#but in this context i meant it in the levant definition | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gadgetsrevv · 5 years ago

Text

Man City aren’t in crisis despite Norwich shock. PLUS: Bayern’s Bundesliga dominance is under threat

There’s lots to talk about in this week’s Monday Musings following a wild weekend. Gab Marcotti is here to recap the big stories around soccer.

Sky isn’t falling for Man City despite Norwich shock

One of the more odd decisions this past summer was Manchester City not replacing Vincent Kompany. “Replace” is perhaps too strong a word. You can’t “replace” him but you can bring in another live body to give you an alternative at centre-back and provide some competition for John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi.

– Ogden: Man City might regret inspiring Liverpool – Miller: Have Norwich shown the league how to beat City? – ESPN’s Ultimate XI: This team would win everything

Many of us pointed this out but hey, it’s Pep Guardiola, so you naturally offer the benefit of the doubt. He must know something we don’t. Maybe Fernandinho (at 34) can fill in too. Maybe Eric Garcia is ready. Maybe Kyle Walker can slide across. Maybe Aymeric Laporte is Iron Man and will never get injured. (Oops: we already know that’s not the case.)

Pep Guardiola’s side looked vulnerable in Saturday’s shock defeat at Norwich but there’s still a lot of time left for them to get their balance back.

It’s not that Otamendi and Stones are bad defenders, it’s that the way City play can leave them vulnerable, which is pretty much what happened against Norwich in their 3-2 defeat. There’s a price you pay for choosing to play a certain way and evidently, for City it’s one worth paying. The problem is this is a low-scoring sport. Scoring goals is difficult and ideally, you want to make conceding them as difficult as possible for the opposition. With those two back there and this setup, it’s that much easier for them.

Updated Luck Index: Man City continue to be unfortunate

No, the sky isn’t falling. Even in this game, Man City could have grabbed the three points with a bit more luck. Nor will they always face someone as motivated and as intense as Daniel Farke’s crew who, severely depleted by injuries, went all out with nothing to lose. But the reality is that the gap separating them from Liverpool is already at five points, and the last time that happened was back in January.

Is time running out on Bayern’s Bundesliga dynasty?

Is this the year someone in the Bundesliga topples Galactus (read: Bayern)?

Leipzig had their audition on Saturday, holding the champions to a 1-1 draw. The result keeps Julian Nagelsmann’s crew top of the league with Bayern fourth, two points back. But other than the usual drive and running you’d expect from Leipzig — and, after the break, the character that wasn’t always there last season — I’m not sure we quite saw enough to predict they’ll prevail over the marathon that is a whole season.

Thomas Muller, right, and Bayern were forced to settle for a point vs. RB Leipzig thanks to some familiar flaws that manager Niko Kovac has yet to fix.

In fact, a lot of it had to do with Bayern’s deficiencies. Having gone ahead early thanks to the age-old Thomas Mueller-Robert Lewandowski connection, they failed to capitalise on their lead despite having the upper hand for much of the first half. Joshua Kimmich in central midfield alongside Thiago Alcantara gave them a bit more control against the press, but they were sterile in the final third. Leipzig deserved their equalizer after a bad error from Lucas Hernandez (the sort that prompts you to say “He cost how much?”) and while late chances meant it could have gone either way, there wasn’t too much separating these two.

The difference? Well, you try to imagine how they can get better and you can see far bigger margins for growth at the Bayern end. Nagelsmann can conjure up some more tactical voodoo, Emil Forsberg might last 90 minutes, Kevin Kampl might be fit again and maybe they’ll get something out of Patrik Schick. But it’s slim pickings.

As for Bayern, Nico Kovac lost David Alaba to injury in the warm-up. But he still has Philippe Coutinho, who only came on with two minutes to go, and Ivan Perisic, who stayed rooted to the bench: presumably both were signed for a reason. The question, really, is how much faith you have in Kovac.

Fabulous Fati obscures Barca’s issues

Ansu Fati, already the third-youngest goal scorer in the history of La Liga, got his first start for Barcelona on Saturday against Valencia and set the Camp Nou alight inside 10 minutes. He scored with a confident, accurate finish, set up a goal for Frenkie de Jong and came close to scoring two more times. Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know, the kid doesn’t turn 17 until Halloween.

His emergence, and that of Carles Perez, means that Lionel Messi (who was in the stands) and Luis Suarez (who came on and scored twice) can come back into the team in their own time. But equally, despite the gaudy scoreline (5-2) and the excitement over Fati, there is still plenty for Ernesto Valverde to work on.

Valencia are a mess right now (thanks, Peter Lim!), having sacked Marcelino and replaced him with Albert Celades. And they still stayed in the game thanks to Kevin Gameiro, falling apart only after Jasper Cillessen‘s mistake for the third Barca goal. Suarez, looking sharp and hungry (no, not in that way), later added two to put the game out of reach.

Defensively, Barca looked far from solid, not just at the back but also in midfield; the fact that it was the first choice trio of De Jong, Arthur and Sergio Busquets doesn’t bode well.

Juventus get lucky vs. Fiorentina

There’s a ton of ancient bad blood between Fiorentina and Juventus. Throw in the enthusiasm that new owner Rocco Commisso has engendered within the Viola organization, the fact that it was Maurizio Sarri’s official post-pneumonia debut and especially the fact that the visitors lost Douglas Costa, Miralem Pjanic and Danilo through injury during the match (and the first two are especially key to the way they play) and perhaps Juve should be happy with a point.

Why? They were poor for much of the game against an opponent who treats the match as if it was the Champions League final and “Avengers: Endgame” rolled into one. Sarri later blamed the heat of a mid-afternoon kickoff, which is a bit hard to stomach since presumably Fiorentina felt just as hot. It might have been better to just take it on the chin, be grateful for the point and move on.

PSG fans will take time to welcome Neymar back

Neymar made his first appearance of the season for Paris Saint-Germain at the weekend and was greeted, predictably, with boos and insults. It’s what you expect when, after pledging your loyalty to the club, you go out of your way to force a move back to Barcelona. So what did he do? Easy, he scored a “worldie” deep in injury time to secure the three points against Strasbourg.

– Laurens: The definitive story of the Neymar saga

“I expected it, but in the end I forced them to applaud,” he said afterwards, adding that every game will now feel like an away match.

