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This excerpt should disqualify Islam from being considered a religion in the US.
"Muslims are required to follow the teachings of Mohammed, who was a slave owner and trader."
He was not a man of God. He was a fraud.
Being a slave owner and trader makes you not a man of God? There are some important American historical figures as well a British historical figures who get a pass on this though as it being a bias of their time. Something seems off here.
This blog (and it is a blog, so saying it should define constitutional law is ****ing stupid as ****) does a good job of giving a history lesson. It for some reason is acting as if the slavery of Islam was significantly worse than the slavery of others, which isn't necessarily true. If we want to get nitpicky, it could feasibly be worse in some aspects but not necessarily universally worse. Nor is the story of "Muslims always enslaving Christians" entirely accurate. Many of the African slaves taken to the Americas were from countries conquered by Islam. This means many of the slaves taken by American Christians were Muslim. An accurate number, to my knowledge, was never found nor could be since the slavers didn't really care if they were Muslim or not. They just wanted to sell people as property. Which is why slavery is bad.
The blog notes that no widespread effort to abolish slavery in the Muslim world has occurred, which is a very clever way of framing it. The thing is, modern slavery is far from exclusive in the very diverse Muslim World. Currently, most modern day slavery happens in Africa. The thing is, it's not actually exclusive to Northern Africa which is predominately muslim, but is also still highly prevalent in the most christian Souther Africa. There's also a pretty serious issue of slavery in East Asia and India. The blogs attempt to make it seem like Muslims are the worst offenders of slavery is simply dishonest. Slavery is most prevalent in under developed and developing countries, as well as countries that utilize more cheap labor to create consumer goods, most notably China. Meaning that slavery is less an issue of religion and more an issue of economics. Not that we're not all used to things that really come down to economic issues being made into something else, be it religion or race.
Let's just remember that the source is another conservative rag.
Actually, it was kind of a book review. You know what I mean? A book, written by a professor at Ohio State? A rag is what the hildabeast wipes her computer with!
Actually, it was kind of a book review. You know what I mean? A book, written by a professor at Ohio State? A rag is what the hildabeast wipes her computer with!
A book review cannot necessarily accurately gauge what or all of what the book says. For that, you'd have to read the book. And even then, this blog still comes to conclusions that probably weren't in the book, assuming we were honestly told what the books subject was.
Also, university professors seem to be liked by conservatives ONLY when they say what they want to hear. If it's anything else, they're part of the liberal agenda.
Few people question the prevailing orders and accepted norms of the time they live in. That holds true for ancient man and conservatives and liberals of the modern West. Just look at the asinine War on Drugs for which the current liberal Pope supports, and its ramifications in the Phillippines. If homosexuality were illegal and a socio-political war declared on it, with wide spread extra judicial murders of homosexuals in the Phillippines by police squads and hired vigilante hit women, tens to hundreds of thousands of homosexuals and gay porn producers turning themselves into the police, the current Pope would be out on the pulpit tossing around overused and meaningless words like "love." He would be lobbying for the legalization or decriminalization of sodomy and homosexuality. But because the War on Drugs remains socially acceptable and widely supported he champions the continued illegality of drugs and punishment of addicts and sellers. Because he is a man of his time not a visionary or someone moved to do right for the sake of right even if 90 percent of the world happens to be morons.
With slavery it is an old institution that predates Christianity and Islam. It was as widely accepted among most human societies until very recently in human history, as the War on Drugs is accepted today. Islam then produced laws and standards for treatment of slaves. To my understanding Islam did this to a much greater extent than Christianity.
Enslavement of other human beings was widely accepted among Early Christians including its 12 Apostles. Jesus seems by depictions in the New Testament tolerant of this socio-economic system and encourages slaves not to disobey their masters. But at other times Jesus does not distinguish between enslaved and free person and proclaims that in the Kingdom of God there is neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female. As best I recall from my memory of New Testament passages anyways.
