This is taken from a TIME magazine special on the Middle East: "For centuries, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Muslim scholars, artists, astronomers and mathematicians flourished...A series of long, bloody, and often inconclusive Crusades followed, and the scars of dishonour they left on the Islamic world have never faded away...After the Crusades, the Muslim world entered a long period of decline...In the wake of their conquests, Islamic rulers also earned a reputation, often forgotten today, for tolerance and moderation; they treated Christians, Jews and others in their midst with respect...It is this respect and tolerance for others that has gone missing in the great fundamentalist revival that has swept across the Islamic world, especially in Arab lands, in recent years...It's true that Islamist terrorists make up a small minority of the Arab world and even a tinier fraction of the global Muslim world. But...a troubling silence persists. Where are the moderate clerics and scholars, denouncing terrorism as a perversion of a great religion?...the central paradox of Islam rests in the dichotomy between what it preaches- submission to one loving God and respect and tolerance for others- and what it practises: tolerance for those who kill in the name of that loving God."
[This message has been edited by shitty wok (edited 01-26-2007).]
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