Non-Western Worldview

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brihaspati
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by brihaspati »

When ref-ing European "battles" of the past - why are we not applying the "professional historian's approach"? After all, the battles we are "fighting" about here on the forum are all reconstructed from narrative claims by Europeans. Why should those numbers have to be believed? Why cannot those large number differences be a matter of "boasting/propagand/self-glorification"? How much archeological support is there for the numbers and ratios and heroism and brilliance claimed? Why cannot they all be part of "myth making"? What stops unheroic means not being used - say bribing of the Persian commanders, sell-outs, supplying them with choice cuts of Greek femininity, underhand dealings?

Recently, tablets were acrhaeologically unearthed that indicated that possibly Alexander carried out those very unheroic tactics of "underhand delaings" with the Persian commander sent to guard his crossing of the crucial river stretch.

No problem if all that is cliamed to be part of "war", but then why not acknowledge the possibility?
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

An interesting aspect is how the Irish got their Independence from the British and how they got accomodated in US society?
brihaspati
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by brihaspati »

ramanaji,
a most interesting observation. But the Irish were actually into USA long before they obtained independence from the British. Prior to WWI, the Irish were subject to direct or indirect repressions. The equation changed obviously after the war, as USA began to see them as a possible safe toe-hold into Europe. The Irish independence period is also an interesting "thinking out of the box" period in geopolitics for USA. This early interwar period is exactly the time when its top entrepreneurs like Ford and others started to consider doing business with USSR, or the Nazis.

But I think the Irish entry and expansion in American politics was facilitated by the racist conception in the Anglo-Saxon of the Irish being racially half-way down from the "Nordic" to the "African" or "non-whites". So they were sort of more acceptable than non-Europeans. As far as I know, Irish girls and women were perhaps more commonly forced into slavery and prostitution in the USA compared to othe European origin women. We have instances of the ealiest "white slaves" being sourced from Ireland under the great liberal Brits and the doyen of Parliamentary and religious reform - Oliver Cromwell.

So if the "white identity' had not crystallized under British Imperialism, the Irish might not have gained the influence they have subsequently had.
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

So it did trigger some thoughts!

It was the Irish success in US society that gave them the wherewithal to throw the British yoke.

Yes there was the Anglo-Saxon bias which the British history books passed off as conquering spirit of the Normans. The Brits always experimented first on Irish all their colonial tricks. Garrison towns, laws, Royal Ulster Constublary etc, etc. Psychologically demeaning words like "paddy wagon" too were developed.

In US the Irish immigrants strove to change their occupations in the old country. They first joined the police forces in mid 1850s and then into politics in large cities like Boston. They made Catholicism synonymous with Irish.

In fact Notre Dame Uty slogan is "Fighting Irish!". Gradually they got accepted into US society.


Book Review: How he Irish became White
“On August 11, 1854, the Liberator [newspaper] published a letter from a Maine correspondent who wrote, ‘passage to the United States seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning hey were pure, loving, and innocent; in the evening, guilty – excusing their fault with the plea of expecting advantage to follow faithfulness.’”
Glad you could contribute to the thread.

My point is immigrant societies can become infleuential in US and thus become factors for changng the perception of their original countries.

However Indian immigrants were a new kind of immigrants who did not climb over others to acheive success.

Indian doctors, high thech workers and VCs are changing the image of India in US, but not yet in the old world.
A_Gupta
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by A_Gupta »

http://dailypioneer.com/244684/Pavan-K- ... Gupta.html
KG: Today we have crossover sahibs who subscribe to the idea of being global citizens, world citizens. For them, the Indian identity becomes baggage.

PKV: I would say I honestly believe in today’s time, the authentic global citizen is one who has the tools to interface with a globalising world is one who is rooted in his own milieu, his own civilisation. Because it is only that person who is rooted in his own milieu who can be a confident interlocutor with the world. Otherwise, we are producing clones. One of the great myths spawned by globalisation is that having been reduced to a global image we have all become mirror images of each other. But I believe that differences are real, that diversity needs to be respected and people who are the legatees of such a civilisation must preserve that identity because only then will they get respect.
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

The Western world has two prominent roots-Classical Greece and Rome and the Germanic peoples.

The early roots were no doubt classical Greece and Rome with an overlay of Judaic religious thought. This root was cutoff or smothered in 500 AD with the fall of Rome. Since then we have the Germanic mileu in which Western cilvization developed. It was this Germanic milieu that cast of the religious shadow of Rome with Martin Luther's Protestant religion. We are still seeing the development of Western civilization as the germanic people are getting more civilizatonally aware. In one way the WWII unfortunate events were one episode of clash with the overlay in a periodic outburst.
Murugan
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Murugan »

Non-Western Worldview in Western World

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/31918/
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

X-post...
Pranav wrote:
Suppiah wrote:Getting a bit OT, but even if it can be assumed that PRC has not acted against India with hostile intent or used TSP for that purpose in the past or present, (an assumption that is patently false given the enormous weight of evidence), their being not ideologically same as 'western powers' is firstly wrong (because clearly they have pan-Asian ambitions 400% and global ambitions <100%) and secondly may be partly true simply because they are not an incumbent, status-quo power unlike the West. It is not because of any congenital kindness and oozing of humanity from pores...or genetic predisposition.
The ideology of the western elites comes from the Sabbatean-Frankist sect, which is considered heretical by orthodox Jews.

There is a book by Rabbi Marvin S. Antelman, "To Eliminate the Opiate", Vols I and II.

Vol I is available for download at http://www.scribd.com/doc/20459331/R-Mo ... iate-vol-1

Thanks Pranav.

Folks try to read this wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Frank
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Pranav, Did you read about this Firangi Jacob? Looks liek he was creating a new Islam in Eastern Europe. Need to look into it more.
brihaspati
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by brihaspati »

Why is Christianity preparing the ground for Jihadi takeover

Significantly unnoticed events have taken place over the last last few months : at MIT a conference was organized by one Omar Khalidi, a staff member of MIT, who advocates separate laws for Muslims such as polygamy etc, different constituencies for Muslims to elect Muslim lawmakers, apparently has issues with Christian nature of USA and is known even by Muslim scholars as someone who selects his data to paint a picture that suits Islamic agenda. Some people are of opinion he is what one can call ‘soft’ jihadi. Moorthy Muthuswamy has studied Khalidi for his apparent influence on political parties within India with an obvious agenda of creating a separate state for Muslims within India. This fits in with perhaps a perception among a section of Jihadis and their backers that for the next stage of Islamist expansion, resources needed can be gleaned from non-Muslims in India since the Pakistan experiment has failed to provide the resources on its own.

Now why this consistent pattern of western support for elements that bring on Islamic Jihad on non-Muslim civilizations? Maybe the key lies in a fundamental weakness of Christianity towards Islam -specifically to the Arabic Sunni sect of Islam. The problem in fact can be traced back to this weakness after we eliminate all other potential reasons.

It appears that both Islam and Christianity had been in competition over the Judaic legacy and therefore each in its own way saw Judaism proper or the community of Jews as an obstacle to this ideological supremacy. However, ideologically they cannot go too far away from each other in the fundamentals because of this root foundation in Judaism. The conflicts bewteen Christendom and Islam in the historical period basically starts over this claim of sole legacy and takes the form of imperialist conflict – because, both the proselytizing versions of Judaism emerged out of a practical imeprialist need for expansion.

The conflict therefore took the form of war for territory and control of productive economies and trade routes of others. To maintain the drive for this imperialist expansion, each side needed to identify the other side as “alien” and the “devil”. The peculiarity of common origins and memes however forced them to find racial divide as an identifier of alien-ness and the enemy.

To date there has been no solid, logical refutation of Islam by Christianity except the claim that Islamics do not recognize Jesus as the sole way to salvation. Even this is problematic because Islam places Jesus as one of the principal prophets and reserves a special role for Jesus in the “end-times”. So the Christian-Islam conflict has taken the loose and weaker basis of “race” rather than any concrete and profound difference in ideology.

It is this theoretical confusion that is clearly indicated in the responses that Christian dominated west gives to Islamic moves. Contrary to the propaganda that west’s reaction to Islamism is purely determined by economic motives, it is actually Christianity’s secret attraction for what it perhasp considers the “purity” of the Sunni Arabic extension of Judaism. For example the West has studiously cultivated the Arabs since using them as tools against the competitors of the British – the Ottomans. But there would be no reason to continue preferring them over and above the Iranians long after Ottomans have been finished, and both Arabia and Iran sit over oil wealth. Not that the west does not dip to deal with Iran when needed – as in the Contra-hostage deal.

Where does this put Christianity and Islam in the eyes of other non-revealed-tradition cultures?

In UK, judicial and executive systems enforce the law strictly when it comes to the case of say liquidation of the “holy cow” of a Hindu temple becuase, reasonably – the cow was diseased. However the same country and system finds desecration of its prized memorial by a Muslim as not being driven by religious hatred and has allowed a symbolic violent form of expression of hatred in Islam – the throwing of the shoe (typically symbolically used against the devil), as a legitimate form of public expression.

