Post by zameel on Jan 28, 2009 19:43:08 GMT
So you know what Islam, the religion, is because you have visited Muslim countries? I've stayed at Egypt and Jordan and visited Qatar and lived in Bangladesh. I did not see any instance where women were treated worse than dogs or where religious minorities were attacked.
Modern mistreatment of women in Muslim countries is a result of colonialism. Amira Sonbol concludes from her study "Arab and Islamic women generally had more rights in previous centuries than they enjoy today. The reason for this decline is that nineteenth-century European social mores prompted a piecemeal and Victorian-era colonial application of shari’a law which quickly became accepted and codified as the ‘genuine’ Arab/Islamic tradition. Muslim women’s groups have shown, for example, that women had more freedom to initiate divorce before the colonial period, and that the many of repressive restrictions were added during the colonial era when state law subsumed and manipulated Islamic law."
Wahhabi (Saudi) and Islamist ideology has affected much of the Muslim world. Oliver Roy has shown the radicalisation of Afghans was a result of Wahhabi-sponsored madrasas in Peshawar and elsewhere whereas indigenous Afghan clerics were opposed to Wahhabi teaching.
This does not take into account many Muslim countries are third world degenerate autocratic police states (headed by irreligious men). As Daniel Price writes in his study on Islam and Human Rights:
"It is a common belief that Islamic-based government, when serving as an ideological foundation for government, facilitates the poor protection of human rights. However most studies of the relationship between Islam and individual rights have been at the theoretical and anecdotal levels. In this article, I test the relationship between Islam and humanr ightsa cross a sample of 23 predominately Muslim countries and a control group of non-Muslim
developing nations, while controlling for other factors that have been shown to affect human rights practices. I found that the influence of Islamic political culture on government has a statistically insignificant relationship with the protection of human rights"
www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1388004.pdf (Islam and Human Rights, A Case of Deceptive First Appearances, Daniel Price, 2002)
No, as I mentioned earlier - it is a result of Israeli policy in Palestine. In fact the Israelis use this to their advantage. Emira Qureshi writes:
As early as 1950 Hannah Arendt warned of the consequences of Israel’s exclusive identification with the West. “Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profited from the presence of the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences.” Arendt couldn’t have been more prophetic. With each Israeli-Palestinian conflict the frustration in the Arab and, increasingly, the wider Islamic world has led to a proliferation of antisemitism borrowed by anti-Israeli militants directly from Europe and based upon an ideology that is within the context of classical Islam. By justifying their most controversial settlement policies on the basis of Western civilizational superiority, Israeli governments risk re-creating within the Middle East the same ghetto conditions they had suffered in Europe, a Jewish ghetto this time surrounded by two hundred million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Supporters of Israeli settlement policies have warmly embraced the clash of civilizations thesis. The U.S.-Israeli alliance, self proclaimed as Western, has placed U.S. policy and power at odds with the increasingly intense support of the Palestianian cause among Muslims. It also allows rejectionist groups to argue against Israel’s right to exist on the grounds that Israel is, in the words of its own leaders, a bastion of Western civilization in the Middle East. For many who have known other bastions of Western civilization, from Crusader castles to colonial rule, such a self definition is not a confirmation of legitimacy.
To quote Qureshi again:
If one steps outside the present environment of moral triumphalism, the claim that post-Enlightenment Christian civilization is less violent than other traditions is breathtaking. The Enlightenment brought many benefits, including important formulations of human rights and democratic institutions. Among the children of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Christianity, however, are the colonial conquest and enslavement of much of the world, two world wars, a nuclear arms race that brought the world to the brink of destruction, massive environmental damage, and the Holocaust. Some examples were more secular than others. While World War I had little overt religious motivation, the destruction of the African civilizations in South Africa, the taking of the land, and the placing of the remnant populations in shrinking reservations and ultimately state apartheid were carried out with Bibles open, by Christians executing what they viewed as their divinely ordained right and duty. The development of a powerful and rejectionist Zionist lobby among evangelical groups in the U.S., many of whom have a long history of antisemitism, has accented yet again the contradiction inherent in an allegedly secular U.S. support for a nation-state based in large part on biblical promise. And within the rhetoric of those who proclaim the superiority of Western secular society is embodied an often surprisingly explicit missionary appeal to the superiority of Jesus as a religious figure and Christianity as a religion.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and a democracy. The reform to democracy was supported in large part by the ulema of that country.
