Merkel Is Getting Me All Hot And Bothered

[Kralizec]

I suppose the idea is that our culture produced these freedoms, and not over the last 3 centuries so much as the last 10 or 20. Remember, there's a huge dose of Roman in our culture, and that brings me to point.

I think Europeans are conditioned to fear Islam, and with good reason. Take a look at a map circa 400 AD, that big red bit is under the Pax Romanum. It's getting a bit ropy, but this is where you have genuinely free and autonomous men, law courts, not only criminal but civil cases, women can hold property and Christianity holds even the Emperor to account.

Fast forward to 700 AD and a big swathe of that has gone Green - sure the Barbarians have taken over Western Europe but they're already learning Latin, Rome still elects magistrates and the Christian bishops are starting to argue over law again. Meanwhile, in the East the Emperor is fighting a losing war against an Alien culture that sweeps all before it. They aren't like the Germans, instead of learning Latin they translate in Arabic, and they destroy whatever doesn't agree with their God with no regard to the past.

Fast Forward again, 1000 AD, and there are now princes who speak adn read in Latin again, Lawyers and law Courts have reestablished themselves not only in Italy but also in France, even the peasants are starting to learn to read their Vulgar Latin. Meanwhile, the March of Islam has continued unabated, roughly 2/3 of the former Roman Empire is either under their sway or threatened. In North Africa Roman Civilisation is just GONE and both the place of Christ's Birth and Death are under sway of an Alien culture.

After this of course came the Crusades, which really should seen less as a war of Conquest and more as an attempt to regain lost ground.

Here's the point: What we think of as "Europe" is the rump of the Roman Empire after North Africa and the Near East are shown off. 2,000 years ago, even 1,500 years ago Morocco was culturally closer to Rome than London, and much wealthier. What changed that is not conquest or Roman collapse, but Islam and Islamic cultural policies.

Fear of Islam is built into our history, Muslims are the ultimate boggy men, worse even that Attila the Hun because Atilla left something Roman in his wake, the Caliphs didn't. So today the unspoken fear is that what happened in Anatolia, Egypt and North Africa can happen in Italy or France and this fear is in no way diminished by the stated belief of a significant number of Muslims that they want to make Europe more sympathetic to Islamic law and customs.

While you make a convincing case, I'm not sure about the validity of this line of thought. It's true that our legal systems draw directly from Roman traditions (not yours, or at least not directly- ironically, Germany is more Roman in this respect) I'm equally sure (though I don't "know" this) that many cultural traits Europeans have nowadays are as alien to the old Romans as those in the middle east. I think that religious reasons have more of a hand in this thananything else.

Your argument that our modern democracy and whatnot are a result of millenia rather than centuries of development is a bit dubious. Republican Rome did have a functiong system of popular participation in government, but it was entirely obsolete long before it became an empire. Whatever "representative institutions" European countries had in pre-modern times were essentially oligarchic, and only became democratic when suffrage was extended. Montesqiueu once compared the instutions of the Ottoman Empire and some Italian city state (I think Venice, but coudl be wrong) and concluded that the latter was prefrable, because by accident (meaning, rather than design) the powers of government were divided and generally frustrated eachother which got in the way of oppressing the populace whereas in the former power was far more centralized.

I'm also sceptical of the idea that Islam was hostile to Roman traditions, allthought that's just my intuition. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bed- I generally make these long posts when I'm either drunk or half-drunk, and checking my own writing for mistakes in grammar or spelling gets exhausting.

[Hax]

I think it's not really wise to identify the immigrants from Muslim countries firstly as Muslims. I don't think it's the defining factor.

Furthermore, the idea of that Islamic institutions are opposed to Roman traditions is probably a wrong assumption. The organisation of the Abbasid Caliphate was largely based upon Sassanian ideas of Kingship and administration. Additionally, there are strong hints that the language spoken at the court was initally Greek rather than Persian or Arabic (which both were in usage at a later point).

Fast forward to 700 AD and a big swathe of that has gone Green - sure the Barbarians have taken over Western Europe but they're already learning Latin, Rome still elects magistrates and the Christian bishops are starting to argue over law again. Meanwhile, in the East the Emperor is fighting a losing war against an Alien culture that sweeps all before it. They aren't like the Germans, instead of learning Latin they translate in Arabic, and they destroy whatever doesn't agree with their God with no regard to the past.