Pagan Rome was one of the largest urban slave owning societies in the world. No urban society on earth would match it in scale of urban slabery until the Portugese established city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
With the Fall of Rome Christians largely did away with enslaving others in their societies. No more mass slaughter of animals for patrician entertainment. No more gladiator events with humans killing humans for the entertainment of free citizens. The Germanized Christianity would give birth to the institution of chivalry, the Western version of the Japanese Bushido, and eventually the chivalry of these evolving barbarians would clash with the sophisticated societies of the East with their well trained and disciplined professional Muslim militaries. Where the womanish male intellectuals of refined, cultured, and learned Byzantium could no longer field enough men in their professional and stellar (but small) armies. Eventually, the ingenuity of these Christians would usher in the scientific revolution financed through the brutal enslavement of blacks (many Muslim) from Africa and their forced labor in the foreign lands of the Americas these new order of Christians took by force and massacre from Amerindians. The wealth and rise of Europe, even among its liberal and anti-Christian segment, was forged through the broken bodies of blacks and Amerindians in silver mines to sugar and tobacco fields.
Catholicism looked to ancient pagan Rome to develop its ethics and practices of enslavement of other human beings. So, manumission became a norm in Catholic slave holding societies. Protestantism much more divorced from antiquity didn't develop this practice as extensively. But life under both systems was dehumanizing and brutal.
The West never adopted the cutting off of male genitals of male slaves as the East did among both Christians (say, Ethiopians) and Muslim lords purchasing slaves. To me this was an additional, irreversible, psychological trauma and dehumanization. The Vatican and Rome was probably the one place cutting off young boys testicles was practiced in the West. The boy choir for the Popes--so they could sing with "angelic voices"--had their testicles cut off. But in many respects the slave system of the Muslims was probably more preferable to that of the European Christians. Advancement and career prestige was still possible as a slave in the Muslim world and the racial caste system was not as extensive and hard set as it was in the European Christian world. There goes Jesus warning us about the Good Samaritan.
To be fair to the Christians and Hindus of the East, the Muslims learned a lot from them and assimilated their thoughts and some of their cultural characteristics into Muslim societies.
But yes... Muslim pirates did raid European shores into the 1800s and abduct and enslave Europeans. But bearing in mind European navies during the 1800s were given legal rights to snatch boys and men off the streets, abducting them aboard ship, and then forcing them to serve X amount of years in European and American military navies.
As for Mohammad, he was no saint by Christian standards. But neither was the likely bipolar and delusional Martin Luther of the German Reformation. He was a pure nutcase and repaying mad anti-Jew. But both men are presented in Western media and discussion as nice, saintly, men. The only one that ever comes under mass public scrutiny is that of Jesus Christ. Mohammad gets a pass on banging a 6 or 9 year-old girl but every modern American and European wants to speculate on Jesus living a sexually immoral life by Christian standards.
The question is not one of mere ethics as most modern conservatives and liberals like to think and discuss the issue of Jesus vs Mohammad as. The fundamental issue is whether or not Jesus is as the book John articulates in the beginning: in the beginning was the word and word was God. That God became flesh as Jesus. That is the fundamental issue. Not whether Mohammad owned slaves or had personal flaws.
Mohammad and Martin Luther became great men in terms of social and historical impact and significance. And that great men can have flaws ought be taught.
Jesus says in the New Testament that there are many things he has to teach his followers but that they were not yet ready to receive those teachings. It is possible on his seeming different and contradictory comments on slaves that the ending of slavery might have been one of them. But Christianity from the Catholic framework is opposed to revolutions. Violent revolutions. Like the American and French Revolutions. Transformations in societies are supposed to come non-violently and the "legitimate" authority being respected.
A book review cannot necessarily accurately gauge what or all of what the book says. For that, you'd have to read the book. And even then, this blog still comes to conclusions that probably weren't in the book, assuming we were honestly told what the books subject was.
Also, university professors seem to be liked by conservatives ONLY when they say what they want to hear. If it's anything else, they're part of the liberal agenda.
Jesus. The Barbary slave trade is well known. It isn't something just being made up now by some conservative agenda to malign Muslims.
In fact, you should ask yourself WHY more attention ISN'T given to the Barbary/Arab slave trade or the millions of Europeans who were enslaved over the past millennia by Ottomans and Maghrebis? We only hear about the past 100 years or so when Europeans started to exert influence over the Middle East, and not the 1000 years before that where the Middle East couldn't keep its armies out of Europe.
Then, wonder why the eastern African slave trade never gets any attention? Nope. All you ever hear about is the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Which, for all its barbarity, was still a fraction of the size of the Arab/Muslim slave trade in Eastern Africa.
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