Christianity, Modern Arianism, and Islam

Our longtime reader and commenter Wild Iris sent an interesting review of Norbert Pressburg’s book on what Modern Martyrs need to know.

After reading the book twice and performing due diligence on the reviews, he has added information to share, including a suggested revision for the title. Everyone who reads “Modern Martyr” finds the publisher’s choice (it was not the author’s idea) not only lacking gravitas, but sadly demonstrating publishers’ views of the IQ of their readers.

Wild Iris uses the principles of mathematics to make some of his points, a strategy that is particularly useful when attempting to establish parameters on a slippery slope such as historical identity.

This one is sure to please our readers; I am grateful to Wild Iris for his fortitude and patience. If you have any questions leave them in the comments and W.I. will respond.

Christianity, Modern Arianism, and Islam
by Wild Iris

From the hard sciences to the humanities, a vice that is part and parcel of academia’s DNA is the perennial appearance of a few individuals that, by their reputations and positions of influence, become gatekeepers. Graduate students, hoping for a professional career, recognize instinctively that to go outside the boundaries set by these gatekeepers is career suicide. With her recent book Diana West crossed such an academic boundary, and caught the full censure for her efforts.

The historical study of early Islam has atrophied under the same academic process. Islam’s own narrative about its early history has been taken at face value by academia for generations. With virtually no exceptions, the early history of Islam was held to be a golden age of culture and learning. Meanwhile, Western Europe was seen as falling into a dark age that it was only able to rise out of thanks to the learning that was kept alive by the Arab-Islamic world.

But what Diana West has done to our historical perspective regarding Soviet influence on USA’s foreign policy during the Roosevelt years is now happening with regard to our understanding of the history of early Islam.

Robert Spencer’s Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins questions the very existence of a historical Mohammed. Emmet Scott’s Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy goes even further and shows, based on archeological research, that there was no Arab/Muslim Golden Age of the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries at all, but rather the Arab world of North Africa and the Levant had fallen into a Dark Age at the same time as Western Europe during those centuries.

The pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg’s work, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran showed that 20% or more of the Qur’an consisted of mistranslations of earlier Syro-Aramaic Christian documents. In fact, the word Qur’an derives from the Syro-Aramaic word “qeryan” which was a lectionary containing selected texts from the Old and New Testaments.

Into this breach another pseudonymous author has thrown him/herself. Norbert Pressburg’s, What the Modern Martyr Should Know: 72 Grapes and not a single virgin both extends and complements the historical research by the above-mentioned authors. This book is rich in technical and footnoted detail and should be considered a must-read for anyone intrigued by this kind of historical scholarship. And it is this new book that I would like to share my thoughts on with the readers here at Gates of Vienna.

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First, regarding a comprehensive review of Norbert Pressburg’s new book, I wish to compliment Chiu ChunLing for a job well done. I can’t imagine being able to write a more complete and faithful review than his. So what follows should be read not as an alternate review of the book, but as a supplement to Chiu ChunLing’s original post. For this reason I will ask any reader that is not familiar with that original post to first revisit it before reading further.

After reading Chiu ChunLing’s review, I knew I had to read this book.

It arrived from Amazon after Christmas; I sat down and read it at one sitting. Then I returned to Chiu ChunLing’s post, along with all of its attendant comments. I also read through the reader reviews posted at Amazon Books. Finally, using all of these comments and reviews as a sort of study guide, I read Norbert Pressburg’s book a second time.

Regarding some of the critical comments posted on Amazon, the only one I found myself in agreement with is that the book’s title doesn’t match the contents. However, having read the book twice I can better appreciate how an editor might have come up with the title he did. But as it is, this title fails to communicate to the reading public what they are actually going to find once inside the book’s covers.

The biggest challenge in creating an accurate title for this book is that its contents are so out of line with the mainstream historical narrative regarding Islam. There isn’t any simple catch-phrase which (1) captures the essence of the book’s message while (2) also managing to make sense to the modern reader unfamiliar with the rules of theological rhetoric and Western religious history.

It would have been preferable, instead of attempting to be clever, to put the point simply and clearly. Thus, a more accurate title might be The Origins of Islam: A Christian Heresy Among the Arabs. In truth, Norbert Pressburg’s book covers lot more than just this topic. But the most important thing he demonstrates is that Islam was originally a Christian heresy. It is this contention that is the most foundationally disruptive aspect of the book.

There were other critical comments posted at Amazon that addressed issues of style, typos and translation. But if you read a book such as this while keeping your emphasis on facts, figures, dates, places, and etc. (rather than focusing on stylistic elements in a translation) then these kinds of critical points become irrelevant.

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Having read the book now, I will have to respectfully disagree with the fallback position Chiu ChunLing takes in his review regarding the existence of a historical Mohammed. That is, that the “absence of evidence shouldn’t be taken as evidence of absence”. Rather, I find that Norbert Pressburg has provided evidence for the much stronger case: the historical Mohammed, as described in the Hadiths and The Qur’an, could not have existed.

This might seem like a quibble of his point, but this difference goes to the heart of how we define a logically reasoned argument. In the discipline of mathematics if one cannot, by a direct method, prove a statement, then one can fall back on a technique known as “proof by contradiction.” That is, one takes the logical opposite of the statement one is trying to prove. Then, if one can show that this complementary assumption leads to a contradiction, the original statement must be true by the “Law of Excluded Middle”.

Now apply this to the question of an historical Mohammed.

We can’t prove directly, using historical and archeological data, that the Mohammed of the Hadiths and The Qur’an didn’t exist. However, we can try the alternate approach and assume for the moment that someone fitting Mohammed’s description actually did exist. We can then ask what kind of footprints in the historical record would we expect such a person to have left? What if we look for such footprints in the places where they should be and end up not finding them? In that case we have a logically valid proof for the non-existence of such an individual.

Just to list a few of the accomplishments credited to the Mohammed of the Hadiths and The Qur’an:

  • he was a desert warlord.
  • a leader of men in battle,
  • a raider of caravans,
  • responsible for the killing and enslavement of hundreds,
  • a destroyer of pagan idols across Eastern Arabia,
  • and he took over and renamed the Jewish city from Yathrib to Medina

While the Arab culture of the time may have been an illiterate one, the world of the Levant was not. A man like this, whose deeds would have so drastically altered the lives of many thousands of those living around him, if he existed most certainly would have left a trail somewhere in the written records from that time period. But when we examine extant written records, we find nothing on the Prophet Mohammed.

