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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: [ History Islam & Beyond . . .] The myth of the murderous Muslim



Assorted credible historians have written about the violent imposition of Islam on other cultures.  From the annihilation of Jewish tribes of Medina and Fadak, to decimation of the Persians after the Sassanian dynasty collapsed from inside following the war of succession after the death of Amir Khosroe, primitive Islam is full of blood baths.  This was followed by the brutal conquest of India, taking advantage on the dispute between Raj-put princes.  Seven centuries of slaughter, slave trade and other forms of misrule reduced India from rich to rags.  Now that Islam has lost its sting, it keeps biting its own tail.  Different groups slaughter each other.  The King of Saudi Arabia considers Iran a foe, and Israel a friend, for example.

The figure 270 million may be a little exaggerated.  Will Durant took this figure to be 80 million in the Sultan period alone.  If one adds another 80 million for the Mughal period which lasted about as long, the figure hovers around 200 million.  The dead cued to be burned in hell ostensibly to supply power in heaven.


On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Jiten Roy <jnrsr53@yahoo.com> wrote:
 


The author seems to have disagreement over 270 million figure, killed in the Jihad. Is it the biggest issue? There was a time in the history of mankind, when one Empire would attack another and kill thousands of innocent people. I thought we are out of that era. 

Author also said the following:

"First, more Muslims died fighting each other than died in battles against non-Muslim dynasties."

That is a plausible argument. We see similar infightings in Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria everyday. My problem is - even this explanation could feed on to the Islamophobia. It's not a positive image of Muslims.

This article is not written to break Islamophobia. Only way to break it is through examples.  

Jiten 


--- On Mon, 1/21/13, Kamal Das <kamalctgu@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Kamal Das <kamalctgu@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: [ History Islam & Beyond . . .] The myth of the murderous Muslim
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, January 21, 2013, 7:33 PM


 

This article is written by an idiot and propagated by another.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:48 PM, QR <qrahman@netscape.net> wrote:
 

Dear members,

This is a good article to read. We spend so much time about history and Islam, it will be helpful to get a different perspective.


Shalom!


----

 
 
Haroon Moghul
Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University.

Haroon Moghul

The myth of the murderous Muslim


Islamophobia promotes a "racialised view of Islam" - the actions of the few represent the "intentions" of the whole.
 
The West has invented weapons of mass destruction and "used them in ways no other parts of the world have" [AP]
Muslims are subversive jihadists. The Middle East is perpetually unstable. "Islam has bloody borders." If you've already made up your mind, you'll find a way to twist the facts to support your conclusion. And if the facts don't do the job, you can always hire new ones.

In the last year, American anti-Muslim hate groups have increased threefold. As playwright Wajahat Ali and others have found, the farther we move away from the September 11 terrorist attacks, the worse discrimination, prejudice and violence against Muslims become.

There's a simple enough reason for this: Islamophobia has become an industry. In the absence of alternative narratives, which can make sense of Muslim extremism, place it into context and guide American domestic and foreign policy, we are stuck with the voices we have - too often, these have been unqualified and uninformed.

It will take us a long time to get past the damage done by years of well-funded Islamophobes, who have dominated the media landscape (finally answering, incidentally, why it is that "Muslims don't do more to condemn terrorism" - nobody was listening). But the resistance to bigotry has already begun and has already scored a number of successes.

There is only so long, after all, you can lie to people.

The boy who cried Islamist
Islamophobia promotes a racialised view of Islam, viewing Arabs and Middle Easterners and Muslims generally as one interchangeable, subversive, homogenous mass; the actions of the few represent the intentions and aspirations of the whole. Thus we were led to believe there could be a plausible connection between bin Laden and Saddam. The resulting cost in American lives, treasure and credibility, is hard to quantify. This is Islamophobia's fruit: poisonous policies.

For reasons of strategic shortsightedness alone, Islamophobia would be discredited soon enough. But there's another reason: Islamophobia doesn't correspond to reality. The more likely an American is to know a Muslim, the more likely she is to have a positive view of Islam. Exposure undermines prejudice. That is, meeting real Muslims pushes aside the media narrative that is so pernicious and harmful. Why? Because much of what Islamophobia peddles is hyperbolic, fanciful, or meaningless.

Let's see how Islamophobia does its damage. The value extends beyond anti-Muslim bigotry, by the way. The same type of "reasoning" is employed by all bigotries - radical Muslim voices, who require a conflict between a homogenous West and an ideally homogenous Islam, make the same types of arguments, often down to the disturbing details. But then it shouldn't be any surprise that extremisms are broadly similar, or that they need to see opposites in the world, for their own identities to take root and thrive.

