Muslims and Islam: A History of Vitriol and Consequences
Muslims and Islam have been at the receiving end of the most vitriolic attacks and polemics known in history, and the consequences have been dreadful. The West was supposed to have learnt from the mass persecution and killing of the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s but did not. Decades later, the mass rape and killings of Muslims in Bosnia took place in the midst of 'civilised Europe.'
The main focus of this work is countering the issue of the depiction of Muslims and their faith as barbarian/barbaric.
Esposito writes, 'Islam and the West are on a collision course. Islam is a triple threat: political, demographic, and socio-religious.'
In all the depictions, whether past or present, Muslim violence and threat have been associated with the faith itself, Islam.
Jean Claude Barreau writes: 'What could be described as the "great humiliation," and what is indeed present in the basic disposition of the Muslims, can be explained by the origins of their religion: it is warlike, conquest-hungry, and full of contempt for the unbeliever.'
However, we all know that mass murderers and genocide perpetrators have always existed and even thrived in the Christian West. Yet, due to the endless propaganda about Islamic terror and barbarism, any Muslim crime is over-inflated, and the world has easily forgotten about the terrible genocides committed on Muslims, whether during the colonial era, the massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatilla in Lebanon in 1982, the Bosnian tragedy, or in Chechnya.
Additionally, the terrible woes inflicted on the Palestinians for decades, the bloody invasions of Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, and the tens of thousands of Muslims murdered by dictatorships sponsored by the West remain overlooked.
The Manufacture of the Muslim Beast
Western news articles, most of all, fail to raise one crucial question: who really is behind such killings, which are so very well organised and expertly carried out in Muslim lands, with their authors never being caught?
Writing and referring to Western media reporting in the early 1990s, Lueg says: 'The Western image of the Islamic world is characterised by terrible news items or apocalyptic visions.'
Of course, for the Muslim to lie dead on the ground, he has to be a beast in the first place. Hence, the filling of minds with his depictions as the monster and his assimilation with the beast—now thankfully dead. They indeed are not innocents, whether old or young, male or female. They either deserve their retribution or are eliminated for the good of humanity.
N. Todorov saw the Muslims in Bosnia as motivated by their 'Islamic way of life,' which is alien to European civilisation, warranting its removal.
The need to eliminate such a totalitarian, strange, and would-be murderous foe, alien to modern Western civilisation, was achieved through mass rape and mass slaughter of a quarter of a million people between 1992 and 1995. In Spain, prior to the final mass elimination of Muslims, the notion of the murderous Muslim was fitted in minds.
Uninterrupted Anti-Muslim Propaganda
According to Rodinson, Western depictions of Islam 'for the most part, contemptuous and uncomprehending,' have continued basically unchanged since the Middle Ages.
No other civilisation or culture has made the systematic onslaught on Islam and turning Muslims into monsters its raison d'être as much as Western culture has done. Hardly do we ever hear or read about the Muslim contribution to modern sciences, for instance. Serres, writing on the history of scientific thought, says that:
'In turning left towards the West we have chosen to neglect the history of the Orient on the right.'
What is remarkable in the reports on Muslim barbarism is the sudden ineptness of the Western and other allied media (helped, it must be said, by the generalised cowardly, corrupt silence of the Muslim elites) to question the veracity of reports, of who truly is behind the many barbaric deeds attributed to the Muslims.
It hardly matters to the Western world if some decent secret service men who know the truth tell it as it is, absolving the Muslims from crimes attributed to them, and generally end up murdered (e.g., Alexander Litvinenko). It hardly matters if journalists who conduct enquiries about the authors of atrocities attributed to Muslims (such as the Beslan massacre) end up murdered (e.g., Journalist Anna Politkovskaya).
Authors’ Perspectives
Authors like Canetti return to the theme of suffering animals, a victim: the donkey, harassed by one man while a crowd of others look in Arabian lands. But another author, Le Bon, says:
'The Land of Islam was a paradise for animals. Dogs, cats, birds, and all species of the animal world, were universally cared for. Birds flew freely inside mosques and even built their nests in their vicinity.'