This is the case that Norbert Pressburg develops in his book. Not only is there no record (outside of Hadiths and The Qur’an) for an historical Mohammed, neither is there any historical evidence of any kind, nothing that can be dated to the 7th century which points to anyone whose life/deeds could have formed the archetype for a Mohammed-like figure. Via this route of examination we arrive at a solid proof by contradiction for the non-existence of the historical Mohammed of the Hadiths and The Qur’an.

Now the Prophet Mohammed of the Qur’an and Hadiths during his time would have first and foremost been regarded as an accomplished military figure; and it is this version of an historical Mohammed that we are explicitly saying couldn’t have existed.

But we need to be careful on this point because we do have a historical record from the 8th century that refers to a person called Mohammed, “The Praised One”, who was considered the founder of a heretical Christian religious sect among the Arabs.

Norbert Pressburg only briefly mentions the existence of a statement made by one Johannes Damascenus. In the Orthodox Church this person is known as Saint John of Damascus (676-749), and here is the relevant quote from his “Critique of Islam”:

“There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist. They are descended from Ishmael, [who] was born to Abraham of Agar, and for this reason they are called both Agarenes and Ishmaelites. They are also called Saracens, which is derived from Sarras kenoi, or destitute of Sara, because of what Agar said to the angel: ‘Sara hath sent me away destitute.’ These used to be idolaters and worshiped the morning star and Aphrodite, whom in their own language they called Khabár, which means great. And so down to the time of Heraclius they were very great idolaters. From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven. He had set down some ridiculous compositions in this book of his and he gave it to them as an object of veneration.”

Heraclius was the Byzantine Emperor during the years 610-641. So this places the Mohammed mentioned by Saint John into the correct time period. But this Mohammed is most definitely not the historical Mohammed of the Hadiths and The Qur’an.

Saint John’s Mohammed was a literate man, knowledgeable in the Old and New Testaments, sophisticated enough in theology to understand the arguments that underlie Arian Christianity, the producer of the Qur’an himself, and a man, not of military accomplishments, but one of feigned piety.

The continuation of this quoted text is well worth reading, since it leaves no doubt that the Syrian Christian world at that time considered the followers of Mohammed as nothing more than Christian heretics.

If this critique of early Islam wasn’t salt enough in the wound, Norbert Pressburg further shows from the archeological record that the Ka’aba, that center of Muslim devotion, is actually the walled up shell of an earlier 4-5th century Yemeni-style Christian Church.

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Norbert Pressburg continues to add to the work of Emmet Scott and Robert Spencer in making the case against the historically accepted reality of a rapid conquest, beginning in the mid-7th century, of North Africa and the Levant by invading Muslim armies.

There are, in fact, no reliable historical records, dating to that time period, that indicate any such thing happened. What we do know is that time period corresponds to the collapse of the Persian Empire along with a withdrawal of the Byzantium Empire from many of the areas that it formerly controlled. There was no need for an Arab conquest. With the collapse of the Persian and Byzantine Empires, the power vacuum left behind would have been more than enough to account for local Arab leaders moving from previously minor roles to being the big bosses of their regions. Moreover, this transition to local Arab rule would have essentially happened overnight, without a single army marching or a single major battle being fought.

Going the next step further, since Islam, as we know it today, didn’t yet exist in the 7th and 8th centuries; there couldn’t have been any “Muslim” conquests either. One of our big mistakes when looking back at that period of history has been in making the assumption that Arab equates with Muslim. We therefore end up mistakenly crediting to a religion we call Islam, a historical shift that was no more than the resurgence of Arab rule into the power vacuum left by the collapsing and withdrawing Persian and Byzantine Empires.

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The embryonic early history of Islam makes perfect sense when viewed as a heretical Christian movement that was originally founded by a charismatic individual whose theology began as a hodge-podge of various Christian heresies. This heretical Christian movement then grew and matured during the 7th and 8th centuries within the Arab populations; eventually it appeared fully formed on the world stage as the religion of Islam.

Islam is the bastard love child of Gnostic Christian thought with pagan Arab religiosity. While this idea might seem totally off-base to anyone accustomed to a modern accepted understanding of Christianity, it cannot be emphasized enough that the Christian world of the 4th through the 8th centuries would be almost unrecognizable by anyone experiencing it from a modern point of view. For this reason, a strong recommendation to anyone planning on reading Norbert Pressburg’s book is to first review the history of the various classic heresies that were prevalent in the Syrian Christian world of that time, notably Arianism and Nestorianism.

Here are two good starting points. Both will have further bibliographies:

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If you stop to think about it, you’ll realize that virtually everything we think we know about the history of the Arab world of the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries has come down to us in the form of written narratives based on second-hand, third-hand, and even more distant sources. These sources were not written down until generations or even centuries after the time of the purported events.

But if you ask, “Are there any first-hand accounts that can be reliably dated to a time contemporary to the events they record, and that corroborate the accepted narrative surrounding the early history of Islam?” …you come up empty handed.

This is the new direction in Islamic scholarship represented by the authors Norbert Pressburg, Emmet Scott, Christoph Luxenberg, and Robert Spencer. They all start with the assumption that the historically accepted narratives are suspect, and then attempt to rebuild a view of history using only sources and methods that they know from their own areas of expertise to be reliable.

In Emmet Scott’s case, he falls back on archeology and finds that not only doesn’t the archeological record of that period support the historically accepted narrative surrounding Islam; it stands in direct contradiction to it.

Christoph Luxenberg applies linguistic analysis to the text of the Qur’an based on his knowledge of the Syro-Aramaic language and finds an extensive presence of older Syro-Aramaic passages and phrases.

Likewise, Norbert Pressburg falls back on the science of linguistic analysis and uses it to examine extant Arabic and Qur’anic writings from the 7th and 8th centuries that pre-date the first known complete copy of the Qur’an. And again, like Emmet Scott, he is led to conclusions that stand in direct contradiction to the historically accepted narratives surrounding Islam.

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If this alternate view of history, as it is developing in the above mentioned books, continues to hold up under further examination, then the implication is that everything we’ve been accepting as historically true about Islam during the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries is completely wrong.

There was no historical Mohammed. There was no Muslim-Arab conquest of North Africa and the Levant; there was not even an Arab conquest of those regions. The religion of Islam didn’t even appear, as we know it today, until sometime around the mid 9th century, so it would have played no role in the history of that earlier time period either.

No wonder then, when it comes to the issues of Islam’s impacts on Western Society, we never seem to be able to win a debate on the matter. It’s because, before the debate even begins, we’ve already been unwittingly accepting as our starting point Islam’s false narrative about itself.