A lie told often enough feels true
Consider this interview from The New York Times, in which a prominent anti-Muslim voice makes the following remark:
Why isn't it a shrine dedicated to the victims of 9/11 or the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements?
The woman behind these words, who I have no interest in naming (I don't want to give her any more attention than she already has), used to be a regular on Fox News, but has lost even that perch. Her extremism was too extreme. (Indeed, one of the best ways to fight Islamophobia is to give the bigots a microphone and let them keep talking. Their disturbing rhetoric will soon unsettle the overwhelming majority of people, who recoil from such extremism.)
But let's spend a moment to reflect on this allegation; namely, that "270 million" are victims of a homogenous jihadi juggernaut. It is certainly an amazingly precise claim. It is often frequently repeated - Islamophobia resembles nothing if not an echo chamber of incorrectness. In the months since, I've encountered many anti-Muslim voices repeat or inflate this number. Most recently, I've been challenged to explain the "300 million" killed by "jihad".
Even if we stick with the lower number, I can tell you that this number was probably pulled out of thin air. (Even if it wasn't, as I will show, it doesn't matter.) But for the sake of argument, let's take this claim seriously. Namely, that "Muslims" killed somewhere between two or three hundred million. Can that be possible? Where does this number come from? Does it reveal a uniquely and dangerously recurrent Islamic aptitude for mass violence? In short, no, out of nowhere, and no.
1,000 years of jihad
First, I think, it'd make sense to choose a time period. We're told there were 1,000 years of jihad, although to be fair, elsewhere the same person described millions of years of jihad, but this is a thought exercise. I imagine she means the period from roughly 600 to 1600 AD, which covers the time when Muslim states were generally not (as was subsequently true) on the receiving end of colonial conquest.
When Islam emerged in western Arabia, around 610 AD, the total population of the world was likely between 300 and 400 million. Fast forward to right past our period. The United Nations Census Report suggests that the world's total population in the year 1800 was 1 billion; since then, of course, it has shot up to some seven billion.
At that point, the world's largest Muslim population, which would be located in South Asia, was almost entirely under British rule. (In 1947, the population of the Indian subcontinent was under 350 million.) We are being asked to believe that jihadis killed, by the year 1600, more people than lived in South Asia in the year 1600. Keep in mind that India is one of the most densely populated parts of the planet and has long been a centre of world culture and civilisation.
How did Muslims kill so many people?
India, or properly most of northern India, was under Muslim rule from 1200 to 1800. By the Islamophobe's logic, millions of these Indians should have been slaughtered. But by whom? Muslims were never more than a minority and Islam was never imposed by force. The proof for this is in the geography - the capitals of Muslim India rotated between cities like Delhi and Agra, but conversion proceeded most widely on the fringes of these empires, in what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is like saying the Roman Empire imposed Christianity and Christian populations were found farthest from the centre of imperial power.
Further, under Muslim rule, India became increasingly wealthy. (The same happened, by the way, in Muslim Spain, as Arab rule brought with it an agricultural revolution and an urbanising boom.) How was India becoming increasingly wealthy while its Muslim rulers were slaughtering Indians left, right and centre? How were they able to cause so much damage, for so long, without being overthrown? Muslims never enjoyed the kind of decisive advantage in military technology the West enjoyed after 1800. And the organisation of Muslim India gives the lie to the entire edifice of eternal jihadism.
 
Dutch photographer was held by "Jihadis"
on Turkey-Syria border
The capital of the world
We often look to the Ottomans as the world's most powerful pre-modern Muslim dynasty. But the Mughals, rulers of much of South Asia, ruled over far more people and were far wealthier - compare Istanbul's monuments to the Taj Mahal and you'll see what I mean. There is however one thing both empires had in common: both ruled over majority non-Muslim populations.
Under the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, some 30 percent of this Muslim dynasty's nobility were not Muslim, a proportion that had risen to 50 percent in the reign of his son Aurangzeb (1658-1707). By nobility, I mean those individuals given land and status based on their ability to muster troops to defend and expand the realm. If Islam was perpetual jihadism, why would so many non-Muslims join in - and be allowed to join in?

