#islamic civilisation

[illustratus]

Attack on a Moorish camp - Defeat of the Saracens at the Battle of Tours, AD 732 — by Alphonse de Neuville

The Franks led by Charles Martel attack the Saracen camp at the Battle of Tours, halting the Muslim invasion in the year 732

#charles martel #battle of tours #battle of poitiers #franks #frankish #moors #invasion #germanic #france #art #alphonse de neuville #history #middle ages #medieval #europe #european #islam #muslim #christian #christianity #tent #battle #civilisation #civilization #western civilization #western civilisation #western europe #alphonse marie adolphe de neuville #french #treasure

[souredfigs]

Israel is an illegal state which has no right to exist and every european white settler living in the terrorist state of Israel is fully and wholly aware of the fact that they are in a land which they stole from carrying out the genocide of Palestinians who have been living there for as far back as 11000 years on the basis of a fake ridiculous piece of writing . It's very simple to understand .

#in fact the events of october and November and of the past 75 years should be a wake up call for you #its not complex #free palestine #palestine #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #fuck israel #zionism is a colonial concept exactly similar to manifest destiny and nazism #and white supermacy #zionism is a facist ideology #it has nothing to do with Judaism #just like kkk has nothing to do with Christianity #and like ISIS has nothing to do with Islam #dont ever expect me to stop posting about Palestine #if it bothers you fuck off from my page #palestine has literally existed ever since the dawn of civilisation #like Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the world #you cannot ignore history #and history is never complete without Palestinian history

[sweepingtree]

Can't win an argument so you just blocked. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.

OP literally believes in Christianity supremacy and wrongly insists that I'm insulting the Christian god by pointing out that Christianity isn't the only religion that preaches kindness and compassion. Also, they're a pro-lifer who believes that abortion is a cop out /:

I'm taking out the rubbish. I don't want that stink near where I spend my idle time.

#anon #answered ask #also thank you to geyo for pointing out my error in saying that islam predates Christianity. though my point still stands #how narrow must your worldview be to think that all morality regardless of culture and context is derived from Christian teachings? #its incredibly racist to say that countries which cultures are not based in Christianity are less civilised #thats literally like LITERALLY imperialist mindset #i know that op isn't white but damn that's literally what imperialism was based on #the idea that foreign savages need to be civilized with Christianity #this take is so so incredibly anti-indigenous too

[ccnountche]

Le Prix Littéraire de la Grande Mosquée de Paris est créé cette année dans le cadre de la promotion des livres traitant de l’Islam à travers ses aspects les plus divers, théologiques, culturels, historiques ou philosophiques.

#rentrée littéraire 2022 #littérature #prix littéraires 2022 #récompenses #distinction #Prix Littéraire de la Grande Mosquée de Paris #jury #remise du prix #cérémonie de remise de prix #lauréats #roman #fiction #essai #islam #islamologie #civilisation islamique #religion #philosophie #théologie

[metamatar]

im asking this out of pure ignorance but I've always wondered how does hinduism handle people who are not hindu? i know Christianity is essentially 'be the right kind of christian or go to hell' (so much as to beleive that Jewish people are literally devils, for example) but i was wondering how hinduism deals w people who are in proximity but not of the same religion. also if a dalit or lower caste person converts from hinduism to another religion, how does that affect thier life and how they're treated? appreciate your answer if u feel like explaining ^__^

it depends, in some parts of the country the non hindu has the same status as the lower caste dalit by default – so exclusion but in most places its a detente where religious and caste endogamy is strictly maintained. housing and employment discrimination is v common. its actually much harder to marry under the special mariage act and violence against interfaith and intercaste couples by their own families is common. in 2023, the muslim is the designated enemy of the state. the christian was fooled by the british and/or money to give up their culture or is literally a foreign agent. if you're looking for a textual answer, the equivalent of the "infidel," there isn’t really one because the streamlining of the canonical religious texts and construction of the hindu is recent. hinduism has aimed to appropriate instead of convert.

in modern india, legally anyone who is not a christian or a muslim is treated as a hindu. you are hindu by default in india to the state, governed by hindu codes for marriage and inheritance. for indigenous tribals it is a matter of coercing their children to feel shame at the (state sponsored but outsourced to private religious groups, love privatisation!!!) residential schools about their animist practices and making them worship the proper gods. for sikhs, jains and buddhists their is marginally more toleration. but they are basically seen as wayward hindu sects. this does change when they're in conflict with the majority in a way that resists "national cohesion" – see sikh pogroms in 1984 and the recent moves against sikhism due to the invocation of khalistan in the farmers protests. when dalits convert to buddhism many right wingers will invoke the spectre of predatory conversions.

since you are supposed to be hindu by default, christians and muslims are then seen as invasive outsiders and conversions are regulated very strictly by many states. it is historically true that christian missionaries brought christianity as part of a broader civilising mission, but imo it says something really depressing about hinduism that its epithets for christians is 'ricebag converts' bc people apparently converted for a bag of rice. islam's foothold in the continent is older, accompanying immigration from the west as well as the sultanate and the mughals. returning these christians and muslims to the fold, or "ghar wapsi" is a major project of the hindutva right. note that india is home to one of the world's largest populations of muslims (~200mil).

lower caste dalits have long converted to christianity and islam but caste violence follows them there anyway. caste may have textual origins in religion and focus on ritual purity but it is a socioeconomic form of subjugation. this means that while still subject to caste violence, dalit christians and muslims will be denied redressal through state protections like legislations against anti caste violence or reservations because those are restricted to hindu dalits.

