Where was America in 711AD?

http://lebanonheartblogs.blogspot.com/2006/07/lidice-1942-beirut-2006.html
Isn't it a paradox that the worst of leaders and ideas are sponsored because they reinforce the prevailing paranoia and dominant school of thought? Thus accounts for the 'legitimacy' of Bush Sr's and Jr's administrations, as well as the currency of Huntington's idea of the Clash of Civilizations. However, here's an optimistic dissenting viewpoint:
Cry like Women!
On January 2, 1492, Castellanos entered Granada, the only city that was under Muslim control and the Cross immediately replaced the Crescent, which had been flying over Granada for seven centuries.
Sultan Abu Abdullah, his wife and others who accompanied him left the al-Hamra palace last time. The sultan “sighed deeply” and sobbed as he looked back at the palace. “You couldn’t fight like a man, now you're crying like a woman, ” Valide Sultan Fatima told her son, Abu Abdullah. The rocky hill from which the expression “farewell look” is derived is known in Spanish as “El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro” (the Moor’s Last Sigh).
Tariq ibn Ziyad, a great Muslim commander, landed in Spain in 711 and this was was followed by Abdurrahman al-Gafiqi’s conquest of Cordova in 726. In 1492, Muslims abandoned their last stronghold. I have a line, vague in my memory, from a long poem by an Arab poet whose name I cannot recall at the moment: O, men, why this division among you, even though you are brothers? Historians argue that disunity in Muslim political consciousness and understanding and the meaningless power struggles that emerged caused the collapse of Andalusia. This is a truism. For more on Andalusia you can read any of Ziya Pasha’s works.
The Arab League convened yet again on August 7, 2006. The Arab League convenes all the time only to agree to disagree at each meeting. No one knows why Arab League meetings always end without concrete agreements. Take a look at some of the League’s decisions and then bite your tongue! League members agreed to send envoys to New York to pressure the United Nations to take swift measures to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, as if they are not United Nations members. This should go down into the Arab League record books as one of its “great achievements in history,” just like the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. These are all efforts by Arabs and Muslims at state and governmental levels.
Some thing strange happened at the recent Arab League meeting in Lebanon which escaped the media’s attention. Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, fighting back tears as he was trying to describing the situation his country, could not complete his sentence. And the heroic Arab delegates applauded him.
Every Arab country sings a different tune; each seems to have different calculations. However, a closer look into the matter would show that it is not a tortuous affair. They all share a common fear: Incurring the wrath of the United States! None feels secure. In fact, except Syria and Iran, all the other 22 countries covered by the Greater Middle East Project, including the one that co-chairs the League with pride, face a similar situation. This fact is always ignored: There is no use in fearing the inevitable. Sooner or later, these anachronistic political structures will undergo transformations. If these 22 countries fail to effect the necessary reforms, improve self-reliance and take into account their own dynamics, then they will all be signing their death certificate. The entire Arab population is 280 million and 75 percent are under 30, at the point of explosion. Non-Arab Muslims are disillusioned and also angry.
As Israel bombards Lebanon, the feelings of love and sympathy for Hezbollah leader Nasrallah grows and a Syrian minister expresses his willingness to be a Hezbollah soldier; as the United States and Israel threatens Iran, Tehran gains more respect. In fact, it was not the Lebanese prime minister who burst into tears in front of the world media; it was the entire Arab and Islamic world that cried out for help. 280 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims. Israel is facing an uphill battle against Hezbollah, a tiny group; however, the Arabs are afraid of incurring Israel’s wrath, even though they spend a huge part of their budgets on arms. The Arabs, one way or the other, cannot come together, and even when they succeed in doing so, their meetings yield no results. The future does not depend on such meetings; it depends on adopting the spirit and mission of Osman Bey who fought constantly against Byzantine as he put domestic conflicts aside. I have always stressed that there is a link between the fall of Andalusia and the rise of the Ottoman Empire. As Arab leaders cry like women and sigh deeply, new “Osman Gazis” are emerging. While Andalusia was dying, the Ottoman Empire was being born. We are at the beginning of birth pangs -- and it will be very painful indeed.
August 09, 2006
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=columnists&alt=&trh=20060811&hn=35551
Another compelling argument:
Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust
Between America and the World, Kishore Mahbubani, New York: 2005
Chapter 3: America and Islam (Pages 59-65)
Islam is the most successful religion in the contemporary world.
