[Part 1 of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=3768.]
For those of you who know history well, you might ask, "Wasn't Islamic civilization very developed in the 800s-1500s?"
The answer is simply, yes and no. Let's look at it a little closer. After conquering and occupying everything from Spain, southern France and North Africa in the West by the 700s, to Iran and India to the East, the Arab Imperialist Movement began a process of cultural theft and absorption of the conquered peoples. A process of Arabization and Islamicization took place over the next several hundred years. Arabic - the language of the new ruling class - was used in all official documents and many of the subjugated peoples adopted it along with Islam - the religion of the conquerors - which allowed them to move up the new social hierarchy. This process allowed a relatively backward and martial desert people - the Arabs - to gain access to knowledge, technology and wealth, through their newly acquired human capital.
Add to this the Jewish involvement in "Islamdom"; most Jews did not convert, and they were generally oppressed, sometimes more, sometimes less. But, through their translations of Greek and Roman texts into Arabic, Jews were a major transmission mechanism for the Arabs. They provided access to the wisdom of the ancients for the Islamic hordes. They also provided doctors, philosophers, grammarians and scientists to the developing "Islamic civilization". It is said that the "great" medieval Muslim thinker Ibn Rushd or Avveroes, got most of his ideas from the teachings of Moses Maimonides.
For those who claim that in the past, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together, don't forget that Jews and Christians were dhimmis, officially bound in Islamic law as second-class citizens with inferior rights and subservient to Muslims. Let me point out that eras of "near equality" occurred only in a few places, for short periods of time, during a 1,400-year "civilization". Some peace.
Simply put, all the available knowledge - scientific and otherwise - was assimilated into Islam, giving it its temporary dynamism. Once the process was complete, Islam ran out of steam and began to decay, a process partially described by Malaysia's then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad in his keynote speech to the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Malaysia not long ago.
"The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers, etc., and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practicing their own religion of Islam... At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilization, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah [nation] from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage," Mahathir told his audience.
Except that Mahathir simply ignores the cultural theft and technology transfer issues, brought about through conquest and occupation.
"But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually, the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual regression, the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither. But for the emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilization would have disappeared with the fall of Granada in 1492," Mahathir explained.
Here, Mahathir begins to face reality. Islam simply didn't have "the ideas" that built "the great Islamic civilization." They stole them from others and after several centuries of stifling Islamic rule, as the empire settled down, with no new conquests and information acquisitions and with religious obscurantism on the rise, they began to decay. Islam - the word in Arabic means submission - didn't build a thought system that liberated creativity and the human spirit, but suffocated it.
Mahathir continued, "The early successes of the Ottomans were not accompanied by an intellectual renaissance. Instead, they became more and more preoccupied with minor issues such as whether tight trousers and peak caps were Islamic, whether printing machines should be allowed or electricity used to light mosques. The Industrial Revolution was totally missed by the Muslims," he admitted.
There you have it in a nutshell - the cause of "Muslim rage" against the West today, and it is self-inflicted. Today's Taliban, Osama bin Ladens, Jihadists, Wahhabis, Khomeinists, "fundamentalists", etc, are no different; they are backwards and obscurantist. They hate the West, they hate Jews and Christians, and they even hate other Muslims not quite like them.
The Arab and Muslim world, by self-admittance, is crumbling. Although blaming outside forces is still popular, a growing number of self-incriminating "thinkers" are demanding that they look inward for the causes of their misery. Although blaming Israel ("the Jews rule the world") still satisfies many, others are beginning to blame themselves for their problems.
Take for example, the publication of "The Arab Human Development Report 2003" by a group of Arab academics not long ago, commissioned by the United Nations Development Program in Amman, Jordan. It found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deem fundamental to development: freedom of expression; access to knowledge; and the empowerment of women. The report covered 21 Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority areas. One of the authors, Clovis Maksoud, said he hoped the report would generate debate among the Arabs to seek "objective and constructive change from within." The report said, for instance, that Arab media outlets operate "in an environment that sharply restricts freedom of the press and freedom of expression and opinion." Journalists, the report pointed out "face illegal harassment, intimidation, and even physical threats." Again, the real source of "Arab rage", we find out, isn't Israel and the "occupation", but self-inflicted backwardness.
Islam's promotion of aggressive behavior and violence - as described earlier - is the opposite of the moral systems of Judaism and Christianity. It has caused the Arab world in particular to create societies that breed backwardness. Violence against women - for example, Islam-sanctioned female genital mutilation perpetrated throughout Islamic Africa - is endemic in the Arab/Islamic world. Islam is an anti-civilization.
One comforting thought is that, while Jihadists carry out violence and chaos in the West, they also do the same at home. For example, they've branded Sufism - Islamic mysticism and the only version of Islam that seriously stresses moral refinement, and the love of G-d and fellow man - as "kufr", or heretical.
Israel, America and Western Civilization as a whole have nothing to fear from Islam on the spiritual-theological-cultural level of competition. Islam simply has nothing of consequence to offer.
Notice, the prize for sacrifice in Islam is 72 virgins in the after-life - unlimited fulfillment of desire; whereas, the reward for the life well lived in Judaism and Christianity is eternal closeness with G-d (the "All-Good") in heaven. Islam appeals to the most base, material and aggressive drives in man. Just look at the open societies in the West. Even with their occasional excesses, they are vastly more appealing than the totalitarian places Islamic "anti-civilization" has produced.
However, as long as they remain part of an imperialistic military-political movement bent on world conquest, the Islamic barbarians are dangerous and need to be vanquished.
