He's just going to say the US put the Shah and Saddam in power, it's the usual line, the only answer to each person which would address all the persons is to say.

When these proxys are put in play the US works under the idea that they are the best candidate, unfortunately power corrupts and both became corrupt Saddam in fact showed his meglomania during Kuwait. Now how does a person say that either of these men were US puppets or had the okay from the US to persecute their population if these men always kept the US and her allies in check?

Fun fact: Muhammad was Buddhist

Actually his tribe was and still is pagan, not sure about buddhist as the Arabs had thier own set of gods.

I’ll reply to both of your posts in this single quote.

I really like how you used the point of view of a single person who decided to leave said religion. I can easily find scores of sources of Christians (or other) people becoming Muslim with opposite points of view. Is it more probable that he turned away from Islam because Islam is “inherently evil” or is it that his personal experiences within his family and country (considering Afghanistan being the most brutal of any nation)? I think it is far more probable that it has everything to do with his personal experiences and the extreme view his nation puts on the Hadiths, not the Qur’an or Islam itself.

I also disagree with your view on religious titles. But, that is really a different topic all together. Just pointing out that Muslim does not mean someone who follows Islam, it means “one who submits himself to God”. In a general sense, this is why Muslims refer to all past prophets as Muslims, even though Islam as a named religion didn’t exist.

You’re history is a bit skewed here. Unlike the Catholic Church that immediately forced religion on the peoples their empire conquered, including Africa and the Americas, the Arab invaders allowed every area free religion and the ability to govern their adherents according to their own laws. This includes the allowance of their own judges and Priest full control over their clergy. Granted, I’m sure they were not allowed to come out and openly denounce Islam, but that would be the only real difference between the Arab Empire then and the common use of Freedom of Religion in the western world now.

Islam itself took centuries to become the dominate religion in each and every one of these areas. You bring up the Philippines as an example of devastation. However, it was never under Arab rule. It became the most populace Islamic state solely due to centuries of Arab trading that eventually caused the nation to almost completely convert. Sure today they are extremist but so is the case with all Dark Age Islamic nations; which is the real point of the OP, btw.

What do modern inventions have to do with any of this thread? You mention these as if the foundations of most of this were not based in various parts of the world including the Arab/Islamic empire. Where did the foundation of all higher math come from? (Algebra) Who saved the, essentially, entire Greek thought and literature from devastation? Who had the largest and first real world library, until it was destroyed by the Mongols, who themselves very soon afterward became Muslim? Who advanced the study of the stars far beyond where the Greeks and others started? Who created distillation, purification, oxidization, ethanol, 2,000 various medical substances, various highly used acids, arsenic, coffee, restaurants, sugar refining, tons of spices put into foods (this is mainly towards the west), kerosene, petroleum industry, various specialties in pottery and fabrics, kerosene lamp, waste removal, surveying instruments, modern soap, toothpaste, perfumes and deodorants, Agencies, College, charitable trusts, drugstores, medical schools, public hospitals (including the sanitation of), various forms of automation (including programmable), abacus (i.e. the first computer), various pump designs, gas masks, adhesive bandages, surgical suture, tracheotomy, marching bands, fireproof clothing, abus gun, metal cased rocket artillery, mechanical analog computers of various types for navigation, basis of observation tubes which later begat the telescope, homing pigeons, scientific method itself, guitar, …

I can go on with tons of other innovations that all stemmed from the Islamic empire and Arabs in particular. They form the foundation of nearly every level of science and medicine. See this Wikipedia page for a good summary and tons of sources. This was all due to Islam’s origination in being a free and open society.

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

So, yes, while there is obviously cases where any nation learned from another, (your example of the number 0), it is also well known that Arab society during this time was the peak of world culture, science, medicine, navigation, stellar observation, math, etc. Hence, why it’s called the Arab Golden Age. This all is supported by the freedom that Islam used to allow based on what is actually written in the Qur’an which would disallow the entirety of what is the modern Islamic nation and its full adherence to its own made up Hadith.

Also, your ignorance on the influence Muslim Spain had on the beginnings of the Renaissance is simply lacking of world historical knowledge. Black Plague only supported the medical advances and general cleanliness Spain and the rest of the Muslim world was already commonly using. Hell, just a quick study of the effects of the Black Plague on the Islamic Empire as compared to Europe is enough to prove the differences in culture during that time.

Now moving on to your next post…

At least you did recognize the actual context of the quotes, yet you still throw that out because of the use of generic words like “unbelievers”. That makes absolutely no sense at all. I mentioned in another post that it was the only term usable in this context. They were not fighting foreign armies. They were not fighting Persians or Romans. They were fighting other Arabs. So, the verses could not possibly of used a national specific term as nothing existed. The only differentiating choice was the most obvious and only thing left, was religion. So, the Qur’an uses the term nonbelievers.

Fact is, all of your quotes refer directly to wars they were in. They were meant to keep the Muslim fighters engaged and unafraid to fight for their freedoms against the pagan Arab’s assaults. No different than a speech given by a coach before a game.

I also notice how you gloss over the phrase “But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.” Clearly this was regardless if they were converted or not. Simply put, if one seeks peace you must offer it back. The greater majority of any war verse always ends like this where God wants you to accept

peace with those you’re fighting without any limitations or conditions. These endings directly contradict your assertion that they are globally to fight any non-Muslim.

