Women and Islam

[sedonaman]

But another excuse by someone (sedonaman) to attack Islam?

What’s wrong with attacking Islam? Islam is an idea, not a person. People question Christianity all the time, and we don’t consider it “attacking”.

 

[Sister_Amy]

What’s wrong with attacking Islam? Islam is an idea, not a person. People question Christianity all the time, and we don’t consider it “attacking”.

So?

 

[Jay53]

I had a legitimate on topic question: (at least I thought so anyway. )

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sister Amy
That’s nice… popcorn was more off-topic than Palestine, I’d think.

But this is actually a really good question. Unfortunately the answer is rather murky. Sorry. It’s complicated to answer because it doesn’t really fit in either of the three categories, in the way that you asked it.

You asked only about leaving the home, though, and not traveling (which is a different issue.) So I’m going to stick with just leaving the home for mundane matters.

It’s true that a married couple is supposed to have an agreement about what they do outside of the home, and that they know where the other person is. If a husband is leaving the home, his wife has a right to know where he is, and a husband has a right to know where his wife is when she leaves the home. That’s the real objective, and not keeping a woman locked up inside a house (which is absurdly inhumane!)

So there is a Shari’a basis to the statement, that a woman should have an agreement with her husband about leaving the home, that he knows where she is. It doesn’t mean she has to ask his permission every single time she steps outside. It’s like if they have an agreement she will go to school, and it means she has class twice a week at night, then she’ll be gone all those time, and he knows about it up front so she doesn’t need to “ask permission” each night in order to go to class. That’s pretty silly.

But if she were never to tell her husband where she was, it’d be a problem. Or if he needed her for something during that time and didn’t know where she was (I mean an emergency, like he had to go to the hospital or something.)

So I think that some people really take this to an extreme. In fact, I know some people do. The man will prevent his wife from ever leaving, and he won’t tell her where he goes and he’ll be gone a lot. I’ve seen that happening–and it’s wrong and unfair.

So let’s see… there is a Shari’ah basis, which is frequently misinterpreted by culture. When people see that sort of injustice, I think they perceive it exactly as it is–as injustice, and wrong. But the misperception is more on the people who do it, really. It might be the cases that this is exaggerated even further based on culture, I guess, which could make it cultural too.

And it doesn’t apply for a male relative–she doesn’t need permission of a male relative, it’s just supposed to be an agreement with her husband if she is married.

I was just asking more of a general everyday errand running/want to get out of the house type situation.

So it’s more of a general “common courtesy” type of thing? If I know I won’t be home all day (i.e. going shopping all day) I would let my husband know? But, if I’m just doing errrands or short trips then I wouldn’t have to call him?

So, just for example, I’m at home during the day and I decide I want to go to the gym I would just be able to leave without calling my husband at work to tell him where I’m going? Or then, say I decide in the middle of the afternoon I want to go to the library - I can just go? How far does the sharia basis of the law go?

 

[jakasaki]

**sedonaman, you have dug up a lot of christian history. I mean you christian people had quite a lot of land under your control since 300 or 400 A.D. From where and from whom did you take all that land?

I never allowed any one to capture any of your land. You said planten did this and that.

Actually, it was wrong to disturb the weakling state of Madinah by the nearby christian states under the poweful Army of Caesar of Rome. It was informed by the King Soloman in one of his songs:

“O daughters of Jarusalem, I beseech you by the oath of the deers and … of the fields that you do not disturb and do not wake up my beloved until my beloved would like to wake up itself…” Songs ch.2 verse 7.**
The actual words are:

songs 2:7, O, Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the does of the field: that you
Do not arouse or awaken my love
until it so desires. (wakes up itself)…

That was an advice in advance to the Jews and the christians that they should not disturb the man of God Muhammad (the beloved of Soloman) and should not wake him up until he wakes up himself. It was an advice to the people of books that they should not try to pick any fight with Muhammad, the last prophet. That is because the prophets do not attack any one and do not address any one until they are provoked…

But the people of the books were heedless of the advice of King Soloman.

