If it was uploaded by Google's staff as part of their paid job, then yes, Google is intentionally infringing their copyright. But why would Google be blamed for an employee acting on his own to upload something?
Because they are a largely ineffectual minority among a vast aggressive mob of Islamic majoritarianism
Got evidence for that?
They aren;t noteworthy enough to be covered in the media
Perhaps they're not covered by western media, but in the Muslim world I've seen journalists, Islamic scholars and thinkers, individual Muslims and TV personalities with large fanbases all speak against terrorism and violence. Ask anyone in the region.
Whenever Muslims followed Islam as defined by the Quran and Sunna, they showed mercy and kindness
Which, even if we assume your argument to be valid, has been very rare in Islamic history.
No it hasn't. You're ignoring, among many examples, Omar Ibn El-Khattab's fair treatment of Chrisitnas and Jews, the Golden Age of Jews in Al-Andalus( after which the driving out of Muslims lead to the prosecution of jews in Spain), or the fact that the Ottoman empire provided a safe haven for Jews fleeting persecution.
For hundreds of years Islam was a beacon of tolerance and justice and yet you focus on isolated incidents by people who disobeyed to rules of their own religion and make these incidents look like a representative of the religion. And no, this isn't the NSM fallacy, since what a Muslim is allowed to do is defined by the Quran and Sunna, and not descided by someone's whimsy (as the fallacy requires).
given that Muhammad massacred 900 Jews of the Banu Qurayza and Banu Nadir tribes
Check your facts. Banu Al-Nudair weren't "massacred" but simply exiled after they betrayed their pact with the Muslims and attempted to assasinate prophet Muhammad. As for Banu Quraiza, they made an alliance with Arab tribes and intended to wipe out the Muslims during the battle of "Al-Khandaq" and the Muslims retailiated. Again it wasn't a "massacre" but a battle among other battles.
.and why should we accept that from you, a random user on the internet
Please re-read my post all my posts and replies in this article. I've given examples and cited multiple sources including Hadith, Islamic sites, personal sites of individual Muslims and sites by non-Muslims. In all cases you either ignored my evidence or dismissed them with unverified accusations of bias.
On the other hand, you seem to be more interested in piling accusations than supporting them. However confident you are of your position neither of us is above having to provide evidence. And whenever I reply to you, you seem to ignore my replies and either repeat your attacks or come up with new ones.
And your main point seems to repeat, over and over and over, how some Muslims at some place killed non-Muslims, ignoring the fact that those people violated the rules of Islam (as told by the Quran and Hadith, not simply the opinion of some individual Muslim) or the possibility of any other factors at work like poverty, ignorance, tribalism or political conditions.
Also, I think we're going too offtopic in this discussion. If you want, we can continue this discussion by email and discuss the issue in whatever level of detail you like. my email (encoded in rot13 to avoid spam) is fnzl2004@tznvy.pbz
BTW by I intended "AC" to mean "anonymous poster" and wasn't criticizing your choice of not using an account. I hope my use of/. slang didn't give the wrong meaning:)
(Are you the same AC who's been exchanging messages with me on a sibling thread? Your style is very similar to him but I'm not sure if this is a continuation of a conversation or a new one. It's hard keeping track on this stuff when I don't know who I'm talking to).
From my point of view, I see Muslims detained without basic rights.
More Muslims have done that to each other than "Kaffir-Harbis" or whoever
For starters, two wrongs don't make a right.Also by asking "where's my outrage" you seem to imply that I somehow find that acceptable, I don't! As for how could Muslims do this, we already had a long discussion about acts of Muslims vs. what Islam allows and disallows:)
Anyway, my aim here wasn't criticising American detainment per se but simply noting that reality is not conformant with your belief that America is somehow under Saudi/Muslim control when more than 100 Saudis were forcefully detained. I shouldn't really need to bring evidence that Muslims are harassed anyway. Should be obvious:(
the Hijab/Naqab/Burqua is a symbol of oppression of women and fundamentally incompatible with modernity
Says who? I personally know female doctors, teachers and programmers who are muhajabat or munaqabat. Interestingly, in the colledge I worked in, it seemed to me that the vieled female students tended to score more in exams and be better programmers than the non-veiled, who seemed more interested in superficial things. Of course this is my personal observation and this isn't always the case but it shows there's no conflict between hijab and modernity. I'm sure you can find similar examples in other places/countries.
Muslim women declare it's their own choice,
Now that, is nonsense
You mean that no Muslim woman declares that (which is wrong, they even filed lawsuits to defend their right to wear hijab) or you mean that even if they declared that hijab is their choice they're wrong and should be forced to take it off? Now here's the problem: the western world allows things that are scientifically proven as harmful like alcohol or smoking all in the name of freedom, yet they want to ban consenting adult women from an activity because it's perceived symbolically harmful by non-Muslims. Now that's hypocricy.
and ongoing pressure to stop building mosques.
Where?
Germany and Italy, for starters. I could probably find more examples in several European countries if I look hard enough.
Besides, attacking religion is entirely acceptable in modern discourse in the modern world.
Again, I wasn't specifically criticising the Pope's attack on Islam (he has a right to say what he wants) but providing a counterexample to your claim that Christians are somehow afraid of Muslims. In hindsight, I didn't really need an example, it's enough to be aware of the news in the past months to see that no one seems to respect Muslims at all (let alone fear them as you claim).
