The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

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Random Pilferings

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, August 8 2007, 6:52:47 (CEST) from 71.116.101.196 - pool-71-116-101-196.snfcca.dsl-w.verizon.net Network - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Going to lift quotes from Dr Joseph ‘s book, “Muslim-Christian Relations”, and comment. Ch. 1 pp. 10-12 “The efforts made by the Byzantine emperors and the Greek Orthodox church to suppress Middle Eastern “heresies” ended when the area was conquered by the Muslims, thus assuring the survival of Monophysites and Nestorians all the way to the present.” …any unbiased study of the Church’s persecution and elimination of various heretical sects will show that this is a true statement. The Arabs cared nothing for the doctrinal subtleties over which Christian was killing Christian…they only asked them to maintain civil peace, cease from attacking each other, believe what they would, and let them go their ways. It is thanks to Muslims that these sects have survived till today. “Muslim rulers, like the Persians before them, favored the Christians who were “heretical” in the eyes of the Roman emperors of Byzantium. The Arabs granted the Monophysites and the Nestorians civil recognition, which had been denied them under the Byzantines, thus paving the way for them to establish national churches in Armenia, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.” …not only the survival of these sects but their ability to establish themselves in other countries came as a result of Muslim toleration and indifference. Had the Muslims had it in for Christianity they simply could have continued the oppression carried out by the Byzantines, instead they freed them from persecution and left them to expand. This would indicate a strong sense of security in their faith by the Muslims, as well respect for the religious rights of others…since they allowed Christians to grow their religion without the fear that they would entice candidates for Islam to Christ instead. “The Middle Eastern Christians helped the Arab conquerors and welcomed them as liberators from persecution. ‘The hearts of the Christians rejoiced over the domination of the Arabs—may God strengthen it and prosper it,’ wrote a Nestorian chronicler a few centuries after the Arab invasion.” Without further evidence and jumping ahead of myself…I begin to see the “agenda” of these nationalists…what they base their claims of persecution and decimation at the hands of the Muslims on and how they think to gain by it. Even they would be hard pressed to deny that the Arab Conquest saved their heretical forbears from certain extinction at the hands of the Eastern Roman Christians. From where then do they get their tales of “dhimmi” status or the jizya tax as the reason their numbers dwindled, and repeated persecution, massacre and forced conversions? Why this all-out effort to explain their dismal status today as the result of Muslim depredation…even though the Quran specifically states that Christians must be protected and with all the historical evidence of their survival among Muslims. Why this recent effort to blacken the good name of Islam, in timely accordance with the same effort made by Western Christianity…why blame Islam for their condition today and insist that only severed from their fellow-citizens in a Christian enclave can they find peace and prosperity in the Middle East? That long list of Jassim’s about all the persecution and massacres Christians suffered doesn’t tell the whole story. It is presented as if the Christians did nothing to bring disaster on their own heads…instead one is merely told that “Christians” suffered…the impression being that they were minding their own business and that they were all one cohesive and unified group…mowing the lawn at their church, baking cookies to give to poor people and the Muslims just swooped down and killed them all…merely because of their Christianity. Our own Screws-Loose Shlimon tells a variant of this tale….when I asked him to mention one incident in which a Christian population was massacred by Muslims, he brought up the case of Homs, in Syria where, “60,000 Christians were massacred”…that he didn’t stop there but went on, recklessly, to add, “for rebellion”…shows how weak-minded the church can make people…he didn’t bother to see, right in front of him, the simple fact which proved Muslims didn’t kill these people for their religion but for the ACT of rebellion…which many rulers, including the Assyrians, have done regardless of the religion of the rebels. But in his mind this was simply a case of killing innocent Christians…who are presumed to be innocent and “Christ-like” at all times. It is uncritical minds such as these who see only Muslim violence aimed at innocent Christians, without asking what Christians have done to force Muslims to retaliate, without considering the entire context. Muhammad admonished his followers to leave Christians in peace, but there was no turning of the other cheek…if Christians attacked Muslims then retaliation was called for. The truth is that there were several competing Christian entities in the Middle East and nor merely “Christians”. There were Greek orthodox, and Syrian orthodox and, during the Crusades, Latin orthodox, who were blood enemies of the Byzantines, and each other, plus various “heretical” sects, all hating one another and the established orthodoxies, which returned the favor…and all of them engaged in treachery and backstabbing…even to turning each other in to the Muslim rulers, concocting stories of betrayals of the Arab state in favor of the Byzantines or Latins, some taking sides with anyone who attacked Muslims, while others served alongside. There was never ONE Christianity, not as far as the Muslims were concerned and certainly not as far as the Christians were concerned. It is the reprisals made against treacherous Christian sects and the wars against the orthodoxies that our nationalists point to as examples of Muslim bloodlust and a penchant for massacre…of innocent and blameless Christians. You can see them at it today when they refuse to mention that Christians in Iraq who act the part of collaborators with the foreign Christians attacking their country are killed for collaboration, as all people expect to be the case everywhere, and NOT simply because they are Christian. Not to mention that every time in their history a foreign Christian power has attacked the Middle East, local Christians, especially if they appear to be supportive of their co-religionist’s aggression or, if like-minded Christians among the invading powers make too much of a show of solidarity with their brethren living among Muslims, the locals have, understandably, paid a price It’s the same trick they always pulled, this business of complaining about “persecution” based solely on the fact that they are Christians and , more recently, because they are also modern Assyrians whom the Muslims “hate”…a compliment to these same treacherous games they’ve indulged in from almost the beginning of trying to get one-up on each other…even before the Muslims came to Iraq. To continue… “Writing during the crusading period, Abu Salih the Armenian spoke of how the Arabs had humbled the Romans and taken possession of the land of Egypt, thus freeing ‘the Jacobite Christians’ from Roman tyranny.” “During the same period, a Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, saw the coming of the Arabs as an act of the “God of vengeance”, to deliver us by them from the hands of the Romans…from their wickedness, from their anger, from their cruel zeal towards us, and to find ourselves at rest.” And… “The Jacobites of Edessa had welcomed the Muslims as deliverers from the active persecution that they suffered at the hands of the Malkites (Byzantines, mine).” Tell any of this, all of it fact and well documented by scholarship and research, to our supposedly non-religious nationalists, and you’ll be accused of loving Islam, of being Muslim, of favoring Arabs, of being Arab. The same reaction one received when telling the real story of what white America had done to Africans…for telling the simple truth made one a “nigger-lover” and an “enemy” of the white race etc. "Under the Umayyads, the patriarch of the Jacobite Syrians became, ‘one of the most influential leaders in Syria'. The reason for the preferential treatment extended to non-Chalcedonian (Non-Byzantine, mine) Christians was more than political; self-interest dictated it: these non-Muslim citizens were useful to the new conquerors as artisans, merchants, tax-collectors, scholars and physicians. A century later, under the Abbasids, it was the more numerous Nestorians who were favored over all other Christian sects. The Nestorian patriarch had the right of residence in the capital itself, a privilege denied even to the Jacobites during the early period. As early as 676 the Nestorians were able through their cannon law to prohibit Christian tax collectors from exacting the poll tax from a bishop.” It appears that early in their tenure the Arabs treated Christians favorably. If that changed, and in times and places it did, it would be instructive to find the reasons and not merely attribute the change to Muslim perfidy…as our religio-nationalists claim...especially not when we see the depths of Christian perfidy which have brought us this ongoing and most inhumane war against the people and children of Iraq. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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