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=> Will Durant on the Muslim Conquest.

Posted by dr pancho (Guest) - Saturday, April 22 2006, 4:15:04 (CEST)
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Will Durant, indeed almost any historian, is everything Aprim is not. And that goes for those ridiculous Syriac manuscripts as well. Given the wide divergence between real history and what our boys learned at the knee of some priest in a village you can see why none of them ever bothered to study the real thing...for it hardly conformed with the propaganda they've been raised on...

fer instance from page 218 of the third volume titled, "The Age Of Faith":

"As in most religions, the various sects of Islam felt toward one another an animosity more intense than that with which they viewed the "infidels" in their midst. To these "Dhimmi"-Christians, Zoroastrians, Sabeans, Jews- the Umayyad caliphate offered a degree of toleration hardly equalled in contemporary Christian lands. They were allowed the free practise of their faiths, and the retention of their churches, on condition that they wear a distinctive honey-colored dress, and pay a poll tax of from one to four dinars per year according to THEIR INCOME (emphasis mine). This tax fell only upon non-Moslems capable of military service; it was not levied upon monks, women, adolescents, slaves, the old, crippled, blind or very very poor. In return the Dhimmi were excused (or excluded) from military service, were exempt from the two and a half per cent tax for community charity, and received the protection of the government. Their testimony was not admitted in Moslem courts, but they were allowed self-government under their own leaders, judges and laws".

and more:

The Jews of the Near East had welcomed the Arabs as liberators. They suffered now divers disabilities and occasional persecutions; but they stood on equal terms with Christians, were free once more to live and worship in Jerusalem, and prospered under Islam in Asia, Egypt and Spain as never under CHRISTIAN RULE (mine). Outside of Arabia the Christians of western Asia usually practised their religion unhindered (need we remind ourselves how much Christian hindered Christian in Europe?); Syria remained predominantly Christian until the third Moslem century; in the reign of Mamun (813-33)we hear of 11,000 Christian churches in Islam, as well as hundreds of synagogues and fire temples. Christian festivals were freely and openly celebrated; Christian pilgrims came in safety to visit Christian shrines in Palestine; the Crusaders found large numbers of Christians in the Near East in the twelfth century;and Christian communities have survived there to this day. Christian heretics persecuted by the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria or Antioch were now free and safe under a Moslem rule that found their disputes quite unintelligible. In the ninth century the Moslem governor of Antioch appointed a special guard to keep Christian sects from massacring one another AT CHURCH.

For a time relations between the two religions were so genial that Christians wearing crosses on their breasts conversed in mosques with Moslem friends. The Mohammedan administrative bureaucracy had hundreds of Christian employees; Christians rose so frequently to high office as to provoke Moslem complaints. Sergius, father of St. John of Damascus was chief finance minister to Abd-al-Malik, and John himself, last of the Greek Fathers of the Church, headed the council that governed Damascus. The Christians of the East in general REGARDED ISLAMIC RULE AS A LESSER EVIL THAN THAT OF THE BYZANTINE GOVERNMENT AND CHURCH.

Despite or because of this policy of tolerance in early Islam, the new faith won over to itself in time MOST OF THE CHRISTIANS, nearly all of the Zoroastrians and pagans (Assyrians among them) and many of the Jews, of Asia, Egypt, and North Africa.

Where Hellinism, after a thousand years of mastery, had failed to take root, and Roman arms had left the native gods unconquered, and Byzantine orthodoxy had raised rebellious heresies, Mohammedanism had secured, almost without prosletysm, not only belief and worship, but a tenacious fidelity that quite forgot the superseded gods. From China, Indonesia and India through Persia, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt to Morocco and Spain, the Mohammedan faith touched the the hearts and fancies of a hundred peoples, governed their morals and molded their lives, gave then consoling hopes and strengthening pride, until today it owns the passionate allegiance of 350,000,000 (in the 1930s)souls, and through all political divisions makes them one."

...is it any wonder the boys are deleting and banning and lying like mad? Is it any wonder none of them study history but prefer to make it up to conform to the flattering lies their village priests taught them?

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