Pepe, this idiot would likely say that the Taj was an Indian piece of architecture and the Alhambra Spanish.
He would have a point since both are at the extremes of the Muslim world. Also, Islam came from a tribe of desert dung-breeders so it's a bit tough to ask them to produce a good architecture.
Still, hardly anyone besides the Greeks and Romans had good architecture that was really their own.
The thrust of the article was the fate of art [not architecture, by any primary means] under Islam. The fate of art existing before Islam assumes control over that area. The article, instead of being "shit", [shit being the operative word as to what passes for PP's sanity], hits precisely a simple observation of history. Islam destroys preexisting art, and artifacts in general, and does so for ideological reasons, and is limited in doing so only by its extent of control over the land and by the means of doing the destroying. The Buddhist statues at Binyamin survived as long as they did only by remoteness and the sheer challenge of climbing that high with enough equipment and men to hammer them down. Once it became a simple job of explosives, and the mosquemen were in charge, kaboom. At best Islam has shown interest only in existing artifacts which are useful for war or for worship. The walls of Constantinople were preserved by the Ottomans because they were of significant military value. The Hagia Sophia, the building itself, was preserved because it made a magnificent mosque. Everything else that is art, the music, the statues, the paintings, the ancient works at the university, the books, were destroyed or were hidden by survivors--and these, if not spirited out, soon were forgotten and entered oblivion as Islam diminished the numbers of unbelievers and erased the means to historical memory. And the longer Islam is lord the more thoroughgoing is this cleansing, the deeper things enter into oblivion. It is, of course, not just the initial scouring of the memory of what there was under the Kufr, nor just the loss of the record of the past, it is a cultivated and deeply rooted indifference to whatever there was before Islam came. There is no record in any major Islamic Civilization of showing curiosity, never mind a desire to discover, about the surviving art and antiquities in its midst. Even the relatively unlearned and uncouth Crusaders wrote and wondered about the Pyramids of Egypt or [the then yet surviving] Lighthouse at Alexandria in a way unseen even by those attached to the "Houses of Wisdom". In Napoleons' expedition to Egypt, with its direct interest in uncovering the ancient and pre-Christian past, the only Egyptians who showed any understanding for the effort, nevermind enthusiasm, were the Copts. The Mosques? They saw all of it, all that human ingenuity spent in the service of recapturing past human ingenuity, as just another reminder of how debased were the dogs of Al Harb. And in Islam, the closer a nation is to Sharia and rule by mosque the more it targets, and destroys, the artifacts that recall an age before The Message. It ain't just "pure land" types, such as the Saudis or the Taliban, but anyplace where the mosques have a significant voice. Iran has targeted that which still remains of the Persian empire. In Egypt the Islamic Brotherhood has made eradication of the pagan past one of its central"policy planks". In Indonesia the island of Bali is the center of so much jihadist violence NOT so much because there are foreign tourists there [there are actually more tourist enclaves, well guarded and reasonably safe, on Java than on Bali, by far] but because it is the last remaining territory where Hinduism still holds sway [and that sway is rapidly dimishing, thanks to that jihadism]. In Pakistan there has been a near complete eradication of all traces of the Hindi, Buddhist, pagan, and Christian cultures which lived and died there, and Pakistan has done this in very short time. In India, the rioting is never so intense as when it is over preserving some mosque deliberately built on a previous Hindu site. Also in India, the art and architecture of the Moghuls, yes, including the Taj Mahal,although certainly representative of Islam [at its most moderate] is under attack by Muslims as owing much to the "pernicious" influence of Aurangzheb and his syncrenistic and openminded ways. And in Eurabia, where the article aims at,the great mass of accumulated art of the land, the buildings and structures which show the shape of the past hundreds or thousands of years, are more and more just targets for the young jihadi to splurge their youthful energies on. Bats to the brick and kindling to the fire. A smashing good time acomin'. There will be mosques in some, there are metals and good stone for the pillaging in others, and then there are things to smash, and burn, and to bury in mud. Yeah, this will take time. But Islam will have all the time in the world, and, besides, if Islam shows a certain efficient flair for anything it is destruction. Time eventually annihilates all things, that is certain,but with Islam the conqueror worm turns with astonishing immediacy, and that is also certain.
Illuminating essay, AA. Of course, it will fall on completely deaf ears with Pepe, whose eyes are forever closed to anything resembling a historical argument, or logical thinking. Hasta la vista -- just keep on trucking, and don't worry about it.
