Know him before you insult him...

[TashaN]

If Muslims can say that "Jesus was just a prophet", I have no problem with people saying that "Muhammad was just a politician and a judge". There is no proof that Muhammad was anything but a political leader and a judge, so there is nothing wrong with saying so.

I respect your opnion, you don't have to believe he was a prophet.

 

[TashaN]

As for taking responsibility, I suggest that those who create, promote, or allow Islam to serve as theological cover for backwardness and barbarism - many of whom are perhaps not unlike you, take full responsibility for the current affront against democracy.

bla bla bla :biglaugh: as usual ..

Believe me, you don't know what you are talking about.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

No. It was ignited by those who counterpose barbarism to democracy. Islam is as Islam does, and it is appearing increasingly deranged and dangerous.

If you believe democracy is not barbaric then you watched way too many "I'm just a Bill" cartoons on Sesame Street. The history of Western democracy has been nothing but barbarism. Some barbarians wear a turban, some wear Eddie Bauer. Some fight with AK47s, some fight with M16s. Some terrorist beheads a reporter, some PRESIDENT supports torture.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

I know plennty about who the "prophet" really was, a murderer, hypocrite, and the orginator of a religion that is the oposite of liberating etc for its people and those who come in contact with it.
One only needs to read the history and actions of this man to decide who or what he really was, it is the islamic extreamists around now who best represent him.

You're right, Pat Robertson's history of Islam probably says all of those things. But if you read any academic history books, such as ones that do not have a religious bias, you'll read an entirely different history.

One of the most factual and authoritative is written by Karen Armstrong, entitled, "Muhammad."

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

I think now people should really start asking themselves if good muslims do really make up the majority of islam. I reckon a hell of a lot of the muslims at the demostartions in england were previously thought of as good muslims. All it took was a cartoon to get them out threatening Europe with their own 9/11.

Get real. There are over 1 Billion Muslims worldwide, that's 40 times the population of Australia, while the number rioting are like the number on Bondi Beach on Saturday afternoon. There were probably more fat tourists snorkeling off of Cairns than there are rioters!

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

I dont know of many americans who have called for the beheading of a basketball team's opponent, or of any who while rioting tried to kill people. I would certainly bet that not many of the rioters are Christians either.

You're right, no American has called for the beheading of a basketball player, but the President does want torture. Americans not trying to kill people while rioting? Ever heard of Reginald Denny? Why don't you think any American rioters are Christians? Is it because you believe Christians are inherently good and wouldn't do something like that? The Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople (a Christian city) was about the biggest riot in history.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

Mohummed didn't even understand Christianity, for example he thought the trinity was father, son and mary. And if Mohummed himself followed Christs teachings why didnt he himself turn the other cheek instead of having jews murdered as he raided different tribes, or what about the caravans he would raid and plunder? Was it Christs teachings he was following when he would make peace treaties with others only to break them when he was in better situation where he could win? How about when he married a 6 year old when he was 49?

And as someone who claims to follow Christs teachings and belives in "turn the other cheek" as you pointed out above, what do you do with your koran when it says things like -

"So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." Quran 9.5

There is so much uninformed bias in this paragraph, it's not even worth my time trying to dissect it. You can use whatever history you want to dispute any historical fact. You obviously choose to use a history that demonizes one of history's most pious men. And you're concerned that he married a 6-year-old? Now you're confusing tribal ethics with modern ethics. Wasn't it the common for American frontiersmen to marry girls as young as nine? They weren't immoral,they were just men of their time.

Clearly you don't seek truth. You seek knowledge that fulfills your expectations. What's most offensive is how you try to use that information to perpetuate a falsehood. And you call yourself a Christian? That's ironic.

I respect Jesus too much to resort to such backwardness, although there's enough anti-Jesus literature available that can demonize him just as readily. But it's mutual respect among religions that helps peace and understanding. You seem to be one of those who prefers to incite instead of pacify, and I have no more time for you.

 

[Steve]

There is so much uninformed bias in this paragraph, it's not even worth my time trying to dissect it.

uninformed bias? just plain history...

You can use whatever history you want to dispute any historical fact.

huh?

You obviously choose to use a history that demonizes one of history's most pious men.

I dont choose history, nor do i have a time machine to go and make mohummed do the things he did. He was not in my opionion one of histories most pious men.

And you're concerned that he married a 6-year-old? Now you're confusing tribal ethics with modern ethics. Wasn't it the common for American frontiersmen to marry girls as young as nine? They weren't immoral,they were just men of their time.