But once you accept the fact that the commonly accepted early history of Islam and the Muslim world is a complete fantasy, the temptation that comes next is to start creating a new narrative building from your own speculations. If there is any cautionary lesson to be learned from the works by Norbert Pressburg, Emmet Scott, and Robert Spencer, it is that we really don’t know anything for sure about the historical period of the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, and we shouldn’t be making any assumptions at all at this point.

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Epilogue

Not every reader would necessarily notice this, but Saint John of Damascus’ singling out of Arianism as the source of Mohammed’s heretical view of Christianity provided for me one of those proverbial “aha” moments.

Arianism was the first of the Gnostic heresies to arise in the early church. It postulated Christ as a creation of the Father, hence he could not be equal with the Father. It was this sticking point, the Trinitarian view of Christianity, which eventually prevailed over Arianism. Thus, anytime you hear new-age-spirituality describing Jesus as just another prophet, a wise teacher, an enlightened master, this is simply a modern echo of that early Arian heresy. And if you go to any of the mainline Protestant churches today, the ones who have fully embraced politically-correct multiculturalism, listen to the clergy: you will discover that these churches have incorporated into their theology elements of Arianism as well.

All of the Germanic/Gothic barbarian tribes, as they progressed from paganism to Trinitarian Christianity, went through a stage where they were first Arian Christians. One notable exception was the Vandals; they remained Arian throughout their stay in the historical record. Is it only a coincidence that the Vandals ended up in North Africa where several centuries later the religion of Islam became dominant? Is it also coincidence that the Arian Christian Vandals practiced forced conversions under threat of death, just as the followers of Mohammed later would?

There appears to be a special resonance between the pagan barbarian mindset and the Arian version of Christianity. The early Church Fathers lived in a world much of which was still pagan. And they had firsthand experience dealing with the Germanic/Gothic barbarian ways of thinking. Were they seeing, in the way the pagan barbarians embraced Arianism, an especially toxic combination?

Looking back in history, we see that the First Council of Nicaea was adamant in eliminating the Gnostic heresy of Arianism from the early church. The Nicene Creed was worded precisely to exclude the Arian view of The Christ. Did they know something back then that we should be paying attention to today?

Arianism shows up as a common thought pattern shared by both Islam and by those segments within the Christian faith that have embraced PC/MC. After my old ELCA Lutheran Church called a new pastor, one of the first things she did was cut the recitation of the Nicene Creed from our regular service. On the other hand, those within the Christian faith that seem to be immune to the effects of PC/MC are those that still confess the traditional Trinitarian view of The Christ. All this leaves me wondering if there isn’t something very important going on here. But I not sure what exactly it might be.

38 thoughts on “Christianity, Modern Arianism, and Islam

  1. “Arianism was the first of the Gnostic heresies to arise in the early church.”

    You might want to look into this point further. Arianism dates from the latter third century, but Marcion was already developing an early form of Gnosticism in the second century. Moreover, Arianism wasn’t a Gnostic system.

    Jeffery Hodges

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    • You’re definitely the boss on this one, Gypsy. Nice to know you’re lurking.

      So for those of you with an inclination for further research, here’s – what else? – the wiki:

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

      It was certainly a heady time for heresies – in fact, if Jerusalem hadn’t been destroyed in 70 AD and the Diaspora begun, I wonder if Paul wouldn’t have ended up being considered a heretic by the nascent church in Jerusalem…

      I vaguely remember this Marcion fellow from my long-ago readings in the Patristics, along with a lot of other contentions. The opinions re women were umm…off-putting, to say the least. And they wouldn’t pass Gates of Vienna’s rules for moderation and courtesy.
      —————————

      At the end of the last millenium, here’s what a Presbyterian had to say about the lurking dangers of present-day Marcionism:

      http://www.theologymatters.com/SEPOCT98.PDF

      …What kind of God is being preached in Presbyterian
      pulpits? Is it the God of orthodox Christian faith and the
      Reformed confessions, “abundant in goodness and truth,
      forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of
      them that diligently seek him; and withal most just and
      terrible in his judgments; hating all sin, and who will by no
      means clear the guilty?”

      Or is it “Marcion’s god: tolerant of evil, encouraging wrong, wheedling about his grace, prevaricating in his goodness?” The extent to which what Scripture calls sin is diluted (or deleted) from the pulpit and what Scripture declares evil is commended is the
      extent to which the heretical god of Marcion is being
      proclaimed and not the God of historic, orthodox Christian
      faith. The goddesses of feminist theology and the god that
      accepts sexual perversion are only the most blatant
      examples of the heretical deities who are being proclaimed
      in the name of Christ and leading others astray.

      These are all versions of “the better god who never takes offence, is
      never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared
      no fire in hell, who forbids all delinquency, but only in
      word,” as Tertullian observed. This god may let people do
      whatever they want and freely accept their “justice-love,”
      but this is not the God of orthodox Christian faith. The
      true God commands the obedience of all and will judge
      those who refuse to repent of what Scripture clearly calls
      sin…

      Oh well. I won’t let the door hit me in the gluteus maximus on the way out. And let me tell you, I certainly plan to stand with Saint Valentine while he and I have a few words with Tertullian.

      Gypsy scholar makes a good point about Arianism not being gnosticism, though for the sake of this post’s theses re the identity of the historical Mohammed, his comment is probably just for the (vanishingly few) GoV readers(I’m one) who want to pursue this point. Here’s a good place to start:

      http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm

      Sheesh. I’m quitting while I’m behind. Just putting a toe into these old rivers and I begin to feel cheated not to have had the intertubes to turn to back when I was a student. Heraclitus was wrong: you can step in that darn river more than once. But let enough time go by and the water is NOT inviting.

      Back to Moham and the Arabian steppes.

    • Jeffery Hodges, on this point I will stand corrected. But I doubt that I’m the first person to have included Arianism as a Gnostic heresy. My background has always been to consider as Gnostic any doctrine that decouples Jesus from Judaism. But technically, on this point you’re correct. But hopefully, this error on my part doesn’t prevent you from seeing the points I was trying to make in my epilog.

      I still stand by my observation that Arian Christianity might be the common thread that Germanic/Gothic barbarians shared with their Arab counterparts several centuries later. If this were true, then it would explain the ease with which North Africa fell under Arab control. That is, for many, the Arabs would not have been seen as a hostile presence, but rather, as fellow Arian Christians.

      The rapidity with which Islam has moved into Europe in recent decades matches the rapidity that early Islam spread across North Africa. This comparison makes me wonder if there might be something in common here.