Western Academia’s Role
Kabbani puts it:
'The West had to reshape the Orient in order to comprehend it... to devise in order to rule.'
Indeed, when Sir William Jones, a servant of the East India Company, inaugurated studies of the Orient centuries ago, it was in order
'To increase Europe's acquaintance with the peoples it would exert control upon.'
The object of such Western academics, Sardar and Davies further observe (Book: Distorted Imagination), was:
'Unlike any other discipline—when, for example, one studies botany one shows certain respect for plants; when one studies entomology, one comes to appreciate insects—Orientalism came to be based on hate. The Orientalists loathed and feared, and to some extent still do, the subject of their study: Islam and Muslims.'
Western academia has made it a rule to exaggerate and even fabricate a bleak history of Islam by attributing to the faith and its adherents all the dark pages in history.
The Use of Images
During the Crusades, for instance, whilst the Franks were slaughtering their way into the Muslim world, they showed a different image of both deed and foe. This is seen in the illustrations of the chronicles of William of Tyre. The Muslims are distinguished from the Franks by their exaggerated physical features, to the limits of caricature.
In the 18th century, Henri Regnault's 'Execution sans jugement sous les rois maures' (Execution without Trial under Moorish Kings) of 1870 depicts a killing, the title giving it 'historical' validity to it.
During the colonial era (19th-20th century), Muslim barbarism was captured in a number of paintings, which Kabbani describes with great skill. The villain in Orientalist painting is almost always depicted as very dark or as a black barbarian (Muslim).
Cinema and Television
Cinema and television are the most powerful pictorial weapons used to promote the image of the evil Muslim. Muslims are nearly always cast as villains, with exaggerated physical features such as thick lips and slimy expressions. One example is the 1950s film El-Cid (starring Charlton Heston), where El-Cid is portrayed as the courageous, loyal, and humane Christian figure fighting the black-faced, vile, cruel, and fanatic Muslim invaders.
If, by chance, a film depicts Muslims in a good light, their fall from grace is never far. For instance, George Clooney, who sought to present Muslims as victims of big politico-business interests in Syriana, saw his status and position within the industry fall sharply.
The Depiction of Muslims Through the Ages
1) The Crusades (1095-1291)
During the Crusades, Muslims were depicted as pagans, sexual deviants, and heretics. As Sweetman points out, Islam was represented to the popular mind as the religion of the 'pagan Saracens,' who were regarded solely as the traditional enemy. Tolan explains how the association of Islam with paganism justified the Crusades as a vengeance against 'such pagans.'
For Raymond, the massacre of at least 70,000 Muslims was sweet revenge. He states:
"This was truly a judgment of God, that that place should receive their blood, since it endured for such a long time their blasphemies."
The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was also said to have made himself adored as an idol or even as a god. The Gesta Francorum speaks of oaths taken by Muhammad as a god. Sigebert of Gembloux (d.1112) wrote:
"This is the Muhammad to whom the Gentiles hitherto offer the worship of a deity."
Marco Polo, in his Travels (1298), was tolerant of the Mongols and admired Hulagu, who had destroyed the Caliphate. However, he described Muslims as treacherous, prone to great sinfulness, and "as dogs not fit to lord it over Christians."
From Le Couronnement de Louis, we read that people were attracted to Islam by the pleasures of drinking and sexual gratification. Another version of how the Prophet (PBUH) acquired his teachings appears in L'Entrée d'Espagne, where he is depicted as a former Christian leader frustrated at being denied the Papacy, which led him to start a new religion.
The dominant purpose of Christian polemics was to darken the character of the Prophet through distortions and lies. In The History of Charles the Great and Orlando, the pseudo-Turpin states:
"The Saracens had a tradition that the idol Mahomet, which they worshipped, was made by himself in his lifetime; and that by the help of a legion of devils, it was by magic art endued with such irresistible strength that it could not be broken."
2) The Renaissance (15th - 17th Centuries)
During this period, the dominant image of Muslims shifted to the Ottoman Turk. Schwoebel notes:
"The Turk was viewed as an infidel, a follower of the profane Mohammed, and a pernicious force dedicated to the destruction of Christendom."
