There are all sorts of crazy theories surrounding the rise of ISIS, now the Islamic State (IS), and its successes in Syria and Iraq so it’s good to see some of the commoner allegations being teased out by Peter Weber for The Week. While some of the claims in relation to United States’ culpability for creating the environment in which IS grew have more than a grain of truth behind them most are based on (understandable) paranoia or known historical precedence. Meanwhile Vice looks at the ongoing tragedy of the Yazidis in northern Iraq whose communities have suffered terribly at the hands of IS in recent weeks. There is quite a bit of hyperbole in the article but it makes a few interesting points:
“In the eyes of IS the Yazidis are Devil worshippers—something that’s actually kind of tricky to argue against; the group consider themselves to be the chosen people of Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel,” who they also know as Shaitan, or Satan. In Yazidi tradition, this special relationship began when Shaitan visited their ancestor Adam in the garden of Eden, bearing forbidden fruit.
The parallels between the Peacock Angel and the Satan we’re more familiar with can be baffling—Melek Taus is God’s most important angel, his commander-in-chief in this world, which was also his original role in the Abrahamic traditions. He’s also a fallen angel who rebelled against God and was subsequently cast into Hell; but in the Yazidi cosmology, after 40,000 years his tears quenched Hell’s flames and God forgave and reinstated him.
The Yazidis don’t see good and evil as polar opposites personified in particular gods, but as qualities that are integral parts of creation—they exist throughout the world, within the mind and spirit of human beings, and also within the Peacock Angel.
The Yazidis claim to be the world’s oldest nation, tracing the origin of their culture back to this covenant between Shaitan and Adam. Though this obviously has the ring of massive over-simplification and elaboration common to all origin myths, there’s a growing body of archaeological evidence that seems to suggest there’s an element of symbolic truth in it—that the Garden of Eden story shared by all the Middle Eastern religions might in fact be a faded folk memory of how human civilization began in the first place, a memory connected to the Yazidis in a very special way; a memory that Judaism, and subsequently Christianity and Islam, inherited from them, distorting it in the process.
…have you heard of Gobekli Tepe? It’s a recently unearthed archaeological site just over the Turkish side of the border that’s in the process of causing complete upheaval to all our old assumptions about the dawn of human civilization.
The discovery of Gobekli Tepe came when an archaeological team noticed a curious collection of what looked like gravestones on top of a strangely isolated hill. They began to examine these graves, which they soon discovered were just the tip of an astonishing iceberg: that the “hill” was in fact man-made, and, more importantly, that the “graves” were just the tops of huge, immaculately preserved limestone megaliths. These giant stones formed a large circular sacred site that had mysteriously been buried under tons of earth in distant antiquity, the rocks adorned with beautiful carvings of snakes, boars and strange bird-gods that the Yazidi swear they easily and instantly recognise as depictions of Melek Taus and their other angels.
Stonehenge is about 4,000 years old. Gobekli Tepe has been carbon dated and clocks in at an unbelievable 12,000 years old, extending the advent of monumental human architecture—and with it a human society large and complicated enough to build it—at least three times further back into the deep past, a time before writing, before metal and also a time before farming. “Stone age” hunter-gatherers built this place. Until very recently we imagined complex society—“civilization”—began with agriculture. Gobekli Tepe overturns this assumption about the birth of human culture in a stroke.”
That the Yazidis, a people whose religion and culture still contains some of the foundational roots of the great “Desert Religions” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), should be subject to ethnocide says much about the fanatical nature of IS and its opposition to the intellectual curiosity that for centuries characterized Islam. Extremism in religion or politics is anathema to human civilization.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1 and commented:
I
LikeLike
You are in the process of being culturally enriched by the Paedostani community in Ireland, same as the good people of Rochdale.
LikeLike
From the Rochdale reference I presume that is a derogatory term for Muslims or Pakistanis?
LikeLike
I think John Cronin is an anti-irish empire loyalists from the North using a southern name……
LikeLike
I don’t buy the bullshit story about cops who were afraid of being called racists.