I find the entire last paragraph a horrible insinuation (seriously mothers who send off kids to suicide, wtf) . All it does is to promote my OP in that Islam is in its Dark Ages and requires a renaissance. Plenty of non-Muslims have done the same ignorant suicides based on their belief system. Kamikazes come to mind most recently. Additionally, the entirety of the Crusades is another, as was the infighting in Northern Ireland. Again, Islam and the Qur’an is not the culprit here. The extremists who use Hadiths and manipulated Qur’anic verses to push a largely uneducated and hopeless society to perform actions and create laws that are clearly against what the Qur’an actually dictates as well as the greater majority of the history of Islamic culture are the ones to blame.

Fun facts: My facts are usually falsehoods... Including This fact/falsehood. What say you now?

(1) Non-islamic people had much less rights than islamic people in islamic countries. Non-christians and non-jews had almost none.

(2) Algebra is pretty basic mathematics and it comes from India. It's called algebra because it was introduced to Europe through the Arabs.

(3) Same as above. Europeans didn't know it was invented by indians.

(4) Medieval monks. On the other hand the islamic conquest of the Byzantine empire almost wiped them out. The final destruction of the library of Alexandria happened during the early islamic rule by the way.

(5) Libraries are an invention of the late antiquity.

(6) The (hellenistic) greeks already knew the size of the circumference of the earth, the mechanics behind the tides, the eliocentrism and a lot of things. Not to mention the calendar, which is a pretty difficult astronomical task.

(7) You may be surprised to know the origin of the most part of these things.

By the way, Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery in 1962, UAE in 1963, Oman in 1970.

1) Every society the ruling party has advantages over the others. However, I was referring directly to religious freedoms and in that Islamic empire was centuries ahead of anyone else at the time and FAR more advanced that today's Muslim nations. This supports my OP in that Islam is not the cause of this extremism, but its the extremists themselves and their made up Hadiths.

2) You're basically right. The basics of what became algebra do date to Indians. However, Arabs are the ones who finalized it as a distinct math discipline as well as much of its techniques. From Wikipedia:

While the word algebra comes from the Arabic language (al-jabr, الجبر literally, restoration) and much of its methods from Arabic/Islamic mathematics, its roots can be traced to earlier traditions, most notably ancient Indian mathematics, which had a direct influence on Muhammad ibn MÅ«sā al-KhwārizmÄ« (c. 780–850). He learned Indian mathematics and introduced it to the Muslim world through his famous arithmetic text, Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians. He later wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, which established algebra as a mathematical discipline that is independent of geometry and arithmetic.

3) I actually did not know this. I thought only the concept of zero came from Indians, but the use of a decimal based system stemmed from Arabic.

4) I wouldn't fully agree here. When the Roman Empire fell to barbarians, Greek literature was being tossed out. The Islamic Caliphs had already begun translating and hording great literature from the rest of the ancient world and among that was the Greek literature. This is specifically why a lot of astronomy uses Arabic words, which were simply translated from previous Greek names and works. Also, the Library of Alexandria's destruction is not actually known. There are some Arab sources that claim it was from Arab invaders, but many disagree with this for various reasons. Is it possible, yes, is it fact, no.

http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom This is the library I was referring to. I did not state it was the invention of all libraries, just the first that's specific intent was to house all the world's knowledge. Granted, that title of 'first' probably belongs to the Library of Alexandria, but none the less, this library shows the great lengths the Islamic empire went for in studying information and knowledge. Something its clearly not known for now, but was an essential part of early Islam where there was no distinction or confrontation between science and religion.

6) Again, I did not state they invented Astronomy. Just propelled the tools and knowledge base from what they gained in Greek literature. Many unique tools and the beginnings of the telescope all stem from this expansion of the study of astronomy.

7) You may be simply washing aside anything an Arab or Muslim has accomplished over time. I prefer to stick to actual history and historians view points.

8) What does slavery have to do with this? First of all, slavery in the Qur'an is heavily mitigated and based on those rules it is no where near the same as slavery in the US. There are more ways to get a person out of slavery in Islam than to be a slave. Fact is, slavery was simply a part of society then and isn't even discussed in other religious literature, so by that can we take it to mean it was also accepted in any form for others?

It was just to put things in perspective, because I think that you are a little too enthusiast. For example, the Arabs call the "Arab numerals" "Hindu numerals", and the Latin numerals were decimal if you know what decimal actually means. When you say that the Islamic empire was century ahead of its time for religious freedom, you should study a bit more the history of the Roman empire, or even of the Kingdom of Sicily.

The slavery thing is on topic, because, you know, social and political knowledge is also important. In your OP you said you hope in an Islamic Renaissance, well a Renaissance doesn't happen all of a sudden, it needs a lot of social and political advancements and a lot of self-awareness from the masses: civil rights, constitutional laws, a political system are all advancements that happened in a time span of centuries in the western world.

Actually credit goes to the Mongols, whose vast Eurasian network managed to bring together disparate European, Muslim, Indian, and Chinese sciences, but that's a debate for another day.