Pope launches scathing attack on Islam

Zingu and Freedom4Free, thanks for the history lessons, I've been reading on the forming of Christianity for the past year and the more I read, the more confusing. So much history crammed in those first 14 centuries, so many turns and twists in so many wars with the mix of politics and religion most incredible.

But, what is happening today is George Bush just continues to bring religion into every speech, odd thing is I don't think he's religious but just uses little silly remarks like God-Bless-You to infuriate. I think now that this pope has entered into the foray the exposure of Christianity's fake beginnings is crucial. Truth does, and will, set us free.

At the least, the pope should have owned up to the use of the "sword" in Christianity's history. Or, would that be burning at the stake.

You should have tried to refute the 'rabid Islamist sites claims'

Please do not ever take history lessons from those 2. You will only make yourself dumber by doing so.

freedom4free wrote:

You should have tried to refute the 'rabid Islamist sites claims'

Here ya go - a page-after-page-after-page, fully sourced and annotated, comprehensive timeline tracing the bloody history of Islam from Mohammed's first battles through the events dominating today's headlines - enjoy.

McGentrix

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Please do not ever take history lessons from those 2. You will only make yourself dumber by doing so.

McGentrix, this implies that we either have supernatural powers to influence the way history books are written, or we've actually re-written it our selves.

Which one is it ?

timberlandko wrote:

freedom4free wrote:

You should have tried to refute the 'rabid Islamist sites claims'

Here ya go - a page-after-page-after-page, fully sourced and annotated, comprehensive timeline tracing the bloody history of Islam from Mohammed's first battles through the events dominating today's headlines - enjoy.

Can ya believe it, this is the same guy, who tells everyone off for posting meaningless links to prove a point. I remember him saying that only FOOLS post links and runaway without engaging in actual debate using their own words.

He couldn't even post a quote from that homemade website, which clearly shows the use of 'swords' to spread Islam.

Oh, and when did anyone claim that there were NO bloody battles, did you expect them to invade and win countries by simply praying to Allah ?

...I think...

Ticomaya

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...I think...

Outch! , you're engaging in a painful task, take it easy Tico.

Actually, I think it implies that you don't know spit about history.

Ticomaya

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Actually, I think it implies that you don't know spit about history.

This implies that history is a well kept top secret, which can only be unlocked by a special Bushit key, which of course you've hidden up your a**, and can only be pulled out by Bush's orders.

freedom4free wrote:

You should have tried to refute the 'rabid Islamist sites claims'

Here ya go - a page-after-page-after-page, fully sourced and annotated, comprehensive timeline tracing the bloody history of Islam from Mohammed's first battles through the events dominating today's headlines - enjoy.

638 The "Covenant of Umar," a pact between Umar Ibn Khatib and the Christians of Jerusalem, was concluded on the occasion of the conquest of that city by the Muslims. Umar decreed that Muslims should forever thereafter guarantee Christians freedom of religion, use of their churches for worship, and the right to visit holy places. In another version, Umar rescinded the Roman decrees that had banished Jews from Jerusalem and accorded Jews all the rights granted Christians.

Non-Muslims were not required to participate in jihad (military action in defense of Islam) nor did they have to pay the zakat (the tax for charity required of all Muslims), but they were required to pay the jizya, a poll tax that helped defray the expense of protecting them. Since Muslim taxes amounted to considerably less than what had been exacted from them under Byzantine rule and since Muslims allowed them much more freedom to pursue their own customs and religious beliefs, Jews and Christians almost universally welcomed their new rulers.

What does one have to do to know history Tico ?

But we can't contact him.

1. To possess knowledge, understanding, or information.
2. To be cognizant or aware.

I suggest you take up your concern with McG

Who's "we"?

Please do not ever take history lessons from those 2

Ticomaya

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1. To possess knowledge, understanding, or information.
2. To be cognizant or aware.

How much do you charge for that ?

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I suggest you take up your concern with McG

My question was originally posted to McG, you butted in, and now your butting out. McG will thank you for standing up for him.

hey what happened to my post?

I answered all 3 of f4f questions...now I will have to reproduce a piece of masterful skill again

Battle of BadrThe Great Battle of Badr took place on the seventeenth of Ramadan, two years after the Hijra. This was the first battle that the believers ever engaged in with the disbelievers ...

... And so the Muslims defeated the disbelievers in a humiliating defeat by the Help of Allah (swt). Indeed Allah, again, fulfilled His promise, ""Their multitude will be put to flight, and they will show their backs"" [54:45]

The Battle of al-YarmukIn the face of the Muslim expansion, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius gathered a large army which met the Muslim army at the Battle of the Yarmuk in Syria on 20 August 636. It was a crushing victory which gave Syria to the Muslims ...