You’ve got to be kidding right?

If I read your posting correctly, this has nothing to do with mohamad, never did, never will…

Where and how do you associate “The Song of Songs” with mohamad… I am quite currious…!

 

[jakasaki]

You’ve got to be kidding right?

If I read your posting correctly, this has nothing to do with mohamad, never did, never will…

Where and how do you associate “The Song of Songs” with mohamad… I am quite currious…!

Planten - forgetaboutit!!!

**Do not reply because now again at this point the main topic is going in a different direction I must be courteous to the poster… **

Ah… I can see how these threads go astray… It’s like you fall into a trap and can’t get out!!!

 

[sedonaman]

So?

You asked a question. I provided one possible answer. Maybe someone else has another.

 

[dzheremi]

I do not think it is an “attack” on Islam to recognize that all of the land that is now “Islamic” with the exception of the Arabian Peninsula itself is the result of Islamic conquest following the death of Muhammad. That is simply a fact of history, and itself carries no value judgment. The question of whether or not it is a justified expansion, of course, comes down to where you personally find yourself, religiously. For Christians, “Palestine”, “Iraq”, “Algeria”, et. al. are known as incubators of the early Church, ripped from their rightful places in our shared history by Muslim conquest. This is why it is not “stupid” in the least to remember their (pre-Islamic) histories, even though Muslims like to try to tell us that everyone in those places converted en masse because they saw the truth of Islam. We know better.

Sedonaman and others are absolutely right that this is not stupid, but absolutely essential to the topic at hand if you are going to bring up the idea that “Jews should have gone somewhere that wasn’t already occupied by non-Jews.” We tell you in turn that this should also apply to Muslims not because Christians don’t have their own history of conquest of non-Christians (though the early church that we are referring to when we talk about the original spread of Christianity does have a fundamentally different modus operandi than the Islamic conquerers of the early post-Muhammad period, due to the Christians’ different evangelistic principles, e.g. the six shipwrecked Assyrian monks who converted the Christian king of Axum in the fourth century did not have any force with them, which was not the case with the Moors who invaded Spain, for instance), but because if you were to apply the same restriction that you are demanding of others to your own people, then your religion would still be stuck in the Arabian Peninsula, with no place to go.

What Puritans or Spanish missionary-conquerers have to do with anything, I don’t know. Last time I checked, neither were Apostles, Assyrians, or Egyptians, and those are the groups that did the real leg-work of spreading Christianity outside of Palestine. So there is no apt comparison to be made between the spread of Christianity and the spread of Islam, because in Christianity’s case, the spread became violent and oppressive once Christianity had become associated with the power of empire. In the case of Islam, apparently empire was the whole point to begin with, so there was not a time outside of the early period of Muhammad’s preaching (when he was rebuked by basically everyone) when Islam could be said to be without the corrosive power of empire behind it.

If Jews are to leave Israel-Palestine because there were already people of other religions living there, then surely Muslims must be close behind them, not only in Palestine, but in Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Afghanistan (do you ever wonder where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan came from?), India/Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Chinese Turkistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Nigeria, Sudan…even certain parts of the Arabian Peninsula itself might be fair to list, given the historically large Jewish communities in the Yemen.

It is the height of ridiculousness for Muslims to appeal to history to support their land claims while simultaneously closing their eyes to the pre-Islamic histories of the places they now claim as exclusively “theirs” (and don’t even start with the idea that because there are some Christians or Jews in certain places that means that the societies are open to everyone…Islamic societies are Islamic specifically because all of the rights, privledges and obligations of their citizenry are defined with reference to the Qur’an and its code of law and social conduct, making the resulting society inherently unequal with regards to non-Muslims).

 

[Sister_Amy]

I had a legitimate on topic question: (at least I thought so anyway. )

I was just asking more of a general everyday errand running/want to get out of the house type situation.

So it’s more of a general “common courtesy” type of thing? If I know I won’t be home all day (i.e. going shopping all day) I would let my husband know? But, if I’m just doing errrands or short trips then I wouldn’t have to call him?