      Much has been written about the First Council of Nicaea and the reasons behind the decisions made there. But until I read Norbert Pressburg, I had never thought about the barbarian connection to Arianism and the possibility that this might have been the motivation for the expulsion of the Arians from the early church.

  2. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Christianity, Modern Arianism, and Islam

    • Well you haven’t met our current Presiding Bishop for ECUSA. At the time of her investiture, she posed for a photograph that NYT ran. I do hope it’s not her official portrait since she looks so much like Muammar Gaddafi.

      Bishop Katharine, what’s with the trousers? Is a cassock too much like a skirt?
      —————————
      A comment left at VirtueOnLine re our bishop, once touted as a “reconciler”, now exposed as a pit bull:

      OK, the facts are that Schori was a failed scientist and a failed bishop in a failed diocese that lied about a number of things on her resumé. She is convicted by her own statements of not believing in God or in the Creeds. She is an avaricious “career climber”. She believes in the MDGs rather than the Gospel. She is driven by a social agenda rather than by God’s commands. What’s not to dislike about Queen Katie?

      wow. Sounds like Obama in pants.
      —————————-

      I’m torn on this subject. Whilst ol’ Bishop Katie is a bad dream, the priest who serves our tiny church is a woman and she’s everything anyone would want in a pastor: warm, tough, and intelligent. We haven’t any money to pay her – enough for gas and lunch money, perhaps – but she has been a faithful once-a-month shepherd for a number of years now.

      • A blogger once commented about Bishop Katharine Schori that her theology was so muddled, she couldn’t even get her heresies right.

    • Alfonse, you know the list of ‘possibles’ would be very very long. And some Catholics would start with the Augustinian, Martin Luther. However, that’s not really fair since he didn’t nail his theses with the idea of leaving…at least that wasn’t his original intention…

      OK, let’s get back on topic??

  3. If one applies logic, one quickly comes to understand that Jesus Christ is a self evident Truth. He is unique in his own right. That is the reality of “faith”. Simply put there in nobody like Him. He is truly the Son of God…..

    I have a major battle daily with “Biblists” trying to explain this simple paradigm. They become walking “Bibles”-fanatics unmoved by argument….Again “PC” is nothing new. Before I was let “lose” on the Bible I spent years reading philosophy but especially Kant.

    Other seminarians have to spend years studying Plato and translating back into Greek. This teaches priests how to think and be objective using tried and tested methodology. For my stance I have been attacked, abused and God knows what! Even condemned to “Hell”.

    It still goes on and I resent another human trying to tell me what I should believe. I don’t ram it down people’s throats and neither should others. God comes to us in His own time and way….The relationship is like a Father and son and nobody has the “right” to impose their ways on that holy of all holies- one’s personal relationship with God. Indeed it is the greatest sin of all to force one’s limited undertsanding of God on another for one is saying, “I am greater than God”. This is what Islam is trying to do today and why I will resist it while I can.

    There is some irony herein with this exposure of Islam as an “Arian Heresy”, since I have argued for years that “Allah” is not the same “God” as Christ and “Jaweh” but a fake concotion, as everything else is in “Islam”- as in “taqyia”. So “Mohammed” lied to his own followers or they lied to themselves. Moslems with other ancient races are also highly gullible as they are today.

    There is also the question of “intelligence” and its diminution by years of family intermarriage, which the Church and the pagan Roman state forbade. Germanic tribes often intermarried for simliar reasons as the Arabic and Indians do today to preserve familial integrity and property. Christianity stopped this. European intelligence increased and we thrived, as did the Church- of which the modern is but a poor shoddy copy.

    I find it amusing that “Allah” is indeed a poor copy of “Jaweh” via a Christian heretical sect. (And) if one thinks about it, it is indeed very funny and a “cumuppance” for the years of brutality they have inflicted on Humanity. The cautious “Be careful what you wish for” comes to mind…..

  4. Brilliant post.

    Another aspect that further cements this view is the Islamic crescent and star flag.

    The flag seems to have been an old Roman flag and was the flag of the city of Byzantium (prior to the relocation of Rome there and it’s change to Constantinople and the seat of the Roman empire).

    Interestingly after the fall of Constantinople Mehmet the Conquerer claimed the title ‘Caesar of Rome’ and had blood lineage from the Byzantine Imperial family to further his claims.

    So it seems the Ottoman empire was just an Arian version of the previous empire and genetic studies of Anatolian haplogroups show very little Mongol or Turkic admixture. The Anatolian population is the one that was present there already and the haplogroups of hordes from the East are virtually not present.

  5. Tertullian wrote an entire book about Marcion, refuting him.

    Among many curious notions, Marcion believed (as many other Gnostics did), that the God of the Old Testament was evil, and that the serpent was actually an emissary of the good God who is so beyond this cosmos he has nothing to do with its Creation, and only proffers from transcendent afar, an invitation to “escape” this veil of tears and return to him. Marcion says “return” because like many other Gnostics, he also believed that imprisoned within our wicked bodies created by the evil demiurge Yahweh, there lies a tiny pneumatic “spark” that needs to escape and be reunited with the Other God.

    Tertullian’s refutation of this is long and masterful, weaving a grand synthesis of the New and Old Testaments and of the divinity of the Son and of the Father as an integral whole.

    Marcion also had a dismally pessimistic, darkly nihilistic view of human nature: Tertullian reports that one of Marcion’s well-known aphorisms was that the human being is “nothing more than a thing packed with dung”. This does not necessarily contradict the aforementioned belief in a pneumatic spark at the core of the human person — for Marcion had reduced the animus animi so radically it logically had the result and function of alienating the human from himself; which, to the Gnostic (both ancient and modern), is the whole point.

  6. I assume that you mean “political correctness” by PC? Then what is MC?

    If so, then I would disagree with your connections between PC/PC immunity to certain brands of christianism, as I found quite obvious that PC is a sort of a lay version of christianism, regardless of the brand.

    PC posits that you can’t say certain things (that some blacks are racists, that islam is slowly conquering the West, that it not true that a women politician is necessarily better than any man politician (unless the woman is a republican), etc.) – otherwise know as sin in a religious context.

    A sin is something you can’t do – and can’t think about, since you could “sin in your mind, before you sin in your flesh” (I’m paraphrasing from the French expression – a catholic French school education – there must be a standard way to say that in English). That dainty sensitivity is exactly echoed in today’s PC dictates – all sin stems from the mind of the sinner.

    Central to PC is also the concept of victim classes. If you belong to them, all will be forgiven by God. Where does the concept of a “chosen people” come from? judaism, but christianity through inheritance.

