I saw this fascinating little piece of history on another site...

I now think that recent Islamic terrorism does have a near-perfect historical precedent. And that the sorry condition of the Islamic world today is the direct result of doing the wrong things in response to their fear.

In the Austrian Imperial Treasury in Vienna one can see the coronation vestments of Charlemagne. They were made by Arab craftsmen: in the dark ages, the inhabitants of Christian Europe were so obsessed with the eternal salvation of the soul that they forgot how to cut cloth. Then take a look at Saddam Hussein, clad from shoes to hat in Gucci, Versace and Borsalino. In a time when Europeans suffered Black Death and bubonic plague, because in their Christian zeal they had destroyed the baths and the aqueducts and burned the libraries, the Moslems copied and translated Aristotle and Aeschylus, invented alembics and algorithms, and wrote love stories and ribald poetry. Arab merchants traveled to the Baltic in the North and the Cape in the South, bringing with them profit and knowledge, writing the first works of anthropology about people from Poland to Zanzibar. They built great cities from Baghdad to Seville, where millions of people, Moslems and Jews and Christians, lived together in freedom and prosperity and health.

And then the Christians, enraged by the prosperity of the heathens, armed by faith that they were going into the arms of Christ if they died in battle, came to kill and die, and killed and died until they rid their world of Moslems and Albigensians, and of everyone who had lived in peace with the heathens. The Crusaders found their excuse in the heathen occupation of the Holy Land, and in the Moslem denial of collective "self-determination" to the Christians of occupied Spain. After the Christian _reconquista_, it was five centuries before Christian Spaniards again had individual rights comparable to what they enjoyed as "second-class citizens" in Moslem Spain. In the Crusade against Albigensians, who lived among Christians, a bishop of the Church spoke the policy of terrorists to our day: "Kill them all, God will know his own."

The Moslems, in fear of mass murder, did the exact equivalent of what the civilized world is doing today. They prohibited books and letters in languages their police could not read, such as Hebrew and Latin and Greek (think of controls against strong encryption on the Internet, of warrantless eavesdropping and searches.) They ordered Christians and Jews to wear distinctive identification (think national ID cards). They prohibited blasphemy and music and the display of women's faces, lest their unity in the face of danger be disrupted by heresy and doubt. Their anti-terrorism legislation, the Code of Omar, is still enforced in Islamic law to this day. And the miserable descendants of what was once a great civilization kill and die, hoping, like the Crusaders of a thousand years ago, to earn heaven by doing God's will on Earth.

(by Adam Reed)

-- Eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), October 31, 2001

Answers

Eve, It appears Moslem's know history, the history that has been selectivly forgotten by the Christians.

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), October 31, 2001.

>>>>They built great cities from Baghdad to Seville, where millions of people, Moslems and Jews and Christians, lived together in freedom and prosperity and health.

OH, come on!! From the days of Mohammed rousing the troops to slay the pagan Arabs, to the Jihad across North Africa (which had been Christian up to the 7th century), the Moslem's swords dripped with the blood of Christians for centuries. The onslaught continued over Turkey (which likewise had been Christian along the coast), up the Danube, until it threatened Europe, with a foothold in Spain. Battles such as Tours by a beleagured Christendom, against huge odds, stopped the Med from becoming a Moslem lake. Who knows how many were slain?

The Crusades were small potatoes by comparison. A mixture of the pious and the bloodthirsty, they even sacked Christian towns.

But Islam's early history as being peaceful and mild?

Ever wonder where the word 'assassin' came from?

-- Surely you jest!!! (Too.Revisionist@To.Believe), October 31, 2001.

Perhaps dear Cherri might explain the current genocide that has been going on and is going on in Sudan, where Moslems are systematically erraticating Christians.

-- Santiago (SDN@friendlybanc.com), November 01, 2001.

Not to mention in the country of our new best friends, Pakistan http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,3163964%255E1702,00.html

-- NottinghamTarkington (Not@simonstown.net), November 01, 2001.