The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Excerpts from a book....a REAL book

Excerpts from a book....a REAL book

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, March 6 2015, 15:39:46 (UTC)
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The book is “God's Crucible, Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215”. Dealing with books in modern Assyria we have learned that such information as who the publisher is and what credentials the author has are of extreme importance. That's because our people like those books which stroke their balls and leave their minds unruffled....and the only people who provide that kind of book are Fred Aprim, Rosie Malek-Yonan and a handful of religious types, all of them amateurs, none of them accredited or even learned in the subjects they blithely chop and dismember and give personal opinions on as if they were relating facts, or gossip from their grandparents, in other words on nothing other than their ignorance and a need to force an issue...and, of course, the only printers who bother with this kind of crap are the print-for-hire jobbers who will print anything at all if you pay them...but no legitimate publisher has ever bothered with their tripe...only Dr. John Joseph, among us, has been actually published by an actual and prestigious publisher and naturally, we hate him for it....”who does he think he is.....”.

The publisher is W.W. Norton, New York, London....an actual publishing house with a distinguished track record. The author is David Levering Lewis, a professor at New York University whose two volumes of a biography of W.E.B DuBois both received the Pulitzer Prize. Lewis is also the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship as well as many other awards. In other words, not someone any Assyrian would take seriously, or even bother to read....why would they when they can buy the same book, printed twenty times under twenty different titles, by Aprim or Rosie-Malek...all of them titled something like, “How Everything Bad Happened to Me and No One Cares”.

As the title implies, Islam had a lot to do with the making of Europe. The book begins with the Sassanian and Roman (Constantinople/Byzantine) wars and how early Christians had to tread a careful path between. Following are a few excerpts.

“'Everywhere, in humble homes, in the streets, in the marketplace, at street corners,' sighed a bemused visitor to the imperial capital, ' if I ask for my bill, the reply is a comment about the virgin birth; if I ask for the price of bread, I am told that the Father is greater then the Son; when I ask whether my bath is ready, I am told the son was created from nothing.' Shapur II was flabbergasted when the head of the Monophysite community refused to order his people to pay a special tax needed for another war with Rome. Hardly surprising, then, that a contemporary Sassanian source relates the widespread belief among the aristocracy and Zoroastrian clergy that 'the Christians were all of them spies of the Romans. And nothing happens in the kingdom that they do not write to their brothers who live [ in Imperial Rome].'” p. 13

And we haven't changed....we sold out Iraq quickly enough even though it had been our home for a 1000 years and more. Those of us living in peace in America and Europe were only to pleased to pay our taxes for the destruction of Iraq, our “dear” homeland over which we never cease to bawl. And now, we are shocked SHOCKED that death and destruction rule the land.

“No people showed greater determination to rid themselves of Graeco-Roman rule than the Jews, whose lot had become almost unbearable after Justinian's policy of forced conversion and property expropriation. To the dogged Nestorians, along with large numbers of powerless and poor, the approach of the 'kaviani', The Sassanians' imposing gold, silver, and bejeweled rectangular battle standard, raised hopes of better days.” p. 22

This is one of many references to the fact that Christians and Jews were many times eager to be living anywhere but where Christianity ruled. Whether among the more tolerant Persians or, later, the Arabs, didn't matter so much as long as they were far from their own religious rulers.

We skip ahead to after the Muslim conquest of southern Spain or al Andalus, in particular the battle of Poitiers, in southern France, at which the Frankish Christians were finally able to stop the Islamic juggernaut thereby preserving Christian rule in Europe.

“Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Devoisse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers (IF it had happened, mine): astronomy, trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek Philosophy. 'We would have gained 267 years', according to their calculations. “We might have been spared the wars of religion'. To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer (Christian leader who defeated the Muslims at Poitiers, mine) must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy”. p. 174

The brutish Frankish tribes of Germany, ruled by Charlemagne and his Carolingian dynasty, were the ones who pieced Europe together after the fall of Rome.

“As a people (Muslims, mine) uniquely vouchsafed God's final revelation, the conquerors of Hispania looked upon their Christian and Jewish subjects as people stunted by a failure of theological understanding. In marked contrast to the Frankish rulers beyond the Pyrenees, for whom religious conversion and conformity would become policy imperatives, the Andalusian amirs believed that it made good social and political sense to let infidel conversions proceed, as it were, naturally. Enforced conversion was alien to Islam in al Andalus, as it was elsewhere in the ummah. Moreover, the tax benefits of slow-rate conversion always remained compelling”. p. 203

One of our nationalists, and many in our community, surmised that the decreasing numbers of Christians after the Arab Conquest could only mean the Arabs had murdered millions of Christians who refused to convert to Islam. They simply refuse to believe that Christians converted freely and with no force applied...it is, after all, embarrassing to say the least to see so many jump ship...and why not? They had already “jumped” to Christianity...if you can jump once, for a “good deal”, you're that much more likely to jump again, for an even better deal. The fact is that the amirs became alarmed that so many conversions would reduce the tax base and so impediments were placed before Christians to STOP them from converting.

“It was not until the Saxon Wars that Christian conversion in the West became not just a prescription for spiritual salvation but the sine qua non of group survival itself. Surrender alone no longer sufficed; the defeated were obliged to renounce all that was heretical and heathen under pain of sanctions whose extreme harshness Charlemagne himself helped devise. The Quranic injunction that religion must be free from compulsion would, had he known of it, have made little sense to the king of the Franks, for whom State certification of confessional practice was a prerequisite”. Pp. 242-3

The record is abundantly clear, in spite of what our printed authors say; Islam did not forcibly convert Christians or Jews, rather it was the Christians who did so, on pain of death.

“A second army commanded by Charlemagne in person finally succeeded in cornering the main Saxon fighting group near Verden, a Saxon settlement deep in the woods near the Weser River....The punishment Charlemagne inflicted on the Saxon people was intended as a permanent cure for what he regarded as a chronic deceitfulness, which the tribes saw as a fight for their way of life. During one long, infamous day (whose exact date is unknown), the giant Frank watched as his men slaughtered forty-five hundred Saxon prisoners of war on his orders”. pp. 264-5

He'd already tried forced conversions to the Christian faith but the Saxons preferred going back to their own way of life, so this time Charlemagne simply murdered all whom he caught.

“Things were never to be quite the same again after Roncesvalles (Charlemagne was defeated by the Muslims at the Muslim/Christian border in Spain, mine). Galicians and Basques went on the offensive, according to al-Masudi, 'and snatched the towns located near the Franks' frontier from Muslims.' Perturbations in the invasion's wake would grow deeper as the eighth century wound down. Basque nationalism, to speak anachronistically , had been inflamed. Unrest among the amir's Christian populations above the two great rivers in the north and east, the Duero and the Ebro, augured badly for the long-term stability of the frontiers. There were enough instances of Christians' rallying to the Franks in the Upper March as well as in the southeast to induce a certain wariness among Muslims after some seventy years of uncontested and relatively gentle overlordship. Of actual religious persecution, there were only a few instances, but an era of tightened policing of the frontier Christians began. Muslims began to be more suspicious of their Christian subjects, a bit more imperious in their interfaith dealings”. p. 269

The same thing happened in Ottoman Turkey just before and during WW I. The frontier Christians had been allowing and inviting western Christian missionaries (so-called) to cross the borders freely. Once again Muslim rulers, who had been tolerant before, became suspicious now that war was declared against them by yet another coalition of western Christian nations. For this reason the border Christians were moved inland and for this reason alone...and yes, many died due to the weather and starvation, as did thousands of Muslim Turks.

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