    If you aren’t chosen, then your only chance at redemption is to never ever defend yourself, show any pride or confidence. For thou art a sinner. “Turn the other cheek”: that horrible concept of creating a virtue out of not defending yourself is entirely religious, and is a pox that christianism has inflicted upon its believers for centuries.

    That said, advancing islam is a current problem, regardless of its origin. PC creates the ideal conditions for its advancement, and we largely have to thank christianism for that. Yes, I am aware that once upon a time, there were christian warriors, but that time is long gone – or may be resurrecting in Bulgaria – of all places.

    • There is some wisdom to be gained in regarding the contents of one’s mind as a source of training the heart in one direction or another. Thoughts have their own power and the “monkey mind” can do much damage. Reading the lives of those who have been imprisoned for one reason or another is enlightening. Solitary confinement can indeed teach one the power of “just thinking” about something.

      As for ‘turning the other cheek’ – notice the anatomical limits of that injunction – i.e., a person has only TWO cheeks. After the second one is slapped, your obligation toward loving your neighbor is altered. The unanswered third slap is indeed allowing oneself to be a victim and no one recommends that – not even Quakers. What one does at that point will vary. Christ himself advised that one must be as innocent as a dove and as wise as a serpent so obviously he’d thought through the concept of facing one’s adversaries.

      “Christianism” is not Christianity. And your bitterness re “the pox” of Christian belief is obviously a burden you’ve not been able to let go…

    • Ido, thaks for your reply. PC/MC is short for politically correct multiculturalism. It is the term those of us on one side of the socio-political divide use to refer to the thoughts and actions of those on the other side.

      Your observation that PC is a sort of lay version of Christianity is exactly correct. PC/MC is the secularized, corrupted, hollowed-out shell of what use to be Christian charity. If more people were able to see this, we might begin to role back the tide of this thing called political correctness. A good analogy might be to say that PC/MC is to Christian charity what Gollum was to Sméagol.

      But to secularize Christian charity you first have to take Christ out of it. And you do this by separating Christ from the Divine. In this respect, the Arian concept of The Christ is not so much a coherent theology, as it is a “get out of jail free” card. Once you set Jesus apart from The Father, he can be refashioned into whatever kind of holy man, prophet, guru, etc. anyone wants him to be. Just one egregious example of this is the Black Liberation Theology of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

      Unfortunately, there are too many that share your sentiments. While people see that in some indirect way Christianity is responsible for this thing we call PC/MC, they can’t abide the possibility that it will be in Christianity that the solutions will also be found. People will lament that there are no more Christian warriors to do battle for them, while they themselves have no intention of joining the Christian ranks and becoming one.

        • By definition an atheist can’t believe there is anything in their world worth fighting and dying for. If by some chance they find that one thing, whose preservation is more important to them than their own life, then they are no longer atheists.

          On the other hand, the world of Islam is a billion and a half individuals, the majority of who are quite ready and willing to fight and die for their faith.

          So, Mark H, what exactly does an atheist like you bring to such a lopsided contest? Are you going to bring a box of “Religion is Stupid” and “Be Nice to People” bumper stickers to hand out?

          I’m really asking an honest question and I would really appreciate a thoughtful answer from you. When it comes the struggle between Western Europe’s cultural heritage and the world’s most aggressive faith based political system, Islam, what can an atheist bring to the fight that will be of any use?

          • Wild Iris- Mark H is more complex than it would may seem on the surface. We’ve had some discussions that made me understand better his pov. Like others who write me, Mark H is an atheist who prays sometimes, though I think he feels such a project is not legitimate given his starting place.

            I consider him our ‘token leftist’ – and those don’t come along every day.

            I didn’t read his original comment to which you’re responding here, but I feel fortunate to have him among our commenters. Otherwise we become too insular, hmmm?

            Pat Condell, as witty as he can be sometimes, is limited in his understanding of ‘religionists’ of any stripe and is therefore less useful.

          • Really, how dare you assume that I’m as shallow and selfish as you suggest?

            I might argue that as I don’t believe in an afterlife, I have a greater interest in improving things on earth than you do, as I believe we have only this one precious existence.

            I had the good fortune to visit several European countries last year, spending time in churches, palaces and galleries. The Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona had me in tears with its beauty. Do I sound like someone who doesn’t care about our culture?

            I’ll turn your last question around, and ask what you as a believer can bring to the struggle that I can’t?

      • Quote:
        But to secularize Christian charity you first have to take Christ out of it.

        The universalist and unitarian reforms of New England, c. 1817, did precisely that.

        • As you note, what we call PC/MC can be traced back to Christian movements that began in the 19th century. Sadly, what we are going through today is the final logical outcome of what has been a long multi-generational process.

          • I wouldn’t pin something as totalitarian and corrosive and just plain evil as PC/MC on some 1800’s American Christians and Deists. I’d daresay wager that those outside of the ministry in that era were much more un PC/MC than most of the souls on this blog carping about those long dead folk.

            Hard life doesn’t breed soft and genteel people.

            But for the most part the rise of PC/MC can be traced to the Frankfurt group immigrating to the U.S. in the 30’s and it’s disciples coming to power in academia over the next 7 decades along with the popularity rabidly atheistic European textual critics like Foucault and crew to point their views dominate the studies of humanities in academia and in politics to the point that a entire political party(the Democrats) defines itself in terms of PC/MC along with tribalism. Even our public schools are infested with it to the point they are a complete disaster.

            Of course it isn’t a cool as Christian bashing.

        • When you see Christianity as just a philosophy and not as divine revelation, then major logical errors will eventually appear.
          As a teaching Sister told us “When you take Christ out of Christianity you get inanity”

      • PC has nothing whatever to do with Christianity, except as a contributor to it’s demise. Political correctness is part of the generic term “Cultural Marxism” which also includes feminazi’ism,, the race industry, the rights industry, mass immigration, the undermining of the justice system and the imposition of thought and race crime. You might recognise these. They emerged from the School of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt sometime between the mid 1920’s until the participants were forced to flee nazi Germany for the USA in the early 1930’s.

      • “PC/MC is the secularized, corrupted, hollowed-out shell of what use to be Christian charity. ”

        I think this rather thoroughly dismal characterization is to crucially misunderstand the precise dilemma of the problem PC MC presents. A large portion of the problem is precisely that there is much good in PC MC — derived directly from the twin pairs of pillars of Western Civilization (Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Cbhristian) — and that its adepts for the most part are not wicked but actually have substantive reasons to think they are on the side of the angels. Our problem then is more complicated, more akin to untangling a mess of wiring that has become monstrously intertwined and misdirected; whereas to misconstrue the problem by succumbing to the temptation of demonizing PC MC is, so to speak, to take the drastic step of taking an axe to all the wires and cables or to just toss it all in the garbage.

