Try to read the Quran

Those were semites not arabs though.
Arabs come from yemen.

Eh, Arab Muslims built cities as well. Historians generally agree that changes in areas such as social security, family structure, slavery and the rights of women improved on what was present in existing Arab society.

That's because the only historians around after the islamic takeover were muslims who may very well have been killed had they indicated things were better before mohamed took a fat shit all over the arab tribal system.

If things really got better then it doesnt make sense that right after mohamed dies, several tribes all over the paninsula declare apostasy and come up with willing manpower to fight a war to that end.
Then theres the fact that there used to be jews and christians in the arab peninsula. Theyre all dead as shit now besides superminorities that have no rights whatsoever. So religiou freeedo. Certainly didnt improve.
On women, one need only look at preislamic stories including arab women in them. The standard of practice was insanely different then. Yes women were still treated less than men but it wasnt a systematic evaluation of their servility but an understanding of who did what in society.
If abla was beaten mercelessly every time anatara son of shadad looked at her funny it would be an entirely different commentary on arab treatment if their women folk. Instead it describes herculean deeds done specifically to protect the women because they actually gave a shit about them.
The only difference is the spread of literacy but it was all uniform communist -like propaganda.
Slavery sure as hell didnt improve despite the ostensible stance islam took on slavery, the slave trade exploded as the new muslim nation dragged several tribes into wars all over asia minor and north africa.

Rome's expansionism is also self-defense, in fact, all of expansionism is self-defense.

>That's because the only historians around after the islamic takeover were muslims who may very well have been killed had they indicated things were better before mohamed took a fat shit all over the arab tribal system.

No, I’m talking about modern day historians of Islam like Bernard Lewis and W. Montgomery Watt, not early Muslim historians.

>If things really got better then it doesnt make sense that right after mohamed dies, several tribes all over the paninsula declare apostasy and come up with willing manpower to fight a war to that end.

Eh, the fact that some people resisted Muhammed’s reforms doesn’t mean that these reforms were bad.

>women were still treated less than men but it wasnt a systematic evaluation of their servility but an understanding of who did what in society.

Muhammed abolished female infanticide and forced marriages. He also limited polygyny and gave women the right to administer the wealth she has brought into the family or has earned by her own work. One hadith reports that when a person said “Allah's Messenger, who amongst the people is most deserving of my good treatment?”, Muhammed replied “Your mother, again your mother, again your mother, then your father, then your nearest relatives according to the order (of nearness)”.

>Slavery sure as hell didnt improve

Muhammed banned the enslavement of free persons except in strictly defined circumstances, strived to de-racialize slavery and encouraged manumission of slaves. I mean, virtually no historians dispute that Muslims improved the position of slaves in the Arab society, read Lewis’s “Race and Slavery in the Middle East”.

>open thread
>OP misuses the term neoliberal
>close thread

>Bernard Lewis and W. Montgomery Watt, not early Muslim historians.
These people didnt exactly do a lot of excavated (they couldnt) and ultimately had to rely on what was left. I.e. islamic accounts of things thay happened hundreds of years befor their language even became standardized.
>Eh, the fact that some people resisted Muhammed’s reforms doesn’t mean that these reforms were bad.
These werent some people. These were large tribes representing a significant portion of the arab population.
To put scale into perpective. Abu bakr once lamented having to send 700 men out of mecca on a fat'h in order to honor mohameds orders after he died.
When the ridda wars were under way, abu bakr sent 3 seperate armies to subdue a single tribe, the last one was nearly 4000 men. At was a comparitively huge amount of manpower to spend on "some people"
>Muhammed abolished female infanticide and forced marriages.
Female infantiside was a fabrication and forced marriages occured consistently durimg and after mohammed.
Mohamed himself fengaged in forced marriage and later scholars would try to pass it off as him mercifully freeing his slave women.
>He also limited polygyny
As if this somehow makes things better.
If youre able to take care of them and theyre willing, you should have them and thats how it was ideally.
>and gave women the right to administer the wealth
So long as they had a male chaperone in all things.
>she has brought into the family or has earned by her own work.
Also explained how to beat them when they disobey men and refuse to sleep with them.
>One hadith reports...
In otherwords your sources arent modern scholars but classical islamic ones..

>Muhammed banned the enslavement of free persons except in strictly defined circumstances
Like when you capture an infidel while engaging in jihad italab (aggressive jihad) or when you kill an infidels womens men folk.
>strived to de-racialize slavery
Slavery was already deracialized, arabs would attack caravans of persians romans, and ethioians alike and enslaved whomever they captured, ultimately black people were considered uglier but neither more nor less slave material than whites.
>and encouraged manumission of slaves.
As i said ostensible.
The slave trade exploded under islam.

It's the usual denialism of own wrongdoings through self-victimization. Everybody does it.