Abu Bakr's caliphate was short but important. An exemplary leader, he lived simply, assiduously fulfilled his religious obligations, and was accessible and sympathetic to his people. But he also stood firm when, in the wake of the Prophet's death, some tribes renounced Islam; in what was a major accomplishment, Abu Bakr swiftly disciplined them. Later, he consolidated the support of the tribes within the Arabian Peninsula and subsequently funnelled their energies against the powerful empires of the East: the Sassanians in Persia and the Byzantines in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In short, he demonstrated the viability of the Muslim state.

The second caliph, 'Umar - appointed by Abu Bakr in a written testament - continued to demonstrate that viability. Adopting the title Amir al-Muminin, "Commander of the Believers," 'Umar extended Islam's temporal rule over Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia in what from a purely military standpoint were astonishing victories. Within four years after the death of the Prophet the Muslim state had extended its sway over all of Syria and had, at a famous battle fought during a sandstorm near the River Yarmuk, blunted the power of the Byzantines - whose ruler Heraclius had shortly before disdainfully rejected the letter from the unknown Prophet of Arabia ...

'Uthman achieved much during his reign. He pushed forward with the pacification of Persia, continued to defend the Muslim state against the Byzantines, added what is now Libya to the empire, and subjugated most of Armenia. 'Uthman also, through his cousin Mu'awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, the governor of Syria, established an Arab navy which fought a series of important engagements with the Byzantines ...

After the battle of Siffin, 'Ali - whose chief strength was in Iraq, with his capital at Kufa - began to lose the support of many of his more uncompromising followers and in 661 he was murdered by a former supporter. His son Hasan was proclaimed caliph at Kufa but soon afterward deferred to Muiawiyah, who had already been proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem in the previous year and who now was recognized and accepted as caliph in all the Muslim territories - thus inaugurating the Umayyad dynasty which would rule for the next ninety years.

The division between the Sunnis and the Shi'is continued to develop, however, and was widened in 680 when 'Ali's son Husayn tried to win the caliphate from the Umayyads and, with his followers, was killed at Karbala in Iraq. His death is still mourned each year by the Shi'is.

With the advent of the Umayyads, how ever, secular concerns and the problems inherent in the administration of what, by then, was a large empire began to dominate the attention of the caliphs, often at the expense of religious concerns ...

... Nevertheless, Mu'awiyah was never able to reconcile the opposition to his rule nor solve the conflict with the Shi'is. These problems were not unmanageable while Mu'awiyah was alive, but after he died in 680 the partisans of 'Ali resumed a complicated but persistent struggle that plagued the Umayyads at home for most of the next seventy years and in time spread into North Africa and Spain ...

... Under 'Abd al-Malik, the Umayyads expanded Islamic power still further. To the east they extended their influence into Transoxania, an area north of the Oxus River in today's Soviet Union, and went on to reach the borders of China. To the west, they took North Africa, in a continuation of the campaign led by 'Uqbah ibn Nafi' who founded the city of Kairouan - in what is now Tunisia - and from there rode all the way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean ...

... Umayyad expansion also reached the ancient civilization of India ...

... In Europe, meanwhile, the Arabs had passed into Spain, defeated the Visigoths, and by 713 had reached Narbonne in France. In the next decades, raiding parties continually made forays into France and in 732 reached as far as the Loire Valley, only 170 miles from Paris. There, at the Battle of Tours, or Poitiers, the Arabs were finally turned back by Charles Martel ...

... The last great Umayyad caliph was Hisham, the fourth son of 'Abd al-Malik to succeed to the caliphate. His reign was long - from 724 to 743 - and during it the Arab empire reached its greatest extent. But neither he nor the four caliphs who succeeded him were the statesmen the times demanded when, in 747, revolutionaries in Khorasan unfurled the black flag of rebellion that would bring the Umayyad Dynasty to an end ...

... Marwan ibn Muhammad, the last Umayyad caliph, was defeated and the Syrians, still loyal to the Umayyads, were put to rout. Only one man of importance escaped the disaster - 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Mu'awiyah al-Dakhil, a young prince who with a loyal servant fled to Spain and in 756 set up an Umayyad Dynasty there.

By the time 'Abd al-Rahman reached Spain, the Arabs from North Africa were already entrenched on the Iberian Peninsula and had begun to write one of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history.

After their forays into France were blunted by Charles Martel, the Muslims in Spain had begun to focus their whole attention on what they called al-Andalus, southern Spain (Andalusia) ...

