reply to DNM

Submitted by Mozere (United Kingdom), Jul 11, 2012 at 12:47

1 Historical discontinuity,see my posts destruction parts 1 and 2

2 Consensus is that the library was destroyed during an anti pagan riot by a Christian mob who had the Roman power behind them.The Muslim claim looks like a propaganda piece, a construct made up years later.

3 Whoever did the translations of ancient texts it was done under Muslim administration with Muslim funds to address the curiosity of Muslim intelligentsia which is a healthy thing and the world at large gained from it.Golden age of Islamic discourse was in the early Abbasid period especially under Calif Mamun.Scholars such as Avicinna,Averroes Farabi etc.flourished.These scholars whom the Islamists are proud of never made the ordinary curruculum of the madrassahs.It is asif the Cambridge University never mentioned Newton.With the needs of a large Empire to control a reaction to free thinking emerged at 12th century spearheaded by AL Ghazali.Averroes was spat at as he sat on the steps of a mosque in Andalus,but he still continued to write. I venture to guess had these philosophers lived today and published their books in Saudi or Pakistan they would find life a bit difficult.

4 Ancient monuments in the Byzantine Empire was a source of building materials.The citadel in my hometown of Ankara was built by the Byzantines in its walls you can clearly see reused marble pieces with Latin and Greek inscriptions.

5 Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a museum and it is well looked after.I refer you to a book titled Salonica city of ghosts by Mark Mazower and I quote after the fall of Salonica "the municipality decided almost immediately to demolish the cities minarets...the demolishing followed the pattern set over the past century in the Balkans where the departure of Muslims was often followed swiftly by the destruction of their places of worship".

6 concerning China and India:

Ihave no religious axes to grind.I neverquote dogma and never use religious scripts as a reference to ake a point.I will not defend the indefensible.My pointis to destroy the holier than thou attitude of some Christian commentators who think christians never commit despicable acts and only Islam is to blame.

You say 90 million Hindus were slaughtered you are right to lament this.This was the human nature,it was power politics every nation did it then.Indians were too fragmented to defend themselves,they should have got rid of their cast system and united.Soon after this the Mongols killed millions of Muslims and leveled the country side,their horsemen were better than ours.The Spanish obliterated a continent full of Aztecs Mayas and Incas,their technology was better.Only 70 years ago millions of people died in Europe including children.All I am saying is we should grow out of this bloodlust.You cannot keep on blaming Muslims look at the greed for oil. It was Reagan administration who funded and encouraged the extremists to contain the Soviets.

7 Asoka ,prince of India became a Buddhist after the battle of Kalinga,he was sick of bloodshed.This shows the Indians were quite capable of killing each other without outside help.Demise of Buddhism in India has many causes ,you cannot tie it down to Islam.After all Hindus survived and they did very well under Akbar. Maybe the cast system played a part,as Buddhists were against it and thus eliminated by the Brahmins.A lot of Indians converted to Islam to escape the despicable caste system, under Islam they found brotherhood and dignity.

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