Most Muslim countries are third world developing nations, hence corruption is to be expected, especially since many are autocratic and police states. But interesting to note: "For many Muslims it is a bitter irony that the dominant stereotype of Islam is based upon the Saudi model of police-state repression, religious intolerance, oppression of women, moral hypocrisy among the male elite,
and an aggressive and highly funded export of militant anti-Western ideology—and that the Saudi monarchy is kept in power by the very Western nations that display fear and loathing at that stereotype"
The reason many have a misconception that all Dhimmis were mistreated, second class citizens (Spencer in fact said they should not even be called citizens) is because of the non-academic independent writings of Bat Ye'or. The following is a response to Bat Ye'or by a professional historian of Islam Michael Sells (Haverford College):
Islam as Jihad and Dhimmitude (footnotes not added)
The writings of Giselle Litmann, who writes under the pseudonym of Bat Ye’or (“Daughter of the Nile”), were championed by Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul, who authored prefaces to her books. In two books, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam and The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: from Jihad to Dhimmitude, Ellul and Bat Ye’or portray Islam—always and everywhere—as an unchanging force of aggressive violence (jihad) and parasitic, enslaving absorption (dhimmitude). Although Bat Ye’or claims to be writing a history of Jewish and Christian peoples under Islamic rule, she concludes with a totalizing claim about the nature of Islam and its relationship to all non-Muslim peoples granted dhimmi status under Islamic governance, which would include Jews, Christians, and other “peoples of the book”:
‘The oblivion which surrounds the dhimmi past is not accidental; it reflects the abolition of dhimmi history. The annihilation of a community transfers its cultural heritage—civilization, arts, and sciences— to the dominating group. Cultural imperialism accompanies territorial imperialism; culture, monopolized by the authorities, becomes an additional instrument of domination and alienation. In fact, the umma claims a monopoly of culture: the dhimmis’ languages are banned, relegated to the liturgy; their monuments, testimony to their civilizations’ greatness, are destroyed or Islamized.’
These categorical judgments are buttressed with an elaborate scholarly apparatus that might seem quite impressive to those not familiar with Islamic history and with how much has been left out of the picture or falsified. The golden age of Hebrew poetry serves as one example of such falsification. Up through the period of late antiquity Hebrew poetry was confined to religious and liturgical contexts. It was only in the medieval Islamicate civilization that Jewish poets, in close cultural interaction with Arabic culture and poetic traditions, created the golden age of Hebrew secular poetry—in Andalus, foremost, but also in other areas of the Islamicate world, such as Egypt and Yemen. Although Jews in neighboring Christianruled territories made impressive cultural and literary achievements (in Kabbala mysticism, for example), they lacked the kind of secular poetic tradition their Jewish near neighbors had created under Islamic rule. Not only did Islam not relegate Hebrew to liturgical purposes and not forbid Jews from creating a secular poetry, it was Islam-governed Andalus that provided the conditions for the major premodern sustained manifestation—and a stunning manifestation it was—of Hebrew secular poetry.
Bat Ye’or does similar violence to the history of the Balkans. Under Ottoman rule South Slavs developed a major poetic tradition, both epic and lyric, a tradition that Catholics, Muslims, and Serb Orthodox shared. In the nineteenth century one version of this language became the self-conscious basis for Serbian national identity. Bat Ye’or’s own earlier admission that Serbian became the “official language of the Turkish chancellery for affairs related to the Balkan peninsula” does nothing to slow her rush to the categorical claim that under Islam the languages of dhimmi peoples were banned or confined to the liturgy.