If Muslims were savages bent on perpetual terror, by what moronic logic would they arm their enemies, teach them to fight and incorporate them into their armies? What would we make of the fact that the greatest threat to late 17th century Mughal rule was the remarkable rebellion of a Hindu king named Shivaji, who was finally captured and defeated by the Mughals' senior most general, whose name was Jai Singh - he, too, was not a Muslim.
Somewhere jihadis are killing everyone they come across, more or less, but still Muslim dynasties remain in power, their wealth increases, the urbanisation of their population increases and they leave behind magnificent public and private structures, which suggests they had quite a bit of free time. When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed at the end of World War I, its capital, then called Constantinople, was over 50 percent non-Muslim. This is not to suggest the Ottomans were liberal democrats. But it also suggests they were remarkably tolerant for their time. Probably no other city in Europe was so diverse.
And we're not even talking about most of the planet.
Muslims aren't everywhere
Many of the territories conquered, ruled or dominated by Muslims, such as Central Asia, North Africa and Arabia were comparatively empty. Muslim dynasties never touched the Americas, Australia or East Asia; the last of these undoubtedly held a significant percentage of the world's population throughout the last 1,000 years plus.
So Muslims, who ruled over vast desert spaces and many sparsely populated areas of the world, still killed something of the equivalent of one-quarter of the world's population in 1800. When the first Mughal emperor Babur conquered north India - from another Muslim dynasty, I might add - his army is estimated to number around 10,000; his opponent's army is estimated at several times than that.
Is it conceivable that Muslim empires, such as the Umayyads, Ottomans and Mughals, who ruled over majority non-Muslim populations, could have contributed to the killing of huge percentages of the world's population while staying in power for centuries? How would they, as minorities, have been capable of sustained carnage for decades at a time? When did they get the time to build huge public works projects, establish towns, rebuild cities, fund wells, hospitals, mosques, pools and fountains?
What technological advantage did they have that made them so superior to their enemies that they could sustain such a bloody and vicious record - for 1,000 years? The Mongols exploded out into the world and caused horrific damage, but they managed that for only a few centuries and left nothing of the kind of legacy the great Muslim empires did. Indeed, the Mongols ended up adopting the religion of the peoples they conquered, whereas the reverse happened early in the Muslim period.
A most post-modern warfare
And thus we are left with an implausible and absurd suggestion that jihad killed 270 million people. But even with all this, still three more points need to be stressed, because in recognising their significance, we recognise the ultimate absurdity of the Islamophobic worldview.
First, more Muslims died fighting each other than died in battles against non-Muslim dynasties. Armies were often mixed too, which drives bigots off the wall; when the Ottomans were defeated at Vienna in 1683, they were finished off by a charge of Polish Muslim cavalry, allied with their enemies. Where do these casualties fit in? Should we arbitrarily decide that "intra-Muslim jihad" killed 50 percent of the total number? Why not, considering most of Islamophobia's made up? How were Muslims who so often fought each other also able to fight everyone else?

Unless of course it's not about Islam versus non-Islam.
"Islamophobes link events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart and want us to take it seriously."
Second, this isn't real history. It's dumping "facts" on the unawares, hoping that the sheer flood of information covers up the lack of an explanatory framework. Not only does the Islamophobe play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples, but she ties events together without attempting to explain why. If jihad is really the most murderous ideology ever and it is equal to Islam, then why would so many people become Muslim? What motivated their violence? What sustained it? And how come most Muslims live peaceable lives?

Bigots make up history because actual history undermines them.
Third, let's say for the sake of argument Muslims killed 300 million people over a 1,000 year span. That doesn't mean anything. One could just as easily construct a counter-narrative that works like Islamophobia does: arbitrarily, ignorantly and entirely unself-consciously. I mean, we'd link disparate events based on the religious (or cultural) identity of the culprit.
We could construct a narrative of Western perfidy in response.
According to Charles Mann's 1491, which explores the pre-Columbian Americas, nearly 100 million perished during the European "Age of Discovery", making that the most violent contact between peoples in human history. Nothing in Islamic history remotely compares. With the typical sloppiness of the Islamophobe, we could note how Western ideologies like Communism and Nazism led conservatively to the deaths of another 120 million people; we could note the brutal colonial exploitation of Africa and Asia, in which millions more perished and then breathlessly announce, "Five Hundred Years of Western Civilisation Kills Hundreds of Millions!"
We could toss in the fact that the West has invented weapons of mass destruction and used them in ways no other parts of the world have. (Chemical weapons in World War I; aerial bombing was invented by the Italians against Libyan civilians; and, of course, only America has used nuclear weapons, and twice, both times against civilian targets.) But this would be stupid, because it assumes that people in different times and places are the same, responsible for each other's actions and should only be judged by the dark chapters of their history.
Osama bin Laden portrayed the history of Islam and the West as one long narrative of confrontation, as do many intemperate and extremist voices. He chose to ignore all the countervailing evidence and ignored the differences between times and places, peoples and their leaders. He downplayed and dismissed the achievements of Western culture and civilisation, of which there are so many I'm hard-pressed to know where even to begin. Penicillin? Goethe? The modern museum?

Islamophobes play a similar game, linking events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart, and they want us to take this seriously. And so you get numbers like "270 million" or "300 million". And these are brought up talismanically, as if they constitute overwhelming proof. The Islamophobe is completely and congenitally incapable of reflexivity. They cannot, in other words, look in the mirror; their mind has been made up, and what history is marshalled is not to engage in discussion but to preclude it.
The jihad on accuracy

There is this last little problem.

The Muslim proportion of the world's population has accelerated dramatically in the past centuries and continues to do so today; during our 600-1600 AD window, there were far fewer Muslims in the world, proportionally speaking. Which means we have to figure out what everyone else was up to.

What about the people killed by other peoples - or, the biggest killer of all back then - disease and its most vulnerable victims, infants and the young? Where do we put the Crusades, the Aztecs and the Incans, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mongols (good heavens), Slavs and Byzantines, the Chinese, Korean and Japanese?
Add them all together, and more people were probably killed than ever lived, which is about as accurate as you can expect this kind of nonsense to be.
Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University.
Follow him on Twitter: @hsmoghul
2858
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.