Nonsense. Especially this last part. What did they destroy with no regard to the past? I literally have no idea what the Arabs destroyed. And please, please don't say the Library of Alexandria, because it weren't the Arabs who did that. You should also probably realise that the early Islamic forces constituted largely of non-Muslims as well. Saying that it was an Islamic invasion aimed at spreading Islam is historically incorrect.

Although there were some on and off wars between the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates and the Eastern Roman Empire, with the Arabs even going as far as reaching Constantinople and sieging it several times, relations had more or less stabilised by the 9th century. Roman ambassadors visited Jerusalem and other cities and were regarded as the spokesmen of the Christians living under Muslim rule. The other way around, there were also Arab ambassadors stationed in Constantinople who generally had relatively good relationships with the Roman Emperor.

Several administrative concepts were directly borrowed from earlier traditions: the collecting of the land-tax, the kharaj was directly taken over from earlier Sassanian and Roman taxes.

Now the perception of the Crusades in Islamic historiography is quite interesting. Initially, the Crusades were regarded as a temporary loss of territory to Byzantine (or Roman) armies and met with hardly any response. Outrage at the court in Baghdad led to the Seljuk ruler Malikshah to send an army over to Syria, but it was regarded with suspicion by the autonomous rulers of Mosul and Aleppo and the army was largely destroyed by another Muslim army.

What I find really interesting is that you're strongly supporting the idea of Islam as being inherently alien to (ill-defined) European culture; in this, you're actually following the rejectionist Islamic traditionalist line of thought that Islam in its core is hostile to the West and is in this sense unique. Seeing how you're an historian, I think you're widely off the mark here. Islamic theology was heavily influenced by Judaism and Nestoric Christianity while still retaining some traits typical of pre-Islamic Arabian religions.

However, and I'm risking getting too interpretative of the historical situation around 650 now, the influence of these Arabian folk religions can be seen not so much in the theological fundaments, but rather to its practicalities and its rituals such as the pilgrimage to Mecca and the payment of Zakat. The theological concepts in Islam are borrowed mostly from Eastern Christian Monophysite sects. At this point, we're relatively sure that Muhammad was able to read and write to some degree and was quite aware of Christian and Jewish metaphysical concepts. You wouldn't say that Eastern Christianity is an Alien culture (the word "alien" unexplicably with a capital A)?

So today the unspoken fear is that what happened in Anatolia, Egypt and North Africa can happen in Italy or France and this fear is in no way diminished by the stated belief of a significant number of Muslims that they want to make Europe more sympathetic to Islamic law and customs.

The "Gates of Vienna" rhetoric: they tried from the West, at Tours (note: not a war of conquest) in 732 and failed, they tried from the East at Vienna (1583; in which the Polish army was assisted by Tatar Muslims in their service, a fact conveniently left out of the histories) and now they're trying from the backdoor.

Where do you get this idea that "a significant amount" (how much) of Muslims want to make Europe more sympathetic to Islamic law? What does that even mean?

[rvg]

Nonsense. Especially this last part. What did they destroy with no regard to the past? I literally have no idea what the Arabs destroyed. And please, please don't say the Library of Alexandria, because it weren't the Arabs who did that. You should also probably realise that the early Islamic forces constituted largely of non-Muslims as well. Saying that it was an Islamic invasion aimed at spreading Islam is historically incorrect.

True. The initial purpose of their invasion was to rape, loot and pillage.

Although there were some on and off wars between the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates and the Eastern Roman Empire, with the Arabs even going as far as reaching Constantinople and sieging it several times, relations had more or less stabilised by the 9th century. Roman ambassadors visited Jerusalem and other cities and were regarded as the spokesmen of the Christians living under Muslim rule. The other way around, there were also Arab ambassadors stationed in Constantinople who generally had relatively good relationships with the Roman Emperor.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it "good relations", it was more like a prolonged ceasefire.

