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The Muslim Brotherhood wants this back
The Islamic Society of North America, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has published an article that calls Andalusia – the hottest bit of Spain – a “paradise” that will return when “the only victor is Allah.” It reads like part travelogue and part religious tract, claiming that Andalusia was a region of tolerance “for 800 years” when occupied by Muslims, was then ruined by “the insanity following the Spanish reconquista” and, only today, has regained some of its former lustre thanks to growing interest in Islam in the region. Quote: “In 2006, Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said that Spain was indebted to Islam for its great historical contributions.” Mr Zapatero also legalised gay marriage, so it’s fair to presume that he’s not too keen for the Caliphate to come back.
The article actually makes some very good points. Islamic Andalusia was a cultural centre for western Europe, did tolerate the presence of Jews and Christians and did see a great many natives convert to Islam. Within Spain, that interpretation of history has become institutionalised as the country has tried to make peace with its Muslim minority and preach its own brand of multiculturalism. But it’s only half the story. According to the New York Times:
Of course, even this was arguably preferable to what followed the Spanish reconquista – an era characterised by violent mass pogroms against the Jewish population.
Nevertheless, there’s something both creepy and presumptuous about a Muslim writer visiting a Christian country and yearning for its “return” to the fold. Creepy because, for many Islamists (the author of this travelogue not included), that return will be by compulsion rather than evangelical outreach and church picnics: Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, once wrote that "Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, south Italy, and the Roman sea islands were all Islamic lands that have to be restored to the homeland of Islam… it is our right to restore the Islamic Empire its glory." Such sentiments are also presumptuous because they imply that certain parts of the globe spiritually “belong” to people who “owned” them for a bit in the past. And if we’re really going to divide up the world by that logic, I’d like to make a counter offer to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Can we Christians have North Africa back? After all, it was once a centre of Christian civilisation – some of the earliest Christian communities were found there. You want brilliant theologians – Africa gave us St Augustine. You want devotion – Africa gave us the Desert Fathers. You want beauty – Africa gave us stunning iconography. You want learning – Africa gave us the libraries and schools at Alexandria. So Andalusia for Egypt seems a fair swap. After all, those pagan pyramids can surely be of no use to the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Free speech, human rights,Freedom, equality and accountability. We all human are same.Balochistan act for justice on a wide range of issues.Event and News related to Balochistan and world. Baloch In Balochistan have been disappeared and hanged and or murdered by Pakistan's military and securities agencies and Iran regime. Pakistan rarely allows journalists or human rights organizations to travel freely in Balochistan and coverage in the world press is inadequate.
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Muslim Brotherhood wants Spain back. Can the Christians have Egypt in exchange.
Was the Islam Of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?
A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building -- hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years.
But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration.
It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled their flag in 1492, marking the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Less than a decade later, forced conversions of Muslims began; by 1609, they were being expelled.
That lost Muslim kingdom -- the southern region of Spain the Muslims called al-Andalus and is still called Andalusia -- now looms over far more than the new mosque's garden. And variations of ''the Moor's last sigh'' -- the sigh the final ruler of the Alhambra supposedly gave as he gazed backward -- abound.
For radical Islamists, the key note is revenge: in one of Osama bin Laden's post-9/11 broadcasts, his deputy invoked ''the tragedy of al-Andalus.'' For Spain, which is destroying Islamic terrorist cells while welcoming a growing Muslim minority (a little over 1 percent of Spain's 40 million citizens), the note yearned for is reconciliation.
The sighs have also included a retrospective utopianism. Islamic Spain has been hailed for its ''convivencia'' -- its spirit of tolerance in which Jews, Christians and Muslims, created a premodern renaissance. Córdoba, in the 10th century, was a center of commerce and scholarship. Arabic was a conduit between classical knowledge and nascent Western science and philosophy. The ecumenical Andalusian spirit was even invoked at this summer's opening ceremony for the new mosque.
That heritage, though, can be difficult to define. Even at the mosque, the facade of liberality gave way: at its conference on ''Islam in Europe,'' one speaker praised al-Andalus not for its openness but for its rigorous fundamentalism. Were similar views also part of the Andalusian past?
