Dhimmi: The Protocol of the Islamic Apartied

When looking at the issues in the Middle East, it's really hard to separate the facts from the bias. Every time I read a web site or book on Middle East history, I feel the need to take everything with a grain of salt. It makes it very hard to figure out what is going on. Here is a fairly good source, http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm , although it focuses on Israel. Here is one on Assyrian Christians, http://www.aina.org/aol/peter/brief.htm . Source like these exist all over the net but, again, they are written from the perspective of people in the middle of a lot of conflict.

On the issue of Dhimmi, as I understand it according to Islam, those who do not believe in Islam, have souls without any worth. Hence, it is okay to treat them poorly or even kill them. I'm not sure how prevalent that view is but I do know that Wahhabism takes it to extremes.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/wahhabism.html
(This link has a new nifty phrase, neo-Wahhabism. I wonder what books Neo-Wahhabists read? Besides the Koran, of course )

Islam grew under the shadow of Judaism and more so Christianity. Hence, it has a very harsh, exclusionary view of other religions and has a set of beliefs hundreds of years old on how to react to those who do not believe in Islam., hence the word Dhimmi.

My hope is that we are going through a temporary period where Fundamentalist Islam is having to deal with a new, high level of contact with outside ideas. With the advent of TV, radio and the internet, they are feeling much closer to non-Islamic people and are not liking it very much. I hope we do learn to live in constant contact with each other without feeling like the other "side" might be winning converts. The Turks give me hope.

Thanks for the links kappa. Very interesting.

 

Too....much.....ignorance....

Kappa, go crawl back under whatever racist rock you've been hiding recently. Seriously.

At least AM is up front about distrusting Kappa's crap links. Good move. They are totally bogus and completely distort the history of Islamic culture.

Jews and Christians are singled out in the Koran as "People of the Book," and thus to be respected. Indeed, Muhammed represented to the Arabs simply their turn to get a prophet, and Judaism was the clear model and inspiration for the new religion. Muslims originally prayed towards Jerusalem, btw.

As the Islamic empire spread, religious tolerance was WAY ahead of anything comparable in the Western world. The Christians on the edges of Byzantium actually preferred living under Muslim rule (they probably had little contact with their rulers in any case). Jews often occupied high places at court in various sultanates. Muslim Spain is also consistently offerred as an almost idealized culture of tolerance and religious mixing.

The bottom line is that Kappa's links are pure post-1948 lies and propaganda. Much like the ultra-nationalist Hindus who are trying to rewrite Indian history, these sites are trying to animate fear and loathing against something that simply didn't exist. Arabs had no particular hostility towards Jews until the European powers decided to create a Jewish homeland on Arab land without Arab consent.

Anti-Semitism is certainly alive and well and very rabid in the Muslim world today, but it's a very recent phenomenon.

 

?? ? ?? ? ? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??? ? ??

How's your a$$hole feel with that gaping hole left after you pulled this crap out it? Just read a SINGLE book on Islam by a respected writer. Hell, even Bernard Lewis would be a major step up for you.

 

Here is another source on Islam.

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesTitle/productCd-0764555030.html

 

Religious tolerance? Perhaps you arn't as familiar with this as you claim to be. All non muslims were non believers, and this was unacceptable. There were two options for an infidel: conversion and thus salvation, or conflict with the regional Muslims.

Islamic law is hailed by its followers as enlightened etc., but in order to benefit from it you had to be a Muslim male. Thus there were a couple of people who were left out in the cold. Infidels, slaves, and of course, women.

Yea, you could call that tolerant

 

That's not true. The early Islamic invasions were often no better than what they replaced with regard to religion.