In the USA, the California text book controversy showed that the administration and system would be reluctant to withdraw protection to attempts to represent the non-Muslim past of India in a way that suits the Islamic agenda aginst Hindus. The same system finds a Chief Minister of an Indian state known for his strong Hindu affiliations persona non grata even though he has not yet been convicted on the charges of complicity in Hindu-Muslim violence – the main excuse given to refuse him visas. However the same administration has no problem with Omar Kahlidi’s claims which as Muthuswamy points out are based on dubious scholarship. So the “Hindu” fall foul of freedom of expression but Islamist views do not. In India, the Christian proselytizers are not known to target the Indian Muslim communities for conversion, but Hindus. Indian Christians are also not seen as active protesters against Jihadi activities or statements by various sections of Islamists.

Alll this shows up as a secret attraction and weakness towards the Sunni-Wahabi form of Islam within Christianity of the west to the Hindus, among whom the mistrust of Christian missionaries and their motives have been increasing. Moreover the gradually increasing intervention of western states in favour of protecting the primary propaganda mechanisms of Islamists, and prevention of movements or expressions of ideological criticisms of Islam, is bound to alarm Hindus or Buddhists across South Asia.

If Christianity cannot resolve this fundamental dilemma, it will not be too distant a day, when the Azaan will be heard from Westminster Abbey, the British Monarch may well come out of his Zenana Harem to attend Friday Prayers where the Khutba will be read extolling a new Caliph in the middle East, and the USA rechristens itself the United American Emirates.

Yes, absurd perhaps – but just imagine it for a moment and decide!
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

X-posted
Brihaspati wrote:

There were two Charles of the Franks important for European history. Both belong to the same line of leaders sources originally from a kind of "prime minister" (Major Domus) to the previous Merovingingian dynasty. The first Charles, - Martel- lured the Moorish Muslim army in its adventure from Spain into southern Franconia (roughly modern France) and ambushed it in a way that forced the Moor army to face a humiliating defeat and supposedly even leave behind their loot to esacpe with the bleeding rump of their army back into their Sapnish territory. Whatever be the reality of this campaign (Islamic chroniclers, as in the case of India typically avoid describing their humiliation at the hands of non-Muslims), the fact remains that this defeat must have been so decisive and penalizing that no Muslim army tried to get into France again.

The more famous Charles the Great (Carolus Magnus - Charlemagne) is actually a descendant of this same line. Between Charles Martel and Charlemagne, Europe had already known what Islam was in reality. The context of the homogenization attempt by Charlemagne cannot be understood unless we explore the intervening patch of interaction of Christianity and Islam in the Byzantine arena.

In the eastern Mewditerranean, the drama revolved around the expansion of the Arab armies under the first Caliphs which ate into the Byzantine territory that stretched across the Levant and included Egypt. If we explore the history of conquest of Egypt under the Arabs, we see that Egypt at this time was a curious mixture of sects within Christianity which were essentially split along the hyperfine fractures on polemical differences that had nothing to do with practical application of the philosophies. The root of teh dispute starts from the rival factions within the early Church formed by Constantine - essentially on points in Christology. The intense factional fights came formally to a head in the Nestorian schism, which essentially split the Church right along the middle. However the fallout of this led to further factional divisions within the Church that led to rival councils and schools of thought - based again on hyperfine divsions of doctrine. As an aside, i t will be illuminating for anyone to make a comparative study of not only the type of debate but also the accompanying rivalry between groups of intellectuals - in the Nestrorian debates and the Indian debates at around the same period -between 400-800 CE.

It would have been alright if intellectual debates on abstract theological issues kept away from affecting politics and military alignments. But this is where "diversity" of doctrinal fine points has the most corrosive effects. In Egypt, the Egyptian Coptic Church (deriving legitimacy from the Chalcedonian school) maintained its rivalry with the Byzantine Church which was an adjunct of the Byzantine empire which in turn was in formal occupation of Egypt. The fall of Egypt to the Arab expeditionary army was far more rapid than expected. There has always been speculations that a section of the local establishment collaborated with the Islamists. But it is an uncanny coincidence that the rate of Islamist conquest of a non-Islamic territory at this early stage was positively correlated with the general intensity of ideological and theological schisms and sectarianism within the prevailing regime, or the degree to which the prevailing regime tolerated multiple rival, competing religions simultaneously.

This is where an important weakness of the approach of Constantine to ideological diversity shows up. Constantine "harmonized" the different threads of doctrine within the early Christian church but did not homogenize them. For him, Christianity was going to be the ideological tool by which he would simultaneously weaken his enemies and increase his personal authority and consolidate the empire. So he only suppressed those elements of different doctrines that would challenge this imperial project. But he did not think it through as to the seeds that would remain to ultimately split the political military integrity of the Roman project. He did not homegenize ideology, and tried to use this non-homogenized doctrine to homogenize the political structure of the empire.

In time, in the tradition of "pure" intellectuals without commitments or involvement in the practical running, protecting of a society - who are basically out to win debates as a feedback loop to gain a sense of power, the "intellectuals" gathering within the Church would split among themselves in rivalry essentially over a question of dominance and power. In all such movements, including the communist, these polemical battles are a cover for personal rivalry and mutual hatred or jealousy. That such polemical rivalry does not remain purely within intellectual domain and substantially affects betrayal or collaboration with the "enemy" is evident in any detailed and authentic study of these movements.

The effect of this oversight - in failing to homogenize doctrine/ideology in parallel to attempts to homogenize political superstructure - created conditions where personal rivalries could survive under ideological cover and raise their heads in times of crisis. The entire North African coastal reach of the Romanized sphere of influence was also subject to the weakening effect of this and we see the result in the Arabs reaching Spain within decades, from Egypt. Thus Constantine represents both an incomplete homogenization (since it did not extend into ideology) as well as an incomplete harmonization (since it did not extend into politics).

(to be continued)

Highlights are mine.
Karna_A
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Karna_A »

It's rarely mentioned in any Western media that the first planned mega city of a million people had Indic Origins in Angkor(Sanskrit for City).

Angkor Wat still an awesome place, and a much more creative and grand place than Taj Mahal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor
In 2007, an international team of researchers using satellite photographs and other modern techniques concluded that Angkor had been the largest preindustrial city in the world, with an elaborate system of infrastructure connecting an urban sprawl of at least 1000 square kilometres to the well-known temples at its core. The closest rival to Angkor, the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, was between 100 and 150 square kilometres in total size. Although its population remains a topic of research and debate, newly identified agricultural systems in the Angkor area may have supported up to one million people.
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Brihaspati wrote:
The lead up to the scenario that put Charlemagne in the role he finally played, is usually not always told from the viewpoint of role of doctrinal conflicts in political and military outcomes. This also suppresses a crucial explanation in the rapidity with which Roman Spain under Visigoth rule fell to the Arab (strictly speaking more Berber than Arab) armies.

Without going into the main theological points of difference between Arianism (essentially rising in Egypt/Alexandria) and the Roman Church which was increasingly becoming a "Byzantine Church" at this time - again nitpicking on hyperfine divisions in Christology - we simply need to note for our purposes, that for specific historical circumstances Ariansim spread more among the Germanic tribes of Visigoths, Franks and Lombards (also Vandals). By the time, they had come down to rule as officials - then vassals - then kings "under Romans" in the various parts of the western Roman empire, they had made some compromise with the Byzantine Roman church in official doctrine but retained their Arian core. This was also the case for the Visgothic Frankish kingdoms of Francia/Frankonia and Spain.


Not unexpectedly, we can see that ethnic/regional identities will try to hold on to different interpretations of the same ideology and form doctrinal slightly separate streams even within a major ideology as a means of maintaining distinction. Moreover such distinctions are important as mobilizers for future rebellions against the major doctrine with hwich they have had to compromise. Thus the Visigothic kings had essentially been subjected to a "harmonization" process under the Byzantine Roman Church authority by which parts of their original doctrine had been suppressed (the Filoque for example) but they retained awareness of their doctrinal distinction and would use it in the future to hit back at the Roman. Here doctrinal/ideological diversity and regional/ethnic identity play a mutually reinforcing role and produces justifications for future conflict.

{The Persians after the Arab conquest retained their regional/ethnic identity first under the Abbasid dynasty and later even adopted Shiaism as a doctrinal differentiatior under Safavid dynasty which still persists to modern days. Recall Saddam Hussein's last words to iraq to "beware of the Persians!"}

The doctrinal conflict extended to a fight for supremacy between pro-Byzantine and anti-Byzantine schools in which the dominant faction of the Franks were opposed to Byzantine-Roman Church control. The Byzantine navy came twice to Spain at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century to tilt the balance of power - at a time when they should have been fighting the spread of Islamists in northe Africa. At the Seventeenth Council of Toledo in 694, the Jews were condemned to slavery because they had confessed to a plot to overthrow the 'Christians' (meaning Goths) in Spain, with the help of "those who dwelt in lands beyond the sea,". This could mean both Islamics as well as Byzantines. {Disraeli says this was the charge against the Spanish jews and most likely the helped the foreigners} Some scholars hold that it was definitely meant as indication of the Byzantine since the Muslims were yet to officially conquer Carthage, the capital of this Roman province ( or exarchate). The Gothic king Egica (687-701), repulsed a second attempt by the Byzantine navy. So one of the possible motivations for the naval expeditions could be inciting revolts by Roman-Byzantine Christians against Gothic Christians! Witiza (701-708), the son of Egica, also defeated a Byzantine attempt to gain a foothold in southern Spain. These Byzantine attempts failed, and the Roman Berber governor of Ceuta, Julian (711), followed by the Gallo Romans, like Eudo the Roman Duke of Aquitaine, established alliances with the Islamists against Visigoths and Franks. These Roman-Byzantine Christian-Arab-Berber-Muslim alliances overthrew Visigothic rule in Spain (711-719), but were stopped by Charles Martel, first at Poitiers in 732, and then in Provence in 739.

