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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Egyptians not Christian, but were instead "proto-Muslim" who were persecuted by real Christians

Author Fadel Soliman wants us to believe him when he talks about the downtrodden "proto-Muslim" of Egypt and how they were, like Muslims today, persecuted by those evil Christians.  This is another re-write of history to make Islam look good and Christians look bad, a continuing method by Islamists to warp tighter the cloth of victimization by Christians against Muslims.

From the estimable Raymond Ibrahim comes this dissection of Solimans' book, "Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad"


From RaymondIbrahim.com April 24 by Raymond Ibrahim

Were Conquered Christians Really Liberated Muslims? 


Fadel Soliman, Islam expert and "bridge-builder

Imagine if a top American historian appeared on the MSM insisting that the only reason Europeans conquered the Americas was to "defend" the Native Americans—who somehow had adopted Christianity centuries before Jesus was born—from being persecuted by heathen tribes.

While that would create a maelstrom of outrage and derision in the West, in the Arab world—where some think bewitched animals work as infidel operatives—such absurdities regularly pass for "truth."

Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad


Consider the case of Fadel Soliman, a celebrated Sharia expert and Arab media darling. Director of the Bridges Foundation—which teaches Muslims "how to present Islam" to non-Muslims—Soliman also lectures at Western universities, churches, and governmental agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Defense.

His new Arabic book, Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad, which he has been promoting all over the media, including al-Jazeera, asserts that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt (c. 640), the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, or muwahidin, who were actually being oppressed by Christians: hence, the Muslim conquest of Egypt was really about "liberating" fellow Muslims. Soliman's evidence is that the Arian sect, which rejected the claim that Jesus was coequal with God, was present in 4th century Egypt. Therefore, according to Soliman, the indigenous Egyptians were practicing "proto-Islam"
hundreds of years before it was founded in the 7th century.

As with much of modern academia's approach to Islam, this thesis is based on pure fiction. While the Arians were pronounced heretics at the Council of Nicea (325) for their interpretation of the Trinity, they nonetheless accepted all of Christianity's core tenets—including original sin, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation—all of which directly contradict Islam's teachings. What an imaginative stretch, then, for Soliman to portray the Arians as prototypical Muslims, simply because they did not believe Jesus was coequal with God (a standard that would make many people today "Muslims").

Needless to say, no historian has ever suggested that Muslims invaded Egypt to liberate "proto-Muslims." Rather, the Muslim historians who wrote our primary sources on Islam, candidly and refreshingly present the conquests as they were—conquests, for the glory and empowerment of Islam and its followers at the expense of unbelieving infidels.

Of course, with the weakening of Islam in the modern era, embarrassed Muslims began to euphemize their imperialistic history, portraying jihad as "defensive," "spiritual," etc.—culminating with Soliman's fairy tale. Even the unapologetic Sayyid Qutb, the sheikh of "radical Islam," interpreted jihad and the conquests as "altruistic" endeavors to "liberate" mankind.

Such sophistry is inevitable; for the Muslim conquests pose a thorny problem for Muslims. As David Cook writes in Understanding Jihad, p.167:
[T]he conquests were seen from the beginning as one of the incontrovertible proofs of Islam. To disavow them or to examine them critically—which has yet to happen in the Muslim world—will be very painful for Muslims especially Arabic-speaking Muslims. At every point… when Muslims have tried to abandon militant jihad for the internal, spiritual jihad… the memory of the conquests and the need to rationalize them have defeated this effort. The problem may lie in the unwillingness to confront the fact that the conquests were basically unjustified. They were not a "liberation" and they were not desired by the non-Muslim peoples; they were endured and finally accepted.

Read it all

1 comment:

A Christian Woman Who Has Lived Under Shariah (CD) said...

Islam and its revisionist "historians" are so very reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's masterpiece "1984". Winston Smiths job at the Ministry of Truth was to search all historical records and documents (books, magazines, newspapers, etc...) for the purpose of revising and rewriting those records, to make them conform to the "Truth" as seen and preached TODAY by Big Brother. Rewriting history rendered Big Brother and the Party, God like, all knowing, all powerful, omniscient, always consistent, and always correct. Emmanuel Goldstein (those darn Jews again) is the enemy of the Party and of Big Brother (and Islam).
Much of Islam is reminiscent of Orwell's "1984".
The Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Truth all have their counterparts in Islam.
And so horrific, mind numbing oppression becomes freedom, as in the "freedoms" obtained by following Shariah Law, "truth" is everlasting and immutable, one needs only to look to the Quran (Big Brother) to find "truth", Big Brother's and Allah's love and mercy is obtained through the "re-education" and/or liquidation of the enemies of Big Brother (and Islam), the Thought Police have been replaced by CAIR and other Islamic groups with their frequent vociferous charges of "Islamaphobia" and racism (Thought Crime), illicit romances are handled by Islam and by Orwell's Ministry of Love, once again by "re-education" and the jailing and/or execution of the individuals involved, Newspeak is practiced when we are told that jihad means "internal struggle" not a clarion call to violent action and war, and finally the 3 precepts in Orwell's dystopia, "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", and "Ignorance is Strength" lie at the very heart of Islamic thinking and practice, just as it has been for over 1400 years. Truth is indeed dispensed of and incinerated down the "memory hole" for Winston Smith and for us here in the West. Thus the gentle Jewish prophet Jesus is declared an "unperson" and is reborn in today's world as a militant Palestinian Muslim hell bent on the destruction of Israel. Islam means to declare all of us as "unperson's" and our lives and our histories are to be rewritten as the perpetual and eternal followers of Mohammed.