ninme

I’ve had this open since late Monday, but couldn’t decide whether to put it as an update here or give it a new post. Since I waited so long since option a was first published, well, that solves that problem. Anyway:

Insight Scoop - The Double Standard

Aznar also said that the Western world is in serious trouble when it comes to relations with the Islamic world, and not just because of radical Islamic terrorists. The former president said that poor leadership in the West has led to a sense that Western values are indefensible. “I can put on the table the names of various Western leaders who don’t believe in the West,” he said.

Unfortunately, no table big enough could be found, so the names have not yet been revealed. But what of Aznar’s complaint that Muslims have never apologized for invading and conquering Spain? A recent statement by the Muslim American Society, given in response to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture, “explains” why such apologies will probably never be made.

[I'm skipping the lengthy denial that anyone was ever forced to do anything.]

But, in addition to being confused (if Islam was never spread by the sword, why were Muslims continually invading and conquering countries for so many centuries? …[In The Myth of Islamic Tolerance] former Muslim Ibn Warraq writes:

Those [Muslim] apologists who continue to perpetuate the myth of Islamic tolerance should contemplate the massacre and extermination of the Zoroastrians in Iran; the million Armenians in Turkey; the Buddhists and Hindus in India; the more than six thousand Jews in Fez, Morocco, in 1033; hundreds of Jews killed in Cordoba between 1010 and 1013; the entire Jewish community of four thousand in Granada in 1066; the Jews in Marrakesh in 1232; the Jews in Tetuan, Morocco in 1790; the Jews of Baghdad in 1828; and so on ad nauseam.

Warraq outlines the intriguing theory that the myth of Islamic tolerance came about, in large part, because of mythology of the “noble savage,” which was developed by thinkers such as Montaigne, Pierre Jurieu, and Pierre Bayle. “Thus,” he writes, ” by the eighteenth century, the noble savage was simply a device to criticize and comment on the follies of one’s own civilization. The noble savage is no longer the simpleton from the jungle but a sophisticated and superior observor of the contemporary scene in Europe. By emphasizing the corruption, vice, and degradation of the Europeans, eighteenth-century writers exaggerated the putative superiority of the alien culture, the wisdom of the Chinese or Persian or Peruvian moralist and commentator.” Within this setting, many intellectuals were ready to “adopt the myth of Muhammad as a wise and tolerant ruler and lawgiver…”

One retort to this would be, “But what about the Crusades?”… [writes Bernard Lewis]:

Jihad is sometimes presented as the Muslim equivalent of the Crusade, and the two are seen as more or less equivalent. … But there is a difference. The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels. Christendom had been under attaack since the seventh century, and had lost vast territories to Muslim rule; the concept of a holy war, more commonly, a just war, was familiar since antiquity. Yet in the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history — in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companians and immediate successors. It has continued throughout Islamic history and retains its appeal to the present day. The word crusade derives of course from the cross and originally denoted a holy war for Christianity. But in the Christian world it has long since lost that meaning and … The one context in which the word crusade is not used nowadays is precisely the original religious one. Jihad too is used in a variety of senses, but unlike crusade it has retained its original, primary meaning. (pp 37-8).

And yet the mythology of nasty, brutish crusading Christians attacking peace-loving, tranquil Muslims continues, often promoted and continually allowed to pass for truth by many in the West who either should know better or who do not believe in the West. Perhaps it’s time to get Mr. Aznar that table.

That was really long, and I should have just said “read the whole thing”, but there’s a goldmine of searchable archiviness in there.

Former PM Aznar, at Barcepundit:

It is interesting to note that while a lot of people in the world are asking the pope to apologise for his speech, I have never heard a Muslim say sorry for having conquered Spain and occupying it for eight centuries.

Hah!