{A scholar at UC Santa Barbara says that North Africa was occupied by the Vandals who were kin of the Goths and it was the Vandals who got converted to Islam (while the Goths became Christian) and conquered Spain and gave it the name Al-Andalus ie land of Vandals!}

Those interested can explore the early raids and conquests of the Islamics who were thus introduced through an ideological-regional-ethnic diversity which Islam could exploit in Spain. Islamists claim a golden period and Christian narrators claim the opposite. I tend to agree with the Christian narrators more since Islamic narrators use almost similar expressions they used to describe the "golden rule" in India and what we know they did. The widow of the defeated Gothic king was promptly converted, given a Muslim name and "married" by the commander of the "faithful".

So we can understand why Charlemagne would be as ruthless in ironing out "diversity" when he came to power, and why he would tend to "harmonize" less. For he had seen through the example of what his granddad had to face because of "tolerance" of ideological "schisms" and non-homogenization of ethnic/regional/linguistic (yes that too!) distinctions.

A point to note is that we know from St. John of Damascus (675-749) that the Byzantines considered Islam to be a "Christian" heresy during this period. So they could somehow still work with the Islamists without a guilty conscience against what they would dub - another Christian heresy!
-------------

It took quite some time to realize that Islam while denying Christ was a heresy from without just as Marxism was much later.

Hilaire Belloc had quite bit to say about the heresies that racked Christian power:Arianism, Islam and even Marxism,
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century
Vintage | ISBN: 067975704X | 2000-03-14 | 512 pages |
"A useful, important book that reminds us, at the right time, how hard [European unity] has been, and how much care must be taken to avoid the terrible old temptations." --Los Angeles Times

Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take.

Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention. Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next. Unflinching, intelligent, Dark Continent provides a provocative vision of Europ's past, present, and future-and confirms Mark Mazower as a historian of valuable gifts.
We can see that in the current fight over the bailout of the Mediterranean countries and the attitudes of the French and Germans.
A_Gupta
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by A_Gupta »

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16joseph.html

Manu Joseph is badly wrong.
. The International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil, a tech advocacy and networking group, has petitioned Icann for top-level domain names in the Tamil script. But if it cares about increasing the opportunities available to poor Tamils, it should be promoting English, not Tamil.
No. If you lose your identity, you enter basically the Pakistani trap. Once you are deracinated you fall prey to all kinds of madness. Growth involves both keeping your culture and language AND adopting the new; it is not either/or issue. Since English on the internet is trivial, it is entirely appropriate to make Tamil available too.
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

I see that among the most extreme Islamists and extreme Christians there is a coming together of goals as seen from their convergence in the Afghan war with Former Soviet union. Now I see a trend in US liberals a convergence with Islam.

What I see in another 100-200 years is a new age Islamo-Christianity that make Muhammed one more prophet in along line of them. The current struggle is to maintain their divergence but eventually they will converge. The long struggle was to gain dominance. Early on Christianity gained dominance in the Mediterranean region but got hijacked by Romnas as an Imperial tool. Then came along Islam for the rest of the people in that region and spread itself in areas which were formerly Christians thrown out of Nicean creed. And spilled over greatly almost into Europe.

With Englightenment and Scientific Revolution, the Christian West gained an upper hand and was able to cause self-collapse of FSU. And then came 9/11 which was another occassion to gain dominance in the Middle East which is the fountain head of Western religious thought and to own the dialog in future. But the defeat/retreat in Iraq and the financial meltdown put paid to that ambition. It will take tiem to sink in and you will see this convergence become more talk of the town.
Sanjay M
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Sanjay M »

new film on the destruction of the library at Alexandria:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23agora.html
ramana
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

X-post..
The History of White People
Nell Irvin Painter (Author)

Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (March 15, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393049345
ISBN-13: 978-0393049343



Who are white people and where did they come from? Elementary questions with elusive, contradictory, and complicated answers set historian Painter's inquiry into motion. From notions of whiteness in Greek literature to the changing nature of white identity in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors, Painter's wide-ranging response is a who's who of racial thinkers and a synoptic guide to their work. Her commodious history of an idea accommodates Caesar; Saint Patrick, history's most famous British slave of the early medieval period; Madame de Staël; and Emerson, the philosopher king of American white race theory. Painter (Sojourner Truth) reviews the diverse cast in their intellectual milieus, linking them to one another across time and language barriers. Conceptions of beauty (ideals of white beauty [became] firmly embedded in the science of race), social science research, and persistent North/South stereotypes prove relevant to defining whiteness. What we can see, the author observes, depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. For the variable, changing, and often capricious definition of whiteness, Painter offers a kaleidoscopic lens.

Her latest selection examines the history of “whiteness” as a racial category and rhetorical weapon: who is considered to be “white,” who is not, what such distinctions mean, and how notions of whiteness have morphed over time in response to shifting demographics, aesthetic tastes, and political exigencies. After a brief look at how the ancients conceptualized the differences between European peoples, Painter focuses primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There, the artistic idealization of beautiful white slaves from the Caucasus combined with German Romantic racial theories and lots of spurious science to construct an ideology of white superiority which, picked up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other race-obsessed American intellectuals, quickly became an essential component of the nation’s uniquely racialized discourse about who could be considered an American.

The book's best sections deal with the development of racial attitudes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans, seeing themselves newly dominant over the rest of the world, attempted to find some biological rationale for their preeminence. Painter's descriptions of the bizarre "scientific" theories dealing with hair texture, skull sizes and shapes, height, and so on would be laughably absurd if those same theories had not led to the development of eugenics in the late nineteenth century. In turn eugenics in the twentieth century led to forceable sterilization of the "unfit" and other horrors, culminating in the Holocaust.


Painter writes well, with an occasional wry grimace and shake of the head. Her last chapter is one of the best, for here she gives a summary of the current state of "whiteness" in a world where DNA analysis and the mapping of the human genome have so muddied the waters that one wishes J.F. Blumenbach, William Z. Ripley, and other "scientists" who tried so hard to identify one race as superior to all others could be alive to see their work brought to naught.

At first blush readers may be a bit off-put at a black woman writing a history of white people and the usual questions are likely to arise. But as a historian it is Nell Irvin Painter's job to transcend identities such as race and gender and to remain objective about her subject matter. There are many compelling arguments about the relative pros and cons of writing about a part of your identity or about an identity other than your own. Those arguments aside, Painter sets an ambitious goal of writing a history on the construct of the white race; the who, what, where, when, why and how of its origins, its evolution and change over time, and its greater societal significance and meaning to our present day and age. Rather than an angry diatribe against racism Painter seeks to provide a narrative of the evolution of white identity.

Painter begins in antiquity, a time in which race was not important so much as place; where you were from, a time of social hierarchy and class more so than racial consciousness. The disturbing truth is that class served more to define one's status and place than ethnicity or race for many centuries. Slavery, the great sin of any age, was racially colorblind in antiquity, and even in colonial America it was initially colorblind if indentured servitude is included. Painter guides readers through the evolution and construct of whiteness leading up to the harsh realities of the 19th Century, a time where whiteness took on further nuances, differences, and distinctions owing to increased immigration. It was a time when the Irish, Italians, Jews, and "others" were denigrated for their otherness; for not fitting the Anglo-Saxon ideal of whiteness. These ideas and concepts linger in American consciousness and inform public policy and public opinion for nearly a century, resulting in some of the most egregious sins of the republic, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the exclusion of Asians from immigration, anti-Semitism and more. By the time of the Civil Rights Movement whites felt increasingly under attack, becoming the "other" in their own society. If Malcolm X and James Brown could exhort blacks to proclaim "Say it loud! I'm black and proud!" then why couldn't whites revel in their own racial pride? And here's where it gets interesting. Painter's argument is that a nation, founded by slaveholders with justification for its class system based upon the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, must reach some form of reassessment of what it should be once slavery has ended. That process has hot yet fully occurred in the United States and until such a time remains unfinished business for us to move forward.

The end result is thought-provoking, certainly controversial, and more into the realm of history of ideas than most lay people will be comfortable with. Many will undoubtedly be offended by what Painter has to say, but her point is not to provide a hagiography of a race, but to examine the larger meanings of what race is, what it means, and how it shapes us as a people and a society. The results are meant to be unsettling and to initiate further thought, contemplation and introspection. To that end Painter succeeds wonderfully. This is meant to be a challenging and polarizing book and quite honestly those who make it through will be rewarded for it. Undoubtedly many will find points to contend and debate, but they will miss the larger argument.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Last night there was segement on Jon Stewart show where the anchor showed clips of US media chatterati wondering if Obama will be construed as asserting blackness while relieving Gen McChrystal!
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Prad, You are not getting the gist of my post. Its about people construing that BO was asserting black power when he exercised Presidential powers.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by JE Menon »

And Barack Obama is only half-black, something which blacks will never forget and whites will never remember.

But what's the issue? He was elected as far as I can tell, by a telling majority and that consists mainl of whites. Plus he is far too smart to play the "black power" game. For what? When he has a chunk of supporters in both camps. Anyway, moot point.

