best part is still the "desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction" bit.

THAT'S RACIST!!!!1!!11eleventies!

"Arab" is a cultural and linguistic term. It refers to those who speak Arabic as their first language. Arabs are united by culture and by history. Arabs are not a race.

And what filthy bunch of bigots is disseminating such racist trash?

Oh...the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Well, WTF would they know? Certainly not much, compared to our awesome faculty of Wiki-warriors and Google-meisters.

Islam isn't a race either. It's just a religion. But wouldn't it be great - for Some People - if we could get Catholics and Baptists declared races, so they could try (however ineptly) to play the race card against their critics?

And I'm a complete fail as an anti-Arab anti-Muslim bigot. As I've said too many times, I spent 6 years living in the Middle East. So I literally put my life into the hands of Arabs and Muslims on countless occasions.

Just FTR, Ramadan starts this week (June 28). So we can expect the usual round of Kumbaya Krap from the apologists for all religions, great and small.

Usual Irrelevant Trivia, long as I'm here - I very rarely saw camels where I lived, in Northern Egypt/Nile Delta. The end of Ramadan was the only time I saw those critters and the occasion wasn't a happy one, at least for the camels. They were tied up outside butcher shops, waiting to be sacrificed in the Eid al-Fitr feasts at the end of Ramadan. Camels are prized sacrifices but are very expensive, so generally only available to the Muslim 1%. And these were young (small) camels, not considered very useful since they can't carry heavy loads at their age.

/irrelevant trivia

is that there really is not a monolithic "Arabic" language that is spoken over a wide area. Different versions of Arabic are spoken in different countries, and they may be only partially, or barely intelligible to one another.

When working in Egypt, once we had to call the "EGYPTIAN" Tech Service line for Hewlett-Packard. My Egyptian co-worker had a funny look on his face while talking.

When he hung up, he said: "That guy wasn't Egyptian. He was a Gulf Arab." He knew the accent instantly.

I've also read about some major heartburn from those millions of Muslims in Indonesia who don't know Arabic. They often feel condescended to by visiting clerics from the Middle East. Especially when those clerics insist that all REAL Muslims will learn Classical Arabic, so they can read the Koran as it was written.

You can also learn to speak Classical Arabic. But as I understand it, that's roughly the equivalent of walking around speaking in Shakespearean English, since Classical Arabic hasn't been updated since the 9th century or so. People might understand you, but they will look at you funny.

I learned a few Arabic words when I was in Saudi Arabia. But when I tried out those words on Egyptians, they looked at me funny. They could usually figure out what I was saying, but it took a few minutes. Then they would tell me the Egyptian way to pronounce whatever word I was mangling.

One of those words was "kwaji," which can mean either "foreigner" or "enemy." Or both at once!

Something that always cracks me up in Tom Clancy-type crap novels. At least since 2001, there's usually a line where Our Hero is described as speaking "perfect street Arabic."

Uh-huh. But if he's speaking Beirut street Arabic on the streets of Riyadh, he's going to blow his cover real quick.

"I don' hate arab people. I like to eat food late at night!"

If not for the protestant reformation and to a lesser extent, Henry VIII wanting to get into a little strange, the pope may have kept his grip on most of Europe. Even then it took a couple of centuries of carnage and a bunch of refugees to the new world before we had it in writing.

Anyone who studies that time period must understand how dangerous it is to have government and religion intertwined. It wasn't just an obscure, ancient history lesson for the founding fathers, it was the primary reason many of them were here.

The western "tradition or separating politics and religion" is less a tradition and more an ongoing battle.

Anthony Pagden's "Worlds At War."

Pagden spends a lot of time discussing the evolution of Roman law and its modern Western descendants, like British common law.

The Romans learned one lesson early: keep the priests out of the law courts. Law had to be based on observable facts, logic and human reason.

Western law generally evolved from that Roman lesson, with a few setbacks along the way, as you noted. And Pagden notes some of the same in his book.

But sha'ria law never went thru a similar evolution, despite periodic attempts to make the law more secular in some Muslim societies. The source of sha'ria law is the Koran, period.

What I often heard when I lived in Egypt was a wish for a society with all the benefits of modern Western technology, but still based in traditional Islamic law. e.g. I heard more than one well-educated Egyptian hope for a return to the death penalty for adultery. For both parties.

The thing that scares me - that's exactly what Iranians thought they were getting back in 1979. All the benefits of modern Western society, just a little more religious than the Shah. What they got was a govt. of armed Fundamentalist cranks who dragged the society back to the 7th century.

Egypt had some of the same fights as Iran, over women wearing the veil etc., when I was living there from 2005-09. At one point, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni banned all women on TV from wearing the hijab (head covering). That caused a huge uproar.

You might think Hosni was a Good Liberal for rules like that. Until you saw his threat to search Egyptian libraries and burn any books he found written by Jews.

The Middle East...usually a lot more complicated than it looks...

story is just as true. The RW NutZ can not reconcile Reality with their economic fantasies,
and Reality has to somehow bend to make their "Beliefs" true.

Last edited Wed Jun 25, 2014, 11:46 PM - Edit history (1)

Many thanks for posting this.

when religion trumps science, science dies.

Why did science die in the West leading to the dark Ages?

Words of warning about the teaparty?

It's another canard of the church to make them look better. It was initially a time of strife, Rome had faltered, and the church had splintered, but things were still chugging along like they always had. The complaint was that barbarians were moving in, not learning the language, and people weren't going to church (sound familiar?) This whole thing about science stopping, and forgetting knowledge while the churches preserved what they could was made up in the renaissance. During that time dark meant unknown: they didn't know much about that time (like darkest Africa, they just didn't know what was there)

Constantinople was the capitol of the Roman empire for a long time, people just didn't think of it as the same beast, so they treat it as a separate entity, and the schism feeds into that idea.

"In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God."


They basically denied that correlation and causation exist and replaced it with "God's ways are mysterious."

"God did it" is the lamest non-excuse excuse ever! It adds nothing, solves nothing, IS nothing.

The Ash’ari view has endured to this day. Its most extreme form can be seen in some sects of Islamists. For example, Mohammed Yusuf, the late leader of a group called the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western education is a sin” by explaining its view on rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.” The Ash’ari view is also evident when Islamic leaders attribute natural disasters to God’s vengeance, as they did when they said that the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the result of God’s anger at immodestly dressed women in Europe. Such inferences sound crazy to Western ears, but given their frequency in the Muslim world, they must sound at least a little less crazy to Muslims. As Robert R. Reilly argues in The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), “the fatal disconnect between the creator and the mind of his creature is the source of Sunni Islam’s most profound woes.”

"Sound crazy to Western ears"? Hell, we've got plenty of people right here that believe in this bullshit. We all know that GLBTs are responsible for hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, terrorist attacks, etc etc etc. You'd be amazed at our power!

The Keeper:The Legend of Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam was a mathematician and astronomer who lived in Persia, in Naishapur, about 1000 A.D. This movie traces his story and the story of his modern descendants in Houston, pursuing their roots.
More info: www.greatomar.com


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294806/

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTMyMjU5Mjg0OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDY4MTkyMQ@@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg

There was a sultan after Khayyam lived who decided to shut down scientific research. I don't know his name but I heard it in a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Omar's buddy Hassan grows up and becomes a religious fanatic, the founder of the Hashashin, which is where the words "hashish" and "assassin" come from. Hassan tells Omar he must join his religious revolution. Omar asks him, "And just WHO has ultimate....religious...authority?" Hassan is silent.