Well if you ultimately think its ok for a 49 year old to marry a 6 year old thats up to you.

Clearly you don't seek truth. You seek knowledge that fulfills your expectations. What's most offensive is how you try to use that information to perpetuate a falsehood. And you call yourself a Christian? That's ironic.

No whats clear is that it wouldnt matter to you what real history had to say about your "prophet", you regard him as "one of history's most pious men" inspite of his history of murder, broken peace treaties, theft etc.. It is you who ignors him for who he was and what he taught.

I respect Jesus too much to resort to such backwardness, although there's enough anti-Jesus literature available that can demonize him just as readily. But it's mutual respect among religions that helps peace and understanding. You seem to be one of those who prefers to incite instead of pacify, and I have no more time for you.

You can compare Jesus to mohummed anytime, infact i think it would do you some good.
But your right about one thing - i dont want to pacify, why should i ignore mohummed and who he really was, its just blind tolerance etc that allows people to say he is even close to being in the same legue as Jesus.
And as a Christian why should i accept mohummed as anything more then one who has decieved many, a false prophet just as Christ warned about so often especially when mohummed denied the greatest sacrifice Christ made for mankind?

 

[TashaN]

In 1978, Michael H. Hart published a book called The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. His book was a ranking of the 100 people who, in his opinion, most influenced human history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100

1 MUHAMMAD​

​

570-632​

​

From the 100, a Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History​

by Michael H. Hart​

​

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels.​

Of humble origins, Muhammad founded and promulgated one of the world's great religions, and became an immensely effective political leader. Today, thirteen centuries after his death, his influence is still powerful and pervasive.

The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of being born and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured or politically pivotal nations. Muhammad, however, was born in the year 570, in the city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a backward area of the world, far from the centers of trade, art, and learning. Orphaned at age six, he was reared in modest surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us that he was illiterate. His economic position improved when, at age twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached forty, there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable person.

Most Arabs at that time were pagans, who believed in many gods. There were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and Christians; it was from them no doubt that Muhammad first learned of a single, omnipotent God who ruled the entire universe. When he was forty years old, Muhammad became convinced that this one true God (Allah) was speaking to him, and had chosen him to spread the true faith.

For three years, Muhammad preached only to close friends and associates. Then, about 613, he began preaching in public. As he slowly gained converts, the Meccan authorities came to consider him a dangerous nuisance. In 622, fearing for his safety, Muhammad fled to Medina (a city some 200 miles north of Mecca), where he had been offered a position of considerable political power.

This flight, called the Hegira, was the turning point of the Prophet's life. In Mecca, he had had few followers. In Medina, he had many more, and he soon acquired an influence that made him a virtual dictator. During the next few years, while Muhammad s following grew rapidly, a series of battles were fought between Medina and Mecca. This was ended in 630 with Muhammad's triumphant return to Mecca as conqueror. The remaining two and one-half years of his life witnessed the rapid conversion of the Arab tribes to the new religion. When Muhammad died, in 632, he was the effective ruler of all of southern Arabia.

The Bedouin tribesmen of Arabia had a reputation as fierce warriors. But their number was small; and plagued by disunity and internecine warfare, they had been no match for the larger armies of the kingdoms in the settled agricultural areas to the north. However, unified by Muhammad for the first time in history, and inspired by their fervent belief in the one true God, these small Arab armies now embarked upon one of the most astonishing series of conquests in human history. To the northeast of Arabia lay the large Neo-Persian Empire of the Sassanids; to the northwest lay the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople. Numerically, the Arabs were no match for their opponents. On the field of battle, though, the inspired Arabs rapidly conquered all of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. By 642, Egypt had been wrested from the Byzantine Empire, while the Persian armies had been crushed at the key battles of Qadisiya in 637, and Nehavend in 642.

But even these enormous conquests-which were made under the leadership of Muhammad's close friends and immediate successors, Abu Bakr and 'Umar ibn al-Khattab -did not mark the end of the Arab advance. By 711, the Arab armies had swept completely across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean There they turned north and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, overwhelmed the Visigothic kingdom in Spain.

For a while, it must have seemed that the Moslems would overwhelm all of Christian Europe. However, in 732, at the famous Battle of Tours, a Moslem army, which had advanced into the center of France, was at last defeated by the Franks. Nevertheless, in a scant century of fighting, these Bedouin tribesmen, inspired by the word of the Prophet, had carved out an empire stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic Ocean-the largest empire that the world had yet seen. And everywhere that the armies conquered, large-scale conversion to the new faith eventually followed.