Shit mate, grow up in Bosnia like me and you will hear such shit from all sides all the time. "We dindu nuffin and the stuff we did was self defense/retaliation/neccesary evil".

I'd advise you to read that book. Soak it in and then look at the prevailing narratives and be surprised how muslims aren't that far away from other apologists.

Also, funny that you complain about evil-denial and post a Praljak meme based on a war criminal who literally went "I dindu nuffin fuck y'all".

And what is the nature of islam?

>durr conquest is bad

grow up soyboys

Exactly. OP is somehow under the impression that human culture hasn't changed over the years. The Arabs described in the Quran did nothing different than the Jews in The Holy Bible

Unironically the worship of chaos stylized to fit an arab aesthetic.

Best start reading about the kawarij. Basically they are hardcore muslims from the perspective of what we call hardcore muslims today.
They can be considered to be the only group that ever aytempted a totally genuine apliccation of the quran and ahadith before the islamic schisms.
The end result was they fought a holy war in the name of ali bin abi talib then emmediatly renegged on him because he submitted to a court which in the quran , no caliph should submit to anyone but allah. Then they fought a series of civil warrs because ni matter who was in charge of the muslim world they all commited some bullshit sin or whatever.
Effectively they were isis before it was cool.

>Quran talks about Visigoths
What kind of Quran were you reading???

Muhammad didn't even go outside of ME

Theres a story in the quran about a conqueror name the two horned one who basically went everywhere.
Also apparently he made a wall in northern siberia to protect mankind from the muslim version of orcs and goblins.

A bunch of apostate slanders ITT. How pleasant. If you decided too leave Islam then just shut up and stop talking about things that you failed to understand in the first place.

You dont have to slander islam. Its presence insults itself automatically.
Practically every major facet of the quran and its religion has been either disproven holy or discredited. At this point the religion is built on a language barrier and the sheer ignorance of its followers.

Oh and emotions. Almost forgot the power of feels in driving the muslim mind to ever greater depths of bestiality.

Arabs are semites.

>Theres a story in the quran about a conqueror name the two horned one who basically went everywhere.
That's actually Alexander the Great.

>who try to syncretize a radically traditionalist religion
You're letting modern Islamic fundamentalism paint your view of Islam, when it's no more or less revisionist than this preface you're describing. For most of its history Islam was giving way to racial/ethnic traditions and its courts fought a continuous and uphill battle with syncretization.

>paints Islamic expansionism as 100% self defense situation
You'll have to clarify what he meant by expansionism, but assuming a standard Sunni position he'd most likely refer to Muhammad and the Rashidun, who conquered Arabia, North Africa up to Libya, and Western Iran. The usual narrative is that Muhammad fought the Meccans for survival, and both the Byzantines and Persians were hostile to a united Arabia, which isn't a big stretch considering the various invasions from both empires and their proxies. IIRC the Quran even mentions one of these.

>Arab Pagans were all just evil monsters who couldn't help themselves oppress Muslim dindu nuffins
It's hardly surprising considering the usual relationship between early Abrahamic faiths and others. Not a few early Islamic martyrs are counted as being slaves and the like who converted and were punished by their masters for it. If this is an issue with only surviving Muslim texts presenting the story, we could always look to contemporary non-Muslim sources from the 5th-7th century, few of which had anything positive to say about the Arabian tribes of their time.

>unironically 'Look how tolerant we are to other religions! You can pay the Jizya in Islamic countries! We want to marry your women as interfaith dialogue!'
For Classical times, it's not that special. At the time however, the Christianized Romans were harsh towards pagans, and while the Persians were more open they were not without their brutal religious strife and suppression either. For a while, a religiously enshrined recognition of other religious communities was as good as it got.

(cont)

>I want to read it bros, but Jesus Christ (pbuh). Historically did Muslims honestly believe all of their violent imperialism was in response to aggression? The Romans did interlope in Arabia a fair bit, that is true. Everything else, just no. I'm gonna guess they dismiss it with "Humans are flawed, don't blame it on religion" while ignoring the state that was carved out from imperalized nations was the Caliphate - an Islamic, theocratic society.

Should a modern preface really stand in the way here? Historically, Muslims believed their imperial expansion and rule was divine right, a slow evolution of the Biblical chosen people mandate into a Roman-Christian and Persian-Zoroastrian style Imperial Cult. But a lot of this was a construct long after the fact to justify what was more likely a simple tribal expansion where religion mostly served as a pact to justify the alliance (and its leadership) as a super-arbiter of all Arabs. Most of what you described is an even later set of modern apologetics, with most of these subjects barely explored by Muslim writers until Westernization because they weren't important to historical practice and theology of the religion.

Infidels living in the caliphate itself were protected by law though. Foreigners were free game but that was a thing for every society in those times.
Also freeing slaves was told to be a good and virtuous act so in that way he did encourage it.
Also I'm not the user you replied to.

What has been disproven then?