AA, you're full of shit. The Christians used the pagan marbles of Rome for their lime-burners and made cement with which to hold together the inferior stones and bricks of their paedophile churches.
The Christians melted down the bronze roof of the Pantheon to first try to make cannon and then (finding the Romans' noblest roofing metal inadequate for artillery) used it to make Bernini's Baldacchino in St Pete's, replacing the Pantheon's roof with the best those fucks could do, lead, Pb.
Gimme a goddamned break.
The Christians brought heathen obelisks all the way from Egypt to put their bronze crosses upon and show thereby that the superstition had been superceded by (another one).
AA, you are so hilariously wrong that Pepe should gloat like a Taliban destroyer of (some rather lame) statues.
JJ, pardon the expression, but the shit you are spewing comes straight from your Cloaca.
The "Christians" you refer to were early into the game, not approaching 1500 years on. We are not referring here to the militant enthusiasm of the first centuries of the political triumph of a religion, but to what Islam has sustained, and carries out to this day. And among the Christians, even in bouts of triumphalism, there were always wide swaths of Christianity which resisted such efforts and sought to maintain the past, or at least preserve it as memory and study. This is the exact opposite of what Islam did, and did as commanded explicitly in the Hadithas and Quran. The last great heyday of a branch of Christianity seeking to obliterate a culture was with the Spanish conquistadores [or, rather, the Jesuits of the Church Militant who accompanied them] in the Americas, where the written records of the Mayan civilizations were sought out for destruction. However, at the same time, back in Europe, or the non Spanish colonies, there was no such effort whatsoever, in fact an open curiosity as to what there was to be seen and what the New World offered. The literature of the 16th and 17th Centuries is absolutely rich with information on the texts and peoples and artifacts and natural objects and the flora and fauna of the pagan lands on the Americas. And, just to remind you, after the first wave of Jesuit enthusiasm for burning and smashing, subsequent church leaders, both within the order and among the Popes, countermanded these and tried to mitigate the damage through efforts of preservation and translation. Nothing like this has ever occurred with Islam. All efforts or resistance to destruction of what was found among conquered peoples came from secular elements of Islamic society, from various political leaders who were seeking stability as the new Islamic rule was faced with the problem as to how to manage largely inimical populations. These efforts at blunting or denying the particulars of The Message as to how to solve the problem of unbelievers consistently failed in the not so long run; being overwhelmed by the religious centers, the mosques and the madrassahs, which inevitably grew in power as populations were Islamicized. The history of the West has been one where at times the Church engaged in barbarity and destruction, as ideological spasms passed through it and its political branches, and more times where it played an active role not simply in maintaining learning and civilization but in understanding, and reanimating the worlds that existed before Christianity or through which Christianity was challenged. And in this to and fro of clashing attitudes, among the religious themselves and not just secular contra religious, the weight of the teaching of Jesus Christ gave no comfort to those who wished to burn. The Will to Power found the Book a hindrance, not an aid. The exact, and telling, opposite of Islam. These worlds Christianity sought to understand, or incorporate[and, no, not just for war or worship] were all the major civilizations it encountered. It was not just the Graeco-Roman world, but also those of Persia, Graeco-Syria, Egypt, the Nordic pagans, the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, and, yes, even Islam. There are many texts written by the Christian west trying to understand and come to grips with what Islam was all about, how it operated, what its similarities and differences were with Christendom, etc.....This in the days of the Crusades, not from 19th Century Episcopalians. From Islam, however, you get, throughout its millenia, utter indifference to what made "the Other" tick. There are a few accounts of individual travellers reporting on their adventures in Dar El-Harb, but nothing whatsoever from the centers of education or the few areas were writing flourished with Islam, showing an interest in understanding, exploring for knowledge, the worlds it had overcome or sought to overcome. With one obvious exception, of course, which was the endless religiously minded exegeses [yes, Le Pew, exegeses] blathering on what the Quran and Hadithas said as to the reasons for needing to conquer the Unbelievers, discussions on the tactics, military and political, to achieve that goal, and on what to do with those kufr once defeated. From Mohammed to Saladin to Mehmet II to the Mahdi, it is the same fucking neverending story. Only in military defeat, and subjugation under the rule of those Kufr they had sought to subjugate, did serious efforts from within believing Islam arise to understand the nature of these Kufr, but even then only for the practical goal of "understanding in order to destroy". [ Qutb, for example, mentions often his disgust and anger at having to spend time