As to why Muslims seem to care a lot for not having their religion insulted, it's because they seem to be among the last people who actually care about the position of religion in their lives, Al-Hamdulillah. Everyone else seems to have more or less abandoned it so the jokes/insults to their religion don't really matter to them.
Christians/Jews who do care about their religion would probably take offence in the insults you mentioned as well.
Looks to me like it is Muslims who are attacking non-Islamic lands in droves.
From my point of view, I see Muslims detained without basic rights, the veil prohibited in western countries even when Muslim women declare it's their own choice, and ongoing pressure to stop building mosques. So how again are Muslims in control of anything as you seem to imply? How could Christians be afraid of Muslims as you said when the new Pope publicly attacked Islam in his "Roman emperor Manuel II" speech?
As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, from what I understood he didn't call for a total acceptance of sharia law but he considered allowing non-Christians (Muslims or otherwise) to appeal to their religious laws in cases of personal matters that relate to religion like marriage and divorce. I don't think that's necessarily wrong and a similar system has already been applied to Christians for decades here in Egypt.
About the various crimes you seem to be attributing to Islam instead of individual motives, it would take too long to provide evidence that Islam rules against them all so I'll cite two examples: Here's Islam's stance against honor killing and rape.
As shown by the second link, the 'hadd' (singular of the huddood you mentioned) is deterrent punishment and the total opposite of "giving rapists a medal" that you mentioned.
and that leads to the classic "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy.
Please see the second part of your linked article about misapplication of the NTS fallacy: The "no true Scotsman" fallacy applies only when the definition of the proverbial "Scotsman" is vague or always changing. But the way a Muslim should act isn't like that, the Quran and Ahadith have been preserved for hundreds of years and they define strictly what a Muslim is and isn't allowed to do. I think it's kind of unfair to blame Islam for the acts of people when these specific actionswent against its explicit rules. You yourself have cited some reasons for Muslims not strictly following Islam like ignorance and desire for political control. I think we should solve the root cause of the problems instead of assuming that the problems will suddenly go away if Islam was removed. Teaching the Quran and Sunna to those people could actually solve the problem.
The only way by which you can reconcile all this with the claim that Islam teaches peace and love and hippie "cumbaya" ** is if you regard some 75% of the world's Muslims as "false Muslims" (takfir?)
** BTW, let's not confuse kindness and justice as promoted by Islam with hippie stuff, please:)
It's not my position to say who is a Muslim and who's a non-muslim, but a person doesn't need to be a disbeliever or kafir to violate the rules of Islam.
A person who believes in God, prays...etc but still commits sins and disobeys God could be a "Muslim 'aasi" or a disobedient Muslim. And yes a very large number of the people in the Islamic world are like that. Every time a person violates a rule from Islam he commits a "ma'seya" and determining if he's still a Muslim or not depends on the nature of the ma'seya, his intent, whether he stopped committing it and repented or not, and other factors.
My point is that a large number of current Muslims could be committing ma'seya and violating the rules of Islam each day, and it's wrong to say that "Islam allows X" because some Muslim somewhere did it.
Come listen to a Friday lecture in an Egyptian mosque some time. You'll probably hear the sheikh lament how so many Muslims have strayed away from the ruling of Islam and freely do acts that Allah forbade.
Finally, I think that this conversation might be g
Fair enough, but then why are there no Muslims actively working against the militants? Where are they?
They do exist. Only the news media aren't interested in covering them, since (by their nature) they focus on problems like bombings...etc.
Muslims have condemned terrorism, Islamic scholars wrote article to show how killing of innocents is forbidden by the religion, and many Muslim journalists or individual Muslims wrote articles about the issues. I don't know how you define "working against the militants" besides writing, speaking and calling against them. Are we expected to fight against terrorists? I mean they have machine guns and we have children to worry about. It's not like English people, say, have took in arms and got into combat with the IRA.
We're certainly not happy with militants. We were among their first victims. Egypt was a victim of terrorism in the 90's, way before the word had widespread use in the USA. People were genuinely scared and the terrorists didn't seem to leave anyone in peace. I remember a young Egyptian schoolgirl who died in 1993 from the explosion of a bomb intended to kill the Egyptian prime minister. My point is the issue of terrorism is much more complex than an "East vs. West" mentality that some people want everyone to believe.
[this] is not tolerance, it is barbarism.
Yes it is. And Islam is innocent of it.
Whenever Muslims followed Islam as defined by the Quran and Sunna, they showed mercy and kindness. And were forbidden to be cruel or injust. I suggest your read this for some examples of this.
The act of some leader who happens to be a Muslim is far from an indicator of what Islam allows or forbids. People didn't assume the acts of the Nazis, the massacres committed by the Crusades or the Inquisition were representative of Christianity even though the transgressors were Christians and even some of them declared they committed their acts in the name of their religion. But when it comes to Islam some people assume Islam is really about murder or injustice because some leader of a Muslim country was a murderer. I think this is because Americans are Christian or live with Christians every day and know how normal Christians really behave while they hear nothing about Islam except from news...etc which mainly cover attacks or bombings.
