"Obama is acting like Bush"

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Max2147

He got his start as the peaceful arbiter of disputes in Medina. He unified the Arab tribes that had constantly fought among themselves before he came along. He was a brilliant political leader. And yes, he was a military leader as well - quite an effective one too.

That's a little different from the way I heard it. My understanding was that Muhammad was a self-styled prophet in Mecca, who was shunned by his neighbors and family. Disillusioned, he went to Medina and began leading raids against Meccan caravans. Eventually, he got enough guys together to go back and sack Mecca.
IIRC, part of the reason Islam is so radically divided between the Sunni and Shiite sects is because after the prophet's death, some chose to follow his closest friend and other followed his brother, who he disliked but who was his closest kin.

Is that all true or am I mistaken?

[Skybird]

I refer to an older piece of text of mine, to save me the time to type it again, if you do not mind.

Originally Posted by A critical history of Islam

Social revolution came in the person of Muhammad, born around 571, whose parents died when he was young. Beeing an orphan, commentators describe him to have shown several psychological anomalies (maybe coming from the early death of his parents), a general hypersensitivity of his mind and physical senses, and often it is said that he was epileptic, too. But however, his intellectual and organisational talent soon became evident when he started to help out in the business of his uncle, whose family belonged to the Hashim, a sideline of the trade-controlling Quraysh, which were the elite caste controlling the trade via caravans from and to Mekka, and the complete financial system in the Western provinces of the Arabian peninsula. During his travellings and business negotiations he trained his talents in organisation, perceiving opportunities, and his obviously outstanding intellect. When he was in his mid-20s, he married a woman that with over 40 years was far older than he was, Khadidja, she was a rich business women that already had lost two husbands. Originally it was planned as an instrumental marriage to increase his monetarian basis and her profit incomes by using Muhammads intellectual and organizational and negotiating talents. Both partners later learned that there may have been more in their relation than just material gains, and so they had six children, of which only the four daughters survived childhood.

No longer depending on his original tribe and a low income for himself, but beeing secured in wealthy living conditions, Muhammad now had the freedom and time to concentrate on questions that had found his interest since longer time now, additionally motivated by the experiences of his many travellings. Beeing of high sensual sensibility and intellectuality, he realized the growing dysbalance between the growing wealth of the Quraysh and the increasing social insecurity of the poor that formerly were embedded in their functioning tribal structures, and he became aware of the growing moral and ethical vacuum that came in the wake of the material success. These personal qualities together earned him the reputation of beeing a visionary seer (kahin). He did not stop here, his business travellings brought him into contact with the ideas of the Christians, Jews and Hanufas. Especially the Christians sects, victims of deportation or expulsion by the official Byzantinian church, were struggling hard to widen their influence in the Arabian diaspora. But all the new religions Muhammad came into contact with, described the same single, allmighty, true God that would hold court over each human beeing at the end of his days and would judge him according to his individual bilance of life. That all these religions and their regions of origin had been able to create civilizations that were far superior in practical political power to that of the Arabs of that time, may have had an additional effect on Muhammad that drove him into an intense examination of these religions and cultures. For one and a half decade he spend much time on sharpening his view for the social problems within Arab society, and educated himself in the teachings of the Christians and Jews.

The year 610 marks the time when Muhammad is said to have received teachings and educations by an idea of a higher divine entity that he named „Allah“, and that from now on should have send him regularly visual visions and verbal inspirations („Eingebungen“), that are named ayat (that means: signs of miracles, Wunderzeichen). He used these to start doing threatening, powerful preachings, in which he made it more and more clear, that this entity named Allah was speaking through him and that Muhammad himself for that simple reason rightfully claimed the status of beeing God’s prophet, a „call to duty“ that was delivered to him by the archangel Gabriel in an appearance that almost should have crushed him to the floor and pressed all breath out of his body (sign for his epilleptical disease?) so that he almost feared that he must die and lost allmost all control over his mind, body and senses.