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Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: [ History Islam & Beyond . . .] The myth of the murderous Muslim



Thank You, Shah Deeldar!  Any physician is essentially a quack, no matter how many degrees he/she might have.  In ancient Rome, they were ill treated.  Patients were kept in a quarantine by the street side and people depended more on the passers by than on the physicians.  Even today, the advice they dispense is not worth much towards the cure of the disease they treat.  But that is another matter altogether.  Those who try to make others believe that Islam had been a creed of peace, does not care to know its history at all.  With three of its four rightly guided Caliphs being murdered by swords and spears, the first being poisoned; even the corpse of the Prophet not found; it is indeed a violent creed from the beginning till today.  If some one writes, Muslims as killed more Muslims than non-Muslims that contradicts Prophet Muhammad's advice, doesn't it?  Any deeply religious person like myself deserves to analyze all religions, their contents and histories.  An Islamist, however, is not expected to follow the line of free thinking, even if he participates in 'muktomona'.
 

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:03 AM, Shah Deeldar <shahdeeldar@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

I must say, in a forum like this, degrees and gold medals are not much worth. It is basically making a point against another point. It would be far better for us to keep our degrees home for our friends, families and work places. If you are not making good points, your degrees would be rather your burden. Nobody really cares how hard you worked for those degrees. We have grown beyond that point.  

From member Das's postings, I know that he could be pretty rough and tough and that is alright with me. We had some arguments in the past and it was OK. If you do not like his comments, please make a counter point to show that he is wrong. He can take few punches, I suppose?
With respect and regards,
-SD  

 
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." GBS

From: MOHAMMAD KHAN <mak_285@yahoo.com>
To: "mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 4:11 PM

Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: [ History Islam & Beyond . . .] The myth of the murderous Muslim

 
Mr. Kamal Das, you should have some decency when you write in a group. Could you tell us why you think this person who is going to Columbia University is an idiot? What is your qualification also?
M. Khan. M.D., F.R.C.S.
From: Kamal Das <kamalctgu@gmail.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, 21 January 2013, 18:33
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: [ History Islam & Beyond . . .] The myth of the murderous Muslim
 
This article is written by an idiot and propagated by another.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:48 PM, QR <qrahman@netscape.net> wrote:
 
Dear members,

This is a good article to read. We spend so much time about history and Islam, it will be helpful to get a different perspective.


Shalom!


----
 
 
Haroon Moghul Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University.

Haroon Moghul

The myth of the murderous Muslim


Islamophobia promotes a "racialised view of Islam" - the actions of the few represent the "intentions" of the whole.
 
The West has invented weapons of mass destruction and "used them in ways no other parts of the world have" [AP]
Muslims are subversive jihadists. The Middle East is perpetually unstable. "Islam has bloody borders." If you've already made up your mind, you'll find a way to twist the facts to support your conclusion. And if the facts don't do the job, you can always hire new ones. In the last year, American anti-Muslim hate groups have increased threefold. As playwright Wajahat Ali and others have found, the farther we move away from the September 11 terrorist attacks, the worse discrimination, prejudice and violence against Muslims become. There's a simple enough reason for this: Islamophobia has become an industry. In the absence of alternative narratives, which can make sense of Muslim extremism, place it into context and guide American domestic and foreign policy, we are stuck with the voices we have - too often, these have been unqualified and uninformed. It will take us a long time to get past the damage done by years of well-funded Islamophobes, who have dominated the media landscape (finally answering, incidentally, why it is that "Muslims don't do more to condemn terrorism" - nobody was listening). But the resistance to bigotry has already begun and has already scored a number of successes. There is only so long, after all, you can lie to people.The boy who cried Islamist
Islamophobia promotes a racialised view of Islam, viewing Arabs and Middle Easterners and Muslims generally as one interchangeable, subversive, homogenous mass; the actions of the few represent the intentions and aspirations of the whole. Thus we were led to believe there could be a plausible connection between bin Laden and Saddam. The resulting cost in American lives, treasure and credibility, is hard to quantify. This is Islamophobia's fruit: poisonous policies. For reasons of strategic shortsightedness alone, Islamophobia would be discredited soon enough. But there's another reason: Islamophobia doesn't correspond to reality. The more likely an American is to know a Muslim, the more likely she is to have a positive view of Islam. Exposure undermines prejudice. That is, meeting real Muslims pushes aside the media narrative that is so pernicious and harmful. Why? Because much of what Islamophobia peddles is hyperbolic, fanciful, or meaningless. Let's see how Islamophobia does its damage. The value extends beyond anti-Muslim bigotry, by the way. The same type of "reasoning" is employed by all bigotries - radical Muslim voices, who require a conflict between a homogenous West and an ideally homogenous Islam, make the same types of arguments, often down to the disturbing details. But then it shouldn't be any surprise that extremisms are broadly similar, or that they need to see opposites in the world, for their own identities to take root and thrive.