He made his bed, he can lie in it now and won’t get much sympathy. But at the very least, he deserves recognition for the professionalism he showed Saturday. Whether he’ll ever get love from the Ultras given what happened is unclear but that doesn’t mean they can’t reach some mutually beneficial relationship.

What’s obvious is that if you’re Thomas Tuchel, you’re glad he’s back.

Arsenal’s issues are self-inflicted

The statistics say Arsenal conceded 23 shots on goal in the second half against Watford on Sunday. That’s one every two minutes and it’s frankly hard to do. It’s especially tough when you go in at half-time with a two-goal lead, one which, based on what we saw in the first half, was likely more than generous. And yes, they ended up settling for a 2-2 draw.

You can focus on individuals — Matteo Guendouzi, Sokratis Papastathopoulos, David Luiz — all you like and there’s another statistic floating around that says that since the start of last season no team has made more errors leading directly to opposition goals than Arsenal. But this is a team issue.

If you have error-prone players, you design tactical systems that protect them and don’t expose them. That’s just basic. And that’s on Unai Emery.

Real nearly throw it away before PSG trip

It’s a sign of Real Madrid’s current state that even after playing well, creating plenty of chances and racing to a 3-0 lead at home to Levante, they still required a last-ditch save from Thibaut Courtois to retain their three points. In the cold light of day, you’d look at this performance, note Madrid’s domination, the fact that the goals conceded were against the run of play and chalk up the 3-2 scoreline to the randomness of football. And you might even celebrate Eden Hazard‘s debut and look forward to what is next.

Instead, it’s all fraught nerves ahead of the trip to the Parc des Princes to face Paris Saint-Germain in midweek. Context matters, possibly because we’re in mid-September and we have no real idea what Zinedine Zidane has in mind.

Neville a bit harsh on Man United?

Manchester United squeezed out a victory over Leicester City, but I was struck by Gary Neville’s comments suggesting Ole Gunnar Solskjaer should get at least three more transfer windows “to clean up the trash in the dressing room, because there is trash in there.”

I have a lot of time for Neville, but I was wondering to whom he’s referring given a summer of significant departures. Of the guys who are most frequently targeted as “trash” (or “weeds,” to use another of his terms), Eric Bailly, Phil Jones and Marcos Rojo haven’t played this year. Fred has been on the pitch for 24 minutes, Nemanja Matic has started one game. Who does he mean? Paul Pogba? Anthony Martial? Juan Mata?

I’m also not sure about the comparisons with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool and how it took him time to produce. He reached a Europa League final after taking over in October and finished fourth the following year. Plus, he had a rather more credible résumé than Solskjaer did. By all means, give him time, but set credible targets and deadlines too.

Why Chelsea’s youth movement feels different

Chelsea’s 5-2 away win to Wolves brings their seasonal goals total to 11 and all of them scored by Academy graduates. Fikayo Tomori, Andreas Christensen, Tammy Abraham and Mason Mount all started at Molyneux and all look poised to play a big part in Chelsea’s season. With more homegrown players — Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Callum Hudson-Odoi, possibly Reece James too — set to return from injury, there could be as many as seven of them in Frank Lampard‘s XI at some point.

What sets this group apart, though, is the fact that apart from Christensen, who joined at 16, the others have all been affiliated with the club since before they were 10 years old. We often play fast and loose with the homegrown label since so many clubs (including Chelsea, of course) cherry-pick top talent from elsewhere at 16, stick them in the Academy for a year or two and then count them as “club-trained.” Technically, that’s true but with these guys, it’s different.

Dortmund look ready for Barcelona

“Bouncebackability” isn’t a real word, but it applies here. Borussia Dortmund had a whole international break to stew over the humiliating 3-1 defeat to newly promoted Union Berlin and with Kai Havertz and Bayer Leverkusen rolling into town, the potential for aftereffects was still high. Instead, we got one of the most dominating Dortmund performances in recent memory. At the attacking end, Marco Reus got his mojo back, Jadon Sancho popped up with his usual two assists and Paco Alcacer scored in his eighth consecutive game, including internationals.

Roll on, Barcelona, this Tuesday.

Odegaard continues to dazzle

Martin Odegaard made his international debut for Norway at 15 years of age and moved to Real Madrid six months later. Too much, too soon? It felt that way to many, given he failed to establish himself at youth level and later spent two years on loan. But players develop at different speeds, and having rocketed to the international stage, he was due a breather.

This year, he’s on loan at Real Sociedad, where he’s already scored twice and, on Saturday night against Atletico Madrid, was arguably man of the match. He doesn’t even turn 21 until December, but it feels as if this could be the year it all comes together for him. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, for Atletico, the 2-0 defeat reinforces what we already know: losing four or five starters in a summer is tricky to metabolize and there will be days like this when Diego Simeone’s tinkering leads nowhere.

Why Roberto Firmino is so unique

My former colleague Matthew Syed, writing in The Times, made the point that Roberto Firmino appears to have 360-degree vision, a bit like those owls, whose heads seem to swivel all the way around. It’s not hard to see why, given his performance in Liverpool’s 3-1 win over Newcastle.

Some see him as a prototype of a modern center-forward, the “false nine” who is more creator than finisher. That certainly fits with Firmino’s strengths though another, equally formidable strength is the intensity and intelligence of his pressing game. But I’m not sure he’s a prototype of anything.

Most of Europe’s top teams — from Barcelona to Manchester City, from Tottenham to Real Madrid, from Bayern to Juventus — still have a genuine centerforward rather than a “false nine” (to use another hipsterish term). In other words, Firmino is not a trend as much as he has a nearly unique, extremely rare skill set, which comes as a result of his past as an attacking midfielder.

Conte keeping expectations down at Inter

Antonio Conte is playing that age-old game straight out of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” — “when you are weak, appear strong and when you are strong, appear weak.” Following Inter’s third win on the bounce (one-nil against Udinese) he said, “We know the game. They build us up now to knock us down later. For us to win the title, other clubs would have to have disastrous seasons.”

– Schoenfeld: Romelu Lukaku talks about his Inter mission

It’s pretty transparent what he’s doing. And yes, Inter aren’t title favorites but he has the strike force he says he wanted (Romelu Lukaku, Lautaro Martinez, Alexis Sanchez), he has two of the best young midfielders in the league (Stefano Sensi and Nicolo Barella) and arguably the best center-back corps. There’s no reason to hide. Own the responsibility.

