thanks for the article.

Can you please try to get it printed in our daily newspapers, particularly The Australian, sometimes dubbed as The Catholic Boys Daily.

"Tony Abbott's call for a reformation within Islam demonstrates his lack of historical comprehension. And history is vital to understanding the terrorism problem"

Bollocks.

As if fundamentalists care about history, traditions, culture or anything outside of trying to impose their totalitarian religiopolitical system on others. They are knuckle-dragging thugs, the men and women alike.

Sam Harris (“The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”) was right, “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge”.

Harris added that there was nothing remotely racist about his criticisms of Muslims: “I criticize white, western converts in precisely the same terms,” he said. “In fact, I am even more critical of them, because they weren't brainwashed into the faith from birth.”

He added: “There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people .. have been taken in by it.”
(Independent, Apr 13, 2013)

'The Australian, sometimes dubbed as The Catholic Boys Daily.'

yeah Chek I am not a fan of the Catholics but not nearly as perverse and deceitful as the feminist girls daily rants on the abc/fairfax

I think the author gilds the Islamic lily somewhat: many 'rescuers' of old Greek and Roan documents were Jews and Christians. Much of the maths came from India, through Zoroastrians in Persia and south-central Asia.

It's a pity that the author doesn't elaborate on his statement:

"The critical decision that led to the disastrous state of Islam today was the banning of the printing and the importation of virtually all printed books in the mid 1500s. In Europe knowledge expanded while in the Turkish Caliphate it froze, leading eventually to economic and military failure."

The invention of the printing press, very early in the Renaissance, facilitated a billion books to be circulated across Europe by 1500, mostly in Latin. In turn, that led to demands for books in local vernaculars, which in turn led to the opportunity for vastly more people to hold sacred texts up to the light. Hence, the flowering of the Renaissance, the movements to break away from the Catholic church, and the beginnings, baby steps forward and painful steps back, of the Enlightenment.

As absolutists, the Turkish Sultans were in the business of power, not any search for knowledge. As the Caliphs as well, they had as much interest in propagating knowledge in the vernaculars, as the Catholic Church of the time, especially as they watched Catholic Europe unravel in the early sixteenth century and onwards. Hence no printing press in the Muslim world until 1824.

Religion generally is inherently reactionary, in the old Marxist sense of responding negatively, and often brutally, to any new advances in science or human rights. As we can see now, Islam is not only not immune from that reactionary tendency, but an archetype of it. In its extreme forms, Islamism is fairly obviously a reactionary form of a pretty reactionary religion.

But totalitarians of the world seem to be uniting around it. For example, the SAF (Socialist Apologists for Fascism). It's going to be a long war.

Get stuck in.

Joe

Was there ever a more misguided individual than Tony Abbott, apart from some of his myopic fellow reactives?

What a shame for the future of this country that the Chicken Little fears of life beyond the fowl run have been exploited so thoroughly by Abbott, Murdoch and Howard to the detriment of this nation and minority groups doing their best to get on with life without all the hot air Muslim Hecht.

Hi Paul,

News: Abbott is no longer prime minister. Nor is Howard.

But if it helps, we could wait until they die and then dig up their bodies and kick them around the cemetery. That'll show 'em.

Joe