JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I know it is. It is a clearer conclusion than the one put forth by them, though.
History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
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Original Sin is absent in Judaism, too, but there are still examples of grace (even though they is not named as such). Moses convinces God not to destroy the Israelites after the Golden Calf episode, for instance. But in Islam God is a remote and absolute sovereign.
Here's a bit more to read about this: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/122502/our-abraham-not-theirs
Yes, but martyrdom is not encouraged in Christianity. The death of Christians is viewed as tragedy, and it is that tragedy that makes the triumph over death so powerful. In Islam sacrificing your life is seen as an honor, not unlike Germanic warriors going to Valhalla.
The Arab hostility to Israel is a modern example of this mentality, but Israel doesn't persecute Muslims for being Muslims. It occupies Muslim (or 'Arab,' but the idea is inherited from Islam) land. The two are often conflated, creating the belief that the Zionists and Crusaders are in alliance or whatever.
Absolutely. I don't claim that this represents all Muslims.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
What do you mean by unimaginable precisely? Allah's mercy is an important aspect of Islamic belief.
Crafty edit, Mouthwash.
But yes, what Jackelgull said. Allah is Most Gracious and Most Merciful, so says the Quran over and over to emphasise those qualities. Heck, Islam's lack of Original Sin demonstrates this as Allah forgave Man for the transgression.
But yes, what Jackelgull said. Allah is Most Gracious and Most Merciful, so says the Quran over and over to emphasise those qualities. Heck, Islam's lack of Original Sin demonstrates this as Allah forgave Man for the transgression.
I make a lot of edits, sometimes back and forth. You'll have to point it out to me.
I don't think so, mercy and justice are inseparable in Islamic texts. What do you think divine grace means, besides unmerited salvation?
It can be argued that Al-Ghazali and the Asharite school was responsible for the idea of God's absolute will (certain philosophers argued that God could command Muslims to worship idols or commit murder and they would have to obey), but the general tone of the Quran seems to reflect this. Every person is his own sacrifice.
I don't recall saying that the Arab ethnicity and Islam were the same thing. Certainly Islam was based on Arab values
I don''t think monotheism qualifies as an 'Arab value'.
That depends on what version of Islam you have in mind.
Speaking of grace, Allah seems to have more in store of that than the biblical God. But then, grace is another Christian concept, just as original sin is, so we should be careful for anachronisms here.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
The Prophet as a hole was more concerned with reforming the Arabs then tearing their civilization down and rebuilding anew. He kept many Arab practices he found acceptable, and prohibited the ones he (or Allah, if your a Muslim) disliked.
Neither do I. That's why I never said any such thing.
That's not really what I argued. Seventh-century Arabia was divided into various competing tribes, but Muhammad made his believers into an all-incorporating 'tribe' of their own. If anything, Islam created the idea of an Arab nationality. There's a strong case to be made that Islam was an Arabized version of the other monotheistic religions, incorporating Biblical characters but placing them in Arabia; in a sense casting the Arabs as the 'Chosen People.' The behavior of the early Caliphate demonstrates this. Conversion to Islam was actually discouraged since it gave foreign peoples the same rights as Arab ruling class, and finally non-Arab Muslims were just taxed the same way that non-Muslims were (there was a Caliph in later centuries that tried to reverse this, but his name slips me at the moment).
I don't think that Muhammad, whoever he was, really intended for his religion to spread outside of Arabia.
So you did't say this:
Well, that maybe because of your view of Islam as a 'tribe'. Which contradicts your own words that 'Islam created the idea of an Arab nationality' (whatever that means), because a nation by definition transcends the notion of a tribe.
I'm not sure where the idea that 'conversion to Islam was actually discouraged' comes from. In fact, partly due to the tax freedom for Muslims, mass conversion occurred in conquered territories. Which in turn was one reason to abolish such tax freedom.
By the way, even present day Saudi Arabia has various tribes - all Muslim. The current Saudi dynasty is from one such tribe.
That's Pelagianism. Orthodox Christianity (not just Calvinism) teaches that salvation is a gracious gift, not something that's earned.
You're right of course, but the situation was more complex than that. I was thinking not of philosophical sects but of the mystery religions, which were not as ethnically-focused as the religions you mention - indeed some made a virtue of their (supposedly) foreign origins. E.g. the cult of Cybele and Attis revolved around a story set in Anatolia although it was a Greek cult. And Mithraism made a great deal of the Persian origins and ethnicity of its god, although it was a Roman religion.
sweeping generalisations in general are bad.
Also Calvinism is weird. You tell me that you re predestined to go to heaven or hell and that's like telling me I can do whatever I want because if I'm saved I am already saved and if I'm condemned I'm already condemned. It's just weeeeird.
James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner takes this criticism to extremes, but of course it's a caricature. In Calvinism, if you're one of the elect, you wouldn't want to do anything contrary to God's will because you'd have the action of the Holy Spirit in you. It's not some kind of weird arbitrary legal judgement.