A lie told often enough feels true
Consider this interview from The New York Times, in which a prominent anti-Muslim voice makes the following remark:
Why isn't it a shrine dedicated to the victims of 9/11 or the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements?
The woman behind these words, who I have no interest in naming (I don't want to give her any more attention than she already has), used to be a regular on Fox News, but has lost even that perch. Her extremism was too extreme. (Indeed, one of the best ways to fight Islamophobia is to give the bigots a microphone and let them keep talking. Their disturbing rhetoric will soon unsettle the overwhelming majority of people, who recoil from such extremism.)
But let's spend a moment to reflect on this allegation; namely, that "270 million" are victims of a homogenous jihadi juggernaut. It is certainly an amazingly precise claim. It is often frequently repeated - Islamophobia resembles nothing if not an echo chamber of incorrectness. In the months since, I've encountered many anti-Muslim voices repeat or inflate this number. Most recently, I've been challenged to explain the "300 million" killed by "jihad".
Even if we stick with the lower number, I can tell you that this number was probably pulled out of thin air. (Even if it wasn't, as I will show, it doesn't matter.) But for the sake of argument, let's take this claim seriously. Namely, that "Muslims" killed somewhere between two or three hundred million. Can that be possible? Where does this number come from? Does it reveal a uniquely and dangerously recurrent Islamic aptitude for mass violence? In short, no, out of nowhere, and no.
1,000 years of jihad
First, I think, it'd make sense to choose a time period. We're told there were 1,000 years of jihad, although to be fair, elsewhere the same person described millions of years of jihad, but this is a thought exercise. I imagine she means the period from roughly 600 to 1600 AD, which covers the time when Muslim states were generally not (as was subsequently true) on the receiving end of colonial conquest.
When Islam emerged in western Arabia, around 610 AD, the total population of the world was likely between 300 and 400 million. Fast forward to right past our period. The United Nations Census Report suggests that the world's total population in the year 1800 was 1 billion; since then, of course, it has shot up to some seven billion.
At that point, the world's largest Muslim population, which would be located in South Asia, was almost entirely under British rule. (In 1947, the population of the Indian subcontinent was under 350 million.) We are being asked to believe that jihadis killed, by the year 1600, more people than lived in South Asia in the year 1600. Keep in mind that India is one of the most densely populated parts of the planet and has long been a centre of world culture and civilisation.
How did Muslims kill so many people?
India, or properly most of northern India, was under Muslim rule from 1200 to 1800. By the Islamophobe's logic, millions of these Indians should have been slaughtered. But by whom? Muslims were never more than a minority and Islam was never imposed by force. The proof for this is in the geography - the capitals of Muslim India rotated between cities like Delhi and Agra, but conversion proceeded most widely on the fringes of these empires, in what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is like saying the Roman Empire imposed Christianity and Christian populations were found farthest from the centre of imperial power.
Further, under Muslim rule, India became increasingly wealthy. (The same happened, by the way, in Muslim Spain, as Arab rule brought with it an agricultural revolution and an urbanising boom.) How was India becoming increasingly wealthy while its Muslim rulers were slaughtering Indians left, right and centre? How were they able to cause so much damage, for so long, without being overthrown? Muslims never enjoyed the kind of decisive advantage in military technology the West enjoyed after 1800. And the organisation of Muslim India gives the lie to the entire edifice of eternal jihadism.
 