#asks #religion

[thatdebaterguy]

All of Jewish history, Jewish culture, the beginnings of so many kingdoms, inventions, revelations, history changing events, all derive from this one small piece of land, inhabited by Jews, founded by Jews, lived in for thousands of years by Jews, built from the ground up and turned into a beautiful revitalised landscape by the Jews, fought for and protected by the Jews, and now finally officially held by a government to represent the Jewish and Israeli people. But this land they've owned for millennia, these buildings they've built, cities they've sprung up that began as small villages at the beginning of modern human history thousands of years ago, they now happily share this land with people who's ancestors invaded it in the 600s from the Arabian peninsula, intermixed with the local Canaanite population, drove out the Jews the same way the Romans did, and settled and colonised that land and converted the local population to Islam, only for it to be held by Caliphates and Islamic empires for centuries, the Jews living there in the tens and hundreds of thousands, they thrived, and now welcome so many Arab-Israelis, 20% of Israel's entire population, to freely live in Israel with equal opportunities.

Despite struggle after struggle, massacres, assaults, anti-Semitic acts, the worst genocide in human history, their culture lives on and can be openly celebrated while allowing so many others to come to their land and openly celebrate their own beliefs and cultures. The story of the founding of the Israeli state is one that stems from the first Kingdom of David up until the first wars to remove the modern state of Israel from the face of the Earth. It's one of perseverance, overcoming hardships, resilience and hope. And while not all the people of Israel are innocent, as it is with any country anywhere on Earth throughout history, the people of Israel should never be shunned into hiding their pride for the resilience of their people in history and the amazing things they've achieved, and learning from any past mistakes made. The Jews deserve a home, and the land of Israel has been an unofficial home for them since the dawn of human civilisations. Why is it suddenly such a crime to believe so?

To those in Israel and those who are Jewish who are good people, who live their lives peacefully, just wanting to get through another hardship without being judged for your beliefs, whether you support the Israeli government or not, I hope you can be proud of your culture, your history, without being forced to be ashamed.

#israel #politics #palestine #current events #history #jumblr #jewish

[talonabraxas]

The Cosmic Tree of Life Talon Abraxas

The Cosmic Tree is a universal archetype that appears in the symbolism and mythologies of countless civilisations. It represents the Axis Mundi, or World Axis, that connects every aspect of the universe. From the giant Ash Yggdrasil, that connected the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology, to the Islamic ‘Tree of Immortality’, and the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ in the Garden of Eden, again and again the human condition is connected to the physical and transcendental universe through the image of a plant. The motif of a sacred tree is often associated with the figure of a serpent – an emblem of the shamanic experience, ascending from the shadows to the spiritual plane.

The great Twentieth century psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed a deep understanding of the archetypes of the collective unconscious and how they emerge as symbolic images. He created an extraordinary manuscript - the Liber Novus - now commonly known as The Red Book, filled with symbolic images he discovered in the depths of his own mind. The tree was a recurring motif, pictured as both supporting and connecting every aspect of the cosmos. Planted in the earth its roots reach down through the terrestrial realm toward darkness and the shadow realm, whilst its branches stretch up through the celestial, toward the star-filled heavens.

ॐ As Above ॐ ॐ So Below ॐ

[probablyasocialecologist]

Gaza, that ancient city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, has come to be the political and moral compass of the entire world. Despite the pervasive destruction, Gaza stands not as a place in need of lessons. Instead, it is itself the poignant lesson of our modern age – a litmus test for humanity. As the death toll continues to rise, it becomes increasingly challenging to conceive of a violence more profound than that inflicted by machine guns and aerial bombardment. However, Israeli colonial violence – both in Gaza and Palestine more broadly – has historically manifested at various scales. It extends from the confines of a bedroom to encompass a neighbourhood, a whole city, and stretches to the scale of a regional geography.  Understanding the destruction of Gaza calls for a dual perspective. It requires zooming in on the intimate scales of violence while also being aware of these broader manifestations. At the core of Israeli colonialism in Palestine is the logic of partition, a paradigm fundamentally at odds with the land, its people and its history. Gaza has long been a nexus of interconnected worlds: for millennia, it served as a vital crossroads, connecting Palestine to Egypt and bridging the continents of Asia and Africa. The roads from Gaza to Bir al‑Sabe’, Jaffa and Jerusalem have witnessed the passage of visitors, merchants and pilgrims from diverse corners of the world. The city’s social, cultural and economic prosperity has been woven into its geographical openness, a defining feature in Palestine’s long history. Any thought about Gaza and Palestine’s future is bound to reckon with this history. The enduring imprints of Gaza’s geographical openness are discernible in both its social and built fabrics. This ancient city has witnessed the rule of various empires and civilisations, including the Egyptian Pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and successive Islamic dynasties – each contributing to the rich tapestry of the city. Gaza is home to historic treasures such as the Anthedon Harbour, the port that linked the city to the Mediterranean world in the Roman era; the Great Omari Mosque, one of the most significant mosques in Palestine; and the Church of Saint Porphyrius, believed to be the third oldest church in the world. These historic landmarks, among residential buildings, universities, museums and cultural institutions, have not escaped the intentional targeting and destruction inflicted by Israel. In essence, these sites embody all that Gaza stands for and Zionism doesn’t – geographical openness and historical continuity. In historical terms, the 75 years of Zionist domination in Palestine represent an anomaly, as Gaza and other cities have perennially thrived on cultural diversity and interconnection. 

