Not All Muslims Are Reactionaries

I’ve been against reactionary Muslims ever since I became aware of them, and I am against the current movement by them to Islamify the West, which sadly most leftists are inadvertently supporting. But just to show that there are Muslims out there who are against this, see this link which talks about an Egyptian named Gamal al-Banna. Ironically, he is the brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. But he definitely does not agree with them or their program, in particular the idea that the government needs to be Islamified. Here’s what I think is his best quote:

When Christians merged politics with Christianity, they got the Spanish Inquisition.

I hope that he will prevail in the Muslim world, but it seems like a lost cause, especially since he’s 91.

Comments

[Andrea Harris]

"When Christians merged politics with Christianity, they got the Spanish Inquisition."

That's... actually not what happened. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, politics and religion weren't "separated" as we now think of the term. As a matter of fact, it was a whole lot more like the sort of society reactionary Muslims want to live in... That's why people scream about the "Spanish Inquisition!" in the first place. But remember, the ideas of democracy and free speech that we take for granted were not even thought of in that way in the Europe of those times. In fact, the way we do things now in the West would seem to the people of the past to be a blasphemous chaos...

In any case, the Spanish Inquisition came about because, due to a variety of factors, many Christian communities had become isolated from the central church in Rome, and there was a fear that a lot of the teachings of the religious in those communities had deviated from what the church thought should be proper channels. In other words, the local priesthood could have been teaching the community heretical beliefs, and in the eyes of the church at the time, that could actually threaten the fate of the souls of those people. (You will also have to remember that the idea of the soul and whether it would get to Heaven or go to Hell was not considered a light matter -- in fact, it was considered the most important thing of all, more important than life or death.) So an Inquisition, or rather, a variety of Inquisitions, were held, and not just in Spain. The one in Spain was rather bloody I guess and that's why the name held, but France's was no laughing matter either if you consider what happened to the Cathars.

To end this tl;dr stuff, to say that the "Spanish Inquisition" was some sort of abnormal thing that came about because "politics" got mixed with "religion" is to see it backwards and inside out. It was an attempt to restore order and accountability in a time of general unrest. It wasn't very nice, no, but life back then wasn't what we'd call "nice."