The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Those Damned Scholars!

Those Damned Scholars!
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, July 26 2008, 19:23:31 (CEST)
from *** - *** Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

Bernard Lewis, author of “Islam and the West”, is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus, at Princeton University. His work has been translated in twenty-two languages, and he has lectured in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and America, and in many Muslim countries.

Fred Aprim got a degree in mechanical engineering from Baghdad U...it’s not known if he ever worked at his profession. He dabbled as a day-trader in the stock market and then took to writing history books...just like that. I can’t imagine why others are so stupid as to pay lots of money and spend years poring over books and writing papers when it’s so damn easy if you do it the Aprim way.

It should also be said that Lewis’s publisher is Oxford University Press...another real publisher and not a print-for-hire shop which gladly prints anything Aprim wants to write so long as his check is good.

Referring to the sorts of translations of the Quran which Jumblat and Minime loved to show us, Lewis says...

“The examples considered so far relate to sins of omission rather than commission...that is to say, the failure to include in the translation some essential part of the meaning expressed in the original. Sometimes the error is the other way around. The translator has more or less understood what the text means but in passing it to his reader has added something of his own, not justified in the original.”

In other words it matters very much who is doing the translating...and if a translation is approved by Aprim or Minime, you can bet it’s a poor translation more than likely deliberately tampered with in order to slander Islam all the more.

Muslims respect Christ as a prophet. They also respect his mother and followers hence they have no motive to garble the meaning of the Bible. Christians dislike Muhammad and Muslims intensely believing that their own religion was the last, authentic revelation, and so, quite naturally, they’ll do anything they can to disparage Islam and Muhammad...so that one can never be sure of any translation of the Quran by Christians. One should certainly be wary of any translation provided by Christian fanatics who are pig-ignorant to boot. Like Minime.

Speaking of the notion that the Turks “forced” their doctrines on others, Lewis says...

“In fact, however, the Turk did not impose his doctrines by force but instead allowed his subjects to follow their own religions, provided that they respected Muslim supremacy and paid their taxes. The result was that in the seventeenth century the Turkish capital was probably the only city in Europe where Christians of all creeds and persuasions could live in reasonable security and argue their various schisms and heresies. Nowhere in Christendom was this possible.”

How different from life under Christian rule, especially for Christians. Would that the Byzantines had allowed Nestorians the same courtesy...or Roman Catholics accorded the same rights to Protestants as the Turks did to all Christians...and Jews.



---------------------


The full topic:



***



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9