Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. Saudi hardliners are even wiping out their own heritage in cities such as Mecca and Medina. The motive behind the destruction is supposedly Wahhabist fears that places of historical interest could give rise to idolatry, although critics might also suspect that they don't want researchers to dig too deep into the early history of Islam, in case this might turn out to deviate from the traditional version of it.
The great Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were demolished by the Taliban regime in 2001, who decreed that they would destroy images deemed "offensive to Islam" and that the statues had been used as idols before. Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues were blown up, was elected the Afghan parliament in 2005.
The Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal in 2001 complained that "The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can't knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain."
In fact, the statues, 53 meters and 36 meters tall, the tallest standing Buddha statues in the world, turned out to be so hard to destroy that the Taliban needed help from Pakistani and Saudi engineers to finish the job. Finally, after almost a month of non-stop bombardment with dynamite and artillery, they succeeded. Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor notorious for his Islamic religious zeal and his persecution of non-Muslims in India, had attempted to achieve the same thing centuries earlier, but failed.
Indeed, judging from the experiences with the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is tempting to conclude that the only reason why the Great Pyramids of Egypt have survived to this day is because they were so big that it proved too complicated, costly and time-consuming for Muslims to destroy them. Had Saladin's son Al-Aziz had modern technology and engineers at his disposal, they might well have ended up like countless Hindu temples in India or Buddhist statues in Central Asia.
As a European, I read about this and fear for the future of the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Michelangelo's figurative paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There is every reason to believe that they will end up the same way as the Bamiyan Buddhas if we continue to allow Muslims to settle in our lands. Some would say that this is not just likely, but inevitable. Although it may not happen today, tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow, sooner or later, groups of pious Muslims will burn these works of art, and doubtlessly consider it their sacred duty.
The official reason given by many Muslims for why non-Muslims are not allowed to visit the cities of Mecca and Medina is because they might damage or destroy the Islamic Holy Sites. But since Muslims have a proven track record of more than a thousand years, from Malaysia to Armenia, of destroying non-Muslim places of worship or works of art, perhaps we should then, in return, be entitled to keep Muslims permanently away from our cultural treasures?
According to military historian Victor Davis Hanson, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves, yet "only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery. Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization."
That freedom of expression is, and long has been, totally lacking in the Islamic world. Europeans, not Muslims, are the true heirs of the Greek heritage. Maybe saying so makes me a bigot, but if so, I think I can live with that.
Posted by Robert at April 2, 2007 10:50 AM
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Islam is destroying history, killing the teachers,artists,historians,and destroying monuments,churches, and all heritages of Non Muslims....
....The only cure seems to be a complete and total war....for all the marbles....
Posted by: exsgtbrown at April 2, 2007 11:37 AMAm I the only one who finds it somewhat distasteful to see the Zoroastrian Persians who were trying to conquer Greece as a part of a normal imperial empire building exercise (and not to have Ahura Mazda replace Zeus in the Greek pantheon) being conflated with todays Islamic Iran, let alone Islamic supremacy in Europe?
Surely one can find better examples, like the Crusades, or the various wars fought in the Balkans between the Turks and the Austrians, Russians, Poles, et al?
Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 2, 2007 11:50 AMAh, history. Here is some:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2047986,00.html
Posted by: pr126 at April 2, 2007 12:48 PMSorry, I missed that the article is already posted.
Posted by: pr126 at April 2, 2007 1:15 PM"[Carsten] Niebuhr had this to say: 'In Cairo there is at least still a store where the Muhammedans can buy old books. In Baghdad one will not find that sort of thing. If one collects books here, and is neither prepared to copy them oneself nor to let others copy them, one must wait till somebody dies and his books and clothes are carried to the bazar, where they are offered for sale by a crier. A European who wants to buy Arabian, Turkish or Persian manuscripts will find no better opportunity than in Constantinople for here at least there is a sort of bookstore where Christians – at least Oriental Christians – can buy books.' (Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 305)
Well, in Baghdad much has been made, especially by breathless reporters, of bits and pieces of old Baghdad that are supposed to represent some time in the recent past of fabled high culture. It's nonsense.
There is that obligatory mention of Mutannabi Street, the bookseller's row, named after one of the most celebrated poets in classical Arabic, and a dab hand at panegyrics for the prince, turning to invective if Mutannabi was not given the reward he expected, where much of the merchandize consists of Ken-Follett-level stuff translated into Arabic, and of course endless books on -- what else? -- Muhammad, and the Qur'an, and the Qur'an, and Muhammad, and did I forget to mention all the books on the Qur'an, and on Muhammad?