#palestine #israel #gaza #zionism

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.

Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. [Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria] who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.

"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.

"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."

Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.

—

By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts.

"There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says [Ronnie Kasrils, former South African Intelligence Minister]. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."

There are important differences. Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.

White South Africa and Israel painted themselves as enclaves of democratic civilisation on the front line in defending western values, yet both governments often demanded to be judged by the standards of the neighbours they claimed to be protecting the free world from.

"The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was this analysis that said Israel is a civilised western island in the midst of these 200 million barbaric Arabs and it's the same as the Afrikaners; five million Afrikaners surrounded by hundreds of millions of blacks who are also assisted by communism."

When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.

emphasis mine. this article is from 2006 and is a part of a two-part series investigating whether israel subjects palestinians to apartheid. the first part is here. since this article was published, amnesty international, human rights watch, and the united nations office of the high commissioner on human rights, among other organizations, have declared israel’s occupation of and blockade on palestine (the west bank and gaza strip, respectively) a form of apartheid.

#israel #south africa #apartheid #long post #going to post more highlights from this piece #it is absolutely worth a close read

[good-old-gossip]

Annihilation of education: 100 European academics sign Euro-Med Monitor petition against systematic Israeli destruction of Gaza Strip’s educational system

Occupied Palestinian Territory - About a hundred leading European academics have condemned Israel’s genocide against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, ongoing since 7 October 2023, and its physical and cultural liquidation of them. including the systematic destruction of the educational system in the Gaza Strip.

In a Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor petition titled “Annihilation of Gaza Education: Israel is systematically erasing the entire educational system”, the academics decry Israel’s physical and cultural liquidation of Palestinian civilians in the Strip and express deep concern about the Israeli army’s continued targeting of academics, educational institutions, and cultural heritage sites there.

The scholars point to knowledge and education as fundamental to human civilisation worldwide, but emphasise that for an occupied people like the Palestinians, education plays a distinctly vital role in society. Education preserves hope and freedom against oppressive, apartheid-era, and depressing policies, plus fosters culture and is essential to the achievement of both individual and societal prosperity.

The current Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip have caused the entire educational process there to be completely disrupted, assert the scholars. The petition warns of grave long-term ramifications due to the bombing of homes of academic, scientific, and intellectual figures without prior notice, which has already led to the killing of hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. The academics also cite estimates from the International Monetary Fund that 70% of the Strip’s colleges and universities have been destroyed, costing the education sector $720 million.

Israeli military attacks have entirely or partially destroyed six universities in the Gaza Strip: Islamic University, Al-Israa University, Rabat University, Al-Azhar University, Al-Aqsa University, and Al-Quds Open University.

The academics state that on 11 October 2023, Israeli airstrikes completely destroyed the Islamic University in Gaza City—one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the besieged Strip—in violation of the rules of international humanitarian law. These rules prohibit deliberate attacks against civilians and require the distinguishing of civilian objects from military objectives; they also call for special protection for educational and cultural institutions.

Al-Israa University was completely destroyed after the Israeli army blew up all its buildings and facilities on 17 January 2024. Before attacking the school, Israel had turned it into military barracks and then used it as a temporary detention centre. The destruction included the National Museum, which housed over 3,000 rare antiquities under licence from the Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities. The university’s administration affirmed in an official statement that the antiquities are believed to have been stolen by the Israeli army.

Additionally, three university presidents have been killed in the Israeli attacks, along with more than 95 university deans and professors; 68 of whom held professor’s degrees. Meanwhile, 88,000 students have been deprived of receiving their university education, and 555 students were not granted the international scholarships they were offered prior to the genocide.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others have been injured during the ongoing attacks, while 231 teachers and administrators have been killed and 756 injured.

The Israeli military actions may amount to premeditated killing and destruction, i.e. an attempt to kill and silence scholars involved in the Palestinian education system, which would have a massive impact on Palestinian future generations. The petition states that attacks by Israeli forces on civilian objects, particularly those classified as historical or cultural monuments protected by special laws, not only constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but also fall under the purview of genocide.

