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Just yesterday at the Coalition to Stop Shariah press conference in Washington, an Al-Jazeera reporter dismissed Shariah finance as innocuous largely because it was, he said, based on the shared values of the "Abrahamic faiths." Fjordman deals with that assumption here.
Hardly a week goes by without somebody claiming that Muslims and Westerners have a "shared cultural heritage." I strongly object to this claim. The only "shared history" Europeans have with Muslims is being at the receiving end of more than 1300 years of Jihad warfare. The re-writing of Western history has become so bad that even playwright William Shakespeare has been proclaimed a closet Muslim. "Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism," said the Islamic scholar Martin Lings, himself a Sufi Muslim, in 2004. According to The Guardian, Lings argued that Shakespeare's work "resembles the teachings of the Islamic Sufi sect" in the International Shakespeare Globe Fellowship Lecture at Shakespeare's own Globe Theatre in London. Lings spoke during Islam Awareness Week.As Robert Spencer commented back then, "Shakespeare is just the latest paradigmatic figure of Western Christian culture to be remade in a Muslim-friendly manner: recently the State Department asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Christopher Columbus (who in fact praised Ferdinand and Isabella for driving the Muslims out of Spain) was aided on his voyages by a Muslim navigator. It is a sign of the times when this kind of thinking is no longer confined to Islamic apologetics websites, but is taken up by the Globe Theatre and the U.S. State Department — hardly representatives of the cultural fringes — and even American textbook publishers. The state of American education is so dismal today that teachers themselves are ill-equipped to counter these historical fantasies. They will become willing propagators of the new history: nothing to fear from Muslims, you see. Shakespeare was one of them. Oh yes, and Goethe. And Abraham Lincoln's mother."
The funny part is that the concept of "theater" hardly existed in medieval or early modern Islam. There was no Muslim Shakespeare because there could be no Muslim Shakespeare. It's yet another part of the Greco-Roman heritage which was not "shared, preserved and passed on to us" by Muslims since they were never interested in it even at the best of times.Hebrew had been dead as a spoken language for centuries already in Roman times, but it was the language of the Hebrew Bible, and a Jew such as Jesus of Nazareth would almost certainly have known some Hebrew. He would most likely also have been familiar with the languages of the two previous empires that had ruled the Levant, the Aramaic of the Persians (and the Assyrians) and the Greek of Alexander the Great's empire. The one language he didn't know was Latin. The extent to which he spoke these languages is disputed, but it's likely that he knew something of all three. Jesus, who founded the religion which was to become Christianity, probably spoke at least some Greek. I'm pretty sure Muhammad did not.
Paul, the person who shaped Christianity more than anybody next to Jesus, was a Jew, but also a Roman citizen. Although the relationship between the Roman state and the adherents of the new religion was complex (some of the early Christians were executed by Roman authorities, including the founder himself), Christianity grew and eventually conquered the Roman Empire from within. Christianity was a Roman religion from the very beginning. It would be fair to say that it was born out of a Jewish conceptual universe, but was shaped in a Greco-Roman environment and baptized in a spring of Greek philosophy and Roman law.
When the American Founding Fathers in the eighteenth century discussed how the shape of their young Republic should be, they were influenced by, in addition to the English parliament and the French thinker Montesquieu (who was inspired by the British political system), descriptions of democratic Athens and the Roman Republic through Aristotle's political texts and Cicero's writings, among other things. None of these texts were ever available in Arabic, Persian or Turkish translations. Cicero was extremely influential in European thought from the Renaissance through the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment, yet totally ignored by Muslims. Roman law is secular and changeable, unlike sharia which is eternal and institutes a religious apartheid system. Roman law was used by Europeans, but not by Muslims. Of the Greek heritage, Muslims even during the so-called "golden age" were uninterested in the concept of democracy, men ruling themselves according to man-made laws.
One of the reasons why Greek natural philosophy was so quickly assimilated into European universities during the Middle Ages, in sharp contrast to Islamic madrasas, was that the earliest Christian theologians were familiar with Greek philosophy and borrowed from its vocabulary and conceptual universe. For Muslims who came from the Arabian Peninsula, the Greco-Roman legacy was an alien intrusion which their cultural immune system failed to fully internalize and eventually rejected. This does not mean that they never borrowed from it when it suited them. They did; but it was never "theirs." For Christianity it was one of its two parent cultures, the other being the Jewish spiritual legacy as contained in the Hebrew Bible. This had practical consequences, for instance in the positive Christian view of pictorial art, which came from the Greco-Roman parent culture. This was never shared by Muslims.
