The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Dr Joseph; Muslim Christian Relations

Dr Joseph; Muslim Christian Relations

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, September 15 2007, 23:59:25 (CEST) from 71.116.101.196 - pool-71-116-101-196.snfcca.dsl-w.verizon.net Network - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Muslim Christian Relations chapt. Two: Among Arabs, Kurds and Turks “After the dust of Tamerlane’s marches had settled, we find Jacobites mostly in regions east of Aleppo and west and north of Mosul. From the fourteenth to the twentieth century their centers would be northern Iraq and the south-central Anatolian regions adjacent to it. Their neighbors would be Kurds, Arabs and Turks, the three Muslim groups who meet and intermingle in this corner of the Middle East. The area, often referred to as northern Mesopotamia, was Arabized and Islamized soon after the conquests of the seventh century….The Arab population and language began to fade away as one moved north of Mardin, ceasing almost entirely upon reaching Diyarbakr. From Diyarbakr the Muslim population became chiefly Turkish and Kurdish. In these northern regions the Jacobite population adopted Turkish and Kurdish as vernacular languages in place of Arabic, their common medium of communication in Mosul and Mardin. By the nineteenth century their mother tongue, Syriac was generally unknown to them in the urban areas; the only Jacobites who spoke it were the villagers of Tur Abdin.”. Can’t help but think of the nimble adaptations the Christians had to make in order to live in peace among such a variety of people, rough and tumble places, languages, customs etc. It sets in even sharper contrast how inflexible and downright inept our people in the West are in dealing with ANY controversy or challenge…how they seem to barely be able to make it only when surrounded by others who think and feel exactly as they do. Take their forums where they ban and delete people who vary even slightly from their beliefs…they seem far more rigid in the West than they could afford to be in the East…maybe that’s what determined who left there and who stayed. Indeed they react towards each other in what are supposed to be political controversies very much as if they were reacting in horror to religious heresies. It’s the same win or lose, winner-take-all, my-way-or-no-way intransigence they credit their religions with having “saved” them through…but politics is the art of compromise…religion quite the opposite. “The center and stronghold of the Jacobites was the Tur Abdin region, just as the home grounds of the Nestorians were the Hakkari Mountains further east...During the last century the population of the Tur Mountains was estimated by a Jacobite patriarch to be ‘about 6000 families’, inhabiting just over a hundred villages. They lived in total isolation from the outside world…Mardin, situated at the western extremity of Tur Abdin, was the nearest point of communication with the inhabitants of the mountain…in mid-nineteenth century its population mostly Christian and Jacobite, was estimated at about ‘fifteen hundred’ inhabitants. As late as the mid-twentieth century and after two world wars, it was the only town in Turkey having the distinction of possessing a population made up mostly of Christians (Jacobites). Our people of Tur Abdin have come down from their mountains claiming the Turks have taken over their villages and practically shoved them out, at least out of the villages. If this is true it may well be another reaction to western meddling in general and specifically the imposition of an Israel at the expense of Muslims. One has to consider this because for centuries the Christians have lived in these villages…centuries when this so-called mandate to ruin Christians was never in effect and when there was no Israel, though plenty of Middle Eastern Jews…and we’ve seen that whenever such a program was instituted it was because of some provocation from the Christian West. To us the creation of Israel is seen as an act of benevolence…something Christians did to “protect” Jews…maybe some of us feel it is owed to them for what “some” Christians recently did to them. We even seem to congratulate ourselves for the “justice” we’ve brought to Jews even at great cost to ourselves etc. That may be the way it’s looked at from our side of the fence but it’s a long way from how Muslims view it. To them the European Jews, until 1940, were perfectly content where they were even with the periodic pogroms…any Jew wishing to visit the Holy Land was free to do so. Jews were and had been living in Palestine for centuries, whenever the Romans would allow them to and the era of Roman occupation ended long ago. They were free all those centuries to buy land in Israel and move there from London or Vienna, if that was what they wanted to do…but they didn’t. Who would? No Jew, not even a mildly prosperous one nor a poor one would have traded Berlin or Warsaw or even Siberia for the Haifa of 1890 or 1940. Only extreme desperation would have brought about such a change…and that’s exactly what Christianity visited on them; extreme desperation. The Jews who moved to Palestine were refugees from death camps..they were not pilgrims or emigrants leaving their homes behind for a better life by choice…they didn’t go there to be close to the bible lands but to get away from their killing fields…they went because six million had just been fried by their neighbors and even though the war was ended they simply couldn’t trust those same neighbors again. The sound of church bells could never again be heard without palpable dread, the sight of a cathedral could only be a reminder of what those praying inside had just done and could be capable of again. To the Muslims the exodus to Palestine was brought on by the Christians themselves who merely moved on to or created an ad hoc “next step” to their Final Solution of ridding themselves of Jews, one way or another. Muslim resentment has grown and grown since 1948 when the United Nations, with no mandate from Palestinians, partitioned their country and set up decades of internal strife and instability which we will all suffer for centuries to come. Muslims, and Jews also, have all the proof they need that Christians cannot be trusted. No need to wait for each specific incident to arise. This is not by way of blaming the villagers pushed out of Muslim lands…but neither can one entirely blame Muslim governments and citizens who feel that the Christians among them are an ever present and ever ready inlet through which, on any number of pretexts, foreign Christian nations can once again enter, claiming to be looking out for the interests of their co-religionists. Both the West and native Christians bear responsibility for giving periodic rise to this feeling among Muslims who’ve shown, in the historical record, a laudable tolerance towards Christians far surpassing what Catholics and Protestants showed towards each other or towards their other “heretical” brothers and sisters. From the Muslim point of view the creation of the state of Israel is a Christian crime against Muslims, to make up for a Christian crime against Jews and they don’t trust or appreciate the master criminal who also claims praise for his care and “justice” towards his own victims or seeks to “liberate” them. Both Jews and Muslims are victims of the Christian West…forced to battle each other like gladiators thrown together for the benefit of the Christian crowd…when they were friends before being subjugated and forced against each other. This has to figure into any discussion of how native Christians can expect to be treated by the Muslims they live among and who far outnumber them. To be truly secure the Christians must be wary of ever applauding the West when it involves itself in their own Muslims lands. That’s a very minimum if they wish to survive there. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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