The "divine" inspirations (probably nothing else than epilleptic attacks) did not stop, a cousin of Muhammad, who was of Christian belief, thought of them as “namus“ in the understanding of the Jewish law and Thora. With time passing by, the growing number of Muhammad’s preachings and inspirations started to circulate under the term „qur‘an“, an Arab word that means „recitation“, while there is a link to an old Arameic word as well, „quiryan“, which means „liturgy“. With growing intensity Muhammad was focussing in his preachings on the social dysbalance in society, on the need to turn and put all trust and faith in the source of his inspiration, Allah, and on the responsebility each individual has for his life when there will be his judgement day at the end of his existence. That he also targeted the criminally and/or illegimately accumulated power and wealth of the rich class both earned him the sympathy of more and more people, and reminds me of the constellation 14 centuries later:

In the beginning of his activity as a preacher and prophet, Muhammad was willing to make compromises concerning the content of his sermons, to avoid too much friction with his social and religious environment in the form of the old traditional gods of tribal structures in his place, of which there were namely three in the main (and a large number of minor ones). That gave him the peace and freedom to act that was needed as long as his position was still weak and uncertain. But beeing told by Allah, that these false gods were only creations of Satan, he gave up to display tolerance towards them, what exposed his position somewhat. In a non-Muslim understanding: he showed strong signs of weakening tolerance for ideas opposing his own’s, and acted with mounting intolerance against them to overcome their resistance. This, in combination with his critizism of established power structures of the Quraysh, finally led him to have raised the attention of the feudal elite - that became aware that he started to become a threatening problem for their privileges. His verbal attacks on their trading monopoles and privileges showed the moral and spiritual deficits of the new social order they had established. Of course they reacted. Muhammad’s few followers became subject to expulsion, torture, murder and prosecution. The unique power monopole and influence on trade the Quraysh had, allowed them to even put pressure on traditional tribal social structures that were trying to protect their members to some degree. The conflict became a serious issue. Muhammad, who had spend so much of his life in Mekka, of course knew the power constellations, and that the reserves for his followers to hold out were thin. Long before the conflict escalated, he had started to form contacts with Medina and Abbyssinia, to learn if it was possible to evade into these regions, if Mekka should happen to become too dangerous to stay. Short before the Quraysh were able to extinguish his rebellious teachings completely by killing him and all of his followers, he left Mekka with a small group and escaped to Medina. This escape in 622, named hidjra, is usually agreed on to mark the beginning of an independent Islamic identity. Usually the move to Medina is interpreted by modern Islam not as a sign of weakness, but pragmatism that is a key charcteristic in Muhammad’s life and personality. They evaded not because of fear, but to ensure they can keep trying on. Having left the reprisals of the Quraysh behind, the small community in Medina now had the freedom to bolster their status, to raise their own profile, to strengthen their community, to win new followers. Literature knows them as muhadjirun (exiles, emmigrants), where as their helping sympathizers in Medina are known as ansar. The climate in Medina was helpful for Muhammad, the local religious cults had been exhausted by decades of rivalry and fight to become the dominant dogma, and so had not only little strength left to resists the convincing power of Muhammad’s new revolutionary ideas, but even showed to be all too willing to follow him under his own rulership and give up their own cults.

The attractiveness of Muhammad’s teachings, heavily influenced by the monotheistic ideas of Christians and Jews, need to be explained, else the question remains, why he was so successful and where Islam was getting it’s convincing and high „cultural penetration power“ from. Until Muhammad, Arab society was ruled by cults based around nature phenomenons and tribal gods that acted as guardians for the tribe and thus saw themselves in conflicts with other gods as often as tribes waged wars against each other (which was no rare event at that time). People‘s mind did not realize that it was their own acting – the world of man, not the world of gods - that was leading to the twistings and conflicts they experienced in their history, and that their gods were just projections of their own states of mind and of human flaws, drives and motives. So people focussed on their gods as creators of war, suffering and conflict, which gave them the impression that life was ruled by the will of gods, whose intentions often remained a mystery and thus, life was an event ruled by random chance and man’s inability to influence it. There was the only answer to subjugate to the tribe’s god, assuming that he hopefully would be stronger than that of the others, and to trust in the belief that beeing a follower of his cult saves one from harm that was projected into man’s world from conflicts taking place on the level of the gods.

