Posted on 05/11/2011 6:54:48 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Attacks on churches, communal divisions -- Cairo has recently seen conflicts between some Muslims and Coptic Christians. But who exactly are the Copts and how did they come to be in Egypt? Part of the answer lies in Coptic art... in the 19th and 20th centuries excavators such as William Flinders Petrie developed truly scientific archaeological techniques and looked beyond the tombs of the kings into the buried worlds of Egypt's past. Petrie, who excavated at Fayoum, looked not just for treasures but pottery and cloth.
Egypt's climate preserves materials that usually perish, including wood, papyrus, and cloth. Even shoes from ancient Egypt's later period under Roman rule have survived. Another stunning type of material discovered by early 20th-century archaeologists was Coptic woven art. Early Christians in Egypt buried their dead with finely woven clothes and shrouds that have survived along with Biblical papyri, paintings and sculpture. In 1910, the Coptic Museum in old Coptic Cairo opened to show such relics released from the earth...
So to return to that question I asked above, exactly who are the Copts? The answer is clear from this connection. Coptic Christianity dates back to the first couple of hundred years after the lifetime of Christ. The people who converted to Christianity were the ancient Egyptians, as well as Jewish, Greek and Roman inhabitants of Egypt. This is even clearer when alongside the art of Coptic Egypt you consider the Coptic language preserved in ancient papyri and manuscripts and still used in the Coptic liturgy today... In the British Museum in London is the Rosetta Stone... the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion... studied Coptic as part of his quest, because he rightly saw that it was descended from ancient Egyptian. That is, the language of the Coptic liturgy is the language of ancient Egypt.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
In the middle ages while Islam was being sort of tolerant of Christianity in Europe, Islam was very busy butchering, enslaving and forcing conversions on Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians if there were any left, animists and whatever few Christians or Jews in the rest of the world. The butchery in greater India, Indoneisa, and many other countries is unparalleled. Islam has only shown tolerance when it was in a weaker position.
In Al Andalus, even, it was onerous:
Eyes down, so as not to offend a Muslim by looking at him directly.
Absolutely NO weapons allowed to be possessed by a non-Muslim.
No non-Muslim place of worship could be built or repaired without (never given) permission of the Islamic authorities.
If a Muslim “needed” a particular piece of property, the non-Muslim must sell it to him at the Muslim's price; refusal meant both confiscation and punishment.
The jizya tax (annual fee for “protection” of non-Muslim “citizens”) double-quadruple the Muslim zakat rates. Non payment resulted in sale into slavery, and/or confiscation of property...unless one converted. Oh, and that was an added tax, in addition to any regular taxes all had to pay.
Converts were very carefully watched, to make sure they adhered strictly to Muslim tenets; backsliding was dealt with very harshly, including death.
In those other Muslim lands, it was much worse for the Dhimmi. In some Middle Eastern areas, there were times the jizya was used as a weapon to force conversions; various places & times it was raised exorbitant levels, rather than the 'usual' rate. There were even times that conversion TO Islam was prohibitted, because the loss of jizya would have imperiled the royal treasuries!
These are the highlights of Muslim “tolerance” of non-Muslims in Muslim lands; but only if one were a Christian or Jew—People of the Book. All others were fair game for rape, murder, and slavery with impunity, unless they converted.
If Europe were a Muslim land invaded by Christians, he might have a point. However, Europe never was a Muslim land, but much North Africa, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey were Christian lands. Arab Muslims took over those lands, oppressed their native peoples and Christianity is persecuted and either waning or obliterated in all of them. Compare that to when European colonial powers held sway over Muslim countries and you see the Muslims did quite well by comparison.
Thank you very much for the details of the Islamic enlightened tolerance...
Sorry, I realized that only after posting.
Hopefully, you didn't take my response as an insult. ;-)
Nope; easy mistake to make, so I had no need to have felt insulted. Just thought I better clarify.
Islam earned it's reputation for tolerance in places like Spain and the Ottoman Turk Empire.
When Christians took over in Spain, they drove out Jews and Muslims who would not convert, and instituted the Inquisition to make certain that all those who now claimed to be Christians really were.
The Ottoman Turk Empire tolerated Christians and Jews, to the point, if I remember correctly, that Palestine was roughly one third Muslim, one third Christian and one third Jewish.
Jews and Christians lived under Muslim rule for over a thousand years in places like Egypt and today's Iraq.
So which Christian countries of that same time could cite a similar record of tolerance?
Looking East, just how different was Muslim treatment of Hindus, Buddhists and other religions there, I don't know.
However, territories now called India, Pakistan and Indonesia, while dominated by Muslims, still had large non-Muslim populations.
Bottom line: if your argument is that the old Muslims' reputation for tolerance has been overblown for modern political purposes, I can certainly agree with that.
But if you go further, to claim that the old Muslims were less tolerant than Christians of that same time period, then I'd say, that's probably going too far.