So, just for example, I’m at home during the day and I decide I want to go to the gym I would just be able to leave without calling my husband at work to tell him where I’m going? Or then, say I decide in the middle of the afternoon I want to go to the library - I can just go? How far does the sharia basis of the law go?

Well, life is different now with mobile phones and text-messaging. It’s likely your husband would not have a problem with you making around-town trips in general without asking his permission, since you could always call if you ran into any problems, and it’s reasonably safe in your neighborhood.

 

[algebra]

The only solution left is a single state that’s open to all the people.

I am not sure how you reached that conclusion.

 

[sedonaman]

I do not think it is an “attack” on Islam to recognize that all of the land that is now “Islamic” with the exception of the Arabian Peninsula itself is the result of Islamic conquest following the death of Muhammad. That is simply a fact of history, and itself carries no value judgment. The question of whether or not it is a justified expansion, of course, comes down to where you personally find yourself, religiously. For Christians, “Palestine”, “Iraq”, “Algeria”, et. al. are known as incubators of the early Church, ripped from their rightful places in our shared history by Muslim conquest. This is why it is not “stupid” in the least to remember their (pre-Islamic) histories, even though Muslims like to try to tell us that everyone in those places converted en masse because they saw the truth of Islam. We know better.

Sedonaman and others are absolutely right that this is not stupid, but absolutely essential to the topic at hand if you are going to bring up the idea that “Jews should have gone somewhere that wasn’t already occupied by non-Jews.” We tell you in turn that this should also apply to Muslims not because Christians don’t have their own history of conquest of non-Christians (though the early church that we are referring to when we talk about the original spread of Christianity does have a fundamentally different modus operandi than the Islamic conquerers of the early post-Muhammad period, due to the Christians’ different evangelistic principles, e.g. the six shipwrecked Assyrian monks who converted the Christian king of Axum in the fourth century did not have any force with them, which was not the case with the Moors who invaded Spain, for instance), but because if you were to apply the same restriction that you are demanding of others to your own people, then your religion would still be stuck in the Arabian Peninsula, with no place to go.

What Puritans or Spanish missionary-conquerers have to do with anything, I don’t know. Last time I checked, neither were Apostles, Assyrians, or Egyptians, and those are the groups that did the real leg-work of spreading Christianity outside of Palestine. So there is no apt comparison to be made between the spread of Christianity and the spread of Islam, because in Christianity’s case, the spread became violent and oppressive once Christianity had become associated with the power of empire. In the case of Islam, apparently empire was the whole point to begin with, so there was not a time outside of the early period of Muhammad’s preaching (when he was rebuked by basically everyone) when Islam could be said to be without the corrosive power of empire behind it.

If Jews are to leave Israel-Palestine because there were already people of other religions living there, then surely Muslims must be close behind them, not only in Palestine, but in Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Afghanistan (do you ever wonder where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan came from?), India/Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Chinese Turkistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Nigeria, Sudan…even certain parts of the Arabian Peninsula itself might be fair to list, given the historically large Jewish communities in the Yemen.

It is the height of ridiculousness for Muslims to appeal to history to support their land claims while simultaneously closing their eyes to the pre-Islamic histories of the places they now claim as exclusively “theirs” (and don’t even start with the idea that because there are some Christians or Jews in certain places that means that the societies are open to everyone…Islamic societies are Islamic specifically because all of the rights, privledges and obligations of their citizenry are defined with reference to the Qur’an and its code of law and social conduct, making the resulting society inherently unequal with regards to non-Muslims).

THANK YOU !!! Your post is a keeper. :clapping:

 

[algebra]

Fantastic Post above. I would like to see Amy’s response to it.

 

[Jay53]

Well, life is different now with mobile phones and text-messaging. It’s likely your husband would not have a problem with you making around-town trips in general without asking his permission, since you could always call if you ran into any problems, and it’s reasonably safe in your neighborhood.

Are sharia laws adaptable/changeable based on changing technology/culture? Who is permitted to change these laws and where are the new laws written down so that everyone knows what they are?

