So How Come That Restriction Doesn’t Work
…But a turning point came in 2004. U.S. troops and insurgents fought fiercely in Fallujah. Zobaie battled U.S. forces in the nearby town of Zaidan, where he grew up. By mid-2005, he had grown wary of the foreign fighters and radicals, with their brutal tactics and rigid interpretation of Islam. They banned smoking, satellite television, even Pepsi because…
…the prophet Muhammad never drank it.
As major dad points out: Muhammed never drove a Hyundai, either.
Humanity...or the Lack Thereof | tree hugging sister | 
March 24, 2008 7:42 pm
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Mo’ rode a horse, and cars need “horsepower”. I suppose that’s the “logic” involved.
They banned smoking, satellite television, even Pepsi because… the prophet Muhammad never drank it.
Wow. The Proph sounds almost Amish. Except, you know, for the pedophilia, beheadings, car bombs…
This goes back more than 1000 years.
The Caliphate of Cordoba was remote enough from the Sultan to be mostly unfettered by continuous control. As a result of this and the riches they had in Spain, they developed one of the greatest collections of artists and poets and philosophers, strongly influenced by the Greek culture that dominated the Mediterranean basin and Spain specifically for a thousands of years. Relatively for the day, they were quite tolerant of Jews, less so of Christians, but still pretty good for the day. It could be said that this was a result of the influence of Aristotle and Greek philosophy, which understood that man can perceive the world and reality without divine revelation.
Of course, nothing good in Islam lasts long. An Islamic scholar whose name I forget and would really mean nothing to me anyway issued a fatwa that Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular, was blasphemous. Man could know nothing if it was not revealed to him by their god. And since the only time the muslims deem god to have communicated to man directly and without translation was through Mohammed, then anything not written by Mohammed in the Koran could not be known by man. The Koran was never printed on the printing press for hundreds of years because there was no printing press mentioned in the Koran.
The fanatical Almohads and Almoravids in turn each invaded the Caliphate from Africa. They were a little less looney than Al Qaeda is today, but not by much. They took over and transformed the enlightened culture of Spain into a backwards society.
But before the Almohads and Almoravids invaded, Christian society was bumping into the Caliphate in Spain and being influenced by its scholarship. From the muslims they were reintroduced to Greek philosophy and Aristotle.
St. Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle and took the basic message to heart. He wrote that man can understand the universe without divine inspiration, that the gift of free will and rational thought is one of his god’s greatest gifts to man. As a result of Aquinas’ influence, the Christian world began to rise out of its dark ages at the same time the muslim world was descending into one.
It’s ironic that Aquinas’ influence encouraged individual interpretation of the religion without priestly guidance; thus he was a catalyst for the Protestant reformation.
Imagine if that fatwa weren’t issued and Aristotle were not recovered by the Christian world. All the towns across the new world would likely be dotted by minarets instead of steeples.
But sadly for muslims, they are still at the nadir of their own dark ages, an anti-intellectual morass of unthinking, a culture that says An Shallah, or “god wills it,” to excuse any foible or failure or oppression. They are a despicable, murderous people because their culture does not believe that man cannot think for himself.
I’m thinking Mohammed also didn’t use or mention rocket launchers, Soviet surplus rifles, or modern explosives. Fair’s fair, boys – take up your scimitars for Allah!
We can all play Indiana Jones, then ~ Woo HOO!!! Capital idea, Diptera!
And things have changed little for Islam, Skyler. Except, perhaps, the obvious level of hypocrisy.