Art is never just "art." It always reflects the world-view of a particular culture. Islamic art has usually been quite sterile. Muslims have created some miniature paintings, but never anything comparable to Western art or ancient Greek art for that matter, and virtually no sculptures. In contrast, the Greek artistic legacy left a major imprint on early Buddhist art and sculpture in the border regions of northern India, after Alexander the Great's conquests. You could thus argue successfully that Westerners share a "Greek legacy" with Asian Buddhist-influenced cultures more than with Muslims. To me, the Islamic failure to fully internalize Greek science is indicated by their failure to internalize the Greek spirit as reflected in arts and politics.
I could add that Christians and Jews, as well as most of the pre-Islamic peoples of the Middle East, from ancient Egyptians and Sumerians to Phoenicians and Persians, accepted wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages as a part of their culture, even as a part of their religious culture. Muslims never formally did this. The Middle East went from being a global center of civilization to a global center of anti-civilization during its Islamization. This corresponds roughly to the time when wine and beer were enjoyed as an accepted part of the culture, which it was in pre-Islamic times and still is for non-Muslims. The Japanese had drinking games in medieval times. They still have this, only now they call it "karaoke." I know of virtually no advanced civilization, from the Chinese to the Mayas in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, who did not enjoy some form of fermented beverage. Wine is civilization. Wine and beer.
The idea of a "shared monotheism" is false, too. Christianity with its concept of the Trinity is akin to soft-polytheism from an Islamic point of view. The religious texts are clearly different, not to mention the personal examples of the founders of the two religions, Jesus and Muhammad. Islam became a major world religion through armed conquest and the creation of an empire. Christianity became a major world religion by gradually taking over an already established empire, the Roman Empire. Moreover, the Zoroastrian and Jewish communities in the Middle East (except for Israel) have been all but wiped out by Muslims, and the Christian communities are in serious decline.
A researcher from Denmark, Tina Magaard, has spent years analyzing the original texts of different religions, from Buddhism to Sikhism, and concludes that the Islamic texts are by far the most warlike among the major religions of the world. They encourage terror and fighting to a far larger degree than the original texts of other religions. "The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with," says Magaard. Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting against people of other faiths. "If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to ask Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is," she says.The main problem with Islam isn't that it is a stupid religion, as some people say, but that it is a violent one. I personally consider Scientology to be a stupid creed, but I haven't heard about many people living in fear that Tom Cruise will cut off their head while quoting poems of L. Ron Hubbard and then post a video of the deed on the Internet. Christianity and Judaism are NOT like Islam. The concept of Jihad is unique to Islam among all major religions.
We do have a shared humanity with Muslims, as we do with everybody else, but we do not have a shared heritage with them. Even the Greek scientific legacy was used differently by Europeans, as I will show later in my history of optics.
Posted by Robert at November 7, 2008 4:32 PM
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What is the motive behind the re-writing of Western history and the Western cultural heritage that Fjordmann refutes here? After all it isn't being done solely by Muslims. The idea seems to have taken hold that this nonsense MUST be put over because of some value inherent in doing so, not because if its truth.
One's impression is that a very dark image of the past, characterized by religious intolerance, wars of religion, book burnings and people burnings, Black slavery, and above all the Nazi Holocaust, is laying a very dead and very heavy hand on the contemporary mind. So much so that objectivity and factual accuracy are considered to be unimportant when compared to a "right attitude" wherever relations between cultures, ideologies, and peoples are concerned. Never mind getting the facts right, get the attitude right.
Is this an admirable failing? Is it degeneracy? I guess you can take your pick. One thing I have no doubt that it is: dangerous.
Posted by: Novalis![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 7, 2008 5:44 PM
This essay -- a good one -- reminds us that we ought to have the thread of Western Civilization taught. Cicero? Montesquieu? How many of us know much about this?
And the effect of that ignorance is that people do not perceive themselves to be from a particular historical origin.
Of course, these days, if the schools taught about such people, the message would include fiction about how important Mohammed was to this or that Western thinker.
Posted by: StillBreathing at November 7, 2008 5:44 PM
Great insights...
From article: "If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem.