I'm a Muslim and I live in the Muslim world, so my point of view is vastly different. I studied the Quran and Ahadith and see how Muslims act, what they think about terrorists and so on. The view from my side is very different:)
I'm not sure how to reply to you when every source I cite is assumed to be either affected by some Islamic organization or afraid of them. If our influence is so pervasive then how is everyone attacking/invading us? You'd think western public opinion would agree with everything Islamic in that case.
About where I learned Arabic poetry from pre-Islamic times, it was in a normal Egyptian public school. As far as I know, most Arab countries teach comparable material. We understood that not everything in these poems is in agreement with Islamic principles and yet these poems had linguistic importance so we studied them. I don't know why you assume that Muslim are trying to erase pre-Islamic history when it's well recorded and even taught in schools of Arab countries.
It seems that you have a lot of negative opinions of Islam. Perhaps the sources you learned about it from focused too much on negative events, or you had bad experiences with Muslims in India/Pakistan...etc (seems to be the main source of your examples).
In both cases, there's a difference between Islam as defined by the Quran and Sunna, and the acts of current or historical individual Muslims who may not necessarily follow Islamic rules.
I'm not happy either with people who arbitrarily lie, oppress or kill people (both non-Muslims and other Muslims) and justify their crimes on Islam. As I said in another post, anyone who commits some crime and says "My faith guided me to do it!" is a worse threat to Islam than any outside military threat on us.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Let's leave innocent civilians out of the whole thing.
Many countries (including my own) have managed to obtain their independence without blowing up women and children.
No, they do that only when invading Muslim countries:(
As a random thought I've never understood why the Palestinians don't borrow some lessons from Gandhi or Mandela.
Remember that violent resistance is relatively new to Palestinians. Their land was first occupied in 1948, and the first intifada was in 1989, 39 years later. And it was stone throwing, not bombing (which became known in the 90's).
In those years, the Palestinians and Arabs had endless negotiations, defending their case at the UN (and US/Israel blocking UN resolutions) and several wars/peace treaties. All while Israel was not being shy of oppressing Palestinians or killing their civilians, women or children. It's not like Palestinians didn't try every possible peaceful solution first.
I don't really care if the guy who killed me did so because his faith told him to or because of socioeconomic conditions that left him hopeless and despondent. I'm just as dead either way.
I'm certainly not trying to defend the murderers who kill innocents in the name of religion. All life is sacred and cheapening the value of an innocent life is evil. In addition to that, those so called Muslims are more effective in ruining the Islamic world than 10 military invasions.
(Legitimate resistance against combatants of an occupying force is something else, however).
Time just had a very interesting article about suicide bombers [...] Faith is an undeniable part of it. It might be a twisted reading of that faith but it's still there nonetheless.
Unfortunately, all noble ideals can be twisted into means of control when ignorance is involved. Western politicians have effectively used democracy, security and concern for the children as excuses for totalitarianism and injustice (it pains me that in some discussions "think of the children" is used as a euphemism for reducing freedoms...etc).
I hope people don't conclude from that Islamic faith is the problem but look into the root cause. IMO problems should be attacked directly and if they were caused by ignorance or politics then they should be solved by education and justice, not by belief that weakening people's faith would somehow indirectly solve everything.
I think strong faith is a great thing. In the first few centuries of the Islamic state (when the Quran and Sunna were followed as precisely as possible) the Islamic world was a beacon of civilization and culture. It spread justice, tolerance and love of science and was one of the factors influencing European renaissance. I'd rather see Muslims revert to the those original ideals and have their strong faith become a catalyst for restoring justice and civilization in the region.
Who cares if the Koran says that killing women and children in war is forbidden? I only care about actions --
(I know it's beside your point, but the evidence I cited was from Hadith, not the Quran, and I'd rather not have the two confused!)
To answer your question,
1- I was replying to a poster who thought that "kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them [...] have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere". It's much easier for both sides to communicate openly when the communication is based on reality.
2- Actions are always influenced by beliefs and ideas (just ask Fox News). Allowing the "Islam's inherently intolerant" meme to spread gives Neocons & friends the pretext to invade Muslim countries or intrude on their affairs and gives them the opportunity to spread fear mongering and erode the freedom inside their own countries. It also gives the terrorists an excuse to kill non-muslims while pretending they're following Islam and to gain sympathy from ignorant Muslims.
A little ironic but I think it's better for both sides that false information about Islam stops spreading.
I wouldn't consider Timur Lenk a good example of a ruler following Islamic guidance. He was a warlord who attacked Muslims and non Muslims alike. For example he waged battles with the Mamluks and Ottomans.
I recommend you read more on him. Here are some quotes from that article:
Islam had first reached India in 711 [...] Just as the Muslim rulers of other regions were relatively tolerant of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, the Muslim rulers of northern India were similarly tolerant of Hinduism, a religion which originated on the subcontinent, and to which the majority of Indians adhered.
Timur launched his attack on India in 1398, claiming that the Muslim Delhi Sultanate was too lenient towards its Hindu subjects. In reality, Timur probably cared more about looting this wealthy Muslim region than about punishing its religiously tolerant Muslim leaders.
As for source on Islamic tolerance, consider reading about Omar Ibn El Khattab or the well known fact that Christians and Jews lived in prosperity under Islamic rule in Spain.
