He wants more Muslims in the West, so he whitewashes Muslim Spain. My latest in PJ Media:
Akbar Ahmed is 75 years old and laden with honors. An internationally respected academic, he holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and is Professor of International Relations at the American University, and is the former Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain and Ireland. He has entrée to the highest corridors of power and influence. All that makes his current campaign of revisionism, designed to whitewash the historical record of Muslim Spain, all the more dangerous.
Historical revisionism is designed to influence current policy. Akbar Ahmed’s ongoing whitewashes of Islamic al-Andalus are clearly meant to break down resistance to the mass Muslim migrant influx into Europe today. Ahmed has gone so far as to call for a “New Andalusia” in Europe. In a March article in Pakistan’s Daily Times, he scolded: “Italy must remember its pluralist past.” He assumed, as have so many others, that it is the responsibility of non-Muslims in the West, and no one else, to be “pluralist” and prove their “tolerance.”
No one ever calls upon Saudi Arabia to remember its pluralist past, when Jews, Christians, and polytheists lived in Arabia. No one ever calls upon Sharia states to be more tolerant of non-Muslims. The onus is always only on the West.
In a piece published in mid-June, Ahmed claimed that the Islamic caliphate in Spain “more than any other came to represent the idea of pluralist society in Europe.”
In reality, as I show in my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, Muslim Spain was anything but pluralist — it was miserable to live as a Christian there. Christians could never be sure that they would not be harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being “pelted with rocks and dung” by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery. The dhimmis suffered severe economic hardship: Paul Alvarus, a Ninth Century Christian in Córdoba, complained about the “unbearable tax” that Muslims levied on Christians. Nor could Christians say anything about their lot, because it was proscribed by Islamic law, and criticizing Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an in any manner was a death-penalty offense.
In 850, Perfectus, a Christian priest, engaged a group of Muslims in conversation about Islam; his opinion of the conquerors’ religion was not positive. For this, Perfectus was arrested and put to death. Not long thereafter, Joannes, a Christian merchant, was said to have invoked Muhammad’s name in his sales pitch. He was lashed and given a lengthy prison sentence. Christian and Muslim sources contain numerous records of similar incidents in the early part of the Tenth Century. Around 910, in one of many such episodes, a woman was executed for proclaiming that “Jesus was God and that Muhammad had lied to his followers.”
Far from being a paradise of tolerance, Umayyad Spain became a center of the Islamic slave trade.
Muslim buyers could purchase sex-slave girls as young as eleven years old, as well as slave boys for sex as well, or slave boys raised to become slave soldiers. Also for sale were eunuchs, useful for guarding harems. Blonde slaves seized in jihad raids on Christian nations north of al-Andalus were especially prized, and fetched high prices. Slave traders would use makeup to whiten the faces and dye to lighten the hair of darker slaves, so that they could get more money for them.
A 12th Century witness of the sale of sex slaves described the market:
The merchant tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire. The merchant paints red the tips of the fingers of a white slave; he paints in gold those of a black slave; and he dresses them all in transparent clothes, the white female slaves in pink and the black ones in yellow and red.
If the girls did not cooperate, of course, they would be beaten or killed.
The primary market for slaves among Muslims was for non-Muslims, as enslaving fellow Muslims was considered a violation of the Qur’an’s requirement to be “merciful to one another” (48:29); hence Muslim slave traders had to look to non-Muslim communities for merchandise….
Read the rest here.
jihad3tracker says
This utterly pathetic taqiyya peddling happens oodles of times every month, and those who engage in it seem to believe that the cyclone of reported Muslim slaughter — available on the Internet for everyone with IQ’s higher than snails — musses our hair a bit and then is forgotten.
James Lincoln says
Because Muslims often utilize Taqiyya, how is it possible to believe anything that they say? Or, more importantly, how do you know when they are actually telling the truth?
Jayell says
You don’t bother finding out because it would tske too long to cross-check everything. Best rule of thumb:- Q. How do you know a muslims lying? A. He opens his mouth!
jack cade says
The ONLY time you can believe a Muslim barrow is when he says he will try to kill you.
J D S says
What needs to be rewritten is all the Islamic texts and then a vast brainwashing of the Muslim race…Maybe that should be reverse brainwashing, washing away centuries of being mislead by the sexual devout and mass murderer Muhammad (if in fact he ever really existed)
Susan B is getting really mad@# says
Islam is a lie built on lies and can only be sustained by more lies and violence. It is truth that will destroy this evil fascist cult because it can not survive the light of truth. That is why the powers that be are trying to shut down free speech, they fear the truth Sayers. Keep exposing this evil non-stop until it has no where to hide.
mortimer says
It is a WHITEWASH OF JIHAD and ABSURD MALARKEY to praise Islamic Spain!
Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force. Its achievements are inseparable from its turmoil.
How then can one explain the persistence of the belief that Andalusia was a land of peaceful coexistence? The historian Richard Fletcher has attempted one possible explanation: “[In] the cultural conditions that prevail in the West today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour…do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”34
Another explanation could be what one might call Spanish self-hatred, the obverse of what once was Spanish self-aggrandizement. Such a view allies itself effortlessly with many non-Spaniards’ hatred of CatholicSpain, in an attitude that sooner or later brings up Las Casas’ condemnation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas—while ignoring the question of why there was not an English, Dutch, or French Las Casas to criticize the English, the French, and the Dutch. As if these nations carried out conquests that left undisturbed the native populations of their colonial lands.
