Arab colonization and the destruction of indigenous cultures and histories

By Aussiegirl

One of the eternal pleasures of the blogosphere is the opportunity to learn and share information with so many well-informed and talented people. In response to my post below that described how Iran's Muslim rulers are attempting to erase pre-Islamic Iranian history, our intrepid reader Scribe left the following brilliant and informative comment. I share it with my readers here. Thanks to Scribe for these invaluable insights.

At 10:45 AM, scribe said...
This news item about Persian antiquities should answer any questions that the Taliban's systematic destruction of ALL their antiquities in Afghanistan (which culminated in the demolition of the Bamiyam Buddhas) was an freakish anomaly. This destruction of pre-Islamic artifacts is wide-spread from Indonesia to Africa. Islam is primarily an iconoclastic movement. That the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyam Buddhas (sculptures which represent transcendant man) shows that Islam isn't interested in any display of transcendance, but obedience to the passion of violence.

The destruction of culture goes deeper than that. Read the works of V.S. Naipal, an Indian, who has visited non-Arabic countries that became Islamic. The indigenous culture becomes "Arabized", replacing the customs and names of the native population. This is not unusual in the history of competing civilizations, but the history of Arab expansion has been one of destruction and exploitation that is unending. For example, much of the hatred between the Iraqi Kurds and the Sunni Arabs was the forced colonization of Kurdish land and confiscation of Kurdish homes and businesses by the Arabs under Saddam Hussein.

A great deal of aggressive Arab colonization is now going on around the world, but all we hear about is how horrible the Western colonizers were. While Western colonization wasn't peaceful either (its destruction of native cultures was more by accident that actual design), in time its commercial energies brought progress to the colonized regions that benefitted everyone. More importantly, the Christian missionaries who came to the New World or other places did not exploit the native, but to this day has worked hard to protect the native from rapacious colonists, and led the campaign against native and African slavery. This fact is often ignored. Were Islamic missionaries as equally concerned about protecting the native? The continuing Arab slave trade in Africa and the recent call to re-introduce slavery in Saudi Arabia by a high-ranking imam should answer that.

1400 years of Arab/Islamic colonization in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have driven into ruin the indigenous cultures it came in contact with. Instead of bringing any kind of progress, it has reduced everything in abject ruin or allowed it to drift into a much declined state. During the mad rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan was the ONLY country in the world that had outbreaks of leprosy, as living conditions there had sunk so low under their Islamofascist rule.

Some muslim groups in Europe are calling for the destruction of Christian frescos and artwork in Spain and Italy, especially those showing Christian knights triumphing over the Muslim. Think what they will do with the Louvre and Vatican museum and other European cultural sites, if ever Islam becomes the religion of Europe. These works of art have no value to them whatsoever, and remember that under the Taliban, music was outlawed.

It's time we stopped referring to Western civilization as the work of "dead white men". It was a truly great civilization which we, in our growing ignorance of it, are throwing away for chaos, moral depravity and savagery. Nature abhors a vacuum and sooner or later, some totalitarian system, like Islam, will step into it, if we allow ourselves to decline as much as we are.