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=> Ye Shall Know Them By The Work Of Their Hands...

Ye Shall Know Them By The Work Of Their Hands...

Posted by parhad (Guest) - Sunday, August 22 2004, 2:09:15 (CEST) from - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

...not their lips. Deuteronomy 16:12 ...let's float above the earth a little and go back to the Muslim Conquest of BetNahrain in the 7th century AD. Let's say at that time all real Assyrian believers in Ashur were barely holding their own against the squabbling Christian sects...We see an army come out of Arabia sweeping all before it. Where did they come from? I mean what was Arabia then? There may have been some "kingdoms there, but like the "kings" of Israel, these were gatherings of goat hair tents with a flea bitten sheik to boast a carpet as his "throne". There was a real empire and several kingdoms in BetNahrain...none really in Israel...Solomon's Temple left not a trace behind and no one is sure there ever was any "palace" at all. Dig anywhere you want to and you'll find nothing even close to what we produced in that tiny fertile region between two rivers...but that was before. certainly there are remnants and signs and indicators by 700 AD of what used to be..but Paul is back there saying it was all for nought..all meant for this day when Bishop one's followers are cracking Bisop two's followers over the head, for Jesus. I have no idea what kinds of palaces the Christians of Iraq might have built...by the reports we get from governors in cities where Christians lived, they didn't do much of anything...officials complained that the members of Christian sects refused to participate in civic life...serve in the military, repair roads etc. Several times they became agitated in their belief that this rotten earth, symbolized by the dishes piling up in their own homes, was about to end and there are many reports of whole herds of Christians deleriously giving their possessions away to go camp in the desert and await HIM...and of course very little mention made by their own "scholars" of how exactly they slinked back and started all over again or what lame excuses they made...till the NEXT time their beliefs drove them nuts. My point is that given what we know of them, their austereness and plain simplicity...it's hardly likely they would have done much more then live in caves or on pillars...with most of them content to wait Life out in a tent or mud hut..every call to create a magnificent anything would be put down to vanity and vainglory...built like that about the only way they could have thrived was if everyone else got off the planet...since they were a minority of ne'er do wells and likely to stay that way, no one would much care to be added to their dusty ranks unless he or she were also built along the lines of one who disdains this earth and the soap that comes with civilized life...and of course whatever their numbers, a Boy Scout Troop could have sent them into a Diaspora. Christianity...as we can see...wasn't made for this earth..it was meant for getting OFF of it in "style"...if you like that sort of send-off. Okay...the Muslims come...they too are from tent towns and mud huts not much different from where the Jews came and inspired the Christians from...they ALL are sort of living on trade, buying and selling...nomadic capitalists like Abraham, the father of the "discount" was. The only people in that region, till you got to Egypt and then the Sassanians, Persians, Greeks or Byzantines to have had any sort of advanced civilization were the Assyrians...who had one of the best of their day...the only ancients to have ruled over Egypt AND Babylon. After the Arabs settle Betnahrain...what do we see? For one thing the Christians are separated and there is peace...and the Byzantines can no longer use Iraq as a dumping ground for every fevered Christian Heretic...and there is security because the Romans got the crap knocked out of them, though they'll hang around till the Turks put an end to their "byzantine" ways. Had the Arabs conquered Israel instead of Iraq...they would have found "palaces" and "cities" and "thrones" to their liking..at least ones that were familiar and looked very like the deplorable types of those articles they left behind in the dust and heat of Mecca and Medina...they would have been right at home and all the world would have known of the Islamic religion was another sheepshit empire on a rock...there was no inspiration in Jerusalem to impress a cat with. It's fair to say we don't know which Assyrians became Msulims and which stayed Christian...which converted away from Christianity and who converted to Islam from Ashur directly and for the first time. We know it happened however because we've seen it happen often enough in the modern era...so it happened then more than likely. So now we have Christian Assyrians and Muslim Assyrians and let's concede that we don't know which is which...but...as ye shall know them by the work of their hands..let's see what those sets of hands did. Muslim hands it turns out went ahead and did very much the same that Assyrian hands had been doing...they developed culture...they became incredible warriors...they built palaces and cities that were the marvel of the Medeival Age, just as their buildings and art had been the wonder of the ancient days..their manners and morals were praised far and wide...they were known to be true to their word...they created the first hospitals and universities..as they'd built the first library...they refined and developed the necessary art of warfare to a point where they came that close to conquering all of Europe...much as the Assyrians when under Ashur had re-invented military techniques...they expanded their contacts and trade around the known world,,as Assyrian merchants