Yep...and therein lies the answer to the riddle of the invisible moderate...
Posted by: duh_swami at November 7, 2008 5:51 PM
From the essay by Fjordman:
Wine is civilization. Wine and beer.
I like this guy. I have often expressed the same sentiment.
My brother's self-procalimed 'liberal' (as if it were a creed) friend tried to tell me about all of the wonderful Muslim contributions to art and science. I explained to him that there were virtually none. That those few examples that it has become popular to refer to were contributions either borrowed from other cultures or created by non-muslims in a state of dhimmitude. Unfortunately that is not how it is being taught these days.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0739130943/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance
Posted by: Richard at November 7, 2008 6:45 PM
good post , Hannah Arendt's books "Human condition" and "Between past and future" are must reads if you want to understand which concepts (roman greek and judeo christian) shaped our civilization , and how they have influenced us ....
Posted by: Péguy at November 7, 2008 7:11 PM
"Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism," said the Islamic scholar Martin Lings, himself a Sufi Muslim, in 2004. According to The Guardian, Lings argued that Shakespeare's work "resembles the teachings of the Islamic Sufi sect"
...................
What sickening rot. There is no figure like Shakespeare in the Muslim world. Nor is there a Muslim George Bernard Shaw, Muslim Tennessee Williams, Muslim Stephen Sondheim, or even Muslim Greg Kotis.
As Fjordman says, it is not part of the culture. Even that, in and of itself, might not matter that much. Many cultures have adopted foreign traditions, and then made them their own. But Islam, as a rule, is not open to adopting elements they either consider "jahillya"--pre-Islamic "ignorance", or "bida"--innovation. (The one clear exception to this is the avid acceptance of violent weaponry.)
from above:
Muslims have created some miniature paintings, but never anything comparable to Western art or ancient Greek art for that matter, and virtually no sculptures.
..................
Even here, figurative miniature painting only flourished in places that had a strong pre-Islamic tradition of picture-making--Anatolia (Turkey), Persia, and India. The practice never became common in most of the Islamic Middle East and Mahgreb.
Moreover, the golden age of this sort of painting--such as Indian Mughal miniatures--often lasted no more than a century or two after Muslim conquest. In all cases, this work was eventually stamped out by Muslim "purists".
We can see this from the recent flap over Muslims trying to suppress images of Mohammed from appearing on Wikipedia--even though the images had been historically created by Muslims.
Fjordman is right--Islam is largely artistically sterile. There is some nice mosque architecture--although even this was often based on Byzantine, Persian and Indian prototypes--or just stolen outright as in the case of Hagia Sofia. There is some lovely calligraphy and tilework, but that is pretty much where it ends.
There is no Muslim Shakespeare, or Muslim
Rembrandt, or Muslim Mozart. And if there had been, they wouldn't have been allowed to live, as they would have fallen afoul of Shari'ah law as soon as they began to create.
at November 7, 2008 7:36 PM
Shared Heritage you have got to be kidding. Islam has no shared heritage with any religion-none. The only heritage it has is that of death and destruction of all that is not Islamic--meaning the civilizations of non Muslims. You see Islams only heritage is of hate, violence, bigotry, pedophilia, misogyny. That is the mantel to which it belongs.
Posted by: savsiv at November 7, 2008 8:16 PM
Thanks for exposing the lies spread by that Muslim fanatic and Perennialist fraud Martin Lings.
By the way he was echoing a lie perpetuated by Idries Shah in his book The Sufis.
Muslims just can stop taking credit for things they can't create.
That said, years ago a I purchased a book by Lings about the bard and it was bad to say the least. He may have been a scholar at one time, but since his conversion to Islam he's went right to the shitter.
He's reduced to selling lies and half-truths just like his fellow Perennialist Hossein Nasr about Islam.
Posted by: waltc at November 8, 2008 12:07 AM
"If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem...
This is the problem that makes Islam more a Cult than religion. It also shares with other violent cults the total control over its individual members with harsh punishments for anyone who disobeys. Islam tries to rewrite the individual as some member of a larger collective, and will enforce this redefinition of the new non-thinking, unreasoning non-individual with harsh punishments, even death. This makes Islam NOT a religion, as they paint themselves, but a politically violent Cult, and whether or not the Koran is the "literal word of God" has no meaning here. Yes, we have a problem. How do we neutralize this vicious political Cult, worshiping a blood-thirsty Arab pagan god Allah, that would drag us back to a primitive pre Greco-Roman era in our modern times? There is the problem.
