How do you know it is incorrect?

Red herring: Western Historians agree that...., therefor the fairytale is in fact true.

How do you know it is incorrect?

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33*.

The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.

Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.: "No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [expression], ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace."

Ibn Abdun also forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops. In fact, plagiarism is difficult to prove since whole Jewish and Christian libraries were looted and destroyed. Another prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade.

The Granada pogrom was likely to have been incited, in part, by the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq, a well known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote: "Put them back where they belong and reduce them to the lowest of the low..turn your eyes to other [Muslim] countries and you will find the Jews there are outcast dogs...Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them...They have violated our covenant with them so how can you be held guilty against the violators?"

The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt.

Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: "..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.."

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I haven't heard anything about crucifixion before.

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I'm starting to suspect that even the 'protection' offered to Dhimmis, which Abu has raised on many occasions, is a farce.

freediver wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2009 at 3:56pm:


Hamas has said it will crucify people.

Also regarding Toledo, this city is a very important site regarding relations between the West and Islam. For it was at Toledo that most of the Islamic advances in science and mathematics were relayed to Europe.

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Program of translations

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Notice how they choose to flee further into Islamic lands, rather than into Christian lands, why do you think that might be? A lot of Muslims and Christians (non-Catholics) fled into North Africa also.

Also, since Rambam studied in the Islamic university in Fez, and stayed there for quite a few years, I doubt he would've remained "disguised as a Muslim".

Also the claim that he moved to the Fatimid Caliphate is nonsense. No doubt to try and imply he left an "extremist Islamic state" to a more "tolerant Islamic state", as the Fatimds are often called, because of the fact they were astray from mainstream Islam. In fact Rambam migrated to the Sultanate of one of the strongest, strictest, orthodox Muslim reformers and fighters of Jihad against invading Crusaders of all time, Sultan Salah ud-Deen al-Ayyubi (Saladin in the West). He actually became the physician of Salah ud-Deen and lived out the rest of his days peacefully under  the rule of Salah ud-Deen. The title Ra'is al-Umma or al-Millah (Head of the [Jewish] Community), was bestowed upon him. His descendants also continued to be powerful figures under the Ayyubid and Mameluk Sultanates right up until the 14th. century.

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If the economic situation of a civilisation is the measure of it's greatness, then check your history, andd you'll see that for most of it's history, Islam was economically and militarily dominant over the West, whilst the West was backwards both ecnomically and militarily. These things constantly fluctuate and are not the measure of a civilisation's greatness.

I don't recall mentioning America nor Australia.

Islam began in the Arabian peninsula. European Christianity in that time, extended it's rule all the way down into Palestine and even across into Egypt.

Islam moved north, growing astronomically in strength, militarily, economically and technologically century after century, engulfing all of the former lands ruled over by the European Christians, and then continued north to Anatolia, west across North Africa and into the Iberian peninsula to the Pyrenees in France. This expansion of Islam continued across the Mediterranean into Sicily, Corsica and Malta (Today Maltese still speak a variety of Arabic)  and further into Anatolia, until the capital of Eastern Christianity, Constantinople, finally fell to Islam in the 15th. century. The Islamic civilisation continued it's spread into Europe until it reached the Austro-Hungarian capital.

Wealthy Europeans sent their children to be educated in Baghdad, and scientists who were persecuted in Europe traveled to Baghdad to study at Dar al-Hikmah (The House of Wisdom) a huge complex of universities setup to gather all the knowledge of the world into one place. Countless technologies and mathematical concepts were introduced to Europe through the translation community in Toledo, where works were transferred from Arabic to Latin.

This is all history, and does nobody any good today, I agree, Muslims cannot live off the past. But you must also recognise that these circumstances fluctuate, and that Islam has seen it's fair share of ups and downs, as has Eurrope/Christianity. It hasn't always been as it is today, as you seem to think.

One could also ask the question, where was Yahweh when Christians were so weak and backwards for centuries? But the question is just nonsensical, as it was when you posed it about Islam.