Tom Holland 'De-Radicalising Muhammad'

I have a beautiful chart of civilizations from the beginning of recorded history to the present. After reviewing that chart, I was able to reduce a portion of it to a sound bite. “The Crusades were an 86 year interruption to over 1,000 years of barbaric Islamic conquest.”

I often have Muslim or anti Christian folks bring up the Crusads. I very simple State, “ The Battle Of Tours occured over a hundred years before the Crusades. Charles Martel stopped the Islamic advance into Europe through Spain. What were those peaceful Muslims doing raping, looting, taking slaves etc 100 years before the Crusades?” “ Oh ,after 100 years of this BS Europeans didn’t have a right to defend themselves?” In the 1600 the Polish Calvary stopped the last Muslim invasion of Europe. It is rediculous!

Great points. I found these two paragraphs in one of my essays. One time when I posted them on Free Republic a responder point out that even though they are listed on the Arab League website all except Saladin are Persians.

"About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with God, and exalting individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought."

"The bloody electioneering among aspiring Islamic totalitarians causes them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. For them an internal/external continuum exists where politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. Why abandon strategies proven throughout a millennium?"

Christianity has been tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment from which sprang the concept of Divine given rights of individual liberty and freedom of conscience. Islam however has been mired in 6th century tribalism and tolerates and condones barbarism, intolerance, the treatment of women as inferior beings and even slavery.

I am a big fan of Tom Holland’s books. I read his book about the formative years of Islam which also covers formation of modern Judaism and Christianity as all the three monotheistic faiths stabilized to their familiar structure around the same time period in Late Antiquity.
Here is a YouTube video of Tom Holland’s documentary about the origins of Islam that got pulled after pressure from the Muslims:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s89hjkfylA

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