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computer parts posted:And Muslims only did it once, nearly 1500 years ago. What do you mean by that precisely? There were tons of further conquests by Islamic states in the future after the initial wars. India, Asia Minor and Southeastern Europe to name a few. This sometimes did involve lots of supposedly religious motivation, and sometimes it didn't, how is distinguishable from Justinian or the Scramble for Africa? Nessus posted:I don't think Islam has anything much to do with terrorism, though I suppose some aspects of the religion's teachings might hinder or support certain forms of actions. We can say a lot of bad things about the IRA but I don't really think they compare to ISIS, in terms of pure numbers killed its not even in the same ballpark. Personally I find myself seeing more parallels with groups like the Carlists in Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlism khwarezm fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 5, 2015 |
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Jul 5, 2015 00:12
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Abner Cadaver II posted:I don't think pure numbers killed is a good measure for this discussion, since that correlates more often with success in violent endeavors than exceptional inhumanity in that violence. The Arab Conquests killed a lot more people than the Mexican-American War but that doesn't decide whether one was morally worse or not. I don't agree that pure numbers killed is a bad measure, certainly it's crude and ignores context but what metric doesn't? Success in violent endeavors often entails exceptional inhumanity, if the likes of Genghis Khan or the Conquistadors are examples. I don't know much about the Arab Conquests ultimately but we don't really know how many people died there. Besides, it was a much longer process than the Mexican-American war and occurred within the context of near constant warfare in the medieval middle east, coming off the back of stuff like this. No matter how we measure it its difficult to come to the conclusion that the IRA or ISIS are particularly comparable entities. The IRA did not engage in large scale ethnic cleansing, it seemed to try and specifically avoid handing its enemies the propaganda victory that killing lots of civilians deliberately would offer them (not they always held themselves to that) to a degree (more about this can be read in this article that several people have linked in the middle east thread), they fought their war on a pretty small scale, they didn't hold sex slaves as booty of war and they pursued regular parliamentary politics alongside the violent campaign, in fact they still do as we can see from Sinn Fein's success. Perhaps most importantly the environment they grew out of differed radically, twentieth century Northern Ireland was not a kind place at all, certainly not to Catholics, but it never approached the level of violent breakdown that we see in Syria and Iraq now. I also don't really think that the IRA tied themselves much to particularly Catholic ideology despite what a lot of people might assume, which is one of the reasons that I'm weary about the fact that they're often the go to example for christian terrorists for a lot of people, they tended to be more a straight forward nationalist grouping with a sprinkling of socialism than a religious one. Its like if we boiled down the Cypriot conflict to Muslims vs Christians, its sort of true and I'm sure sectarianism plays a part, but it ignores the more important nationalistic issues. That's why I booked the example of the Carlists up there, I think that they share more traits with ISIS than the IRA ever would, for one it was much more violent, regularly pursued a course of open warfare out on the field in multiple bloody wars (the last one being the Spanish Civil War), was able to shift to guerrilla warfare based on the situation, had some populist elements mixed with a lot of extremely conservative ones and succeeded in severely undermining the state that they opposed and later helping it to outright collapse (I'm talking about the second Republic here). It gained a lot of support from Clerical elements in favor of traditionalist Catholic view of Spanish society against Liberals taking after the enlightenment. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jul 5, 2015 |
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Jul 5, 2015 02:45
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ToxicAcne posted:Well Benazir was corrupt as poo poo and she was not oppressed at all.... Her family is a bunch of nobles pretending to be socialists. Her father Zulfiqar was the one who declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. My understanding was that Pakistan's law code already took on large elements of Sharia Law since Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's Presidency back in the late 70s and that that contributed to a widening role of politicized Islam in the country which secularists, religious minorities and certain aspects of Human Rights have not done well out of.
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Jul 8, 2015 07:59
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Panzeh posted:When Sisi represents secularism it's no wonder that it doesn't take hold all over the Middle East. If Sisi and the gang represent secularism they're not very good at it. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 16:39
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MrNemo posted:I don't know, if we count the Roman Empire as European we were invading occupying large swathes of the Middle East before they were. Also apart from Moorish Spain I'm not sure which large swathes you're talking about? The Ottomans in the Balkans? I guess that's a large swathe of Europe but it's also one that no-one in Western Europe ever really thinks about. It also didn't exactly wipe out Christianity in the area either. If you are counting the Roman Empire as European (and to be fair, north Africa and the Levant were very important to early Christianity) then North Africa and the Middle East offered a large swath of land that was conquered by Islamic powers that helped create fear of Muslim expansion. I don't think its really constructive to use the concept of 'Europe' during the Middle Ages, it didn't really exist, generally 'Christendom' was more important and would have previously included places that were Christianized before the Muslim conquests, like North Africa or Syria. Places like Egypt and Syria still had a huge Christian population up to the end of the Crusades(a fair few still exist today!), even into the 15th century in Iberian nations like Castile and Portugal it would have seemed natural that the Reconquista wouldn't end in the Iberian peninsula but would extend into the Maghreb, the Spanish and Portuguese often attacked and captured major cities along the coast such as Tunis or Oran and the Crusader element was a major factor in Portuguese exploration, business and conquests down the African coast that began the age of discovery. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Jul 14, 2015 |
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Jul 14, 2015 10:37
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tooterfish posted:If it were as rigid as you say, Islam would be much more hierarchical in structure surely? There's no Islamic equivalent of a pope or anything like that. To be fair The Papacy doesn't have much theological foundation at all and exists in its form as a religious authority more due to massive amounts of skulduggery, tradition and chance than anything else. If Charlemagne didn't really give a poo poo about Popes Stephen III, Adrian I and Leo III's problems with the Lombards, Byzantines and various Italian Lords then the makeup of Christianity could utterly different than it is now. Most protestant sects have little hierarchy (often in response to Catholicism's hierarchical structure which can be easily seen as an innovation that hasn't much to do with pure Christianity). Its differs across Islam too, Shiite's usually have a more elaborate hierarchy than Sunni, and I'm sure if things had gone differently at some point after the religion emerged there could have been an Islamic pope equivalent somewhere. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Aug 2, 2015 |
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Aug 2, 2015 19:23
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tooterfish posted:
Doesn't Al-Baghdadi claim that? "Claim" being the important factor here.
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Aug 2, 2015 19:37
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hypnorotic posted:Doesn't Tunisia have a 40% quota for women in their parliament? I'd say that's pretty loving liberal. I think ethnically and religiously homogeneous Muslim nations (like Tunisia) are entirely capable of engaging in liberal reforms, but the presence of any "other" in the midst provides overwhelming ammunition to reactionaries and overpowers any secular or liberal factions. The West should provide citizenship to any minorities in the Middle East (Christians, Druze, Zoroastrians, Alawites) then work on cleaning up the borders so as to create ethnically homogeneous nation states. Uh, so what your saying is that Muslim states can't handle minorities in the midst, but Western ones can? Feck off.
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Aug 3, 2015 04:47
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Peel posted:I'm serious guys. We've found it at last. I know we've had some false alarms in the past but for real this immigrant group is the unassimilable cancer that will destroy western civilisation.  Except with Muslims this time.
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Sep 13, 2015 20:37
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CommieGIR posted:Holy poo poo, shutup fishmech. Fishmech is nintendo kid. Or did I not get a joke 
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Sep 14, 2015 03:47
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