What I find really interesting is that you're strongly supporting the idea of Islam as being inherently alien to (ill-defined) European culture; in this, you're actually following the rejectionist Islamic traditionalist line of thought that Islam in its core is hostile to the West and is in this sense unique. Seeing how you're an historian, I think you're widely off the mark here. Islamic theology was heavily influenced by Judaism and Nestoric Christianity while still retaining some traits typical of pre-Islamic Arabian religions.

All it takes is to pick up the Koran.... Sura 5:51 states: "O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily God guideth not a people unjust." There's plenty more, but I think this is enough.

The theological concepts in Islam are borrowed mostly from Eastern Christian Monophysite sects. At this point, we're relatively sure that Muhammad was able to read and write to some degree and was quite aware of Christian and Jewish metaphysical concepts. You wouldn't say that Eastern Christianity is an Alien culture (the word "alien" unexplicably with a capital A)?

can you provide an example of this?

[Rhyfelwyr]

All it takes is to pick up the Koran.... Sura 5:51 states: "O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily God guideth not a people unjust." There's plenty more, but I think this is enough.

To be fair there are also verses where they call Jews and Christians "people of the book". Muhammad after all was just the final prophet and Judaism and Christianity were seen as part of that chain of revelation.

I could also quite easily pick verses out of the New Testament where they would appear to be badmouthing Jews.

[rvg]

To be fair there are also verses where they call Jews and Christians "people of the book". Muhammad after all was just the final prophet and Judaism and Christianity were seen as part of that chain of revelation. I could also quite easily pick verses out of the New Testament where they would appear to be badmouthing Jews.

There's a big difference though: New Testament is not the direct word of God. Koran is supposed to be. Furthermore, this is a very blunt statement, it leaves little room for interpretation. It's not mere badmouthing, but a direct call to keep them at arm's length.

[Hax]

You've gone out of the field of historical research and into Qur'anic exegesis. This is not my field of specialty nor interest, but in essence, you've started interpreting the Qur'an according to your own perception rather than basing it on previous exegesis provided by Muslim specialists on the subject.

What I find particularly problematic is that you're applying the same logic as radical Islamists by cherry-picking what verses support your particular interpretation of the religion rather than taking the entire Qur'an at face value. Of course there are Qur'anic verses that say horrible things about Jews and Christians, there's no denying that, suggesting that they play a large role in the day-to-day lives of Muslims is factually incorrect. The general Islamic explanation is that these verses refer to very specific historical moments and have little to no value in their lives today.

it leaves little room for interpretation.

There's an entire field within Islamic jurisprudence aimed at interpretation that we call Kalam.


What you're doing right now is telling Muslims how their religion should be interpreted, even if they themselves don't agree with it. Whenever it comes to Islam, the No True Scotsman fallacy is constantly applied. It's really unfair.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it "good relations", it was more like a prolonged ceasefire

Whatever. Call it whatever you want to, but historical investigations point out that politics between the Byzantines and Arab caliphates (particularly the Fatimids) was generally quite good.

All it takes is to pick up the Koran....

Up until 1962 the Roman Catholic Church held the point of view that every Jew in existence was personally responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. This was amended during the Second Vatican Council, but you can't possibly say that merely the fact that Islam was formed from an alien culture (which is really dependent on how you define it) immediately makes it hostile to say Jews and Christians, especially when Roman Catholic dogma contained serious anti-Jewish sentiments up until the 20th century.

[rvg]

The general Islamic explanation is that these verses refer to very specific historical moments and have little to no value in their lives today.

How can one say that about the Word of God? If one takes Islam seriously, then every word in the Koran is divine. Not divinely inspired, not divinely suggested, divine. Christians can take liberties with the Bible because the only proven Word of God is in the Ten Commandments. That's it. ...Bush to Moses...Bush to Moses. Incoming divine transmission in 3, 2, 1...
Koran lacks that kind of flexibility, which is imho responsible for a lot of problems with modern Islam.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

While you make a convincing case, I'm not sure about the validity of this line of thought. It's true that our legal systems draw directly from Roman traditions (not yours, or at least not directly- ironically, Germany is more Roman in this respect) I'm equally sure (though I don't "know" this) that many cultural traits Europeans have nowadays are as alien to the old Romans as those in the middle east. I think that religious reasons have more of a hand in this thananything else.