The impulse to idealize runs strong. If Andalusia really had been an enlightened society that combined religious belief with humanism and artistry, then it would provide an extraordinary model, offering proof of Islamic possibilities now eclipsed, while spurring new understandings of the West. In Spain, that idealized image has even been institutionalized. In Córdoba, a Moorish fortress houses the Museum of the Three Cultures. There was once a time, the audio narration says, when ''East was not separated from West, nor was Muslim from Jew or Christian''; that time offers, it continues, an ''eternal message more relevant today than ever before.'' In one room, statues that include the 12th-century Jewish sage Maimonides; his Islamic contemporary the Aristotelian Averroës; and the 13th-century Christian King Alfonso X are illuminated as voices recite their most congenial observations.
A more scholarly paean is offered in ''The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain,''(Little, Brown, 2002) by Maria Rosa Menocal, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Ms. Menocal argues that Andalusia's culture was ''rooted in pluralism and shaped by religious tolerance,'' particularly in its prime -- a period that lasted from the mid-eighth century until the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 1031. It was undermined, she argues, by fundamentalism -- Catholic and Islamic alike.
But as many scholars have argued, this image is distorted. Even the Umayyad dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far from enlightened. Issues of succession were often settled by force. One ruler murdered two sons and two brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in Córdoba were answered with mass executions and the destruction of one of the city's suburbs. Wars were accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom. Córdoba itself was finally sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal library destroyed.
Andalusian governance was also based on a religious tribal model. Christians and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had the status of dhimmis -- alien minorities. They rose high but remained second-class citizens; one 11th-century legal text called them members of ''the devil's party.'' They were subject to special taxes and, often, dress codes. Violence also erupted, including a massacre of thousands of Jews in Grenada in 1066 and the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.
In fact, throughout Andalusian history -- under both Islam and Christianity -- religious identity was obsessively scrutinized. There were terms for a Christian living under Arab rule (mozarab), a Muslim living under Christian rule (mudejar), a Christian who converted to Islam (muladi), a Jew who converted to Christianity (converso), a Jew who converted but remained a secret Jew (marrano) and a Muslim who converted to Christianity (morisco).
Even in the Umayyad 10th century, Islamic philosophers were persecuted and books burned. And despite the Córdoba museum's message, Maimonides and his family fled Muslim fundamentalism in Córdoba in 1148 when he was barely in his teens. Averroës was banished from Córdoba about 50 years later. Tolerance may have left less of a cultural mark than intolerance: the historian Joel L. Kraemer has suggested that in Andalusia, a sense of precariousness inspired mysticism, esoteric teachings and a ''prudent dissimulation'' before Islamic superiors.
And what of Andalusian cultural interchange? Ms. Menocal cites the ways Islamic styles appear in Spanish synagogues (one, in Toledo, even incorporating Koranic inscriptions) and in the 14th-century Christian palace the Real Alacazar in Seville. But far from exhibiting convivencia, these resemblances display the power of a culture as dominant as American popular culture is now: it is imitated even if otherwise opposed.
None of this, though, reduces the impulse to idealize Andalusia. One reason may be that it looks so good given what followed. In the 1391 pogroms in Christian Spain, for example, an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed, 100,000 converted and 100,000 forced to flee -- a prelude to the 1492 expulsion of all Jews and the 17th-century expulsion of all Muslims. In comparison, many societies might resemble paradise.
But there was also something intrinsically astonishing about Andalusian culture. A visitor feels that instantly in its surviving buildings. They, too, invite idealization, but their power has little to do with notions of tolerance or liberality.
In the great mosque of Córdoba, for example, begun in the eighth century, the geometric effects are breathtaking. Cascading matrices of arched stone, which once framed thousands of worshippers, lead the eyes outward toward the ever-receding edges of perceptible space. Later Islamic styles retain that sense of enclosure and complexity: filigreed ornamentation surrounds arches and windows, shaping the inner world as much as framing the outer one.
But these varieties of Islamic style, far from reflecting a humanistic vision, suggest a world governed by the rigors of the intellect and the strictures of law. That world, whether in a mosque or a palace, presumes submission and declares mastery. It also seduces, for within its all-encompassing bounds, playful ornamentation and speculation take flight.
But the individual is not the focus of attention. The position or status of the individual is. This is quite different from the humane ideal so often attached to Andalusia's name. The outcome is not a version of tolerance, though at its best it can offer a version of the sublime. The viewer is absorbed in a formal world that overwhelms, inspiring awe with intricacies that seem beyond comprehension.
The Alhambra is a monument to the Andalusian sublime. It is a pillared paradise, calmed by the murmur of fountains. The throne room, dazzling with mosaics of sunlight and filigree, is crowned with a wooden model of the Islamic heavens.