Seriously OT
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Rudradev »

Has anybody seen this map?

"Kingdoms of Epic India"

Image
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

brihaspati wrote:European secularism was essentially about factional infighting within the then prevailing totalitarianism - that by the Church during the middle and late middle ages. The church was formed as a compromise between the Roman empire and its disgruntled elite. So Constantine gained the input by intellectual and other elite towards imperial stability, and the disgruntled in the form of bishops and "Christians" gained vicarious power.

This foundational fight has remained within Christian Church from the beginning. The "empire" tries to impose a common set of beliefs which is however not indigenous and has lots of elements derived from a completely different socio-geo-political root. Therefore various region and subgroup components of the empire cannot adjust easily, and they form "reinterpretations" of the dogma as an ideological reflection of the underlying political struggle. Germans chose Arianism [or even if Arianism was by accident they insisted on maintaining the distinction in contrast to the "Roman"] against Italian Roman. Italian Roman Church fought against Greek-Byzantine Church.

Many try to see in Renaissance-Reformation a break with the Church. Not really. This was again primarily a factional fight started by regional powers against other European powers trying to use the mantle of the Church-empire to centralize power and resources into their own hands. The Northern rim - Germany, Netherlands, and their extensions England were being marginalized by the Mediterraneans - Spain and France - who had greater power over the Papacy. This was reflected in the schism led by Luther and the whole Protestant ring of fire.

The so-called "scienctific revolution" and "secularism" arose out of this struggle [okay there were other happy coincidences that helped - like the fall of Moorish Spain, and Constantinople - displacing and disseminating a lot of knowledge previously prohibited] as a tool to discredit the pre-existing ideological faction in power - the then Catholic Church. You can see, that in essentials the basic attitudes towards society and humanity in fact did not change much in its philosophical basis - there are wonderful nuggets of "racial conceptualization" or underlying superiority of the "faith" itself to all others - in the "rebels", including Luther. Even the "enlightened", liberal, Protestant Anglicans in the early stage show extreme prejudice racially and otherwise, and found nothing wrong in the most brutal forms of slave trade.

Communism or Marxism was the latest in the long line of this intra-"Church" conflict. It rose primarily within the frontier conflict zone of Catholic-Protestantism in Germany and England. When the Protestant factionalism was well-established, those of the elite/intellectuals who felt marginalized even within that world-view would be forced to look for a new "interpretation" - something even more radical that gives them the political inheritance distinct from Catholics or protestants.

But the drive remains the same : its is all about justifying imperialism in newer forms, creating distinctions in identities that give higher status to being European, and thereby ensuring or justifying one-way or net flow of global resources back into Europe.

The irony is that with each factional deviation, the message gets both diluted as well as found to be more attractive and adaptable by non-European disgruntled elite in non-European societies. Ultimately therefore even more deviations happen according to the needs of the imperial vision of regional elite in other parts of teh globe. That was how Soviet Communism evolved and from which Maoism under the label of Sinification of Marxism deviated out further.

The Pope should have recognized the ideological vacuum that has developed in Europe, when Europe constantly needs a reinvention of its basic racial/identity based claims towards global domination and imperialist extraction of resources. There has been too much deviation, and too many factional reinterpretations. In the process the ideology has lost its original purpose and function - that of unification to support renewed imperialism. Moreover, the danger is that alternative frameworks for imperialism - sharing similar claims of origins and memes - like Islamism - can fill up the vacuum. Where does it leave the factiosn of the pre-existing Churches?

I would not be surprised if there are attempts at convergence between the various "factions".

In India the reflection of this is going to be different. Here it is about competing with other factions for the "harvesting" of souls - all the more important because India shows signs of economic resurgence. Imperialist ideologies will be increasingly active and hostile towards the indigenous - because they need to weaken the indigenous to prepare for the next phase of imperialist revival.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Murugan »

Myth of Richness of English Language (=words in dictionary)

Total words in English dictionary = Approx 2.5 Lacs
Original English words in the English dictionary = 65000
French, Portuguese, Spanish, Latin and Sanskrit words in English Dictionary = 1,85,000

More than 70% of English dictionary is chori ka maal

Richness of languages, vocabs in Bharat:

22 Languges

If we count the words of the above Bharat Bhasha, the total is = Approx 60 Lacs

In Sanskrit, the possibilities of word count may be = 1 crore + (includes possibilities of creating newer words using the roots i.e., dhatu)

Not to mention 3280 dialects spoken in Bharat

Myth that English is international language

Language spoken :
No. 1 Chinese - 140 Crore (spoken, read, written and understtod by)
No. 2 Hindi – 85 Crores (100 Crore people can understand),



No. 12 English : spoken, read, understood by 30 Crore (find percentage against worlds total population = not more than 5%)

English is used in 15 countries out of 200+ nations of the world. Most of these 15 nations were english colonies. Ironically the nations sharing common border with UKstan do not use english - i.e., Ireland, Scotland, Wales
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Sachin »

ramana wrote: They first joined the police forces in mid 1850s and then into politics in large cities like Boston.
Any specific reason for this? From many people I have said that in US it is a kind of a tradition/culture that Irish people land up more in the Fire Brigades and the police forces. And then to reinforce this we have characters like Mark McCluskey the NY Police captain in God Father. And his father (and uncles) were in the police too.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Philip »

(X-posted in the Paki-terrorist land)

I was outraged during a recent visit to Paris when visiting the famous Guimet Museum (that specialises in Asian Art) to see a special exhibition on "Pakistan".What was on display? The entire exhibition was dedicated to the Ghandara period of art which is entirely Indian and Hindu/BUddhist with Greek influences in style thanks to Alexander's visit! Pakistan never existed then and only arrived a few thousand years later! What the organisers and Museum should've done was to display the exhibits (all from Paki museums) as being part of either "Ancient Indian (Ghandara) Art ",or "S.Asian Art-Ghandara period",with thanks to the govt. of Pak for providing them with the exhibits,mostly from the museums of Lahore,Peshawar and Taxila,now firmly in the battlezone where extremist Taliban/Islamists want to conquer and dstroy all vestiges of anything un-Islamic.I am apalled that the GOI at Independence or even later administrations,allowed these priceless artefacts to be left back in a designated "Muslim state".These priceless exhibits of India's cultural heritage cannot be left in charge of those cultural outlaws who embrace the Taliban who destroyed the unique Bamiyan Buddhas and threaten to continue their cultural carnage.

The GOI should ask Pak to return or loan at least these glorious examples of India's ancient "Hindu/Indian" cultural heritage.It also points out another sober fact for Pakis,that their most ancient heritage is entirely Indian and Hindu/BUddhist! Pakistan's greatest contribution to history has been the beard,the bullet and the suicide bomber,the Lahore suicide bombers tragedy today being a fitting example.
Needless to say,there was not a single Paki visitor to the exhibition and Museum that I saw during my two hour visit,though there were many visitors from S.East Asia and even China and Japan.

The second point that was brought out in full measure by the Museum and many thanks to the culture hungry French,especially exhibits from former French colonies in Asia,is that the entire land mass of Asia is so beholden to INDIA for its ancient cultural heritage.The spread of Hinduism and Buddhism can be found in every exhibit from countries like Thailand,Cambodia,Vietnam,ASEAN group,Japan,China too! There is also a magnificent Shiva Nataraj,Buddhist art but strangely absolutely no Jain art which is a global phenomenon.The V&A in London a few years ago had a spectacular exhibition on Jain art,which has in fact heavily influenced Buddhist art a fact seldom mentioned or understood.Many thanks to the V&A for their zeal.

The exhibition may still be on and I exhort every Indian in Paris to visit the so-called "Paki" exhibition at the Guimet to see part of our gloriousd cultural heritage "imprisoned" in Pakiland today and also write to the Guimet protesting at this mis-labelling of the exhibition which would've had a far greater turnout from visitors if the words "India" or "S.Asia" were used instead of "Pakistan".
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Aditya_V »

Rudradev Post subject: Re: Non-Western WorldviewPosted: 01 Jul 2010


BRFite

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Posts: 636 Has anybody seen this map?

"Kingdoms of Epic India"

Rudradev-> the Map has too many names like Kerala, Karnataka, Dravida, Andhraka, Telinga and so on. I doubt these names are anywhere mentioned in Ramayana, Mahabharata and Srimad Bhagvatam. That to me raises a red flag
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by svinayak »

Philip wrote:
The second point that was brought out in full measure by the Museum and many thanks to the culture hungry French,especially exhibits from former French colonies in Asia,is that the entire land mass of Asia is so beholden to INDIA for its ancient cultural heritage.The spread of Hinduism and Buddhism can be found in every exhibit from countries like Thailand,Cambodia,Vietnam,ASEAN group,Japan,China too! There is also a magnificent Shiva Nataraj,Buddhist art but strangely absolutely no Jain art which is a global phenomenon.The V&A in London a few years ago had a spectacular exhibition on Jain art,which has in fact heavily influenced Buddhist art a fact seldom mentioned or understood.Many thanks to the V&A for their zeal.
The San Diego Museum of Art has one of the best collection of the Asian artifacts. They have the best Tibetan artifacts I believe. All the countries have atleast one connection to India.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by svinayak »

Aditya_V wrote:
Rudradev-> the Map has too many names like Kerala, Karnataka, Dravida, Andhraka, Telinga and so on. I doubt these names are anywhere mentioned in Ramayana, Mahabharata and Srimad Bhagvatam. That to me raises a red flag
SOmebody needs to verify it.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Sachin wrote:
ramana wrote: They first joined the police forces in mid 1850s and then into politics in large cities like Boston.
Any specific reason for this? From many people I have said that in US it is a kind of a tradition/culture that Irish people land up more in the Fire Brigades and the police forces. And then to reinforce this we have characters like Mark McCluskey the NY Police captain in God Father. And his father (and uncles) were in the police too.
Ireland was the first English colony from the time of the Henry I. Cromwell completed the conquest of Ireland eventually. Added to the language issue the Irish are Celts so different from the Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Then there is the issue of Catholic Irish and the Anglican English.

