How accurate is this video about the Arab Conquest of Christian Syria-Palestine?

by Euruxd
tayaravaknin

I got about a minute and a half in before I was confronted with the glaring inaccuracies of the quotes they're taking out of context.

As any professor will tell you, much of what they say about jihad's goal being to "destroy non-Islamic governments" is false. These quotes are usually taken out of context of the original statements. Now, they're correct in that the Arabs post-Muhammad initiated an attempt to conquer the Persian and Byzantine lands to their north, which Harms describes as being due to the administrative and political issues the Arabs were facing leading them to seek a "tried and true" method of directing attention elsewhere. Even that is roughly speculation, though, in my opinion, and Harms' book is biased towards Israel (it provides that part in the "history" section) and doesn't carry a lot of detail. On the other hand, John L. Esposito does a spectacular job in a lecture called "Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman" of describing both the life of Muhammad and the misconceptions that people like Osama Bin Laden and ilk have used the teachings for; this video does a lot of that already.

The first quote, for example, talks about the struggle (the meaning of jihad). Already, the assumption is that "fight" means violence. It does not. The idea is more in line with the way Muhammad handled the Jewish community: he hoped to struggle against them until they accepted him as a prophet. He did not declare war on them until they sided with his enemies. Further, the post-Muhammad government that declared that war doesn't appear to have done so out of religious fervor (though that may have been given as a reason) but out of political consideration: the caliphs who followed were not prophets as Muhammad, merely politicians and leaders.

The next quote talks about "making war on them until idolatry is no more" or something to that effect. First of all, this quote too is cited incorrectly according to what I've looked up here, since it's not actually in that spot. Same with the first quote. The first quote was at number 24, not 25, so I checked what was at 8:39, and it says:

And fight against them until there is no more oppression and all worship is devoted to God alone. And if they desist - behold, God sees all that they do;

Hardly violent, to put it that way, since "fight" doesn't mean "violently" as I explained already. What confuses me more is that it totally ignores once again the historical implications of what was done. In many cases Muhammad commands war to be made on idolaters and the like because they are fighting him. Muhammad was not perfect, but this is blowing the Quran way out of proportion.

At that point, I stopped, because of the horrific bias in the quotes. I recommend you look into the lectures by Esposito, and the book list.

Source:

Harms, Gregory, and Todd M. Ferry. The Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Basic Introduction. London: Pluto, 2005. Print.