I wouldn't agree totally as different religions and cultures have different attitudes to investigative thought and inquiry.

So whereas the Qu'ran prohibits the consumption of alcohol, and arguably by extension its manufacture, it is remarkable that the arabic scientists in question were allowed to perform their investigations without being persecuted (actually they were encouraged and supported). Maybe had they been born in a different place and a different age they would have been put to death for merely suggesting the idea.

And how did these protections and rights come to be? Not by democratic processes by any chance?

I always wondered how Lahore got its name

(sorry, no offence intended)

Depends on the nation.

You seem to confuse democracy with majority rules. The latter is just one element of democracy.

And if you read my post which started this mini-exchange, I was defending democracy. Re-read. I was saying it was inconsistent for people to act un-democratically here just because we would be treated as such in Islamic nations. It makes no logical sense to say we are better because we value rights and freedoms, but since THEY don't over there, we will act otherwise against THEM over here.

Democracy is majority rule. Anything else such as civilisation, human-rights may arguably be meaningles outside of democracy, but in its deepest kernel, democracy encompasses none of those things.

The Roman republic, for example, didn't care much for human rights (they had slavery, gladiators etc) yet it was in its essence democratic rule and as such forms the basis for most modern democracies and legal systems.

You could argue that it wasn't really democractic because women, slaves etc didn't have the right to vote. Yet I don't know of any modern democracies that let everybody vote. It is just the degree of injustice relative to our current status of brainwashing that has shifted.

Modern democracies often have things such as constitutions and bills or rights which basically say "the majority NOW decides that no FUTURE majority may ever bla bla this or that". These are basically attempts by the majority to uphold a status quo into a time that the opinion of the majority may have shifted, ie, they want to prevent their particular brand of brainwashing being supplanted by another. They re by definition therefore intended to encumber and slow down change. Most democracies haven't been around for long enough for us to observe whether such frameworks can be changed to reflect shifting opinions but my feeling is that they can.

I wasn't calling that statement into doubt.

Except that semantically, if a majority decides something, then it cannot by definition by un-democratic. It is at best injust and stupid.

So I'm fairly confident that both the minaret and burka ban will fail at the polls, but they will do so because they go against the current brainwashing, not because they afre inherently wrong.

Exactly my point. If Islam/Muslims had anything to do with it, it would have been prohibited. But the original poster was trying to claim the distillation as an achievement of Islam. Just an example of painting a different picture of what is actually true.

You forgot to mention that she was wearing "a short skirt and high boots" when she said that ........

Read your history.

Effective "pure distillation" was perfected by Persian and Arab chemists in the 8th century. And although they did produce pure alcohol for industrial purposes, they also produced perfumes.

And as with the Indian number system and Indian mathematics + Arabic/Persian mathematics and science, it was introduced to Europe by Arab traders, along with the re-introduction of Greek maths.

Learn to read! I said the same thing, that it was a regional scientific achievement and nothing to do with Islam/moslems.

Ooops, my deepest apologies.

I think he was using this to illustrate that Islam can be very liberal and enlightened and can bend its own rules. I.e., it is prepared to put scientific discourse and the good life before pedantry, verse-splitting and blind obedience if only given the right conditions.

Absurd. I hope that kind of a ban never passes here. Isn't there more important things in the world to be worrying about?

For example: If the number of women muffin toppin' it increases, could we study a possible ban for that?

The following Wikipedia text shows the important contribution of Arab specialists in the booze distillery art :

The first evidence of distillation comes from Babylonia and dates from the 2nd millennium B.C. Specially shaped clay pots were used to extract small amounts of distilled alcohol through natural cooling for use in perfumes. By the 3rd century A.D., alchemists in Alexandria, Egypt, may have used an early form of distillation to produce alcohol for sublimation or for colouring metal.[citation needed]
Alcohol was distilled for the first time by Arab and Persian chemists in the 8th and 9th centuries.[3] The development of the still with cooled collector—necessary for the efficient distillation of spirits without freezing—was an invention of alchemists during this time. In particular, Geber (Jabir Ibn Hayyan, 721–815) invented the alembic still; he observed that heated wine from this still released a flammable vapor, which he described as "of little use, but of great importance to science". Not much later Al-Razi (864–930) described the distillation of alcohol and its use in medicine. By that time, distilled spirits had become fairly popular beverages: the poet Abu Nuwas (d. 813) describes a wine that "has the colour of rain-water but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand". The terms "alembic" and "alcohol", and possibly the metaphors "spirit" and aqua vitae (“water of life”) for the distilled product, can be traced to Arabic alchemy.[3]

But in spite of those specialists mostly to have been Muslims, it has nothing to do with Islam but with Arab science. And at the beginning also with Persian science.

Just as an aside, I was in East London over the weekend and I noticed a few, probably non-Muslim, women wearing headscarves. They were worn in a style a bit like you might see on some Muslim women, though the folding was different . . . the face was visible, but the scarf was over and around the head. The fabrics used and the different, careful folding mark this out as a new fashion. This follows on from the widespread adoption of the keffiyah as a youth fashion a few years ago.

This is slightly too new a trend for me to find any photos online of the kind of thing I mean. It's definitely a new thing though.

Topic : Switzerland could ban burqas in future!

Thats the most sensible thing to do.. especially to prevent the arab men from ogling white females..

Well, some petrol stations wouldn't let you in if your motorcycle helmet is on. Anything that covers the face should be banned on safety grounds.

Most motocyclists I have ever seen take their helmets off if going into a petrol station or into a shop

Do we really want a place where ladies take there burka off when entering petrol stations? Why all this spiel? What happens if the person serving is male? How about if other customers are male? Why would anyone want to walk around all the time in public like this in a western country?

It's going back to stone age.



Don't you think if god wanted women to be dressed like that then he would have made all women like this-

So? I said the same thing. I don't get it what are you trying to say here.