Signatories to the Euro-Med Monitor petition urge academics, scholars, and higher education institutions worldwide to vehemently denounce Israel’s unlawful killing of Palestinian academics and its systematic destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical assets in the Gaza Strip, such as schools, universities, libraries, and archives. The academics call for the international community to shed light on this specific example of Israel’s crime of genocide, which aims to physically and culturally destroy the Palestinian people as a whole and render the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, in order to force them to relocate.

The petition demands a boycott of Israeli academic institutions that support the occupation of Palestinian lands, especially those situated inside illegal Israeli settlements and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. These establishments normalise apartheid policies against the Palestinian people, gradual ethnic cleansing, and occupation, contend the academics.

In the same vein, over 180 British academics recently signed a separate petition denouncing the effects of the ongoing Israeli military assaults on Gaza Strip educational institutions as well as the targeting of professors, researchers, and students.

Both petitions stress that these Israeli military attacks against educational institutions in the Gaza Strip represent a clear violation of international humanitarian law, and, in addition, express solidarity with the people of Gaza, particularly students and researchers, in light of the targeting of their basic rights to survival.

Source - https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6220/Annihilation-of-education:-100-European-academics-sign-Euro-Med-Monitor-petition-against-systematic-Israeli-destruction-of-Gaza-Strip’s-educational-system

#free Palestine #free gaza #I stand with Palestine #Gaza #Palestine #Israel is committing genocide #Israel is committing war crimes #Israel is a terrorist state #Israel is a war criminal #Israel is an apartheid state #Israel is evil #Israeli war crimes #Israeli terrorism #IOF Terrorism #Gazaunderattack #Palestinian Genocide #Gaza Genocide #end the occupation #Israel is an illegal occupier #Boycott Israel #gaza strip

[honeybleed]

i say this as my own opinion islam like any other religion is not exempt from criticism, however tying islam to arabs automatically when the middle east is diverse and swallowing the western media’s propaganda of arabs being barbaric rapists is dehumanising. zionism is rooted in white supremacy and the foundation of that is to always paint everybody else as sub humans. palestine along with syria & iraq has the oldest civilisation of christians and jews and they are almost gone because of israel’s relentless attack on innocent civilians. this was never a muslim vs jew issue, this is a goal to eradicate the palestinian population and i’m frustrated with seeing all these people cry out rape with no evidence as if that isn’t something UN workers and US military haven’t subjected to innocent civilians across the world. israel is murdering journalists and academics and that is one of the signs of a genocide.

[obaewankenope]

Thinking about stuff and doodling and I just had the thought that Muslim art, Celtic art, and Native American art often gets lumped together as being sort of... Uncultured? No, not that, overly simplistic in that way where someone looks at it and goes "I don't get the symbolism, ugh boring" and assumes the cultures and people who created this art (and still create it) are somehow less civilised than other groups/people (Romans vs Celts, for example, Western vs Islamic art, European vs Native American art etc) because the ways the art actually works isn't the same as the Majority Think Art Should Work.

Like, Celtic art is something I love and it's full of patterns, geometric, repeating, animalistic etc that a lot of the time, people don't get the meaning of. They'll look at it and just Not Understand why that design is circular, or where that particular repeating pattern originated and potentially why, and because of that, they just assume it's from some barbarian, uncivilised, savage people.

And this is the same sort of perspective that is all over historical perspectives of art from non-European, non-white spaces.

.

Islamic art is seen as simple and never measures up to the 'amazing' renaissance art (fuck you Boris Johnson and anyone who thinks like you) because it doesn't use actual people in its work (which meant geometry had to be a whole fucking level and meant the Islamic Golden Age was fucking Lit AF™).

[source]

I mean, just LOOK at the complexity that has been HANDCRAFTED, CHISELED, INTO FUCKING STONE that you can see on MULTIPLE buildings. How the hell can any of that be uncivilised or 'lesser' to European art? It just- it just can't.

.

Celtic art is compared to contemporary Roman and Grecian art of the time by scholars and the general public who tend to perceive it as representative of a Simple Mindset and shit which, yeah no. Like, Roman and Grecian art is amazing, I totally agree, but like it's not "better" or more "Civilised" or whatever bullshit metric is used to measure how Worthy Of Being Respected scholars used to determine how Great™ a civilisation/culture was back in Ye Olden Days. I mean, ffs go and look at some of the AMAZING torques and brooches made by celtic artisans and tell me they're Simple. You're wrong. They're amazing.

[source]

This is an 8th century brooch, the Tara Brooch, and is literally amazing. Just look at it! How tf can anyone ever think Celts were just simple or uncivilised or sth with art that fucking beautiful jfc.

.

And Native American artwork? Oh boy. The WHOLE colonialism and genocide of near enough an entire continent by European settlers and all that came after meant that anything non-European was automatically savage and lesser and needed to be Made To Look Civilised. So yeah, some of the most amazing artwork of Native American people's is just... From a European (art with people and fancy realism and all that shit, perspective) is just apparently less. Like wtf, you can see how historians and scholars for decades looked down on native American art as somehow lesser in the 'research' done on it.

When it's absolutely fucking AMAZING TOO.