Yes, wonderful fabled Baghdad, all mahgoof-and-mutannabi-street, and memories, akin to those of Eygptian intellectuals of old Cairo and old Alexandria, when it had a "different" flavor, meaning that the Jews, and the Greeks, and the Italians, and the Armenians, and even the handful of French and British, were there read La Gazette de Caire or somesuch, and see the syce-runners outside Shepheard's, and life was so...so interesting. Similarly, those who have this imaginary Baghdad in their heads are really longing for a time, decades ago, when there were still many Jews in Baghdad (before 1948-1951, and before the Farhud of June 1-2, 1941, and before the British left, in 1932), and Christians, unafraid to walk the streets or go to church, and Baghdad, like Cairo and Alexandria when the tone was not set by the primitive Muslims -- was so...so interesting.
There's a lot of blah about the "educated" Iraqis, and that "professional middle class" and its supposed high level of culture. It's very exaggerated, in size and in attainment. A handful of sad-eyed musicians trying to play classical music. A professor of poetry here and there. That's about it. In Islamic societies, there is so limited a place for art, or real literature, that for art Muslims endure Qur'anic calligraphy or yet another skyward-thrusting minaret-and-mosque complex, reminiscent of some kind of military installation which, in a sense, it is, or in the case of many of these terrible places, despite the prohibition on depictions of the human form, a twist on Hokusai or is it Hiroshige, with One Hundred Views of Our Leader.
Like most of the Arab Muslim dreams, even the very best (i.e., secularized, semi-westernized) t of those born into Islam have little conception of how deep the Western cultural bench is, and certainly do not know what real bookstores look like, or real publishing houses, and on offer at Mutannabi Street are Western crap, including dogeared manuals and annuals and literature at the level of Ken Follett and Barbara Cartland (but in Arabic), and for every 27 million people (the population of Iraq) there aren't a hundred with the kind of literary taste, I'd wager, that can be found entering, say, a well-stocked university bookstore, even in a lousy university (is there another kind, these days?), not to mention those who are to be found in used bookstores, the native habitat, with its transferred but well-accepted epithet (it is not the bookstore but the books that are "used"), or their on-line versions, devoid of the pleasures of travels to Serendip.
So what Carstens Niebuhr, celebrated traveller to those antique lands, noted the presence of in Cairo but the absence of in equally fabled Baghdad, is no longer true. But the books of Mutannabi Street, aside from the odd find --"Notes of a Mesopotamian Judge" was brought back to me by a friend -- are like the books laid out, at a street fair, in Queens or Brooklyn, with your eager eye conning the tables for good finds, only to end in dismal disappointment.
Posted by: Hugh at April 2, 2007 1:58 PM"....for every 27 million people (the population of Iraq) there aren't a hundred with the kind of literary taste,..."
.....and those 100 had better keep quiet, if they are discovered, they could, well ...be executed....too much knowledge in Islam is a bad thing....
Hugh above wrote "with your eager eye conning the tables for good finds, only to end in dismal disappointment."
Not always, fortunately. Imagine the joy to my Downunder eyes last week alighting on Rudolf Slatin's 1899 "Fire and Sword in the Sudan: A Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes 1879-1895"
Or several years earlier on Said Ramadan's sun-faded "Islamic Law: Its Scope and Equity" in a display window adjoining a backstreet Geneva mosque.
Unfunded Medicare and Social Security Liabilities $37 Trillion and rising by $3 Trillion/yr:
The Federal Budget alone is $3 Trillion a year and we can’t even pay for that. The current strategy to deal with the problem is to import tens of millions of grade school drop-outs and provide them and their extended families with world-class health care and welfare benefits, paid for by the taxpayer.
In order to get close to keeping even with our promises, we would have to confiscate 100% of the income of the top 20% of American taxpayers. That could never happen as the affluent would stop working or move to Costa Rica or Belize (as they already are). When the electorate passes legislation targeting private property for confiscation, the Supreme Court will find it to be Unconstitutional in accordance with the 5th Amendment. The Asians and Wall Street will stop loaning money. Massive depression.
And that will be the end of Islam (and lots of other things) in the United States. We may get a preview in France.
The paintings will be fine.