Dude, it's not easy to go into a fruitful conversation with you when you're accusing every opinion you don't accept with "Islamofacism", Saudi lobbying and so on.
And bringing an unrelated edit from wikipedia doesn't prove that the article I referred to is wrong, especially that my referenced article cites several sources including books by Alfred J. Butler and Lewis Bernard, who are hardly the victims of influence by Muslims.
I concede that the Milligazette might not have been the best source to cite. Here's another articlefrom a Christian web site stating, again, that the story of Muslims burning the library is dismissed as a legend.
and erased all records of pre-Islamic Arab culture (regarded by Muslims as "Jahillya")
It's funny thay you mentioned "Jahillya". I'm an Arab and I learned a lot of Jahilia poetry at school including the Mu'allaqat, for example, which were collections of some of the best Arabic poetry before Islam. And their full text was preserved, along with much of the Arabic culture of the time.
I can receite to you some lines of them if you want:)
(yeah, I know, I linked to wikipedia again but their text references a public domain edition of Encyclopedia Britannica this time, you can check it yourself).
kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy, have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere.
Go evidence for that? Most historical texts I read talk about the tolerance of Muslims in the lands they aquired. And killing of women, children or elderly in war is directly forbidden, see this excrept from a hadith by prophet Muhammad(source):
"I advise you ten things: Do not kill women or children or an aged, infirm person. Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees. Do not destroy an inhabited place. Do not slaughter sheep or camels except for food. Do not burn bees and do not scatter them. Do not steal from the booty, and do not be cowardly."
when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down
I doubt this. And multiple historians dismiss it as a hoax.Again, got evidence?
...the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when Iâ(TM)m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesnâ(TM)t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."
I'm not sure, but I think he's talking personally about his own work on his code. Remember that he comes from an era where people had the goal of mathematically proving that the code is indeed correct. He isn't necessarily doing this now but my persaonal guess is that he prefers statically checking the code to checking a running program. In certain kinds of mathematic/scientific applications this could make sense.
Seeing that C# evolved much faster than Java (starting from C# 2.0) I made a decision to avoid Java on my own projects if I can, to avoid the moment where my development life is miserable because I need some certain language features not available in Java but avaliable in other comparable languages.
When Sun open sourced the JDK, I began reconsidering that decision, because if OpenJDK reaches enough critical mass the community would probably be much reactive than Sun in evolving the language. And in the worst case I might try dive into the compiler and add what I wanted myself.
Now I'm considering Java where relavent, while occassionaly following the various OpenJDK blogs/wikis to see what progress is being made.
FWIW, Mono is not looking *only* for a reimplementation of Microsoft's libraries. Their public goal is to create a high productivity open source dev framework, not to neccessarily recreate every Microsoft library.
And it shows,too: They created GTK# way before Winforms compatibitlity (even now, the Monodevelop IDE has GTK# Visual Design but no Winforms support yet). And they've created bindings for some Unix libraries; and there are Mono libraries (like Monoaddin) that have no Microsoft counterpart.
The verses 88 and 89 are not about every single non Muslim but about Munafiqeen (Hypocrites; people who claimed to be Muslims but aren't).
Hypocrites caused a lot of trouble to muslims in early Islam because the Muslims were a small community and under continuous threat from the Arabs around them. In this situation the hypocrites gave the Muslims false sense of being part of the Muslims and supporting them but were ready to flee at any opportunity. They were a threat to the security of the Muslim society and basically committed treason.
For example in the battle of "Uhud" a man named "Abdullah ibn Ubay" abandoned the battle with about a third of the army: he took 300 men and left the prophet fighting with 700.
In another situation, a group of men apparently declared Islam but wanted to leave the Madina (the city where the prophet and muslims resided at the time) and thus refused to support the foundation of the newly formed Islamic society, refusing to share their hardships and leaving them more vulnerable.
These verses are about a particular situation where Muslims where divided about a group of people who claimed to be Muslims but acted like Munafiqeen (there are conflicting opinions about which particular situation, possibly one of the two I mentioned above).
Reading it from the start really puts things into context.
YUSUFALI 88 : Why should ye be divided into two parties about the Hypocrites? Allah hath upset them for their (evil) deeds. Would ye guide those whom Allah hath thrown out of the Way? For those whom Allah hath thrown out of the Way, never shalt thou find the Way.
89 : They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks
PICKTHAL 88 : What aileth you that ye are become two parties regarding the hypocrites, when Allah cast them back (to disbelief) because of what they earned? Seek ye to guide him whom Allah hath sent astray? He whom Allah sendeth astray, for him thou (O MUhammad) canst not find a road. 89 : They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them,
SHAKIR 88 : What is the matter with you, then, that you have become two parties about the hypocrites, while Allah has made them return (to unbelief) for what they have earned? Do you wish to guide him whom Allah has caused to err? And whomsoever Allah causes to err, you shall by no means find a way for him.
89 : They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
... a prototype style is much better suited to JavaScript's primary role, namely defining interfaces (look at some of the papers published by the Newton team in the '90s).
I'm interested! Care to point to any patricular papers? Thanks in advance.