Bat Ye’or’s claims that the umma, or Islamic polity, abolishes the history of Jews and Christians turns out to be less a description of an objective reality than a kind of self-reflection. If the history of Jews and Christians has been abolished under Islam, it is under the peculiar version of Islam presented by Bat Ye’or, where, indeed, the cultural achievements of Jews and Christians have been either expurgated or—insofar as they are mentioned at all—dismissed as treasonous collaboration with a slave master. The result is an erasure of all cultural achievements of non-Muslims in Bat Ye’or’s version of history in which Non-Muslims exist only as victims, deprived of all culture and meaning, or as treasonous collaborators in the annihilation of their own people. Islam developed its cultural ambience and civilizational treasures, Bat Ye’or claims, “in the midst of conquered peoples, feeding off their vigor and on the dying, bloodless body of dhimmitude.” This portrayal of Islam as cultural vampire is based in part upon an ignorance of nomadic societies that Bat Ye’or identifies with savagery and barbarism. She cannot entertain the possibility that the Arabs of Arabia could have had any culture at all; by definition, then, they had to be parasites on the cultures of those they conquered.
Bat Ye’or’s the cultural achievements of non-Muslims under Islamic governance is exemplified by implicit denial of the existence of the Serbian monasteries in Kosovo and throughout much of the former Yugoslavia. In the same way, Serbian nationalists, who extol the beauty and majesty of the Serbian art of Kosovo, who follow the ritual transportation of Prince Lazar’s relics from monastery to monastery, who catalogue the hundreds of architectural masterworks and priceless frescoes and icons that were built in pre-Ottoman times and survived five hundred years of Ottoman rule, will maintain, tenaciously, that the Ottomans annihilated or Islamicized all non-Islamic sacral and artistic heritage.20 This conflicted rage reached the level of mob pathology through the demonstrations in Serbia from 1987–1991, the rise to power of Slobodan Miloˇsevi´ c, and the subsequent genocide in Bosnia. In Bosnia Serb nationalists, motivated in part by fabricated claims of Muslim annihilation of Serb sacral heritage, waged a campaign of organized destruction against all Islamic monuments, including mosques, Sufi shrines, libraries, museums, tombs, and Ottoman-style secular architecture. When challenged on their portrayal of Ottoman rule as absolute evil, Serbian nationalists find in Bat Ye’or’s writings a non-Serb, academic validation.
Bat Ye’or depicts the Ottoman devs¸irme (conscription of young boys into the Janissary corps) as another essentialized aspect of Islamic polity, which she claims (echoing Serb nationalist polemic) “steals the blood of subject peoples.” No people should be expected to look back fondly at the abuses of their former colonizer, and Serbs have every justification for feeling resentment at the years of humiliation and domination symbolized most powerfully in the forced conscription (and conversion) of Serb boys. Yet in her portrayal of devs¸irme as the evil and eternal essence of Islam she fails to note that Ottomans, however flawed in this regard, were infinitely more tolerant of religious diversity than the rulers of Christian Europe who quickly eradicated the Muslim minorities in Spain and much of the Balkans. One of the few authorities Bat Ye’or cites on the evil of the devs¸irme system and its globalizing quality in Islam is the early twentieth-century Serb nationalist Jovan Cviji´ c. Devs¸irme elicits from Bat Ye’or not an analysis of the institution in history and in relation to Islam as religion and as polity, nor a condemnation of specific practices and specific abuses in the past, but generalizations about the timelessly evil essence of Islam.