Dutch photographer was held by "Jihadis" on Turkey-Syria border
The capital of the world
We often look to the Ottomans as the world's most powerful pre-modern Muslim dynasty. But the Mughals, rulers of much of South Asia, ruled over far more people and were far wealthier - compare Istanbul's monuments to the Taj Mahal and you'll see what I mean. There is however one thing both empires had in common: both ruled over majority non-Muslim populations.
Under the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, some 30 percent of this Muslim dynasty's nobility were not Muslim, a proportion that had risen to 50 percent in the reign of his son Aurangzeb (1658-1707). By nobility, I mean those individuals given land and status based on their ability to muster troops to defend and expand the realm. If Islam was perpetual jihadism, why would so many non-Muslims join in - and be allowed to join in? If Muslims were savages bent on perpetual terror, by what moronic logic would they arm their enemies, teach them to fight and incorporate them into their armies? What would we make of the fact that the greatest threat to late 17th century Mughal rule was the remarkable rebellion of a Hindu king named Shivaji, who was finally captured and defeated by the Mughals' senior most general, whose name was Jai Singh - he, too, was not a Muslim.
Somewhere jihadis are killing everyone they come across, more or less, but still Muslim dynasties remain in power, their wealth increases, the urbanisation of their population increases and they leave behind magnificent public and private structures, which suggests they had quite a bit of free time. When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed at the end of World War I, its capital, then called Constantinople, was over 50 percent non-Muslim. This is not to suggest the Ottomans were liberal democrats. But it also suggests they were remarkably tolerant for their time. Probably no other city in Europe was so diverse.
And we're not even talking about most of the planet.
Muslims aren't everywhere
Many of the territories conquered, ruled or dominated by Muslims, such as Central Asia, North Africa and Arabia were comparatively empty. Muslim dynasties never touched the Americas, Australia or East Asia; the last of these undoubtedly held a significant percentage of the world's population throughout the last 1,000 years plus.
So Muslims, who ruled over vast desert spaces and many sparsely populated areas of the world, still killed something of the equivalent of one-quarter of the world's population in 1800. When the first Mughal emperor Babur conquered north India - from another Muslim dynasty, I might add - his army is estimated to number around 10,000; his opponent's army is estimated at several times than that.
Is it conceivable that Muslim empires, such as the Umayyads, Ottomans and Mughals, who ruled over majority non-Muslim populations, could have contributed to the killing of huge percentages of the world's population while staying in power for centuries? How would they, as minorities, have been capable of sustained carnage for decades at a time? When did they get the time to build huge public works projects, establish towns, rebuild cities, fund wells, hospitals, mosques, pools and fountains?
What technological advantage did they have that made them so superior to their enemies that they could sustain such a bloody and vicious record - for 1,000 years? The Mongols exploded out into the world and caused horrific damage, but they managed that for only a few centuries and left nothing of the kind of legacy the great Muslim empires did. Indeed, the Mongols ended up adopting the religion of the peoples they conquered, whereas the reverse happened early in the Muslim period.
A most post-modern warfare
And thus we are left with an implausible and absurd suggestion that jihad killed 270 million people. But even with all this, still three more points need to be stressed, because in recognising their significance, we recognise the ultimate absurdity of the Islamophobic worldview.
First, more Muslims died fighting each other than died in battles against non-Muslim dynasties. Armies were often mixed too, which drives bigots off the wall; when the Ottomans were defeated at Vienna in 1683, they were finished off by a charge of Polish Muslim cavalry, allied with their enemies. Where do these casualties fit in? Should we arbitrarily decide that "intra-Muslim jihad" killed 50 percent of the total number? Why not, considering most of Islamophobia's made up? How were Muslims who so often fought each other also able to fight everyone else? Unless of course it's not about Islam versus non-Islam.
"Islamophobes link events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart and want us to take it seriously."
Second, this isn't real history. It's dumping "facts" on the unawares, hoping that the sheer flood of information covers up the lack of an explanatory framework. Not only does the Islamophobe play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples, but she ties events together without attempting to explain why. If jihad is really the most murderous ideology ever and it is equal to Islam, then why would so many people become Muslim? What motivated their violence? What sustained it? And how come most Muslims live peaceable lives? Bigots make up history because actual history undermines them.
Third, let's say for the sake of argument Muslims killed 300 million people over a 1,000 year span. That doesn't mean anything. One could just as easily construct a counter-narrative that works like Islamophobia does: arbitrarily, ignorantly and entirely unself-consciously. I mean, we'd link disparate events based on the religious (or cultural) identity of the culprit.
We could construct a narrative of Western perfidy in response.
According to Charles Mann's 1491, which explores the pre-Columbian Americas, nearly 100 million perished during the European "Age of Discovery", making that the most violent contact between peoples in human history. Nothing in Islamic history remotely compares. With the typical sloppiness of the Islamophobe, we could note how Western ideologies like Communism and Nazism led conservatively to the deaths of another 120 million people; we could note the brutal colonial exploitation of Africa and Asia, in which millions more perished and then breathlessly announce, "Five Hundred Years of Western Civilisation Kills Hundreds of Millions!"
We could toss in the fact that the West has invented weapons of mass destruction and used them in ways no other parts of the world have. (Chemical weapons in World War I; aerial bombing was invented by the Italians against Libyan civilians; and, of course, only America has used nuclear weapons, and twice, both times against civilian targets.) But this would be stupid, because it assumes that people in different times and places are the same, responsible for each other's actions and should only be judged by the dark chapters of their history.
Osama bin Laden portrayed the history of Islam and the West as one long narrative of confrontation, as do many intemperate and extremist voices. He chose to ignore all the countervailing evidence and ignored the differences between times and places, peoples and their leaders. He downplayed and dismissed the achievements of Western culture and civilisation, of which there are so many I'm hard-pressed to know where even to begin. Penicillin? Goethe? The modern museum? Islamophobes play a similar game, linking events that take place across the planet and hundreds of centuries apart, and they want us to take this seriously. And so you get numbers like "270 million" or "300 million". And these are brought up talismanically, as if they constitute overwhelming proof. The Islamophobe is completely and congenitally incapable of reflexivity. They cannot, in other words, look in the mirror; their mind has been made up, and what history is marshalled is not to engage in discussion but to preclude it.
The jihad on accuracy There is this last little problem. The Muslim proportion of the world's population has accelerated dramatically in the past centuries and continues to do so today; during our 600-1600 AD window, there were far fewer Muslims in the world, proportionally speaking. Which means we have to figure out what everyone else was up to. What about the people killed by other peoples - or, the biggest killer of all back then - disease and its most vulnerable victims, infants and the young? Where do we put the Crusades, the Aztecs and the Incans, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mongols (good heavens), Slavs and Byzantines, the Chinese, Korean and Japanese?
Add them all together, and more people were probably killed than ever lived, which is about as accurate as you can expect this kind of nonsense to be.
Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is an author and a graduate student at Columbia University.
Follow him on Twitter: @hsmoghul
2858
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.