But now came Muhammad: and his idea of man beeing the deciding factor himself that creates each individual‘s fate (all life, punishment or reward) by his own responsebility - that was revolutionary. Because it freed people from the canon of many gods and their conflicts that led to human suffering, and brought order and foresight to a world that before was experienced as a „labyrinth“ of random chances, in which everything was unsecure and no anticipation of a secure future seemed to be possible. The subjugation to Allah caused law and order, structure and insight to enter man’S world: a fair bilance between one own’s good and bad acts and doings, and one’s resulting fate after death, and these deed‘s consequences (in form of Allah’s judgement) decided the design of desirable ways of behavior to avoid bad consequences and to help good consequences. If man was living a life that was pleasing to Allah, if he was obedient in other words, he now had all reason to trust in his mercy and getting his reward, giving him peace of mind and a sense of certainty and security that before was unthinkable, because what Allah expected from him was preached by Muhammad: an ever-growing set of more or less strict rules, that left little space for misinterpretation and misstepping, and a codex of behavior that assisted man in finding his way to Allah’s mercy and let him in no more existential fear and doubt. That sounds like a fail-safe method for guaranteed ticket to paradise. Man had all reason to feel arrived in life now, to be fulfilled by having a duty in life for which he will be rewarded, to be held by the hand of someone who was bigger than it all. „Success“ at the end of his life – in the understanding of avoiding an empty, dark void after death, or a hellish penalty - was now within man’s own reach and responsibility, it was no longer a lottery that was manipulated by selfish, fighting gods, or the arbitrariness of nature’s phenomenons. The forming and regulating authority of Allah, the destroyer and mercyful („Vernichter und Erbarmer“), should end the increasing disorder of mislead behavior of man, the ratio of monotheism replacing man‘s former fatalism in the face of god-made random rule in life, so that man could start to act with a sense of responsebility for himself, and awareness of Allah’s final judgement as a motivation for that. Divine arbitrariness was replaced with human ratio. And that was a revolutionary idea in the Arab world of that time indeed.

Nevertheless, although having been influenced by Jewish ideas, his knowledge of their religion was far from beeing complete, so his contacts to the Jewish tribes, that had a very strong presence in and around Medina, necessarily ended in the exposure of his theological deficits. That the Jewish theologists, aware of their superior theological agility, also met him with condescension and hurting irony, necessarily must have offended a strong and dominant personality like that of Muhammad. Realizing that the Jewish disrespect threatend his postion in Medina, he took drastical consequences. In 624 he attacked and drove away two Jewish tribes, and three years later he took on the last remaining one, the Quaryza, who were sort of allies of the Quarysh in Mekka; he ordered a two days-lasting massacre, in which up to 800 male tribe members got executed in his very own presence, while all girls and females were traded into slavery or ended in the harems of his followers, or his own.
For the population sizes of that time the size of the massacre was immense. The years 624 to 627 saw Muhammad’s radical extinction of Jewish opposition and any opposition in general. Several short wars and predatory raids against all other tribes settling in his neighbourhod, to strenghten his economical power, were accompanied by the systematical hunt on artists, writers and poets, intellectuals, who did not fully support his rulership and that were killed by a growing dedicated subgroup of murderers amongst his followers. The acting-option to use the later so-called fatwa to call for the killing of an unwanted critics has seen it’s tradition beeing founded in these years and still is a valid option until today. As a matter of historical fact, murder always has been a legitimate tool of securing Islamic power throughout all centuries of it’s existence. Murder was also acceptable in the powerpolitics of Western civilization, but here it never was raised into the official status of beeing religiously acceptable, where a fatwa not only means that it is acceptable according to religious rules, but that it even is allowed to actively order it.