What needs to happen beyond #BlueGirl

The harrowing tale of Sahar Khodayari, the 29-year-old Iranian woman who set herself on fire (and later died from severe burns) after being sentenced to six months in prison for disguising herself as a man to attend a football match between her team, Esteghlal, and the UAE’s Al-Ain last March, shocked the world.

Like many such stories, it’s more complicated than it appears. There is no written law barring women from entering Iranian stadiums, so she was sentenced for not fully adhering to Islamic hijab laws and covering her head. But equally, since the Islamic revolution 40 years ago, women have been unofficially banned from watching men’s games with very few exceptions, like last November’s Asian Champions League final.

It shouldn’t take the tragic death of a vulnerable person for the world to take notice. The hashtag #BlueGirl is great to raise awareness but it can’t end there, particularly since there has been so much outrage and support for change, even in Iran.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has pushed Iran on this matter before and the stock answer has been that the “infrastructure” was not yet in place to allow women in on a regular basis. (What infrastructure? Women’s toilets? Surely they have port-a-potties in Iran…) That argument is nonsense as evidenced by the fact that women have been allowed in before. FIFA’s statutes are very clear when it comes to equality and access. They have the power to withhold development money and suspend the Iranian FA.

It’s time to take action and, given the support such action would have within Iran — from much of the population and virtually the entire football world — it feels like a no-brainer.

//due to VPPA compliance we can not send keywords through URLs implicitly in the US var countryValue = $.cookie("country"); if(!!countryValue && countryValue !== "us") {

$.ajax({ url: '//pixel.mathtag.com/event/js?mt_id=694557&mt_adid=137010&v1=&v2=&v3=&s1=&s2=&s3=', dataType: 'script', cache: true }); } (function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=116656161708917";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, "script", "facebook-jssdk")); Source link

via wordpress https://ift.tt/300ES4B

#Uncategorized #blog - marcotti Man City aren’t in crisis despite Norwich shock. PLUS: Bayern’s Bunde

0 notes

militant-holy-knight · 6 years ago

Text

Re-Thinking the So-Called “Islamic Golden Age”

During the Middle Ages, the Islamic world glowed brighter than Europe. Or did it really?

It’s pretty unavoidable to hear the topic of the Islamic Golden Age whenever someone observes how Islamic countries today have lagged behind to everyone else where back in medieval times, Muslims were ahead culturally and scientifically than European Christians. By some measures, it’s an correct assertion because they did have some advantages that their counterparts did not at the time. However, most people tend to exaggerate or give them the wrong credit they don’t deserve. Which is I intend to clarify in this blog post as competently as I can.

Historical Context

To give you a brief overview on the rise of Islam that is closely associated with this period: Shortly after the death of Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphate led by his companions (also known as the rightly-guided caliphs) lasted only 25 years and had only 4 leaders, but succeeded in conquering all of the Levant, Egypt, the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia and Persia. The following dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate formed after the death of the final Rashidun caliph Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law), grew even larger and to this day remains the largest Islamic empire to have existed stretching all the way from modern-day Spain to India.

This is all very impressive for an nomadic people from the desert that had supposedly existed since the Biblical times as descendants of Ishmael but never represented a real challenge to superpowers like the Greeks, Romans or Persians before them. Even more impressive that they’d be considered so advanced compared to other cultures at the same time, in spite of the ideology they created being the most antithetic to science that has ever been produced. It almost looks like it was designed to stump any attempt to better understand our world (pure coincidence, kafir). It achieves this wonderful result thanks to its two fundamental principles.

Divine Revelations Are Superior to Empiricism

From Wikipedia: “Empiricism [says] that all hypotheses and theories must be TESTED against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.” You might recognize empiricism as "the foundation of the scientific method", or "the main reason western civilization invented everything it has invented". Well, Islam rejects it and states that divine revelations MUST have the priority, always and in every circumstance. After all, divine revelations come from the all-knowing, mistake-proof Allah, so of course they can't be wrong. The Quran is right because it comes from the perfect Allah, and Allah is perfect because the Quran says so.

This lovely piece of circular logic lies at the very core of Islam, and if it ever were to be rejected, the entire house of Islam would crumble like a sandcastle hit by a wave. It has influenced every Muslim thought, theory and practice for the past 1400 years, and still does. As a result of this principle, if facts and divine revelations clash, the facts are wrong:

A man came to the prophet and said, 'My brother has got loose motions'. The Prophet said, 'Let him drink honey.' The man again (came) and said, 'I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.' The Prophet said, 'Allah has said the Truth, and THE ABDOMEN OF YOUR BROTHER HAS TOLD A LIE.' (Sahih Bukhari 5716)

What about dangerous shit like putting toxic antimony in your eyes? Lots of doctors say it's bad, even though Muhammad said it was beneficial. This fatwa clarifies the issue:

Ithmid (antimony) is known to be very good for the eyes. […] Trustworthy doctors are the ones whom we should consult on this matter (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/44696/pure-kohl-is-beneficial-to-the-eyes-and-is-not-harmful)

“Trustworthy” is code for “Muslim”. After all, medicine comes from human minds, and human minds are flawed and subject to constant changes, so medicine is also flawed and constantly changing, while revelations come from the perfect and timeless mind of Allah (actual argument you'll hear in debates). Plus, we all know kuffar are all liars hellbent on pushing Muslims on the wrong path. The “revelation over empiricism” principle is at the root of much Islamic (hilarious) retardation. Such as:

Scantily clad women cause earthquakes.

Evolution is a lie from Shaytan.

The Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it

youtube

Still in 2017, a Tunisian PhD student wrote a doctoral thesis that said that the Earth is flat, only 13,500 years old, and the center of the universe. Oh, also relativity is wrong. And Newton too. The thesis (which took 5 years of work) was accepted by two assessors. Only after passing the first approval stage did its retardation come to light (thanks to a leak) and the faculty stepped in to reject it, but it was too late to avoid the media shitstorm. The student claimed that all she did was unmasking the kuffar lies and reshape science in a way respectful of the Quran's divine revelations, so her conclusions were right. Every time it's accused of being an intellectually crippling religion, Islam claims that it's a kuffar lie. In fact, Muslims say, Islam ENCOURAGES rational thought. Problem is, Islam likes to play with words and change their definitions to fit its agenda. In this case, it has traced a fictitious distinction between "critical" and "rational" thought. This glorious essay explains it clearly:

There are two different things; critical thinking and rational or independent thinking. There are categories where the mind should play its role and where it should not poke its nose. The clear and apparent meanings of the Glorious Qur'aan and the Hadith [...] have no place for criticism. Here, rational thinking to find out the depth is not only permissible but also encouraged in Islam [...] but it is not allowed to criticize since the mind has its own limitation as other human faculties have. (http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_351_400/does_islam_permit_critical_think.htm)

Get that? It's fine if you use your brain to analyze the scriptures and understand how to better please Allah and fully respect his rules... but you're not allowed to question them, point out logical or factual flaws, or criticize them because they run contrary to your morality.