I certainly see where you're coming from. I haven't done much DB or network programming in Java but I remember trying to read a string from the console and realizing I need to combine instances of multiple classes with scary names (like BufferedInputReader) to do it, so the responses to my post and the OP I replied to do have a point.
(The C# library is much cleaner than Java, IMO. Java suffered a lot from early design mistakes, with each incremental version adding more code to compensate for bad decisions made in the earlier versions. C# had the benefit of hindsight and learned from Java's mistakes).
Anyway, my original point was that a huge object oriented library isn't in itself a bad thing, and that a well designed OO library can be insanely useful and help push a language/VM/platform forward. See how many new languages are directly made to target the JVM/CLR, for example. The "kitchen sink" approach to their libraries probably helped!
I like the "Huffman's compression" analogy:) It is true that languages like Java & C# can have verbose syntax at times, but I think that this verbosity is only skin deep, and that the libraries themselves are well designed. Having to type more!= having a library being inherently bad.
These languages have an "everything should be in a class" mentality to them and got to avoid things like plain functions and closures and that makes things sometimes look more complex than they should be.
If you program in a simpler language like python on top of the.net framework or JVM, your experience with the libraries might be significantly different.
Also, the Java/C# designers are learning their lessons and C# already has closures and closures in Java are being discussed. Java also has static imports which allow you to create something that "looks like" normal C function calls.
Sometimes a balance has to be striked between "make everything simple" and "application complexity keeps growing".
Many languages start with the goal of making everything simple and keep bolting on features gradually until the language becomes a mess and everyone complains about the inconsistencies and (ironically) excessive complexity. PHP is such an example.
Sometimes it pays to design for complexity up-front. I don't mean anticipating every possible feature and bundling it in (like, say J2EE) but to be ready for things like Unicode, file streams or built in collection classes. Unless your language is very specialized, you'll certainly need these features anyway.
Yeah. ML and it's descendants are awesome. Incidently, I thought you were talking about C# 3.0 when I was reading the beginning of your post. In my opinion this is one of the reasons Microsoft has succeeded: They shamelessly steal the best features of other good products.
While Java fan's were complaining that.net "stole" from Java like this was a bad thing, MS was busy ripping off features from functional languages and improving their platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Islam doesn't. Some Muslims pretend it does.
If it was uploaded by Google's staff as part of their paid job, then yes, Google is intentionally infringing their copyright.
But why would Google be blamed for an employee acting on his own to upload something?
Got evidence for that?
Perhaps they're not covered by western media, but in the Muslim world
I've seen journalists, Islamic scholars and thinkers, individual Muslims and TV personalities with
large fanbases all speak against terrorism and violence. Ask anyone in the region.
No it hasn't. You're ignoring, among many examples, Omar Ibn El-Khattab's fair treatment of Chrisitnas and Jews, the Golden Age of Jews in Al-Andalus( after which the driving out of Muslims lead to the prosecution of jews in Spain), or the fact that the Ottoman empire provided a safe haven for Jews fleeting persecution.
For hundreds of years Islam was a beacon of tolerance and justice and yet you focus on isolated incidents by people who disobeyed to rules of their own religion and make these incidents look like a representative of the religion. And no, this isn't the NSM fallacy, since what a Muslim is allowed to do is defined by the Quran and Sunna, and not descided by someone's whimsy (as the fallacy requires).
Check your facts. Banu Al-Nudair weren't "massacred" but simply exiled after they betrayed their pact with the Muslims and attempted to assasinate prophet Muhammad. As for Banu Quraiza, they made an alliance with Arab tribes and intended to wipe out the Muslims during the battle of "Al-Khandaq" and the Muslims retailiated. Again it wasn't a "massacre" but a battle among other battles.
Please re-read my post all my posts and replies in this article. I've given examples and cited multiple sources including Hadith, Islamic sites, personal sites of individual Muslims and sites by non-Muslims. In all cases you either ignored my evidence or dismissed them with unverified accusations of bias.
On the other hand, you seem to be more interested in piling accusations than supporting them. However confident you are of your position neither of us is above having to provide evidence. And whenever I reply to you, you seem to ignore my replies and either repeat your attacks or come up with new ones.
And your main point seems to repeat, over and over and over, how some Muslims at some place killed non-Muslims, ignoring the fact that those people violated the rules of Islam (as told by the Quran and Hadith, not simply the opinion of some individual Muslim) or the possibility of any other factors at work like poverty, ignorance, tribalism or political conditions.
Also, I think we're going too offtopic in this discussion. If you want, we can continue this discussion by email and discuss the issue in whatever level of detail you like. my email (encoded in rot13 to avoid spam) is fnzl2004@tznvy.pbz
BTW by I intended "AC" to mean "anonymous poster" and wasn't criticizing your choice of not using an account. I hope my use of /. slang didn't give the wrong meaning :)
(Are you the same AC who's been exchanging messages with me on a sibling thread? Your style is very similar to him but I'm not sure if this is a continuation of a conversation or a new one. It's hard keeping track on this stuff when I don't know who I'm talking to).
