How did Mohammed die?

[manualman]

Another thought…is Muslims did indeed bring higher education to Europe…how come it is only Europe that benefitted, and not the Middle east?

And it seems, all the great advances in science occurred in Europe, not in the Middle East…if indeed it was the Muslims who had higher education than those in Europe?

Can you explain this phenomena?

Muslims have DO have a point on this matter, but not a good one. It’s true that western Europe was mired in an intellectual backwater for a long time after the Roman Empire declined and it’s remnants moved from Rome to Constantinople. Jumping ahead several hundred years, it is also true that contact with the muslim east stimulated tremendous cultural, scientific and philosophical advances in the west.

But muslims are a bit disingenuous in taking credit for that. An awful lot of the “muslim” contributions to art, science, math, architecture, etc are actually outgrowths of other cultures conquered by Islamic armies and absorbed into the larger Islamic world. It’s true that in many cases muslim scholars built on top of those plundered treasures, but it’s also true that the advances generally peter out fairly quickly in the timeline of history.

Islam sees God as inscrutable and exhibits a disturbing tendency to shrug and say “It’s the will of God” in answer to questions about how the world works. Christianity, on the other hand, understands God to be beyond our comprehension, but not incompatible with our comprehension (i.e. we are created in his image). As such, we have a philosophy that expects the world to make sense or struggles hard to find explanations for things. In that way, the western world has made more of the cultural treasures that the Islamic world either discovered or plundered from others.

It really makes you wonder how the world would have evolved differently had Constantinople defeated the Islamic invaders and Christianity continued to flourish in that area of the world. Oops, I’m tangenting the thread, aren’t I?

Aside, count me as one fascinated at the peak into the conflicts between Sunni and Shia. Y’all squabble as badly as catholics and protestants!

 

[manualman]

After Europe benefited from the higher education from the Muslims, they turned around and colonized the world. They destroyed the Ottomon Empire, and they destroyed the endowments that funded many of the Islamic Universities across the Muslims world. The placed dictators in charge of the their countries and put the Islamic world into a dark age.

This cop-out doesn’t hold up to a plain history timeline. Islamic advances in science, technology, philosophy and education petered out LONG before the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

You can make a valid claim that the English did a horrifically masterful job of pillaging and plundering the carcass of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, but that ignores the sad state of affairs in the Ottoman Empire prior to the collapse. The sad truth is that culture had stagnated there for centuries.

 

[jimkhong]

1. His body is buried in the city of Medina

1. He was buried in Medina, which is where he died. His tomb is in a mosque called ‘Masjid an-Nabawi’-- you can Google it if you want more information. It’s one of the holiest mosques to muslims.

So, then is the story of Mohamad (p) ascending bodily to heaven on a white horse without basis. Isn’t this why the Al-Aqsa mosque the third most holy site in Islam?

Not trying to be offensive, a lady in my local community tells of how a Muslim cleric tried to convert the Christian girls to Islam (without parental consent, which is illegal - things like this happen in my country, unfortunately). When her turn to proclaim the shahadat during the ceremony, she asked the cleric whether Mohamad is in heaven because Muslims are asked to pray for him (her point is that we don’t pray for Jesus because we know he is already in heaven). The cleric replied that Muslims do not know where Mohamad is, which is why they pray for him. Seems an odd position for a Muslim to take from my view. (For the record according to her, all subsequent girls then refused to go through with the conversion and those who have already done so regretted doing so)

While you guys are still around, could I ask whether you as Muslims have any objections to non-Muslims adding the ‘s.a.w.’ when referring to the Prophet and ‘s.b.t’ (in English or in Arabic) when referring to God. You may be aware that this is a sensitive issue in my country where the government is taking the Catholic Church to court on the basis that Allah is exclusive to Muslims (Melkites, take note).