 

[planten]

Are sharia laws adaptable/changeable based on changing technology/culture? Who is permitted to change these laws and where are the new laws written down so that everyone knows what they are?

**There are many permissible ways in Islamic law. We follow the law of Quran. Also we try to do what our prophet did as well (good) as we can. But it is not a necessary thing to do that. If the prophet did something and told us to do the same then it becomes binding on us. Otherwise, there is no restriction if he did not tell us to do a thing which he did himself.

Briefly, I may explain that we follow the Quran and Sunnah. The Sunnah is of two types:

1. The obligatory (mu’akkidah).
2. The non-obligatory. (Ghair Mu’akkidah).

The Sunnah can be found from the actual observed practice of the holy prophet and from the books of Hadith. The Quran is the perfect guard over all. Allah has guarded our faith by words and deed. We are protected forever because Allah has promised us the protection in words and deeds.

Allah says in Quran:

“We have sent down the Reminder and We are the protector of it”. That is about the Quran. It is fully protected in its text (and meaning).

In an important hadith, the Prophet Muhammad said " Allah will keep on sending at the head of every century such people that they will reform the religion for the Muslim nation."

That means if anything wrong creeps into the religion, those specialists (Reformers, Mujaddideen) will explain the right way and will route out the mistakes that crept into the faith.

So there is great protection for the Muslims till the end of times. It is a promise from Allah and Allah never goes against His promise. Alhamdu Lillah.**

 

[Sister_Amy]

Are sharia laws adaptable/changeable based on changing technology/culture? Who is permitted to change these laws and where are the new laws written down so that everyone knows what they are?

Here we get into the subtle distinction between two terms–Shari’ah, and Fiqh.

Shari’ah is Sacred Law–it is the law in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. And fiqh is like the law derived from the Qur’an and Sunnah.

You start with the basic laws and principles of Shari’ah, and then apply the specific situation against it. So when you have a particular question, you kind of (name removed by moderator)ut the variables to find the answer to the question. For example, a person asks the following question, “Do I have to make wudhu, if the water is very cold and because of an illness it might cause me harm or death, or may I make purification with dirt instead?”

So we start with what we know, which is the principles and specific laws of Shari’ah. We know (because of the Qur’an) that it is obligatory for a person to make wudhu (ablution) before he prays. We know (also because of the Qur’an) that if a person is not able to find water, then he is allowed to use dirt instead. It’s also a principle that Shari’ah aims to protect life (as well as religion) and doesn’t allow harm or harming. Those are the Shari’ah principles/laws.

Then we take the particular situation. So we know that there is a possibility that the person’s life or health might be in danger if he uses the water which is, in this case, very cold.

So can the person use dirt instead of the cold water?

The answer is actually yes. The person can use dirt instead of water. Basically we start with Shari’ah, and then apply the Sacred Law, (i.e., the divine commandments which are Shari’ah), to a person’s practical situation (by using fiqh.)

So the laws of Shari’ah are actually fixed. Adultery is forbidden, for instance. It’s always going to be forbidden and it’s never going to be adaptable. Prayer is five times a day–not adaptable. The laws of Shari’ah tend to be general, while Fiqh is more specific. You start to interpret these laws based on a particular situation–and that quite often is adaptable. You aren’t changing Shari’ah, but rather it is the Fiqh that changes because a person’s situation changed.

So how do you know what the law is? Most people aren’t experts in either the principles of Shari’ah or of Fiqh, so they are supposed to go to someone who is.

You see, the example I gave you was a real example–actually happened. And the man didn’t know if he could use dirt, so he asked someone. And that someone didn’t know the answer, but he told the person he had to use water, and the man died from it. The Prophet (saws) was really upset about that, and emphasized the importance of going to someone who has knowledge, if you don’t have knowledge, to find out the answers to these questions. But once you learn the principles, it gets a lot easier to understand the rulings.

I hope that helps.