Hostility towards Muslims and their faith continued to be based on distortions and exaggerations, much like in the medieval period. As Blanks points out:
"Deliberate misrepresentations on the part of medieval writers who had access to accurate information have been an enduring issue in the historiography of pre-modern encounters between Europe and Islam."
Vitkus expands on this: 'The early modern image of Islam, as seen through Western eyes, is one that has been radically transformed by time.. In fact, the representation of Islam in medieval and Renaissance Europe is at times almost the opposite of its alleged original..'
European visitors to the Muslim lands, under various guises, contributed to distort the picture further. Herbert states that it was from his parents that the Prophet: 'sucked knowledge of both religions'. Obviously Herbert was blind to the fact that the Prophet was an orphan. He also holds that the Prophet was baptized by Sergius, a 'Sabeeian heretic'.
Likewise George Lengherand, mayor of Mons in Hainault, who visited Palestine in 1486, stated that:
'Muslims believed blessedness consisted of food, drink, luxuries, and in all sensualities, and pleasures which excite the body, even sodomy. Mohammed decreed that those who did not live in such pleasures would perish ...'
18th Century
In this supposed age of enlightenment, still they hold same beliefs: In his Voyage au Levant (Travel to the East), Paul Lucas says that he witnessed the execution of two Muslims convicted of theft, condemned to be burned alive in a public place. This, as Gunny notes, might well be a figment of his imagination, for this is certainly not an Islamic punishment.
Abbe (Abbot) Vincent Mignot wrote Histoire de /'Empire Ottoman etc, to the year 1740.298 In it, amongst others, he insists that Muslims behave towards their womenfolk like the savage idol-worshippers do towards their deities.
Alexander Ross, in his Pansebeia, dated from the last decade of the 17th century, insists that the Muslims worship the sun and the moon, which, of course, is not the case.
4) The 19th & 20th Centuries
This period corresponds to the age of empire, an empire that was built on the notion of the Western 'civilising mission' of the Muslim lands. Chevaliers D' Arvieux says:
'This is more or less what I could say about this unpleasant country, which is only peopled by the dregs of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and which we can consider without fear of errors as the most unworthy rabble in Africa and as a lair of thieves, which I shall never regret having left.'
Pananti, who had resided in the country early in the 19th century, says:
'These degraded people ... monsters who vie with each other in the deepest hatred and bitterest hostility towards Christianity and civilisation.'
Eliot Warburton's The Crescent and the Cross, was a very popular work, and was edited eighteen times, the last as late as 1888. Warburton describes the Egyptian fundamentally as 'sensualist and a slave .... He is only to be a subject in the basest of all kingdoms.'
In article, 'A Method of presenting Jesus Christ to the Moslems', the writer H.B Young held:
'How can I best present my saviour to my Muslim brothers and sisters? This has been the question every missionary must have asked from the earliest days of missionary work. Many methods have been tried with the utmost devotion. Yet we still must all confess with heartfelt regret that the results so far have been meagre.'
Rippin, for his part, holds: 'The earliest non-Islamic source testifying to the existence of the Koran appears to stem from the eighth century.'
TURKS:
The Turk as 'the Cruel Persecutor and Oppressor of Christians': Grand Master of Rhodes, Jean de Lastic, vividly portrayed his 'perilous position and the ultimate threat to Christian civilisation.' 'The Grand Turk,' he wrote, '... was a wild beast who practised every manner of cruelty and impiety upon Christians.'
Pope Nicholas, on September 30, 1453, following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, addressed a crusade bull to all Christendom. In it, he denounced Mohammed II (the conqueror of Constantinople) as: 'The cruellest persecutor of the Church of Christ, the son of Satan, the son of perdition, the son of death who thirsted for the blood of Christians.' He pronounced the sultan to be the great red dragon with seven heads crowned by seven diadems and with ten horns described by St. John.
Every Turkish success was met with similar horrified accounts. Cardinal Bessarion thus held:
'The Turks were no better than savages. Despoilers of all that was worthwhile, inhuman barbarians, fiercest of wild beasts, they were guilty of every vile and debased deed.'