[source]

This is a totem pole. That shit gets hand carved, painted, and engraved ffs. How is ANY of that barbaric or representative of a supposedly lesser or savage culture and people? Fuck colonialism and it's bullshit effect on perception of people and art and history. Just fuck that shit.

.

Like, sure, in recent years there's definitely been a push to recognise that these types of art aren't lesser or uncivilised or whatever. And I appreciate that, greatly. But then I see some bullshit hot take by Boris Fucking Johnson or some other bigoted piece of shit gain traction for whatever reason and I R A G E.

Anyway. Love all art. It's amazing.

Art is universal human expression. Treasure it.

.

.

Sidenote: In my defence rn, I'm very under-caffeinated and limited on things I can do so research quality is definitely not as good as I'd like. If you have any info, advice, or additional links for further reading/learning about these amazing art types, add them in reblogs, message me, or throw an ask my way. I live to learn and be angry on main about indignities like bigotry. ~ Kat.

#Art #Artwork #Celtic art #Islamic art #Native American art #Art history #I just... I went off a little okay.

[heretic-child]

The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, was a one-party state during the interwar period. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) of the Republican People's Party (CHP) was omnipotent. Turkey’s state ideology was Kemalism. According to Dutch-Kurdish historian and genocide researcher Uğur Ümit Üngör, this was a combination of "republicanism, secularism, statism, populism, revolutionism and nationalism".

The Turkish government believed in one people, one language, one religion: their new Turkey was ethnically Turkish, linguistically Turkish, and the faith was Sunni Islam. This ideology was spread from the centre to the periphery. Everywhere CHP party buildings were erected, the new message was proclaimed.

In Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey, Turkish centralisation met with Kurdish resistance. Turkey crushed these uprisings and strengthened the power of its central authority in these areas, which used to be only nominally under Ottoman rule. One of the most problematic areas was Dersim, located around 400 km east of the capital Ankara. In this mountainous, difficult-to-access area, central government had only nominal authority. The actual rulers were the various Kurdish tribes, who regularly clashed with each other.

The Kurds in Dersim were also a triple minority. They were Kurdish, but spoke a different language to many Kurds: Zaza. In addition, they were Alevis.

According to Üngör, Kurds from Dersim can in a way be compared with the Yazidis, who were victims of a genocide by ISIS in 2014. "Yazidis also formed their own minority group, with their own ethnic and religious identity. And they were also killed for that," he said.

Dutch anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen, who has studied Turkish, Kurdish and Zaza cultures, said that the Turkish government compared the Kurds in Dersim with the Native Americans in the "Wild West".

"The Turkish rulers considered Dersim a desolate area where 'civilisation' was not yet ruling. This area had to be civilised. The Kurds in Dersim were barbarians in the eyes of the Turkish rulers. They were dehumanised and it was easy to kill them en masse in 1937-1938," he said.

"Children from Dersim who survived the slaughter were raised as Turks and as Sunni and in the Turkish language, with the aim of extinguishing their former identity."

In this context, Üngör speaks of three hammer blows that the Dersim Kurds had to deal with:

"The first blow was when Turkey decided in 1937-1938 to destroy the pilgrimage sites and to kill the carriers of its own Dersim culture. The second blow came when children from Dersim were raised Turkish and Sunni, and Dersim itself was filled with Sunni mosques. The third blow was the massive exodus of Dersim Kurds from Dersim, who immigrated to Istanbul, Izmir and abroad. New generations no longer learned Zaza. This language is now threatened with extinction. This also had to do with the nationalist education in Turkey after the 1980 coup. At school Zaza was banned."

The Dersim Massacre - Then and Now

#dersim #zaza #alevi #kurdish #txt

[ccnountche]

Créé cette année dans le cadre de la promotion des livres traitant de l’Islam à travers ses aspects les plus divers, ce prix récompense l’auteur d’un ouvrage dans les deux catégories Roman et Essai écrit en langue française et d’un ouvrage traduit en français publié par un éditeur entre le 1er septembre de l’année précédente et le 31 août de l’année en cours.

#rentrée littéraire 2022 #littérature #théologie #religion #philosophie #prix littéraires 2022 #récompenses #distinction #islam #islamologie #civilisation islamique #cultures islamiques #roman #essai #grande mosquée de paris #paris #france #jury #sélection #remise du prix

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Nov 13, 2023

On November 11, 2023, my friend, colleague, and hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali released a statement explaining "Why I am Now a Christian".

I have known Ayaan for many years. She has been a guest on my podcast, and I on her podcast. We have appeared together at conferences. I have read all of her books and support her heroic work defending women’s rights, civil rights, free speech, and freedom of religious expression, along with her brave stand against intolerance, bigotry, and hate, religious or otherwise. I’ll never forget when she spoke at Occidental College when I was a professor there, when during the Q&A two Muslim women dressed in the hijab accused her of Islamophobia for unfairly characterizing Islam as a religion of violence. “Then why do I have to have to travel with armed guards to protect me from death threats I receive from members of my own religion of Islam?” she rejoined understatedly and with characteristic aplomb. Ayaan has pride of place in the pantheon of greats who have had the courage of their convictions to the point of putting their own lives on the line in the name of universal principles of justice and freedom.