The obvious point is that "tolerance" can be a relative thing -- one religion might be more or less tolerant than another, depending on circumstances.
No one would claim that by today's standards Muslims were ever very tolerant of other religions.
Instead, the comparison is relative, to the intolerance practiced by many Christians towards their own "heretics" and non-Christians.
In that comparison, the old Muslims don't look quite so intolerant.
By contrast, some Muslim countries today are more intolerant than ever.
Doesn’t sound so nice to me:
Professor Moshe Maoz has summarized the conditions of those Jews (and Christians) living
under Ottoman rule for centuries within their indigenous homeland of (Syro-) Palestine, as
follows:
“…the position of the Jews was in many ways precarious. Like their Christian fellow subjects, the Jews were
inferior citizens in the Muslim-Ottoman state which was based on the principle of Muslim superiority. They were
regarded as state protégés (dhimmis) and had to pay a special poll tax (jizya) for that protection and as a sign of their
inferior status. Their testimony was not accepted in the courts of justice, and in cases of the murder of a Jew or
Christian by a Muslim, the latter was usually not condemned to death. In addition, Jews as well as Christians were
normally not acceptable for appointments to the highest administrative posts; they were forbidden to carry arms
(thus, to serve in the army), to ride horses in towns or to wear Muslim dress. They were also not usually allowed to
build or repair places of worship and were often subjected to oppression, extortion and violence by both the local
authorities and the Muslim population. The Jews in Ottoman Palestine and Syria lived under such ambivalent and
precarious conditions for a number of centuries…”
http://www.answering-islam.org/NonMuslims/turkish-tolerance-jews.pdf
In all points east of Saudi Arabia, every Muslim today is a descendent of someone who was forced into Islam, or of the original conquerors. In fact, pretty much the only voluntary converts to Islam short of a few idiots like Cat Stevens are prisoners in the US. Other than descendents of Mohammed’s family and original volunteers, everyone else is a descendent of someone forced into Islam. Actually being born Muslim is tantamount to being born in a prison from which you can never leave.
Islam’s history is one of non-stop forced conversion and butchery. If you don’t know the history of Islam east of Saudi Arabia, then you know little of Islam. The history of Islamic torture, enslavement, forced conversions, rape, looting and mass slaughter in India is horrific. Similiar crimes took place all over SE Asia and other countries. Indonesia was primarily a Hindu Kingdom with many Buddhists as well. Slaughter and forced conversion, the usual system.
Of course it's all relative.
If you compare ancient Muslims to modern Europeans, then Europeans look more tolerant.
But if you compare the old Muslims to Europeans of that same time, Muslims sometimes were more tolerant.
Indeed, if you compare many modern Muslims to, say, the old Ottoman Turks, the Turks were more tolerant -- more Christians and Jews lived in those territories back then than do today.
Please understand, I don't disagree with any of the facts you cite, since I have also read them elsewhere.
My only argument is that, relatively speaking, centuries ago more non-Muslims survived in many Muslim dominated countries than non-Christians survived in many Christian dominated countries of that same time.
On this fact, and this fact alone, is the old Muslim reputation for "tolerance" based.
In the past century, while the west has grown increasingly tolerant of different religions (with some notable exceptions), many Muslim countries have grown increasingly intolerant of their non-Muslim populations.
And my only disagreement is that Muslim’s “tolerance” wasn’t that nice, was only in a very short time period, and in one spot on the globe. While Jews and Christians were being sort of tolerated as low-grade second class citizens and not actually being butchered, large scale butchery and “the scimitar or the Koran” was the usual practice in East Asia.
Whatever intolerance Christianity has shown pales in comparison to the solid history of Islam. It was an aberration for Christianity, and SOP for Islam.
Some of my family history goes back to this period of, as you call it, "aberration" -- decades-long religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, persecutions, even burnings at the stake of many heretics.
Escaping all that is a reason I am American today, and not, say, Swiss or French or German.
And Christian persecutions of heretics and non-believers was not just an "aberration" of the 16th & 17th centuries.
It actually began with the Roman Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicaea.
Constantine wanted to make Christianity the Roman Empire's new State Religion, but he didn't want all the diversity of practice and doctrine that had grown up over the previous three centuries.
Indeed, some of the same persecutions described on this thread as committed by Muslims against non-Muslims were also committed by the newly Christian Roman Empire against non-Christians and heretics.
So religious persecution has a long, tragic history and Christians were doing it centuries before Mohamed was even born.
The difference is that today there are no Christians I know of who want to return to those bad-old-days, whereas there are significant numbers of radical Muslims who do, and some of them wield power through politics or terror.
Tnank you for your reply - you are absolutely correct. I admit I am not as knowledgeable - by far - as you are about European Christian history, but do know a smattering, and Constantine’s atrocities were nothing but atrocities.
My mother sent me an article long ago about an ancestor who had been burned at the stake in England for not being the right kind of Christian; can’t remember what kind he was or refused to become.
Christians got over it; Muslims never have.
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