Hugh,
Yes, books. When I was in Damascus I wanted to buy some books. Nothing very obscure. Just books teaching Arabic as a foreign language. We went to quite a few bookshops, but they were all small. They did not have much to offer. In the end I found the most useful books at the Goethe Institute in Damascus. I live in Essen in Germany - a medium sized town (population 600,000). I live centrally, round the corner from the high street. There there are two bookshops with four floors. But even then disappointing. Nothing like what I can find in London, in Charing Cross Road or specialist bookshops. I later asked a friend from Jordan to find me one book, any book by each of Taha Hussain, Naguib Mahfouz and Khalil Gibran, which he managed to do without any difficulty. If I had asked for something by Abu 'L-ala Ahmad b. Abdallah al-Ma'arri , it might have been more difficult, if not impossible, for him to find them. He would have tried if I had asked him. He once asked me if I believe in 'Him,' looking upwards. No, I said, and that was that. When my son became a Christian (as he tells me, but he is young), my Jordanian friend asked if that was 'ok.' We agreed it is basically his choice. However, back to books. I had to ask my friend if he had bought the books in a second hand bookshop. No, he said. But the condition was such that I would have asked for a reduction in price here. They looked used. And when I read something like Fouad Ajami's 'The Dream Palace of the Arabs' I have the feeling that they, the people he speaks of, largely Christian Arabs, hoped for something better, but while wanting to liberalise Middle Eastern society, they also wanted to prove themselves more 'Arab than the Arabs' - 'more Catholic than the Pope.' Albert Hourani is a good example here - in the end the only way to be 'Arab' is to be Muslim. And the latter objective, to be Arab, was in the end more important. Bat Ye'or is useful in helping understand this point, I think. Egypt is different, of course. There the modernizers were mainly Muslims. But always Islam wins. Has always won. Has always defeated attempts at reform. Why is this? Well, the key text here, for me, is Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain.' Anyone who has read this and cannot admit to the emotional pull of Naphta's arguments, and the apparent insipidity of Settembrini's; I would think is quite possibly not being honest. Here's a link on this http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007131. What Naphta represents is something which Islam has consistently represented, unlike Christianity. But what is my own reaction to all this, to what is happening in the world today - to go back to our roots - to the Graeco-Roman world, to improve my Latin and Greek, and to say with Cicero 'O tempora, o mores' and 'quo usque tandem abutere, muslimi, petienta nostra.'
Ah, I hate my last post. It is so badly constructed. I should stop trying to type into this little box and compose the things I want to say in Word and then copy and paste.
Posted by: kevin at April 2, 2007 7:02 PMThe deliberate of ignoring of any classical works not connected to science or logic by Muslims has long been noted in Europe. Gibbon, a great believer in a classical education, regretted this, writing in 1788:
"The philosophers of Athens and Rome enjoyed the blessings, and asserted the rights, of civil and religious freedom. Their moral and political writings might have gradually unlocked the fetters of Eastern despotism, diffused a liberal spirit of inquiry and toleration, and encouraged the Arabian sages to suspect that their caliph was a tyrant, and their prophet an impostor."
Gibbon is often presented as being less hostile to Mohammedanism than most western writers, but he as good as calls Mohammed an imposter on two occasions in his 'Decline and Fall'. Among other things he also mentions his use of torture and consummating of his marriage to a nine year old: it's rather sad that British schoolkids aren't encouraged to read him nowadays the way they used to be.
Posted by: wallyUK at April 2, 2007 7:03 PMWhen looking at (reading) history--especially that dealing with Islamic vs. the rest of the world--Hegel's "History is a butcher's block," is most appropriate.
In keeping with that aspect of history, isn't it about time that we take up the cleaver? I mean they (the Mos.) have had their turn and more.
Posted by: unicorns62000 at April 2, 2007 8:09 PMI personally like the example of using the Spartan stand at Thermopylae in 480 BC as an example of fighting off an undesirable enemy.
The Spartans of past stood up to a tyrant and empire that longed for the enslavement of every man, woman and child that lived in their country.
The enslavement of every man, woman and child at the hand of Islam is an even greater threat, but it appears we have no more Spartans or Greeks like those anymore. We surrender our history, our culture, our art and our intellectual freedoms without a fight these days.
I posted last week, what I truly believe is we are entering the beginning phase of the end of history. It's only a matter of time before any history on Greece, Rome, Egypt, Jerusalem, India, even Persia and the Zoroastrians will be eventually stricken from the books. What kind of world will emerge in the future, when we have societies hell bent on consumerism and don't care about raising families or don't care about their past history?