        But in this particular venue in this wing of the Counter-Jihad, with the atmosphere here thick with conspiracy, I fear that train left the station long ago.

        • Hope you’re still following this thread, Hesperado. I’ve often disagreed with your opinions here, and on JW under your other moniker, but appreciate your comments above.

          I’ve made myself unpopular with fellow-leftists, and members of my own family, arguing the dangers of Islamism, but don’t believe that they all have evil intentions.

  7. Wow. There are some many holes in the historical record. When people try to fill those ‘holes’ with unsubstantiated conjecture it becomes the ‘hysterical record’. Good job Mr. Pressmburg and Dymphna.
    of course now all those historical texts I’ve read concerning the Byzantine era must be rethunk yet again by me. I don’t expect too many revisions to be rushed out by ‘MSM-type’ authors.
    Thanks,
    JBP

  8. I started my miserable counter-jihad career with the signature LN, but after some time I found this to be too tame and passive, and badly complying with my growing abhorrence of the Islamic faith, so I saddled over to the new nick ANTI-ISLAMIST. I did fancy, however, to perceive that I had opened my mouth too much. Nowdays I call myself Da Capo – but today I am not only an anti-islamist – I’m an anti-muslimist (and thus automatically also everything from a wretched racist to the greatest admirer of SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf).

    I had to return to an archive on one since long archived hard drive to find the following contribution to the GoV post: The Media Myth of Córdoba, from August 22, 2010.

    My main contributions to the serious Islam research are as follows:

    1. The veil: burqa/hijab, is a complete mistranslation of the Aramaic „belt“ and nothing more but the personal opinion of at-Tabari, a famous Koran-editor around the year 900, who obviously was disturbed by the fact that women dressed in bast or rafia skirts often unintensionally showed their genitals when squatting. Since then the veil is considered in the Islamic world to be god`s command, though there is not one word about in the Koran

    2. Also for a simple counter-jihad amateur with an one-track mind it is a fascinating idea that an old Bible-version written in Syro-Aramaic, by script-perverters/exegetes/activists of that time hating the idea of the Trinity (Nicea 325) and before a premature Arabic language was standardized and established, during a few centuries reedited, constructed and finally in the 9th century brought about the preliminary Glorious Quran, an oriental-arabic-beduin-bellicose version of a Bible.
    – – – – – – –
    BACK 40 MONTHS IN TIME.

    ANTI-ISLAMIST said…
    http://www.blogger.com/profile/09642613040643385503

    “Isn’t the entire story bogus” – Did Mahound ever exist?

    Des Pudels Kern: For the Christian arabs in the East the edict of Nicea was a pain in the ass!
    [Please reflect over the following: ‘in nomine dominis miseriscordis’ is verbally translated to ‘bismillah rahman rahim’ and ‘non deus nisi deus solus’ – > ‘la illah illallah — two central muslim sentences were ‘pinched’ from the early Christians!]

    The Golden Years of Islam: Many Muslims are wishing back the Golden Years of Islam, when the prophet was alive and leading his community, creating the perfect society. We do not have any primary sources of these times, however, just legends. Connected to these legends is the conquest and islamisation of half of the known world. Again, we do not have any historical facts of these events for the 8th century, the time they were reported for.
    Golden Years were considered also those, when muslim scientists and scholars were the leading ones in the world. Names such as Al-Farabi, Hunnain, Biruni, Ibn Sina (Avicenna in the West), Ibn Rushd (Averoes) or Thabit (Thebit) are famous. However none of them was Muslim in todays sense and as scientists and philosophers in the Greek tradition, they were distant to mere believes. Ibn Rushd was even declared „apostate“ and exiled, his books were burned. There were Golden Times of Arab scientists, but not of Muslim scientists. Moreover, the establishing of Islam crashed the flourishing Arab sciences within short time. The sciences have been expelled then to the west, where they still are.

    The Quran of Sciences: There are a lot of so called dark passages in the Koran which no Muslim interpreter was able to understand, what resulted in so many different interpretations. The traditional excuse is, we are not able to understand fully Allahs perfect Arabic. Christoph Luxenberg (pseudonym), arabist and specialist in old oriental languagues, caused a short-lived(!) tsunami within the scientific world and earned a placement on the front-page of the New York Times with a publication, which existed in German languague only: He read a number of those dark phrases in the languague of the time, which was Syro-Aramaic. Seemingly senseless phrases made suddenly a sense. He proved the famous „maids in paradise“ to be in fact „sweet, clear grapes“ – bad news for djihadists.
    The burqa/veil is a complete mistranslation of the Aramaic „belt“ and nothing more but the personal opinion of at-Tabari, a famous Koran-editor around the year 900, who obviously was disturbed by the fact that women dressed in bast or rafia skirts often unintensionally showed their genitals when squatting. Since then the veil is considered in the Islamic world to be god`s command, though there is not one word about in the Koran. It turned out, the original languague of the Koran was defenitely not Arabic. There did not exist anything like Koran-arabic in the 6th, 7th or 8th century. Much of the Koran is clearly based on Syro-Aramaic texts, and is a translation of later times 9th century).
    (continued)

    ANTI-ISLAMIST said…
    http://www.blogger.com/profile/09642613040643385503

    The Muhamad of Sciences: We do not have any trace of the prophet Muhamad for about 250 years after his stated death. For the 6th and 7th century we do not have even any trace of the name „Muhamad“ itself. The reason: Muhamad was at that time a title and not a name. The first mentions of muhamad come from the eastern-provinces of the Persian Empire on coins bearing this name plus christian symbols. Muhamad was used by Christian Arabs in the East and meant the „to be praised one“. Coins bearing the muhamad-logo and/or „halifat Allah“ together with a standardized figure with a large sword, were traditionally interpreted to be a Caliph or even Muhamad. Modern research tells us, it is without doubt the eschatologic Christ with the sword of judgment and the title „announcer for god“ (halifat Allah). The „to be praised one“, the muhamad was Jesus. This very clearly tells the inscription in the „Dome of Rock“ in Jerusalem: „To be praised is Isa bin Maryiam“. The muhamad was the Christ of the East Arabian Christians, it was Jesus. During rhe 9th centure the muhamad developped into the Muhamad, the Prophet of the Arabs. „Muhamad“ was a figure of identification, but did not exist as person.

