Sunday, May 29, 2016

A historical glimpse into a problem with the "Great Brown Hope"

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About a year ago, I was lucky enough to find an excellent history of the period just after the Spanish Reconquista (1492), an old dusty tome probably few Academics today in MESA Nostra would touch with a ten-foot pole:

Michel de Cervantes, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre politique et littéraire

(“Miguel de Cervantes: His life, his time, his political and literary works”)

This study was written by an obscure 19th century French historian, Émile Chasles.  What is amazing about this book is that its theme is how Cervantes responded to the problem of Islam in his time (16th century).  It turns out that that greatest of Spanish poets (Spain's equivalent of a Shakespeare or a Dante) was positively consumed by the problem of Islam.  Readers interested in my essay on it which I published here many months ago, click here:

Cervantes and Islam.

Today's essay does not rehash that, but provides an interestingly disquieting glimpse buried deep in the dusty pages of that book (well, digitally dusty, since I accessed it via Google Books) into the problem of trusting any Muslims -- including even ex-Muslims.

The “Great Brown Hope” of my title refers to the Christian Wilsonians of the Counter-Jihad (e.g., David Wood and Sam Shamoun) whose starry eyes look forward to solving the problem of Islam through converting a critical mass of Muslims to Christianity (unless they are Christian apocalypticists; in which case they look forward to an eschatological solution to the problem of Islam, and hope their efforts at converting Muslims will save souls before the great tribulations arise to finally put an end to History).

I provide first an extended quote from the book to flesh out the historical predicament of the era; then end on a disquieting fact of history about the Moriscos who were not expelled from Spain but who were allowed to remain because they (ostensibly) converted to Christianity:

From 1453 to 1520, Europe had allowed itself to become penetrated by the Turks, and everything had recommenced for Spain. It was a second conflict: the Ottomans coming out of Asia conquered Constantinople and Belgrade. They subjugated the Slavic countries. They created a navy which dominated the east and the Mediterranean. Mahomet II, Selim I, Suleyman, founded an empire which expanded hour by hour. They took Rhodes and Cyprus, they assailed Malta — and also Greece, Italy and Spain would be, Allah willing, the three stages of their conquest. When Charles V rose to the top rank among the sovereigns of Christendom, it seemed to devolve in the face of Suleyman. Obliged to fight against the Turks, he tried to defend the northeast in assembling Germany and placating Ferdinand his brother, as well as Hungary. He protected the south in attacking Tunis and Algiers, and in entrusting Malta to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.

But this was not all: in the interior of Spain, the Moriscos revolted. They agitated and fomented division in the land and put the unity of the whole peninsula in doubt. Giving aid to their brothers in Africa, they introduced a new infusion of Islam in Europe, while Charles V died before this came to issue.

Let us pause to digest this. The “Moriscos” by that time (over 50 years after the liberation of Spain from Islam in 1492) were Muslims (probably a combination of Muslims and “reverts”) who had previously converted to Christianity upon the Reconquista. And yet, they proved to be such a security problem to the newly freed Spain, that the new King (Charles V) had to re-divert most of his energies from the Mediterranean problem just to take care of this rebellion.

Muslim attacks within Portugal continued to be such a problem for Charles’ successor, Phillip II, that he was unable to come to the desperate aid of Christians languishing in misery and torment under Muslim captivity; a predicament greatly lamented by Cervantes and his companions.

A sobering lesson for us today, when we think of trusting ex-Muslims.

14 comments:

Egghead said...

Here's the Jewish side of the story before and after 1492.

http://unitedwithisrael.org/jewish-history-jewish-people-find-refuge-in-ottoman-turkish-empire/

Egghead said...

Let's wrap it all up in a big red bow:

'Israeli marriages are performed under laws inherited from Ottoman times that grant each Israeli religious community's state-recognized leadership sole jurisdiction over marriage.'

http://www.timesofisrael.com/why-is-there-no-civil-marriage-in-israel/

Egghead said...

But wait! Maimonides was the parting 'gift' of the golden age of Islamic Sephardic Jews in Spain. Maimonides codified Talmudic law which brings us to the very important chicken and egg question of which came first: Tamudic Law or Sharia Law? Eh, same old, same old....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

Egghead said...

