'@simval'
"
Not as widespread as you think. And Christian theologies do not make that claim, because since the Bible contradicts itself many times, it is an untenable position for a coherent theology. There is indeed something unique to Islam, the Quran is written in the first person, as if Allah himself was speaking through Muhammad. The Quran also claims to be the final revelation, nothing can ever contradict it anymore."
lol if you think the Koran is consistent. Nothing says "I am clueless about religion" or "I am a literal fundamentalist" louder than believing for a second that any religion has a basic objective reading with no conflicts and grey areas.
"Christianism was largely peaceful for the first 1000 years of its existence."
What in the sexual intercourse are you talking about. Is the only Christian violence you've ever heard of the Crusades or what.
"There was repression, but not done at the behest of the religion but from secular authorities wishing to preserve unity in their people's faith."
Oh ok, so when Christians do this it doesn't count as religious. But when Muslims do it is. Truly a scholar I'm dealing with here.
"Buddhism has very few wars I know of in its name."
Buddhism has rarely if ever become politically in power, Jainism too. They managed converts and patronage, but that was about it. They're also much less religions and more philosophies from the start. Comparisons to the Abrahamics and even to Polytheistic things like Hinduism is flawed and always has been except in some forms.
And even so when they have (well Buddhism) its proved to have the same oppressive state authority as the others. Modern day Burma showcases how Buddhism can file right into that violent sectarian and authoritarian role as well as any.
"Not as widespread as you think."
It would have been the absolute norm across the board prior to modern secularization of the west, nothing to credit Christianity with. And even still its a very common view in the US. And really this cuts to the problem with half your approach, because the west (for the most part) has introduced secularism and such on wide and deep scale by the present day...you seem to credit the resulting moderated and fairly liberal Christianity...to Christianity. Rather than seeing the pattern here suggests the issue in most of the Muslim world has been a lack of that process, and if anything an increase in fundamentalism in the last 40 years. Its extremely history illiterate.
"Hinduism is pretty insular, as its belief system doesn't necessarily claim other religions must be false."
Hinduism has produced tons of violence, and to even say it HAS a belief system shows you don't really know what it is. It's a catch all term for countless Indian pagan traditions that have somewhat merged over the years. Hindu extremists exist and are a mega problem in India even today, how you're unaware of this when they are the people who killed Gandhi I really can't say.
" If you look at Christianity, crusades occurred largely in a 300 years period and sprang up as a reaction to Muslim aggression on the Christian world."
The pilgrimage routes becoming dangerous because of nomadic invaders was not "MUSLIM AGGRESSION" any more than it being mostly in Byzantine territory made it "ON THE CHRISTIAN WORLD". The greatest farce of all are Christian apologists trying to whitewash the crusades. And why? Because the only people who could possibly have a rosy view of them are Western Christians. The people being attacked by the Turks were Eastern Christians, now ask them, Russian or Greek alike, and see how they view the Crusades.
And your "300 year period" here leaves out the entire colonial/imperial/exploration eras when religion played a massive role in the fate of the natives of the Americas, Africa, and other locales.
As well as the wars of religion back in Europe, and the general blowback of the Reformation.
"The entire Mediterranean, in the 7th century, was Christian, "
And Jewish. But yeah forgetting how the Jews were treated in the Christian world is another convenient amnesia that you need for your argument to function yes.
Also I know already you're about to assert that the Mediterranean was strongly Christian and was force converted. Except it wasn't. Conversion was really gradual and even then it wasn't complete.
That's no saying violence wasn't involved, but the Muslim conquerers actually tended to not force conversion. They were rougher on pagan religions, but even then Zoroastrianism lasted quite a while after Persia was conquered, and even still exists. The Middeast is littered with odd little paganish groups and small Christian populations left over from pre-Islamic times. This is heavily inconsistent with the usual attempts to paint things as massive conversion wars. Even whole areas that are still Christian in spite of living alongside and under Muslim domination for most of their history, see Georgia, Armenia, and Cyprus.
As for pagans in Europe, you have to go to deep European Russia to find any continuous populations of that (neo-norse pagan crap doesn't count lol).