As Geary notes:
'Whereas Arredondo's efforts to malign Islam and the Turks were based to a significant degree on theological arguments, legendary underpinnings, and the use of opprobrious language, it was primarily by means of portraying the Ottomans as violent and avaricious people.'These accounts were totally FALSE.
18th-19th Century Depictions:
As the Ottomans began to decline, Western depictions and methods were necessary for the destruction of the now weakening monster. The Frenchman Lucinge, as outlined by Cirakman, advises:
'The empire of the Turk cannot receive any damage or alteration by outward causes; it is necessary that inward causes, either separate or mixed, effect it.'This would make it easier to defeat it by open force.
The double standards can be seen in their work, as Eton also pioneers in the Western strategic polemic, by both praising and commiserating with the fate of the people living within the Turkish realm, including the Arabs. He claims that the Arabs consider the Turks as enemies, and unlike the Turks, they neither kill nor make slaves out of their prisoners. As Glubb notes, European powers did not want the Ottoman Empire to be reformed, but to be destroyed. So, they just hyped up the Arabs.
The persistent labelling of the Turks, whether the early Seljuks (10th-13th century) or the Ottomans (13th-20th century), as barbaric, cruel fiends and enemies of science and progress has no basis in reality, but has other motivations.
Other European scholars say something different: Glubb notes Othman (1281-1326), the founder of the Ottoman nation, gained the reputation of a ruler who might be safely followed, and under whose protection Christians found security both from other Turks and from the exactions of their own emperor.
Bertrandon de la Broquiere, who was sent by Philip of Burgundy East in 1432, travelled to study the situation with a view to the Crusade, and wrote his impressions. He noted that towns and cities had a mixed population of Greeks and Turks, the latter described as thrifty, clean, and hardworking.
As noted by F. Osborne, who spoke of the French massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day:
'The foulness of which story has not yet been matched by Mahumet (Muhammad SAW) or any of his disciples, never found to have borne such bitter fruit.'To him, the Ottoman Government had far superior characteristics to the European monarchies of his age.
Conversions under the Turks
As for conversions under the Turks, the majority of the Christian slaves who converted to Islam, as Arnold points out in his book The Preaching of Islam, changed their religion of their own free choice.
Also, as Fisher writes:
'Among the surprises that emerge from a perusal of Christian records and narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are testimonials to the Turks as a highly civilized people, from both a moral and practical standpoint.'
MUSLIM INTOLERANCE
It seems the faith of Islam has changed from the Middle Ages to our day, but this is not the case. The fact is that it is accusations against Islam that have shifted to suit the circumstances of Western Christendom and its aims. In both periods, though, Islam was attacked: for its tolerance in the Middle Ages and for its reverse today (which is also the case for sexuality—Islam reviled for being sexually lax in the Middle Ages, and Islam reviled today for being sexually repressive; both accusations made by Western Christendom, and in both instances, the West claiming to be in the right).
For Cox and Marks, writing in 2003, in Western societies, pluralism is encouraged and realized, while, on the other hand, these societies are monolithic, intolerant of dissent, and, de facto, lacking in individual freedoms.
These assertions are contradicted by reality. As Herbelot remarked long ago, the second chapter of the Qur'an makes it clear that forcible conversion is banned in Islam, quoting the passage in question.
We must not forget what Voltaire points out:
'No Christian nation suffers the existence on its soil of a mosque, whilst the Turks allow the Greeks to have churches.'
The Archbishopric of Morocco continued until the 16th century under the Merinids, who kept the protection granted to it by the (supposedly fanatic) Almohads. The successors of Pope Honorius III many times thanked the Moroccan kings for their favor granted to the Christians and religious persons. In the year 1233, which followed the death of El-Mamun and the advent of his son al-Rashid, Gregory IX wrote to the Emir hoping that 'one day he would recognize Christian truth', and thanked the Emir for his goodness.
Contrary to Western assertions, tolerance, in fact, was an Islamic concept before being discovered by others. As Daniel points out, the very notion of toleration in Christendom was borrowed from Muslim practice.