 

[Sister_Amy]

I do not think it is an “attack” on Islam to recognize that all of the land that is now “Islamic” with the exception of the Arabian Peninsula itself is the result of Islamic conquest following the death of Muhammad. That is simply a fact of history, and itself carries no value judgment. The question of whether or not it is a justified expansion, of course, comes down to where you personally find yourself, religiously. For Christians, “Palestine”, “Iraq”, “Algeria”, et. al. are known as incubators of the early Church, ripped from their rightful places in our shared history by Muslim conquest. This is why it is not “stupid” in the least to remember their (pre-Islamic) histories, even though Muslims like to try to tell us that everyone in those places converted en masse because they saw the truth of Islam. We know better.

What you have said is very misleading, I think. It is quite often an “attack” on Islam when a person derails a topic with an overwhelming amount of data (i.e., so much that it is not the result of actual research on the poster but a paste job) in order to deliberately show Islam in a bad light by subjectively interpreting that data. What the poster did was attack Islam, quite simply.

Secondly, to attribute to spread of Islam to “conquest” only is misleading. Islam spread by da’wah for 13 years in Mecca. When the Muslims migrated to Medina, the Meccans went to war with them. Islam really truly began to spread, however, when they made a peace treaty. People started coming to Islam, especially in the Arabian peninsula, in the thousands. And that is what happened. By the time the Prophet Muhammad (saws) died, the entire Arabian peninsula had embraced Islam. Not necessarily sincerely, but certainly not under force. The Arabs were united for the first time.

Then Islam continued to spread–people weren’t forced to convert en masse at the edge of the sword as you might believe, they were given a choice. Not everyone had to convert, and many people didn’t. The caliphs tried to ensure that no town came under the rule of Islam by force. But sure enough, as time went on, the armies became less and less faithful–I mean, come on, they turned on themselves! The Muslims were fighting each other!

But that doesn’t change Islam. And by then the Prophet Muhammad had long since been dead.

Yet there are some places that Islam spread entirely peacefully. Into the East, most notably. India, for instance, was ruled by Muslims for centuries. Did you know that? And what are most Indians today? Certainly not Muslims! And the absolute largest Muslim country on the planet today is Indonesia–NEVER was Indonesia ruled by a Muslim empire.

Now, if you still wish to attack the spread of Islam, you must equally attack the spread of Christianity and tie it with the Roman Empire of the past, and more recently the English Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the French Empire. How did South and Central America become Catholic, anyway? How did the USA become primarily Protestant-Christian? For this reason it’s dishonest to attack the spread of Islam and say that Islam was only spread by force.

continued…

 

[Sister_Amy]

Sedonaman and others are absolutely right that this is not stupid, but absolutely essential to the topic at hand if you are going to bring up the idea that “Jews should have gone somewhere that wasn’t already occupied by non-Jews.”

Hold on here–that was not my idea at all! Nononono. If Jews wanted an entirely Jewish state, they had no right to FORCIBLY EXPEL the existing population. They did it anyway. People have done it for centuries. I’m telling you that THEY DIDN’T HAVE THE RIGHT.

We tell you in turn that this should also apply to Muslims not because Christians don’t have their own history of conquest of non-Christians (though the early church that we are referring to when we talk about the original spread of Christianity does have a fundamentally different modus operandi than the Islamic conquerers of the early post-Muhammad period, due to the Christians’ different evangelistic principles, e.g. the six shipwrecked Assyrian monks who converted the Christian king of Axum in the fourth century did not have any force with them, which was not the case with the Moors who invaded Spain, for instance), but because if you were to apply the same restriction that you are demanding of others to your own people, then your religion would still be stuck in the Arabian Peninsula, with no place to go.

I am not suggesting at all that religions can’t spread. But you’ve made a serious mistake here thinking that Christians don’t have a history of conquest. Because they absolutely do.

What Puritans or Spanish missionary-conquerers have to do with anything, I don’t know. Last time I checked, neither were Apostles, Assyrians, or Egyptians, and those are the groups that did the real leg-work of spreading Christianity outside of Palestine. So there is no apt comparison to be made between the spread of Christianity and the spread of Islam, because in Christianity’s case, the spread became violent and oppressive once Christianity had become associated with the power of empire. In the case of Islam, apparently empire was the whole point to begin with, so there was not a time outside of the early period of Muhammad’s preaching (when he was rebuked by basically everyone) when Islam could be said to be without the corrosive power of empire behind it.