... By the eleventh century, however, a small pocket of Christian resistance had begun to grow, and under Alfonso VI Christian forces retook Toledo. It was the beginning of the period the Christians called the Reconquest, and it underlined a serious problem that marred this refined, graceful, and charming era: the inability of the numerous rulers of Islamic Spain to maintain their unity. This so weakened them that when the various Christian kingdoms began to pose a serious threat, the Muslim rulers in Spain had to ask the Almoravids, a North African Berber dynasty, to come to their aid. The Almoravids came and crushed the Christian uprising, but eventually seized control themselves. In 1147, the Almoravids were in turn defeated by another coalition of Berber tribes, the Almohads ...

... The Arabs did not surrender easily; al-Andalus was their land too. But, bit by bit, they had to retreat, first from northern Spain, then from central Spain. By the thirteenth century their once extensive domains were reduced to a few scattered kingdoms deep in the mountains of Andalusia ...

... Meanwhile, outside Granada, the Christian kings waited. In relentless succession they had retaken Toledo, Cordoba, and Seville. Only Granada survived. Then, in 1482, in a trivial quarrel, the Muslim kingdom split into two hostile factions and, simultaneously, two strong Christian sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, married and merged their kingdoms. As a result, Granada fell ten years later.

In the Middle East, during these centuries, the 'Abbasids, after their victory over the Umayyads, had transformed the Umayyads' Arab empire into a multinational Muslim empire. They moved the capital of the empire from Syria to Iraq, where they built a new capital, Baghdad, from which, during the next five centuries, they would influence many of the main events of Islamic history ...

The province of Ifriqiyah - North Africa west of Libya and east of Morocco - had fallen away from 'Abbasid control during the reign of Harun al-Rashid, and under al-Mamun other provinces soon broke loose also ...

... Al-Mamun died in 833, in the town of Tarsus, and was succeeded by his brother, al-Mu'tasim, under whose rule the symptoms of decline that had manifested themselves earlier grew steadily worse. As he could no longer rely on the loyalty of his army, al-Mu'tasim recruited an army of Turks from Transoxania and Turkestan. It was a necessary step, but its outcome was dominance of the caliphate by its own praetorian guard ...

The most stable of the successor dynasties founded in the ninth and tenth centuries was that of the Fatimids, a branch of Shi'is. The Fatimids won their first success in North Africa, where they established a rival caliphate at Raqqadah near Kairouan and, in 952, embarked on a period of expansion that within a few years took them to Egypt ...

... At their peak they ruled North Africa, the Red Sea coast, Yemen, Palestine, and parts of Syria ...

But the Fatimids' dreams of gaining control of the Islamic heartland came to nothing, partly because many other independent states refused to support them and partly because they, like the 'Abbasids in Baghdad, lost effective control of their own mercenaries ...

Although individual Turkish generals had already gained considerable, and at times decisive, power in Mesopotamia and Egypt during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the coming of the Seljuks signaled the first large-scale penetration of the Turkish elements into the Middle East ...

... After the death of Malikshah in 1092, internal conflict among the young heirs led to the fragmentation of the Seljuks' central authority into smaller Seljuk states led by various members of the family, and still smaller units led by regional chieftains, no one of whom was able to unite the Muslim world as still another force appeared in the Middle East: the Crusaders.

The most imposing of the many fortresses built by the Crusaders the elegant Krak des Chevaliers in Syria held out against the Muslims for over a century and a half. The Crusader castle at Sidon in Lebanon was abandoned after the final defeat of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

To Arab historians, the Crusaders were a minor irritant, their invasion one more barbarian incursion, not nearly as serious a threat as the Mongols were to prove in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ...

... Although unable to fend off the Crusaders at first ... the Muslims eventually began to mount effective counterattacks. They recaptured Aleppo and besieged Edessa ...

... In the meantime the Crusaders - or Franks, the Arabs called them - had extended their reach to the borders of Egypt, where the Fatimids had fallen after two hundred years. There they faced a young man called Salah al-Din (Saladin) who had founded still another new dynasty, the Ayyubids, and who was destined to blunt the thrust of the Crusaders' attack. In 1187 Saladin counterattacked, eventually recapturing Jerusalem. The Europeans mounted a series of further crusading expeditions against the Muslims over the next hundred years or so, but the Crusaders never again recovered the initiative. Confined to the coast, they ruled small areas until their final defeat at the hands of the Egyptian Mamluks at the end of the thirteenth century.

Although the Crusades achieved no lasting results in terms of military conquest, (they) ... put an end to the centuries-old rivalry between the Arabs and Byzantines. By occupying Constantinople, the capital of their Christian allies, in the Fourth Crusade, the Crusaders achieved what the Arabs had been trying to do from the early days of Islam. Although the Byzantine Empire continued until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, it never recovered its former power after the Fourth Crusade ...