Toleration: Who is Tolerant?
Who is tolerant, and who is not, is indeed best demonstrated by one fact of crucial importance: which minority survived under whom. The Muslims have not survived under Western Christian rule throughout history; Christian minorities, on the other hand, have lived and, to this day, thrive under Islam. The examples of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc., stand testament to this.
Arnold narrates this story:
'One of the Spanish Muhammadans who was driven out of his native country in the last expulsion of the Moriscos in 1610, while protesting against the persecutions of the Inquisition, made the following vindication of the toleration of his co-religionists: "Did our victorious ancestors ever once attempt to extirpate Christianity out of Spain, when it was in their power? Did they not suffer your forefathers to enjoy the free use of their rites at the same time that they wore their chains?"'Arnold thus stated: 'We indeed punish them as they deserve; since their conversion was voluntarily, and was not by compulsion.'
He adds, relying on a number of sources:
'What deep roots Islam had struck in the hearts of the Spanish people may be judged from the fact that when the last remnant of the Moriscos was expelled, they also didn’t change religion.'
The Situation Today
Today, the same discrepancy exists between Western rhetorical rant about Muslim intolerance contrasting with Western tolerance, and reality, which shows the very opposite. Let's compare these words with reality. We take the instances of Sabra and Shatila, when, in 1982, the Christians massacred over two thousand Palestinians—men, women, children—in the most horrific manner, adding to their previous massacres of Palestinians in the 1970s at Tell Ezaatar, Qarantaine, etc., all in Lebanon. Nowhere in the Muslim world was a Christian harmed for it, the massacres not blamed on Christianity but blamed instead on the extremist Phalanges and their Israeli supporters.
Robert Fisk of The Independent, in September 2004, says how he wrote back in 1998 asking himself why the Iraqis did not tear any Westerner they came across limb from limb as a reprisal for what the Westerners have done to them since 1991, starving millions of them to death.
Muslim 'Oppression of Women'
Gerald of Wales, writing in the 12th century, held that the Prophet's teachings were concentrated on lust, thus particularly suitable for Orientals. This is a fallacy, of course, which is noted by Smith, who points out how Islam won the hearts and the minds not because it was a sensuous religion; the fast, daily prayer, alms giving, Smith notes, 'Appeal little to lazy, sensual or selfish people. Nothing could be more destitute of truth than to argue that a religion owed its permanent success to bad morality.'
But they don't stop, Galland recounts the story of a mistreated slave girl made desperate by her keeper. Also, 18th-century depictions follow the same lines: unlike the 'Eastern beastly male', the Western man treats his woman with care and respect. In the Lettres Persannes, Montesquieu emphasizes the essential differences between the East and the West by contrasting stereotypical images of Oriental women with that of Western women.
In a similar vein, Hunter observes, as against Montague's description, that Turkish women are quite unhappy and live a slave's life. You might be wondering why the Europeans cared so much about the women?
Kabbani answered this:
'This romantic dependency that the European liked to cherish was only a sublimated form of Eastern women's real dependency on Western men. All Easterners were ultimately dependent in the colonial power balance, but women and young boys especially so. Thus they served as the colonial world's sex symbols, its accommodating objects. Oriental males, as noted already, are almost always portrayed as predatory figures in Orientalist paintings. They are mostly depicted as ugly or loathsome, in contrast to the women who are beautiful and voluptuous. By such projection, the European fantasised about the Eastern woman's emotional dependency on him. This appealed to his sense of himself as a romantic hero.'
Did Colonisation Solve This Issue?
Obviously, colonisation failed to 'liberate Muslim women', and so the same depictions of 'Muslim barbaric treatment of women' contrasting with Western humanity are found today. The Western view of women under Islam today is summed up by Lueg:
'From the gossip column to the feminist magazine, Islamic women are mainly this: victims. As such, they are merely objects of reporting, never allowed to speak for themselves. Women from Islamic countries are sometimes even perceived as a threat because they are victims.'
As Lueg notes,
'The harem, the veil, and the Turkish cleaning lady with headscarf are the images that the West associate with Muslim women.'And you know the reason why they show it.