This is why other Muslim talking points thrown around in every discussion, like this hadith which supposedly encourages scientific research...

The Messenger of Allah (pbuh) said: Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim.

...don't really mean what a Western reader might think they mean. As explained in this fatwa, “What is meant by knowledge here is knowledge of sharee’ah (Islamic knowledge)”. (See here, which also specifies that hadith is probably false anyway.)

This is what Islam says when they talk about “knowledge”. They mean the wisdom of Allah revealed in the Quran and (through the words and actions of Muhammad) in the Sunnah. Nothing else is worthy of being considered actual knowledge, because science is achieved through the workings of the human mind, which is flawed and subject to mistakes. Muslims always point at past scientific theories that are now recognized as wrong to “prove” that science is inferior to divine revelations, not realizing that the ability to distinguish right from wrong and discard the latter is precisely that which makes science superior to revelations. Science realizes its mistakes and grows, constantly improving. Divine revelations CANNOT change, because that would imply accusing Allah of being imperfect. Which brings us to the second principle.

Progress is Actually Regress

This second principle is a logical consequence of the first. Since divine revelations are perfect and forever valid in every time and place, this means that our scientific, philosophical and moral knowledge have all peaked 1400 years ago, when Muhammad transmitted us Allah's wisdom. Islam calls Muhammad “the perfect man” and considers his generation the best that ever existed:

[Muhammad said:] The best among you (are) the people (who belong to) my age. Then those next to them, then those next to them, then those next to them. [...] Then after them would come a people who would give evidence before they are asked for it, and would be dishonest and not trustworthy... (Sahih Muslim 2535. Also, Sahih Bukhari 6429).

Since the Quran and the Sunnah that Muhammad gave us are perfection, changing a single thing from them is regress, not progress. And it's considered apostasy:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to deny the existence of Allah, His eternality, or to deny any of His attributes which the consensus of Muslims (ijma) ascribes to Him;

to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus (ijma) belongs to it;

to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims (ijma) is part of Islam, even one rak'a [bow] from one of the five obligatory prayers. (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph o8.7)

As a consequence, the role of the Islamic “scholar” is reduced to that of a broken record: all he can and must do is repeat his predecessors' opinions. Old ideas and interpretations of the scriptures are considered more valid than new ones BY DEFINITION. Current scholars simply can't contradict the ijma (the established consensus of ancient scholars we've discussed in the previous lesson). This makes Islamic theology a desiccated corpse.

This is an essential point that western liberals have a very hard time understanding, because they grew up in a culture (ours) where scholars have the freedom, and even the expectation, to subvert old thinking and innovate the intellectual landscape. But Islamic scholars are the exact opposite. Chained by every intellectual restriction imaginable, incapable of denying, questioning, criticizing or ignoring even the smallest rule of Allah or of his prophet on pain of apostasy, the Islamic scholar has the role of PREVENTING innovations. Of preserving Islam during the centuries like a mosquito in amber.

Which is why a fiqh manual of 800 years ago like “Reliance of the Traveller” is pretty much identical to a manual written in 2001 like “A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence”, despite belonging to a different fiqh school. Individual fiqh schools almost can't deviate from each other because of the intrinsic limits of Islamic theology, and indeed, they all agree on the most essential questions: the treatment of infidels, women and gays, admissibility of pedophilia and slavery, refusal of the scientific method, obligatoriness of aggressive jihad even without provocation, etc. All the things that make Islam problematic are clearly stated by every fiqh school.

This doctrinal rigidity is also the reason why the objection “anybody can write a fatwa” is not a valid reason to reject its content. First of all, no, not anybody can write a fatwa. You need a specific license to issue them (not even Osama bin Laden was considered a qualified jurist - he was a businessman - despite issuing two fatwas in the late 90s calling for war against the USA). But the most important point is that fatwas are NOT PERSONAL OPINIONS of the issuing scholar. They're always expression of orthodox Islam. They MUST be, because Islamic scholars can't state their personal opinions if they differ from the orthodoxy. That would be apostasy. Proof is that fatwas are always very well sourced with a profusion of sahih hadiths and Quranic verses (ayat). To reject a fatwa, you need to explain why the hadiths and the ayat it's based on are not valid. Good luck.

This rigidity also invalidates the common objection “but there is an imam in [liberal country] who says [liberal opinion which contradicts orthodox Islam]”. Some Western imams even claim that homosexuality is fine. In Germany they have a female imam who spouts all kinds of liberal feel-good stuff, and is portrayed by the media as the face of “modern Islam”. The problem is that in this case we are truly talking about ENTIRELY PERSONAL OPINIONS, which not only are not supported by the holy texts, but directly contradict them. So what these liberal imams say (either out of ignorance or because they're looking for attention), doesn't change Islam in the slightest. Orthodox Islam still states that gays must be killed and that women can't be imams. The principle is very simple: if a fatwa or a statement from a Muslim scholar are supported by sahih hadiths, excerpts from the Sirat and/or (not abrogated) Quranic verses, they're theologically valid, otherwise they're not. It should be obvious, but liberals don't seem to get it and regularly choose to believe only the unfounded claims and to ignore the theologically solid ones.

As we were saying, according to Islam itself, our understanding of Islam (and therefore of the universe and of morality) is constantly DECREASING instead of increasing. The further we go from the time of the Prophet, the more we deviate from the perfect path. This view is in direct opposition with the Western one, which considers every scientific discovery an improvement. The time of the Prophet was considered the best period of time in existence, which explains why groups like the Taliban want to revert whatever societies they operate to one from 1400 years ago.