For starters, two wrongs don't make a right.Also by asking "where's my outrage" you seem to imply that I somehow find that acceptable, I don't! :)
As for how could Muslims do this, we already had a long discussion about acts of Muslims vs. what Islam allows and disallows
Anyway, my aim here wasn't criticising American detainment per se but simply noting that reality is not conformant with your belief that America is somehow under Saudi/Muslim control when more than 100 Saudis were forcefully detained. I shouldn't really need to bring evidence that Muslims are harassed anyway. Should be obvious :(
Says who? I personally know female doctors, teachers and programmers who are muhajabat or munaqabat. Interestingly, in the colledge I worked in, it seemed to me that the vieled female students tended to score more in exams and be better programmers than the non-veiled, who seemed more interested in superficial things. Of course this is my personal observation and this isn't always the case but it shows there's no conflict between hijab and modernity. I'm sure you can find similar examples in other places/countries.
You mean that no Muslim woman declares that (which is wrong, they even filed lawsuits to defend their right to wear hijab) or you mean that even if they declared that hijab is their choice they're wrong and should be forced to take it off?
Now here's the problem: the western world allows things that are scientifically proven as harmful like alcohol or smoking all in the name of freedom, yet they want to ban consenting adult women from an activity because it's perceived symbolically harmful by non-Muslims. Now that's hypocricy.
From my point of view, I see Muslims detained without basic rights, the veil prohibited in western countries even when Muslim women declare it's their own choice, and ongoing pressure to stop building mosques. So how again are Muslims in control of anything as you seem to imply? How could Christians be afraid of Muslims as you said when the new Pope publicly attacked Islam in his "Roman emperor Manuel II" speech?
As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, from what I understood he didn't call for a total acceptance of sharia law but he considered allowing non-Christians (Muslims or otherwise) to appeal to their religious laws in cases of personal matters that relate to religion like marriage and divorce. I don't think that's necessarily wrong and a similar system has already been applied to Christians for decades here in Egypt.
About the various crimes you seem to be attributing to Islam instead of individual motives, it would take too long to provide evidence that Islam rules against them all so I'll cite two examples: Here's Islam's stance against honor killing and rape.
As shown by the second link, the 'hadd' (singular of the huddood you mentioned) is deterrent punishment and the total opposite of "giving rapists a medal" that you mentioned.
Please see the second part of your linked article about misapplication of the NTS fallacy: The "no true Scotsman" fallacy applies only when the definition of the proverbial "Scotsman" is vague or always changing. But the way a Muslim should act isn't like that, the Quran and Ahadith have been preserved for hundreds of years and they define strictly what a Muslim is and isn't allowed to do. I think it's kind of unfair to blame Islam for the acts of people when these specific actionswent against its explicit rules. You yourself have cited some reasons for Muslims not strictly following Islam like ignorance and desire for political control. I think we should solve the root cause of the problems instead of assuming that the problems will suddenly go away if Islam was removed. Teaching the Quran and Sunna to those people could actually solve the problem.
It's not my position to say who is a Muslim and who's a non-muslim, but a person doesn't need to be a disbeliever or kafir to violate the rules of Islam.
A person who believes in God, prays...etc but still commits sins and disobeys God could be a "Muslim 'aasi" or a disobedient Muslim. And yes a very large number of the people in the Islamic world are like that. Every time a person violates a rule from Islam he commits a "ma'seya" and determining if he's still a Muslim or not depends on the nature of the ma'seya, his intent, whether he stopped committing it and repented or not, and other factors.
My point is that a large number of current Muslims could be committing ma'seya and violating the rules of Islam each day, and it's wrong to say that "Islam allows X" because some Muslim somewhere did it.
Come listen to a Friday lecture in an Egyptian mosque some time. You'll probably hear the sheikh lament how so many Muslims have strayed away from the ruling of Islam and freely do acts that Allah forbade.
Finally, I think that this conversation might be g
They do exist. Only the news media aren't interested in covering them, since (by their nature) they focus on problems like bombings...etc.
Muslims have condemned terrorism, Islamic scholars wrote article to show how killing of innocents is forbidden by the religion, and many Muslim journalists or individual Muslims wrote articles about the issues.
I don't know how you define "working against the militants" besides writing, speaking and calling against them. Are we expected to fight against terrorists? I mean they have machine guns and we have children to worry about. It's not like English people, say, have took in arms and got into combat with the IRA.
We're certainly not happy with militants. We were among their first victims. Egypt was a victim of terrorism in the 90's, way before the word had widespread use in the USA. People were genuinely scared and the terrorists didn't seem to leave anyone in peace. I remember a young Egyptian schoolgirl who died in 1993 from the explosion of a bomb intended to kill the Egyptian prime minister. My point is the issue of terrorism is much more complex than an "East vs. West" mentality that some people want everyone to believe.
Yes it is. And Islam is innocent of it.
Whenever Muslims followed Islam as defined by the Quran and Sunna, they showed mercy and kindness. And were forbidden to be cruel or injust.
I suggest your read this for some examples of this.
The act of some leader who happens to be a Muslim is far from an indicator of what Islam allows or forbids. People didn't assume the acts of the Nazis, the massacres committed by the Crusades or the Inquisition were representative of Christianity even though the transgressors were Christians and even some of them declared they committed their acts in the name of their religion. But when it comes to Islam some people assume Islam is really about murder or injustice because some leader of a Muslim country was a murderer. I think this is because Americans are Christian or live with Christians every day and know how normal Christians really behave while they hear nothing about Islam except from news...etc which mainly cover attacks or bombings.