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[mukto-mona] Funny but insightful news



Please read the enclose story below.

I could not copy the video where the 5-year old girl was showing her paper gun. It's like if you cut the bottom-left quadrant out of a half-page. Teachers and School officials interpreted that piece of paper as a fake gun. That's what caused such an ordeal for her, and she is having nightmares. 

I just think about the competence of teachers and administrators of US-school system, and wonder about what they have been teaching to our kids. I believe kids have more commonsense than these people. I say - it's time to outsource teaching jobs to teachers from the 3rd-world countries; they are jewels compared to these empty-headed ones in the USA. Video conferencing will not cost billions of our tax dollar and our kids will get solid education.

What do you say?

Jiten Roy

Fifth-grader reprimanded for bringing paper 'gun' to school
 
Another fake gun has reportedly created problems for a young student.
According to Philadelphia mother Dianna Kelly, who spoke with FOX 29 about the incident, her daughter, Melody Valentin, was given a sheet of paper by her grandfather that was torn and folded to look like a pistol. When another student saw the fake gun, which Melody had thrown in the trash can, he alerted the teacher.
The teacher then went over the top when reprimanding Melody, Kelly told Fox 29, saying that he "should call the cops on her" and that she could "be arrested."
Kelly added, "Why did he threaten my daughter?"
Melody, meanwhile, said that the teacher "yelled at me and said I shouldn't have brought the gun to school and I kept telling him it was a paper gun but he wouldn't listen."
Kelly has been keeping Melody home since the incident last week and says she's looking into enrolling her in another school.
According to Fox 29, school officials have not responded to their requests for comment.

Last week, a kindergartner was suspended after saying she was going to shoot classmates with her pink Hello Kitty bubble gun. And earlier this month, a 6-year-old boy was suspended after making a gun gesture with his hand and saying, "Pow."



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Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: Harvard University places at its entrance verse from Quran as best example of justice



JR:
- how to deal with people who disagree with your religious views; some of those prescriptions are very harsh to those who do not conform to the principles of Quran. 


QR:
>>>>>>>>> I am always open to learn new things. Kindly give me some specific examples and I'll explore it with you. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mr. Rahman,

Please verify some of these verses below: 


Below, a few verses from the Qur'an, which clearly call for the murder of the deserters of Islam.

 

Strike terror in the hearts of the unbelievers; smite the unbelievers at their necks and cut off their fingers...8:12

 

Seize and slay the renegades (i.e., apostates) wherever you find them (death for the apostates as per Baydawi; ref. Leaving Islam, p. 17, as per the translator of Noble Qur'an kill those who reject Islam after accepting it)...4:89

 

If the enemies violate their oaths (i.e., if they apostatize or do not accept Islam) and taunt the faith then fight them (i.e., death for the apostates as per Maudoodi; ref. Leaving Islam, p. 18)...9:12

 

Covenant with Allah must be honoured; deserters (apostates) cannot escape death or being killed (death for the apostates)...33:15-16

 

Allah curses the hypocrites, diseased hearts; they are not able to stay as Muhammad's neighbour; wherever they are found they will be seized and slain mercilessly (i.e., kill the apostates and the hypocrites) ...33:60-61

 

There is a terrible penalty for those who dispute about Allah after accepting Islam (apostates)...42:16

 

And here are a few ahadith on how apostasy against Islam was treated during Muhammad's time.

 

Muhammad ordered to kill the apostates; if somebody (Muslim) discards his religion, kill him')...(Sahih Bukhari, 4.52.260 Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 260:

 

Narrated Ikrima: Ali burnt some people and this news reached Ibn 'Abbas, who said, "Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, 'Don't punish (anybody) with Allah's Punishment.' No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.' "

______________________________


My goal is not to target Quran particularly; my understanding is that - all religious scriptures (Quran, Bible, Torah, Gita, etc.) are full of such violent instructions to punish anyone who does not conform to edicts of those scriptures. If you differ, let me know why. 


Jiten Roy




--- On
Wed, 1/23/13, QR <qrahman@netscape.net> wrote:






-----Original Message-----
From: Jiten Roy <jnrsr53@yahoo.com>
To: mukto-mona <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Jan 23, 2013 6:22 am
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Fwd: Harvard University places at its entrance verse from Quran as best example of justice

 
"Those who have irrational hate about Islam, they would "Invent" issues if necessary. The beautiful verse from the Qur'an is an example of "Universality" of the message Qur'an delivered to us."

Why do I hear the same accusation from you whenever someone criticizes anything about Islam? You know that - everybody do not follow Islam or care about Islam. That does not mean they necessarily hate Islam. 

Anyway, let's come to the point about the display of this verse. 