[Part 2 of 2]
(c) 2004/5764 Pasko
For those of you who know history well, you might ask, "Wasn't Islamic civilization very developed in the 800s-1500s?"
The answer is simply, yes and no. Let's look at it a little closer. After conquering and occupying everything from Spain, southern France and North Africa in the West by the 700s, to Iran and India to the East, the Arab Imperialist Movement began a process of cultural theft and absorption of the conquered peoples. A process of Arabization and Islamicization took place over the next several hundred years. Arabic - the language of the new ruling class - was used in all official documents and many of the subjugated peoples adopted it along with Islam - the religion of the conquerors - which allowed them to move up the new social hierarchy. This process allowed a relatively backward and martial desert people - the Arabs - to gain access to knowledge, technology and wealth, through their newly acquired human capital.
Add to this the Jewish involvement in "Islamdom"; most Jews did not convert, and they were generally oppressed, sometimes more, sometimes less. But, through their translations of Greek and Roman texts into Arabic, Jews were a major transmission mechanism for the Arabs. They provided access to the wisdom of the ancients for the Islamic hordes. They also provided doctors, philosophers, grammarians and scientists to the developing "Islamic civilization". It is said that the "great" medieval Muslim thinker Ibn Rushd or Avveroes, got most of his ideas from the teachings of Moses Maimonides.
For those who claim that in the past, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together, don't forget that Jews and Christians were dhimmis, officially bound in Islamic law as second-class citizens with inferior rights and subservient to Muslims. Let me point out that eras of "near equality" occurred only in a few places, for short periods of time, during a 1,400-year "civilization". Some peace.
Simply put, all the available knowledge - scientific and otherwise - was assimilated into Islam, giving it its temporary dynamism. Once the process was complete, Islam ran out of steam and began to decay, a process partially described by Malaysia's then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad in his keynote speech to the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Malaysia not long ago.
"The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers, etc., and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practicing their own religion of Islam... At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilization, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah [nation] from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage," Mahathir told his audience.
Except that Mahathir simply ignores the cultural theft and technology transfer issues, brought about through conquest and occupation.
"But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually, the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual regression, the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither. But for the emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilization would have disappeared with the fall of Granada in 1492," Mahathir explained.
Here, Mahathir begins to face reality. Islam simply didn't have "the ideas" that built "the great Islamic civilization." They stole them from others and after several centuries of stifling Islamic rule, as the empire settled down, with no new conquests and information acquisitions and with religious obscurantism on the rise, they began to decay. Islam - the word in Arabic means submission - didn't build a thought system that liberated creativity and the human spirit, but suffocated it.
Mahathir continued, "The early successes of the Ottomans were not accompanied by an intellectual renaissance. Instead, they became more and more preoccupied with minor issues such as whether tight trousers and peak caps were Islamic, whether printing machines should be allowed or electricity used to light mosques. The Industrial Revolution was totally missed by the Muslims," he admitted.
There you have it in a nutshell - the cause of "Muslim rage" against the West today, and it is self-inflicted. Today's Taliban, Osama bin Ladens, Jihadists, Wahhabis, Khomeinists, "fundamentalists", etc, are no different; they are backwards and obscurantist. They hate the West, they hate Jews and Christians, and they even hate other Muslims not quite like them.
The Arab and Muslim world, by self-admittance, is crumbling. Although blaming outside forces is still popular, a growing number of self-incriminating "thinkers" are demanding that they look inward for the causes of their misery. Although blaming Israel ("the Jews rule the world") still satisfies many, others are beginning to blame themselves for their problems.
Take for example, the publication of "The Arab Human Development Report 2003" by a group of Arab academics not long ago, commissioned by the United Nations Development Program in Amman, Jordan. It found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deem fundamental to development: freedom of expression; access to knowledge; and the empowerment of women. The report covered 21 Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority areas. One of the authors, Clovis Maksoud, said he hoped the report would generate debate among the Arabs to seek "objective and constructive change from within." The report said, for instance, that Arab media outlets operate "in an environment that sharply restricts freedom of the press and freedom of expression and opinion." Journalists, the report pointed out "face illegal harassment, intimidation, and even physical threats." Again, the real source of "Arab rage", we find out, isn't Israel and the "occupation", but self-inflicted backwardness.
Islam's promotion of aggressive behavior and violence - as described earlier - is the opposite of the moral systems of Judaism and Christianity. It has caused the Arab world in particular to create societies that breed backwardness. Violence against women - for example, Islam-sanctioned female genital mutilation perpetrated throughout Islamic Africa - is endemic in the Arab/Islamic world. Islam is an anti-civilization.
One comforting thought is that, while Jihadists carry out violence and chaos in the West, they also do the same at home. For example, they've branded Sufism - Islamic mysticism and the only version of Islam that seriously stresses moral refinement, and the love of G-d and fellow man - as "kufr", or heretical.
Israel, America and Western Civilization as a whole have nothing to fear from Islam on the spiritual-theological-cultural level of competition. Islam simply has nothing of consequence to offer.
Notice, the prize for sacrifice in Islam is 72 virgins in the after-life - unlimited fulfillment of desire; whereas, the reward for the life well lived in Judaism and Christianity is eternal closeness with G-d (the "All-Good") in heaven. Islam appeals to the most base, material and aggressive drives in man. Just look at the open societies in the West. Even with their occasional excesses, they are vastly more appealing than the totalitarian places Islamic "anti-civilization" has produced.
However, as long as they remain part of an imperialistic military-political movement bent on world conquest, the Islamic barbarians are dangerous and need to be vanquished.
[Part 2 of 2]
(c) 2004/5764 Pasko