When Did the ME Go Wrong?

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Especially Christianity didn't have access to statepower for the first few centuries of its existence. It's initial leaders, the examples to be followed basically, are generally not warriors.

You are accepting the description of Jesus as nothing but a peaceful rabbi on blind faith here.

The fact that "Christianity" didn't have access to statepower does not mean it wasn't militant. The teachings of Christ were in fact both revolutionary and militant and absolutely at odds with the status quo, be it Roman occupation (or rule) of Judea or the power structure within judaism.

I think if you are going to use other sources than the Quran to prove Mohammed was worse than Hitler, it would serve you well to perhaps look beyond the Gospels when it comes to sources about Christianity. Just a tip.

Nevertheless, the example of jesus is what we'd generally call a "good guy". Someone who doesn't go around raiding caravans, conquering villages, killingthe men and sending the rest into slavery. So whatever he was in reality doesn't matter as it is unknown due to lack of sources and due to editing of the gospel. All christians acknowledge that via their acknowledgement (tacit or not) that the bible has been edited many times.

Now the mohammed that comes to us is most certainly not a "nice guy" (he may not be a hitler, but he'd certainly be tried for human rights violations on a large scale). Wether or not the primary source on mohammed has been edited or not is still up for debate, given that it wasn't written down at once on can assume that some stuff did end up different than it was. However, that is not something a faithful muslim will ever admit: the quran is the word of god and there ends the debate. Yet the result is still that this mohammed, which islam considers the example to follow, is a nasty man.

And that is the big difference. With what is know it is nigh on impossible to portrait jesus as anything but a man of peace. Something which cannot be said about mohammed.

[Faeelin]

How about tagging the Shia-Sunni split as the beginning of the end?  Before that, Islam had no real clerics, just religious philosophers.  After the split, though it became important not just to be Muslim, but the "right kind" of Muslim, and those religious philosophers started to gain the power to say what was, and wasn't, the "right kind" of Islam.

I am not claiming to know enough whether I am over-simplifying the case, but my tenuous read on Islam's Nightfall tends towards this split as a significant change in Muslim (and Arab) identity.

Eh. I'm still leery of projecting things backwards. The idea that a society is doomed for mistakes made over a thousand years ago seems iff.

Spellus, you might know the answer to this; I've read one of the reasons Abdul Hamid got rid of the parliament after 1878 was that the Russians demanded it; (Abdul Hamid wasn't shedding any tears given the way it acted, but still.) Have you ever this?

[Faeelin]

And that is the big difference. With what is know it is nigh on impossible to portrait jesus as anything but a man of peace. Something which cannot be said about mohammed.

My problem with it is that:

a) It doesn't seem to square with much fo Christian history, where Jesus wasn't considered a good guy, but rather a model to emulate in a series of holy wars.

b) Ignores the entire Old Testament.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

And that is the big difference. With what is know it is nigh on impossible to portrait jesus as anything but a man of peace. Something which cannot be said about mohammed.

My problem with it is that:

a) It doesn't seem to square with much fo Christian history, where Jesus wasn't considered a good guy, but rather a model to emulate in a series of holy wars.

b) Ignores the entire Old Testament.

a) most, but not all. The holy wars start when christianity gains statepower. And it was the desire of the state that it remained unified. As such the attempts to squash dissent within christianity are a continuation of the attempts by the empire to suash christianity. The result of imperial policy rather than a jesus te emulate. Jesus himself doesn't, iirc, call for his followers to go out and smite the unbeliever. The source material, such as it is, seems more to point to a guy who doesn't really care what religion you are, what nationality you are or what your social status is. He even refuses to fight his arrest, unlike swordwielding petrus who jumps to his masters' defence and cuts of the ear of a hapless roman.

edit: basically my point is that the "beginning" of history (of the religion) has a profound influence on said religion and how subsequent generations will deal with it. Especially given the inevitability of fundamentalists (people wishing to return to the way of life of the "first christians/muslims/...).
And we've still ignored the small fact that there's 4 gospels in the Bible, 4 chosen out of many, something which is accepted by christendom at large. Whereas there's just one quran that came to us as is, something which is accepted by the ummah at large.

b)that's because they ain't jewish anymore. The OT isn't as important by far as the NT. The moment christianity stopped being an exclusive jewish sect the OT had to lose its importance. It is, after all, a collection of books dealing with the history of the jewish people, as well as laying down rules for the jewish people. Whereas the Christians came from all corners of the empire.

[Razgovory]

My problem with it is that:

a) It doesn't seem to square with much fo Christian history, where Jesus wasn't considered a good guy, but rather a model to emulate in a series of holy wars.

b) Ignores the entire Old Testament.

My suggestion would be to work a bit more on history and then theology.  Some of those problems might be cleared up.

[Sheilbh]

The ME went wrong with the Crusades and 19th-20th century imperialism.

Well the Crusades did fuck everyone up.  I mean the Greeks and Muslims had been at war for around 400 years by the time the Crusades came along and not very long afterwards they'd become allies because the damage inflicted by marauding Franks was so high.

He even refuses to fight his arrest, unlike swordwielding petrus who jumps to his masters' defence and cuts of the ear of a hapless roman.

But that's not because Jesus is a peaceful man.  It's because he's the lamb of God, the son of God, the Word made flesh whose ultimate purpose is to die for the sins of mankind.  If he resists arrest he's sort of missing the point of his divine purpose.

