don't know if this has been posted here yet

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but i found it interesting, would have posted a little time back but wanted to get a source the mods were ok with, I myself am unaffiliated so to speak, so I have no bones in it, just curious on the take from the politically like minded.

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1159094813

Muhammad's Sword

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. no evidence whatsoever?

In Persia, during the Safavid dynasty of the 16th and 17th centuries, Jews were forced to abandon their religion, proclaim publicly that they had converted to Islam, and were given the name Jadid-al-Islam (New Muslims); in 1661 an edict was issued overturning this forced conversion, and the Jews returned to openly practising Judaism. Similarly, after a pogrom in 1839, the Jews of Mashhad were forced to convert to Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Jew

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2. sorry

no evidence whatsoever?

to what were you referring about no evidence, if it was from the avnery article please be a little more clear.

[Fredda Weinberg]

3. I quoted from the article and refuted the assertion

Jews have been forced to convert to Islam and it didn't take long to find "evidence".

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4. you quoted nothing,

you clipped a public forum and showed an occurrence of forced conversion.

is that in your opinion as far as this article goes in describing a long term "50 generation" relationship? what are your feelings as to christian forced conversions over the history of the last 2000 years in comparison?

I did not post this as a point to be picked apart piece by piece, I'm sure avnery is already dealing with that and since he his the one who wrote it please take your two second debunking there.

mods please lock and delete if you feel needed.

[Fredda Weinberg]

8. I took my subject line from the article - just added the ? n/t

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10. I caught that now, sorry

a "snip" can make a difference, that was a ways down the article and I thought the end was more inter sting than the beginning, please forgive my misunderstanding of your response.

[sam sarrha]

5. however the Buddhists ..and others didn' fare so well.. ie: Sudan genocide

and the Sudan genocide is against fellow Muslims..

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7. at the time

were the muslims and jews respectful of each others religion because of heritage or trade?

[sam sarrha]

18. muslems cant exchange money or profit from lending it, so they hired jews

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6. guess i was looking for a little more than

gotcha your wrong, if thats the answer to religion for you then stop looking at other's questions, you already know it all and you don't care to share that wealth of knowledge do you?

[Fredda Weinberg]

11. I'll happily share my wealth of knowledge - how many here

have studied the bible in its original language, with all the Aramaic commentaries?

I understand what you're after - and the truth is, as usual, more complicated that it first appears. Yes, Jews were prized in the Ottoman empire, but it was always in subjugation. As long as we didn't threaten political power, we were just another "people of the book."

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12. then not much has changed i see.

edit: political power held by jews in america is highly suspect by some, christian political power is almost a prerequisite, and muslim political power, well we'll get back to that in 30 years or so.

That all jumps past the point avnery made here tho, he claims jews have the muslims to be thankfully to as they have provided a wider berth than have the christians.

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9. I apologize for say you quoted nothing

I went back through the article and could not find what you were referring to, Then it hit me, it was the first line from the first paragraph I had posted, sorry for that. I think I remembered it as being a paragraph referring to toledo spain, and not the thrust of the article as it may have seemed, and nothing in the wi ki article referred to that.

Thus my confusion.

but like I said I was going to post this a couple days ago and I snipped and saved some of it then.

The part of forced conversions to me is not a huge issue, there was alot of that going on back then. I was more interested in the relationship between muslim and jew and how that has morphed into what we have today.

[Fredda Weinberg]

13. What happened is that we established our own state

That took confrontation out of the spiritual realm and dropped it smack down into the military arena. So looking at our respective histories doesn't shed much light on the current conflict. Romanticizing our past relationship isn't useful either - which is why I pointed out the factual error in the article.

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14. if I may as a disinterested party to your conflict

ask this of your statement,

do you realize what a statement like that actually says to a non believer?

let me break it down,

we took property and called it our state.

we took disagreement and placed it the military war machine.

history doesn't matter.

propaganda isn't useful.

there was a factual error in avnery's statement.

[Fredda Weinberg]

15. Do you realize that you're speaking to an atheist?

So you've got two non=believers here ... except that I know history - and what you describe fits the US experience to a 'T'. The Jewish National Fund, on the other hand, made every attempt to purchase land for settlement, but this still left tenant farmers displaced.

As for the "military war machine", I'm glad Israeli pilots are no longer dropping seltzer bottles instead of real bombs. As a "disinterested party", your opinion may differ.

[razors edge]

16. whoa

I was trying to understand where the real split between cultures came from, we obviously can't fix the problem if we refuse to understand where it started.

I guess my history is a little lacking, how many F-16s sorties did the american frontier settlers fly in to drop 30 year old cluster bombs on the Comanches?

I wasn't alive then and hope you weren't either, I can understand the fear of living on the front lines never knowing when a war will end with no way out. I guess I will never understand those who wish to live on the front line with no end allowed.

We had slavery here too, Is that next in the occupied territories, since if the americans who lived more than a hundred years ago did it that must make it right yes?

[Fredda Weinberg]

17. Well, so much for theology

This thread now belongs in the I/P forum.