In a nutshell: why Islam is doomed

Nonsense all religions with special regard to Christianity had gone through periods of tying the religion with military power and political power.

I love how Henry IV Emperor of the Holly Rome Empire needed to stand out in the snow for three days to get the then Pope to lifted an excommunication and as soon as he could clean his house of the Pope supporters he hit back hard.

In any case Islam is not likely to end over conditions that Christianity servive in the past.

I'm not a religious scholar, that's true. My study of Islam has mostly focused on its evolution since the medieval period, how Islamic religious authority works in the modern world, and the views of the global community of Muslim scholars about human rights and secularism.

Yes. I know Islam extends beyond the middle-east. It has since at least 800 CE.

This lady had an empire, who'd a thunk?

Sharia can't outlaw slavery. This is an example of the way Islam is dependent on political authority in the modern world.


Islam faces challenges which Christianity has never faced.

A lady you been drinking?

Number one Sharia law in not accepted as a core part of Islam by a large fraction of that religion and whole Muslim nations do not used it, see Turkey as an example of that and of those nations that have elements of Sharia law in their law codes few embrace the whole thing.

So for the most part that is a strawman argument



Nonsense.

You just made the same mistake you warned me about. You conflated Islam with Muslim nations. Sharia is part of Islam's heritage. Come to understand why Sharia can't outlaw slavery, and you'll be getting closer to understanding the real challenges facing Islam.

This isn't some criticism I made up. It's a hot topic among Muslim scholars.


It's not nonsense. It's a fact.

Try since about 630 CE--it's not the history of Islam as a religion, nor even, for that matter, history at all which has lead you to make a fool of yourself. It's current events about which you display a lamentable ignorance. You seem not to understand the political situations in the nations of the middle east (believe it or not, they are not a political monolith), and you ascribe to ISIS an importance they don't deserve. ISIS has slaughtered thousands of people--usually unarmed prisoners, the elderly and women and children. Militarily, they have demonstrated that they are pathetically inept. They raged across the western desert of Iraq, Al Anbar, and attacked Ramadi. They were stopped there for more than a year by the Iraqi army which was, if anything, more incompetent than ISIS. Bogged down before Ramadi, they left a regiment-sized force, and headed for Tikrit. That tipped their hand, and although the newspapers would require many months for the nickel to drop, anyone paying attention knew from that that they were former Saddam Hussein Ba'athist loyalists. There they slaughtered thousands of prisoners, and then headed for Iraqi Kurdistan. This was in the summer of 2014, and the Kurds had negotiated a cease-fire with Turkey requiring the Turks to withdraw from the areas bordering Iraqi Kurdistan, in return for which the PKK would disarm--that was in March, 2013. Both sides kept their part of the bargain. So when ISIS invaded Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds were largely disarmed, and the Shi'ites of al Makiki's incompetent and corrupt Iraqi army ran or were rounded up and slaughtered. ISIS then attacked Syrian Kurdistan, but were driven out by the Kurds there, who had not disarmed. The Iraqi Kurds have since been armed (rather indifferently) by the West, and are fighting back, but they couldn't resist attacking the Turks, so now the Turks bomb Kurdish targets while the West bombs ISIS and counts on the Kurds to be their proxy army to fight ISIS.

ISIS is **** as a military force--no commissary, no quartermaster, no transport corps, no repair and maintenance infrastructure--and their military leaders are a pack of incompetent loons who mostly wanted revenge against the Iraqi Shi'ites. If they ever seriously threaten the holy shrines of Shia, the Revolutionary Guard of Iran will come down on them like a ton of bricks.

ISIS is just the flavor of the month in whacked out Muslim jihadis, and the chattering classes of journalism run around doing their "sky is falling" routine because they're usually no better informed than you appear to be. Nobody wants to go into the Syrian morass to deal with them, but a Marine Expeditionary Force or the Foreign Legion could mop them up pretty quickly. Wars are expensive, though, and to send in 8000 Marines or Legionnaires would require about 10,000 support troops and air support, as well as naval forces, and lots and lots of cash. They'd probably also have to fight any number of other lunatics, too, and no one wants to get bogged down in Syria.

ISIS is the big bad wolf right now, but as was the case with al Qaeda, they'll probably eventually get wiped out, at least "decapitated" (the leadership wiped out, which is what happened to al Qaeda), although the name Islamic State will live on, just as the name al Qaeda lived on, because if has jahadi radical chic cachet. They're just the latest round of murderous scum to emerge from the middle east. They're not the first, and won't be the last.

LOL and by that thinking Christianity can not ban slavery or killing homosexuals or anyone that dare to work on the lord day or.......as all that and more are the heritage of Christianity.

No, that's Holly Rome. You post like drunk people talk, and you do it all the time.

I said Islam extended beyond the Middle East in the 800's. If that was also true in 630 CE, where beyond the Middle East did they exist? I thought they were just heading toward Damascus at that point. I would consider Damascus to be part of the Middle East.


I speculated in the OP that ISIS has no intention of creating an Islamic State. I think if they did, they would focus on securing Iraq instead of sending emissaries out to Afghanistan to attack the Taliban. They claim to have bases of operation as far out as Algeria.

Sectarian conflict does indeed fuel much of the bloodshed we see among Muslims. But it is supposed that something else is fueling ISIS: apocalypticism. They're waiting for divine intervention.

You need to understand what Sharia is. The Koran is not a system of jurisprudence, just a series of principles. What is known as Sharia law is a legal framework drawn up by Islamic scholars right at the beginning. It is an interpretation, and these scholars were very aware that that's all it was. They said at the time that subsequent generations should revisit and change it to make it relevant to their time. This did not happen, and the proponents of "Sharia" law are actually defying the wishes of those who drew it up in the first place.

Your comprehension of the differences between Islam and Christianity is clearly close to zero.

The above can be simplified.



There you go. BillRM lives in a fantasy world and talks a load of nonsense.

That's a typo which i didn't see until you quoted me. Islamic forces invaded Egypt in 639 (I believe that date is correct). Egypt, of course, is in Africa. What ISIS claims is meaningless, really. I agree that they probably never intended to create an Islamic State, but they cashed in on the popularity of jihadist themes among young, dumb Muslims, especially in the west. I personally would not ascribe any visionary motives to those Ba'athist scum who are leading ISIS. I even doubt that they're sincerely religious--after all, they came from a secular state, which had been secular even before most of them were born. As i say, i think they were just exploiting naïve young Muslims.

Sharia is not encoded law. It's a practice of deriving judgments based on holy texts. Sharia law does now allow condemnation of slavery because of the nature of the holy texts it is bound to.

Considering how many of the terrorists and bombers in France and Madrid were originally petty criminals and generally disaffected young people you have a good point. Paradoxically those brought up with the Koran are less likely to fall for the bullshit.

There was an interview with an ex Al Qaida/MI5 informer on the radio a few months back. His disillusionment started when he questioned the killing of so many innocents during the Kenyan embassy bombings. He was told of a particular fatwa which sanctioned such action, so he researched it.

The fatwa in question referred to the Mongol empire using Moslems as human shields for their siege engines. It was agreed it was alright to fire on the siege engines and the human shields because it was a matter of survival. That's a far cry from blowing up innocent bystanders in an attack on an embassy.

And it's an interpretation and needs to be updated as its creators wanted. By locking it in stone you're doing the same thing as the fundamentalists. Most modern thinking Moslems do condemn slavery.

Yeah, it doesn't matter what the religion, what the nationality, what the historical epoch--almost all leaders are cynical and manipulative to a lesser or greater extent.

I'm reposting that to the taglines thread.