This policy of displaying a tyrannic ammount of power, and using it without scruples or mercy, did it’s part to intimidate his enemies and to silence those who were in doubt. In Mekka people started to look in deep sorrow towards Medina. There were no doubts left about who was in control of rulership. The ursurping of power was complete. The political and economical success and the many raids Muhammad conducted, raised the wealth of his community and raised the convincing power of his example (that’s one reason why it is called the Medina modelm the other reason beeing that the community of Medina for later generations of Muslims served as a model that taught them how to orgnaize their communal life, identity and self-understanding). In 628 he surprised his old enemies in Mekka by using the financial prey from his raids to form and lead an impressively big army to Mekka „for pilgrimage“, by that he left the city no other choice than to accept a dictating of conditions during so-called „negotiations“, that led to a peace treaty that should last for ten years – so said the treaty. But in fact just two years later (in which he conducted a series of more raids throughout the region to fill his community’s treasure chest), in 630, he again attacked Mekka with an even bigger army and broke the peace treaty, and enforced the handover of the city. Bribery, generous gifts and distribution of his prey from former raids were used to calm the hostile sentiments in the city, which led to some anger amongst his followers from Medina. Muhammad now was in control of the Kaaba and changed the cult around it so that it was focussed on Abraham and reflected the monotheistic belief in Allah. New followers joined the community by the thousands. It just took two more years to secure Muhammads conquest of the complete Arabian pensinsula, this part of history ended with the last independent tribe surrendering to the new authority of Muhammad’s rite. Administratively Arabia now was controlled by close and trustworthy followers of Muhammad, who were responsible both for preaching and strengthening faith, and to control the regular payments of taxes: state and religion essentially were united in the same hands.

Two years later, in 632, Muhammad died in Medina.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Thanks, Sky

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Skybird

You need to pervert the sermon on the mountain or other preachings by Jesus and must ignore him in order to behave sh*tty to others, to use your words.

You need to pervert Muhammad and be disobedient to him in order to behave tolerant and respectful to other cultures and relgions.


Now compare that with lets say the sermon on the mountain. How many wars have Jesus authorised? How many men has he slain himself? How many predatory raids did he ordered? How many genocides (like Muhammad in Medina) has he unleashed? Was Jesus a murderer and bandit like muhammad? A conqueror and warmonger? Say, how many caravans has Jesus robbed before he started preaching, and how many of his followers had to flee him in order to save their lives from his wrath?

That would seem to be my point. I said people, not Messiahs.

Buddahaid

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Skybird

but the Bible has a New Testament as well - and that is very different to the old one.

Yeah, but when the OT turns out to be fraud, where does that let the NT? let

[geetrue]

I wonder who the Iranian people are going to believe after the smoke clears (no pun intended)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Barack Obama of behaving like his White House predecessor and called on him to apologize for what he called U.S. interference following Iran's elections.

Originally Posted by google

With enhanced research, VOA has been better able to track its audience. Of particular interest is ... where 40 percent of urban adults listen regularly to VOA

http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=500&sid=1696410

Iran regulates and monitors the activities of international and independent media operating within its borders, and it closely watches and guides its own internal state media. Many reformist newspapers, magazines and Web sites have emerged in the past decade, but often come under restrictions or are shut down.

http://ibb7-2.ibb.gov/pubaff/farsi001.html

Monitoring has identified two forms of jamming. The first is “bubble jamming,” a fast oscillating tone transmitted by a jamming transmitter operating on the same frequency as the VOA transmitters. The second is “voice jamming,” broadcasts of the external service of the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran transmitted on the same frequency as VOA Farsi.

The Voice of America broadcasts world, regional, and U.S. news and information in 53 languages to an estimated weekly audience of 91 million listeners.