Nothing Ayaan has written in her essay changes my evaluation of her as a heroic figure. I simply think she is mistaken. We all are about a great many things. Maybe I am wrong here and she is right. But I think reason and history prove otherwise. Let me explain in the spirit of respect for what is on the line here, starting with the subtitle of Ayaan’s essay: “Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war.” She’s right, but not in the way she thinks.

Atheism per se can’t equip anyone for anything because it is not a belief system or worldview. Atheism just designates a lack of belief in God. Full stop. It is a purely negative statement, an indicator that someone does not believe. A lack of belief can never be the basis of a belief system. I am an atheist in the same sense that I am an a-supernaturalist or an a-paranormalist. There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. These descriptors are just linguistic place-holders for mysteries we have yet to explain. Once explained, they move into the realm of the natural and the normal. If there is a realm of the supernatural or the paranormal, there is no way for a natural and normal being like us to perceive or understand it.

From this misunderstanding of what atheism is, Ayaan deduces that it can’t handle the stressors of current events:

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

Again, she’s right. Atheism can do nothing about these threats because it is not a positive assertion of principles that counter authoritarianism, expansionism, Islamism, China, Russia, and woke ideology. What can? Ayaan mentions “modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil.” She says these are not enough because “we find ourselves losing ground.” Are we? I don’t think so. But it’s a debatable point, so let’s set aside for a moment the matter of whether or not the world is getting better or worse this week, month, or year, and take the long view of what has driven moral progress over the centuries.

In my books The Moral Arc and Giving the Devil His Due I show that it isn’t atheism bending the arc of justice and freedom, but Enlightenment humanism—a cosmopolitan worldview that places supreme value on human and civil rights, individual autonomy and bodily integrity, free thought and free speech, the rule of law, and science and reason as the best tools for determining the truth about anything. It incorporates scientific naturalism, the principle that the methods of science operate under the presumption that the world and everything in it is the result of natural processes in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. By extension from above, if God is a supernatural being outside of space and time and therefore unknowable in any rational or empirical manner, it is not possible for natural creatures like us to understand a supernatural deity.

Scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism made the modern world, and many of the founding fathers of the United States, for example Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, were either practicing scientists or were trained in the sciences, and their construction of the Constitution and the principles on which it is based were thoroughly secular and based on the best science and philosophy of the day. It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too did the founders discover moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.

Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits—given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else—scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, that blacks do not like being enslaved, and that the Jews do not want to be exterminated. Why?

The answer is that it is in human nature to struggle to survive and flourish in the teeth of nature’s entropy, and having the freedom, autonomy, and prosperity available in free societies—built as they were on the foundation of scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism that seek to discover the best way for humans to live— enables individual sentient beings to live out their evolved destinies. This is moral realism, and it doesn’t require a deity to justify its validity. Steven Pinker explains the logic:

If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me—to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car—then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

This is the principle of the interchangeability of perspectives (developed in Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now), which is the core of the oldest moral principle discovered multiple times around the world throughout history: the Golden Rule. Pinker notes that it also forms the basis of “Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle—the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.”

Thus, there are perfectly rational reasons to ground morals and values in universal humanistic principles, and these do not depend on adherents being theists or atheists. That they are universal principles mean that they apply to all people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pantheists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Whether or not there is a God—much less the Christian God—is irrelevant. That’s what universal means.

Are there good reasons to believe in God? Theists certainly think that there are, but atheists are just as certain that there are not. Who is right? I have written numerous articles, essays, reviews, and book chapters on this subject, and in my next book, Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025) I review the top 20 philosophical and scientific arguments for God’s existence and the counterarguments against them, so I won’t adjudicate the matter here. I will simply note that both sides have strong arguments and that, ultimately, it is not a question that can be definitively answered in the affirmative through philosophy or science, so it comes down to faith—one either makes the leap for personal reasons, or not.

As for Christianity, since Ayaan has declared her fielty to that particular faith over all others, I will concede her point that on the three threats facing the West that concern her (and me)—(1) the authoritarianism/expansionism of Islamism, (2) China and Russia, and (3) woke ideology—Christian conservatives have a clearer vision than atheist (or even theist) Leftists about the threat that Islamism, China and Russia, and woke ideology pose to the West (including and especially the LGBTQ community that would not fare well under such regimes). But this is political pragmatism pure and simple—“Say what you want about Christian conservatives, at least they know what a woman is!” I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, but is it a basis for a worldview? I think not. We should believe things because they are true, not just because they are politically pragmatic.

Consider what’s on demand in Christianity—that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified, and was resurrected from the dead. (As the apostle Paul said in 1 Cor. 15:13-19: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. … And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”) Is that true? My first question is this: Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection as real, either in Jesus’ time or in ours? Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the same holy book as Christians do (the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament). They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think the carpenter from Galilee was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians, and still they reject them. That’s telling.

