Discover 1000 years of missing history

[szahtut]

Adam Hart-Davis; Photographer, Writer and TV Science Presenter of BBC
Series ‘What the Ancients Did for Us’.

www.1001inventions.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.viewSection&intSectionID=405

www.muslimheritage.com/timeline/default.cfm
to be or not to it is amazing history

Prince Charles

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Prince Charles, Heir to the British Monarchy in a recent public speech at
Oxford University stated:


"If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there
is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to
the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straight-
jacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from
central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men
of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of
the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to
ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history."

www.muslimheritage.com/about/default.cfm

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Yeah, but we can see from that why it was that HRH the Prince of Wales only got
a third class honours degree.

He is no arbiter of the state of any nation or people's state of learning.

[babiana]

The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy
By BERNARD HAYKEL
WITH Israel at war with Hezbollah, where, you might wonder, is Al Qaeda? From
all appearances on the Web sites frequented by its sympathizers, which I
frequently monitor, Al Qaeda is sitting, unhappily and uneasily, on the
sidelines, watching a movement antithetical to its philosophy steal its thunder.
That might sound like good news. But it is more likely an ominous sign.

Al Qaeda's Sunni ideology regards Shiites as heretics and profoundly distrusts
Shiite groups like Hezbollah. It was Al Qaeda that is reported to have given
Sunni extremists in Iraq the green light to attack Shiite civilians and holy
sites. A Qaeda recruiter I met in Yemen described the Shiites as "dogs and a
thorn in the throat of Islam from the beginning of time."

But now Hezbollah has taken the lead on the most incendiary issue for jihadis of
all stripes: the fight against Israel.

Many Sunnis are therefore rallying to Hezbollah's side, including the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. The Saudi cleric Salman al-Awda has defied his
government's anti-Hezbollah position, writing on his Web site that "this is not
the time to express our differences with the Shiites because we are all
confronted by our greater enemy, the criminal Jews and Zionists."

For Al Qaeda, it is a time of panic. The group's Web sites are abuzz with
messages and questions about how to respond to Hezbollah's success. One
sympathizer asks whether, even knowing that the Shiites are traitors and the
accomplices of the infidel Americans in Iraq, it is permissible to say a prayer
for Hezbollah. He is told to curse Hezbollah along with Islam's other enemies.

Several of Al Qaeda's ideologues have issued official statements explaining
Hezbollah's actions and telling followers how to respond to them. The gist of
their argument is that the Shiites are conspiring to destroy Islam and to
resuscitate Persian imperial rule over the Middle East and ultimately the world.
The ideologues label this effort the "Sassanian-Safavid conspiracy," in
reference to the Sassanians, a pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty, and to the Safavids,
a Shiite dynasty that ruled Iran and parts of Iraq from 1501 till 1736.

They go on to argue that thanks to the United States (the leader of the
Zionist-Crusader conspiracy), Iraq has been handed over to the Shiites, who are
now wantonly massacring the country's Sunnis. Syria is already led by a Shiite
heretic, President Bashar al-Assad, whose policies harm the country's Sunni
majority.

Hezbollah, according to these analyses, seeks to dupe ordinary Muslims into
believing that the Shiites are defending Islam's holiest cause, Palestine, in
order to cover for the wholesale Shiite alliance with the United States in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

Ultimately, this theory goes, the Shiites will fail in their efforts because the
Israelis and Americans will destroy them once their role in the broader
Zionist-Crusader conspiracy is accomplished. And then God will assure the
success of the Sunni Muslims and the defeat of the Zionists and Crusaders.

In the meantime, no Muslim should be fooled by Hezbollah, whose members have
never fought the infidel on any of the real battlefronts, like Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir. The proper attitude for Muslims to adopt is to
dissociate themselves completely from the Shiites.

This analysis — conspiratorial, bizarre and uncompelling, except to the most
diehard radicals — signals an important defeat for Al Qaeda's public relations
campaign. The truth is that Al Qaeda has met a formidable challenge in Hezbollah
and its charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who have made canny choices
that appeal to Al Qaeda's Sunni followers. Al Qaeda's improbable conspiracy
theory does little to counter these advantages.

First, although Sheik Nasrallah wears the black turban and carries the title of
"sayyid," both of which identify him as a Shiite descendant of the Prophet
Muhammad, he preaches a nonsectarian ideology and does not highlight his group's
Shiite identity. Hezbollah has even established an effective alliance with
Hamas, a Sunni and Muslim Brotherhood organization.

Second, Hezbollah's statements focus on the politics of resistance to occupation
and invoke shared Islamic principles about the right to self-defense. Sheik
Nasrallah is extremely careful to hew closely to the dictates of Islamic law in
his military attacks. These include such principles as advance notice,
discrimination in selecting targets and proportionality.

Finally, only Hezbollah has effectively defeated Israel (in Lebanon in 2000) and
is now taking it on again, hitting Haifa and other places with large numbers of
rockets — a feat that no Arab or Muslim power has accomplished since Israel's
founding in 1948.

These are already serious selling points. And Hezbollah will score a major
propaganda victory in the Muslim world if it simply remains standing in Lebanon
after the present bout of warfare is over and maintains the relationships it is
forging with Hamas and other Sunni Islamist organizations.

What will such a victory mean? Perhaps Hezbollah's ascendancy among Sunnis will
make it possible for Shiites and Sunnis to stop the bloodletting in Iraq — and
to focus instead on their "real" enemies, namely the United States and Israel.
Rumblings against Israeli actions in Lebanon from both Shiites and Sunnis in
Iraq already suggest such an outcome.

That may be good news for Iraqis, but it marks a dangerous turn for the West.
And there are darker implications still. Al Qaeda, after all, is unlikely to
take a loss of status lying down. Indeed, the rise of Hezbollah makes it all the
more likely that Al Qaeda will soon seek to reassert itself through increased
attacks on Shiites in Iraq and on Westerners all over the world — whatever it
needs to do in order to regain the title of true defender of Islam.


Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at New York
University, is the author of "Revival and Reform in Islam."

[babiana]

szahtut napisał:
> to be or not to it is amazing history

And sad reality
The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States,
have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large
as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the
US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural
resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium
and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the
gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made
their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers. The
social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years
ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque
fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According
to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under
the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab
world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total
number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6
million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the
poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening
in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part
of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history,
one of the most advanced cultures in the world. It is fair to say that this
creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks,
fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact
that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States,
on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and
anything , except themselves.