[Buddha-l] Bangladesh Muslim lovefest

[Dan Lusthaus]

> It's interesting to to note that the Buddha advised pretty strongly 
> against blaming people.

On the contrary, unlike the attempts to make the specifics of the situation 
dissolve into generalized abstraction, for Buddha there was no such thing as 
disembodied generalities that did anything or that incurred any karma. Karma 
belongs to the people who do the action, and it is they to whom 
responsibility and consequences were assigned.

That major effort to throw a veil over muslim actions is necessary in order 
to neutralize (i.e., obfuscate) them in the eyes of others is itself very 
instructive. I was going to let Gerald McLoughlin's misinformation about the 
frequency of forced conversions slide in the interest of not prolonging this 
pointless discussion (the willfully blind cannot be made to open their 
eyes), but since it also illustrates how one has to create a fictitious 
Islam in order to defend it, let's briefly look at it.

This time I will not provide links, since obviously very few read them -- if 
people did, then they would have had sufficient material to refute the claim 
that forced conversion was rare. The topic is complex, so for brevity's 
sake, I will merely summarize. Anyone interested in pursuing the topic 
further, there is already plenty online, starting with the links I provided 
previously, and tons more to verify the following.

First, it is true the forced conversion was not a constant, but there is 
hardly a place under muslim sovereignty that did not, at some time (not all 
the time), resort to forced conversions. As scholars have focused increasing 
attention on specific histories of specific places, this has become 
increasingly evident.

Gerald was not being disingenious or dishonest. He is merely the victim of a 
very successful propoganda campaign. In the 1980s, persuaded by muslim 
informants and proponents, scholars thought it was their duty to "correct" 
the myth of Islam spreading by coersion. The Quran passage discouraging it 
was often cited (which is as meaningful as explaining the last 2000 years of 
Western history by citing the New Testament on turning the other cheek), and 
at that time scholars tended to specialize in broad areas, e.g., Arabia, 
Egypt, North Africa, etc. Typically, since they realized that some forced 
conversions and other forms of religious oppression, repression and even 
extermination took place in the area of their scrutiny, the claim of 
benevolent, bloodless conversion campaigns tended to be deferred to the 
regions in which they did not specialize. Specialists in Indian Islam would 
point to north Africa as the region of peaceful conversions, and north 
African specialists would, instead, point to India and south Asia as the 
non-violent conversion campaigns. Any historian who did his/her work well, 
was aware of the periods of violent religious conflicts (which, until 
relatively modern times, invariably were muslim aggressions against others, 
the two exceptions being the Crusades and the Mongols), and would typically 
deal with this by minimizing the extent and numbers. If Muslim generals 
claimed (boasted would be a better term) that they killed 500,000 Indians in 
a successful sweep, the historians (especially British historians) would 
argue the numbers were invariably boastful exaggerations -- a defense that 
required no evidence since it was sui generis and merely a tautological 
application of its own principle that all such numbers are invariably 
exaggerations. Gerald, in other words, was echoing the polemics of the 80s. 
Time to catch up with fuller research.

Take a location, any location, that has been under muslim sovereignty for a 
protracted period, and do a full history. What will be rare is finding a 
location that did not at one time or another engage in forced conversions. 
Much depended on the rulers -- benevolent rulers would treat their 
populations well or in tolerable ways, and then some despot would come along 
and make conversions a priority. Making the life of dhimmis insufferable was 
another of "coercing" conversions -- but at certain times in certain places 
Jews and Christians were also subjected to forced (violent) conversions. In 
Maimonides day, a major forced conversion campaign, with massacres, etc., 
took place in Morocco, leading him to issue a legal opinion that pretending 
to convert in order to save one's life was not true apostasy and was 
permitted -- that was necessary given the mass forced conversions that took 
place.

Artur Karp cited Richard Eaton's early work -- Eaton is a splendid scholar, 
but one has to follow the fuller trajectory of his work. His early work, 
typical of the British approach at the time, was to argue for minimization 
as forcefully as possible. As his research continued, however, he found it 
harder and harder to dismiss the reality. He compiled a tabulation of 
temples (primarily Hindu, but Buddhist and Jain) destroyed by Muslims in 
India, and even after his attempt at minimization, there were still over a 
thousand he couldn't dismiss. His trajectory is a metonymy of how the field 
itself has matured, as it has become increasingly difficult for serious 
scholars to deny not only conversion attempts, but oppressions of all sorts 
(again, check the links previously sent which document some of the ways over 
the centuries that muslim minorities have been treated by muslim majorities, 
as well as how Baha'is, Sikhs, etc. have fared.

Andy Stroble suggested that one should ignore all these facts, since 
Indonesian women in hijabs appear in videos dancing to ganggam style. I'm 
sure Rimsha Masih (if you followed the links, you know who she is, and the 
situation countless others like her are facing in the present) as well as 
all the women who have faced and will face honor killings (which are 
increasing in the US - http://tinyurl.com/c72kobe ) will join Andy and no 
longer worry about their realities anymore either. Enjoying the video while 
ignoring them is clearly the ethical thing to do.

In short, if one shifts the focus from forced conversion (which DID and do 
take place) to religious oppression, the evidence becomes overwhelming and 
damning. And the myth that dhimmi status was enviable has also been 
debunked.

Keep pretending that's not the problem.

Dan