It’s far more likely that they received bribes from the perpetrators to look the other way and destroy evidence.
Race, religion and ethnicity are irrelevant in this case. The cops who allowed this to happen are just as guilty as the perpetrators.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, race religion and ethnicity are extremely relevant in this case. They were not taking bribes. They were just terrified of losing their jobs if they tried to do anything about it.
Rotherham is a relatively small town (bout 280,000 people) and which is only 10% or so Moslem, or so I am told, never having had the misfortune to visit the place. So if there are only 28,000 Mozzies in Rotherham, this obviously means 14,000 male ones, ie about 10,000 healthy able bodied men of kiddie-raping age. If a community that size can produce 1400 victims (itself a fairly conservative estimate) then what in the name of Jesus must the national figures be like?
The same thing has happened in Leeds, Bradford, Luton, Birmingham, Oxford, Luton, the East End: wherever the UK has been culturally enriched by this charming and picturesque folk custom. The number of victims and perpetrators must be well into the tens of thousands. You’re talking about having to build a whole new prison network to house em all. Those police officers and social workers who actually blew the whistles and tried to do their jobs risked losing their jobs in the process: the McPhersonisation of the cops was of particular import.
Everyone in the working class areas of the Pennine towns in particular knew about this 10-15 years ago. The liberal meeja thought that it just wasn’t nice to talk about. This was probably the main reason for the rise of the EDL: the working class whites who had the misfortune to live in the areas of cultural enrichment knew better than to let their daughters ride in a taxi driven by a follower of the Paedo Mohammed.
There seems to be more than a suggestion from what I hear that this obsessive interest by the Plod, CPS, media etc in elderly white celebs who may or may not have patted someone on the arse in 1967 is clearly some sort of diversion scheme to stop the sheeple from finding out what their moral superiors at the Beeb have been keeping from them. I suspect there might be something in this.
LikeLike
They were just terrified of losing their jobs if they tried to do anything about it.
—————-
Even if they were – as I said – I’m not buying that BS.
That does not make them not guilty.
And yes – I would rather lose my job than tamper with evidence and cover up paedophiles.
I can’t imagine how people with children can ignore these horrific crimes.
LikeLike
The reason they were ignored is that the senior figures buried it when the foot soldiers dared mention it:
From the London Daily Telegraph……
By Tom Brooks-Pollock
12:00AM BST 02 Sep 2014
A researcher who raised the alarm over the sexual abuse of teenage girls in Rotherham more than a decade ago was sent on a ‘ethnicity and diversity course’ by child protection bosses who refused to act on her evidence.
The researcher, who was seconded to Rotherham council by the Home Office, was told she must “never, ever” again refer to the fact that the abusers were predominantly Asian men.
Speaking to the BBC’s Panorama programme under the condition of anonymity, the researcher said that she identified more 270 victims of trafficking and underage prostitution by mainly Muslim gangs in Rotherham.
But, despite being sent to Rotherham Council, the report – based on interviews with underage girls seeking help from the council’s anti-child prositution project, called Risky Business – was never published. Indeed, the council tried unsuccessfully to sack the researcher after she resisted pressure to change her findings.
Related Articles
•Rotherham: politics ‘imported from Pakistan’ fuelled sex abuse cover-up – MP
31 Aug 2014
•Rotherham is not an isolated incident
31 Aug 2014
•Rotherham child sex scandal: watchdog says police tried to ‘disprove’ victims
28 Aug 2014
Data to back up the report’s findings also went missing from the Risky Business office the weekend after she submitted her report, the researcher told the programme.
Recalling the reaction of one official after she had submitted the report, the researcher said: “She said you must never refer to that again. You must never refer to Asian men.
“And her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues.”
One of the girls who was allegedly abused, whose name was changed to Isabel to protect her identity, said that her abuser told her he would “play the race card” if the police tried to take action.