Hesp: To ignore the historical, philosophical, legal, and genetic partnerships and similarities between Judaism and Islam is to ignore truth.

'What's past is prologue.' --Shakespeare

http://www.jewfaq.org/m/ashkseph.htm

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ashkenazi-jews-dna-diseases-20140909-story.html

Anonymous said...

Egghead: Talmudic law predates Sharia law because the Talmud, which was written up around 500 AD (Anno Domini), codified the Mishna (Oral Tradition) and Gemara (commentaries on the Mishna). Islamic scholars admit to at least 90% of Islamic Law emanating from Talmudic ('jewish') Law. It was the "oral tradition" that the Pharisees supported which Christ condemned as removing God from the central point of faith and placing instead man-made laws which perverted the core teachings (view of humanity, usury, and paedophilia, amongst others).

Egghead said...

Anon: Thanks! My thought is that Jewish law with pre-existing elements of Sharia Law predated Sharia Law, but then Sharia Law influenced Jewish law - a legal race to the bottom, as it were.

The fact that enslaved Jewish scribes 'wrote' Islamic foundational documents interests me. It has been proposed that enslaved Jewish scribes purposely introduced obvious errors into Islamic foundational documents in order to 'warn' other Jews of the falseness of Islam.

But then, we find the world's oldest Koran in England - possibly predating Mohammad!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3216627/Koran-Birmingham-thought-oldest-world-predate-Prophet-Muhammad-scholars-say.html

Egghead said...

I would like to see a side by side comparison of past and present Talmudic and Sharia Law to see where they converge and diverge. The problem is that English might fail to convey the true meaning of Mishnaic Hebrew and Hebrew, and Classical Arabic.

Egghead said...

'Any discussion of the relationship between the two systems must therefore concern itself with two phases: (1) the early history of Islam, characterized mainly by Jewish influence on Islamic law; and (2) greater influence of Islamic law on Jewish law as Islam consolidated its political power and evolved its own legal principles, from the 8th to the 12th centuries.'

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0011_0_10121.html

Egghead said...

'Their influence upon each other was more than just a simple two-way process: Gideon Libson (in Halakhah and Reality in the Geonic Period) explains it as a feedback model in which the Talmudic system first impacted Islam, which at a later stage left its imprint on Talmudic law.'

http://www.thejc.com/judaism/judaism-book-extracts/115805/the-talmud-and-islam

Egghead said...

Clearly, Jews - who first wrote Islamic foundational documents and who later spent many hundreds of years administering Islam for Muslims - greatly impacted the content, impact, and dispensation of both Sharia Law and Talmudic Law.

We need only to look to our current Western legal system filled with Jewish litigants (Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc.), lawyers, judges, media, business people, and rulers to see the Jewish impact on our legal system in well less than one hundred years. Federal rule over states. Civil 'rights' for all minorities - instead of the Christian majority. Abortion on demand. Hate speech. Gun control. Infinite third-world immigration. Polygamy. Lack of meaningful usury laws. Lack of rule of law for elites.

The US Constitution has now 'become' a 'living document' where even - perhaps particularly - free speech is a target intended to conform to Jewish concepts - with free speech ceding to 'acceptable' speech. Acceptable to whom?!

Egghead said...

Read about Henry Ford - and then ponder if it is an accident (or an eye for an eye) that Dearborn is the current Islamic capital of the USA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States

Egghead said...

Then, read about Martin Luther - and ponder if it is an accident (or an eye for an eye) that Germans have been a target for genocide since before WWI (from Communism), WWI, WWII, and now Merkel's invitation to African Muslim invasion.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-39/was-luther-anti-semitic.html#storystream

Egghead said...

'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.'

Note that I used mainly JEWISH sources above!

I have yet to write about the Young Turks (Crypto Jews) who perpetrated the Armenian Christian genocide.

Ah well, when I have more time....

Egghead said...

Here is a good place to start:

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/10/25/the-doenmeh-the-middle-easts-most-whispered-secret-part-i.html

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/10/26/the-doenmeh-the-middle-easts-most-whispered-secret-part-ii.html