“But wait”, you might say. “Muslims are not like the Amish, they don't seem to have any problems using technology. They gladly and immediately accepted our cars, fridges, electricity, computers, automatic rifles and cellphones. How can you say they're against scientific progress?”

Once again, Islam avoids this schizophrenic contradiction by playing with words, twisting concepts and, if it needs to, inventing new ones. Islam distinguishes between IDEOLOGICAL innovations (bid'ah), which are negative until proven otherwise, and MATERIAL innovations, which are positive until proven otherwise (proof that can only be found in the scriptures, of course, not derived by logic or facts):

Allah's Messenger (pbuh) said, "If somebody innovates something which is not in harmony with the principles of our religion, that thing is rejected."» (Sahih Bukhari 2697)

[Bid'ah] means anything that is not referred to specifically in Sharee'ah, and for which there is no evidence (daleel) in the Qur'aan or Sunnah, and which was not known at the time of the Prophet and his Companions.

At the same time, it is quite obvious that this definition of religious inventions or innovations, which are condemned, DOES NOT INCLUDE WORDLY INVENTIONS [such as cars and washing machines, etc. – Translator].» (https://islamqa.info/en/answers/864/bidah-hasanah-good-innovations)

Muslims always quote this hadith where Muhammad said:

Whoever starts a good thing and is followed by others, will have his own reward and a reward equal to that of those who follow him.

...and this should prove that Islam just LOVES innovations. Problem is that once again Islam gives a different meaning to words. As clarified in the above quoted fatwa:

From the context of the story, it is clear that what is meant by the words "whoever starts a good thing (sunnah hasanah)" is: Whoever revives a part of the Sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh), or teaches it to others, or commands others to follow it, or acts according to it so that others follow his example. [...] It should be clear from the above, with no room for doubt, that the Prophet (pbuh) was not allowing innovation in matters of deen (religion)

So only teaching somebody an islamic rule that he might not know is "a good thing". To sum it up: ideas, theories and philosophies which were “not known at the time of the Prophet” are bad, but “wordly inventions” are good. This very convenient distinction allows Islam to take all the fruits of the infidels' work, all the electronics, the factories, the medicines, the weapons, etc., while rejecting their ideas, which have the naughty tendency of disproving some part or another of Islam's “perfect” revelations. As a result, Islam creates very obtuse but dangerous cultures.

Islamic societies are scientifically stagnant, because science is first of all a specific MINDSET that says everything can and should be questioned and nothing should be accepted without valid evidence. You simply can't do science without this mindset, and Islam utterly kills it... But Muslims are also armed with all the latest gadgets and convinced they have the right to own them (since the kuffar were created to serve Muslims, their achievements are gifts from Allah to them – actual argument I've heard) and even to use them against the same kuffar who created them.

What About That “Islamic Golden Age”?

That Islam inevitably generates scientifically infertile cultures might appear like a preposterous statement. In which case, you're probably squealing: “But what about the Islamic Golden Age? Without Islam we wouldn't have our science because Muslims were inventing shit and Wakandin' around while our ancestors were still in caves and didn't even know how to bathe” yadda yadda. This apparent contradiction ceases to exist when we realize that the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” never existed. At least not as it's commonly meant, as a time when innumerable Muslim scientists were creating whole new scientific disciplines and discovering the secrets of the cosmos.

What REALLY happened was that Muslims invaded and conquered scientifically advanced but militarily weak societies like Persia, India and eventually Greece, and then absorbed all their useful infidel knowledge. The “Islamic Golden Age” should be more accurately called the Greek-Hindu-Persian-Dhimmi Golden Age, since it started when in the 9th century caliph Abu Jafar al-Mamun ordered that all the scientific and philosophical treaties written by the infidels be translated in Arabic (which is actually commendable considering some of his predecessors burned down the Christian Library of Alexandria or erased whatever traces of Zoroastrianism in Persia by destroying pretty much all its sacred texts and killing all their priests). All the translators were Christians or Jews (like abbott Probus of Antioch and Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son) which translated and released into Islamic societies the works of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Galen, and many other Greek mathematicians, thinkers, astronomers and doctors.

Many Indian discoveries were also appropriated by Islam. Like the number zero, invented by Brahmagupta in 628 AD and described in his book “Brahmasphuta Siddhanta”. Or the so called “arabic numerals”, which Muslims keep telling us we owe to them... even though they were invented in India in 700 AD. (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Indian_numerals.html) Arab societies don't even use our same numbers, but very different ones. Islam even brags about giving us coffee, even though it was already well known by their black slaves. Yeah, Muslims had black slaves. Oh, they had so fucking MANY black slaves.

This massive translation enterprise had the positive effect of preserving many treaties that otherwise we might have lost, but the Islamic Golden Age didn't really generate anything new. Consider this: Pre-Islamic India was renowned for its universities: Takshashila, Vikramashila, Nalanda, Ujjain and other places attracted students and scholars alike from far and wide, much like the United States of today .After the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, not a single center of learning (other than Islamic seminaries) was established for over seven centuries.

In 1400 years, Islam produced no relevant scientific discovery, no new paradigm, no major breakthrough, no revolution even remotely comparable to the Copernican or the relativistic one. Or the germ theory of diseases. Or the Newtonian laws of physics. Or the atomic theory. Or the discovery of continental drift. Or the taming of electricity. Or the development of the theory of evolution. Or the periodic table. Or the discovery of DNA. Or, hell, the goddamn SCIENTIFIC METHOD, which Islam keeps rejecting to this day. And of course, even in the philosophical, political and social realms, Islam has rejected every major breakthrough, from freedom of speech, to inalienable human rights, to the idea that authorities should not be above the law, to independence of scientific research. Hell, they didn’t even make any military breakthroughs: the Turks may have used gunpowder to take Constantinople down, but they were given by the Chinese, who discovered it ages ago while the Europeans improved it, many, many times and now we have modern weapons because of them. For a religion that revolves created around and for warfare, that is quite an unimaginable slip up.

