Posted on 08/04/2005 5:34:06 AM PDT by OESY
...Across Europe, Muslims are hungry for advice about how to integrate in their new countries while remaining true to their faith. Questions range from the complex (Can I pay into a pension system that is based on interest, which is forbidden by Islam?) to the mundane (When do sunset prayers take place during the summer solstice in Scandinavia, when the sun doesn't set?). In response, councils, television shows and Internet sites have issued a flood of fatwas aimed at aiding the residents of Islam's newest frontier, Europe.
But as the French woman found out, this avalanche of advice is heavily skewed toward interpretations of Islam that can make integration harder, not easier. Well-financed organizations based in the Middle East dominate the discussion in Europe, promoting scholars who display little understanding of the problems facing European Muslims. Some advice contradicts local laws, especially in questions of marriage and divorce. And even in an Islamic context, much of the advice is issued by self-appointed experts with a shallow grounding in Islamic law. Says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California in Los Angeles, Islamic law has become the "playing field for shabby scholarship, political sloganism and ideological demagogues."...
Europe's most influential Muslim rule-making body is known as the European Council for Fatwa and Research. It was set up by an organization and scholars tightly allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that has widely penetrated Muslim life in Europe....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
don't confuse arabic "kaafir" or "kufr" with Afrikaans "kaffir"
OK..thanks..but can you explain the difference, please..one would assume that since they are so similar, they are related on meaning..is it a different origin?
Afrikaans is bastardized Dutch
Arabic is, well, bastardized vomiting cat.
so, yes: different origins.
Can't be done with Islam. It's completely at odds with Western civilization.
thanks again...regards
Problem is this is one of those "things" the Moslems don't want anybody else to talk about. They don't discuss it themselves.
Recent Christian scholarship, independent of Arab records on the matter, indicates that Islam as an independent religion simply did not appear until long after the Conquest and the establishment of the Arabian Empire.
Probably took that long to Islamicize the Arabs themselves ~
It appears to be a total fabrication that the imperative behind the Conquest was a religion ~ rather, it's simply a case of the bad boys in Mecca escaping the Dark Ages first. They prettied up their history later on when they realized their pagan past was an embarrassment.
Doggone it, where you guys been? The whole thing is "FAKE".
the Eastern Empire didn't have a "dark ages"
They sound just like democraps to me.
I wonder if the WSJ is for open borders in Europe so Muslims can stream in unimpeded? That's what they advocate for the USA and have done so for years. Free market loony tunes.
There's roughly an 80 year period where no new art works were produced in the City itself, and afterwards it is clear to anyone the Classical Period was over. Only inferior pieces came through the imperial studios. Michaelangelo, produced the first art to equal that of the Classical Period about 800 years later.
Still, the level of depopulation suffered in the Eastern Empire was much less than that of the Western Empire which suffered a total social, governmental and economic collapse.
No doubt Byzantium was in good shape compared to the West. On the other hand, the Persians had been so weakened that it was a trivial task for the Meccan and Petran Arabs to destroy their empire in a few years. Once they'd done that, and offered to pay renegade Byzantine armies (who hadn't been paid for several decades), it was 1, 2, 3, and the Islamic Caliphate began to take shape.
BTW, the City of Byzantium was supposed to have sufficient resources for a 7 year siege, and that indicates that the climatic catastrophe that brought on the Dark Ages only lasted a few years ~ most observers view it as something on the order of a rather widespread and lengthy Fimbul Winter.
You can continue to believe the Dark Ages didn't happen in the Eastern Empire, of course, but you have to explain the decline of the Persians and the rise of Mecca ~ which, for gosh sakes, is still a small city ~
Islam is, on the other hand, fully a product of Western Civilization.
If Mohammad lived today the civilized world would have to kill him.
Justinian's Idiocy (the reconquest of Italy) broke the byzantine's land army, ate up its navy, emptied its coffers, and helped transmit the plague.
It was very bad luck that Justinian's Idiocy coincided with a large eruption on the other side of the world which caused a drop in european temperatures significant enough to set off the plague.
It was *extremely* bad POLICY that, in support of his Idiocy, Justinian oppressed the Levantine, Egyptian, and Arabian Monophysites - making conversion to Islam a small step.
And, of course, the usual biff-baffing between Khosroes and Justinian surely didn't help the strenght of their respective empires in Syria and Mesopotamia.
yes, byzantium had hard times, but they did not fall into a dark age (total collapse of culture, nation, government, economy, trade, alliances, knowledge base, arts, etc...)
Outside the walls was a different story. One day the Persians ran the place. The next day it was Arabs. China also fell, and whatever remained of the Silk Road disappeared until the Mongol Conquest.
"the Eastern Empire didn't have a "dark ages"
Wrong. They are in it now.
The Turks, of course, were able to keep the homeland strong through a strong tax policy in the hinteland, and then there was Greece ~ it had a decent economy.
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