    The Church on the Temple Mount: Qubbat As-Sakhrah in Jerusalem was built in the year 694 by Abdel Malik. He was an arab-christian ruler and a fervent promoter of the „praised one“= muhamad = Jesus, who was supposed to return to earth in near future to conduct the final judgment as it is pictured on his coins. This judgement was expected to be held on the temple mount, on the place of the temple Salomon´s. Precisely on this place Malik bult his church. On the 240 m long band of the still existing kufic inscriptions, Malik layed down his religious program: It is the typical christian – monophysistic credo. In the 11th century only, the church got the Islamic tradition of the ascension of Muhamad. It was never an active mosque (this was the Al Aqsa opposite) until few decades ago, when the Dome of the Rocks became symbol of Muslim Palestine.
    MHMD was in ancient Ugarit the root for „golden“. This developped in Mesopotamia (inhabited by the „Arabi“) into „muhamad/un“ for „blessed, to be praised“ and into the titel muhamad which was nothing else but „Christ“. This, the christian „Muhamadism“ moved with Abdel Malik from Eastern Persia to Palestine. Nothing was known then, in the 7th century, of a place called Mekka and a prophet Muhamad. Jerusalem was the center of the „followers of the muhamad“ (as the Koran confirms, by the way).
    (continued)

    ANTI-ISLAMIST said…
    http://www.blogger.com/profile/09642613040643385503

    In the 9th century only the stories of a prophet from Mekka named Muhamad with his holy book Koran started circulating, the specific Arab monophysite christianity developped into an own religion called Islam. The Aramaic „qeryana“ of the arab Christians got transformed into the quran, undergoing many modifications and blendings with Beduin traditions. Even the old godesses from the desert got a revival. Godess of the moon was Allat, her black stone is still worshipped in Mekka. Godess of the morning star was Uzza. Their symbols are still present in the flags of many Muslim countries. In the 11th century at the very earliest we find the situation, which the Muslim traditions describe for the 8th century.

    Prophet Muhamad was not a historical person. Modern research draws a totally different picture of the timea when Muhamad founded his religion, which is said to have spread out over half of the known world within 80 years. We do not possess any contemporary sources confirming the traditional stories. The first reports appear not earlier than 200 years after the Prophet – a Koran was not known at those times, when Byzanthium lost half of its territories, Persia the whole empire; millions of Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, pagans came under muslim rule, but none of them tells us about it, there are no scripts, no books, no reports, nothing. Why doesn’t anyone wonder?
    The Muslim and Arab world is in very poor shape. If something goes wrong in the West the typical questions are: What went wrong? What did we make wrong? What can we do? In the Muslim world the traditional question is: Who has done this to us? The answers are always the same: The Franks, the Crusaders, the British, the French, the Soviets and at present Israel, the USA, the West. Remedy is believed to be the return to Muslim values and the conditions of the Golden Times. This expresses the -again- modern movement of salafiya: Back to prophet’s times. It is and idealistic view back to a history which had never existed. Modern views make it urgently advisable to reinterprete the Koran and clear it of misinterpretations occured in the course of centuries. Particularly the origin of the „Hadith“ needs to be reviewed. The bearded Imams and Ayatollahs have failed to make Islam compatible to the modern world.
    – – – – –
    Good Bye Mohammed. Wie der Islam wirklich entstand
    (The true origins of Islam) by Norbert G.Pressburg
    ISBN: 978-3-8391-9203-0
    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Dome_Of_The_Rock/Estwitness.htm
    http://www.islamreview.com/articles/whyallah.shtm

    ANTI-ISLAMIST
    http://www.blogger.com/profile/09642613040643385503

    ANTI-ISLAMIST said…

    POST SCRIPTUM
    I am sorry that the two last links does mot work – the material must
    have been moved. I offer some other useful links instead.
    • Book Review: Christoph Luxenberg (ps.) Die syro-aramaeische Lesart
    des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Qur’ansprache. [Robert
    R. PHENIX Jr. and Cornelia B. HORN]. Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
    6 (2003) 1.
    http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html
    [” Not in the history of commentary on the Qur’Çn has a work like this
    been produced. Similar works can only be found in the body of
    text-critical scholarship on the Bible. From its method to its
    conclusions on the language and content of the Qur’Çn, Luxenberg’s
    study has freed scholars from the problematic tradition of the Islamic
    commentators. Whether or not Luxenberg is correct in every detail, with
    one book he has brought exegetical scholarship of the Qur’Çn to the
    “critical turn” that biblical commentators took more than a century
    ago. This work demonstrates to all exegetes of the Qur’an the power of
    the scientific method of philology and its value in producing a clearer
    text of the Qur’an. Scholars of the first rank will now be forced to
    question the assumption that, from a philological perspective, the
    Islamic tradition is mostly reliable, as though it were immune to the
    human error that pervades the transmission of every written artifact.
    If biblical scholarship is any indication, the future of Qur’anic
    studies is more or less decided by this work.”] For a Muslim response
    by M. S. M. Saifullah, see
    http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/luxreview1.html

    • Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran [ALEXANDER
    STILLE] New York Times (and International Herald Tribune), March 4,
    2002. Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist
    work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist
    scholarship, The Origins of the Koran, and The Quest for the Historical
    Muhammad, have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen
    name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the Institute for
    the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a
    political agenda.
    http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/02/03/1bkk/04b.html
    • The Qur’an, Hadith, and the Prophet Muhammad
    http://www.uga.edu/islam/primsourcisl.html
    [Interactive scholarly site with information and links to other sites.
    Created and maintained by Alan Godlas.]

    • What is the Koran? [Toby Lester] Atlantic Monthly (January, 1999)
    http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/koran.htm
    [This article is a popular summary of critical research on the Qur’an.
    For a Muslim response by M. S. M Saifullah, see
    http://www.themodernreligion.com/basic/quran/quran_days_years.htm
    – scroll down half way here for this selection.
    – – – – –
    Also for a simple counter-jihad amateur with an one-track mind it is a fascinating idea that an old Bible-version written in Syro-Aramaic, by script-perverters/exegetes/activists of that time hating the idea of the Trinity (Nicea 325) and before a premature Arabic language was standardized and established, during a few centuries reedited, constructed and finally in the 9th century brought about the preliminary Glorious Quran, an oriental-arabic-beduin-bellicose version of a Bible.
    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    The above ambitious comment, however, drowned in total silence and disinterest or ignorance – so better to keep your mouth shut in future.
    Une merde reste une merde.