As a colonised people the Irish were brutalized by the English. The Irish got most of their civil rights deprived and alchol was widely available/pubs culture to keep them drunk. The drunks were rounded up in a wagon called paddy wagon and dumped outside the village/town.

The idea of garrison towns was first tried out in Ireland. A castle gets built with an English Lord and the town grows around it. Settlers from Scotland were settled in Northern Ireland. These are called Scotish Irish. They were used to keep Irish aspirations in check and eventually to partition Ireland into two areas: Ireland and Northern Ireland.


So in Irleand under the English the Irish were deprived of self government. When the first Irish settlers/immigrants arrived to escape the Potato Famine/Blight they resloved to become part of the governing bodies in US. One of the first areas they went for is police forces as that was denied to them in their homelands.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ManjaM »

the map posted earlier seems to be in error. Was Karnataka in existence that early? I am under the impression that Karnataka was a later consolidation of myraid other smaller kingdoms. Can someone enlighten?
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

I think they were trying to give modern context to the locations of the places in the Epic age.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

A book on East vs West

Worlds at War Anthony Pagden, UCLA
March 26, 2008
Books of The Times
Two Views of Life, Enduring, Unyielding
By WILLIAM GRIMES

WORLDS AT WAR

The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West


By Anthony Pagden

Illustrated. 625 pages. Random House. $35.

If nothing else, the struggle between East and West has a distinguished pedigree. In “Worlds at War” the British historian Anthony Pagden traces the seemingly endless series of misunderstandings and armed conflicts between “an ever-shifting West and equally amorphous East” to the time of myth, when Paris abducted Helen, provoking the Trojan War.

With the passage of centuries, boundaries shifted, tribes and peoples replaced one another, new religions appeared, empires rose and fell. Yet a remarkably constant theme asserted itself: the irreconcilable differences between two competing views of the world, memorably expressed by Herodotus in his history of the struggles between the Greeks and the Persians, which pivoted not on politics but on “an understanding of what it was to be and to live like a human being.”

The Greeks subscribed, broadly, to “an individualistic view of humanity.” The Persians displayed courage and ferocity on the battlefield but as a society, Mr. Pagden writes, paraphrasing Herodotus, they were “craven, slavish, reverential and parochial, incapable of individual initiative, a horde rather than a people.”

{Roots of Orientalism!}

The Western mission, defined by Alexander the Great, was to civilize the known world through conquest, a project later taken up by Rome, by the Crusaders, by Napoleon, by the imperial powers in the 19th century and, some might argue, by the United States in the 21st century. In Islam the East discovered its own universal mission and set about subjugating the West, propelled, to borrow Cicero’s words about Rome, by its “wise grasp of a single truth.”

Having set the stage with great deliberation, Mr. Pagden takes a majestic stroll through the centuries, covering broad swaths of very familiar history fluently, gracefully and always entertainingly, but in the end he delivers a lot less than he promises. Like an overproduced Hollywood epic, the drama unfolds with strong starring roles, lavish costumes and beautifully photographed scenery; when the credits finally roll, though, the audience is left wondering what, exactly, all the fuss was about.

Mr. Pagden, the author of “Peoples and Empires” and “European Encounters With the New World,” embeds a few basic points about Eastern and Western political cultures in a great mass of historical material, then appends a polemical coda arguing against the idea that Western beliefs about freedom, democracy and secularism can ever be transplanted to the Middle East. He is shrewd, urbane and consistently engaging, but the ratio of effort expended to results achieved seems badly askew.

One of Mr. Pagden’s more arresting observations deals with the Crusades, and the drastic differences in historical memory between West and East. When a writer like Sayyid Qutb, an ideological founding father of radical Islam, referred to “the Crusader spirit that all Westerners carry in their blood,” the characterization seems far-fetched and arcane to most Westerners.

Not to Muslims. “The present is linked to the past by a continuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggle against the ‘Infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world,” Mr. Pagden writes.

The civilizing missions of the West come in for acerbic commentary, notably Napoleon’s misbegotten Egyptian campaign, which Mr. Pagden cites as a dress rehearsal for later disasters, right up to the present. Napoleon arrived with his fleet at Alexandria, flamboyantly proclaiming a new era of civil rights and human dignity, and keen to show how the principles of revolutionary France dovetailed with the teachings of the Koran. The experiment failed.

As for Napoleon’s expressed reverence for Islam’s holiest text, a member of the Divan, or Imperial Council, in Cairo wrote, “To respect the Koran means to glorify it, and one glorifies it only by believing in what it contains.”

{Note to modern West!}

For their part, the French marveled at the indolence and backwardness of the Egyptians. They brought back to the West an image of the Muslim East as “a land rotting in despotic lethargy, constrained by a simple and savage religion that denied half of its peoples their humanity and in so doing prevented any possibility of progress and enlightenment.”

Two centuries later Mr. Pagden sees little prospect of progress or enlightenment, not as long as religion determines the shape of civil society in the Islamic world. Like the Greeks and the Persians, the countries of the West and the Islamic East stare unblinking across a great divide, their notions of citizenship and political life irrevocably opposed.

“The society of Islam is ultimately based not upon human volition or upon contract but upon divine decree,” Mr. Pagden writes. “In the societies of the West, by contrast, every aspect of life has been conceived as a question of human choice.” Never the twain shall meet.

Mr. Pagden is scathing about the idea that moderate voices might prevail, since the very notion of moderation appeals primarily to one side in the argument. “Who says that tolerance, dialogue and understanding are virtues?” he asks. “The answer is invariably: secular Westerners.”

So here we are, after 2,500 years, back in the same place. On one side stand the liberal democracies of the West, convinced that their Enlightenment values and political ideas apply to all peoples everywhere. On the other side, a restless and aggrieved Islamic world defines itself as a vast community of faith, its members convinced that their beliefs, too, are universal. It may take another 2,500 years to sort this out.
The reality is that the West got its values of Enlightenment only after the Reforamtion etc or else it would have been the same as the Islamic world. In fact Pagden cites early French scholars who tried to "sieve the Koran" and found its core consisting of oldtime Christianity!
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) By Martin Bernal
Publisher: Rutgers University Press 1991 | 608 Pages | ISBN: 0813512778 , 081351276X |

Winner of the American Book Award and a Socialist Review Book Award What is classical about Classical Civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the whole basis of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied, or supressed since the eighteenth century--chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers--or Aryans--from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this "Aryan model." They did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy, or religion as original, but rather as derived from the East in general, and Egypt in particular. Black Athena is a three-volume work. Volume 1 concentrates on the crucial period between 1785 and 1850, which saw the Romantic and racist reaction to the Enlightment and the French Revolution, and the consolidation of Northern expansion into other continents. In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal makes meaningful links between a wide range of areas and disciplines--drama poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of "modern scholarship." Martin Bernal is Professor Emeritus of Government Studies at Cornell University; he was formerly a Fellow at King's College, Cambridge.

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (2): The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence By Martin Bernal
Publisher: Rutgers Univ Press 1991 | 736 Pages | ISBN: 0813515831 |

In this volume Bernal's objective is to demonstrate the extent of Egyptian and Phoenician influences on the Aegean during the period in which Greek cultural and national identity was being formed. He reviews the archaeological and documentary evidence supported by research into the linguistic, mythological and religious cultures of the period.
Martin Bernal, "Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Linguistic Evidence, Vol. 3"
Publisher: Rutgers University Press | 2006 | ISBN 0813536553 | 807 pages

Could Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian thought? Is it possible that the Pythagorean theory was conceived on the shores of the Nile and the Euphrates rather than in ancient Greece? Could it be that much of Western civilization was formed on the "Dark Continent"? For almost two centuries, Western scholars have given little credence to the possibility of such scenarios.
In Black Athena, an audacious three-volume series that strikes at the heart of today's most heated culture wars, Martin Bernal challenges Eurocentric attitudes by calling into question two of the longest-established explanations for the origins of classical civilization. To use his terms, the Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers, or "Aryans," of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.
This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages--Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers. Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Rony »

For clergy, losing faith can be an occupational hazard
For some clergy, it is the problem that dare not speak its name.

Affected pastors say they cannot be themselves among their congregations or colleagues, sometimes even with their own families. It’s a huge and burdensome secret with the potential to destroy their careers, they say. They think they’re not the only ones, but feel terribly lonely.

No, it’s not some kind of sexual secret—it’s loss of faith.