A more convincing explanation may be that extolling al-Andalus offers the double advantage of surreptitiously favoring multiculturalism and deprecating Christianity, which is one of the foundations of Western civilization. This mechanism is not unlike that in the mind of those who dislike Western culture intensely, but who with the fall of Communism find themselves without any clear alternative and so grab Islam as a castaway grabs anything that floats. So anyone who dislikes Western culture or Christianity—for any reason, be it religious, political, or cultural—goes on happily pointing out, regardless of the facts, how bad Catholic Spain was when compared to the Muslim paradise.
Rarely says
I sure don’t like his definition of a “pluralist society”.
We really must get these guys to use the same dictionary we are using and to stop using their version — a “fictionary”.
somehistory says
Tolerant of evil….no way, Jose.
This is so sickening. If not for God promising that He will “deliver us from evil,” it would be just too depressing, that these evil, lying creatures and children of demons are having so much success.
rubiconcrest says
Most people are aware of Jihad but don’t begin to understand how Islam is a multi-pronged assault on our freedoms. They don’t appreciate or respect how long Islam has been doing this and how good they are at it. They have been successful in part because most people are unaware and those that are aware grow tired of the fight. I have a brother with an MBA from UCLA who thinks this is all anti-Muslim nonsense. We have to be very patient.
Joe says
I have found it best to have a few questions that get them thinking. For example, “Do you think a person should be killed for converting to another religion?” You will find no place in Islam that allows apostates. In another example, “Should religion teach you to hate your brother?” The Koran teach hatred about 15 times in the first 17 pages.
Susan B is getting really mad@# says
+ 1 Great comment, truth will be what destroys this cult.
Lilith Wept says
That’s true and people spreading the truth of what Islam is and what it does……another lie of Islam and re writing histor is the Islamic website http://www.lostislamichistory.com
It’s full of lies that Islam is telling in order to obliterate the truth .
Lydia Church says
The only form of ‘writing’ or ‘history’ that these types are any good at!
gravenimage says
Robert Spencer in PJ Media: A Muslim Professor Rewrites History
………………………..
I’m so sick of the whitewash of “Al Andalus”. It is all bullsh*t.
dsr says
All lies. Any religious leader Mohammad who wed’s a 7 year old and screws her at age 9 is a sexual pervert – PERIOD. islam is a a religion for worshiping the sex and the devil. Because of this fact, there is no way anyone in the west will Ever accept islam as a peaceful religion.
Buraq says
Akbar Ahmed is 75 years old and ……… holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies. Ibn Khaldun …!!
Wasn’t that the Ibn Khaldun (1332 to 1406) who wrote in his widely acclaimed “AL-MUQADDIMAH”
In the Muslim community, holy war [jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defence. But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
This clown is hiding in plain sight! What a give away using Ibn Khaldun’s name!
gravenimage says
Spot on, Buraq.
TWG says
Sadly, it is the youth who are embracing islam the strongest, and most viciously. Because they are being brainwashed into believing the lies told about the history of the islamic world war all day long, as they sit in the “education” institutions listening to the likes of akbad ahmar. They’ve been taught that to even consider listening to, or reading, any of the (truthful) works of scholars such as Robert Spencer is “racist”, “islamophobic” and “xenophobic”. Take homosexuality for example. These kids have embraced the ideology with vigor, not even considering islam’s horrific treatment of homosexuals. If a Christian (or any other non-moslem) EVER said or did anything close to what islam promotes with regard to homosexuality, they and their entire bloodline would be extinguished, to say the least. Can you imagine a non-moslem religious leader such as Franklin Graham proclaiming to his flock or in the media that homosexuals are to be thrown from the tallest building or lynched on a crane in the town square? How about if a non-moslem proclaimed that women are inferior to men, lower than donkeys, their testimony worth that of half a man, and are to be beaten if disobedient, stoned to death for committing the sin of being raped by gangs of men? How about proclaiming that criticizing Christianity is punishable by death? Yeah, I can imagine the hell that would follow such statements.
Telling the truth to these kids is like exposing Dracula to Holy Water. The youth (the future) will not understand the true nature of islam until it’s too late. Their lives are headed into a very dark and dangerous Hell, thanks to the “educators”, media and globalist politicians.
With “educators” churning these dhimmis out by the millions into society, it does not take a tempest prognosticator to see what the future looks like. How very sad for them, and for all of civilized humanity.
gravenimage says
Yes–very dangerous.
The European says
The Andalusian paradise of “convivencia?”
The Umayyads, the Almohads, and the Almoravids; all of them were following the Maliki school, one of the harshest and most intolerant interpretations of Sharia law and Islamic theology. Andulsia under Islamic rule was just another hellhole, it must have looked like Afghanistan under the Taliban or parts of Syria and Iraq ruled by ISIS.
gravenimage says
+1