“A number of large-scale investigations looking at historical and current sexual offences in Rotherham are ongoing and involve a large number of victims.
The Independent on Sunday reported over the weekend that the Home Office Select Committee will investigate how much the Home Office knew about the scandal from 2001.
LikeLike
Well – you’re just strengthening my argument that these cops and their “senior figures” are corrupt to the core.
Behaviour like that is simply inexcusable.
And I also do not believe in collective responsibility.
Just because some Asian men are paedophiles does not mean that they all are.
LikeLike
“Just because some Asian men are paedophiles does not mean they all are.”
Where did I use the word “Asian”? No Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists or Goanese Catholics have so far been arrested for these offences. Indeed the only organised resistance has come from the Sikh community, who have organised vigilante gangs to keep MMoslems away from their daughters, and indeed have attacked business premises where this sort of thing has been going on.
As I said earlier, there are about 7000 adult male Moslems in Rotherham. This group of about 7000 appear to have raped 1400 (itself a fairly conservative estimate) adolescent white females in the course of the last decade.
Now, you don’t need to be a PHD in statistics to work out that this sort of behaviour is therefore not some sort of aberration here, but a cultural norm among this community. Furthermore it also seems obvious that the rest of the local Moslems do not seem to have much of a problem with their co-religionists molesting indigenous working class girls, as not a single person from that community has ever actually informed on them.
It also seems equally obvious, that if you extrapolate across the country, the number of perps and victims is likely to be well into the tens of thousands: possibly hundreds of thousands. The same stories have been coming out of Bradford, Leeds, Brum, Blackpool, and previously pleasant genteel places like High Wycombe, Oxford etc for at least a decade. They have been studiously ignored by the liberal media.
The Moslem pop of the UK doubled under the last Labour government. Thank you, Tony, oh thank you so much. There are about 1.5 million adult male Moslems in the UK. Between 100,000 and 200,000 of them are likely to be active sex criminals. If every one involved in this were arrested, charged and convicted – which is itself unlikely given the peecee CPS, the Mcphersonisation of the cops, and the extraordinarily corrupt relationship between the local Labour party and moslem “community leaders” in the Pennine towns – this would treble the jail population overnight.
LikeLike
And media are not calling cops, who arrest paedophiles, racists.
On the other hand – paedophiles are being hated with passion – more than any other type of criminal.
Hell – even drawings of nude children are illegal in the UK.
Now that the truth has come out – do you see any respectable news source that defends those paedophiles?
So I still think that those cops are simply trying to shift the blame
LikeLike
“On the other hand – paedophiles are being hated with passion – more than any other type of criminal.”
Believe me, Moslem paedos are not hated by their fellow Moslem prisoners. If anything they are admired.
LikeLike
From an anonymous Irishman who works in the education sector…………
There are 65,000 Muslims in Ireland today and growing, that does not include those that left here on vacation to fight in Iraq and Syria in order to create an extreme Muslim State ruled by fear and bloodshed. Now, Dr Ali Salem, a lecturer at the Mater Dei Institute and Trinity College, spoke to the media yesterday to outline his wishes of wanting to create a “revolution of inclusivity” in Irish schools and “an upheaval” in Irish educational perspectives.”
His choice of words like “revolution” and “upheaval” give pause as to wonder what is the sub-text of his thoughts of what he is really thinking. He also opines that “Muslim festivals are neither celebrated or marked in the calendar of Irish schools” going on to suggest that they be days off for Muslim children. He also points out that during the month of Ramadan, the month of fasting, Muslims give to charity and schools could co-operate by ‘raising funds for the poor and needy.” Now, I wonder where will those funds be going? I think ISIS and a lot more.
Salem adds that any form of raffle or lottery is “strictly forbidden” in Islam yet omitting all the other evil actions that is permitted against women and children. Salem then goes on to set out the differences that need to be addressed between the two faiths of Catholicism and Islam in Ireland starting with the towels around the head rules in the gym and that Muslims should be allowed to keep their towels on at all times. Also, “The girls should not be visible to the boys either while playing school sports and the girls should resist changing clothes in a communal area.”