Daniel C. Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University outside Boston, and Linda LaScola, a Washington-based clinical social worker, researcher and psychotherapist, are the authors of a recent study entitled “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

There used an admittedly tiny sample—just five pastors, all Protestants—of clergy who tell their congregations one thing, but secretly believe another.

“One of the things that was striking was how much like gays of the 1950s these pastors are,” Dennett said. “In most cases, Linda was the first person these pastors had ever discussed this with. They were very lonely.”
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

I have read many US history books overt he last two decades. One thing I note is there is always an anti-drugs campaign whenever there is threat of of non-Anglo Saxon ideas, people emerging as a significant factor in US.

In late 1890s after the railroads were built and the Chinese immigrant labor wa being absorbed opinum was banned. Earlier it was used as pain-killer for all people : laudanum etc as shown in cowboy movies. But with Chinese immigration it was portrayed as a drug for the Chinese underclass and how it would make them crazy and run amok.

Next after WWI ganja was banned as a Mexican immigrant usage problem. Same reasons were dragged out.

After WWII when blacks were becoming politicially aware heroin was banned. Then followed cocaine.

We see the same with ephidrine based derivatives now.

A strong streak of xenophobia is linked to the war on drugs.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Comte De Volney was an important Enlightnement figure in France who influenced European thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Volney

Please do read about him and understand his importance to evolution of Western thought.
Hegel etc came after he already influenced the course of history.
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Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by ramana »

Long post but it details the struggle of France with Islamic conquerors. This struggle bridges the medevial and the modern age. It shows why France went to Algeria.


Understanding Islam

Its really about France and Islam.
....
When one analyses societies that have been shaped by an ideology, it is important to look closely at the ideology, because that is what enforces itself in the end, and eventually changes society. This holds good for Islam. What matters is its ideology and not the way in which it is embodied in different countries. The wars between France and Islam are an example. We always speak of Poitiers : "the Muslims were defeated at Poitiers and they left". We are more or less consciously comparing it to other battles, for instance the battle of Vouillé, in 507 : Clovis defeated the Visigoths and Aquitaine became French. That is not at all what happened with Islam.

The Muslims entered what was then France in 714. They seized Narbonne, which became their base for the next 40 years, and carried out methodical raids. They ravaged the Languedoc region from 714 to 725, destroyed Nîmes in 725 and devastated the right bank of the Rhone as far north as Sens.

In 721, a Muslim army of 100,000 soldiers laid siege to Toulouse, defended by Eudes, the duke of Aquitaine. Charles Martel sent troops to help Eudes. After six months' siege, the latter made a sally and crushed the Muslim army, which retreated in disarray to Spain and lost 80,000 soldiers in the campaign. Little is said of the battle of Toulouse because Eudes was a Merovingian. The Capetians were in the process of becoming kings of France and didn't fancy recognizing a Merovingian victory.

The Muslims concluded that it was dangerous to attack France from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, and they conducted their fresh attacks from the western end of the chain. 15,000 Muslim horsemen took and destroyed Bordeaux, then the Loire region, laid siege to Poitiers, and were finally stopped by Charles Martel and Eudes twenty kilometres north of Poitiers in 732. The surviving Muslims broke up into small bands and continued to ravage Aquitaine. Fresh soldiers would join them from time to time to take part in the looting. Those bands were eventually eradicated only in 808, by Charlemagne.

The ravages in the east went on until, in 737, Charles Martel went south with a powerful army, successively regained possession of Avignon, Nîmes, Maguelone, Agde, Béziers, and laid siege to Narbonne. A Saxon attack on the north of France compelled Charles Martel to leave the region. Eventually, in 759, Pépin le Bref regained possession of Narbonne and crushed the invaders definitively.

The latter broke up into small bands, as they had done in the west, and continued to devastate the country, notably by deporting the men to turn them into castrated slaves, and the women to introduce them into North African harems, where they were used to give birth to Muslims. The bastion of these bands was at Fraxinetum, the present-day La Garde-Freinet. An area of about 10,000 square kilometres, in the Maures massif, was totally depopulated.

In 972, the Muslim bands captured Mayeul, the Abbot of Cluny, on the road to Mount Geneva. The event created an immense stir. Guillaume II, count of Provence, spent 9 years conducting a sort of electoral campaign in order to motivate the inhabitants of Provence, then, from 983 onwards, methodically hunted down all the Muslim bands, small or large. In 990, the last of them were destroyed. They had devastated France for two centuries.

Muslim pressure did not cease for all that. It was exerted over the following 250 years by raids carried out from the sea. The men who were captured were taken to castration camps in Corsica, then deported to the forced labour prisons of Dâr al Islam, and the women of nubile age to the harems. The Muslim pirates' lairs were in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, on the coasts of Spain and of North Africa. Toulon was completely destroyed in 1178 and 1197, the population massacred or deported, the town left deserted.

Finally, the Muslims having been driven from Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, from southern Italy and northern Spain, the attacks on French soil ceased but they continued at sea. It was not until 1830, that France, exasperated by the exactions, made up its mind to go to Algeria in order to definitively destroy the last bastions of the Muslim pirates

What is striking is that between the years 714, the first incursion, and 1830, the final crushing of the Barbary pirates, there elapsed over a millennium. Now no political organisation lasts for a thousand years. How then was that endless war kept going for so long?

The active principle of the war was the same as that of the war waged by the Spaniards on their own soil, and which also lasted over one thousand years : ideology. Only an ideology is lasting enough to give rise, century after century, to that sort of inexpiable war. That is why, if you wish to understand Islam, you must study its ideology and not conduct an almost ethnological study of the different varieties of Islam. I repeat : its ideology; because, for Muslim scholars, Islam is Dîn, Dunya, Daoula, i.e. religion, society, state. Khomeiny used to say that 90% of Islamic rules are to do with civil society, and that, in an Islamic library, 90% of the books deal with society and the state, and only 10% with private morals and man's relationship with God. The problem with Islam is not religion, it is the civil part of the ideology.

Islam is founded on the same structure as political totalitarian machines. The most well known are the total socialisms of the 20th century, but if we delve deep into history, the Akkad dynasties, ancient China, the Incas etc. were totalitarian machines that have a certain number of elements in common with Islam. To show up these elements, one only has to compare the main features of total socialisms with those of Islam.

Islam, like soviet socialism, is founded on a dual basis : on the one hand the ideological foundation, and on the other the imposition of that ideology through armed force. The combination of the two is characteristic. The earliest person to speak of this was Sima Qian, one of the greatest intellectuals in China, a historian, who was also prime minister. As an intellectual and as prime minister, he was perfectly acquainted with a system based both on ideology and on violence. In his letter to Jen An, which dates back to 91 B.C., he explains that, in such a system, there can be only two solutions :

physical death : you oppose the system and in that case you are killed

spiritual death : you pretend to believe in the ideology, and in that case you wear a mask.


Thus, according to Sima Qian, in a system founded both on force and on ideology, one can choose only between physical death and spiritual death.

That is precisely the structure of Islam, founded both on ideology and on the use of armed force. I have already spoken of violence towards the exterior. One must add to that the interior violence that is exerted on the 'dhimmis'. The term 'dhimmis' refers to peoples conquered by the Muslim armies, who lose all their political rights and the greater part of their civil rights, and who become foreigners in their own country. They are driven to extinction by a combination of methods.

Throughout antiquity, and right up until the second half of the 19th century, there were fluctuations in population due either to famines, or to epidemics, or to wars. After each decline, the population would increase again until it reached its equilibrium, that is, the maximum number of people who could live on the land considering the agricultural techniques available. The Muslims built new towns, Oran, Cordoba, Cairo, etc. while slaughtering or deporting the local populations, and peopling the towns with Arabs either from the Hedjaz region or from Syria. At first, these immigrants were few in number. In North Africa there were 5 million Berbers. About 200,000 Arab-Muslims were brought in and established in areas that had been depopulated to that end. The immigrant population grew to the maximum number tolerated by the agricultural production of the occupied areas, they then cut up the remaining land into strips that were depopulated one by one and given over to the expansion of the Arab-Muslims. Each successive strip was small enough not to stir up a general revolt, but sufficient for the Arab-Muslims never to reach their demographic equilibrium, and to be able to continue their growth.

{Boiled frog syndrome}

Alongside localized massacres in order to invade new areas, a fall in the birth rate was deliberately brought about among non-Muslims. The latter, the 'dhimmis', had to wear a round yellow badge on dark clothes. They could use only donkeys, lowly mounts, camels and horses, noble mounts, being reserved for Muslims. Donkeys could only be mounted with a pack and not a saddle, in the country and not in town. Dhimmis' houses had to be smaller in size than those of Muslims. Many other provisions of a similar nature destroyed the dignity of dhimmis and lessened their self-confidence, whence a drop in their birth rate and their progressive extinction.

The fall in the birth rate, massacres and conversions under coercion were the means which, in invaded countries, gradually brought about what Bat Ye'or calls a demographic reversal. There were 200,000 Muslims to 5 million Berbers at the start of the Muslim invasion. After 8 wars, and three centuries of the above methods being applied, there were 1% Berbers left in Tunisia, 10% in Algeria, where they were driven into Kabylia, about 35 to 40% in Morocco, where they were driven into the Atlas and Riff regions, each time infertile mountainous lands.

It is a general phenomenon. Thus the Turkish population, initially 100% Christian, had fallen to 30% Christian by 1900, and is 0.2% Christian today.