[don1reed]

A passing suggestion:

Don't know if any here have viewed the PBS series, "God on Trial." It's about Auschwich Jews putting God on trial for their predicament.

It can be viewed on Youtube.com in a 9 part series.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Fish

Yeah, but when the OT turns out to be fraud, where does that let the NT? let

Several key parts of the four Gospels - for example the sermon on the mountain - speak for themselves even if ignoring the rest of the Gospels completely. You do not need historical contexts to see something valuable in them - that's why it does not matter whether they are authentic or not, and whether Jesus is a historc figure, or just a fiction. But for explaining the shape and content of the Old Testament as well as the Quran, you cannot avoid refering to historical contexts and circumstances. You cannot understand what the Quran says what it says if you ignore the figure of Muhammad. Only within the context of Muhammad's life, the shape and form of Quran makes any sense in that it can be explained why it is like it is. and since the Quran is understood to be Allah'S will, this means that Allah is limited by the intention that muhammad has put into the term.

Max had it absolutely correct when saying that the Quran is highly contradictory in itself. You can find a red guiding line only when seeing it through the life and biography of Muhammad, and superimpose Muhammad's intention over it, else it does not make any sense, and is just confused. But what you get when using Muhammad as the key to interprete it, is a conqueror's agenda who keeps his forces together by cheating and intimidation, and who prevented weakness and caused unified strength by declaring any straying off from muhammad's path a religious crime that causes most unforgiven penalties - it is not a transcending message by a holy man, but works as a tool for disciplinary penalties to keep the hierarchy and command structure of an army intact. And from that perspective the Quran all of a sudden makes a lot of sense, even more when considering that there have been several versions of the Quran who all got tailored and changed a bit by local rulers to use it to legitimise their own powerpolitics, like Muhammad did. The Quran is a document that serves as justification for Islam's claim for power and dominance - that is it's primary purpose, and that'S what it pretty much is limited to. And no matter how inferior in style and kitschig in language it is - this one purpose it serves with remarkable efficiency. But it is a work of totalitarian politics. I often said that Islam is more politics than religion.

That's what I mean when saying that in Islam, in the end all and everything is about Muhammad - not about Allah, not about Quran, not about Sharia. Because all these things go back to Muhammad whose mouth has founded them and without whom terms like Allah or Islam simply would not be known today. In that meaning I also refer to Islam as Muhammedanism - not to intentionally stirr emotions and offend people, but because it is the most precise and reasonable description of what Islam is - a personal cult rooted in the life and personality of and focussed on Muhammad. Until the world war, the term Muhammedanism was in common use to refer to Islam. that Muslims do not like it, can be explained. It reminds them of what their proclaimed devine religion in fact is about: and that is neither a superior devine entitity, nor a book of divine laws and rules that existed already from the beginning of time on. Muhammad is not just an announcer proclaiming the showact to come - Muhammad is the very star of the show itself. And that Islam cannot accept without giving up the basis of it's own identity.I personally have always seen Islam unable to reform without giving up what actually makes it "Islam". In other words: you can only reform Islam based on Quran and Muhammad - by bringing it to an end. and if it is not basing on Muhammad and the Quran, than it is not Islam. It makes no sense to define Islam any different if the term should have any meaning.

Go figure the problems coming from that.

[Shearwater]

The way I see it, most of Obama's behaviour in the current situation can be explained the following way: US interests (or those of the West in general) stay the same, even if political leaders change. Electing a president in one country (the US) doesn't change the political situation in the other country (Iran) all by itself.
That applies even more to Iran because Mr Ahmadinejad is, so to speak, only the tip of the iceberg, viz. an authoritarian regime thinly disguised as "theocracy". And even if someone else takes over in Iran, changes will not be dramatic because it's the system.
Don't confuse the government of a country (both in the US and in Iran) with long-term national interests.

