Jefferson encounters Islam and Farid

Submitted by Daryl (United States), Mar 4, 2006 at 05:26

Friends:

Farid's facts are correct and the very conservative Kingdom of Morocco, whose ruler is a direct descendant of The Prophet, continues even today, to represent another face of Islam than the savage terrorists and pirates of past and present. Whether the King's enlightened efforts at improving the status of women, like efforts which got Anwar Sadat assassinated and Reza Pahlavi Shah deposed, will blow up in his face, literally, remains to be seen.

The fundamental problems of modernizing the Arab Orient is the lack of Public Reasoning, no separation between civil and religious law, and that Quranic model of Despotic government. It will be a challenge to see how far Enlightened Despotism can carry a society into Modernity.

Back to the subject at hand.

There is even a period comic opera by Rossini, The Italian Girl In Algers, which makes light of being kidnapped at sea and subjected to sexual slavery.

The Arab pirates also conducted slave raids on the coast of Southwestern England fairly regularly throughout the 17th and 18th centuries besides attacking shipping.

The pirates would sadistically permit their victims to write home describing all the cruelties and indignities to which they were being subjected, and to beg for ransom, which rarely resulted in release, even when paid.

The European Great Powers, embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, paid scarce attention to the abduction and murder of their subjects and citizens, even though a single Man of War could have blown the Tripoli bey, his palace, and his scruffy corsair fleet to bits in an afternoon.

It took the brash new American state to send three frigates and the recently formed Marine Corps to punish the Arab pirate/terrorist state and to rescue the captives.

Sounds rather familiar, no?

Although this topic is a grave matter which naturally arouses great passion, we must not demonize all Moslems or casually rewrite History like the self-loathing Left to suit our simplistic mentality. In this great struggle between Good and Evil, we will find many Moslems on the side of Liberty and of the Common Good, just as we are finding way too many Westerners who are Quislings, fools, and dupes.

Daryl

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