“Music, performed using non-tunable percussion instruments such as drums, most Muslims will have no problem” Salem adds. Ah yes, the drums of war.
There is more: “At school plas, physical contact between members of the opposite sex who can be legally married is forbidden in Islam and that gender role reversal is not permissible or acting in a way that may arouse sexual feeling or give sexual hints causes objection to Muslims.” I bet it does not cause objection to the one aroused.
Please note: The legal age of Muslim girls allowed to marry is anything between 10 or 14 years old or puberty, otherwise known to be children still here in Ireland and the western world.
Aside from the towels around the head bit, it seems there are a lot more similarities between the Catholic church of recent times and that of the Muslim church of present times, with the only differences being that the RC church know they cannot get away with that anymore and that the Muslims know they can.
The only reason this Salem, with his religious degrees that are in essence about nothing except the merits of brainwashing, is allowed to spout his nonsense is because the ones that spouted it before him now want to appear Fr Trendy like on a public platform and inclusive which is why he is allowed to speak at the Mater Dei Institute and Trinity College.
The reality is that the Catholic Church in Ireland is as inclusive as having a lion in the same bed as a hyena which is about the same level of inclusivity and tolerance that the Muslims have.
In closing, there are no Catholic or Muslim children but only the transfer of thoughts from their parents and peers to make them think so. It is only when they think for themselves and are taught to do just that, will freedom of mind be more than just a cliché.
LikeLike
Maybe you should criticise unionists who believe the world is 6000 years old instead of making similiar incendiary and genocidal remarks towards Irish Catholics and Muslims. Iv’e got a suspicion your’e nothing but a racist sectarian bigot who pines for the good ol’ days of empire.This doesn’t mean I support the catholic church having any influence in education nor do I want ‘Muslim’ exclusive schools but then pastor mcconnell is one of ‘god’s chosen people’ not the savages of Ireland or Palestine etc. Why don’t you reveal your true name and stop pretending to be a southern Irishman.
LikeLike
Can you give me any examples of “genocidal” comments which I have made about anyone. Not sure how a comment can be genocidal in grammatical terms.
LikeLike
You see Irish catholics in the same ways as muslims don’t try to fool me
LikeLike
You are obviously psychic as well as semi-literate.
LikeLike
From Barry Clifford?
I know relatively little about the scandal in Britain, mostly just the headline stuff I’ve seen reported here, so I would need to look further into it to Comment. However I would tend to Jānis’ viewpoint while accepting the particular cultural difficulties presented by some immigrant communities (which are not the same as religious ones; not all Moslem nations are as “tolerant” of the exploitation of children, etc.). Looking in from the outside the case seems to me to be a mix of corruption, patronage and incompetence in the policing and political spheres mixed with, yes, overly sensitive treatment of minority groupings.
I think John you are almost going into the territory of “Not all paedophiles are Moslem but all Moslems are paedophiles”. I get your concerns but they could be more far nuanced than you are expressing. There are dreadful men and women in every community.
LikeLike
From Steve Sailer: he is worth reading if you have done so previously:
Back in April, the Islamic Boko Haram organization in the backwoods of Nigeria kidnapped 276 local black Christian schoolgirls and threatened to sell them as wives and/or sex slaves. This became a vast global story with the great and good all over the world weighing in to demonstrate their concern.
This hasn’t, actually helped — some girls subsequently escaped, but but 217 are still unaccounted for. But that’s not the point, the point is that Awareness Was Raised, and, more importantly, that numerous celebrities were seen engaging in Raising Awareness so that your awareness of their awareness has been heightened.
In contrast, for many years in England, Pakistani pimps have been luring pubescent white Christian girls into sexual slavery. But the Establishment responded with a long Awareness Lowering campaign. In the first decade of the 21st Century, those who protested were ignored, censored, or sent to diversity sensitivity training. The most prominent politician to take up the case a decade ago, Nick Griffin of the BNP, was put on trial twice for inciting racial hatred (but juries did not convict him).
