I’m not a diplomate, and no, saying the koran was “adapted” would not be accurate.

The cross-post above concerning certain over-heated accusations of paedophilia against Islam mentions some posters by name. There appears to be no facility for ‘right of reply’ or for self-defence. Do you think this is fair?

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I agree Sue R. – totally unfair AND dangerous since the post puts in the spotlight people who can be interpreted to have “insulted the Prophet”.

Such posts are completely unethical.

“The Koran is stolen scripture, ”

Does it ever occur to you that adapted or translated might be both more diplomatic and more accurate?

http://www.callejadelasflores.org/?p=3552
http://www.callejadelasflores.org/?p=3524

Saludos cordiales desde Al-andalus

Actually Sue, there was a tank troop of black US soldiers who arrived before the Red Army. I heard one of the vets who had joined up as a teenager speaking at a church here in Toronto about a half dozen years ago, when a documentary honouring them for their contribution during WW II despite the racism they suffered at home was released.

I think you, or they, are confusing Auschwitz with Buchenwald. Auschwitz was well behind the Soviet lines, in Poland. Buchenwald was within American lines, in Germany.

As I tried to mention above (somebody please release the moderation), the Auschwitz rumour is false, created by a politically-correct US television documentary trying too hard to show (at a time of internal US Jewish-black political conflict) the Jews owe something to African-Americans.

In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic.

The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate — not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations.

But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.