But the Alhambra is hardly a model for contemporary aspirations. It does not frame the world; it divides it. It is both a fortress and a palace, thrusting a grim, forbidding face outward and an ornamented countenance inward. Its aggressive facade and precious interior are irreconcilable. It was the last Muslim redoubt in a Christian realm, an embodiment of the Moor's last sigh.
And when this monument to a culture's grand, expansive dreams and its quest for reflective purity finally fell, the Christians understood the message in their own way. In 1492, the year of its fall, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand triumphantly met in Alhambra's halls and there committed themselves to both expansion and exorcism: they sent Columbus away on his voyage and expelled the Jews from Spain. The resulting sighs and satisfactions are still being sorted out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/arts/was-the-islam-of-old-spain-truly-tolerant.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration.
It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled their flag in 1492, marking the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Less than a decade later, forced conversions of Muslims began; by 1609, they were being expelled.
That lost Muslim kingdom -- the southern region of Spain the Muslims called al-Andalus and is still called Andalusia -- now looms over far more than the new mosque's garden. And variations of ''the Moor's last sigh'' -- the sigh the final ruler of the Alhambra supposedly gave as he gazed backward -- abound.
For radical Islamists, the key note is revenge: in one of Osama bin Laden's post-9/11 broadcasts, his deputy invoked ''the tragedy of al-Andalus.'' For Spain, which is destroying Islamic terrorist cells while welcoming a growing Muslim minority (a little over 1 percent of Spain's 40 million citizens), the note yearned for is reconciliation.
The sighs have also included a retrospective utopianism. Islamic Spain has been hailed for its ''convivencia'' -- its spirit of tolerance in which Jews, Christians and Muslims, created a premodern renaissance. Córdoba, in the 10th century, was a center of commerce and scholarship. Arabic was a conduit between classical knowledge and nascent Western science and philosophy. The ecumenical Andalusian spirit was even invoked at this summer's opening ceremony for the new mosque.
That heritage, though, can be difficult to define. Even at the mosque, the facade of liberality gave way: at its conference on ''Islam in Europe,'' one speaker praised al-Andalus not for its openness but for its rigorous fundamentalism. Were similar views also part of the Andalusian past?
The impulse to idealize runs strong. If Andalusia really had been an enlightened society that combined religious belief with humanism and artistry, then it would provide an extraordinary model, offering proof of Islamic possibilities now eclipsed, while spurring new understandings of the West. In Spain, that idealized image has even been institutionalized. In Córdoba, a Moorish fortress houses the Museum of the Three Cultures. There was once a time, the audio narration says, when ''East was not separated from West, nor was Muslim from Jew or Christian''; that time offers, it continues, an ''eternal message more relevant today than ever before.'' In one room, statues that include the 12th-century Jewish sage Maimonides; his Islamic contemporary the Aristotelian Averroës; and the 13th-century Christian King Alfonso X are illuminated as voices recite their most congenial observations.
A more scholarly paean is offered in ''The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain,''(Little, Brown, 2002) by Maria Rosa Menocal, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Ms. Menocal argues that Andalusia's culture was ''rooted in pluralism and shaped by religious tolerance,'' particularly in its prime -- a period that lasted from the mid-eighth century until the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 1031. It was undermined, she argues, by fundamentalism -- Catholic and Islamic alike.
But as many scholars have argued, this image is distorted. Even the Umayyad dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far from enlightened. Issues of succession were often settled by force. One ruler murdered two sons and two brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in Córdoba were answered with mass executions and the destruction of one of the city's suburbs. Wars were accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom. Córdoba itself was finally sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal library destroyed.
Andalusian governance was also based on a religious tribal model. Christians and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had the status of dhimmis -- alien minorities. They rose high but remained second-class citizens; one 11th-century legal text called them members of ''the devil's party.'' They were subject to special taxes and, often, dress codes. Violence also erupted, including a massacre of thousands of Jews in Grenada in 1066 and the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.
In fact, throughout Andalusian history -- under both Islam and Christianity -- religious identity was obsessively scrutinized. There were terms for a Christian living under Arab rule (mozarab), a Muslim living under Christian rule (mudejar), a Christian who converted to Islam (muladi), a Jew who converted to Christianity (converso), a Jew who converted but remained a secret Jew (marrano) and a Muslim who converted to Christianity (morisco).
