Islam is also European!

Now the hard work and soul searching must begin.  In my opinion there is a big job for all of us ahead.  I mentioned it earlier today in a facebook post where I argued that pupils in Europe ought to all visit Andalusia, Albania and Istanbul.  Europeans must stop excluding Islam and Arab empires in the explanations on the history of its development.  The tale of the development of its democracies and enlightenment itself are not without relation to knowledge come through from Arab sources.  But there is little knowledge thereof likewise in some European Muslim communities, many of whom with little knowledge of Europe, whose families have migrated from Asia or the Indian Sub-continent.  In my conversations with people, I learned that some were not even aware that Spain was once Arab and of the great buildings and legacies left behind.  There were tolerant legacies in Baghdad in the Middle East as well as in Cordoba in Spain in which people of all faiths partook whilst Muslims had the upper hand.  And yes the Arab and Turkish conquests were not peaceful affairs, they were conquests with the sword rather than just by the book.  Neither were the crusades holy affairs of kindness to other human beings or further East activities by the Russian Byzantines.  But if faith and religion are to have any meaning to anyone in the world at all, it can not be achieved through the gun or sword or terrorising people, can it?  Islam and other faiths, including the Jewish tradition I uphold, have more to offer than the verses and paragraphs on the destruction of others (as we read over and over again most scriptures have these – should we all be at each others throats therefore?) .  The fearfulness of a higher presence and meaning, for those who believe in it, the personal humbleness, and self-control, the reaching out of the hand to others even if they are not friends and the care for those in need, are these not the values that count, that we shall not murder, steal, take another’s partner, that we shall honour parents, and is not the promise that there is a God or for others Gods, and even for full hearted secular evolutionists that somehow we are all connected by shared origin and destiny, even if we may argue about the specifics?  Islam, just as Catholicism and Judaism and all other world faiths, can actually be proud of its contributions to science and human advance. No followers of faith are free of wrong doing either.  Arab conquests and Islamic fundamentalism, Christian crusades, justified slavery, genocide and colonialism and the Hindu curse of casts, along with Jewish biblical battles and some of Israel’s politics.  If each stands in front of their God’s or morals jury, will they all be clean? Surely not!  But I like to repeat, Islam contributed to European civilisation, and that is what we need to say loud most of all in all directions, because there are many who don’t know this and others who don’t want to know this.   This is the message that needs to be spread on the internet and into the heads of insecure youngsters.  These should be the responses, when they find themselves marginalised by small minded people.  Then there cannot be an offence to vile cartoons, because well educated people will know that there is a different narrative to Islam which is quite connected and central to all that Europe is.  You can bet a  Croissant and Turkish Coffee on it!