Violent and oppressive? The spread of Islam was absolutely not violent or oppressive during the rule of Muhammad, nor during the rule of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, as they are called. It is what you see once the lands of Islam became ruled by Empires. Precisely the same situation as Christianity. Precisely the same.

If Jews are to leave Israel-Palestine because there were already people of other religions living there, then surely Muslims must be close behind them, not only in Palestine, but in Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Afghanistan (do you ever wonder where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan came from?), India/Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Chinese Turkistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Nigeria, Sudan…even certain parts of the Arabian Peninsula itself might be fair to list, given the historically large Jewish communities in the Yemen.

Why should Jews have to leave Palestine? I don’t think they should have to. Just like I don’t think anyone else should have to. Have you not been paying attention?

It is the height of ridiculousness for Muslims to appeal to history to support their land claims while simultaneously closing their eyes to the pre-Islamic histories of the places they now claim as exclusively “theirs” (and don’t even start with the idea that because there are some Christians or Jews in certain places that means that the societies are open to everyone…Islamic societies are Islamic specifically because all of the rights, privledges and obligations of their citizenry are defined with reference to the Qur’an and its code of law and social conduct, making the resulting society inherently unequal with regards to non-Muslims).

My family is originally from England. Should I go to England today, centuries later, and declare that I am home. Or isn’t America my home now? My family has been here for generations. And as far as I am concerned, it is my home.

For that reason, I see Jews living in Palestine today as being in their home–not because their ancestors of millenia lived there, but because they have grown up there. Similarly, Palestinians living in Palestine have just as much right because they have also grown up there. What I don’t think is possible is for the Jews to take the right of the Palestinians away–for the Jews to take the land where Palestinians lived, and to expel the Palestinians.

I’m convinced now that you’ve never understood my position on Palestine–perhaps I have poorly articulated it, but I would be far happier for you to stop making assumptions about it. What I propose is peace and equal rights for all the people living in Palestine. Forcing either to live, or subjugating one to the other, is nothing but injustice.

 

[c659smith]

Hold on here–that was not my idea at all! Nononono. If Jews wanted an entirely Jewish state, they had no right to FORCIBLY EXPEL the existing population. They did it anyway. People have done it for centuries. I’m telling you that THEY DIDN’T HAVE THE RIGHT.

I am not suggesting at all that religions can’t spread. But you’ve made a serious mistake here thinking that Christians don’t have a history of conquest. Because they absolutely do.

Violent and oppressive? The spread of Islam was absolutely not violent or oppressive during the rule of Muhammad, nor during the rule of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, as they are called. It is what you see once the lands of Islam became ruled by Empires. Precisely the same situation as Christianity. Precisely the same.

Why should Jews have to leave Palestine? I don’t think they should have to. Just like I don’t think anyone else should have to. Have you not been paying attention?

My family is originally from England. Should I go to England today, centuries later, and declare that I am home. Or isn’t America my home now? My family has been here for generations. And as far as I am concerned, it is my home.

For that reason, I see Jews living in Palestine today as being in their home–not because their ancestors of millenia lived there, but because they have grown up there. Similarly, Palestinians living in Palestine have just as much right because they have also grown up there. What I don’t think is possible is for the Jews to take the right of the Palestinians away–for the Jews to take the land where Palestinians lived, and to expel the Palestinians.

I’m convinced now that you’ve never understood my position on Palestine–perhaps I have poorly articulated it, but I would be far happier for you to stop making assumptions about it. What I propose is peace and equal rights for all the people living in Palestine. Forcing either to live, or subjugating one to the other, is nothing but injustice.

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?

Written above is the quote you use as part of your signiture.

We have 30,000,000 illegals that came into this country in the past 10 years but we do not use missle attacks and humans with bombs strapped on them to get them to leave.

 

[Sister_Amy]

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?

