The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> What Is Arabization?

What Is Arabization?
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, December 1 2007, 21:10:09 (CET)
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The simple answer is; Being influenced by Arab culture to a greater or lesser degree. In effect it’s no different than Hellinzation, Aramization, Americanization, or Westernization. The influence by an outside entity can come as result of conquest, simple proximity or immigration, either forced or voluntary.

The Romans certainly Romanized foreign people and Christians Christianized one-third of the world…. the Arabs Arabized those nations they conquered…the British Anglicized India, America Americanized Hawaii and Alaska and so on. What’s the big deal? We know our boys well enough by know what the big deal is; While all other groups, Christians mostly, are seen as having done “God’s Work” whenever they stormed into a place and are forgiven their manifest cruelties and the destruction of native culture and the forced conversion of the native population to Christ…the Arabs are condemned because they are…Muslim.

The odd thing is that the Muslims, unlike the Christians, didn’t kill people just for their religion neither did they force them to convert to Islam. When Beth-Jumbo failed to find any such instance he switched over to “Arabization” instead as a Muslim “crime”. In fact, only Islam allowed Jews and Christians to live among Muslims in peace…a far greater peace than Christian ever extended to Jew or Muslim (except briefly in Spain after the Christians took control) and even greater than that which they allowed each other. One only has to read the atrocities Christians committed against fellow Christians to realize that nothing even close ever existed between Muslim and Muslim, or from Muslim to Christian or Jew.

Because Muslims were ruled by Sharia Law it would have been unjust to force this on their Jewish and Christian subjects and so the Millet system was devised wherein these minorities could be ruled by their own religious councils. Nothing like this was allowed to Jews or Muslims living among Christians. There were disadvantages, certainly, sometimes great injustices, but these were the rare exception. This is balanced by the number of times Christians escaped from their bishops to the greater peace and security of Muslims lands. There were great disadvantages to being Protestant in France as well as Catholic in England…and Jews in Europe suffered untold misery everywhere they lived among Christians(except for Holland). As for Muslims, Christian Europe never had “problems” with them because they killed them outright wherever they encountered them.

The Armenians, Nestorians and Jews lived among the Ottomans for centuries. It was only when the Europeans sent their missionary/spies into the Sultan’s lands and these began laying the groundwork and seeking the allies they thought to exploit during the coming Great War of 1915-18(in Syria alone 100,000 students were enrolled in French schools) that the Muslims realized they had harbored and allowed to flourish among them Christians who were ready to betray their country…had the Turks done what the Europeans did they would have killed all religious minorities centuries before.

They realized too late they had a nest of potential traitors among them and their understandable overreaction, something Christians had engaged in earlier, was nothing more than a desperate attempt to attain “unity” in the face of the greatest challenge they had yet faced. It is regrettable certainly…but the Armenians in particular bear responsibility for their open sedition as well as acts of sabotage(such as taking hostages in the central bank in Istanbul and threatening to blow it up) and weapons procurement. The Christians within the empire played with fire and got burnt…the sad thing is that then, as now, the majority had to pay for what a few hotheads did. But there’s nothing odd or peculiar to Islam in any of this…all nations, especially Christian ones, have behaved in similar fashion…even when they didn’t face a coalition of the most industrialized nations on earth, as Turkey was up against.

The Christians of Iraq, Egypt and Syria considered themselves liberated by the Arabs…freed from the taxes and attempts to force them to convert to Roman Christianity. The jizya tax was a milder one than what they had been forced to pay the Byzantines and their exclusion from military service was a blessing, allowing them to remain with their families and work their farms while Muslims were forced into service. However, ambitious Christians were drawn to the dominant culture of the Arabs and no doubt to Islam as well and so there were many defections…but no forced conversions.

If we believe we are descended from the ancient Assyrians then we were Aramized. We took their language, in which none of our ancient history was written, we took the Christian religion(Jewishized) and, in time, our culture was no different from that of the Kurds and Turks we lived among, except for religion and ritual. Everyone has always been influenced by every culture that next took its turn…only to die out in time and be supplanted by the next and the next. The Sumerians were Akkadinized…and the two cultures were later Amoritized…and Babylonianized…with no fuss, no crying or wailing…in fact each succeeding conqueror brought a new spurt of growth and refinement…and it was no different when that region was Arabized….going on to create the greatest civilization of its day…far in advance of any Christian nations.

What beth-Jumbo is trying to say is that great violence was done in Arabizing that region…so that we’re back to that old bugaboo and he STILL can give no example to back this up. Instead we’re supposed to be horrified JUST to know that they Arabized the region, no matter how peacefully they did it….but, considering the great civilization which ensued, I’d say they did everybody there, and the entire world, a big favor.

They certainly saved the glorious Classical literature and science from destruction at the hands of the Church.



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