What would it take for a rational person to accept the resurrection? Let’s put some numbers on it. Demographers estimate that throughout all of human history approximately 100 billion people have lived before the 8 billion people alive today. Not one has died and returned from the dead, unless you are a Christian, in which case you believe that one person did—Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed—100 billion to 1. Is the evidence extraordinary for the resurrection? No. It’s not even ordinary.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosopher Larry Shapiro in his 2016 book The Miracle Myth, “evidence for the resurrection is nowhere near as complete or convincing as the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Because miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions, “the evidence necessary to justify beliefs about them must be many times better than that which would justify our beliefs in run-of-the-mill historical events.” But, says Shapiro, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even as good as ordinary historical events.

What about the eyewitnesses? Maybe, Shapiro suggests, they “were superstitious or credulous” and saw what they wanted to see. “Maybe they reported only feeling Jesus ‘in spirit,’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest that they saw Jesus in the flesh. Maybe accounts of the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries. Any of these explanations for the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection are far more likely than the possibility that Jesus actually returned to life after being dead for three days.”

The principle of proportionally—or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—also means we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less, which these alternatives surely are. Therefore, I am not a Christian because there is not enough evidence to believe that the core doctrines about Jesus’s resurrection are true. And I don’t want to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true.

What about the moral and political principles of Christianity upon which the West is claimed to be based? In The Moral Arc I make the case that Christianity went through the Enlightenment and came out the other end with the values so revered today by Westerners. This was not due to some new revelation from God (“thou shalt grant women equal rights as men”, “thou shall not enslave thy fellow humans”) or interpretation of scripture (“Galatians 3:28, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,’ is actually channeling the 1964 Civil Rights act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.“) Rather, once moral progress in a particular area is underway due to secular forces, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, civil rights and women’s rights in the 20th century, and gay rights in the 21st century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

The world’s religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle—unless they have inculcated the secular values of the Enlightenment, which most Christians have. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not like us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.

Even if our morality does not originate in the Bible, religious believers will often argue that Christianity gave Western civilization its most precious assets: art, architecture, literature, music, science, technology, capitalism, democracy, equal rights, and the rule of law. First, no one disputes the magnificence of countless works of art, architecture, literature, and music that were inspired by Christianity: the great cathedrals that make the spirit soar, the requiems that capture the heartache of loss, the psalms of joy that unite listeners, the paintings that dazzle with light and human emotion.

But artists who live in a Christian world, who are surrounded by other Christians, who understand next to nothing beyond Christianity, and who are likely being supported by Christian patrons, are going to produce Christian work. Christianity was the dominant religion at a moment in history when Europe was going through a Renaissance and an explosion of discoveries of new lands and new political and economic systems; no wonder it ended up being the great patron. The fact that artists living in Christendom were inspired by the life and death of Jesus by crucifixion, and not, say, by the life and death of the Buddha by mushrooms, is not a surprise. Christianity was the only game in town.

As for Christianity forming the basis of democracy and capitalism, we can run the historical counterfactual and make a prediction: if this hypothesis is true, then societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion should show Western-like forms of democracy and capitalism. They don’t. The Byzantine Empire, for example, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian from the early A.D. 300s, and for seven centuries produced nothing remotely like democracy and capitalism as practiced in modern America. Even early America wasn’t like it is today when, a mere two centuries ago, women couldn’t vote, slavery was legal and widely practiced, and capitalism’s wealth was vouchsafed to only a tiny minority of land holders or factory owners. Throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period, all the nation states, city states, and various political conglomerates of Western and Central Europe were not only Christian but Western Christian, and yet as late as the 19th century the only quasi-democratic republics in Europe were England, Holland, and Switzerland. In Christian Europe, both England and Spain profited handsomely from their overseas colonial empires, made more profitable yet by the decimation of the native populations and the looting of their troves of precious metals, gems, and other natural resources—actions that by today’s moral standards are condemned.

Finally, social scientist Gregory S. Paul conducted correlational study of the societal health of 17 first-world prosperous democracies—Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States—and religiosity (to what extent the citizens in each believe in God, are biblical literalists, attend religious services at least several times a month, pray at least several times a week, believe in an afterlife, and believe in heaven and hell, ranking them on a 1-10 scale). The results were striking…and disturbing. Far and away—without having a close second—the United States is not only the most religious of the 17 nations but also the most dysfunctional, scoring the worst on a wide range of 25 different indicators of social health and well being (on a 1-9 scale from dysfunction to healthy), including homicides, suicides, life expectancy, STDs, abortions, teen births, fertility, marriage, divorce, alcohol consumption, life satisfaction, corruption indices, adjusted per capita income, income inequality, poverty, employment levels, incarceration, and others.

Correlation is not causation, of course, and each of these measures has multiple causes having nothing to do with religion (or the lack thereof), but if religion is such a powerful force for societal health as Christian commentators claim, then why is America—the most religious nation in the Western world—also the unhealthiest on all of these social measures? If religion makes people more moral, then why is America seemingly so immoral in its lack of concern for its poorest, most troubled citizens, notably its children? While it would be too much to say “religion poisons everything,” as Christopher Hitchens famously concluded in his book God is Not Great, it is problematic enough to conclude that it is not needed to create a healthy society.

Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is. We can ground human morals and social values not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’ fairness ethics, but in science as well. From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment, reason and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proclaimed: Sapere Aude!—dare to know! “Have the courage to use your own understanding.” As he explained: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” The Age of Reason, then, was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but from original ignorance and dependence on authority and superstition. Never again need we be the intellectual slaves of those who would bind our minds with the chains of dogma and authority. In its stead we use reason and science as the arbiters of truth and knowledge. As I said in my 2012 Reason Rally speech before a crowd of over 20,000 humanists and science enthusiasts on the mall in Washington DC:

Instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves. Instead of looking at illustrations in illuminated botanical books scholars went out into nature to see what was actually growing out of the ground. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected cadavers in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see with their own eyes what was there. Instead of human sacrifices to assuage the angry weather gods, naturalists made measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, and winds to create the meteorological sciences. Instead of enslaving people because they were a lesser species, we expanded our knowledge to include all humans as members of the species through evolutionary sciences. Instead of treating women as inferiors because a holy book says it is a man’s right to do so, we discovered natural rights that dictate that all people should be treated equally through the moral sciences. Instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the legal right of democracy, and this gave us political progress. Instead of a tiny handful of elites holding most of the political power by keeping their citizens illiterate and unenlightened, through science, literacy, and education people could see for themselves the power and corruption that held them down and began to throw off their chains of bondage and demand their natural rights.

The constitutions of nations ought to be grounded in the constitution of humanity, which science and reason are best equipped to understand. That is the heart and core of scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism.

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"Beliefs are not like clothing. Comfort and utility and attractiveness cannot be our conscious criteria for adopting them." -- Sam Harris

#Michael Shermer #Ayaan Hirsi Ali #belief #atheism #scientific naturalism #enlightenment humanism #enlightenment #the enlightenment #religion #religion is a mental illness

[thatdebaterguy]

Some history

I had a feeling someone would mention this, so I had something prepared.

First off, that's an inflated figure.

Secondly, Canaanite really just means people descendent from the Levant area, and more people from Lebanon have ancestral heritage with Canaanites, who intermixed with various cultures. Back when they were still a civilisation, the Canaanite people were predominantly Jewish, it was the main faith in the area, seconded by Christianity. The wave of Islam started sometime around the 8th century under the first few invasions of the various Muslim nations around, predominantly Egypt. The thing is, the more Jewish Canaanites intermixed more with Europeans, Greeks who had settled Anatolia, generally people across the Northern Mediterranean and had European ancestry, but these people often moved to Europe due to the generally higher acceptance of Jews (for a while in some places) and the higher living standards and opportunities, and they mainly favoured Orthodox countries, with Catholic Poland being a key exception. The Palestinian Canaanites intermixed with the other Levantine based cultures or descendants, like Iranians, Lebanese people, Egyptians and Mesopotamians. Since it was the Egyptians and Arabs who conquered the land and it was ruled under Islam for over a thousand years, it was more favourable for the Palestinians to stay there. They continued to intermix with Egyptians, Syrians, and Bedouin people, who shared even more in common with the Canaanites than the Palestinians. The simple thing is, while many more Jews share heritage with Europe, they can pretty much all be traced back to Canaan, as can the Palestinians. The Muslims invaded, the Jews migrated, people intermixed. However, the culture of modern Palestinians was altered to be much more intertwined with the Muslim faith, which was spread via missionaries, similar to how Christian missionaries operated in European colonies.

In the end it's a whole cultural mess of heritage, but each of them lay claim to the land, since their ancestors on both sides originated from these Levantine lands, but the Jews got more European and the Palestinians got more Muslim, meaning while Palestinians share a lot in common with Canaanites still, the Canaanites who had been living in the regions both sides inhabit now, have practically no modern equivalent, since the Palestinians mixed with other Levantine cultures, Egyptians, Iranians, etc, which makes defining ancestral homeland tricky, since if you say it's all Canaanite descendants, then the Lebanese have a better claim than anyone, but The Canaanites who'd been local to places like Jerusalem have no modern comparison, which leaves you with the two main modern variations of the Canaanites who had lived in these lands; the Palestinians and Israelis. Even though a fair amount of the Jewish population in Israel had emigrated from Europe, it was still Canaanite Jews who'd mixed with those Europeans, and legal immigration to a country offering a home to those of your faith is still a very fair way to enter a country where your people historically have lived and even in modern and recent history have lived. Me as a Brit who's 25% Irish could apply for an Irish passport and live in areas once held by English settlers hundreds of years ago, but are rightfully Irish now, so it's fair if Jewish people legally immigrate to historically Jewish lands where many of the Israeli people have lived their entire lives and who's families have lived there far longer. Tel Aviv was built by Jews, Gaza was built by Palestinians. Barely any Israelis want to own Gaza, a scary amount of Palestine supporters want to either burn down or occupy Tel Aviv for Palestine. Let the two exist, they've both been there, just get Hamas out the picture and they can go about their lives.

#israel #politics #palestine #gaza #current events #hamas