Saudi Islamic scholar misunderstands Islam, says democracy and Islam not compatible

Islam was invented somewhere between the 6th and 8th century AD: **centuries** after the advent of the **Iron Age**.

The Iron Age, which followed the Bronze Age, seems to have begun around 3000 years ago - i.e. around 1000 BC.

So, strictly speaking, if one uses the archaeologists' chronology, Islam arose **millennia** after the *end* of the Bronze Age (the Bronze Age can be very roughly dated from about 3300 BC to 1200 BC.

Islam is well and truly a child of the 'Iron Age', and well into the Iron Age, at that.

Strictly speaking, Dda, your chromoly is correct. Islam is a late Iron Age ideology. But intellectually, they reflect more closely the mindset of a previous age where Jinns, women suppression, witches, slave taking and tribal wars dominate their universal view of the world. This Muslim cleric is being true to form, seeing his universe through the lense of more barbaric times. The rest of the world moved on. Saudi theology is stuck thousands of years ago, with modern weapons to carry out their primitive barbarism.

The thing is, sharia is fundamentally inhuman and antihuman.

The sharia ban on music, visual and plastic representation of living beings, alcohol and pet dogs - which ban though it has never been perfectly achieved has been repeatedly *attempted* and is always there as the Mohammedan ideal - seems to me to be tantamount to an attempt to undo humanness itself (since as far as we can tell, from the archaeological record, for over 30 000 years humans everywhere have been making carvings and paintings depicting living and mythical beings, humans have been using musical instruments for some 35 000 years [as witness a 35 000 year old bird-bone flute recently discovered], have had pet dogs/ camp dogs for thousands of years, and the making and drinking of some kind of alcoholic beverage is found in most societies both ancient and modern. )

Never mind about Iron or Bronze, Islam isn't even *stone age*, it's *pre*-stone age! (Think about the fact that in the most strictly Islamic states - ignore Mogul and persian miniatures, they were created in any case in despite of Islam, not because of it - there is no visual art that could equal the awesome paintings created by the stone-age artists of the Chauvet cave, or of Lascaux or Altamira).

Post scriptum.

Terms like 'stone age', 'bronze age' and 'iron age' are merely convenient labels to do with *technology*.

What age are *we* living in? The iron age? The steel age? (People in widely-separated places figured out how to make some kind of steel surprisingly early on within the so-called iron age, though cheap good-quality mass-produced steel wasn't possible till the 1850s, so I guess one could argue that in 1858 the Iron Age gave way to the Steel Age. Those who might claim that we are now in the Plastics Age and/or the Silicon Age need to reflect on just how much our infrastructure still depends on lots of high-quality steel).