The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> By A Sad Paradox

By A Sad Paradox
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, July 28 2008, 22:16:20 (CEST)
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By a Sad Paradox

Taken from “Islam and the West” by Bernard Lewis, pp. 182-3;

“From a Muslim point of view, neither Judaism nor Christianity is a false religion. Both were in origin based on authentic revelations, but both are superseded by the final and perfect revelation vouchsafed to Muhammad in the Quran. Some go farther and claim that the Jewish and Christian scriptures were distorted and corrupted by their unworthy custodians (this is certainly obvious in Christianity). However, the principle has always been adopted in Muslim law and usually in practice that Christians and Jews...but not atheists, polytheists, or idolaters...are entitled to the tolerance and protection of the Muslim state. This has meant, in law and in practice, that they were allowed to practice their religions and to form their own communal organizations in which they administered their own laws, subject to the payment of additional taxes and the acceptance of certain social, fiscal, and political restrictions. The severity with which these restrictions were in fact applied varied enormously from place to place and from time to time. It was determined by many factors, perhaps the most important among them being relations with the outside and more particularly the Christian world. In some periods the restrictions were harshly and rigorously enforced; in others they amounted to little more than a token of formal submission.”

Would that Christians had afforded half so much tolerance to fellow Christians.

“By a sad paradox, the adoption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of democratic constitutions, guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens in the Ottoman Empire, in Iran, in Egypt, and elsewhere, on the whole weakened rather than strengthened the position of minorities. On the one hand, it deprived them of the limited but substantial and well-grounded rights and privileges which they enjoyed under the old Islamic dispensation. On the other, it failed to make good the new rights and freedoms offered to them by the newly enacted constitutions which, in this as in many other respects, proved a dead letter. It is easier to be tolerant from a position of strength than from a position of weakness, and in the age of overwhelming European superiority of wealth and power, the Christian and to a lesser extent the Jewish minorities, suspected with some justification of sympathizing and even collaborating with European imperialists, were subject to increasing hostility. After the withdrawal of those imperialists in the postwar period, the surviving minorities were in an exposed and dangerous position.”

Which is what the Christians of Iraq have to look forward to, thanks to the deadly embrace of the nationalist fools among us. When current hostilities cease and the Christian occupiers and despoilers of the land leave, the really bad time for Iraqi Christians will begin. Not only did they suffer equally with their Muslim fellows, but their misery will be increased once the Christians leave, while Muslim suffering may at long last decline.

So long as Islam is what it is, that is; a system of government that relies entirely on religious law, it is far better that Christians and Jews NOT be included...for their own benefit. Islam recognized, from the start, that it would be wrong to force non-Muslims to live under Muslim laws...and so Christians and Jews were allowed to govern themselves in accordance with their own beliefs. Under these conditions “democracy” would be a disaster...as we clearly see in Iraq where a Shii’a majority will now rule “equally” over all. Under these circumstances it is impossible, and goes against democratic principles, to give any group “special” rights. Special rights, that is; the dispensation to live by one’s own, minority, religious law and customs was a gift of Islam, denied to minorities in Christian lands and, later, in democratic governments as well.

The best Christians in Muslim lands can hope for is to live as citizens of the nation, not an “Assyrian/Christian” minority agitating for its “special rights”. That’s sedition all over again and will be treated exactly as the crime it is...as it is handled in every country on earth.



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