Quote:
Originally Posted by Tronic
no, I think you're totally wrong here... It was infact the "West" which was a threat to the East in those days... It was the West which went around carrying out religious wars, and it was the West which constantly invaded the East. Even Islam is a Western religion, not an Eastern one...
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I think Swift Sword is astutely pointing out that the pre-Islamic Persian empires of the Achaemenids, the Parthians, and the Sassanids were a threat to Western culture. That they were is undeniable. The Achaemenids attempted to destroy the cradle of Western civilization when Darius and Xerxes invaded Greece. The Sassanids and Parthians were inveterate opponents of Rome, which was the heir to western civilization after absorbing Greece.
Islam could only be considered a Western religion in the geographical sense. Or, on more tenuous grounds you could claim that it shares some features with Christianity, the main Western religion, since they are both Abrahamic faiths.
However, either or both of those assertions do not counter the fact that Islam today, and certainly for most of its past, has been vigorously involved in dismantling Christian Europe and doing away with most of the bastions of Western culture such as Byzantium. It is true that the Arabs translated some Greek texts and were advanced for a while. Nonetheless, Islam today is an archaic, aggressive, and intolerant ideology that shares little or nothing in common with Western culture since the Renaissance or Enlightenment. Ideas about democracy, separation of church and state, religious tolerance, and a secular worldview are conspicuously absent in the Muslim world.
So, Tronic, far from being Western, Islam may be the greatest opposite to Western civilization.
Also your claim that the West was always launching religious wars is ambiguous. Do you refer to the Crusades? Well, the Muslims penetrated much farther into Christian lands and held parts of Europe longer than the Crusaders ever held Muslim lands. Ever since 632, the march of Islam has been directed westward with only a few delays. I think you underestimate the religious motivations of the first Caliphate or the Ottoman Empire, which were the main powers responsible for erosion of Christian power.