with us Ricain devils, at being forced by fate to rub shoulders with those perverted Coloradan church dancers, in order to see what had to be seen so that an Islamic Brotherhood could be forged to put the world back in its proper order under Allah. ] There is much to say about the relationship of Islam to the arts, in all their variety, and to the astonishing number which are explictly prohibited by the "theory" of the Mosques or bound to very narrow limits. That is a related, but distinct, topic to the one on Islam's attitude to the creations of the non Islamic world. The Mosquemen have had differences in what art, in what form, should be allowed in the Ummah. But they all, from the ancient and powerful currents of Sunni and Shia Islam, to the Sufi or Ahmadiyya sects seeking survival at the edge of Islam, agree on what is to be done with the prior creations: If it is useful against Dar al Harb, or to the Message as expounded in the Mosques, then it can be retained. If it is other, then it is Haram and to perish. Your willful blindness on this, Rot, is as qomical as your going around parading that one member of Believing Islam [ Salam] to have done great physics as "proof" that religious Islam is compatible with the vibrant life of the scientific mind. And you know exactly why it is qomical, if you keep the shit down long enough to reflect over the statistics of the whole thing as well as the particulars of Salam's life. Of course, if you wish to argue that religious Islam is fully compatible with the vibrant life of the weaponusing mind, well, then, you will actually have a strong case.
Nonsense. The Persians under Islam were quite cultured and scientists and artists (often at odds with the religion's teachings were invited to the courts there at least as much as mediaeval types in Europe (or shudder, Russia or the East) would ever do.
Also, in Spain, the Arabs were a civilizing influence.
But you've also digressed to talk about stuff having nothing to do with art.
Rot: Go back and read your history books. Whatever knowledge you think you have acquired previously has been superseded, while you ceded the high ground to AA (the two verbs are not antithetical, despite what you think).
15 comments:
Pepe will have a better time if his wife lets him out of the house.
And then look at the pitiful room or two of so-called "Islamic art"
does he mean the taj mahal and the alhambra ?
Pepe, this idiot would likely say that the Taj was an Indian piece of architecture and the Alhambra Spanish.
He would have a point since both are at the extremes of the Muslim world. Also, Islam came from a tribe of desert dung-breeders so it's a bit tough to ask them to produce a good architecture.
Still, hardly anyone besides the Greeks and Romans had good architecture that was really their own.
The article is crap.
thank you: i read shit like this and i question my sanity.
The thrust of the article was the fate of art [not architecture, by any primary means] under Islam. The fate of art existing before Islam assumes control over that area.
The article, instead of being "shit", [shit being the operative word as to what passes for PP's sanity], hits precisely a simple observation of history. Islam destroys preexisting art, and artifacts in general, and does so for ideological reasons, and is limited in doing so only by its extent of control over the land and by the means of doing the destroying. The Buddhist statues at Binyamin survived as long as they did only by remoteness and the sheer challenge of climbing that high with enough equipment and men to hammer them down. Once it became a simple job of explosives, and the mosquemen were in charge, kaboom.
At best Islam has shown interest only in existing artifacts which are useful for war or for worship. The walls of Constantinople were preserved by the Ottomans because they were of significant military value. The Hagia Sophia, the building itself, was preserved because it made a magnificent mosque. Everything else that is art, the music, the statues, the paintings, the ancient works at the university, the books, were destroyed or were hidden by survivors--and these, if not spirited out, soon were forgotten and entered oblivion as Islam diminished the numbers of unbelievers and erased the means to historical memory. And the longer Islam is lord the more thoroughgoing is this cleansing, the deeper things enter into oblivion.
It is, of course, not just the initial scouring of the memory of what there was under the Kufr, nor just the loss of the record of the past, it is a cultivated and deeply rooted indifference to whatever there was before Islam came. There is no record in any major Islamic Civilization of showing curiosity, never mind a desire to discover, about the surviving art and antiquities in its midst. Even the relatively unlearned and uncouth Crusaders wrote and wondered about the Pyramids of Egypt or [the then yet surviving] Lighthouse at Alexandria in a way unseen even by those attached to the "Houses of Wisdom".
In Napoleons' expedition to Egypt, with its direct interest in uncovering the ancient and pre-Christian past, the only Egyptians who showed any understanding for the effort, nevermind enthusiasm, were the Copts. The Mosques? They saw all of it, all that human ingenuity spent in the service of recapturing past human ingenuity, as just another reminder of how debased were the dogs of Al Harb. And in Islam, the closer a nation is to Sharia and rule by mosque the more it targets, and destroys, the artifacts that recall an age before The Message.
