The curse of the infidel

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

Just to remind again, as has been done repeatedly at this forum,

that Sahaja Yoga is the Last Judgment and Al-Qiyamah (The

Resurrection). No matter how much SYs try to evade discussing this

central message of Shri Mataji, sooner or later they will have to

face it.

 

The current method of concentrating 99% on the subtle system has

failed, is failing and will continue to fail abysmally. No Jew,

Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu is interested in anything that

is outside their centuries-old traditions. All SYs know that the

subtle system is falling on deaf ears, as it has been for three

decades. Where is the common sense that perhaps we should stop

flogging it and just tell the plain truth?

 

i have extracted an article by Karen Armstrong regarding our

prejudice towards Islam. Perhaps it may enlighten some to view and

embrace Islam and the Koran. After all, as announced by Shri Mataji,

Al-Qiyamah (The Resurrection) has begun. Who knows it may inspire

some SYs to do just that.

 

 

warmest regards,

 

jagbir

 

 

----------------

 

The curse of the infidel

 

A century ago Muslim intellectuals admired the west. Why did we lose

their goodwill?

 

Karen Armstrong

Thursday June 20, 2002

The Guardian

 

On July 15 1099, the crusaders from western Europe conquered

Jerusalem, falling upon its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants like the

avenging angels from the Apocalypse. In a massacre that makes

September 11 look puny in comparison, some 40,000 people were

slaughtered in two days. A thriving, populous city had been

transformed into a stinking charnel house. Yet in Europe scholar

monks hailed this crime against humanity as the greatest event in

world history since the crucifixion of Christ.

 

The crusades destabilised the Near East, but made little impression

on the Islamic world as a whole. In the west, however, they were

crucial and formative. This was the period when western Christendom

was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as

the Dark Ages, and the crusades were the first cooperative act of

the new Europe as she struggled back on to the international scene.

We continue to talk about " crusades " for justice and peace, and

praise a " crusading journalist " who is bravely uncovering some

salutary truth, showing that at some unexamined level, crusading is

still acceptable to the western soul. One of its most enduring

legacies is a profound hatred of Islam.

 

Before the crusades, Europeans knew very little about Muslims. But

after the conquest of Jerusalem, scholars began to cultivate a

highly distorted portrait of Islam, and this Islamophobia, entwined

with a chronic anti-semitism, would become one of the received ideas

of Europe. Christians must have been aware that their crusades

violated the spirit of the gospels: Jesus had told his followers to

love their enemies, not to exterminate them. This may be the reason

why Christian scholars projected their anxiety on to the very people

they had damaged.

 

Thus it was, at a time when Christians were fighting brutal holy

wars against Muslims in the Near East, that Islam became known in

Europe as an inherently violent and intolerant faith, a religion of

the sword. At a time when the popes were trying to impose celibacy

on the reluctant clergy, western biographies of the prophet

Mohammed, written by priests and monks, depict him, with ill-

concealed envy, as a sexual pervert and lecher, who encouraged

Muslims to indulge their basest instincts.

 

At a time when feudal Europe was riddled with hierarchy, Islam was

presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and

freedom to menials, such as slaves and women. Christians could not

see Islam as separate from themselves; it had become, as it were,

their shadow-self, the opposite of everything that they thought they

were or hoped they were not.

 

In fact, the reality was very different. Islam, for example, is not

the intolerant or violent religion of western fantasy. Mohammed was

forced to fight against the city of Mecca, which had vowed to

exterminate the new Muslim community, but the Koran, the inspired

scripture that he brought to the Arabs, condemns aggressive warfare

and permits only a war of self-defence. After five years of warfare,

Mohammed turned to more peaceful methods and finally conquered Mecca

by an ingenious campaign of non-violence. After the prophet's death,

the Muslims established a vast empire that stretched from the

Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but these wars of conquest were secular,

and were only given a religious interpretation after the event.

 

In the Islamic empire, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians enjoyed

religious freedom. This reflected the teaching of the Koran, which

is a pluralistic scripture, affirmative of other traditions. Muslims

are commanded by God to respect the " people of the book " , and

reminded that they share the same beliefs and the same God. Mohammed

had not intended to found a new religion; he was simply bringing the

old religion of the Jews and the Christians to the Arabs, who had

never had a prophet before. Constantly the Koran explains that

Mohammed has not come to cancel out the revelations brought by Adam,

Abraham, Moses or Jesus. Today, Muslim scholars have argued that had

Mohammed known about the Buddhists and Hindus, the native Americans

or the Australian Aborigines, the Koran would have endorsed their

sages and shamans too, because all rightly guided religion comes

from God.

 

But so entrenched are the old medieval ideas that western people

find it difficult to believe this. We continue to view Islam through

the filter of our own needs and confusions. The question of women is

a case in point. None of the major world faiths has been good to

women but, like Christianity, Islam began with a fairly positive

message, and it was only later that the religion was hijacked by old

patriarchal attitudes. The Koran gives women legal rights of

inheritance and divorce, which western women would not receive until

the 19th century. The Koran does permit men to take four wives, but

this was not intended to pander to male lust, it was a matter of

social welfare: it enabled widows and orphans to find a protector,

without whom it was impossible for them to survive in the harsh

conditions of 7th-century Arabia.

 

There is nothing in the Koran about obligatory veiling for all women

or their seclusion in harems. This only came into Islam about three

generations after the prophet's death, under the influence of the

Greeks of Christian Byzantium, who had long veiled and secluded

their women in this way. Veiling was neither a central nor a

universal practice; it was usually only upper-class women who wore

the veil. But this changed during the colonial period.

 

Colonialists such as Lord Cromer, the consul general of Egypt from

1883 to 1907, like the Christian missionaries who came in their

wake, professed a horror of veiling. Until Muslims abandoned this

barbarous practice, Cromer argued in his monumental Modern Egypt,

they could never advance in the modern world and needed the

supervision of the west. But Lord Cromer was a founder member in

London of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. Yet again,

westerners were viewing Islam through their own muddled

preconceptions, but this cynicism damaged the cause of feminism in

the Muslim world and gave the veil new importance as a symbol of

Islamic and cultural integrity.

 

We can no longer afford this unbalanced view of Islam, which is

damaging to ourselves as well as to Muslims. We should recall that

during the 12th century, Muslim scholars and scientists of Spain

restored to the west the classical learning it had lost during the

Dark Ages. We should also remember that until 1492, Jews and

Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim

Spain - a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly every single Muslim

intellectual was in love with the west, admired its modern society,

and campaigned for democracy and constitutional government in their

own countries. Instead of seeing the west as their enemy, they

recognised it as compatible with their own traditions. We should ask

ourselves why we have lost this goodwill.

 

 

 

Karen Armstrong is the author of Muhammad: A Biography of the

Prophet (Weidenfeld); The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism,

Christianity and Islam (HarperCollins), and Islam: A Short History

(Weidenfeld).

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,740468,00.html