Hi Mac,

The Arabs/Muslims burst out of Arabia around 650 AD and conquered vast areas, almost non-stop until the eighteenth century. i.e. Islam had well over a thousand years, ruling over one of the biggest and most oppressive empires ever known. They had power for more than a thousand years, - plenty of time to develop whatever may have been progressive or positive in their doctrines, if it were there. H

But here's a couple of facts:

* when Islam conquered the Central Asian city of Merv, on the Silk Road, they butchered everybody. Everybody. Not that this was all that uncommon. The MOngols did much the same across Syria and later, Timur did the same in Babylon. So let's talk about Islam as a 'religion of peace'.

* the first printing presses in Europe were set up around 1450, and by 1500, a billion books had been printed. The first printing press in the Muslim world was set up in Istanbul in 1824. So let's talk about Islam as a civilization of culture, of refinement, of flourishing.

OR we could face inconvenient truths and sympathetically analyse Islam as a religion with its roots in tribal savagery, in which some bright spark came up with the idea of a book in which - since he could claim that it came from god herself/himself - not a single word was to ever be challenged, and therefore - brilliant - any criticism, modification, discussion was impossible, at the point of death.

So Islam has remained a dead thing for nearly 1400 years now, with nothing to contribute to the world except blind obedience - 'Islam' means 'surrender', after all - vile misogyny engraved in stone, and perhaps an inordinate love of goats.

How on earth the OppLeft could ever countenance sucking up to it is unbelievable, pure 100 % opportunism. Marx would be disgusted.

Joe

Hi Loudmouth,

Yes, Islamic societies were even slow to adopt innovations that reached them before the Europeans. As for Islam's 'Golden Age', it lasted only a few centuries and unlike the Renaissance, eventually reached a dead end.

I agree with your comments on today's 'Leftists', the old Left would have disowned them. They seem to have only one idea---Muslims are members of a race, so opposition to the toxic Islamic ideology is 'racism'.

Hi Mac,

I used to be a great fan of Malcolm X, Malik el-Haji el-Shabazz. At the end of Alex Haley's 'Autobiography', he goes to the Middle East and realises that Muslims are of all shades and ethnicities. Being very young and naive back then, I took this as a sure sign of how much more progressive Islam was than Western imperialism. Of course I was too simple to realise that it was a sure sign of how many parts of the world Islamists had invaded, and to a large extent, put to the sword as the 'religion of peace'.

So nowadays, Arab Muslims are a small minority, with perhaps as many or more Indian Muslims, Indonesian Muslims, African Muslims than Arab Muslims. And of course, many Arabs are not Muslim but have retained their Pre-Islamic Christian or Yazidi or Mandean beliefs.

It's interesting - make of this what you will - that DNA studies of Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia, find that the male Y chromosome is 80 %, overwhelmingly, Arab; but the female mitochondrial DNA is far more likely to be 'Persian' and Kurdish. I suppose frape, sexual slavery and polygamy have helped that along.

So there's nothing 'race'-oriented about Islam. Even in north Africa, a huge proportion of the population would call themselves Berber, or Copt, rather than Arab. Islam is a religion, with many sects and schisms, and like any religion, spawns all manner of ideologies, mind-sets of how to engage with the actual world. One day, the OppLeft will begin to understand that.

Joe