It ain't just "pure land" types, such as the Saudis or the Taliban, but anyplace where the mosques have a significant voice. Iran has targeted that which still remains of the Persian empire. In Egypt the Islamic Brotherhood has made eradication of the pagan past one of its central"policy planks". In Indonesia the island of Bali is the center of so much jihadist violence NOT so much because there are foreign tourists there [there are actually more tourist enclaves, well guarded and reasonably safe, on Java than on Bali, by far] but because it is the last remaining territory where Hinduism still holds sway [and that sway is rapidly dimishing, thanks to that jihadism].
In Pakistan there has been a near complete eradication of all traces of the Hindi, Buddhist, pagan, and Christian cultures which lived and died there, and Pakistan has done this in very short time.
In India, the rioting is never so intense as when it is over preserving some mosque deliberately built on a previous Hindu site. Also in India, the art and architecture of the Moghuls, yes, including the Taj Mahal,although certainly representative of Islam [at its most moderate] is under attack by Muslims as owing much to the "pernicious" influence of Aurangzheb and his syncrenistic and openminded ways.
And in Eurabia, where the article aims at,the great mass of accumulated art of the land, the buildings and structures which show the shape of the past hundreds or thousands of years, are more and more just targets for the young jihadi to splurge their youthful energies on. Bats to the brick and kindling to the fire. A smashing good time acomin'. There will be mosques in some, there are metals and good stone for the pillaging in others, and then there are things to smash, and burn, and to bury in mud.
Yeah, this will take time. But Islam will have all the time in the world, and, besides, if Islam shows a certain efficient flair for anything it is destruction. Time eventually annihilates all things, that is certain,but with Islam the conqueror worm turns with astonishing immediacy, and that is also certain.
Illuminating essay, AA. Of course, it will fall on completely deaf ears with Pepe, whose eyes are forever closed to anything resembling a historical argument, or logical thinking. Hasta la vista -- just keep on trucking, and don't worry about it.
AA, you're full of shit. The Christians used the pagan marbles of Rome for their lime-burners and made cement with which to hold together the inferior stones and bricks of their paedophile churches.
The Christians melted down the bronze roof of the Pantheon to first try to make cannon and then (finding the Romans' noblest roofing metal inadequate for artillery) used it to make Bernini's Baldacchino in St Pete's, replacing the Pantheon's roof with the best those fucks could do, lead, Pb.
Gimme a goddamned break.
The Christians brought heathen obelisks all the way from Egypt to put their bronze crosses upon and show thereby that the superstition had been superceded by (another one).
AA, you are so hilariously wrong that Pepe should gloat like a Taliban destroyer of (some rather lame) statues.
Like you ought to be.
JJ, pardon the expression, but the shit you are spewing comes straight from your Cloaca.
The "Christians" you refer to were early into the game, not approaching 1500 years on. We are not referring here to the militant enthusiasm of the first centuries of the political triumph of a religion, but to what Islam has sustained, and carries out to this day. And among the Christians, even in bouts of triumphalism, there were always wide swaths of Christianity which resisted such efforts and sought to maintain the past, or at least preserve it as memory and study. This is the exact opposite of what Islam did, and did as commanded explicitly in the Hadithas and Quran.
The last great heyday of a branch of Christianity seeking to obliterate a culture was with the Spanish conquistadores [or, rather, the Jesuits of the Church Militant who accompanied them] in the Americas, where the written records of the Mayan civilizations were sought out for destruction. However, at the same time, back in Europe, or the non Spanish colonies, there was no such effort whatsoever, in fact an open curiosity as to what there was to be seen and what the New World offered. The literature of the 16th and 17th Centuries is absolutely rich with information on the texts and peoples and artifacts and natural objects and the flora and fauna of the pagan lands on the Americas. And, just to remind you, after the first wave of Jesuit enthusiasm for burning and smashing, subsequent church leaders, both within the order and among the Popes, countermanded these and tried to mitigate the damage through efforts of preservation and translation.
Nothing like this has ever occurred with Islam. All efforts or resistance to destruction of what was found among conquered peoples came from secular elements of Islamic society, from various political leaders who were seeking stability as the new Islamic rule was faced with the problem as to how to manage largely inimical populations. These efforts at blunting or denying the particulars of The Message as to how to solve the problem of unbelievers consistently failed in the not so long run; being overwhelmed by the religious centers, the mosques and the madrassahs, which inevitably grew in power as populations were Islamicized.