Commenter JamestheFin writes:
… As for the Pakistani Muslims themselves, well…look, I like Steve Sailer quite a bit when it comes to issues of race, IQ, and demographics but his analysis of Islamic ideology is quite lacking. This really is one of those cases where someone like Timothy Furnish or Robert Spencer>Steve Sailer. Why? Because Sex Slavery is explicitly sanctioned in the Quran.
Don’t believe me? Take it from the Quran;
Quran 4:24 Al-Nisa(Women): And also forbidden to you are all married women (muhsanat) except those women whom your right hands have come to possess (as a result of war). This is Allah’s decree and it is binding upon you.”
And in case you don’t think the Quran’s rulings are applicable in the present day, here’s very popular and oft cited Pakistani jurist/theologian Abul A’la Maududi (died 1979) talking about his ideal state (you might not have heard of him, his Jaamati followers in the UK Islamic Mission are the largest component of the Muslim Council of Britain):
“Many misunderstandings seem to persist about the right to have sexual relations with one’s slave-girls. It is pertinent to call attention to the following regulations of Islam:
“Islam does not permit soldiers of the Islamic army to have sexual relations with women they capture in war. Islamic Law requires that such women should first be handed over to the government, which then has the right to decide what should be done with them. It may either set them free unconditionally, release them on payment of ransom, exchange them for Muslim prisoners of war held by the enemy or distribute them among the soldiers. A soldier may have sexual relations only with that woman who has been entrusted to him by the government.”
http://www.tafheem.net …
I would be willing to bet that most, if not all of those Pakistani Muslims involved in these crimes had heard Maududi’s teachings (& many others) in one form or another. Even if they weren’t aware of Maududi in some way, there are plenty of other prominent and influential Muslim religious leader who proclaim something similar like the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al-ash Shayekh who believes that marrying and then having sex with 10 year olds is acceptable in Islam….10 year olds, Dude…Of course, there’s also prominent Saudi scholar Saleh Al-Fawzan who has declared that slavery is very much a part of Islam and those who proclaim otherwise really have no basis for their claims…
Just sayin’…By their fruits shall ye know them…
Feminist Susan Brownmiller famously said in 1975 that rape is not a crime of eroticism but of power. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, but Brownmiller did have a point.
Of course, Feminism Inc. has been remarkably out to lunch for the last decade on the crisis of white Christian girls being lured into sexual slavery by Muslim pimps in England.
LikeLike
Er, Steve Sailer of the IQ plus race controversies?
LikeLike
The same.
LikeLike
The numbers abused, 1400, in the Rotherham case are simply staggering. Britain, has commendably, an excellent record on incorporating immigrants including millions of Irish but unfortunately some ethnic groups, unlike the Irish have not integrated.
..and If, as seems the case here, certain ethnic groups are disproportionately represented/inclined to certain types of crime – then we need to say so – irrespective of any considerations of the impact on community relations – as in the longer run – ignoring problems for such reasons is likely to be entirely counter-productive – as seems to be the case in Rotherham.
LikeLike
Google in Charlene Downes, Blackpool.
LikeLike
Gruesome but such horrors are not restricted to Asian/Muslim communities.
LikeLike
Two crucial reasons why European nations have historically been successful with (peaceful) immigration.
Firstly, despite all our differences in languages and cultures, western Europeans are generally a pretty homogeneous bunch of peoples. In broad terms we have shared the same societies, technologies and customs since the 1700s. In terms of the general populations in individual countries we have also been quite familiar or at least aware of each other since the 1800s. Working-class Englishmen in Victorian London knew of and understood something of their Dublin, Paris or Berlin counterparts. Such peoples were not “alien” as such. That created a sense of a “European civilization” that all participated in. Migration and immigration in such a situation made assimilation easier. Migrant communities were simply absorbed.