{We have the similar example of Pakistan today}

The methods referred to above compel the inhabitants of invaded countries either to become Muslims or to disappear. In addition, within the Muslim populations themselves, the ideology imposes a certain type of society.

The first Islamic principle is the primacy of the collectivity, or 'Ouma'. In that word, the radical 'oum' means the mother and 'ouma' means that Muslims should be to Islam as children are to their mother. The primacy of the collectivity is the opposite of what goes on in our present-day societies. Our view is that society is at the service of each person to help him or her to develop. The collectivist view is that each person is at the service of the collectivity to establish its power. That is one of the elements common to total socialism and Islam.

The second principle is the foundation of morals. A Russian dissident said : what is morally right is what those in power declare to be right at present (it may change tomorrow, and morals will change tomorrow). Islam means "submission" and Muslim "a submissive person". Many Muslim intellectuals will tell you that it is only a question of submission to God. But if you read the Koran, you will see that it says twenty or so times "obey God, obey the prophet" and once "obey the prophet" (without adding God). But there is no verse that says only "obey God". Again it says "obey God, obey his prophet, and those in authority", that is to say the caliph and his representatives. The caliph is Allah's deputy, one must obey him, and his representatives, as one obeys God. Submission is the basis of Muslim morals and it is also an element common to all totalitarian systems.

Yet another principle is the combat against anything that develops the ego. One of the first factors that develop the ego is affectivity. You are aware of some of the rules governing the statute of Muslim women, in particular polygamy. A man may have four wives, but a woman may not have four husbands. That is not all. A man may have as many concubines as he wants, as long as they are not the wives of another Muslim. If a woman has a lover, no matter whether he is a Muslim or not, she will be stoned to death. In a court of law, it takes two women to have the same weight as one man. When it comes to inheritance, a woman has only a half share. A husband may repudiate his wife but a wife may not repudiate her husband.

The Muslim ideology is founded on the Koran, and on the hadiths, the words or acts of Mohammed. There are a million and a half of them. It would have taken him 600 years to utter them. Everybody knows, including Muslims, that most of the hadiths are apocryphal. There are, however, six compilations, containing 20,000 hadiths in all, that are held to be assuredly authentic. Among those books there is one, compiled by the scholar Bukhari, that is considered to be particularly sure. The Koran and the compilation by Bukhari are the only two books on which a Muslim can lay his hand to take an oath.

In the above compilation, Mohammed explains : "You know that women can give only a semi-testimony in a court of law, well, that is because of the inferiority of their intelligence". He says that he had a vision of Hell. There were principally women there. He also says that there have been perfect men in history, but no perfect women. Or again, taking up the Bible story in which Eve is supposed to have been created from one of Adam's ribs, "woman was made from a rib, she is bent like a rib; if you try to straighten her, you will break her, so let her remain crooked and take your pleasure from her as from a crooked thing". The conclusion is the Sunnite definition of marriage : "marriage is the contract by which one acquires a woman's genital organs with the intention of taking pleasure from them".

In such an ideology, it is difficult to respect a woman and to build a relationship of marital love. It may happen from time to time, because men are not always completely subject to ideology, but there is massive social pressure to prevent it. The destruction of affectivity and respect in the relationship between husband and wife is destructive of the ego, both for the man and for the woman.

Isn't it odd that only Shah Jehan built a massive muqbara for his wife(Taj Mahal) while we dont know where the other Moghul women were buried?}

In total socialisms, the destruction of affectivity was achieved through the encouragement of denunciation. Anybody could inform against anybody. You could trust neither your spouse, nor your parents, nor your children, nor your friends. Soviet socialists had made a hero of Pavel Morozof, a boy of 14 who had denounced his father for protecting kulaks who had been condemned to death. The father died in the Gulag. Even today, in Moscow, the building where the Komsomols hold their meetings is called Morozof palace. These mutual denunciations give rise to a system that destroys all mutual trust, which leads to the death of affectivity.

The combat against affectivity was complemented, in the early years of soviet socialism, by an attack on marriage – which did not last very long, but which was extremely violent. In the flats built during the twenties, there was no kitchen so that people would be forced to have their meals in common. In fact, they preferred to use Primus stoves so that they could have their meals as a family all the same.

Islam destroys affectivity by humiliating women, total socialisms do it by encouraging denunciation and hampering married life; the means are a little different, but the result is the same.

Another means of destroying the ego is the combat against intelligence. The way in which the contradictions in the Koran are dealt with shows the methods at work in Islam. For example, a surah that Muslims are always quoting (verse 257 of surah 2) : "No constraint in religion" is in contradiction with another verse, known as the verse of the sword : "Massacre all heretics". Mohammed had been asked how it was that two surahs that had come from Allah could contradict each other. The answer is in surah 2, verse 100, and in surah 16, verses 104 and 105, which say that Allah is the master of the Koran; he does as he pleases with it. When he replaces one verse by another, the newer one is better. And those who consider Mohammed to be a falsifier will go to Hell. The Koran is like a packet of circulars, the most recent of which cancels and replaces the previous ones on the same subject. Thereby, all the moderate verses are cancelled by the violent ones, which came later. In that case, the contradiction is settled, through a process whose validity may be questioned, but in other cases the contradiction is deliberately maintained.

A certain number of examples are given by the vice-chancellor of Al Azhar university in Cairo, the largest Muslim university. There are taxes levied on the rich to provide money for the poor, and to conduct wars of conquest. Wealth is determined according to the number of animals. If you own five camels or more, you have to pay tax. But you don't pay any for herds of horses, even if they comprise several thousand animals.

When a woman has her period, she has the right to fast, but not to pray. Yet prayer is more important than fasting.

When a thief commits a petty theft, he has his hand cut off, because it was the instrument of his fault, but they do not punish a rapist or an adulterer by cutting off you-know-what.

There is a whole series of contradictions of this kind. The vice-chancellor of Al Azhar explains that this is deliberate. It is to show that Allah is not bound by logic. Nor is he bound by morals. If he had said that one should lie, then lying would be good.

Tabari, one of the greatest exegetes of the Koran, explains that anyone who approaches the Koran with his or her intelligence, and who is in the right, is nevertheless at fault : no one has the right to be right.

Islam rejects novelty, which it calls 'bida'. Characteristically, the word means both what is new, and the moral fault consisting in doing or thinking something new. This outlook renders progress impossible, especially in economy, with the result that most Muslim countries experience great poverty. 57 States belong to the Conference of Islamic States. Their standard of living is 22 times lower than in Europe. Of these 57 States, 8 are oil-producing and 3 are only partially Muslim : Turkey, which has been trying to be a secular country for 80 years, Lebanon, where the population is 45% Christian, and Malaysia, where 28% of the population is Chinese and 7% Indian. Those three countries are six times richer than the others. If you exclude the oil-producing States and the partially Muslim States, the rest, that is, nearly one thousand million people, have a standard of living 35 times lower than that of Europeans. At such a degree it really means something. The fundamental reason is the totalitarian nature of Islam, destructive of the ego.

Countries under total socialism have experienced the same poverty, for the same reason : damaged egos can no longer be creative, whether in economics, in the intellectual or artistic sphere, or in any field whatsoever.

I have had discussions with many Muslims and have explained to them that one cannot be a Muslim and a Frenchman at the same time. If you are a Muslim, you say that woman is inferior, if you are French, you say she is equal. I have received the same answer umpteen times : according to one hadith, Paradise is under the feet of mothers, so women have a particular dignity which compensates their inferiority. I would retort that this point of view reduces women to their reproductive function. Furthermore, in that case, maiden girls, sterile women or women married to sterile men, have no dignity.

The above argument made no impact. On the other hand, another would leave Muslim women and girls without an answer and very troubled : the French conception of relationships between men and women is equality, the Islamic conception is female inferiority compensated by a special dignity. The woman who chooses equality is French, she who chooses compensated inferiority is not, even if compensated inferiority suits her personally.

In fact, 95% of those with whom I have debated believe themselves to be Muslim men or women, but they are not. In all important matters they have made their choice, and their choice is to be French and not Muslim. When you ask a girl, even wearing a veil to assert her identity, "Do you fancy having 3 co-wives?", she will answer passionately, "Oh! Out of the question!"

"Do you fancy your husband bringing concubines home?"

"Out of the question!"

"Do you consider it normal that, as the Koran says, if your husband suspects you of thinking of disobeying, he has the right to beat you?"

"Out of the question!"

In France, you have the right to think what you like, and to change your convictions if you feel like it. In Islam (surah 4, verse 91), a person who ceases to be a Muslim must be put to death. The first time I said that in a talk, a Muslim got up and shouted, "That's not true!" Now I take a copy of the Koran to talks, and show people the verse. And they say to me, "Well, we don't accept that".

"So you're not Muslims, you're French!"

"Eh, no, I am a Muslim, but I take some and leave some".

"If you say that in Egypt, or elsewhere in Dâr al Islam, at best you'll go to prison, at worst you'll be killed by your neighbour. You can choose to reject part of the Koran because you live in France, where you have French and not Muslim rights. Since you make use of those rights, you have chosen to be French, you are not a Muslim any more".

Each time you take a point on which the opposition between the French and Muslim views is irreducible, you find that all the women and most of the men are in fact French and not Muslim.