That's not correct, at least not universally so. In ancient Christianity it was usual to see martyrdom as something to be celebrated and yearned for. The central text for this was Ignatius of Antioch's letter to the Romans, where he goes on about how he's looking forward to being thrown to the lions. The acts of the martyrs are full of examples of Christians rejecting every offer of leniency from the authorities because they wished to die. In times of less persecution, people would lament how complacent everyone had become, and reminisce about the good old days when there were more martyrs. And of course the Donatist church fetished martyrdom to such an extent that they had groups of brigands called Circumcelliones who, in the absence of any persecuting authorities, would commit acts of mass suicide.
What a Protestant thing to say! Traditionally in Christianity at least grace means any gift of God that is unearned, that is to say, pretty much everything. This includes but is not limited to salvation. In particular all human faculties and abilities derive from divine grace.
You're misinterpreting what I said. Islam absorbed monotheism from Judaism and Christianity, but its version of history and values were Arabic in origin. This whole time I've been arguing that Islam is an Arabized version of the other monotheistic religions.
I'm using the term tribe a bit loosely; it wasn't really a tribe but a community. He didn't abolish genealogical tribalism, but he made it secondary to the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim (and I believe- though I'm not entirely sure- that that sort of tribalism was frowned upon until the Umayyad era.)
https://books.google.co.il/books?id...Imb3Ljc6FyQIVxIMPCh2rrQSt#v=onepage&q&f=false
(It should be noted that converting in the Umayyad period did not release one from property tax, and often the Jizya as well. The converts were also not treated as full members of the Ummah.)
I think the problem is with 'Arabised' - 'changed', certainly, but 'Arabised' suggests that the change had something to do with characteristics unique to and shared by all Arabs. This happens a lot in comparative religion studies - people treat 'our' society as complicated, with lots of different people with different beliefs, agendas, ideas and so on, who have conflicts, rivalries and hierarchies between themselves, but 'other' societies as simple mobs of people who all think in the same way.
To be honest, I can't think of a better term. 'Arabized' is definitely anachronistic, but the Quran reflected the practices, beliefs and customs of seventh-century Hejaz, which were absorbed into modern Arab society through Islam.
On the same note, though - what are the practices, beliefs and customs of your society? Does everyone believe and do the same things? Is a Jewish coffee-drinker who plays baseball on weekends less English than a Christian tea-drinker who plays cricket? If not, then what is 'English' about drinking tea, being Christian, and playing cricket? If so, is this argument not becoming a very narrow, racialised nationalism?
Now who's applying anachronistic labels? Religion as a personal belief rather than a way of life is an early-modern phenomenon, and I'm not thinking of foods or games when I refer to customs. Take your pick from here.
These are later religions, though, established by the more 'globalized' societies of antiquity, but I think we're getting off-topic. My understanding is that Christianity combined both aspects of religion- that of Jewish particularism and mystic universalism. Hence I refer to becoming Chosen without actually abandoning a previous identity.
This would go a long way towards explaining the success of early Christianity, since it is hard to imagine it as a simple cult, wherein one makes a sacrifice or gesture to Jesus for his favor, or the mythology of a single ethnic group.
I stand corrected. However, this doesn't really detract from my criticism of Islam.
I'm not sure that's true. Yes, before the early modern period it was impossible to separate religion, politics and customs, but that's not the same as to say that groups could be reduced to their religions. Take ancient Rome, for example, when you had followers of all sorts of different religions - various flavours of Roman polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, eastern religions and so on - all feeling equally 'Roman'. It wasn't the case that some of these were wrong, even if the Jupiter-believers might have felt that way - rather it was a matter of negotiating what 'Roman' identity meant, with some people trying to tie it to religious practices, and others saying that those didn't matter.
To play the game on your pitch - if somebody from (say) Riyadh doesn't believe that pork is unclean, does that make them less of an Arab? If the debates within Christianity and Judaism are anything to go by, it's not obvious that it even makes them less of a Muslim.
I would hesitate to all the citizens of the Roman empire a single ethnicity. If the citizens of a single polity all define their identity by that polity, is the concept of ethnicity even useful?
I'm not saying that religious values and ethnic values are identical (though they sometimes are), just that there is a lot of overlap. Note that plenty of Middle Eastern Christians still hold on to pre-Arabic identities such as Phoenician, Assyrian, Aramaic, etc. Some of them will call themselves Arabs, but was even that the case before the rise of modern Arab nationalism?
You've still got the problem of dividing 'ethnic values' from 'things which most of the group happen to do, but are actually unrelated to the identity' or even 'things which the powerful people in the group want to make everyone think are essential to being in the group, so as to exclude anyone who doesn't do them'. Do you have a solution?
I don't understand why that's a problem. I'm not saying that all religious beliefs automatically demarcate ethnic boundaries. I'm just saying that ethnic groups have a belief in their own uniqueness, their history and often destiny. This manifests as mythology, but widespread religions can also play the role. Sometimes certain customs are seen as essential to being part of that group (circumcision) but not always.
I think you're making this way more complicated than it is. It isn't always possible to separate ethnicity from religion from culture (nor to understand the causal relationship between them), and I did not claim otherwise, but that doesn't make those terms utterly useless.
I think you're oversimplifying things to make them fit the story. Ethnic groups don't have beliefs; people do, and different people within the same ethnic group have different beliefs. What beliefs do everyone in your ethnic group share about its uniqueness, history and destiny?
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