Serbian religious nationalists cite in defense of their goal of destroying Bosnian Muslims a 1994 interview in which Bat Ye’or announces that Bosnia is a “spearhead” for the Islamicization of Europe. In the interview, Bat Ye’or even suggests that the independent Bosnia will serve as a staging ground for this attack on Europe by providing Muslim immigrants with European passports received in Bosnia. The accusation is particularly forced given the fact that most Muslims come to Europe for employment and even a successful Bosnia would hardly offer the employment opportunities offered by Germany and France in the past few decades. Bat Ye’or’s polemic against Islam has moved full circle, as supporters of contemporary Serb nationalists cite her as a scholarship authority, while she bases her observation upon the writings of an earlier Serb religious nationalist who worked for a greater Serbia.
Whereas Bat Ye’or poses her metaphysics of Islam as history, her collaborator Jacques Ellul writes from the position of Christian superiority over other religions, Islam in particular. Ellul claims that Islam (as opposed to his own tradition) treats women unfairly and is, unlike Christianity, “essentially violent!” (exclamation Ellul’s). Ellul finds a quote from an almost unknown fourteenth-century misogynist Islamic theologian about the alleged lack of souls in women and, like Bat Ye’or, makes an immediate extrapolation from a particular example to generalization about the nature of Islam.26 (Ellul at this point is seemingly oblivious to similar statements found throughout the works of St. Augustine, the most influential figure of the western Christian tradition.)
The moral polemic is founded upon an implicit comparison of Islamic polity to Christian polity, particularly to the polity of European Christianity. Thus the alleged dhimmi-jihad nature of Islam is said to be impervious to Western, Christian values (human rights, democracy, tolerance, and peace). Bat Ye’or, in rejecting analogies between dhimmi communities in Islam and Islamic minorities in Europe, alleges that the Muslims in Europe are “voluntary, economic immigrants” and that the “religious minorities of Christendom have never represented the remnants of national majorities. The claim is doubly dubious. First, European Muslim communities such as Slavic Muslims are defined out of existence, since they are obviously not economic immigrants or even immigrants at all. Second, Bat Ye’or accepts the myth of purity of origin that would postulate Christianity as an indigenous religion throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and other parts of Christendom. Along with Slavic Muslims, American Indians and Australian Aborigines are also defined out of existence. As for those areas in Christendom where there really are no “indigenous, formerly majority populations, reduced by persecution and exile to a minority status,” the reason for the absence is that the earlier populations were so thoroughly annihilated, converted, or forcibly assimilated that they no longer exist as communities that could be subjected to minority status. Bat Ye’or’s claims erase the fact that pre-Christian pagans were killed or converted by force in the early Middle Ages (without the relative luxury of any analogous status to that of dhimmis), that any trace of religious dissidence during the High Middle Ages and Renaissance was effaced by the Inquisition and witch burnings, that the descendants of Muslims, the Moriscos, were “ethnically cleansed” in 1609, that the Jewish community of Spain was expelled in 1492, and that European Jews were subjected to repeated persecution ending in the Holocaust. By obscuring the existence of pre-Christian and other old, non-Christian communities in Europe as well as the reason for their disappearance in other areas of Europe, Bat Ye’or constructs an invidious comparison between the allegedly humane Europe of Christian and Enlightenment values and the ever present persecution within Islam. Whenever the possibility is raised of actually comparing circumstances of non-Christians in Europe to non- Muslims under Islamic governance in a careful, thoughtful manner, Bat Ye’or forecloses such comparison.
While Bat Ye’or claims to write history, Ellul writes a theology of history: It will probably be said that every religion in its expanding phase carries the risks of war, that history records hundreds of religious wars and it is now a commonplace to make this connection. But it is, in fact, “passion”—it concerns mainly a fact which it would be easy to demonstrate does not correspond to the fundamental message of the religion. This disjuncture is obvious for Christianity. In Islam, however, jihad is a religious obligation. It forms part of the duties that the believer must fulfill; it is Islam’s normal path to expansion. (emphasis Ellul’s) Christianity’s superiority to Islam rests in Ellul’s proposition that religious violence in Islam is a duty, whereas religious war and persecution in Christianity has only been a matter of passion. Passion, precisely. Passion is a defining moment in Christian theology. Passion is reenacted in the calendar, in the Mass, in the art. The manipulation and abuse of the passion of Jesus was a guiding motif for the original persecutions of the Jews, often stirred up directly in connection with the Passion Play. Passion was the dynamis of the six hundredth Vidovdan anniversary at Kosovo that set the stage for the assault on Bosnia’s Muslims. The passion of Lazar is the central construct behind the proposition that Serbs can never live with Muslims and that the Serb nation will not be resurrected until the Christ killers and race traitors are exterminated.