Look around you this week, Easter is coming the most significant day in Christianity, the resurrection of Christ, yet I bet all you will see is images of the Easter bunny. Christmas will be here before we know it again, what does that bring, nothing but enormous line ups at Best Buy for Boxing Day. We have become a world of culture less buffoons and wonder why we aren't willing to fight and defend the things that our ancestors achieved way back when, with their own blood
Posted by: The fanatic at April 2, 2007 8:26 PM
Europe knows that Islam has proven in the past to recognise them with special status as 'people of the book' while christian extremists used to call us the 'anti-christs'. Europe has no need to worry for its future. Its future is bright InshAllah. America's future looks bright too.
What is it with Havad or havod, whatever yankies call it, graduates with phD's who do not wash their back sides...uff!!! on them. Use the certificate degree to wipe your back side before commenting on Muslim literacy. Get the dog off your sisters, mothers and wives before banging on about how many wives Muslims can marry
The lesson to be drawn from the above excellent exposition of the current state of affairs is this :
WESTERN CIVILIZATION = Based on Reason ( Aristotlean as illustrated recently by Pope Benedict XVI to his great cost )integrated into early Judeo-Christianity by Paul the Apostle et al and later on in the Protestant Reformation.
ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION = Based on the logic of Allah in the Koran which mandates total submission to the writings in the Koran and ignorance of reason .
This is the essential clash .
You cannot get any more fundamental than this .
The current clash should really be seen as :
The force of Reason and logic VS ISLAM
instead of the : WEST VS ISLAM.
Q.E.D.
“There is No Justice without Freedom”
America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people.
America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies. Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23747-2005Jan20.html
When the smoke clears in thirty years, we will probably refer to this Inaugural as the peak of something like the ‘Nurturing Age’. Uniformed children will be required to discuss the implications of it’s intentions in essays at school. Things will be worse than they are today.
Posted by: pez at April 2, 2007 11:23 PMAbdullah- Thanks for your posts, it's always nice to get a reminder from who our enemy is.
Keep up the good work and let us all know why we can't allow those who share your way of thinking prevail.
Posted by: The fanatic at April 2, 2007 11:55 PMWhat about the Hindus Buddhists and Pagans who live in Europe, Abdullah?
Posted by: Voltaire at April 3, 2007 1:18 AMG K Chesterton, from The Ballad of the White Horse:
'therefore your doom is on you
is on you and your kings...
because it is only Christian men/
keep even heathen things'.
'for our God hath blessed Creation
calling it good. I know
what spirit with whom you blindly band
hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death [the self-offering of Christ] the stars shall stand
and the small apples grow'.
And again: Chesterton imagines the battle cry of a Romano-Briton character, facing the pagan nihilistic Danes at Ethandune - but he might just as well say it to the jihadists:
"Spears at the charge! Yelled Mark amain/ 'Death on the gods of death!/ Over the thrones of doom and blood/ goeth God who is a craftsman good/ and gold and iron, earth and wood/ loveth and laboureth./ The fruits leap up in all your farms/ the lamps in each abode/ God of all good things done on earth/ or wheels or webs of any worth/ the God that makes the roof, Gurth,/ the God that makes the road/ The God that heweth kings in oak/ writeth songs on vellum/ God of gold and flaming glass/ confregit potentias/ arcuum, scutum, Gorlias/ gladium et bellum!"
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at April 3, 2007 1:19 AMAbdullah, you elucidate the desolation of islam so well, your jaundiced and arrogant attitude and your asinine hubris define the typical, benighted muslim. And for that, we thank you. Your perspective on islam, the West, and current events provides an invaluable glimpse into the muslim ethos and its pathological decay.
Men don't need but one wife and prolific breeding is something rats do because they can't do anything else. The world does not need more muslims, so we have every right to worry about how many wives muslims have. It is obscene for a man to father dozens of offspring that he cannot even feed, and to burden society with hordes of dysfunctional children who will grow up and repeat this revolting cycle like human puppy mills. We are suffering the expense and social rot caused by the muslim libido---a systematic production line of jihadist holy warriors, brainwashed in islamic fanaticism by age five and good for absolutely nothing but crime, rioting, protesting, and raping indigenous females. We don't want you, your umpteen brats, your four wives, your revolting culture, and least of all, your malevolent religion.
