Thursday, November 12, 2009

Week 11

Personally, I believe that Cairo is a beautiful city and I plan to travel there when I graduate. Therefore I am very biased when talking about this city. As the center of the Islamic world I feel it is ideal for this because of its location to the Nile river which gives it a prime location for trade as it has access to waterways. The pyramids are very confusing mostly since they are mysterious in that most Westerners do not know how they were built. I have a friend who lives in Cairo and when I told him that we, as Americans, thought it was a huge mystery as to who built the pyramids and that the Jews or Aliens built them. This caused my friend to laugh because according to him the architect who designed them is well known in Egypt. Since then, I have referred to the pyramids as the JEW-ramids simply to anger my friend.
The capital of the Islamic world moved from Cairo to Constantinople with the central Islamic power shifting from the Mamluks to the Ottomans. Constantinople was a major city is the Byzantine Empire and was envied by Muslims since the time of the prophet Muhammad. Mehmed II finally conquered this city and quickly transformed it into the capital of the Islamic world.
As far as religious war goes I feel that there are more between people of different religions than of the same religion. This is because with ideals, each side believes that God is "on their side" therefore they will win a battle or war. I think its ironic since each side feels the divine fighting on their behalf when obviously this could not be the case. As far the the Protestant Reformation, I feel that anytime an individual stands up against a religion to say that it is "wrong", obviously there will be some repercussions. During the history of religion it has often been linked with its own military since there was no seperation of church and state. I feel that religion should be completely independent of any sort of military simply because religion is a set of beliefs which should not punish those who believe differently or impose its beliefs on others.

2 comments:

  1. I think your perspective of religious history is vastly skewed by trusting convenient sources, like a close friend, rather than objective informants. You seem 100% confident that Egyptians built the pyramids. This might be correct, but what does Egyptian mean to you? If you consider Egyptians to be anyone that occupied land in Egypt than yes. However, it seems like you think Egyptians and Jews, or Aliens even, are mutually exclusive. A huge majority of the labor to build the pyramids were Jewish slaves, who lived in Egypt. Lastly, I also am not a primary authority on religious history so you should probably carry out some independent research.

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  2. Good points about the Jews, Egyptians, and aliens being mutually inclusive. I subscribe to a theory that the Egyptians actually descended for a superior race of alien-jews that created the pyramids using alien nano-bot technology, and following this, the jew-gyptians slaves were forced to make human sacrifices to the pyramids for a period of 3846 years. Seriously though, the idea raised about the separation of military forces and religion is an interesting one. The world might be a better place if wars weren't constantly being fought with religious motivations. Almost any war or military conflict can be traced back to some kind of conflict resulting from a difference in religion and/or culture.

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