The greatest weapon of conversion the Muslims wielded was political and economic control. Becoming Muslim meant full engagement with the new people in control, you'll find most conversions over time came down to that. And that many areas that converted were not heavily connected to the Christian centers of power either, such as Bosnia and Albania. They had loose affiliation and were very malleable.
"As late as the 19th centuries, Muslim pirates were still raiding coastal European towns to gather slaves, justifying this by the Quran and Allah, as the Barbary State's ambassador said, which was reported by Thomas Jefferson."
Making reference to religion in motives and cause was the absolute norm for the Christian world until even into the 20th century. It even still happens in places less secular and more conservative like Russia or my own US. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch christened the Russian intervention in Syria as a holy war fer cryin' out loud. But does that really make Orthodox Christianity the villain here? In it's whole?
"Catholicism recognizes the separation of Church and State,"
Ok so you made a token effort to read the history of Europe's edges, but not of Europe itself I see.
""Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's". "
A quote from the bible means the Catholic Church has never been a heavily political body with incredibly centralized structure to make virtually all other sects of both Christian and Islam blush? Really? Are you also implying that there are no quotes from the Bible (yes even New Testament) that are pro-earthly regimes with insinuations of them working through God? Real flimsy here. Also pointless because reality happened.
"The worst thing that the Catholic Church can do to you in Canon Law is excommunication. The Church itself never executed anyone, heretics found by the Inquisition were given over to secular authorities, to be judged by secular law."
This is so easily disproven I'm not even sure where to start. But the Holy See being a literal country for most of the last 1500 years (Papal States) where they carried out capital punishment is probably the easiest and most direct. I also like your weasly bullshit about how finding someone guilty in the Inquisition and then handing them over to the Catholic church dominated "secular" authorities for the dirty work means the Inquistors didn't know what was going to happened. Also the very idea that any kingdoms and states at that time were secular is funny.
"The golden age is a myth. "
Man you're really deep into some kooky crap if you think this lol.
"Considering the stability of the region and its centrality to the known world, the actual contribution of the Islamic world to world knowledge is amazingly small."
It doesn't count because it was in a really good location in the middle of stuff....? What?
Your kind of done arguing seriously aren't you.
"Most of what is attributed to it is actual just translating texts from other cultures and helping spread knowledge from the East to the West."
And doing a shitload with the stuff found in the texts, before that knowledge made its way to the West. I'm surprised you didn't go with another bullshit excuse about how "It was Persian culture that did it, them being Muslim at the time is coincidence!" that I've heard before.
"Meanwhile, the Islamic invasion of India ended a real golden age, that of India, and plunged the subcontinent into dark ages it is barely recovering from."
India was always a chaotic shifting warzone of conquerers from within and without. Vast amounts of their culture and language (especially the North) is defined by things brought from invaders and the subsequent internal conquest. The idea that when Muslims did it this was different and sexual intercourseed up the continent somehow is completely absurd.
Even so the main period routinely called a Golden Age is the Gupta Empire, which rise or fall had nothing to do with Muslims. In fact it fell before Islam even existed lol. And a large part of why it was a golden age was fairly long term (rare!) stability of rule over most of the continent. But yeah sure Muslims did it.
"To be fair, Islam's strict laws were indeed better than the chaos of "might makes right" tribal warfare that preceded it in many places. It is also superior to corrupt arbitrary rules by conquering monarchs, because there is a set of predictable laws by which it rules societies."
No matter how many times you try to assert some simple objective quality to Islam it won't make it true. Its every bit as varied and messy as all the Christian splinterings, up to and including bizarre Mormon like offshoots.
" But the problem is that the laws are stuck in the 7th century and cannot be changed because of their foundation in the holy texts of Islam."
I mean aside from the Hadiths and other side notations and writings, all the scholarly schools, all the splinter groups, the unorthodox groups, the syncretic hybrid religions that are partly descended from Islam, and modern more liberal approaches that funnily enough happened (as with Christianity and Judaism) regardless of how often folks like you and their own fundamentalists say it can't be done.
"As the Caliph Umar is reported saying regarding the great Persian library of Ctesiphon "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed, as for us Qur'an is sufficient"."