[Ishmael]

You are correct. I even registered voters for the man and I admit it. What he's done is to continue the apparantly bipartisan plan of concentration of power in the executive at the expense of liberty, privacy and the Rule of Law. For me, the big news item buried in all the Iran coverage was Ahmedinijad's attendance at the Shanghai Economic Cooperation Council summit in Yekaterinburg with China, Russia, India, Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics. The dominating item under discussion there was a formulation of plans to end the dollar's role as the World Reserve Currency. If such plans come to fruition, the US's role as the dominant military and economic power well be over. The big economic players, Russia, China and India all have enormous reserves of dollars in their foreign exchange holdings that are being devalued by the Fed's continued printing of dollars and deficits going back to the Nixon administration.

Once the dollar ceases to be the Reserve currency, what's left of the bottom of the US economy will fall into a tailspin that will make the Great Depression and our current one look like a Golden Age.

[geetrue]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/06/26/national/w090647D34.DTL

Merkel backed Obama's stand. And she said Iran must be kept from getting a nuclear weapon.

If Obama is acting like Bush acording to the president of Iran

Then who is Gernany acting like?

Israel?

I say these days of history will be th end of Iran's right to bear nuclear arms

[Max2147]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

That's a little different from the way I heard it. My understanding was that Muhammad was a self-styled prophet in Mecca, who was shunned by his neighbors and family. Disillusioned, he went to Medina and began leading raids against Meccan caravans. Eventually, he got enough guys together to go back and sack Mecca.
IIRC, part of the reason Islam is so radically divided between the Sunni and Shiite sects is because after the prophet's death, some chose to follow his closest friend and other followed his brother, who he disliked but who was his closest kin.

Is that all true or am I mistaken?

You missed some parts.

When Muhammad started receiving his "revelations" in Mecca, he started spreading them. Part of his sermons criticized the powers that be in Mecca for their corruption, arrogance, and ignorance of the poor. This did not make him very popular among the local elites, so they decided to kill him. He got wind of the plot beforehand, so he fled, along with his followers.

He had family connections in Medina, and the local leaders decided to invite him in as a neutral arbitrator to resolve a local dispute. He agreed to arbitrate, on the condition that Medina accepted his authority and brought in his followers. They agreed. He gained a reputation as a wise and just arbitrator, and others began bringing their disputes before him. Soon he was the ruler of the city.

He then took his skill in settling disputes to another level, and began to settle disputes between warring Arab tribes. A condition of his arbitration was always that the parties involved accept his authority. Through this he united the Arab tribes under his rule. Mecca was still independent, but eventually submitted without a fight after Muhammad assembled an army to attack it.

This had all been peaceful, aside from a brief unsuccessful attack on Mecca a few years before. The first large scale use of force came when some of the tribes tried to break away, and Muhammad attacked them to force them back into the fold. After that Muhammad began to expand aggressively, conquering the Arabian peninsula and later attacking the Byzantines and Persians.

There was a bit of dispute about who should succeed Muhammad, but the Shia movement didn't really get going until the next century.

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31539392...deastn_africa/

Looks like Obama's buddy is turning on him. Quick! Set up a meeting.

Yeah, and Bush's policy was just so effective. Why should we continue doing something which doesn't work?

What's wrong with starting with a clean slate? If Iran wants to be unreasonable, so be it. But at least give it a chance. If it doesn't work, so what?

Trying diplomacy does not make Aheorpiuzadad his buddy.

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Was Jesus a murderer and bandit like muhammad? A conqueror and warmonger?

Uh... he conquered Death, Skybird. Jeez.

[Shearwater]

Unfortunately, this thread is turning into yet another debate in the line of "Which religion do you believe to be the most prone to violence?" (I'm exaggerating here alright, but it the discussion has certainly gone astray).
Just to make one thing perfectly clear (from my point of view): This is not about religion in the least. If at all, religion is used to make the authority of the ruling class in Iran unquestionable by turning legitimate criticism and opposition into blasphemy. It is an abuse of religion, which could be done with any of them, and has been (even Buddhism). There are certainly both people for and people against Ahmadinejad who claim to be good muslims.