ISIS: Enslaving, having sex with 'unbelieving' women, girls is OK

[Igel]

24. They are Salafists.

Much of Xian history was whitewashed for a long time. Then "we" decided to look into the dirty, nasty, humiliating, and vile side of it. What did Xian churches and rulers do that was truly bad? Structurally bad? What kinds of justifications in ideology, in religious doctrines, in cultural practices licensed these things considered so evil today but so easily justified 100, 200, 500, 1000 years ago.

Few tried to say, "But those weren't really Xians." Few tried to say, "They're lies, distortions." Those that did usually broke with the lines of tradition that led directly back to those kinds of power structures, making it easy to denounce the practices and barricade their own psyches from those practices.

You can find ISIS' views spread across more than 1000 years of Muslim history, from Spain to SE Asia, from Europe to Africa. At times it was more common, at other times less common. But not knowing it lets the claim be made this this is somehow "foreign" to Islam--just as slavery is "foreign" to Xianity. This is a variety of fundie Islam, an atavism, a throw-back to times that most Muslims would rather forget happened and most non-Muslims either revel in (if they're "Islamophobes&quot or seek to avoid (if they don't want to be called Islamophobes). When what's needed is the kind of truth-seeking that European Xian history got from "Christophobes".

It pays to remember that Muslim traders exported more black Africans as slaves from south of the Sahara than the trans-Atlantic slave trade did (and in all the American hand-wringing over our horrible sin, that >95% of that went not to N. America). There's a much smaller trace of those slaves' DNA in the current population in slave-owning territories in Muslim countries simply because the men were often routinely castrated. They couldn't treat their slaves as livestock, breeding them like animals and trading the offspring, just as you can't put geldings out to stud. Note that the trade in slaves also included Europeans and other non-Africans. (This is a great motivation to convert, by the way--Muslims don't enslave Muslims.) Moreover, the idea that black Africans made easy targets for slavery and were good slaves wasn't just discovered by the Iberians in the 1500s: They'd seen the slave trade for centuries--and when they saw a need, a way to apply their knowledge for their countries' use and to make money, they seriously wanted in on the action.