Egypt Protests: BUSTED WIDE OPEN

[Elvis Hendrix]

No, the Nazis were NOT OK.  They were mass murdering fanatics that gave us a whole lot of technology.

There was a brief moment of self reflection in Arab culture after 9/11 in which some of them publically asked, "why don't we write any great new literature?  Win any Nobel prizes for science? Produce any advanced technology?" etc.

Exactly so.  I will say that Iran is very interesting as to potential evolution.  Despite all the turbans and morality police, they might be going in a positive direction.  Could turn out like the Vikings.

The Arabs? Not so much.

potential evolution.

That should be the name of your next band Elvis

[petrus4]

For all of my own comparisons of Islam with the Borg Collective, I've read enough to know that there was a time (you have to go back before the Ottomans, more or less) when the religion was very positive.  Anyone who has looked at the Constitution of Medina will know that, for its' time, Islam was actually extremely progressive.  It is also true that to a large extent, the Arabs kept Greek and Egyptian mathematics and the other sciences alive, during a period when anyone who studied them in the West, generally would have been burned as a heretic by the Catholic Church.

Saladin and some of the earlier caliphs were also enlightened men; payment of the jizyah may still have been enforced, but at the time, being under Islamic protection also actually meant something.  If, as a non-Muslim, I went to a mosque today in a Muslim dominated part of the world, and tried to negotiate a price, in practice I would likely still stand a good chance of being killed by some of them, even though at that point, under Qu'ranic law, I would be entitled to said protection, as mentioned.

Nevertheless, that which is progressive by the standards of the sixth century, most certainly is not by the standards of the twenty first.  Islamic ethics does contain a couple of very good ideas which are not related to the passage of time; most notably the prohibition of usury, or lending money at interest. 

Islam in contemporary terms has largely degenerated into a monopolistic death cult, which wants to take over the entire globe, and is obsessed with lethal violence, to the point where said violence is the primary means by which it perpetuates itself, as mentioned.  It is the religion's fervent insistence on coercive exclusivity, that is the main source of my own distaste towards it.