However when you have immigration by peoples from radically different societies and cultures the challenges to assimilation are far, far greater and the chances for failure far, far worse.
Secondly, communications in the pre-electronic age were hugely different. If you migrated from the west of Ireland or rural Italy, or wherever as a poor working-class person in search of employment and a good life you were unlikely to return home. Communications if they did occur were by letter (or latterly by phone). Newspaper reports, letters or other migrants were your sources of information and contact. The tradition of holding wakes in Ireland for migrating sons and daughters was a real one. Other nations had similar customs of leave-taking.
We now live in the era of the world wide web, of email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, internet TV, satellite TV, mobile phones and SMS messages, etc. Of cheap air flights and trans- European road and rail networks. The pressures/need to rapidly assimilate in a host population are no longer there. I have Polish colleagues who can be simply Polish in Ireland in every way that counts except work. That may be the only place they need to speak or understand English on a regular basis. Outside of that they can exist within their own discreet communities as can their children, beyond schooling (and even then some Educate Together schools seem to be barely aware that they are situated in Ireland). They watch Polish TV or listen to Polish radio by cable, satellite or internet. Speak with home by email, video, phone or SMS. Travel home regularily or have visitors from home. Shop in Polish companies or companies with Polish staff, and socialise in same. I know several people, long-term residents in Ireland and now house-owners, who exist in an entirely segregated way and prefer to do so (it makes for some bizarre workplace chat). This inhibits long-term assimilation – in fact it may well prolong the period before it can occur perhaps making it a multi-generational issue.
These are challenges with no easy solution. One cannot force people to assimilate if they choose not to, one can only hope it will occurr naturally. However one cannot encourage or facilitate self-segregation either for that leads to a fractured society. And ultimately conflict.
LikeLike
Sionnach Fionn,
For me the crucial thing is being allowed to tell it is as it is. If, as seems the case in Rotherham, the Pakistani community, partially because of cultural attitudes to women, has allowed a situation to develop which means young girls are more vulnerable than in other communities – then that needs to be said.
Just as having an organisation like the Catholic Church which recruits people who are exclusively (and allegedly) celibate running our schools – it is reasonable to say that this particular ‘cultural’ behaviour is not one which is sensible in a modern western democracy.
This does not mean that Cathlolic priests or Muslims men are the ONLY groups to involve themselves in these practices but that for ‘cultural’ reasons they are MORE likely (than the general population) to be involved in certain societies i.e. Ireland(North and South) and Rotherham.
LikeLike
I generally dislike such labels but John Cronin seems to be nothing more or less than an old-fashioned BNP/NF man. Roll back the years and I’m sure that Paddy and the West Indians would be on his hit-list.
Is no one going to seriously challenge JC when he says that “This group of about 7000 appear to have raped 1400 (itself a fairly conservative estimate) adolescent white females in the course of the last decade.”?
For their own agendas the other contributors to this debate seem happy to accept that there is a sick and deranged culture in the immigrant Pakistani community in Britain – by extension in Pakistan itself? All muslim cultures worldwide? – that leads them to commit these crimes.
This is a trend that hadn’t manifested itself anywhere else until now though.
As illustrated by the Lawrence scandals etc, Britain’s police are not biased on the side of the immigrant communities though.
An entire police force, social workers, c.2800 parents/carers + untold numbers of friends didn’t really kick up much of a racket though.
Are we supposed to believe that random Muslims drew lots (!) to be the next man to drive the taxis? Or were there just some bad people driving taxis as happens in a lot of cities?
LikeLike
Is no one going to seriously challenge JC when he says that “This group of about 7000 appear to have raped 1400 (itself a fairly conservative estimate) adolescent white females in the course of the last decade.”?
No they won’t, because because these are the stats.
“For their own agendas the other contributors to this debate seem happy to accept that there is a sick and deranged culture in the immigrant Pakistani community in Britain”
Well, there clearly is.