    • Also for a simple counter-jihad amateur with an one-track mind it is a fascinating idea that an old Bible-version written in Syro-Aramaic, by script-perverters/exegetes/activists of that time hating the idea of the Trinity (Nicea 325) and before a premature Arabic language was standardized and established, during a few centuries reedited, constructed and finally in the 9th century brought about the preliminary Glorious Quran, an oriental-arabic-beduin-bellicose version of a Bible.

      “Fascinating”? It sure is.

      • Merde ne mérite pas mieux meurtre que de copie et passé, eh?

        Speaking of concealment of genitalia – here they are, some of them, the recently Swedish hijab rebelling sisters. Just common, decent women like you. http://goo.gl/zfvQCR Everyone a collaborateur.
        Of course islam will win – shure as ivory – in less than 40 years. Idiocy allways wins.

        • The demographic collapse which will occur @ ~2050 is going to be a global phenomenon. Which is why the Chinese have dropped their “One child” law.

          IOW, we won’t be here but the experience of those who come after will be unprecedented. And many of those “idiots” will be the first fatalities.

          In this life there is NO “always” because History is one of the most favored jokes of the Cosmos. We insist on seeing it as linear (or in the East, as cyclical) when it is simply operating by the rules of Chaos.

    • The theology of Islam is a fusion of Christian and Jewish heresies. A couple of the Jewish heresies would be the Hagarenes and the Zealots. For example, from the Hagarenes they get the hajj and circling around the meteorite 7 times to commemorate Hagar’s 7 trips searching for water. Then add all the Ishmael not Isiah origin stories. From the Zealots they get the strict following of Sharia, (Halakha in Judasim).
      http://www.danielpipes.org/160/the-jewish-muslim-connection-traditional-ways-of-life

      It is my understanding that neither the Christian nor the Jews put their heretics to the sword in any systematic fashion, but generally ostracized and eventually exiled them to the “east”.

      As far as the “Muslim” conquests of North Africa and Spain, the rulers of these regions were heretics (of various types), but the majority of the population was orthodox Christians. Replacing one heretical ruling class with another would not be a cause for revolt, especially if initially the taxes were decreased.
      Heretical rulers and a devout public was not new, or a barbarian development, shortly after the Council of Nicea, the bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius (generally credited with definitive theology on the Incarnation) was removed from office five times for refusing to embrace the heresy of the political leaders of the day.

      Pure speculation based on superficial knowledge of the Byzantine-Sassanid war. In previous wars both sides used Arab mercenaries as part of their forces, but in the final war all the Arabs fought with the Persians, (perhaps due to Qutham). This may have been the main reason for the conquest of Jerusalem and Egypt by the Persians. When Heraclius counter attacked, he went straight for the capital of Persia without retaking territories. Heraclius teamed up with new mercenaries, Khazars, who got the spoils of the empire after victory. The Persian/Arab troops that conquered Jerusalem and Egypt returned too late to fight, and the Arab mercenaries did not receive their promised plunder. This caused the Persian civil war and led to the “Muslim” conquest. The Levant and Egypt were left to be governed by which ever army got there first, Arab or Byzantine. The Byzantine army had to fight in the Balkans, while believing that the conquered territories would return to their rule as normal, but the Arabs were angry and were quick to grab any loot they could find.

  9. I believe that islam is an aberration. This view was also put forward in an interview by an Anglican Archbishop about ten years ago. One would be hard pressed to persuade such a cleric to make a similar pronouncement today. They have been cowed into submission by institutionalised islamic threats and violence. I know of two anglican priests who have been attacked an beaten by muslims in the East End of London. There have probably been many more but reports have been suppressed in the name of community cohesion. To continue your discussion, I have been referred to a book entitled “Hagarism – The making of the Islamic World” by Patricia Stone and Michael Cook who put forward a number of theories all opposed to the accepted muslim narrative. I came upon the book as reference was made to it in Patrick Sookhdeo’s “Global Jihad – The Future in the Face of Militant Islam” Patrick Sookhdeo is the founder of the Barnabus Fund.

  10. Rather than a religious (mis)interpretation, I believe that Islam is a Satanic plan to derail Christianity.

    Of course, Islam is going to have a backstory filled with lies because Satan is the father of lies.

    King James Bible – John 8:44
    Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

    Of course, Islam is going to have a false prophet Mohammed to help us see the true saviour Jesus.

    King James Bible – Jeremiah 23:28
    The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the LORD.

    Of course, Islam is going to have the spirit of the antichrist because Islam promotes one evil Allah as the philosophical and behavioral opposite of the supremely good triune God.

    King James Bible – 1 John 4:3
    And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

    I also believe that Islam is one of many Satanic plans to derail Christianity – including Communism founded and imposed by non-Christians.

    “At Fatima, on July 13, 1917, Our Lady told Sister Lucy that ‘God is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Communions of reparation and for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart … In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, which will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.'”

    “At Fatima, Our Lady warned that if the consecration were not done as She requested, then ‘Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated.'”

    http://www.fatima.org/apostolate/faqconse.asp

    I believe that the errors of Russia are the errors of non-Christians including atheists and Jews (racial and/or religious), and it is those errors of intelligent and organized non-Christians that endanger the modern world the most….

  11. I’ll add a few more books for you all to consider:

    “The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History”
    http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Origins-Islam-Research/dp/1591026342
    is a collection of articles discussing many of the topics raised in this post.

    Also “In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World” by Tom Holland gives an excellent background to the period discussed, in particular the Byzantine-Persian wars and the role of the Arabs, and the religious “maelstrom” of the time.

  12. Hey, Iris: thanks for this review. (Although I’ll agree to disagree with some of it; I was not as impressed as you as with Emmet Scott’s effort. I preferred Spencer’s.) You clearly took time to understand what the book was about and why it mattered.

    I’ll put this book on the list.

    (And, to Damon: I heartily second your recommendation of Tom Holland. I will add: Patricia Crone / Martin Hinds, “God’s Caliph”; Patricia Crone, “Slaves on Horses”; David Cook, “Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic”.)

  13. From time to time one comes up upon a reading that undermines the entire 101 course in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, taken at a very decent university. Although not entirely ignorant, after visiting here from time to time (and other places as well) — it really shocks me to read about such a gross misinterpretation of history. Assuming, of course, that the new knowlege is correct and rightfully supersedes the old one.

    Thank you: the author & the commenters. If you could only advise how to squeeze all these readings suggested in the article (books, links) into a tight schedule… (No, I don’t own a Tv set.)

Comments are closed.