If you can even source that quote to begin with (which of course is dependent on your own source of everything here having it), I'm not sure why Umar would even be seen as an end all be all. This is like using anything a Pope ever said to prove Catholicism is bad. But of course knowing apparently literally nothing about the history of the Catholic church I understand your confusion there. Even just within Islam you'd have to be mega ignorant to think Caliphs were treated even back that early as infallible perfect saints or whatever. Do you even know what Shia Islam is? Because they hate Umar.
Considering the Islamic world hasn't had any Caliphs for like the last century (after the last one was forced out of power by...Muslims). There's not even much at all talking about any Caliph system in the texts to begin with. Quite comparable to Popes overall.
"A huge impact of these beliefs is that the Islamic world is very, very insular intellectually."
Aside from the golden age that you poorly hand waved with really comical excuses...and all that other general banal societal function throughout history. Frankly you haven't established a single reason why your claim here is true, let alone even in its manifestation unique to Islam. It just seems like some real big crap relying on the Muslim world missing out on a lot of the advancements of the past couple centuries that happened in Western Europe. Your relying on a historical trend that happened, and people just connecting that to Islam. So ok do you want to explain how Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Orthodox Christianity, and even Catholicism to some extent all also sucked? Like the end result of this lazy ass logic is Protestant supremacism. Whether you even know it or not.
"A UN report in 2002 noted that Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years."
Spain is a first world country with a free press. Aside from the oil boom monarchies there are no first world Arab countries, and even those are run by repressive monarchies. I'll bet viewing Spain's own 1000 history reveals it to be shitty until recently as well. lol if you think differently. Do you have like a Disney view of pre-developed Europe or something?
Take into account also that Spanish coexists with lots of other languages in it's cultural world, there is greater linguistic diversity in Europe than the Middle East.
In the Middle East..? Arabic covers a ridiculous amount of territory,from Mauritania all the way to the Zagros mountains, with only Turkish and Persian being powerful alternatives.
Even within Spain itself Spanish isn't the absolute language!
Also Arab is not the same thing as Muslim! Gosh that's a funny mistake for some sort of expert on the subject to make!
0
'@simval'
"
Not as widespread as you think. And Christian theologies do not make that claim, because since the Bible contradicts itself many times, it is an untenable position for a coherent theology. There is indeed something unique to Islam, the Quran is written in the first person, as if Allah himself was speaking through Muhammad. The Quran also claims to be the final revelation, nothing can ever contradict it anymore."
lol if you think the Koran is consistent. Nothing says "I am clueless about religion" or "I am a literal fundamentalist" louder than believing for a second that any religion has a basic objective reading with no conflicts and grey areas.
"Christianism was largely peaceful for the first 1000 years of its existence."
What in the sexual intercourse are you talking about. Is the only Christian violence you've ever heard of the Crusades or what.
"There was repression, but not done at the behest of the religion but from secular authorities wishing to preserve unity in their people's faith."
Oh ok, so when Christians do this it doesn't count as religious. But when Muslims do it is. Truly a scholar I'm dealing with here.
"Buddhism has very few wars I know of in its name."
Buddhism has rarely if ever become politically in power, Jainism too. They managed converts and patronage, but that was about it. They're also much less religions and more philosophies from the start. Comparisons to the Abrahamics and even to Polytheistic things like Hinduism is flawed and always has been except in some forms.
And even so when they have (well Buddhism) its proved to have the same oppressive state authority as the others. Modern day Burma showcases how Buddhism can file right into that violent sectarian and authoritarian role as well as any.
"Not as widespread as you think."
It would have been the absolute norm across the board prior to modern secularization of the west, nothing to credit Christianity with. And even still its a very common view in the US. And really this cuts to the problem with half your approach, because the west (for the most part) has introduced secularism and such on wide and deep scale by the present day...you seem to credit the resulting moderated and fairly liberal Christianity...to Christianity. Rather than seeing the pattern here suggests the issue in most of the Muslim world has been a lack of that process, and if anything an increase in fundamentalism in the last 40 years. Its extremely history illiterate.
"Hinduism is pretty insular, as its belief system doesn't necessarily claim other religions must be false."
