GOD (Part VII Part I: Shalom Columbus)
Notice (oh, you did!): Due to the demand for this piece, I'm going to post
it "as it's written" so to speak. I'll try to add to it every day until
it's finished.
1000 CE: * [Why are we starting in the year 1000 CE? Well, we
needed a date after the founding of Islam but before September 26th, 2005
when the town of Dover PA pasted on ordinance officially declaring cats
to be "the ungodly consorts of witches".] This was on of those years
(there were plenty before and plenty after) during which The Second
Coming of Christ ™ was supposed to take place. Fortunately for
Europe's peasants, they are completely ignorant as to what year it is
(as well as illiterate and totally unaware of basic hygienic practices)
so J.C.'s no-show only embarrasses the West's nobility (those who bathe
every five-to-ten years or so) and clergy (those who bathe in Holy Water).
The poor will not be so lucky when it comes to future non-Apocalypses.
1095: Pope Urban II, in order to redirect the energies of
Christendom's kings and knights away from slaughtering each other and
each other's women and children and towards something more positive
(slaughtering someone else's women and children), declares the first
Crusade.
Now, I can always tell that someone owns more seed catalogs than history
books if they say "Them there Muslims have hated Christians ever since the
Crusades."
In actually, the Crusades, initially, didn't make much of an impact on the
Islamic world (Of course this doesn't mean that George W. Bush was not a
total moron for using the word "crusade" in a speech shortly after 9/11).
Even though the Crusaders managed to capture Jerusalem (having to fill the
Holy City with the corpses of 30,000 Jews and Muslims to do so), the
forces of Saladin managed to regain control in 1187. While the Crusaders
hung on in the area for nearly of century afterward, they were never much
of a threat to the Muslims: In fact (quidem), the Crusaders killed more
Christians during the first year of their campaign to spread the Love
of Christ ™ than Emperor Nero was able to bump off during the
entire fourteen years of his reign.
No; the Islamic world's problem with the West wouldn't begin to kick into
high gear until a few centuries after the Crusades.
And yet, an argument can be made that the Crusades were the first drops
of rain in the giant shit-storm in which we presently find ourselves.
But not in the way that must Westerners might think.
As alluded to earlier, Europe during this period was a dismal, backward
place. This was partially because due to the tendency of the church to
systematically rid the world of the works of pagan authors. While many
of the books of Aristotle and Archimedes were simply burned, others had
their words scraped from their vellum backings so that they could be
overwritten with the works of the church's fathers.
While the Muslims had no great love with for the pagans of antiquity they
weren't stupid enough to burn their books: In fact (quidem), the Muslims
took the unusual route of actually reading and translating the works of
the ancients. This goes a long way towards explaining why the residents
of Muslim Cordoba were enjoying running water, paved and lighted streets,
and the choice of seventy libraries at the same point in history
when my ancestors endured open sewers, mud floors and over seventy
different kinds of body lice.
The tide of civilization began to turn when Christian Crusaders, following
the divinely inspired sacking of Muslim towns, discovered, among their
booty, a treasure trove of knowledge in the form of the
long-considered-destroyed works of ancient mathematicians, astronomers,
and scientists: The irony being that book were a valuable commodity among
the Christians because they were scarce: They were, of course, scarce
because Christians had burned and overwritten them.
Once the Christians began employing Jews to translate the books back into
Greek, a whole new world literally opened up for them. This new world
required adopting a few Middle Eastern concepts in order to work, however.
For example, it's impossible to do Geometry using Roman numerals. That's
why Europeans began to use the Arabic numeric system. It's also why, today,
you take a deep breath and count from 1 to 10, rather than from I to X,
before you tell your boss how you feel about working late.
In fact (quidem), the only place you're likely to find Roman numerals
nowadays is in the titles of blogs, where they are employed in a futile
attempt to extend an air of scholarship to the most poorly written pieces.
The West would employ this newly rediscovered knowledge to launch the
Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, and the Velvet
Underground. Muslims…well, Muslims, now having to deal with the Mongol
Hordes as well as the Christians, were in for a few lean years.
Circa 1320: Sunni Muslims close the "gates of Ijtihad." Shit Luther,
if I only had a dollar for every time when, as a child running outside to
play in the summertime, my dad would yell "Close the goddamn gates of
Ijtihad! Do you think I work all day at the steel mill so I can air
condition the neighborhood?" I could hire a naked Juliet Lewis to type this
while I dictated it from the International Space Station.
Ijtihad means "Independent reasoning." And by closing the gates of Ijtihad,
Sunnis, but not Shii Muslims, were basically saying "Everything we need to
know is in the Koran. If it's not in the Koran, then we don't need to know
it. If anyone has any questions, please raise your hands and we'll be sure
to cut them off."
Not surprisingly, this move kicked off centuries of decline within the
Islamic world.
1492 : The Muslims are kicked out of Spain when they lose their last
stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, the city-state of Grenada. Spanish
Jews didn't fare much better as they were offered the choice of converting
to Christianity, leaving, or being executed.
While many Spanish Jews did convert, many more left Spain. Some headed
north to eventually become the "Secular Jews" of France and Holland
(Spinoza came from this group) while others headed east to become he cast
of Fiddler on the Roof.
It was also, of course in 1492 that a Jew by the name of Christopher
Columbus sailed…
What? Columbus was kosher?
It's true. Yes, Columbus was a devout Christian but he was descended
from a family of converted Jews. Columbus even maintained a lifelong
fascination with the Kabbalah. Now we know why he was looking for China:
He wanted take-out (If you don't get this joke, ask a Jew to explain it.
If you don't know any Jews, then move out of Kansas.) By the way, this news
that Columbus was a matzoth muncher is not going to sit well with my wife's
Italian family down in South Philly; many of whom are of the opinion that
Leifer Erickson's discovery of Vineland is a Protestant fabrication.
It was also, of course in 1492 that a Jew by the name of Christopher
Columbus sailed to the New World (In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus
sailed the ocean Jew) and thereby kicked the Renaissance into overdrive.
Soon, gold and silver would be flowing from the New World to the Old
allowing for this surplus of wealth to be used to finance more inventions
and discoveries.
Next Time: Protestants Gone Wild! and the Jews finally get their Messiah.
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* In 725 CE, Dionysius Exiguus ("Dennis the Short": Who, by some accounts,
stood as much as four inches taller than the author of this piece)
composed De Temporum Ratione ("On the Reckoning of Time"). Previous to the
publication of this monumental tome, the church had relied on the old pagan
calendar which, oddly, dated from the reign Emperor Diocletian: the great
persecutor of the Christians. Dennis the Puny thought that the
ecclesiastical calendar should date from the birth of Christ.
Since there were no zeros in the Roman numerical system, Dennis was forced
to start with the year I. Dennis was also four years of-the-mark when it
came to calculating the year of Jesus' birth. Technically, it's 2009; and
Jesus, if he was planning on coming back for his 2000th birthday,
would've shown up in 1996.
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Suggested reading:
The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger
Rodney on 10.02.05 @ 05:28 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