As we've seen, fiqh manuals state clearly that denying the smallest rule of islam is apostasy. But they don't stop there: even believing that natural phenomenons might have causes which don't depend on the will of Allah is enough to be considered an apostate:

ACTS THAT ENTAIL LEAVING ISLAM:

to believe that things in themselves or by their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah. (Reliance of the Traveller, Shafi school of law, paragraph o8.7)

The same manual, on paragraph o8.1, adds that apostates must be killed. The other fiqh schools agree:

Maliki school: Malik Ibn Anas, “Al-Muwatta”, book 36, paragraphs 36.18.15-16. (PDF:http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Al-Muwatta-by-Imam-Malik.pdf)

Hanbali school: Saleh Al-Fawzan, "A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence", Al-Maiman Publishing House, Riyadh, 2005, Vol. 2, Part X, chapter 9, pp. 637-8.

Hanafi school: Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, “Bahishti Zewar”, Zam Zam Publishers, Karachi, 2005, p. 375. (PDF:https://archive.org/details/BahishtiZewar_201307)

See also this fatwa: http://www.askimam.org/public/question_detail/34653

How can you have science when you get killed for even attempting to understand the world without assuming the existence of an omnipotent puppeteer directly controlling every atom? The Islamic concept of the universe is that of an ultimately unknowable concoction whose workings depend on the whims of Allah. The universe might respect the laws of physics 999,999,999 times in a row, but there's never any guarantee that on the one billionth time, Allah wont decide to violate them. So every conclusion reached by observation and experimenting is inevitably uncertain. This view of the universe is in direct opposition with the western one of an ordered machinery that can be understood and predicted by analyzing it with our reason.

In 14 centuries, Islam produced nothing besides some minor advancements in optics, algebra, astronomy, medicine and trigonometry, and some new words: nadir, zenith, elisir, assassin, algebra, etc. (Note: algebra was invented in India and developed by Europeans, Muslims simply invented its name.) Not a very impressive trophy room for such a massive culture, so widespread, so old and which counted untold billions of followers since its birth. I wonder what could've caused this intellectual drought...

How About Any Scholars?

Muslims love to name-drop lots of amazing Islamic scientists which supposedly taught us lowly infidels all our science. Too bad basically none of those were actually Muslims. They were heretical thinkers which achieved their results precisely by REJECTING Islam's suffocating dogmas. And sure enough, if they lived even today, there would have been calls for their deaths.

Avicenna (Ibn Sina): He credited his achievements in medicine and logic to Aristotle and Hippocrates. His theology was a fusion of Plato’s and Islam. He denied physical resurrection and thought prophets were simply "inspired philosophers". Also, he believed Allah only knew the universal principles of the workings of the universe, but couldn't or didn't care about controlling the small daily events in our lives, which denied his omniscience. (Arthur J. Arberry, “Avicenna on Theology”, John Murray, 1951.) For these ideas, he was accused of blasphemy by Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyyah (both of whom are considered the most influential Islamic theologians today) and other major scholars, who considered him even more deviant than the pagans who opposed Muhammad! Nowadays, the Muslim scholars who aren't too busy taking credit for his discoveries are busy accusing him of apostasy and forbidding Muslims to respect him. (See for example: https://www.bakkah.net/en/the-reality-of-ibn-sina-avicenna-famous-scientist-and-philosopher.htm)

Averroes: Also strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Dared to say that truth could also be discovered using reason and logic and not only the holy texts, and that Muhammad's way of treating women was disgusting. Was accused of blasphemy, persecuted and forced in exile by the Almohad Caliphate in the 12th century. He also wasn't considered a Muslim in his time (before Muslims started to feel the need to repaint their blasphemers so they could have some scientist to brag about).

Abu Bakr al-Razi: Often considered the best Muslim thinker who ever lived, he called himself a disciple of Socrates and Plato, denied that the world was created from nothing, that faith is superior to reason, that Muhammad only taught the truth, and that revealed religions in general are of much use, besides igniting avoidable conflicts for retarded reasons. He considered them needlessly nitpicky and irrational. He had the balls to write 3 books on the subject:

"The Prophet's fraudulent tricks",

"The stratagems of those who claim to be prophets",

"On the refutation of revealed religions".

He also called the Quran "a collection of absurd fables". Was obviously accused of apostasy and NOT considered a Muslim, despite his titanic testicles. (Source: Deuraseh, Nurdeng, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Works of Abu Bakr Al-Razi and Al-Biruni", 2008, Journal of Aqidah and Islamic Thought, 9:51–100.)

Al-Sarakhsi: Philosopher. Studied the Greeks and dared to apply rationality to the study of the holy books and to deny the veracity of prophets. Was executed in 899 AD for apostasy by the Abbasids.

Al-Farabi: Philosopher. Thought that reason was superior to faith and that the body couldn't resurrect. Was accused of apostasy.

These were only the most famous (and most name-dropped) """Islamic""" thinkers, but the trend should be evident. Some heretics managed to get away with it because the ruler at the time wasn't too stringent about following Islam himself and preferred to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Islam wasn't imposed with the exact same severity in every Muslim culture and in every age. Others had to spend their entire lives using deliberately ambiguous language in their writings in order to maintain plausible deniability. Others still simply hid their heretic work while fronting as strict Muslims. The intellectual sterility of Islam is made evident by the fact that his ideas about the scientific method were completely IGNORED by Islamic societies, and continue to be so.

With very few exceptions, like the historian Ibn Khaldun, the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, the polymath Al-Tusi and a few others (whose actual faith we have no way of knowing since they weren't suicidal enough to openly reject Islam), every supposed Muslim genius was actually not a Muslim at all, according to Islam's own rules. To do good work, they needed the freedom to explore new ideas, and to have that, they had no choice but to reject Islam's stringent limitations. They were persecuted, exiled, tortured, killed and had most of their work burned by the same kind of obtuse Muslims whose intellectual heirs now brag about the very achievements they couldn't destroy. As Ernest Renan said:

Whatever science managed to flourish within Islam during the Middle Ages did so IN SPITE of Islam, not thanks to it. Giving Islam the credit for these discoveries would be like giving the Inquisition credit for Galileo's. (Ernest Renan, "Islamisme et la science", lecture given at the Sorbonne on march 29, 1883)

Apologists always blame the Crusades and the Mongol invasions for ending their Golden Age. But even before Mongols sacked Baghdad (the intellectual capital of the Islamic world) in the 13th century, and before the Crusaders took Jerusalem, Muslims could never really achieve any scientific breakthrough in their centuries of almost uncontested hegemony. Maybe because Muhammad really hated people who questioned his divine revelations and tried to improve on them, and has explicitly forbidden it:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, “Leave me as I have left you (i.e., do not ask me questions that go beyond what I’ve already told you). For those who came before you were doomed because of their questions and differences with their Prophets. If I forbid you from doing something, then abstain from it. And if I command you to do something, then do of it as much as you can." (Sahih Bukhari 7288.)