American perceptions of Islam are filtered by several layers of knowledge. At the root is the European understanding that has flowed into American consciousness as a result of the traditional Judaeo-Christian and European civilizational roots of most Americans. Most Americans celebrate the fact that America as a society represents in some ways the apex of Western civilization. It does. But the historical roots of Western civilization are deeply intertwined through centuries of contacts with the Islamic world. Many of the associations that have lodged in Western consciousness have not been happy ones.
The roots of Christian obsession with the Islamic world can be traced at least to the Crusades, if not earlier. It was at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. that Charles "The Hammer" Martel and the Franks turned the tide of Muslim expansion. Many heroic legends were created in the Crusades, launched at the end of the eleventh century. All of them had to do with heroic Christian knights battling perfidious Islamic "saracens." Hence, for the Europeans, the word "Crusade" has always had a positive aura around it. Any man or woman who is fighting for a just or worthy cause can be said to be "crusading" for it.
Europeans are aware of the expansion of Islam into Europe. The conquest of Spain beginning in 711 A.D. is etched into historical memory as surely as the image of the Alhambra Palace dominates Granada. So too are all the maximal lines of the Islamic military invasion into Europe, culminating in the Ottoman Turks' siege of Vienna in 1683. Most Europeans believe that they narrowly avoided a cultural disaster when the Muslims marched into Europe. In their view, if Islam had triumphed in Europe as successfully as it had in other parts of the world (and Islam is still the most rapidly expanding religion of the world), it would have snuffed out the "lights" in Europe. Europeans believed that they came close to being wiped out by forces of darkness. This is the reason why Islam affects Western minds so strongly. There are deep, latent, historical fears buried in there. Five continuous centuries of Western triumph have not wiped them out.
It is equally significant that the enormous role played by the Islamic caliphates (in their moment of triumph and glory) of preserving the rich fruits of Greek and Roman civilizations (which still provide the spiritual and intellectual foundations of Western civilization) and then passing it back to Europe has not fully registered in the Western mind. Some Western intellectuals recognize the important role played by the caliphates. Chris Patten is one of them. As he said, "And what of Thomas Aquinas? He read Latin versions of the Greek philosophers, courtesy of the scholars at the Muslim School of Translation in Toledo, to which we owe so much of our knowledge of the scientific, religious and philosophical works of the ancient world." (1) Another is Daniel Rose, a New York philanthropist, who has advised that a rediscovery of Islam's glorious past could do good both for the West and for Islam. He said that we should reconnect the Arab world with "the Golden Age of the Abbassid Caliphate, when Muslim scientists, philosophers, artists and educators sparkled in one of the great cultural flowerings of all time." Rose added:
Then Muslims remembered that the Prophet said 'The ink of scientists is equal to the blood of martyrs'; then Muslim thinkers were proud of their familiarity with the best of the world's cultures; then it was taken for granted that science and knowledge belonged to all mankind and that intellectuals' borrowing and lending benefited everyone. What the Muslims had once they can have again. (2)
Most ordinary Westerners are not aware of this rich history. Indeed if a survey is done of Americans, one in hundred, perhaps one in thousand, will be aware of the crucial role played by the caliphates in preserving the Graeco-Roman heritage for the West. What the West chooses to remember vividly and what it chooses not to remember reveals its attitudes. This is especially true of European attitudes towards the Islamic world. America, without knowing it, has inherited these historic European attitudes. (Note: This is one reason why I will speak interchangeably about "Western" and "American" attitudes towards Islam.)
And another:
It is thanks to Islam that the culture of the Classical World were not lost forever, because that was the aim of the Christian Church - to keep us in the Dark Ages, where we would not question its authority. Islam gave back to Europe - and hence, the modern world, Philosophy, Architecture and Mathematics, to mention only a few of their gifts to us.
In fact, Trupolitiks, America would never have been 'discovered' had it not been for Islam's legacy of Mathematics and Astronomy.
Have some respect, TP, because you owe a lot to these 'blood-thirsty savages and their hateful religion.' Thank your god, who is Allah by a different name, that Islam brought light to darkened Europe, when they set foot in Spain in 711AD.
Last edited on Sun Jun 12th, 2005 10:36 am by Hughmac
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