The Generalized, Deficient Western Approach to the Status of Muslim Women
The generalized, deficient Western approach to the status of Muslim women is summed up by Kabbani, who writes:
'One of the reasons I wrote this book was to disprove the commonly held and oppressive assumption that Western culture is superior to other cultures; that it is somehow more humane, civilised or tolerant, less violent and less misogynistic. Such assumptions formed the bedrock of nineteenth-century imperialist thought, and provided the intellectual justification for colonizing other peoples' societies. But imperial ideas did not perish with empire. Islam, at the end of the twentieth century, has been made into the religion the West loves to hate; a seething cauldron of sexism, and a dumping ground for all blame. Today, the imperial torch has been passed to a new group of Orientalists, a great many of them American feminists. It has become intellectually fashionable for American women writers -with little or no experience of the Muslim world, with no knowledge of Muslim history- to spew forth, in books and articles, on the 'pathetic' state of women under Islam.'
Reminding The West About Its Past
During the Crusades, mass rape of Muslim women by the crusaders, which literally shattered that most sacred pillar of Islamic society. Such outrages prompted one Christian chronicler to make the following statement about 'proper' behavior by a crusader:
'In regard to the women found in the tents of the foe the Franks did them no evil but drove lances into their bellies.'(see: R. Finucane: Soldiers of the Faith)
The Muslim as the 'Cruel Captor of Christians'
Throughout the centuries, the Muslims have been depicted as vile captors inflicting terrible cruelties on Christians. A newsletter of 1640 speaks of 3000 English in 'Miserable captivity, undergoing insufferable labor, such as rowing in galleys, drawing carts, grinding in mills, with diverse such un-Christian like work most lamentable to express.' (Source: Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1640)
1) Muslims Under Christian Captivity
In 1191, for instance, Acre was retaken by the crusaders and Richard of England, devious and greedy, had thousands of Muslim prisoners beheaded before the walls as a hint to Salah Eddin to hurry to pay the ransom of prisoners. Richard had not just the garrison massacred, but also women and children.
Edward Coxere, who was freed after Blake bombarded the port of Tunis, became a Quaker and, as soon as he returned home, was imprisoned under the Conventicle Act. This is how he compared his captivity in Yarmouth prison with that of Tunis:
'They allowed us water enough to drink, but nothing to eat, nor bread to be brought us, nor nobody to come near us... Such unkind usage I never had when I was a slave under the hands of the Turks, such as Christians call Infidels, that though I was chained at nights with great iron chains, and was made to work by days, and sometimes beat, yet they gave me a bellyful of bread to eat with my water; but here, among my countrymen and such as called Christians, they gave me not the privilege as they gave their dogs, for they would deny anyone to give them a crust of bread.'
And whilst the fate of Christians in Muslim captivity (as the following heading amply shows) was hopeful, the case of Muslims in Christian captivity was hopeless.
2) Christians under the Captivity of Muslims
Lloyd says:
'There were religious motivations, too, behind exaggerating Muslim bad treatment of Western captives. Rehbinder is particularly scathing about the Catholic priests and their bigoted anti-Islamic writings. Much of what we know about Barbary was written by men who had a very definite interest in painting as black a picture as they could.'
De Tassy accuses the Catholic priests for the spread of prejudice against the Turks, explaining that:
'It is normal that those whose duty is to buy off slaves had great interest to arouse great emotions within a public from whom they expect donations...'He insists:
'We should agree, it is better to fall in the hands of the worst Bey (Turk) galley, than in the hands of the Viceroy of Naples.'
Similarly, in 1635, Henry Kebell wrote that he and his companions would have preferred to
'have fallen into the Turks' hands than into Frenchmen's, for they [the French] would have hoysed them overboard.'
Truth Uncovered: Islam and Slavery
Islam, as a faith, fought slavery more than any faith ever did. The Prophet (PBUH) is reported to have said:
'The worst of men is the seller of men.'(see R.B. Smith's Work)
It was also Islam, Rodinson points out, which became the defender of the oppressed people of Africa. In Blyden's words:
'The introduction of Islam into Central and Western Africa has been the most important, if not the sole, preservative against the desolation of the slave trade.'