Posted by: Battle_of_Tours at November 8, 2008 1:08 AM
The thing is you can't deal with Islam in the West until you deal with Left that has aided and abetted Muslims to gain power here and to silence opposition. Much like they have with illegal immigration, you can't find a Leftist/Democrat who supports secure borders or booting the buggers out.
Without the Left and its resources in the media, politics, the judicial system and academia, the Islamic advance would have gone nowhere.
And as long as the Left is intact they will act as a shield and protect Islam and its violent followers. You need to find a way to neuter the Left before you can take on Islam in the West.
Posted by: waltc at November 8, 2008 2:26 AM
Shakespeare was Judeophobic (Merchant of Venice), misogynic (Taming of the Shrew), glorified murder (Julius Caesar), and who knows what else: I don't blame Martin Lings or any Mohammedan for claiming him as one of their own.
Had I been a Brit, I'd say, "Take him".
Posted by: Infidel Pride at November 8, 2008 3:41 AM
What Novalis describes as “a very dark image of the past [which lays] a very dead and very heavy hand on the contemporary mind” is a result of the ignorance of Western thought and philosophical underpinnings StillBreathing alludes to. A broader view allows one to incorporate, and properly evaluate, the “bad stuff”, as opposed to thinking Western culture is all about it. Perspective, if you will.
Without it, for instance, one sees only the fact that slavery existed in America, not the long & noble struggle (starting with the writing of the Declaration of Independence) to end it.
I will never forget speaking about Hitler and the Second World War to my daughter & her husband (then in their twenties). I was talking; they weren’t saying much. Finally they looked at each other, and my son-in-law said something to the effect that they’d “heard of Hitler, but didn’t really know much about him”. (!)
American public schools graduates, both of them.
at November 8, 2008 8:58 AM
We have a "shared heritage" with Scandanavian pre-Christian religions. Just look at the definitions of the days of our week. So what? Hiltler, Himmler and Streicher exulted in this "shared heritage", and used it as the basis for the new/old Aryan religion, with SS officers as the annonted high priests. The SS officers were formally annointed as high priests in a religious ceremony, and considered themselves as religious warriors, not military soldiers.
Does this "shared heritage" mean the nazis were OK? Should we have opened up a dialogue, instead of a second front, with them? It was close-minded of us to criticize them for the concentration camps. What about the clean, safe streets of Berlin? Well, safe for aryans, anyway. As dhimmis, the concentration camp inmates were sheltered, fed, and provided with freedom creating work. "Arbeit Macht Frei".
The Scandanavian/Aryan "shared heritage" demanded this. The nazi jizya was paid, with proper, religiously mandated public humilation, in the concentration camps. American arrogance destroyed this "shared heritage". Dialogue and mutual understanding would have been much preferred and beneficial. To the nazis. anyway.
Posted by: demolay at November 8, 2008 10:21 AM
Devout Muslims cannot tolerate the possibility that great works of art may be created by non-Muslims. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I heard it seriously argued that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Shaykh Spir.
Well, it is an interesting variation on the rivalry from Francis Bacon!
Posted by: LondonBorn&Bred at November 8, 2008 12:02 PM
Rather than "shared heritage," what Islam has done is "stolen" some prophets and traditions from the Judeo-Christian religion to name-drop into the Quran and thereby make this desert cult appear world-class. Of the 20 Biblical characters named in the Quran, the latter text omits half of the information detailed in the Bible. Consequently, it is impossible to understand the Quran and some of the Muslim traditions without referring to the Bible. A report on these "shared" traditions is found at
http://www.annaqed.com/en/content/show.aspx?aid=16106
"Why All Muslims Need the Bible"
Posted by: Chris at November 8, 2008 12:47 PM
Posted by: gravenimage
There is no Muslim Shakespeare, or Muslim
Rembrandt, or Muslim Mozart. And if there had been, they wouldn't have been allowed to live, as they would have fallen afoul of Shari'ah law as soon as they began to create.
Nor will the be a Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin or a great friend of theirs ROY HARPER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-xmmae__BU
Posted by: InfidelK9 at November 8, 2008 2:13 PM
Infidel Pride wrote:
Shakespeare was Judeophobic (Merchant of Venice), misogynic (Taming of the Shrew), glorified murder (Julius Caesar), and who knows what else: I don't blame Martin Lings or any Mohammedan for claiming him as one of their own.