Hinduism has produced tons of violence, and to even say it HAS a belief system shows you don't really know what it is. It's a catch all term for countless Indian pagan traditions that have somewhat merged over the years. Hindu extremists exist and are a mega problem in India even today, how you're unaware of this when they are the people who killed Gandhi I really can't say.
" If you look at Christianity, crusades occurred largely in a 300 years period and sprang up as a reaction to Muslim aggression on the Christian world."
The pilgrimage routes becoming dangerous because of nomadic invaders was not "MUSLIM AGGRESSION" any more than it being mostly in Byzantine territory made it "ON THE CHRISTIAN WORLD". The greatest farce of all are Christian apologists trying to whitewash the crusades. And why? Because the only people who could possibly have a rosy view of them are Western Christians. The people being attacked by the Turks were Eastern Christians, now ask them, Russian or Greek alike, and see how they view the Crusades.
And your "300 year period" here leaves out the entire colonial/imperial/exploration eras when religion played a massive role in the fate of the natives of the Americas, Africa, and other locales.
As well as the wars of religion back in Europe, and the general blowback of the Reformation.
"The entire Mediterranean, in the 7th century, was Christian, "
And Jewish. But yeah forgetting how the Jews were treated in the Christian world is another convenient amnesia that you need for your argument to function yes.
Also I know already you're about to assert that the Mediterranean was strongly Christian and was force converted. Except it wasn't. Conversion was really gradual and even then it wasn't complete.
That's no saying violence wasn't involved, but the Muslim conquerers actually tended to not force conversion. They were rougher on pagan religions, but even then Zoroastrianism lasted quite a while after Persia was conquered, and even still exists. The Middeast is littered with odd little paganish groups and small Christian populations left over from pre-Islamic times. This is heavily inconsistent with the usual attempts to paint things as massive conversion wars. Even whole areas that are still Christian in spite of living alongside and under Muslim domination for most of their history, see Georgia, Armenia, and Cyprus.
As for pagans in Europe, you have to go to deep European Russia to find any continuous populations of that (neo-norse pagan crap doesn't count lol).
The greatest weapon of conversion the Muslims wielded was political and economic control. Becoming Muslim meant full engagement with the new people in control, you'll find most conversions over time came down to that. And that many areas that converted were not heavily connected to the Christian centers of power either, such as Bosnia and Albania. They had loose affiliation and were very malleable.
"As late as the 19th centuries, Muslim pirates were still raiding coastal European towns to gather slaves, justifying this by the Quran and Allah, as the Barbary State's ambassador said, which was reported by Thomas Jefferson."
Making reference to religion in motives and cause was the absolute norm for the Christian world until even into the 20th century. It even still happens in places less secular and more conservative like Russia or my own US. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch christened the Russian intervention in Syria as a holy war fer cryin' out loud. But does that really make Orthodox Christianity the villain here? In it's whole?
"Catholicism recognizes the separation of Church and State,"
Ok so you made a token effort to read the history of Europe's edges, but not of Europe itself I see.
""Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's". "
A quote from the bible means the Catholic Church has never been a heavily political body with incredibly centralized structure to make virtually all other sects of both Christian and Islam blush? Really? Are you also implying that there are no quotes from the Bible (yes even New Testament) that are pro-earthly regimes with insinuations of them working through God? Real flimsy here. Also pointless because reality happened.
"The worst thing that the Catholic Church can do to you in Canon Law is excommunication. The Church itself never executed anyone, heretics found by the Inquisition were given over to secular authorities, to be judged by secular law."
This is so easily disproven I'm not even sure where to start. But the Holy See being a literal country for most of the last 1500 years (Papal States) where they carried out capital punishment is probably the easiest and most direct. I also like your weasly bullshit about how finding someone guilty in the Inquisition and then handing them over to the Catholic church dominated "secular" authorities for the dirty work means the Inquistors didn't know what was going to happened. Also the very idea that any kingdoms and states at that time were secular is funny.
"The golden age is a myth. "
Man you're really deep into some kooky crap if you think this lol.
"Considering the stability of the region and its centrality to the known world, the actual contribution of the Islamic world to world knowledge is amazingly small."
It doesn't count because it was in a really good location in the middle of stuff....? What?