Even in the Umayyad 10th century, Islamic philosophers were persecuted and books burned. And despite the Córdoba museum's message, Maimonides and his family fled Muslim fundamentalism in Córdoba in 1148 when he was barely in his teens. Averroës was banished from Córdoba about 50 years later. Tolerance may have left less of a cultural mark than intolerance: the historian Joel L. Kraemer has suggested that in Andalusia, a sense of precariousness inspired mysticism, esoteric teachings and a ''prudent dissimulation'' before Islamic superiors.
And what of Andalusian cultural interchange? Ms. Menocal cites the ways Islamic styles appear in Spanish synagogues (one, in Toledo, even incorporating Koranic inscriptions) and in the 14th-century Christian palace the Real Alacazar in Seville. But far from exhibiting convivencia, these resemblances display the power of a culture as dominant as American popular culture is now: it is imitated even if otherwise opposed.
None of this, though, reduces the impulse to idealize Andalusia. One reason may be that it looks so good given what followed. In the 1391 pogroms in Christian Spain, for example, an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed, 100,000 converted and 100,000 forced to flee -- a prelude to the 1492 expulsion of all Jews and the 17th-century expulsion of all Muslims. In comparison, many societies might resemble paradise.
But there was also something intrinsically astonishing about Andalusian culture. A visitor feels that instantly in its surviving buildings. They, too, invite idealization, but their power has little to do with notions of tolerance or liberality.
In the great mosque of Córdoba, for example, begun in the eighth century, the geometric effects are breathtaking. Cascading matrices of arched stone, which once framed thousands of worshippers, lead the eyes outward toward the ever-receding edges of perceptible space. Later Islamic styles retain that sense of enclosure and complexity: filigreed ornamentation surrounds arches and windows, shaping the inner world as much as framing the outer one.
But these varieties of Islamic style, far from reflecting a humanistic vision, suggest a world governed by the rigors of the intellect and the strictures of law. That world, whether in a mosque or a palace, presumes submission and declares mastery. It also seduces, for within its all-encompassing bounds, playful ornamentation and speculation take flight.
But the individual is not the focus of attention. The position or status of the individual is. This is quite different from the humane ideal so often attached to Andalusia's name. The outcome is not a version of tolerance, though at its best it can offer a version of the sublime. The viewer is absorbed in a formal world that overwhelms, inspiring awe with intricacies that seem beyond comprehension.
The Alhambra is a monument to the Andalusian sublime. It is a pillared paradise, calmed by the murmur of fountains. The throne room, dazzling with mosaics of sunlight and filigree, is crowned with a wooden model of the Islamic heavens.
But the Alhambra is hardly a model for contemporary aspirations. It does not frame the world; it divides it. It is both a fortress and a palace, thrusting a grim, forbidding face outward and an ornamented countenance inward. Its aggressive facade and precious interior are irreconcilable. It was the last Muslim redoubt in a Christian realm, an embodiment of the Moor's last sigh.
And when this monument to a culture's grand, expansive dreams and its quest for reflective purity finally fell, the Christians understood the message in their own way. In 1492, the year of its fall, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand triumphantly met in Alhambra's halls and there committed themselves to both expansion and exorcism: they sent Columbus away on his voyage and expelled the Jews from Spain. The resulting sighs and satisfactions are still being sorted out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/arts/was-the-islam-of-old-spain-truly-tolerant.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Global Terrorism and Islam, Tarek Fatah: Islamic Terrorism demands Nothing But Death
Tariq Fateh talk in New Delhi on Global Terrorism and Islam:
"Islamic Terrorism has just one demand--Death"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REEqpNgpQ88
"Islamic Terrorism has just one demand--Death"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REEqpNgpQ88
Canadian writer and advocate of a progressive and liberal Muslim identity Tarek Fatah delivered his lecture in a seminar organise by India Foundation in New Delhi on Global Terrorism and Islam.
Pakistan violence worries Balochistan voters.
Despite increased security following Quetta bombings, election workers and voters are on edge.
Several political candidates in Pakistan's western province of Balochistan have been the victims of election-related violence since campaigning began in April.
Some polling stations have been blown up and many teachers, who are required to oversee voting on May 11, are refusing to do so.
In the provincial capital Quetta, many people said that they would not vote despite the increase in security.
Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab reports from Quetta.
Several political candidates in Pakistan's western province of Balochistan have been the victims of election-related violence since campaigning began in April.
Some polling stations have been blown up and many teachers, who are required to oversee voting on May 11, are refusing to do so.
In the provincial capital Quetta, many people said that they would not vote despite the increase in security.
Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab reports from Quetta.
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