[Vision2020] Follow up - Islam the religion of peace!

[Andreas Schou]

On 6/1/07, g. crabtree <jampot at adelphia.net> wrote:
>
> And I still contend that The Church has never been as savage or outright
> bloody minded. Adding up the numbers over time, the greater number of deaths
> have occurred at the hands of the followers of the "religion of peace" than
> the Roman Catholic Church. Up to the eleventh century Islam had a sizable
> lead. From 1095 to 1291 The Church picked up the pace and nosed ahead. It
> was neck and neck till 1834 and the end of the Spanish Inquisition. After
> that Allah's chosen made it no contest.

That's not really the case.

The Arab invaders of the Byzantine Near East weren't particularly
rapacious or bloody-minded -- they were the sort of poor-land horse
pastoralists that periodically boil out of crappy pasturelands to
conquer the people next door. The extent of their spread was limited
somewhat by Mohammad's pracitcal decision not to burn down the entire
Mediterranean coast and put the Christians to the sword.

Contrary to the behavior of other horse-pastoralist invasions, the
Arabs decided to settle down and tax  their conquered lands, rather
than pick up everything portable and haul it back to the middle of
Arabia. Given that Saudi Arabia is, from the standpoint of a culture
that didn't yet have any use for oil, an ungodly hellhole, I can't
quite blame them.

So, at least at the beginning, the official policy of the Umayyids was
to discourage conversion to Islam: the zakat that Muslims had to pay
was severely restricted in what it could be spent on (essentially, it
was a tithe redistrubuted to charity), whereas the protection money
that dhimmi had to pay could fund armies that could extend the Arab
conquest. The eastward push of Arab armies into Persia was funded
largely on the backs of the Syriac Byzantines that the Arabs had just
conquered.

>From both a doctrinal and a practical standpoint, the Arabs had no
reason to just slaughter people wholesale: Mohammad had come up with a
social structure that allowed for religious diversity. Now, I'm not
saying that the early Islamic state was anything other than a brutal
theocracy: it wasn't. On the other hand, I don't think ti's fair to
prefer the combination of feudal kleptocracy and Romanized Christian
theocracy that prevailed in 6th century Europe.  It was simply another
idiot government created by poor-land horse pastoralists (in this
case, the various Goths) to aggrandize whichever tribal chieftan was
terrorizing the most peasants.

So, later on, the Arabs conquered Egypt, replacing Ptolmeic Greek
slavedrivers for Arab slavedrivers, the Berber lands to the west,
where there weren't enough people to actually be brutal to, and then
crossed the Mediterranean to invade Spain, where a centuries-long war
of atttrition between feudal Goths and feudal Berbers continued, on
and off, until the Reconquista (which was unthinkably brutal). None of
that was particularly bad. Even religions not specifically tolerated
by Islam, like Zoroastrianism and Mandeanism, were grandfathered in as
"religions of the book" under the general term "Sabians" (a term which
Mohammad had used -- and which everyone, later, had forgotten the
meaning of.)

Later in Islam's history, there were, arguably, a number of Muslim
atrocities. The various Timurid states were pretty horrific (though it
bears mentioning that Timur the Lame had started the Timurid states by
burning down, effectively, the entire Islamic world.) The Islamic
world, during the Crusades, was responsible for a number of
tit-for-tat atrocities. The Turkish conquest of Byzantium was pretty
terrible (again, though: that's an example of asshole horse
pastoralists burning down their agricultralist neighbors).

Both for Christians and Muslims, the medieval period was largely
different from other periods in history because atrocities were
significantly more disorganized than in classical times. But I see no
compelling evidence, anywhere, that our ancestors behavior was any
better behaved than theirs.

-- ACS