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Christian versus Muslim was around long before Jesus and Mohamed

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Kurt_and_Hunter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:42 PM
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Christian versus Muslim was around long before Jesus and Mohamed
Edited on Sun Jul-18-10 12:51 PM by Kurt_and_Hunter
Religions confuse the dynamic of conflict between the west and what we think of today as the Islamic world.

While watching the movie TROY on AMC last night (bad movie but a good enough story that I can still enjoy the movie) I was thinking how differently the Iliad would play on film if the Trojans were played by Turks... which they were, of course.

That got me thinking about the roots of western civilization. The founding literature of Europe (The Iliad) is the story of some Europeans getting into some shit with the asiatic world. Europeans besiege a Turkish city. At the end they commit effective genocide. Along the way there is a lot of great conflict between European gods and asiatic gods. (Apollo, for instance, was an asiatic god adopted into the Greek Pantheon.)

The Old Testament is the story of a group who consider themselves distinct from the Babylonian/Palestinian/Egyptian world who are sometimes slaves or captives of powerful civilizations in places that are today Muslim, and at other times besieging any number of cities full of people who would, today, be Muslim. Most encounters end with the effective genocide of whoever was in the city. (Kill all the men, taking all women and children as slaves.)

The first European history was Herodotus' THE PERSIAN WAR, detailing a series of dust-ups between Persia and Greece.

When Christianity came along it was popular for the better part of a thousand years. Then Islam arose and utterly kicked Christianity's butt for more than half a millennium. (Before Mohamed Egypt and Syria and Turkey were primarily Christian nations. Yet they converted to Islam with amazing rapidity once Islam arose.) Then Christianity became ascendant again.

At times Christianity dominated the "muslim world" and at times Islam dominated the "christian world."

But when it all shook out we were still back where we were three thousand years ago! Greece European. Turkey asiatic. Israel in conflict with the neighbors (and visa versa).

Thinking of Troy, Turkey was the seat of Christianity throughout the Byzantine period. In 1492 Constantinople fell to Islam... and it was just the Iliad in reverse. Vienna and Pottier in France were the high-water marks of Islam's spread in Europe... crusades in reverse. Spain was Christian then Muslim then Christian again.

But all that competition between Christianity and Islam was there long before either exited. What would be Christendom (and Israel) slamming into what would be the Islamic world in a constant to-and-fro.

Just some thoughts.

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SwampG8r Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:47 PM
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1. interesting viewpoint
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Name removed Donating Member (0 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:54 PM
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Lasher Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:55 PM
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3. Christianity did not exist until Christ was born.
So the premise of your title is not correct.
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Kurt_and_Hunter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:58 PM
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5. Headlines must be concise
I was trying to express that the conflict that we today consider a Christan vs. Muslim dynamic existed between the same general nations/groups of people before Christianity or Islam existed.

An endless repackaging of of the founding conflict of Europe.
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Solomon Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-26-10 01:30 PM
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9. Boy you could not be more wrong. There was Christianity before
Christ. "Christ is not a name you know. It's a title. Christianity existed thousands of years before "Jesus Christ" was born.
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darkstar3 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-26-10 02:38 PM
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10. Explain how and in what form.
Judaism existed thousands of years before Christ was born. A lot of people forget that Jesus was Jewish.
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EmilyKent Donating Member (753 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 12:55 PM
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4. East is east, and west is west,
and never the twain shall meet...


Considering how the rest of it goes, we'd better change our outlook asap.
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Igel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-18-10 09:51 PM
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6. Turkey fell largely to the Turks before Byzantium fell.
The Turks are latecomers to the scene, we actually know when they arrived. (Rather like we have a pretty good idea when the Slavs arrived in SE Europe.)

But your thesis is pretty much wrong.

Let's take the bit with the Babylonians/Egyptians/Palestinians vs. the newcomers at the time (assuming they really were newcomers). To some extent the construct today has these groups lined up against Israel. It's convenient to try to project it back. But Egypt was Hamitic and imperialist, and often owned the southern portion of the Levant. The Semites in the Levant weren't often united; the Phoenicians had a good run, of course. The Philistines were new arrivals; perhaps Luwians, one scholar suggests; perhaps from west of Greece, others suggest. The Semitic groups farther inland were all of a piece with the Hebrews and Semitic groups to the north. Babylon wasn't Semitic (Assyria was, at least in vernacular), and also often owned the Levant--more often the north than the south. Of course, you leave out the Hittites and numerous other groups.

There's no grouping of the dominant group along the Tigris/Euphrates, the Philistines, and the Egyptians (or even the Phoenicians). They all just vied for dominance and had nothing in common except that they usually wanted to control the Levant. If Israel was a separate kingdom, it fit right in. There's nothing Manichaean about it, unless you pick one nation's perspective to view everything from.

For kicks, let's try the "Turks" in Asian Troy vs the Achaeans--it's not like they were clearly Greek at the time, and in fact were fairly recent arrivals in Greece (with new tribes still showing up, IIRC). There used to be some controversy over the ethnic affiliation of the Trojans. They appear to be Luwian, but part of the Hittite Kingdom. (Not my thing--I turned down my chance to learn Luwian, and if I'm a bit wrong about the Hittites, eh.) Eventually Greek became the language of Asia minor, but not that early. The Hittites'--and Luwians'--main problems stemmed overland from Assyria and recalcitrant Semites (when they showed up) to the south. It meant that they were sometimes allies of Phoenicia, sometimes of Egypt (and on occasion provided mercenaries to Egypt); never really an ally of Assyria. Whatever grief the Achaeans caused the Luwians, the Hittites pretty much yawned at the Ahhiya and the problems they caused Wilusa.

We know that the Luwians fought others in Asia. That the Achaeans weren't much at peace, and the later Greeks had colonies in Italy and France and around the Crimea. Again, it's sort of every group for himself.

The later Greek expansion into Asia-after the Hittites were no longer a problem and Assyria out of the way--put them up against the Persians and the Medes (the Kurds were there already, Mede-related, but of no great interest to anybody it would seem). Mostly it was for who would control their lessers, sort of like Spain and France duking it out in the Caribbean for the same sorts of reasons. There wasn't really much ideology involved, no call for revolution or social justice, no big ideas involved. "You got land; Grog want land." Bonk.

In almost all these cases the response after conquering was to collect tribute and leave. They often found sufficient correspondences to form identies between pantheons. It was tougher between the West and East Indo-Europeans and Semites and Babylonians because their mythologies were sometimes quite different. Still, they found correspondences. Pay your tribute and that's that. Languages spread not by edict but by need and population. So Kurdish spread and displaced Urartean (as a guess), Assyrian squashed Sumerian, Greek (and, in places, Aramaic) blotted out Luwian and Hittite. Many of the elements of nationalism were missing.
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randr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jul-19-10 07:45 AM
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7. You may need to go all the way back to the myth of Cain and Abel
Then on to the son's of Abraham where the real division between what would become the Judea/Christian peoples and the Islamic nations began.
It will be interesting as geneticists unravel where the distrust some people have for their fellow men began in our journey.
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Odin2005 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jul-25-10 02:03 PM
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8. Troy should be called a Hittite city, the Turks didn't even exist yet.
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