I'd also say that I think the Mohammed of the Quran is far more sympathetic and interesting than you're painting him out to be.  My objection would be with the Mohammed of some of the Hadiths.  But there is within Islam a new criticism of Hadith as an acceptable source of religious reasoning, something that hasn't really happened since the Medieval 'golden age' we're discussing.

But then I generally quite like Islam, though my tastes run more to some of the Shi'i groups than the Sunni majority.

[grumbler]

Nevertheless, the example of jesus is what we'd generally call a "good guy". Someone who doesn't go around raiding caravans, conquering villages, killingthe men and sending the rest into slavery. So whatever he was in reality doesn't matter as it is unknown due to lack of sources and due to editing of the gospel. All christians acknowledge that via their acknowledgement (tacit or not) that the bible has been edited many times.

Now the mohammed that comes to us is most certainly not a "nice guy" (he may not be a hitler, but he'd certainly be tried for human rights violations on a large scale). Wether or not the primary source on mohammed has been edited or not is still up for debate, given that it wasn't written down at once on can assume that some stuff did end up different than it was. However, that is not something a faithful muslim will ever admit: the quran is the word of god and there ends the debate. Yet the result is still that this mohammed, which islam considers the example to follow, is a nasty man.

And that is the big difference. With what is know it is nigh on impossible to portrait jesus as anything but a man of peace. Something which cannot be said about mohammed.

I guess my problem with all of this is that the comparison of a real person to a fictional (or fictionalized) one is not only silly, but has nothing to do with the contention that one religion is more violent than another.  Judaism is far more bloodthirsty in its writings than Islam, for instance, and the founders of its religious principals liable to the modern mind for far worse crimes than Mohammad.

All real men are nasty men.  Only in comics books and Bibles do we find saints.  So, calling Mohammad "nasty" is a pretty silly insult.  What is more amusing than that you would bother with it is that you think it is significant! 

[Neil]

I'm curious if you also see Nazism as the inevitable culmination of Charlemagne's decision to expand Eastward in the 8th century, setting in motion one of the cornerstones of Germany's heritage: the extermination of those it didn't consider civilized.

Perhaps not inevitable, but certainly natural.

[The Brain]

All real men are nasty men. 

You'll find Mr. Right someday, I know it.

[Faeelin]

My suggestion would be to work a bit more on history and then theology.  Some of those problems might be cleared up.

Hrmm. The fact that you are wrong doesn't persuade me to do so.

[Razgovory]

My suggestion would be to work a bit more on history and then theology.  Some of those problems might be cleared up.

Hrmm. The fact that you are wrong doesn't persuade me to do so.

Well that's to bad.  If you don't want to learn stuff it only reflects poorly on you.

[CountDeMoney]

but I don't see any posts here about the intrinsic failures of Chinese culture.

That's because I've used other threads for that.

Because China is reforming and economically developing, and so even the historiopgrahy of China has started to change, going from "Autocratic hermit empire" to "one end of a thriving global trade network."

No it's not.  But keep drinking the tiger penis soup, Maoboi.

[Malthus]

My take is that there are two basic causes:

1. Islam never developed a workable method of succession agreed to by all Muslims, leading to the Shia-Sunni split; and

2. Somewhat related to that, Islam grew to be dependant on/prey to the military power of the steppe nomads (and in north africa the Berbers), which barbarized their society from the top down & made it extremely conservative. Kinda hard to progress when your lords and masters are a tiny minority of barbarian aristocrats, "slave" or not ... also when your cities are under threat from their wild cousins back on the steppe.

[The Minsky Moment]

Think for a second about the world economic situation in the 1950s.  There is the developed world - consisting of Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia.  There is a second tier consisting of Japan and the more prosperous Latin American countries like Argentina and Venezuela.  There is a large bottom tier where masses of people lived at near subsistence level - encompassing China, India, and much of Africa.

The ME at this time was mostly in the "middle income" tier between the high-middle countries like Argentina, and the subsistence-level low income countries.  The per capita incomes of countries like Syria and Lebanon outpaced those of Spain, Portugal, and eastern Europe - and while Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Jordan etc trailed a bit behind - there were still way ahead of countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea. 

By the 70s there started to be significant divergence among the ME countries.  Iran was developing very quickly and made it into the second tier.  Iraq was not far behind.  The other major ME countries - Syria, Lebanon, Turkey - were lagging signigicantly.  Since the mid-70s the main developments are that Iran and Iraq have fallen way back, while Turkey has made significant advances.

The main point is that from the standpoint of economic development, the ME at the end of WW2 doesn't really look that much different from the mass of countries that are not part of the charmed "west".  In certain respects it appears well-positioned for the future if the right decisions were made.  Even as late as the mid-70s, at least couple of countries look like they could have a positive future.

I don't chalk up the failures of the ME countries to Islam any more than the apparent failures of east Asian economies c. 1950 could be ascribed to confucianism or buddhism (both claims commonly made for quite a long time).  I do think that failures of political development, self-defeating responses to perceived neocolonism, the corrupting effects of oil, and the replacement of reformist insurgent Islamism by Salafist (or Khoemeinist) insurgent Islamism all played roles.

[Valmy]

The Hispanic/Northern African cultural center did not appear out of nothing. Spain was already, under the late romans

I'm curious if you can cite any historical works, since the consensus AFAIk among academics is "Urban infrastructure decaying under the Visigoths, who treated Jews sufficiently poorly that they all flocked to the Arab invaders."

Well whatever else you can say about the Goths it is true they were no friends to the Jews.