The history of the West has been one where at times the Church engaged in barbarity and destruction, as ideological spasms passed through it and its political branches, and more times where it played an active role not simply in maintaining learning and civilization but in understanding, and reanimating the worlds that existed before Christianity or through which Christianity was challenged. And in this to and fro of clashing attitudes, among the religious themselves and not just secular contra religious, the weight of the teaching of Jesus Christ gave no comfort to those who wished to burn. The Will to Power found the Book a hindrance, not an aid. The exact, and telling, opposite of Islam.
These worlds Christianity sought to understand, or incorporate[and, no, not just for war or worship] were all the major civilizations it encountered. It was not just the Graeco-Roman world, but also those of Persia, Graeco-Syria, Egypt, the Nordic pagans, the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, and, yes, even Islam. There are many texts written by the Christian west trying to understand and come to grips with what Islam was all about, how it operated, what its similarities and differences were with Christendom, etc.....This in the days of the Crusades, not from 19th Century Episcopalians.
From Islam, however, you get, throughout its millenia, utter indifference to what made "the Other" tick. There are a few accounts of individual travellers reporting on their adventures in Dar El-Harb, but nothing whatsoever from the centers of education or the few areas were writing flourished with Islam, showing an interest in understanding, exploring for knowledge, the worlds it had overcome or sought to overcome. With one obvious exception, of course, which was the endless religiously minded exegeses [yes, Le Pew, exegeses] blathering on what the Quran and Hadithas said as to the reasons for needing to conquer the Unbelievers, discussions on the tactics, military and political, to achieve that goal, and on what to do with those kufr once defeated. From Mohammed to Saladin to Mehmet II to the Mahdi, it is the same fucking neverending story. Only in military defeat, and subjugation under the rule of those Kufr they had sought to subjugate, did serious efforts from within believing Islam arise to understand the nature of these Kufr, but even then only for the practical goal of "understanding in order to destroy".
[ Qutb, for example, mentions often his disgust and anger at having to spend time with us Ricain devils, at being forced by fate to rub shoulders with those perverted Coloradan church dancers, in order to see what had to be seen so that an Islamic Brotherhood could be forged to put the world back in its proper order under Allah. ]
There is much to say about the relationship of Islam to the arts, in all their variety, and to the astonishing number which are explictly prohibited by the "theory" of the Mosques or bound to very narrow limits. That is a related, but distinct, topic to the one on Islam's attitude to the creations of the non Islamic world. The Mosquemen have had differences in what art, in what form, should be allowed in the Ummah. But they all, from the ancient and powerful currents of Sunni and Shia Islam, to the Sufi or Ahmadiyya sects seeking survival at the edge of Islam, agree on what is to be done with the prior creations: If it is useful against Dar al Harb, or to the Message as expounded in the Mosques, then it can be retained. If it is other, then it is Haram and to perish.
Your willful blindness on this, Rot, is as qomical as your going around parading that one member of Believing Islam [ Salam] to have done great physics as "proof" that religious Islam is compatible with the vibrant life of the scientific mind. And you know exactly why it is qomical, if you keep the shit down long enough to reflect over the statistics of the whole thing as well as the particulars of Salam's life.
Of course, if you wish to argue that religious Islam is fully compatible with the vibrant life of the weaponusing mind, well, then, you will actually have a strong case.
Nothing like this has ever occurred with Islam.
Nonsense. The Persians under Islam were quite cultured and scientists and artists (often at odds with the religion's teachings were invited to the courts there at least as much as mediaeval types in Europe (or shudder, Russia or the East) would ever do.
Also, in Spain, the Arabs were a civilizing influence.
But you've also digressed to talk about stuff having nothing to do with art.
Most of what you say there is nonsense as well.
AA vs Rot: TKO in round 3. So says judge Tecs.
Rot: Go back and read your history books. Whatever knowledge you think you have acquired previously has been superseded, while you ceded the high ground to AA (the two verbs are not antithetical, despite what you think).
Onan spilled his cede upon the ground?
Keep diggin', Mr Rot. Pretty soon, you will reach Tibet.
c'mon tec - don't just clap like a monkey. And if you're gong to jump in there, you should consider contributing more than just correcting the typos.
Le Pew, natch, is quite happy to contribute nothing except typos.
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