Posted by: Susanp at April 3, 2007 1:39 AMKevin, I loved your post and the link. Many years since I read that coming-of-age novel! Unfortunately, I think the islamic idea of suicide will remain more destructive than Naphtha's, just as their concept of martyrdom shares nothing with the Christian one but the name!
Abdullah, what on EARTH are you on about?? What dog? I haven't noticed one yet. When you have a logical, well-reasoned point to make, do make it. Until then, go an seethe in a corner.
Posted by: Lili at April 3, 2007 1:50 AMAbdullass,
There are rumours that DisneyLand wants a deal with US army to buy the Kaaba (the black stone of mecca)after the US army bulldozes the great mosque. The Disneyland wants it in its the "Cave of Horrors".
The deal hasn't been signed yet as the Army waits for an offer from Tel Aviv zoo who would like to place it in the chimpanze enclosure.
Who do you think will get the deal?
Posted by: thomas. h at April 3, 2007 7:52 AMOne excerpt from native muslim culturality:
When muslims invaded Egipt, they found very advanced culture specialy concetrated around city of Alexandria.In it, many times rebuilted library, became vicim of fire yet again. Story follows:
John Philopompus was very learned scolar. He asked kaliph omar to spare the books which contains knowledge far mor worthy than any gold or silver. But omar piously replyies to him:
``If these books contain nothing more than
that which is written in koran, they are useless; and if they contain anything contrary to the sacred book, they are pernicious; in either
case, burn them.''
And in the incomming months, public baths in Alexandria were not troubled with needed fuel.
Recently on this site was mentioned Zahi Hawas, self proclamaited leading egyptologyst. Just few days later, I watch his epizode on viasat history channel about pyramid builders. Now, story was interesting untill last chapter. "Scientist" (read arabs with ph.d.) from Cairo universety, conduct dna research of sceletons found near pyramids. Beside proving that they are 4500 years old, they proved that modern egyptians are direct descendands of ancient one. Now, everybody who read history of Egypt, know difference between Copts and arabs. But then, it flashes to me that in order to avoid possible destruction of ancient egypt heritage, its was a simple need to present to arabs something which is certanly not theirs as theirs. If average muslim arab concieve in his brain ancient tombs as something which belong to his forefathers, and not some strange idolaters, it perhaps may prevent them falling into antiidolatry tantrum. Eventualy, its strange what kind of people are those whome you must to feed with ovbious and notournous lies in order to make them behave.
Posted by: svemirko at April 3, 2007 10:03 AM"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." -James Joyce.
At least since 622 A.D.
Posted by: profitsbeard at April 3, 2007 11:31 AM
What is it with Havad or havod, whatever yankies call it, graduates with phD's who do not wash their back sides...uff!!! on them. Use the certificate degree to wipe your back side before commenting on Muslim literacy. Get the dog off your sisters, mothers and wives before banging on about how many wives Muslims can marry
Posted by: Abdullah
May I suggest you do the same with the pages of the KKKoran, since you people reject the use of tissue.
Your obsession with animal sex has been duly noted, Abby. See more than a few of your previous posts. Don;t take my 'infidel' word for it.
Your preoccupations have been preserved in the archives like dinosaur genes in amber.
PS. I hope you enjoyed the Mocons from Denmark. Very creative thooe Danes, eh?
Posted by: Allahfanculo at April 3, 2007 2:15 PMYour obsession with animal sex has been duly noted, Abby. See more than a few of your previous posts. Don;t take my 'infidel' word for it.
It has indeed been noticed! Scratch a Moslem and you will find a sex pervert. Just imagine what Abdullass may do to his hamster when alone with the poor animal – especially in the spring time.
When I first read Ayatollah Khomeni instructions how a moslem is to proceed after sex with different animals and human infants I thought it was a stupid grotesque spoof! Well, it was not – the leader was dead serious. It was my first closer look at Islam.
Disgusting!
First the muslim didnot destory the Great Libaray it was destory long before the Islam was born by Christian who burn book and murder than pagan scholar in cold blood tyical christian behavior. Than fire broke out at night in the Great Libaray when than oil lamp which scholar use to read in the dark libarary fell over than start to burn some of the books and wooden floor and wall. The muslim join the scholar in trying to saves as many as the inportant books on science and logic as possible the ancient plays where not as inportant.