had always done...in short and to not wax poetic and prolific, they behaved pretty much the same way we'd come to expect Assyrians to behave....they did not revert to typpical Arab modes of behavior and culture, they did not transplant Mecca to Betnahrain..they built the magnificent Baghdad over the ruins of Babylon and though Mecca remained the center of Ialm...Baghdad and then Damascus became the center of Islamic CULTURE and civilization...and it was OUR culture and civilization...creating yet other fabulous cultural centers that remained strong and vital for 400 years till the Mongols ravaged all of Islam in the 13th century. Now we look over to what the Christian Assyrians "did". Well...what did they do" Since the Jews had been thrown out of Jerusalem they'd developed a penchant for scholarship...for Letters and accounting probably as business was one of the ways they were able to maintain themselves...without armies or borders etc. The Christians of Betnahrain had already been acting pretty much the part the Hebrews played in Isarel..that is they fought over minutae in religious texts...lived in mud huts...and dreamed of the stars as a place to live someday...they created no great anything...they copied each other's religious treatises...kept track of religious holidays and a few went to China to sell their religion and who knows what else along the way...merchants always did that..it's what Abraham used to do...peddle his wares along with his beliefs along the roadside... In almost any way you could imagine, the Christians played the part of a Jewish sect transplanted to Betnahrain...Paul will say they were there getting ready to eat humble pie all along...but the span and scope of Assyrian history can hardly have been leading to dust and locusts and honey...the Assyrians were there still...and when combined with the vigor and purity of a new and vigorous religion from the deserts of Arabia...together they did EXACTLY what we know the Assyrians were always capabale of, though they'd grown exhausted of late..They built yet ANOTHER Great Empire. The Great Islamic Empire was Assyrian in almost every nuanced facet as well as its overall power and refinement...it was not "of the desert" by any means...it's new religion was indeed of the desert...and the emphasis was still on living a clean and decent life on earth that you may be worthy of an afterlife, which can be said to be close to Ashurism except we were always vague about the afterlife...but its actual details...especially the difference of falling in battle fighting your enemy as a short fast trip to paradise, verses bowing your head to get chopped there...indicate clearly that it was closer to our old ways...and the "proof"...the only kind we can hope to have at this distance...comes from what the Assyrian Muslims BUILT...how they BEHAVED and how unlike the achievements in culture and civilization and all the Arts and Sciences which the Arabs seemed to miraculously get from somewhere, contrasted so sharply with what we know they managed on their own, back in their desert stronghold. Something profound influenced then and NO..it weas not a spaceship! The vision and challenges they set for themselves and how quickly and how well they achieved these goals...as if the Assyrian lion had merely been asleep to awaken at the call to prayer with its FULL force and capabilities set to go, tells us that something transformed the original followrrs of Muhammad almost overnight..and that soemthing was not simply their exposure to our magnificent civilization but the joining up of of the best and boldest and brightest of BetNahrain, it's people most of all, that allowed us and th Arabs to create that bright shining culture of Medeival Islam....here was no long, slow climb up the cultural ladder but an explosion of creativity that swept all before it and stunned the world. Within a century of Muhammad's death...all of North Africa...Iraq, Syria, Egypt...all the way to Morroco had been conquered and the Moors had even set foot and settled in southern Spain. The Romans too had been sent scurrying back to Constantinople to turn their swords and cruelties on each other...in time-honored Hebrew and now Christian manner. This is a remarkable achievement requiring all sorts of refinement and experise the deseert Arabs in no way had...and had never even show any signs or need for. Where did they get it? From us...and from us DIRECTLY...and not as "scribes" who merely jotted down what we were told...that old, "boring business document" stuff again. The behavior of the Arabs coming in contact with us...as well as those of us who joined their ranks and what we together DID and BUILT...which is still there to be seen...shows us just how willingly we embraced Islam...most of us anyway. What the Christians among us "did"...what they "achieved" in 500 years in Iraq...how it resembled, not our ancestors, but the friggin Hebrews of old with their sheep herding genius...and petty squabbling...shows us as well that any of us who "chose" Christianity...did so from a lack of commonality and oneness with our Assyrian roots...even then we had skunks and people like Aprim who try to make a religion of their personal shortcomings...even back then a Jassim would have been snapping at the heels of his family members who dared become Muslim..even then. There isn't any proof positive for any of this...but then neither is there for anything in the bible. There IS, however, provocative testimony in the Alhambra and the great Mosque of Cordoba as well as the continuation in Baghdad of a long, long tradition of building the most magnificent cities the world ever saw....these things speak for themselves..you can listen or not. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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