Miroljub Jevti´ c, one of Belgrade’s academic specialists on the question of Muslims, stated at the beginning of the genocide in Bosnia that Slavic Muslims of today bear the blood on their hands for the death of Serbs martyred in fight against the Ottoman Turks. Such a statement is rooted in the Kosovo passion and the Christoslavic notion of conversion as race betrayal and race transformation. A more recent statement by Jevti´ c is rooted in the same globalized “history” of Islam that is presented by Serbian religious militants and by Bat Ye’or. The Serb nationalist academic and “expert” can gaze at the Serbian monasteries, art, and culture that survived five hundred years of Ottoman rule, draw inspiration from them, and then speak as if those same monuments do not and cannot exist, that by the very definition of Ottoman rule they must have been “destroyed or Islamized.” Jevti´c meditates upon the evil essence of Islam and upon the premise—woven throughout the works of Ellul and Bat Ye’or, that, unlike Christianity, Islam is unchanging and unchangeable; that even when it appears to change it quickly reverts to its essence of aggressive violence and enslavement. He meditates upon the killing of the Christ-prince Lazar, the racial transformation that supposedly occurs when a Slav converts to Islam (Turkification), and he brings together passion and historical postulate to conclude:
‘If you want to destroy a Turk, you must destroy his every part. If you do not do this, you risk that he moves about like a whole Turk, that is the whole of Bosnia, and becomes dangerous like the whole of Bosnia. Acting strategically, the designers—that is the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—did not know this, and the leaders of the Republika Srpska, having followed the advice from Belgrade, made a strategic mistake that is difficult to correct. The only remedy would be to completely destroy each “part of the Turk’s body.”
If Ellul and Bat Ye’or’s thesis is correct, if Islam is an unchanging force of aggression and enslavement, if any appearance of tolerance, democracy, or multireligious compatibility is by nature ephemeral and will lead to an inevitable reversion to the unchanging Islamic core nature, then Jevti´ c’s conclusion is ineluctable and the totalizing violence he advocates against his Slavi´ c Muslim neighbours is not only justified, it is required.
The influence of Jacques Ellul and Bat Ye’or has extended beyond Serbian nationalists and their sympathizers in French-speaking Europe to North America. Their writings have become central to what might be called the “Global Persecution of Christians Awareness Movement,” an attempt by the religious right in the U.S. to make the protection of Christians and Christ Christian evangelization around the world a congressionally mandated aspect of U.S. foreign policy. Through such efforts the Christian Awareness Movement works assiduously to supplement the traditional anti-Communist ideology of the religious right with an equally developed anti-Muslim position. Bat Ye’or has also been championed by the influential U.S. Institute on Religion and Public Life, one of the organizations that has helped gain her a major voice in the U.S. Congress.
In the writings of Bat Ye’or and Jacques Ellul the parallel between the two “evil empires” is made explicit. Not only is Islam a global threat to Western civilization, it has already begun to create the “Dhimmitude of the West.” Through unargued assertions that, while Christianity has changed, Islam has not changed and cannot change, Bat Ye’or creates a vision of Islam as an evil, infiltrating force that, even if it seems capable of evolution, will revert to its innate character of jihad and dhimmitude. Bat Ye’or and Ellul offer one and only possibility for change: Islam can change, they write, as Soviet communism changed at the end of the cold war—that is, by ceasing to exist.
Extracted from The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (which seeks to expose the myth of a clash of civilisations).