We have to remember - first, there is nothing wrong with the quote, per se. Second, it did not just appear there by the grace of God; somebody had to pay heftily to put up this quote on the Harvard Campus.
  
Why is there controversy over such an innocuous quote? Now, what are 'justice' and 'injustice,' and who determines them – government/Quran/Gita/Bible/Torah? So you see, one person's justice could be other person's injustice. Since we cannot decide on them, we are bound to have disagreement, even among family members.  Now what we do with the disagreement? Actually, this verse says what to do when you have disagreement - you stick to whatever you believe in, and leave others alone; Allah will deal with them. I like everything up to here. But, things get complicated after that.
 
I wish there were no other verses on this subject in the Quran, but – it is not so, unfortunately. Quran has many other verses (prescriptions) also as to - how to deal with people who disagree with your religious views; some of those prescriptions are very harsh to those who do not conform to the principles of Quran. If someone choose to follow one of those harsher prescriptions to deal with non-conformers, for whatever reason,  could you blame him/her?
 
Therefore, if you just run with this one verse, you will have misguided notion about the reality. Also, we still have blasphemy law to shun dissenting voices, and many other discriminatory practices to deal with non-believers.
 
Therefore, even though this verse says leave those non-believers alone, it may not be effective among believers, who know other verses also.  In other words, it will just convey misinformation to non-believers. It's like one of those Middle Eastern broadcasts - sending one message to English-speaking audiences and a different message to non-English-speaking audiences.
 
I believe - complain is not about this particular verse at all, complain is about the impression it creates. They are afraid – it will convey misinformation. Can you blame them as Islam-haters?
 
There is always one more thing in all religious scriptures to confuse people. This is because - scriptures are products of the most innocent/vulnerable generations, with no scientific/technological organizational background. We need to read them with proper perspectives.

Thanks.

Jiten Roy




--- On Tue, 1/22/13, QR <qrahman@netscape.net> wrote:

From: QR <qrahman@netscape.net>
Subject: [mukto-mona] Fwd: Harvard University places at its entrance verse from Quran as best example of justice
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 8:50 AM

 
Those who have irrational hate about Islam, they would "Invent" issues if necessary. The beautiful verse from the Qur'an is an example of "Universality" of the message Qur'an delivered to us.

Pam Geller came "Unglued" with such a beautiful passage, I wanted to ask her if English was her first or second language!!

Folks, read the passage for yourself and ask yourself where it says anything against Jews, Christians or Hindus? Rather it has been a command to Muslims to establish "Justice" even if requires speaking up against our own families.

Which ended with a warning (For Muslims) NOT to distort justice and staying firm to just actions.



Pamela Geller says, "But the dhimmi lemmings at the Harvard Law School don't know that, or don't care. And so they perpetrate this misleading whitewash of Islamic "justice".

>>>>>>>> Could not believe my own eyes that, such a beautiful verse can arouse such an ugly response from hate-mongers.

When we discuss "Islamic justice", we have to go by what the books says about it. Any attempt to distortion by Muslims would be punished by our Maker.

Shalom!


-----Original Message-----
From: Isha Khan <bdmailer@gmail.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Sent: Tue, Jan 22, 2013 5:38 pm
Subject: Harvard University places at its entrance verse from Quran as best example of justice

Harvard University places at its entrance verse from Quran as best example of justice




At the main entrance to Harvard Law School, a text from a verse in the Koran Chapter "The Women" was placed, presenting it as one of the greatest examples of justice in history. This step of the most authoritative US University is met by strong dissatisfaction of Islamophobes.

A Harvard student, a native of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Jumma, photographed the text at the entrance and posted it on his Twitter page. This was reported by a Saudi paper Ajel in Arabic.

The text of the verse reads:

"O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve, and if you distort justice or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted with all that you do."

(The Holy Quran, Chapter 4. "The Women", verse 135).


Upon learning that the verse from the Koran was posted at Harvard as an example of a higher justice, American Islamophobes expressed their outrage and attacked the Koran and Sharia.

On Atlas Shrugs, a website of the initiator of numerous anti-Muslim campaigns in America, Pamela Geller, "evidence" was posted against Islam, consisting of Koranic texts taken out of context and their interpretation by Islamic scholars. The Islamophobe announced that the Sharia is contrary to "human values".

"The Constitution is the great shining moment of Western civilization, based on individual rights, the premise of which is the opposite of Islamic law", claims Geller.She calls the Sharia "a comprehensive legal system governing every aspect of human life, and asserts authority over non-Muslims".

Claiming that "discrimination against non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians, is part and parcel of the Koran's concept of justice", Pamela Geller says, "But the dhimmi lemmings at the Harvard Law School don't know that, or don't care. And so they perpetrate this misleading whitewash of Islamic "justice".
Pamela Geller is a self-proclaimed human rights activist and director of the center "Stop Islamization of America".

The Harvard University was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, and is the oldest and most prestigious university in the United States.

http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2013/01/16/17265.shtml


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