“This is a trend that hadn’t manifested itself anywhere else until now though.”
It has manifested itself in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, High Wycombe, Oxford, Leeds, Blackpool and everywhere else in the UK where large numbers (or even small numbers) of Pakistani Moslems have settled. The total number of victims and perpetrators is likely to be well into the tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands. There is no point shooting the messenger.
LikeLike
I’m pretty opposed to censorship and John is a strong critic so I generally give him a free rein in the Comments. He does represent a viewpoint common amongst an older generation of Irish people or their ex-patriot offspring, especially those for whom the 1960s and ’70s were formative years. So it would be unfair to curtail his freedom of speech here. However I have blocked one recent contribution for some of the reasons you mention.
I think most of the other commentators have been fairly sceptical of John’s claims. Don’t mistake politeness for agreement 😉
LikeLike
Can anyone give me any facts or figures in any post which I have made which they disagree with? As I said earlier, name calling, messenger shooting, changing the subject and denialism do not constitute counter arguments.
LikeLike
I’m not asking for censorship (as I tend to agree with you there) but I felt that the polite counter-arguments to JC were arguing along lines laid down by JC.
Therefore the Muslim community as a whole is being debated after Rotherham rather than the rapists. A group of 7000 men didn’t do anything wrong – a (strangely unclear) number of actual perpetrators did.
JC is clearly very well read on his specialist subject of race and is clearly driving an agenda in his interpretations (as you neatly exposed). I don’t have much of a problem with a bit of honestly expressed nationalism/chauvinism but this dossier of reasons to dislike/ban/deport Muslims is different. I don’t think he represents a common viewpoint to be honest – he’s propagandising over raped little girls.
LikeLike
“opposition to the intellectual curiosity that for centuries characterized Islam” and yet for approximately 1000 years, the Islamic nations were leaps and bounds ahead of medieval and early-Renaissance Christendom in terms of science and medicine (it is due to Muslim scholars that the works of Aristotle were even known in Europe, for instance, Thomas Aquinas worked from Muslim sources and commentaries).
LikeLike
for approximately 1000 years, the Islamic nations were leaps and bounds ahead of medieval and early-Renaissance Christendom in terms of science and medicine (it is due to Muslim scholars that the works of Aristotle were even known in Europe”
This is a rather politically correct myth. There never was a Moslem golden age. All that the Moslems knew about science and medicine was absorbed by them from the Hellenised or Jewish populations of North Africa whom they conquered. Read Serge Trifcovic: “The Sword of the Prophet” and read also anything by Robert Spencer
LikeLike
Partly true, John, though the Middle East was a great melting pot of influences both native and European. There were no hard and fast lines or borders as we would understand them. The Arabs simply anticipated the European Renaissance and used some of the same resources mixed with numerous others. Not to mention their own developments and innovations. A golden age as such did exist in certain areas and at certain periods.
LikeLike
Agreed. ISIS/IS is actually going against the original trend of Islam after the initial period of religious fervour. It opposes the intellectual traditions of many Islamic nations.
LikeLike
“We are right and you are wrong” is the sum of Islamic intellectual tradition. Reform, in the shape of al-Bana and his Muslim Brotherhood , is regressive, not progressive. The Islamic world has degraded to the point where even wealth has failed to light a spark of intellectual curiosity, resulting in muslims being consumers and little else. More literature is translated from English to Spanish in one year than is translated from the worlds languages into Arabic in a decade ; Pakistan similarly lagging behind India culturally while politically it is reduced to a seething mass of hate and begrudgery. Throwing Muslims the bone of colonialism or imperialism has become, or is rapidly becoming, totally outdated.
LikeLike
Is that fair, though? If certain global powers imposed colonial borders and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East is it the fault of the peoples of the Middle East that they reflect the environment around them? It is like blaming an abused child for being anti-social or violent. What other way could they be? The West sowed the seeds of the whirlwind it is reaping.
LikeLike