Your argument that our modern democracy and whatnot are a result of millenia rather than centuries of development is a bit dubious. Republican Rome did have a functiong system of popular participation in government, but it was entirely obsolete long before it became an empire. Whatever "representative institutions" European countries had in pre-modern times were essentially oligarchic, and only became democratic when suffrage was extended. Montesqiueu once compared the instutions of the Ottoman Empire and some Italian city state (I think Venice, but coudl be wrong) and concluded that the latter was prefrable, because by accident (meaning, rather than design) the powers of government were divided and generally frustrated eachother which got in the way of oppressing the populace whereas in the former power was far more centralized.

I'm also sceptical of the idea that Islam was hostile to Roman traditions, allthought that's just my intuition. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bed- I generally make these long posts when I'm either drunk or half-drunk, and checking my own writing for mistakes in grammar or spelling gets exhausting.

Islam took on some Roman administrative practices and devoured Roman and Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle.

The point is that unlike Byzantium or Rome this was not seen as continuity, but appropriation. Those parts of the Roman Empire that were invaded by Muslims rather than Germans suffred a traumatic break with the past, compare Algeria with France. In the former they speak Arabic and write in Arabic script, in the latter they speak Vulgar Latin and write in Latin script but the great "Western" theologian Augustine was born in Algeria, not France. North Africa became "other" only after the muslim conquests.

I'm not talking about direct continuity of institutions, except within the Church, but the fact remains that only in the West is there a continuity of narrative, the people living in France, Italy or Spain today are more or less the people living there 2,000 years ago and much of the difference is natural cultural drift and interaction. The only place in the old North Weat of the Empire that suffred anything like the break that the Muslims invasions brought to the East is England and that is also the only place where we do not have Roman Law or Roman institutions, and where we speak a Germanic language.

I think it's not really wise to identify the immigrants from Muslim countries firstly as Muslims. I don't think it's the defining factor.

Furthermore, the idea of that Islamic institutions are opposed to Roman traditions is probably a wrong assumption. The organisation of the Abbasid Caliphate was largely based upon Sassanian ideas of Kingship and administration. Additionally, there are strong hints that the language spoken at the court was initally Greek rather than Persian or Arabic (which both were in usage at a later point).

I think the problem is self identification of Muslim immigrants, particularly in the UK, France anf Germany. It makes sense to identify yourself by the thing you share with other immigrant groups when you don't feel you share anything with the host country, but there it is none the less. As far as Islamic institions being "opposed" to Roman traditions, no they weren't, but they still effectively destroyed them because they took them in, broke them down into constituant parts and put them together again. Regardless of what the Abbasids initially spoke in Court, later they spoke Persian or Arabic.

Nonsense. Especially this last part. What did they destroy with no regard to the past? I literally have no idea what the Arabs destroyed. And please, please don't say the Library of Alexandria, because it weren't the Arabs who did that. You should also probably realise that the early Islamic forces constituted largely of non-Muslims as well. Saying that it was an Islamic invasion aimed at spreading Islam is historically incorrect.

If the Islamic invasions did not aim at spreading Islamic control, then what was the aim? Rome invaded to Romanise for its own good and the good of conquered peoples. I'm not making a judgement here, beyond the simple point that Rome is basucally us and the Caliphs aren't. As to destruction... Hagia Sophia is the prime example, desecrated and defaced to become a Mosque - that happened, and the same happened to the Christian Church that was where the Dome of the Rock now sits. Again, I'm not making a judgement but replaces the great Cathedrals with mosques was a deliberate political, religious and cultural statement.

Oh, and they may have destroyed the Second Library at Alexandria, the first was destroyed in the 1st Century BC but the Christian riots in the 5th Century don't account for the complete destruction of the second, and it was Edward Gibbon who first blamed the Christians as part of his project to excuse the Muslims for the collapse Western Civilisation generally.

Although there were some on and off wars between the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates and the Eastern Roman Empire, with the Arabs even going as far as reaching Constantinople and sieging it several times, relations had more or less stabilised by the 9th century. Roman ambassadors visited Jerusalem and other cities and were regarded as the spokesmen of the Christians living under Muslim rule. The other way around, there were also Arab ambassadors stationed in Constantinople who generally had relatively good relationships with the Roman Emperor.

