Salome has an articulate and well-reasoned refutation of Ahmed Deedat's refutation of the Gospel's narrative of the crucifixion. She ends by reporting how Deedat complains that Christians have been trained to hate Islam. I left a comment on her blog:
Deedat will have some accounting to do on the day of the judgment, I suspect. Thanks for writing this.
I also think that Deedat is wrong about Christians being trained to hate Islam. It is true that many, perhaps most, Christians hate or at least dislike Islam, but that is largely a product of what Muslims have done and are doing around the world. If we look for Muslim contributions to art, science, medicine and so on, we are very hard-pressed to find anything at all over the last centuries. Historically, when Muslims did take over such centers of learning as Constantinople and Alexandria the eventual outcome was always decline and stagnation. This will be the future of cities like Paris and London, I suspect.
If one is tempted to point to dar al hikmah in Abbasid Baghdad let me point out that a) the shari'a as it exists today was not yet developed, and b) once the Christians and Jews were properly submitted to Islamic rule and their rights and prerogatives circumscribed, decline was the only option, and indeed that is what happened.