The Muslims surely, during conflict, in particular, took slaves; yet the crucial difference with Westerners was in the treatment of slaves.
Throughout the Turkish Empire, for instance, and at all periods in its history, slaves have risen repeatedly to the highest offices. Sebuktegin, the father of Mahmud, the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty (10 - 11th century), was a slave. A dynasty of slaves, the Mamluks, ruled Egypt from 1250 until 1798, and it is said by J.J. Dollinger, that Christians from the Caucasus were glad to be carried off as slaves to Egypt because each one felt that he might rise to be sultan.
Truth Uncovered: Race under Islam
West sees Muslims as racist, but as Segal notes, for much of Islamic history, there was no such virtually exclusive identification of slavery with blackness as came to exist in the Christian West. He says:
'Such (Islamic) influence also successfully confronted the emergence of racism as a form of institutionalized discrimination, because the Qur'an expressly condemned racism along with tribalism and nationalism.'
As Lloyd writes:
'In Barbary there was no such prejudice, nor was there any racial distinction made in the multi-lingual slave population.'
It is worth quoting Malcolm X, who says:
'The colour-blindness of the Muslim world's religious society and the colour blindness of the Muslim human society: these two influences had each been making a greater impact, and an increasing persuasion against my former way of thinking.'
This prejudice struck Lady A. Blunt, who in her trip to the Nedjed region (1878), states that the governor of one of the largest cities of Meskakeh was a Negro completely black, with a repulsive African look.
Race under Western Christendom
To Montesquieu:
'Nobody can get used to the idea that God, a most wise being, could have placed a soul, especially a good soul, in an entirely black body.'Buffon concludes, that:
'on account of the hostile environment in which they had developed, American natives were inferior to those of the Old World.'This ideology purporting the inferiority of other races accounts for the mass slaughter and extermination of native people in the Americas and Oceania.
THE DEPICTION OF THE MUSLIM AS AN INFERIOR
The dire state of Muslim society today is compounded by the inability of Muslims to deliver a sustained effort to alter this reality. No change happens unless there is an intellectual belief in such a change. No nation rises unless it has confidence in its own capabilities to rise strong, and be self-reliant.
Some ten-twelve centuries or so ago, indeed, the picture was all the reverse from what it is today. As Lombard says:
'Nous vivions dans des clairières. L'Islam, lui, brillait de tous ses feux ...' (We were living in the wilderness; Islam then was shining with all its lights.)'(See: http://www.archipress.org/batin/ts20lombard.htm)
Throughout Western Christendom, the only few blessed with the capacity to read were ecclesiastics, a few souls lost in wide stretches of rural ignorance. This was at the time, Campbell notes, when the Caliphs of Baghdad and Cordova endowed and fostered education among their subjects (both Muslims and non-Muslims) to such an extent that in the latter city, every boy and girl of twelve was able to read and write.
It was Islam, which, in the expression of Lombard,
'dragged Western Christendom out of its barbarian night.'(See: Nous Vivions)
Draper speaks of:
'The systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific obligations to the Muhammadans...'
Nelson says:
'In the case of Islam, how can we account for the fact that Islam was so far ahead of the West in 800, when Harun al-Rashid was caliph, while the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the West, Charlemagne, could not sign his own name?'(See: Islam and the Medieval West)
Conclusions
The West has, as always, seen and shown Muslims, and thus Islam, as a 'Barbaric Nation'; thus, Muslim presence in the Christian West has never been fully consummated. The Muslim presence in the West can be precarious and uncertain. The case of Iraq and the recent Gaza Genocide is before us to show how lies and invented threats were enough to unleash a vast military onslaught on the country, leading it into the chaos and mayhem resulting in the mass killings of tens of thousands of its people every year.
Finally, I hope the world finds peace, and may Allah (God) always help the righteous in the right cause.
Personal Reflections
What do you think of such a long article?
How was your day?
STAY SAFE, STAY CURIOUS.
Allah-Hafiz.
Source of Article: the Book of S.E. Al - Djazairi.