You are quite right, but the "on and off" wars could just as easily be charactarised as "on and off peace" and this in no way diminishes the fact that the majority of the important Christian centres were at this point under Muslim rule, Constantinople and Rome being the only remaining free Patriarchal Sees still in Christian hands.

Traumatic.

Several administrative concepts were directly borrowed from earlier traditions: the collecting of the land-tax, the kharaj was directly taken over from earlier Sassanian and Roman taxes.

Now the perception of the Crusades in Islamic historiography is quite interesting. Initially, the Crusades were regarded as a temporary loss of territory to Byzantine (or Roman) armies and met with hardly any response. Outrage at the court in Baghdad led to the Seljuk ruler Malikshah to send an army over to Syria, but it was regarded with suspicion by the autonomous rulers of Mosul and Aleppo and the army was largely destroyed by another Muslim army.

What I find really interesting is that you're strongly supporting the idea of Islam as being inherently alien to (ill-defined) European culture; in this, you're actually following the rejectionist Islamic traditionalist line of thought that Islam in its core is hostile to the West and is in this sense unique. Seeing how you're an historian, I think you're widely off the mark here. Islamic theology was heavily influenced by Judaism and Nestoric Christianity while still retaining some traits typical of pre-Islamic Arabian religions.

However, and I'm risking getting too interpretative of the historical situation around 650 now, the influence of these Arabian folk religions can be seen not so much in the theological fundaments, but rather to its practicalities and its rituals such as the pilgrimage to Mecca and the payment of Zakat. The theological concepts in Islam are borrowed mostly from Eastern Christian Monophysite sects. At this point, we're relatively sure that Muhammad was able to read and write to some degree and was quite aware of Christian and Jewish metaphysical concepts. You wouldn't say that Eastern Christianity is an Alien culture (the word "alien" unexplicably with a capital A)?

Modern Western, including Christian, Metaphysics is indebted to eithe Plato or Aristotle, currently I believe Aristotle has the upper hand. Islamic thought doesn't run quite the same way, does it, it seeks absolute synthesis within it's religious space, where Western culture divides and compartmentalises. As to Eastern Monophysite sects, I am completely ignorant of the metaphysical system and how the theology constructs and single Divine Person.

Which, I think, answers your question.

The point is that Islam comes from outside where Christianity arose in a Roman context, even if it was on the Eastern edge of the Empire the Empire was able to frame it in a way the European centre could process and assimilate to.

Islam is also a political system, and one which is designed for rulers where Christianity is a religion of the poor and destitute. You have made the point severl times in the past that Muslim rulers did not actively work to convert their subjects, but the implication was that if you wanted to get on in a Muslim country you had to embrace Islam. Christianity is completely the opposite, the priests went to the ruler to ask permission to preach to the populace.

At the end of the day, Islam is a religion which is most comfortable when it has political dominion, which explains the rise and rise of Islamic parties (and they aren't just the same as Christian Democrats) and the angst a lot of Muslims seem to suffer in non-Muslim countires.

The "Gates of Vienna" rhetoric: they tried from the West, at Tours (note: not a war of conquest) in 732 and failed, they tried from the East at Vienna (1583; in which the Polish army was assisted by Tatar Muslims in their service, a fact conveniently left out of the histories) and now they're trying from the backdoor.

Where do you get this idea that "a significant amount" (how much) of Muslims want to make Europe more sympathetic to Islamic law? What does that even mean?

I didn't say I supported it, I said it was a fear built into the European Psyche, as you just indicated. Fankly, I'm not personally that worried about a Muslim takeover - I'm worried about a Pogrom against Muslims when they get control of a particular region of France or Italy and try to run the government there. We're already seeing the beginnings of those issues here with the increasing level of racism and the backlash against (for example) headscarves when Christian women are diciplined for wearing crosses.

Loius said it once, as a French Atheist he was still much more comfortable with a devout Christian than a moderate-ish Muslim. For starters, as none of us really knows anything about Muslim theology we can't tell an actual devout but moderate Muslim from a vague "cultural" one who doesn't really care.

Then there are the Burkas, which I personally find offensive on at least two seperate levels, but I just can't be bothered with those.