Posted by: DefenderofIslam at April 4, 2007 1:02 AMRobert it about time you stop your hate speech against Islam and you falsehood and outright perjury against Islam. The Muslim didnot harm the Red Pyhamid which than other hate filled prejury author wrote about with no real knowlege at all. In fact the Caphs and Sultans where well aware that than tiny faction of the population workshipper the ancient Gods and Goddress and they where hidden due to the Christian presocrution of all pagon and the Christian where looking for the hidden member of this group. The Caphs and Sultan forbid the harming of the old temples and tombs of the ancient untril European pressure to turn over the mummy of the ancient deads. That why many of there sciencist are nothing more than grave robbers.
Posted by: DefenderofIslam at April 4, 2007 1:49 AM"America's future looks bright too. "
....yes it does, but not in the way you envision...
abdullah - said "Use the certificate degree to wipe your back side before commenting on Muslim literacy. Get the dog off your sisters, mothers and wives before banging on about how many wives Muslims can marry"
abdullah, I have been told that, unlike the West, islam respects women. Yet instead of debating the issue you chose to insult the FEMALE relatives of who you addressed. You are a coward and a misogynist (in other words a devout muslim). No one who criticizes islam has misjudged it, they only show, as you did, what islam really is.
Posted by: RedForemanTM at April 4, 2007 7:25 AMI'm new here and I suppose this has been posted before - but good links are worth repeating The Dhimmi Revolution
Here's an excerpt >> At least 75% of the Sira (life of Mohammed) is about jihad. About 67% of the Koran written in Mecca is about the unbelievers, or politics. Of the Koran of Medina, 51% is devoted to the unbelievers. About 20% of Bukhari’s Hadith is about jihad and politics. Religion is the smallest part of Islamic foundational texts.
Posted by: RedForemanTM at April 4, 2007 7:40 AMDeadenderofIslam,
Reading your atrocious gibberish I can now understand why koran forbids alcohol to mohamedans. You guys can't hold your liquor! Simple like that.
You are lucky Hugh doesn't report you to your imam for being drunk. Still, I don't think he will keep on covering up for you always, so you'd better stop that shameless crapulence now before it is too late.
DefenderofIslam:
First the muslim didnot destory the Great Libaray it was destory long before the Islam was born by Christian who burn book and murder than pagan scholar in cold blood tyical christian behavior.
Really?
Then how is it that throughout 1300-1900 in Europe when nearly all were Christian, there flourished
Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Geology
Sculpture
Music (Bach, Mozart Beethoven, Brahms)
Medicine
Industrial development
at the same time as Christianity?
Where is the "typicalness"?
Only at the start, did the Church persecute Galileo. Once things got going knowledge was treasured and advanced.
No such thing took place within Islam, within the Mamluks and Ottoman empire. And is it said that Umar, the 3rd Caliph said about books, "If it contradicts the Quran it is heretical, and if does not then it is superflous" and therefore could be burned. Note all the sources for that are Muslim not Christian. About the only thing I am aware of that Islam contributed is Ceramics - and that is it, not much else.
Than fire broke out at night in the Great Libaray when than oil lamp which scholar use to read in the dark libarary fell over than start to burn some of the books and wooden floor and wall. The muslim join the scholar in trying to saves as many as the inportant books on science and logic as possible the ancient plays where not as inportant.
What are the sources for this?
I find this most unlikely as Science has never arisen in Islamic countries. The whole development of Science was mainly European.
If necessary I can catalogue all discoveries and achievements.
On 'Knowing Our History' - we need to remember the victories and learn from them.
Apart from the straight historical accounts [and perhaps this site could link us to a list of the most reliable and interesting ones?] are there films, art works, poems celebrating, for instance, the victory of Charles Martel? The defence of Malta in the 16th century, equal in desperate heroism to the defence of Malta during WWII, and probably historically more significant? Is there an epic film, novel, poem, musical composition celebrating the victory at Vienna in 1683? The liberation of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria from Turkish rule?
Speaking as an Australian - we don't just remember Gallipoli, where we failed and retreated. There is a grand old film called "Forty Thousand Horsemen". It celebrates the Australian Light Horsemen of the First World War, who fought the Ottoman Turks in the Middle Eastern theatre and were part of the process that led to General Allenby walking into Jerusalem, and the end of Ottoman domination of the Holy Land. The climactic moment in the film is when the mounted troops - on thirsty horses, with the desert at their back, no other water within riding distance - are given the order to charge the Turkish trenches guarding the Wells of Beersheba. It's magnificent. (Australian writer Frank Dalby Davison wrote a great short story "The Wells of Beersheba", about the same epic charge).
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