Now, not all of these conquests proved permanent. The Persians, though they have remained faithful to the religion of the Prophet, have since regained their independence from the Arabs. And in Spain, more than seven centuries of warfare 5 finally resulted in the Christians reconquering the entire peninsula. However, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the two cradles of ancient civilization, have remained Arab, as has the entire coast of North Africa. The new religion, of course, continued to spread, in the intervening centuries, far beyond the borders of the original Moslem conquests. Currently it has tens of millions of adherents in Africa and Central Asia and even more in Pakistan and northern India, and in Indonesia. In Indonesia, the new faith has been a unifying factor. In the Indian subcontinent, however, the conflict between Moslems and Hindus is still a major obstacle to unity.

How, then, is one to assess the overall impact of Muhammad on human history? Like all religions, Islam exerts an enormous influence upon the lives of its followers. It is for this reason that the founders of the world's great religions all figure prominently in this book . Since there are roughly twice as many Christians as Moslems in the world, it may initially seem strange that Muhammad has been ranked higher than Jesus. There are two principal reasons for that decision. First, Muhammad played a far more important role in the development of Islam than Jesus did in the development of Christianity. Although Jesus was responsible for the main ethical and moral precepts of Christianity (insofar as these differed from Judaism), St. Paul was the main developer of Christian theology, its principal proselytizer, and the author of a large portion of the New Testament.

Muhammad, however, was responsible for both the theology of Islam and its main ethical and moral principles. In addition, he played the key role in proselytizing the new faith, and in establishing the religious practices of Islam. Moreover, he is the author of the Moslem holy scriptures, the Koran, a collection of certain of Muhammad's insights that he believed had been directly revealed to him by Allah. Most of these utterances were copied more or less faithfully during Muhammad's lifetime and were collected together in authoritative form not long after his death. The Koran therefore, closely represents Muhammad's ideas and teachings and to a considerable extent his exact words. No such detailed compilation of the teachings of Christ has survived. Since the Koran is at least as important to Moslems as the Bible is to Christians, the influence of Muhammed through the medium of the Koran has been enormous It is probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. On the purely religious level, then, it seems likely that Muhammad has been as influential in human history as Jesus.

Furthermore, Muhammad (unlike Jesus) was a secular as well as a religious leader. In fact, as the driving force behind the Arab conquests, he may well rank as the most influential political leader of all time.

​

 

[TashaN]

Continue ...

Of many important historical events, one might say that they were inevitable and would have occurred even without the particular political leader who guided them. For example, the South American colonies would probably have won their independence from Spain even if Simon Bolivar had never lived. But this cannot be said of the Arab conquests. Nothing similar had occurred before Muhammad, and there is no reason to believe that the conquests would have been achieved without him. The only comparable conquests in human history are those of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, which were primarily due to the influence of Genghis Khan. These conquests, however, though more extensive than those of the Arabs, did not prove permanent, and today the only areas occupied by the Mongols are those that they held prior to the time of Genghis Khan.

It is far different with the conquests of the Arabs. From Iraq to Morocco, there extends a whole chain of Arab nations united not merely by their faith in Islam, but also by their Arabic language, history, and culture. The centrality of the Koran in the Moslem religion and the fact that it is written in Arabic have probably prevented the Arab language from breaking up into mutually unintelligible dialects, which might otherwise have occurred in the intervening thirteen centuries. Differences and divisions between these Arab states exist, of course, and they are considerable, but the partial disunity should not blind us to the important elements of unity that have continued to exist. For instance, neither Iran nor Indonesia, both oil-producing states and both Islamic in religion, joined in the oil embargo of the winter of 1973-74. It is no coincidence that all of the Arab states, and only the Arab states, participated in the embargo.

We see, then, that the Arab conquests of the seventh century have continued to play an important role in human history, down to the present day. It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history.

http://jamaat.net/hart/thetop100.html

 

[Darkdale]

I respect your opnion, you don't have to believe he was a prophet.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews need to remember the importance of values – not their values, or my values, but those values that create civil societies. If you and I live side by side, we don't have to force our gods or our values on each other, and can agree to live by those values that create a free and civil society, then we'll be just fine.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Some terrorist beheads a reporter, some PRESIDENT supports torture.

That you equate the two speaks volumes.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

And as a Christian why should i accept mohummed as anything more then one who has decieved many, a false prophet just as Christ warned about so often especially when mohummed denied the greatest sacrifice Christ made for mankind?