Had I been a Brit, I'd say, "Take him".
..................
I take your point--I remember how shocked I was by the misogyny of "The Taming of the Shrew" when I first read it as a teenager. But I hope you reconsider.
It is hard to know how much of the British and American stage (and later film) tradition would exist at all without Shakespeare. And he is important not just as a progenitor--how much work produced in the sixteenth century is still avidly read and produced today?
There is a reason for this. Despite his sharing many of his contemporaries biases, there is a essential humanity to his work. Even in "The Merchant of Venice", there is Shylock's wonderfully humane, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" soliloquy--"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions...".
Romeo and Juliet, sadly, is still quite topical today--it is hard to read or see this play and not think of "honor killings".
And I have been extremely inspired by the St. Crispin Day speech in Henry V, which begins"
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..."
I can't think of a better way to describe the defenders of the West against Jihad and Shari'ah.
at November 9, 2008 10:37 PM
The thing that makes Western civilization superior than others revolves around One Jewish Man: Jesus of Nazareth.
Posted by: Crusader at November 10, 2008 6:55 AM
gravenimage
Apologies for this late response - I didn't check out this thread yesterday.
I get your point on how Shakespeare enriched English literature, and provided a reasonably good window into history of that era - Richard III, Henry V, et al. I also recognize that he was playing to sensibilities of that era, and that while it was okay in Europe to malign Judaism then, that doesn't mean that that would apply today, and similar arguments go vis a vis women's rights in 'Taming of the shrew'. Normally, I'd judge such works and characters by the era they were in.
However, it is important to note that while in the West and (non-Islamic) East anti-Semitism is frowned on (nobody would think of spitting on a Jew just because he's a Jew the way Antonio did against Shylock, even though some on either fringe do accuse Jews of owning world banking and Hollywood), stories like Merchant of Venice, although probably pure fiction, are used by Mohammedans to reinforce the stereotypes of Jews as greedy money-lenders who charge interest. It's in that context that I remarked that Shakespeare is one part of English culture that might have prospered in Islam (I wouldn't ever say or think that about Sir Walter Scott, R L Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, nor non-literary luminaries such as Sir Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, et al).
As to whether English drama and other literary tradition would exist or not, being from the non-literary field myself, I wouldn't hazard a guess as to how different it'd be. However, given that I don't think that ill about the other greats that I mentioned above, it's probably a safe bet to say that while different, there would still have been a great English cultural tradition. Unlike Islamic 'golden age' which was heavily dependent on a few luminaries who were either non-Muslim or only first or second generation Muslim, there was a whole range of artistes in every European country, and the lack of any one of them wouldn't have made that country a non-starter.
Posted by: Infidel Pride at November 11, 2008 8:12 AM
Infidel Pride, thanks for your response.
Posted by: gravenimage at November 11, 2008 2:25 PM
Re. Shakespeare - the gender relations depicted in, inter alia, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and Merry Wives of Windsor, would be simply unimaginable for any Muslim.
Look at the way Beatrice and Benedict deal with each other! (And those who slander a woman, in Much Ado, get exposed and soundly punished, and the man who has believed them, has to repent of the cruel things he's said to the girl, and ask her forgiveness).
Look at Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It. Look at the way they talk to their men.
Look at Twelfth Night - 'because thou art virtuous, dost thou think there shall be no longer cakes and ale'?
Look at the 'Merry Wives'. Mistress Nan chooses her own husband, all by herself; neither the man her father means for her, nor the man her mother means for her; meets him secretly; skips off with him sans chaperone and gets married; and instead of an 'honor' murder, as would happen in dar al-Islam, her parents grit their teeth and accept the fait accompli.
Look at Midsummer Night's Dream: the couple who want to get married in spite of their parents' wishes, ultimately manage this, and nobody gets killed for it.
Measure for Measure has a pretty good go at skewering the hypocrisy of the sort of people who create Religious Police to Promote Virtue and Punish Vice.
Then we could think of the feisty heroine of All's Well That Ends Well, and the free public mixing of men and women, and their witty conversation, in Shakespeare's earliest play, 'Love's Labour's Lost'.
Shakespeare inhabits a very different world from that of Islam.
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at November 12, 2008 4:28 AM
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