Written above is the quote you use as part of your signiture.

We have 30,000,000 illegals that came into this country in the past 10 years but we do not use missle attacks and humans with bombs strapped on them to get them to leave.

The article was written in 1947, first of all. Consider the number that 30 million is in comparison to 300 million. The equivalent now would be 150 million immigrants.

And if there were that many, you’d better believe that there would be outrage.

I would also like to point out that your use of the term “illegal” is very very rude. People use it interchangeably with immigration and it is not correct, and already pigeonholes immigrant peoples–inherently racist against Hispanic immigrants.

If there are a people more maligned in the USA than Arabs, it’s definitely Hispanics. (And actually, Hispanics are far more maligned than Arabs.) And you know what? Most of them are Christian! So folks like chrisse can’t even use that “they’re out to get us all!” excuse. Why the hatred? Why the animosity?

 

[dzheremi]

What you have said is very misleading, I think. It is quite often an “attack” on Islam when a person derails a topic with an overwhelming amount of data (i.e., so much that it is not the result of actual research on the poster but a paste job) in order to deliberately show Islam in a bad light by subjectively interpreting that data. What the poster did was attack Islam, quite simply.

Okay, that is why I did not reply like that to your post - to show that I can understand and support the poster’s position, since you replied as though the poster had posted something that was less than factual.

Secondly, to attribute to spread of Islam to “conquest” only is misleading. Islam spread by da’wah for 13 years in Mecca. When the Muslims migrated to Medina, the Meccans went to war with them. Islam really truly began to spread, however, when they made a peace treaty. People started coming to Islam, especially in the Arabian peninsula, in the thousands. And that is what happened. By the time the Prophet Muhammad (saws) died, the entire Arabian peninsula had embraced Islam. Not necessarily sincerely, but certainly not under force. The Arabs were united for the first time.

Okay. Notice how in my post I said that the spread everywhere OUTSIDE of the Arabian Peninsula was due to the conquests that happened after Muhammad. I do recognize that Muhammad brought the Arabian Peninsula under Islam (and a tiny bit of Jordan, if I remember correctly) during his lifetime, but the spread to the rest of the now “Arab-Muslim world” happened after his death. I recognized this in my post and didn’t pass judgment on it. So I don’t know why wrote any of the above.

Then Islam continued to spread–people weren’t forced to convert en masse at the edge of the sword as you might believe, they were given a choice. Not everyone had to convert, and many people didn’t.

To an extent you and I will have to agree to disagree on points like this, since nothing you write will change the accounts I have read of forced conversion of Christians in Lebanon, Syria, etc. written by (for instance) Maronite and visiting western historians of the mid-to-late Ottoman period. I had to return the book to the library last Tuesday so I can’t quote it exactly, but Dr. George T. Labaki, in recounting the social conditions that eventually led to the great Maronite exodus from Lebanon starting with the 1840-1860 massacres by the Ottoman-armed Druze, quotes a traveling Italian priest who writes that the jizya tax was extracted from the Maronites in such a fashion as to make conversion the only realistic option for those who wished to remain in their ancestral homes in the countryside, and that when the Ottoman rulers had collected the Islamically-prescribed tribute, they then beat the Maronites in order to try to extort from them more than they actually had to give! Granted, this is not the “convert or die” option given to our beloved modern martyrs like Fathers Ragheed Ganni and Paulos Faraj Rahho (may their souls and memories live forever!), but to the extent that it got so bad for the native Maronites, the ones who had built the land that we know today as “Lebanon” in an alliance with the Druze under Fakhr al-Dinn II, that their patriarch at one point gave all the valuables of the Church to satisfy the greed of the Ottomans, it might as well have been. You make a grave mistake in assuming that I am only talking about conversion at the point of a sword when I write that we know better than to believe that strong Christian societies like Coptic Egyptic simply decided to come to Islam because Islam is just so obviously true. This is not what I mean at all, so this is not what I said. I only said that the history of Islam that you paint is not the truth as we know it, not based on the picture that we want to paint of Islam, as is so often claimed here, but based on the history of the people who remain unconverted, and what they tell us. What my Palestinian and Iraqi Christian friends tell me about being Christian in those places, what I have read and heard from the Copts about their treatement both now and historically (as when they were disallowed from teaching their Coptic language as a means to hasten their Arabization, similar to what happened to the Assyrian minority in Iran after the Islamic revolution there when new education directives announced in 1981 dissolved Assyrian educational institutions).