I'm a Muslim and I live in the Muslim world, so my point of view is vastly different. I studied the Quran and Ahadith and see how Muslims act, what they think about terrorists and so on. The view from my side is very different :)
I'm not sure how to reply to you when every source I cite is assumed to be either affected by some Islamic organization or afraid of them. If our influence is so pervasive then how is everyone attacking/invading us? You'd think western public opinion would agree with everything Islamic in that case.
About where I learned Arabic poetry from pre-Islamic times, it was in a normal Egyptian public school. As far as I know, most Arab countries teach comparable material. We understood
that not everything in these poems is in agreement with Islamic principles and yet these poems had linguistic importance so we studied them. I don't know why you assume that Muslim are trying to erase pre-Islamic history when it's well recorded and even taught in schools of Arab countries.
It seems that you have a lot of negative opinions of Islam. Perhaps the sources you learned about it from focused too much on negative events, or you had bad experiences with Muslims in India/Pakistan...etc (seems to be the main source of your examples).
In both cases, there's a difference between Islam as defined by the Quran and Sunna, and the acts of current or historical individual Muslims who may not necessarily follow Islamic rules.
I'm not happy either with people who arbitrarily lie, oppress or kill people (both non-Muslims and other Muslims) and justify their crimes on Islam. As I said in another post, anyone who commits some crime and says "My faith guided me to do it!" is a worse threat to Islam than any outside military threat on us.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Let's leave innocent civilians out of the whole thing.
No, they do that only when invading Muslim countries
Remember that violent resistance is relatively new to Palestinians. Their land was first occupied in 1948, and the first intifada was in 1989, 39 years later. And it was stone throwing, not bombing (which became known in the 90's).
In those years, the Palestinians and Arabs had endless negotiations, defending their case at the UN (and US/Israel blocking UN resolutions) and several wars/peace treaties. All while Israel was not being shy of oppressing Palestinians or killing their civilians, women or children. It's not like Palestinians didn't try every possible peaceful solution first.
I'm certainly not trying to defend the murderers who kill innocents in the name of religion. All life is sacred and cheapening the value of an innocent life is evil. In addition to that, those so called Muslims are more effective in ruining the Islamic world than 10 military invasions.
(Legitimate resistance against combatants of an occupying force is something else, however).
Unfortunately, all noble ideals can be twisted into means of control when ignorance is involved. Western politicians have effectively used democracy, security and concern for the children as excuses for totalitarianism and injustice (it pains me that in some discussions "think of the children" is used as a euphemism for reducing freedoms...etc).
I hope people don't conclude from that Islamic faith is the problem but look into the root cause. IMO problems should be attacked directly and if they were caused by ignorance or politics then they should be solved by education and justice, not by belief that weakening people's faith would somehow indirectly solve everything.
I think strong faith is a great thing. In the first few centuries of the Islamic state (when the Quran and Sunna were followed as precisely as possible) the Islamic world was a beacon of civilization and culture. It spread justice, tolerance and love of science and was one of the factors influencing European renaissance. I'd rather see Muslims revert to the those original ideals and have their strong faith become a catalyst for restoring justice and civilization in the region.
(I know it's beside your point, but the evidence I cited was from Hadith, not the Quran, and I'd rather not have the two confused!)
To answer your question,
1- I was replying to a poster who thought that "kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them [...] have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere". It's much easier for both sides to communicate openly when the communication is based on reality.
2- Actions are always influenced by beliefs and ideas (just ask Fox News). Allowing the "Islam's inherently intolerant" meme to spread gives Neocons & friends the pretext to invade Muslim countries or intrude on their affairs and gives them the opportunity to spread fear mongering and erode the freedom inside their own countries. It also gives the terrorists an excuse to kill non-muslims while pretending they're following Islam and to gain sympathy from ignorant Muslims.
A little ironic but I think it's better for both sides that false information about Islam stops spreading.
I wouldn't consider Timur Lenk a good example of a ruler following Islamic guidance. He was a warlord who attacked Muslims and non Muslims alike. For example he waged battles with the Mamluks and Ottomans.
I recommend you read more on him. Here are some quotes from that article:
As for source on Islamic tolerance, consider reading about Omar Ibn El Khattab or the well known fact that Christians and Jews lived in prosperity under Islamic rule in Spain.
Dude, it's not easy to go into a fruitful conversation with you when you're accusing every opinion you don't accept with "Islamofacism", Saudi lobbying and so on.
And bringing an unrelated edit from wikipedia doesn't prove that the article I referred to is wrong, especially that my referenced article cites several sources including books by Alfred J. Butler and Lewis Bernard, who are hardly the victims of influence by Muslims.
I concede that the Milligazette might not have been the best source to cite. Here's another article from a Christian web site stating, again, that the story of Muslims burning the library is dismissed as a legend.
It's funny thay you mentioned "Jahillya". I'm an Arab and I learned a lot of Jahilia poetry at school including the Mu'allaqat, for example, which were collections of some of the best Arabic poetry before Islam. And their full text was preserved, along with much of the Arabic culture of the time.
I can receite to you some lines of them if you want :)
(yeah, I know, I linked to wikipedia again but their text references a public domain edition of Encyclopedia Britannica this time, you can check it yourself).
