Ironworks Gaming Forum - Christian convert prosecuted

Wow Balintheras, such ignorance... *shakes head*

not unexpected though, at least the family went to the authorities instead of taking matters into their own hands (as is often the case when one violates the koran's teachings on leaving islam) but wait, I thought I read somewhere that "There is no compulsion in religion" oh right, Koran 2:235 link

Except it's contradicted quite heavily in the koran as well as islamic tradition, sharia law, and local customs.

Balintheras, enjoy:

Quote:

The Crusades were a small-scale defensive action designed to secure the safety of the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims. The Crusaders committed abuses that cannot be excused, but their excesses pale before 450 years of aggressive jihad warfare that went on before any Crusade was called. Today, however, the Crusades have become one of the cardinal sins of the Western world. They are Exhibit A for the case that the current strife between the Muslim world and Western, post-Christian civilization is ultimately the responsibility of the West, which has provoked, exploited, and brutalized Muslims ever since the first Frankish warriors entered Jerusalem. Bill Clinton affirmed this not long after 9/11, recounting the Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem in 1099 in lurid terms as if it were something unique in history – when actually armies often behaved this way in those days, including Islamic jihad armies. This is not to excuse the Crusaders’ behavior, but only to say that it does not bear the weight that is put on it today. The Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem, according to journalist Amin Maalouf in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was the “starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”

Maalouf doesn’t seem to consider whether “millennial hostility” may have begun with the Prophet Muhammad’s veiled threat, issued over 450 years before the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, to neighboring non-Muslim leaders to “embrace Islam and you will be safe.” Nor does he discuss the possibility that Muslims may have stoked that “millennial hostility” by seizing Christian lands centuries before the Crusades — lands that amounted to nothing less than two-thirds of what had formerly been the Christian world.

Professorial Islamic apologist John Esposito is a bit more expansive — he blames the Crusades (“so-called holy wars”) in general for disrupting a pluralistic civilization: “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.”

Esposito’s “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” were exemplified, he says, by the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638: “churches and the Christian population were left unmolested.” But he doesn’t mention Sophronius’ Christmas sermon for 634, when he complained of the Muslims’ “savage, barbarous, and bloody sword” and of how difficult that sword had made life for the Christians.

Wikipedia says mostly the same thing.

[ 03-22-2006, 08:24 AM: Message edited by: Morgeruat ]