You're really talking about the bishops who were doing it for political reasons. The Christological controversies of this period, specifically monphysitism, are far too complex to be boiled down like this. The power struggle among the 5 great Patriarchates was complicated, and the reason the Egyptians preferred the Arabs had a lot more to do with their desire to be free of the religious "tryanny" of Constantinople. Not in the oppression sense, but in the dogmatic sense. Alexandria figured it would be free to do its own thing in terms of religious politics, since it figured Arabs weren't monotheletists. If you'd asked Alexandria in retrospect who was more tolerant, I don't think they'd have said the Arabs

Sorry, the occasionally inaccurate description of Byzantine history (and therefore Islamic history) is one of my biggest pet peeves.
For some its misspelling, muddled metaphors, whatever. For me its this

You are right in the overall scheme of things, of course. Nothing in Islam itself predisposes it towards hatred of Jews or Christians. To suggest so is foolish. Any religious text can be twisted and manipulated into whatever a lunatic wants.

 

Manny, this is patently untrue. The evidence most certainly does not support you. Hell, the Copts are still around!

Ah, so it was the same as ecclesiastic law which held sway in most of Europe as late as 1600. People who live in glass houses...........

 

And not only that, they're growing.

 

I wasn't comparing who was more tolerant. i simply don;t agree with the statement that Islam was tolerant in those times.

 

I like how you took "conflict" to mean "annihiliation."

 

Well, lets think about this. If you have a country with 98% Muslims, and 2% Copts, if they're in constant "conflict", wouldn't you expect the 98% to eventually eliminate the tiny unarmed minority? I sure would.

Say, is this like the conflict the enlightened west had with Jan Huss's movement, or the Albigensians, or the Lollards, or the etc. etc.

 

Well Jebus Christ Manny, that's a useless statement. If you're going to talk about tolerance you should put it into some perspective - we're discussing whether or not it was tolerant for its time. The US 50 years ago would be a completely intolerant place to most, but it was far more tolerant than France in 1300. Perspective.

 

alright alright..fair enough...geez

 

I was responding to nicephoras, and ignoring you. Have a nice day.

 

Somewhere between Kappa's Apartheid and DoctorJones24's Islamic utopia lies the truth. It's a bit of a stretch to say the Jews and Christians were well off under Islam, though this was true in numerous instances.

The Koran, like most religious texts, sends mixed messages.

 

That doesn't sound very mixed to me. Sounds pretty anti Semitic actually.

 

Hell is how they feel.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/106/36.0.html

 

I actually agree with this, and didn't mean to suggest any utopia. (I was careful to use qualifiers like "often" and "some" I thought.) Basically, the Islamic empires that spread outward went through many phases and were at times better/worse for non-believers than at other times. And I love how manny decides NOT to talk comparatively when my original claim he was responding to was specifically a COMPARATIVE statement. Sheesh.

Ultimately, there's simply no way to argue that Jews have had even close to as much trouble under Muslim rule as they had under Christian rule. Not even a ballgame, really.

 

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Christian-Arabs

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Demographics-of-Lebanon

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Jacobite-Orthodox-Church

http://www.nationmaster.com/country/sy/Religion

Christians in Syria are 10% of 17,585,540, do the maths.

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Palestinian-Christians

I guess it's hard to explain why there were so many christians (mainly arab christians) given the supposed islamic intollerance.

Spain was really intollerant and history shows it.
In 1492 the spanishes (who at that time ruled Sardinia) expeled all the sardinian jewish communities.
There were no islamic ppl so there weren't the need to expel them as it has been done in Spain.

 

He's assuming you know the stuff about respecting People of the Book, I guess. The Zionist website he gleaned those quotes from must not have included that side of it though. Shocker! He's quite right that the messages are mixed, however, especially towards Jews due to Muhammed early political struggles against the Jewish tribes in Medina who sided against his little community when they migrated there.

 

First thanks for the links Sardinia. I'll check them out.

Do you think Americans have been tolerant of American Indians because there are so many of them?

PS - There are about 2.5 million American Indians.

 

Ben,

Damn, you had to go and ruin the fun by actually quoting from the Koran.

 

Is it too late to ask what religion Tariq Aziz, ex-Iraqi foreign minister was? Was he oppresed by them intolerant ay-rabs?