The caliphs tried to ensure that no town came under the rule of Islam by force. But sure enough, as time went on, the armies became less and less faithful–I mean, come on, they turned on themselves! The Muslims were fighting each other!

Oh, that’s right…eventually they just couldn’t help themselves and had to begin oppressing the people…what kind of goon do you think I am, really? If I said this about the American armies in Iraq, I would hope that you would take me to task for it, because no amount of stress or other problems justifies brutality, Islamic or otherwise. Please argue using actual logic or just don’t respond. I know you are capable of more than this hogwash.

 

[dzheremi]

Yet there are some places that Islam spread entirely peacefully. Into the East, most notably. India, for instance, was ruled by Muslims for centuries. Did you know that? And what are most Indians today? Certainly not Muslims!

If everything was so hunky-dory for all of the religious communities in India, then what is this thing we call “Pakistan”? Why does it exist? Besides, my point is not that all Muslims have ever done is convert people by the sword. I don’t believe that for a second. The only point I was trying to make with my post is that Christians and Muslims look at the history of the Middle East from entirely different perspectives, since in our eyes Islam did nothing but run roughshod over Christian civilizations (and others) that were already established in those places. So for a Muslim to turn around and try to appeal to history in making claims to these lands…well, it evokes some very bitter feelings. I am sorry if you do not like the way I have expressed myself, but it is not out of any hatred of Islam that I point these things out. It is out of a love for my people and an empathy with their long historical and continuing suffering at the hands of Muslims in their native lands that is very similar in intensity to the feeling that must come from the “ummah” when they think of the Palestinian situation or any other situation where they feel Muslims are being oppressed. I have nothing but good things to say about the way that you conduct yourself here, but please understand that I cannot and will not ever agree with your version of history, because to do so would be to twist the knife into the backs of the Assyrians, Copts, Ethiopians, Armenians, Sudanese, and others who have suffered so long for their belief in Christ. While I certainly don’t claim to feel the same pain that they do, I recognize that their struggle is my struggle just as the struggle of the Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, can unite you and I in a very small way, even though you would presumably advocate for an Islamic Palestinian state and I would rather die than to have that happen. So it is with everything in the wider Muslim world: You see a beautiful capital of Islam, a testament to the belief in Allah, Muhammad, the the Qur’an where I see the ruins of the Church in its North African cradle (Tunisia, Libya, Algeria). Where Saudi Arabia inevitably envokes for you images of the Kaaba and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, I think of Najran, where Christians remained well into the 7th century when the pressure to adopt Islam along with the rest of the society became too great and they fled to Syria and Iraq.

And the absolute largest Muslim country on the planet today is Indonesia–NEVER was Indonesia ruled by a Muslim empire.

Okay.

Now, if you still wish to attack the spread of Islam, you must equally attack the spread of Christianity and tie it with the Roman Empire of the past, and more recently the English Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the French Empire.

No, I don’t. Did you not read my post at all? I said that Christianity has its own history of conquering non-Christian people, but that the intial spread of the two religions is not comparable, because Christianity spread peacefully until it became aligned with empire, while Islam spread violently (Spain, Egypt, Berber North Africa, etc) in most of its early history. The example of Indonesia, it should be said, is outside of this time period.

How did South and Central America become Catholic, anyway? How did the USA become primarily Protestant-Christian? For this reason it’s dishonest to attack the spread of Islam and say that Islam was only spread by force.

All of those places became Christian by force, yes. You don’t need to tell me any of this. My father’s side of the family comes from Mexico. We know all about that. Again, I owned up to Christianity’s history of conquest in my original post, so I don’t know why you’ve written any of this.