Just asking questions about something is enough to make that something haram (forbidden) even though before it was allowed:

The Prophet (pbuh) said, "The most sinful person among the Muslims is the one who asked about something which had not been prohibited, but was prohibited because of his asking." (Sahih Bukhari 7289.)

This obviously made Muslims fearful to question and to investigate. As Rodney Stark said:

What killed Islam's science was Islam itself. How can you do research in biology, chemistry, physics or philosophy, when the law explicitly forbids it?

Unlawful knowledge includes:

philosophy;

the sciences of the materialists.

and anything that is a means to create doubts (n: in eternal truths) (Reliance of the Traveller, paragraph a7.2)

This little paragraph is enough to kill any hope of scientific development and to qualify Islam as the most backward religion currently in existence.

Imminent Christian Apologetic

For all the shit people give Christianity and accusing us of “holding back progress”, the development of Western civilization is intrinsically tied to it. The first modern universities established in India after centuries of Muslim occupation were made during Anglican British rule. The Jesuit order were regarded the Catholic Church’s best educational system in its most innovative thinkers and their suppression was considered an unmitigated disaster for Catholicism. The Earth being spherical was already a consensus among Christian scholars before Galileo Galilei (which I will get to it in the future). Even things we take for granted like question marks, upper and lowercase letters were created as a result of Charlemagne’s policy to make his people literate. Muslims themselves benefited from their Christian dhimmis translating texts for them. It was Christian scholars like Mendel, Copernicus, Bacon, Magnus, Ockham and countless others that developed biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, their Muslim counterparts were too busy memorizing doubtful anecdotes about Muhammad, even more doubtful “divine revelations”, and writing obsessively detailed rules about the most mundane daily act, from the right way to sit to how to wash your ass. The difference is striking, and mostly due to the Christian view of the cosmos not as something subjected to the whims of Allah, therefore unpredictable, but as a collection of stable, harmonic mechanisms which could be studied and understood. An act which, rather than irritating God, would reveal His glory. Even during the so-called Dark Ages, Christianity was still doing seminal scientific work while Muslim clerics today issue fatwas against building snowmen because it's an act of creation which challenges Allah's power (Drawing pictures or creating sculptures is considered illegal because muh idolatry).

Conclusion

Islam's problem with science, which unfortunately is the most basic belief at the core of the entire doctrine is therefore unfixable: the belief that Islam is PERFECT. This inevitably creates a mentality where science is impossible, because progress and research are seen as not only useless but harmful. A step back from the perfect path. When Muslims claim to believe that the universe is ordered and harmonic, what they mean is that every atom is under the complete control of Allah, so there is no chaos. The Islamic Golden Age is a giant meme, they were only ahead of the Europeans during the Middle Ages because they stole information from the peoples they conquered rather than producing anything new and was the job of infidels to do that shit for them. It’s no wonder that Islam's scientific progress stopped so abruptly once they exhausted the Indo-Greek bag of gifts they stole with their bloody wars of conquest and even now, rather than training actual scientists, Islam is too busy misunderstanding science (and Christianity for that matter) in an attempt to prove the “scientific miracles” in the Quran (like a Grand Mufti who insisted the Earth was flat and the Sun rotated it, only changing his mind after a Saudi prince who went to space told him himself), while at the same time accepting all the useful trinkets and rejecting the ideas and the mindset which generated them.

This intellectual poverty, inability and unwillingness to question old dogmas and research new ideas are inevitable in a culture ruled by Islam, and explain why the entire Muslim world, with all its 1,7 billion people, is still so insignificant in the scientific community, and can claim virtually no achievement to its name. In its entire history, Islam has produced only three Nobel prizes in scientific disciplines: Abdus Salam (physics), Ahmed Zewail and Aziz Sancar (both chemistry). Not surprisingly, all three of them received their education and did their research in Western countries. I will also make an separate blogpost in the future showing how the Islamic world “rewards” the geniuses it produces.

But you know what? Maybe refuting the so-called Islamic Golden Age is an exercise in futility because as Salafism proliferates and festers in the Islamic world, they don’t really genuinely care about that period (they only use it to rub in the face of infidels and make up for their loss in prestige) because this era as its understood peaked during the Abbasid Caliphate. The only period they most want to emulate is one of Muhammad’s time and the Rashidun Caliphate (the so called “rightly guided”) - i.e. the one where Islam was mostly spread by the sword - since all the following ones: the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans were considered “corrupted” and “non-Islamic”. You might be familiar with that better as what Taliban and ISIS were trying to do. So yeeeeahh....

#history

0 notes

aguadillaiceskatingarena · 7 years ago

Text

Let’s Eliminate The Term Middle East – And Response

The term Middle East is imprecise, culturally and geographically biased, susceptible to misunderstanding, and therefore useless in terms of accuracy. Though the term has been called Eurocentric, it is more precisely Anglo-centric, originating at the height of the British imperial century (1815-1914). I also suggest that the related acronym “MENA” (Middle East-North Africa) also be dropped.

The broadest definition of the term “Middle East” came at the 2004 conference of the G8 nations, based on the definition of USA’s Bush administration. This included the entire Muslim world, because to the Bush administration Middle East = Muslim = terrorist (or oil in the case of “friendly” regimes). Often called the “Greater Middle East”, this list includes the “traditional” Middle East nations in Anatolia, the Levant, the Arabian peninsula, and Mesopotamia, as well as those in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and North Africa.

Anatolia, also called Asia Minor, is the peninsula containing most of the (soon-to-be Islamic) Republic of Turkey, its Asian portion. The Levant includes Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Cyprus, the Sinai peninsula of Egypt, and Hatay province of Turkey, the capital of which is Antakya, the ancient Syrian city of Antioch. The Arabian peninsula nations are Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, U.A.E. (United Arab Emirates), Qatar, and Bahrain. Mesopotamia is made up of Iraq, Kuwait, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

The city of Antioch, the great rival of the Egyptian city of Alexandria for power and influence in the Eastern Mediterranean world in late ancient times (and with it one of the two great centers of Hellenistic Judaism), was founded by Seleucus I, one of the Macedonian Diadochi succeeding Alexander the Great. It served as the capital of the dynasty that he founded to rule over the Seleucid Empire.

