DNM brings a very important point

Submitted by Prashant (United States), May 29, 2013 at 13:24

Dear Dr Pipes,

I am too hard pressed for time to go through the video cited by DNM. In the video an Egyptian cleric supposedly recommends that Egypt should invade and loot other countries to come out of its economic malaise. I will like to draw your reader's attention to this basic idea.

Hasn't looting other countries not been a bonafide way to boost your own gross national product throughout the human history? Romans, Greeks and Mongols did it a long time back. Muslims did it after that. And the colonial powers of Europe did it in the most recent centuries. And, in fact, it is said that the HIndu kings who built great temples of South India also took a page from the books of their Mughal neighbors and plundered other neighboring Hindu kingdoms around them to ensure prosperity.

What makes Islamic colonization unique was that the invading armies got and aggressively utilized religious justification for their actons. When, on the one hand, Hadiths were being compiled at the core of the empire --golden age of Islam--, countries were being won on the edges (711 in Spain and 712 in India). I do not know if the Egyptian clergy indeed said what DNM is suggesting he said but what he said has been applied by invading kings throughout the history and we need to see it the way it was.

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