Posted on 11/07/2005 7:55:59 AM PST by Wuli
Because through the building and unbuilding of Empires, and from migrations and trade the Greeks and the Persians shared alot, in art, science and literature.
Did you compile this line of events or pick it up from somewhere else? I mean, if I wanted to slam somebody with the facts what source can I site other than "Wuli." No offense, but I think you know what I mean.
You are partially right in noting one of the things that lead to a weakend Byzantine Empire, which helped make some of the Muslim conquests possible. There were many other factors as well.
My main point is that the spread of the Muslim faith was entirely by Military conquest, other than in Indonesia, Malyasia and the southern Philippines where Islam was introduced by seafaring traders to people who were essentially animists (nature worshipers).
It is historical stupidity to ignore that they were "conquests" and they were conducted for the spreading of Islam. It was not peaceful conversion of neighboring peoples.
ping
If it is time to "move on", then it is time to understand from what we are "moving on", and if we can only tell one half of a story, from a part of the past that helped build our present, then whether or not it is "time to move on", we will not.
You are so very, very right. And, it makes one really more suspicious about the History Channel segment on the Crusades, because part of the dogma accepted by the Al Queda types is that they are fighting to restore the Islamic lands of Europe that Christianity "took" from them, in the centuries after the crusades.
The History Channel show helps that propoganda because it leaves out the three hundred year Islamic Jihad that placed Islam in Europe in the first place.
The muslim history they lean to is after their own major military conquests - the three hundred year Jihad that built the civilization of Islam - is over.
Their resentment is towards what lands Muslims then later lost, while ignoring those "lost" lands were simply taken back by the peoples the Muslims conquered them from to begin with (Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, all of North Africa, Spain and Portugal and eventually a good part of central Europe (the Balkans).
Because the eastern and western branches of Christianity were in the midst of their own discord, between each other, when the era of the crusades open. And, as the centuries went on the Byzantine (Orthodox) side became the weaker side and lost more to the Muslims (like Palestine itself).
Your replies to these posters are nonsensical. Step away from the bong.
The Columbia History of the World (Edited by John A. Garraty and Peter Gay, Forwarde BY President William J. McGill, Columbia University, 1972 by Harper and Row)
The Timetables of History (A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, by Bernard Grun, based on Werner Stein's Kulturfahrplan, with a forward by Daniel J. Boorstin, 1979 by Simon & Schuster)
Rand McNally Atlas of World History [Maps], 1992, Rand McNally
and my fabulous brain
In the ancient world, Persia was more part of "the west", Greco-Roman civiliation (which spread to Europe) than was the areas that later became France, England, Germany, etc.
Excellent! Thank you and your brain.
Anyway to shut that background music off? I quit watching after 5 minutes. The story sucked also.
I am citing how the Persians were viewed at the time, in the ancient world, not how they later came to viewed by "western civilization", after it (Roman + Judeo-Christian) moved north and west from the Mediterranean world, became dominant more in the "world" it spread to than in the world it came from, which was, in ancient times, the confluence of the Mediterranean and the ancient Middle East - from Persia, down through Mesopotamia and Arabia to Egypt, up through Israel and Syria to Greece; Rome was a late comer and brought very little science of her own. Her art and literature was learned and expanded from the Greeks and the Etruscans.
I have a question. I am still doing research, but I know I could get the answer faster here. The Turks who overran Hungary during the Tartar invasions of the 1400s. Were they Muslim? If so, did Hungary have Middle Eastern influence at that time?
And they got paid back by the crusade that sacked Constantinople at the urging of the Venetians. This probably took 100 years off the life of the Eastern Empire.
It is not God who is vengeful, it is his acolytes who are foolishly drawn to the power of the sword and the attraction of conquest.
It shall be this way until a true Age of Reason sets in.
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