In the thirteenth century still another threat to the Muslim world appeared in the land beyond the Oxus: the Mongols. Led by Genghis Khan, a confederation of nomadic tribes which had already conquered China now attacked the Muslims. In 1220 they took Samarkand and Bukhara. By mid-century they had taken Russia, Central Europe, northern Iran, and the Caucuses, and in 1258, under Hulagu Khan, they invaded Baghdad and put an end to the remnants of the once-glorious 'Abbasid Empire ...

... The Mamluks had been recruited by the Ayyubids and then, like the Turkish mercenaries of the 'Abbasid caliphs, had usurped power from their enfeebled masters. Unlike their predecessors, however, they were able to maintain their power, and they retained control of Egypt until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Militarily formidable, they were also the first power to defeat the Mongols in open combat when, in 1260, the Mongols moved against Palestine and Egypt. Alerted by a chain of signal fires stretching from Iraq to Egypt, the Mamluks were able to marshal their forces in time to meet, and crush, the Mongols at 'Ayn Jalut near Nazareth in Palestine ...

... At the dawn of the fourteenth century, Ghazan Khan Mahmud officially adopted Islam as the religion of the state, and for a time peace descended on the eastern portion of the Mongol empire. During this period the Mongols built mosques and schools and patronized scholarship of all sorts. But then, in 1380, a new Turko-Mongol confederation was hammered together by another world conqueror: Tamerlane, who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. Under Tamerlane, the Mongol forces swept down on Central Asia, India, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, occupying Aleppo and Damascus and threatening - but not defeating - the Mamluks ...

During the second Mongol invasion, Tamerlane had met and very nearly annihilated another rising power: the Ottomans. Under a minor chieftain named Othman, groups of Turkish-speaking peoples in Anatolia were united in the Ottoman confederation which, by the second half of the fourteenth century, had conquered much of present-day Greece and Turkey and was threatening Constantinople.

The Ottoman state was born on the frontier between Islam and the Byzantine Empire. Turkish tribes, driven from their homeland in the steppes of Central Asia by the Mongols, had embraced Islam and settled in Anatolia on the battle lines of the Islamic world, where they formed the Ottoman confederation. They were called ghazis, warriors for the faith, and their highest ambition was to die in battle for their adopted religion ...

... The first important step in the establishment of this empire was taken in 1326 when the Ottoman leader Orhan captured the town of Bursa, south of the Sea of Marmara, and made it his capital.

It was probably during the reign of Orhan that the famous institution of the Janissaries, a word derived from the Turkish yeni cheri ("new troops"), was formed. An elite corps of slave soldiers conscripted from the subject population of the empire, they were carefully selected on the basis of physique and intelligence, educated, trained, introduced to Islam, and formed into one of the most formidable military corps ever known ...

... Orhan's successor, Murad I, who launched naval attacks upon the Aegean coasts of Europe, established himself on the European shores of the Bosporus, and crushed a Balkan coalition. The next Ottoman leader was Bayazid I, who besieged Constantinople and routed the armies dispatched by an alarmed Europe to raise the siege.

It was at this point in history that Tamerlane and his Mongols advanced into Anatolia and very nearly crushed the Ottomans forever. They recovered, however, and later, under the leadership of a new sultan, Murad II, besieged Constantinople for the second time. They were repulsed, but by 1444 they had advanced into Greece and Albania, leaving Constantinople isolated though unconquered. Murad II was succeeded by Mehmed (Muhammad) II, called "The Conqueror" because on May 29, 1453, after his artillery finally breached Constantinople's massive walls, the city fell ...

... The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in size and splendor under the sultan called Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566 and was known to the Turks as Suleiman the Law-Giver. But from the middle of the sixteenth century on the empire began to decline ...

... Temporary reforms under various sultans, and the still formidable, if weakened, military prowess of the Ottomans helped maintain their empire. As late as 1683, for example, they besieged Vienna ...

In the sixteenth century three Muslim empires are at or close to the pinnacle of their power and brilliance: the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent, Safavid Persia under Shah Abbas the Great, and Mogul India under Akbar the Great. The Ottoman Turks have conquered and maintain effective control over diverse peoples in a vast empire stretching from Persia almost to the gates of Vienna and along the north coast of Africa to Algiers. In the Arabian Peninsula the Ottomans penetrate to al-Hasa on the Arabian Gulf and to Mocha on the Red Sea. However, the sharifs of Mecca and Medina are virtually independent. Throughout this period the Ottomans contest control of the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea with the Portuguese, who establish themselves in Bahrain, Muscat, and Hormuz and assist Ethiopia in repulsing the Turks from the coast of East Africa.