Then why unleash your venom on Muhammad only? What about Jospeh Smith? David Koresh? Satan? Obviously yours is a political agenda.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

That you equate the two speaks volumes.

I agree. Equating the Torture President to terrorists removes his false claim to be a "Compassionate Conservative." And he expects the world to accept his superior "Christian values?"

 

[JerryL]

The ongoing Danish cartoon controversy was ignited simply because those people do not know who the Prophet really was and think that Islam is a violent religion that incites its followers to kill anyone who is simply non-Muslim which is completely not true.

I suspect that the cartoonists were less interested in Muhammed himself and more interested in what the very visible proclamed followers were doing. The Muslim world seems to be universally violent, most often in the name of their religion.

It was therefore obligatory on me and every muslim in the world to spread the real image of Islam. Doing so, I put this website between your hands and you are free to decide what Islam really is. Please forward this message to all muslims and non-muslims you know .

Perhaps a good way to spread the "real image of Islam" (as you are implying it to be) would be to stage anti-terrorism protests by Muslims, to engage Muslim political and religious leaders to behave better and encourage better behavior in others, to police your own, to tear down terrorist recruitment posters at mosks and turn in those who put them up, to start an outreach to Muslim youth, and to stop blaming everyone else for the view they have of Islam.

 

[c0da]

One of the most factual and authoritative is written by Karen Armstrong, entitled, "Muhammad."

Does it have pictures?

 

[BUDDY]

Then why unleash your venom on Muhammad only? What about Jospeh Smith? David Koresh? Satan? Obviously yours is a political agenda.

How do you know that he doesn't? Isn't this a debate concerning Islam? Why bring up other religious figures that have nothing to do with the subject? Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Obviously yours is an ignorant agenda.

 

[Ibrahim Al-Amin]

How do you know that he doesn't? Isn't this a debate concerning Islam? Why bring up other religious figures that have nothing to do with the subject? Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Obviously yours is an ignorant agenda.

Brilliant.

It's this level of stereotyping and backward thinking that keeps "good" Christians in the dark ignorance so long taught by the church, in fear of Islam. Have you ever even considered that your opinion may be false? You must believe that good Christian men don't beat their wives. Well, you're in for quite a shocker.

Notice, in all of these threads, which group consistently assaults Muhammad specifically, and Islam generally. If there's a jab, you can almost bet it's a "good" Christian. Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Satanists, Atheists, or whatever, are much less ignorant and much more accepting of Muhammad. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because Western Christianity has been convinced of its universal superiority for so long, that Christians are the only rightful winners of God's love. And I add "Western," because such offenses rarely come from Orthodox Christians.

So please, before you embarrass yourself and your religion again, understand what you are writing and do some research before you label yourself a bigot.

 

[muslimbrother]

Great link Ibrhahim Al-Amin

 

[BUDDY]

Brilliant.

It's this level of stereotyping and backward thinking that keeps "good" Christians in the dark ignorance so long taught by the church, in fear of Islam. Have you ever even considered that your opinion may be false? You must believe that good Christian men don't beat their wives. Well, you're in for quite a shocker.

Notice, in all of these threads, which group consistently assaults Muhammad specifically, and Islam generally. If there's a jab, you can almost bet it's a "good" Christian. Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Satanists, Atheists, or whatever, are much less ignorant and much more accepting of Muhammad. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because Western Christianity has been convinced of its universal superiority for so long, that Christians are the only rightful winners of God's love. And I add "Western," because such offenses rarely come from Orthodox Christians.

So please, before you embarrass yourself and your religion again, understand what you are writing and do some research before you label yourself a bigot.

Wrong. The correct answer is mu. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html

I guess then that my supposition in the first place was correct, and you are ignorant. Please do some research about my "beating your wife" question, before you reply in such a ridiculous way.

I do salute you though for coming right out and saying that you have a preconceived notion of christianity and the christian believe, and that you are swayed by your prejudice. Keep this same honesty up and we may be able to get somewhere in a discussion. For instance, are you ready then to admit that many muslims, and in particular those who are participating in thos violence because of some cartoons, are taking to seriously the attempt at light heartedness, attempted by the editors of these newspapers? Are you ready to admit that these muslims have no sense of humor? Are you ready to admit that they refuse to take personal responsibility for their actions, and use these cartoons simply as an excuse to commit acts of violence? Since we are all being honest here, how do you answer these questions Ibrahim?

And by the way, since you do not appreciate people characterizing all muslims as being a particular type of person, I would like to advise you not to do the same with Christians. Remember the Golden Rule and all of that?