Here's more evidence against the "Muslims burned the library of Alexandria" myth.
Go evidence for that? Most historical texts I read talk about the tolerance of Muslims in the lands they aquired. And killing of women, children or elderly in war is directly forbidden, see this excrept from a hadith by prophet Muhammad(source):
"I advise you ten things: Do not kill women or children or an aged, infirm person. Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees. Do not destroy an inhabited place. Do not slaughter sheep or camels except for food. Do not burn bees and do not scatter them. Do not steal from the booty, and do not be cowardly."
I doubt this. And multiple historians dismiss it as a hoax.Again, got evidence?
I'm not sure, but I think he's talking personally about his own work on his code. Remember that he comes from an era where people had the goal of mathematically proving that the code is indeed correct. He isn't necessarily doing this now but my persaonal guess is that he prefers statically checking the code to checking a running program. In certain kinds of mathematic/scientific applications this could make sense.
Seeing that C# evolved much faster than Java (starting from C# 2.0) I made a decision to avoid Java on my own projects if I can, to avoid the moment where my development life is miserable because I need some certain language features not available in Java but avaliable in other comparable languages.
When Sun open sourced the JDK, I began reconsidering that decision, because if OpenJDK reaches enough critical mass the community would probably be much reactive than Sun in evolving the language. And in the worst case I might try dive into the compiler and add what I wanted myself.
Now I'm considering Java where relavent, while occassionaly following the various OpenJDK blogs/wikis to see what progress is being made.
FWIW, Mono is not looking *only* for a reimplementation of Microsoft's libraries. Their public goal is to create a high productivity open source dev framework, not to neccessarily recreate every Microsoft library.
And it shows,too: They created GTK# way before Winforms compatibitlity (even now, the Monodevelop IDE has GTK# Visual Design but no Winforms support yet). And they've created bindings for some Unix libraries; and there are Mono libraries (like Monoaddin) that have no Microsoft counterpart.
Hypocrites caused a lot of trouble to muslims in early Islam because the Muslims were a small community and under continuous threat from the Arabs around them. In this situation the hypocrites gave the Muslims false sense of being part of the Muslims and supporting them but were ready to flee at any opportunity. They were a threat to the security of the Muslim society and basically committed treason.
For example in the battle of "Uhud" a man named "Abdullah ibn Ubay" abandoned the battle with about a third of the army: he took 300 men and left the prophet fighting with 700.
In another situation, a group of men apparently declared Islam but wanted to leave the Madina (the city where the prophet and muslims resided at the time) and thus refused to support the foundation of the newly formed Islamic society, refusing to share their hardships and leaving them more vulnerable.
These verses are about a particular situation where Muslims where divided about a group of people who claimed to be Muslims but acted like Munafiqeen (there are conflicting opinions about which particular situation, possibly one of the two I mentioned above).
Reading it from the start really puts things into context.
Here are the two tanslated together (from here):
I'm interested! Care to point to any patricular papers? Thanks in advance.
I certainly see where you're coming from. I haven't done much DB or network programming in Java but I remember trying to read a string from the console and realizing I need to combine instances of multiple classes with scary names (like BufferedInputReader) to do it, so the responses to my post and the OP I replied to do have a point.
(The C# library is much cleaner than Java, IMO. Java suffered a lot from early design mistakes, with each incremental version adding more code to compensate for bad decisions made in the earlier versions. C# had the benefit of hindsight and learned from Java's mistakes).
Anyway, my original point was that a huge object oriented library isn't in itself a bad thing, and that a well designed OO library can be insanely useful and help push a language/VM/platform forward. See how many new languages are directly made to target the JVM/CLR, for example. The "kitchen sink" approach to their libraries probably helped!
I like the "Huffman's compression" analogy :)
.net framework or JVM, your experience with the libraries might be significantly different.
It is true that languages like Java & C# can have verbose syntax at times, but I think that this verbosity is only skin deep, and that the libraries themselves are well designed. Having to type more!= having a library being inherently bad.
These languages have an "everything should be in a class" mentality to them and got to avoid things like plain functions and closures and that makes things sometimes look more complex than they should be.
If you program in a simpler language like python on top of the
Also, the Java/C# designers are learning their lessons and C# already has closures and closures in Java are being discussed. Java also has static imports which allow you to create something that "looks like" normal C function calls.
Sometimes a balance has to be striked between "make everything simple" and "application complexity keeps growing".
Many languages start with the goal of making everything simple and keep bolting on features gradually until the language becomes a mess and everyone complains about the inconsistencies and (ironically) excessive complexity. PHP is such an example.
Sometimes it pays to design for complexity up-front. I don't mean anticipating every possible feature and bundling it in (like, say J2EE) but to be ready for things like Unicode, file streams or built in collection classes. Unless your language is very specialized, you'll certainly need these features anyway.
Yeah. ML and it's descendants are awesome.
.net "stole" from Java like this was a bad thing, MS was busy ripping off features from functional languages and improving their platform.
Incidently, I thought you were talking about C# 3.0 when I was reading the beginning of your post. In my opinion this is one of the reasons Microsoft has succeeded: They shamelessly steal the best features of other good products.
While Java fan's were complaining that