Historically always considered part of Syria, Antioch has been part of Turkey since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. No one in Antakya is at all eager to rejoin Syria at this time, however. It is the most culturally diverse region of Turkey and celebrates that diversity.

The nations of the Greater Middle East as defined by the G8 (Group of Eight) and the USG (United States government) include the core Middle East nations of Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, UAE, Yemen; the North African nations of Algeria, Djibouti, Libya, Mauretania, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR; Western Sahara), and Tunisia; the South Asian nations of Afghanistan, Azad Kashmir (Pakistani Kashmir), and Pakistan; the Caucasian nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia; and the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

These G8 nations, by the way, are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States of America. So here we have the absurdity of having an envoy from Russia, whose easternmost border comes to a mere 82 kilometers (51 miles) from the western border of the U.S.A. state of Alaska, referring to events in Morocco as happening in the “Middle East”. Or that of an American cultural attaché in Athens discussing the same thing, something possible since the USG (United States government) still uses the same definition.

The term “Middle East” first began to be used by the British imperial government in the middle during the 1850’s, the decade that witnessed both the Crimean War, which involved all the major imperial powers of Europe and West Asia, and the assumption of rule of the Empire of India by the British government from the British East India Company. As defined at that time by the British government, India included modern India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Burma, and, at least hypothetically, Afghanistan.

As a term useful to locating an area, “Middle” East has no meaning without having other regions on either side, which was the case with the imperialist colonial vocabulary of the British imperial government, where it was part of a referential scheme that included the terms Near East and Far East, all three referring to separate regions. The system of terminology references the nations of Asia in relation both to each other, the UK’s Empire of India, and the Ottoman Empire.

The term “Near East”, often mistakenly equated with “Middle East”, refers to Anatolia, Cyprus, and the Levant; in the case of the last, most of what is now Jordan was then part of Arabia rather than the Ottoman Empire.

The “Middle East” was everything between the eastern outskirts of the Near East and the western border of the Empire of India.

The “Far East” was everything west of the UK’s Empire of India.

Some writers have accused the term “Middle East” of being Amero-centric, but in the context of this three-term scheme that doesn’t make any sense because the UK’s “Far East” is America’s Far, Far West. For example, Oliver Perry did not get to Japan by sailing around the Horn of Africa and through the Molucca Straits. In another example, the Philippine Island were the most western of American’s colonial possessions throughout most of the first half of the 20th century.

Inhabitants refer to the area included in the Greater Middle East by other names: the Maghreb, which includes the North African nations along the Mediterranean Sea (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), Bilad al-Sham (the Levant), and the Mashriq (eastern Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and the nations of the Arabian peninsula). Egypt is not included in either the Maghreb or the Mashriq, nor is Iran included in the latter. Egypt, along with the Sudan, are assigned to the Nile Valley, considered a region in and of itself.

The term “MENA” which I decried above is an acronym for Middle East-North Africa which at least acknowledges the difference between the two separate regions.

Another often misunderstood and misused term related to all of these is “the Orient”. When I first heard the name of Agatha Christie’s famous novel, I though the Orient Express was in China, because at the time I heard it (mid-1970’s), “Orient” meant East Asia. In truth, the line ran from Paris to Constantinople (now Istanbul) from 1883 to 2009. A plan by the governments of the German and Ottoman Empires to extend the line from what was then Constantinople to Baghdad, then part of the latter empire, and its nearby oilfields played a major part in sparking the First World War.

The term Orient derives from the Latin for “East”, and in the Roman Empire referred to most of the area of the “traditional” Middle East. Its major usage came about after the division of the empire into four prefectures in the 330’s CE, one of which, taking in Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Libya, was called the Prefecture of the Orient. Orient did not mean something distant, exotic, and foreign, just the eastern end of a far-flung empire in relation to its western half, the Occident.

In its geoscheme of the world, the UN assigns the nations of the “traditional” Middle East to the subregion of Western Asia, except for Iran, which it inexplicably attaches to the subregion of South Asia (the nations of British India) despite its millennia old cultural and historical ties and megannni old geographical ties to the former subregion. Iran should definitely be included in Western Asia. Of course, the UN also assigns the subregion North Asia (Siberia), to the region of Europe, despite its extension to within 82 km of North America and being part of the region or continent of Asia.

An alternate name for Western Asia is Southwest Asia, perhaps because of another subregion called Southeast Asia with which it is parallel. However, since the subregion in question is almost entirely west of the meridian through the Ural Mountains and therefore directly south of European Russia, Western Asia is the more accurate.

So, this is what I propose: accept the name Western Asia. This would lend itself to an acronym referring more accurately to the same area as the rather inaccurate term “Greater Middle East”, similar to that in current vogue (i.e., MENA) as WANA. I think from the context in which it is used, folks will be able to discern that the writer or speaker is not discussing the Washington Association of Nurse Anesthetists. Or if using the alternate designation, that the speaker or writer is not discussing the Solid Waste Association of North America.

Chuck Hamilton

* * *

I’m still trying to determine if you actually care about any of what you said, or if you just wanted a guise to take a pot-shot at President Bush without appearing to be doing so.

Assuming you do actually care about the semantics of the term "Middle East," why not also go ahead and tackle the terms "African-American" and "Caucasian." Both are used to refer to all members of a certain race, and only those members. The former refers to all black people, and *only* black people, while the latter refers to all white people, and *only* white people, despite the fact this is factually inaccurate in both directions.

All white people are not from the caucasus region, and many non-white people are, indeed, from the caucasus region. Likewise, all black Americans are not from Africa, and there are many non-black Americans who are, indeed, from Africa.

Side note: Nelson Mandela was referred to as a great "African-American" many times, despite the fact he was not an American.

So, since you’re so worried about semantics in commonly-used terms, go ahead and tackle those terms as well. Maybe one day we can become 100 percent politically correct and won’t have to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings due to one’s perception of being "culturally and geographically biased."

Jim Dothard Apison

Source Article

The post Let’s Eliminate The Term Middle East – And Response appeared first on Aguadillaiceskatingarena.

Read full post at: http://www.aguadillaiceskatingarena.com/lets-eliminate-the-term-middle-east-and-response/

0 notes