I do not believe Islam can last very long in the modern world. I am told it has lasted 14 centuries, and that it will continue. In 1980 people also said, "Communism has lasted 70 years, it will go on". Then in 1989, Mitterand, who was an excellent seismograph of public opinion, said, 5 weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall, "The reunification of Germany is neither for this generation nor for this century". He had seen nothing coming, despite his political sensibility, because the violence of the repression in countries under total socialism dissimulated the loss in conviction of their inhabitants. Islam exerts the same repression against dissident opinions, which gives rise to the same dissimulation, but that does not prevent minds from secretly evolving.

As I was able to see in Lebanon and in Kabylia, there are three factors on which the modern world is radically opposed to the Muslim world, and those three factors will eventually bring about its downfall :

Freedom. Freedom to defend one's opinion, to change one's mind. Muslims are demanding it more and more. As they are in danger every time they demand it in a Muslim country, they do not do so very often, but the yearning is stronger and stronger.


Rationality. The Koran, according to Muslims, was written by Allah before the founding of the world, in Arabic because Allah spoke Arabic with the angels. Now Arabic has only existed for 2,000 years while the creation of the world goes back 14 billion years. Confronted with that sort of improbability, a Muslim, even moderately cultivated, will answer, "We can't believe that!"


Affectivity. Among the Kabyles, there are many conversions : about 5,000 per year. They are converted by the American Baptists. I asked several converts, "Why did you become Christian?". The answer wasn't what I expected at all. Freedom, that was secondary. Rationality hardly bothered them for they were not great intellectuals. The decisive factor for them was affectivity. The Baptists organise prayer meetings, Muslims come along to have a look, and they are taken by the affectivity that reigns in those meetings, between men, between women, between men and women. From what they say, at Muslim gatherings there is comradeship, solidarity, but not the sort of affective warmth they find amongst Christians.

Affectivity is one of the foundations of the Western World. Today 50% of marriages break up. One has the impression that the institution is falling apart. It is exactly the opposite. For centuries marriage was based on the desire to have descendants and on social convenience. When there was affection or love between the spouses, it was all the better. Today, the ideal is marital love. If love is not there, the couple separates. That is radically incompatible with Islam. The idea of marriage founded on personal choice and on marital love is incompatible with the woman's place in Islam. That is the strongest pressure at work on Islam.

In Lebanon and in Kabylia at least, Islam finds itself in the position in which communism found itself in 1970. I'm going to tell you an anecdote. My wife, the founder, director and chief editor of a music magazine, had been invited to Poland along with 200 French journalists. During a grand cocktail party, one of the ministers present told her, in quite good French, that she was an abominable capitalist and that she ought to be in the Gulag. "Besides, you'll be there before long because the Soviet army can reach Brest in ten days". Two minutes later another minister said to her, "Don't think Poles are stupid. My colleague is the only communist amongst us. All the others are ministers because it's pleasanter to be a minister than something else, but none of them believes in communism. We know perfectly well that communism doesn't work " I was very surprised that communist ministers should speak so freely to journalists and I calculated that the system was ripe for collapse. It was holding out because of the administrative structures whose interest was to make the system last, but no one believed in it any more.

Islam today is in a similar position. Its internal mental structure is caving in. At any rate in Kabylia and in Lebanon. And I don't think the political organisation can survive the downfall of its ideology for very long.

Today, Islam versus the Western World is like the fable of the clay pot against the iron pot, it has met more than its match : let us look at what those who are neither Muslims nor from the West are doing, that is to say the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese etc. I remember going to a concert about ten years ago, in Berlin. The pianist was Japanese and wore a black western-style dress. The conductor was Chinese and wore "tails". I have never, anywhere on earth, seen a Chinese, Japanese or Indian person don a turban and a jellabah and intone an Islamic chant. Nowadays, if you go to any country that is neither Islamic nor of the West and look at the architecture in the towns, at the town planning, at the methods applied in economy, at science, at technology and even at marriage, everything comes from the West. When Eugénie de Montijo married Napoleon III, she wore a white dress. All the Parisian girls copied her, French girls copied the Parisians, European girls copied the French. Now the whole world gets married in a white dress.

As a whole, countries that are neither Islamic nor of the West, that is over 4 billion inhabitants, have adopted Western ways. Islam has but a very weak power of conversion : it converts about one million people a year, essentially in black Africa, whereas the different variants of Christendom convert 10 million every year, essentially in the southern hemisphere. When it comes to freedom, rationality, and especially affectivity, Islam has no capacity of assimilation into the modern world. Moreover, Islam has been frozen for over a thousand years, whereas, at the instance of the West, the world today is experiencing the most rapid evolution in its history.

Islam has another weakness that is even more deadly : the way in which it was developed is beginning to become known. People commonly believe that the history of the development of Islam and Mohammed's biography are quite well known. That is not the case at all.

In the region where Islam developed, all the original documents, covering over two centuries, have disappeared. The biography of Mohammed was written 220 years after his death, under the orders of a caliph. The hadiths were written down between 250 and 300 years after the death of Mohammed. The Koran was replaced several times, notably by general Hajjâj, in 692, sixty years after the death of Mohammed, with the destruction of previous copies.

Islam in its early years extended over the Middle East, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, the most civilised region in the world at the time. It had libraries, scribes' workshops, universities. It is absolutely unnatural that all the original documents should have disappeared. That can only be explained by a deliberate and methodical intervention by the political authorities.

A comparison with France at the same period is significant. At that time there was no library, nor university, nor scribes' workshop, nor bookshop in France. Yet those holding political power in France, Clothaire II and Dagobert I, left their traces in many a written document, and it is even more the case with their immediate successors, Pépin de Heristal, Charles Martel, Pépin le Bref, Charlemagne. The prominent religious figures were bishops, Saint Ouen of Rouen, Saint Omer of Thérouane, Saint Césaire of Arles, Sidouane Apollinaire of Clermont, Saint Grégoire of Tours, Saint Léger of Autun, Saint Eloi of Noyon, etc…They are well known.

Mohammed was both a political and religious figure. Why did no original document about him remain, unless it was to cover up a story that was very different from that told by Muslim scholars? As a famous specialist on Islam, Harald Motzki, says, either one makes a critical study of the sources of Islam and one does not write a history, or one does not make a critical study of the sources and one can write "stories". Alfred-Louis de Prémare, professor at the university of Aix-en-Provence, a historian of the Arab-Islamic world, and a lecturer at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim world, adds, "Any biography of the prophet of Islam has as much value as a novel that one hopes is historical".

Over the past ten years, the work of a number of researchers has made it possible to uncover texts written in Georgian, Armenian, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew or Coptic, that give information (a few sentences in books of several hundred pages) on what the Islam of the origins was. The discoveries are surprising : Mohammed was never a Muslim, for the words Muslim and Islam appeared sixty years after the death of Mohammed. His first companions called themselves the 'Magrayes', a Syro-Aramaic term meaning emigrants. Their holy language was Syro-Aramaic, not Arabic. Mohammed was not born in Mecca, for the work of Patricia Crone, a specialist on Islam who teaches at Princeton and Cambridge, has shown that the town was founded around 670, forty years after the death of Mohammed.

Islam as we know it today is a fabrication by the caliphs, invented to serve as an ideology for the empire that Mohammed's companions had started building, and that his successors developed. Mohammed's religion was Nazareism, a Judeo-Christian sect born in the Middle-East. Nazareism could not serve as a binding agent for the empire they were setting up, on the one hand because it was not Arabic, while the Arab conquerors wanted a religion that would justify their pre-eminence over all other Muslims, on the other hand because Nazareism anticipated the return of Christ, who would come and take command of the Nazarene armies to conquer the world by force. Since that had not happened, Nazareism had to be replaced by a religion that made no false prophecies. The construction of the new religion out of material drawn from the earlier one and the obliteration of all trace of the earlier religion went on for over two centuries. Hence the destruction of all written evidence of what had happened, and the construction by the caliphs in power of a sacred book in Arabic, an Arab prophet, and an Arab history that could be used as a basis for their ideology.

The enormous number of researchers in every field in the modern world, the use of new techniques in exegesis, archaeology, epigraphy, etc., the discovery of ancient, non-Muslim texts on the development of Islam, dating from 10 to 30 years after the event, and not from over 200 like the Islamic documents - all the above are leading people to question everything they thought they knew about the development of Islam. It is unlikely that the Islamic religion and ideology will be able to withstand the destruction of their historical foundations by modern science.
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Sanjay M
BRF Oldie
Posts: 4892
Joined: 02 Nov 2005 14:57

Re: Non-Western Worldview

Post by Sanjay M »

I feel a need to ask something important, here - who is the West?

If we're talking about Western worldview and non-Western worldview, then for clarity of discussion we need to know the definition and membership of the "West". The need for a clear definition on this is critical, as we're told that Western values are the best values.

I take it that the US, Britain, France, Germany are part of the "West". I take that pretty much all the European countries apparently are as well. Who else is?

Is Japan part of the "West"? Is Australia part of the "West"?
If the latter but not the former, then what is the differentiating criteria between the two - bloodline?

Is Mexico part of the "West"? Brazil? Venezuela? Guyana? Jamaica? Haiti?

Is there any silver-tongued Johann type of "Westerner" here who might speak firsthand on who their Western tribe is composed of? Any care to share the cryptically concealed secret of the Western membership list?
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