Piltdown Man

[carrust]

If the world was Muslim,would we still be living in the stone age?

[maxximus]

well i'm not sure i'm quite yet willing to accept that bit of history johnny, even though they always seem to immediately know who is responsible for these attacks, to my knowledge other than moussaoui who was custody at the time of the event, no muslim has been convicted for any direct involvement for any of these attacks. and now that we are in the middle east where is alqueda? biggest terror organization in history, in 60 different countries, on holiday. maybe you can help me out here? incidently this is not the 'history' i was referring to.

[Supernick]

For goodness sake. You know that things are going down the pan when people start descibing Muslims as 'the enemy'.
The recent terrorists were working under extremely misguided interpretations of Islam, and in fact the vast majority of Muslims would not understand how people could do things like that in the name of their faith.

If I take a scripture from the Bible (something about homosexuality for example), interpret it in my own radical way, head down to the local gay club and blow it up in the name of God, then I'm not representaive of worldwide Christianity. The same is true of these terrorists.

[jake-the-peg]

No Nikki it's more a case of carying the torch.

The Abbasidian Caliphate modelled itself on the Persian empire but established great centres of learning such as the "House of wisdom" in Bagdad. People like Al-Kindi taught Medecine, philosophy astronomy there and Greek texts were translated and studied. He died in 873 while we were fighting off Vikings

The Al-Azar University in Cairo was founded in 988 and has a fair claim to be the earliest University in the Western world.

To suggest that the Arab world merely basked in the glow of previous civilisations would be wrong

[matt66]

The originators of suicide bombing were the Tamil tigers who were by my last understanding either of the christian or Hindu faith. Suicide bombing comes out of an injustice...so look at the injustices before you look at the perpetrators. Do away the injustice and the bombings will go away.

[jgs]

Yes. It's a backward, intolerant cult.