Your kind of done arguing seriously aren't you.
"Most of what is attributed to it is actual just translating texts from other cultures and helping spread knowledge from the East to the West."
And doing a shitload with the stuff found in the texts, before that knowledge made its way to the West. I'm surprised you didn't go with another bullshit excuse about how "It was Persian culture that did it, them being Muslim at the time is coincidence!" that I've heard before.
"Meanwhile, the Islamic invasion of India ended a real golden age, that of India, and plunged the subcontinent into dark ages it is barely recovering from."
India was always a chaotic shifting warzone of conquerers from within and without. Vast amounts of their culture and language (especially the North) is defined by things brought from invaders and the subsequent internal conquest. The idea that when Muslims did it this was different and sexual intercourseed up the continent somehow is completely absurd.
Even so the main period routinely called a Golden Age is the Gupta Empire, which rise or fall had nothing to do with Muslims. In fact it fell before Islam even existed lol. And a large part of why it was a golden age was fairly long term (rare!) stability of rule over most of the continent. But yeah sure Muslims did it.
"To be fair, Islam's strict laws were indeed better than the chaos of "might makes right" tribal warfare that preceded it in many places. It is also superior to corrupt arbitrary rules by conquering monarchs, because there is a set of predictable laws by which it rules societies."
No matter how many times you try to assert some simple objective quality to Islam it won't make it true. Its every bit as varied and messy as all the Christian splinterings, up to and including bizarre Mormon like offshoots.
" But the problem is that the laws are stuck in the 7th century and cannot be changed because of their foundation in the holy texts of Islam."
I mean aside from the Hadiths and other side notations and writings, all the scholarly schools, all the splinter groups, the unorthodox groups, the syncretic hybrid religions that are partly descended from Islam, and modern more liberal approaches that funnily enough happened (as with Christianity and Judaism) regardless of how often folks like you and their own fundamentalists say it can't be done.
"As the Caliph Umar is reported saying regarding the great Persian library of Ctesiphon "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed, as for us Qur'an is sufficient"."
If you can even source that quote to begin with (which of course is dependent on your own source of everything here having it), I'm not sure why Umar would even be seen as an end all be all. This is like using anything a Pope ever said to prove Catholicism is bad. But of course knowing apparently literally nothing about the history of the Catholic church I understand your confusion there. Even just within Islam you'd have to be mega ignorant to think Caliphs were treated even back that early as infallible perfect saints or whatever. Do you even know what Shia Islam is? Because they hate Umar.
Considering the Islamic world hasn't had any Caliphs for like the last century (after the last one was forced out of power by...Muslims). There's not even much at all talking about any Caliph system in the texts to begin with. Quite comparable to Popes overall.
"A huge impact of these beliefs is that the Islamic world is very, very insular intellectually."
Aside from the golden age that you poorly hand waved with really comical excuses...and all that other general banal societal function throughout history. Frankly you haven't established a single reason why your claim here is true, let alone even in its manifestation unique to Islam. It just seems like some real big crap relying on the Muslim world missing out on a lot of the advancements of the past couple centuries that happened in Western Europe. Your relying on a historical trend that happened, and people just connecting that to Islam. So ok do you want to explain how Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Orthodox Christianity, and even Catholicism to some extent all also sucked? Like the end result of this lazy ass logic is Protestant supremacism. Whether you even know it or not.
"A UN report in 2002 noted that Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years."
Spain is a first world country with a free press. Aside from the oil boom monarchies there are no first world Arab countries, and even those are run by repressive monarchies. I'll bet viewing Spain's own 1000 history reveals it to be shitty until recently as well. lol if you think differently. Do you have like a Disney view of pre-developed Europe or something?
Take into account also that Spanish coexists with lots of other languages in it's cultural world, there is greater linguistic diversity in Europe than the Middle East.
In the Middle East..? Arabic covers a ridiculous amount of territory,from Mauritania all the way to the Zagros mountains, with only Turkish and Persian being powerful alternatives.
Even within Spain itself Spanish isn't the absolute language!
Also Arab is not the same thing as Muslim! Gosh that's a funny mistake for some sort of expert on the subject to make!