Robbie Render retweetledi
Ayesha...
On the Renaissance owing everything to Islam. The transmission of Greek texts through Islamic scholars is documented and acknowledged in the previous reply. But the Renaissance also drew on Byzantine scholarship, Roman legal tradition, European monastery archives and the printing press. It was a synthesis of multiple sources of which Islamic transmission was one. More importantly it is a deflection. The argument was never about who inspired the Renaissance. It was about which civilisation produced Magna Carta, habeas corpus, parliamentary democracy and the abolition of slavery. The Renaissance produced those things. The Islamic Golden Age did not. That question remains unanswered.
On the Ottoman refuge. Dhimmi status meant special taxes, restricted professions, excluded from equal legal testimony and prohibited from building synagogues taller than mosques. Relative tolerance is not equality. The bar was low.
On UN resolutions. Saudi Arabia, Iran, China and Russia sit on the Human Rights Council and vote on Israel. The quantity of resolutions reflects the voting bloc not the conduct. By that logic North Korea is a beacon of human rights.
On Palestinian population growth proving there is no genocide. You have conceded the central argument. If the population has grown from one million to five million the legal definition of genocide, the deliberate destruction of a group as such, is not met. Thank you for making that point more clearly than I did.
On slavery being more prevalent among Christians. The transatlantic slave trade was conducted by European Christian nations. It was also ended by a specifically Christian abolitionist movement operating on explicitly Christian theological grounds. What is consistently omitted from this argument is that the trade was facilitated at source by African tribal leaders who captured and sold their own people to European traders. Slavery was not imposed on Africa from outside. It was a pre-existing practice that European demand accelerated and monetised. The Arab slave trade predated the transatlantic trade by centuries, was conducted on a comparable scale, continued long after British abolition and has never produced an equivalent internal moral reckoning. The Barbary pirates enslaved over a million Europeans from coastal communities across Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Italy and Spain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. That trade ended not through Islamic moral development but through British naval power and diplomatic pressure. Comparing scale without comparing the moral response, and without acknowledging who actually ended it and how, tells less than half the story.
On Iran winning. Khamenei is dead. Thirty thousand citizens massacred in 48 hours. Nuclear facilities struck and inaccessible. Currency collapsed. Proxy networks dismantled. The Strait of Hormuz disruption is economic hostage taking by a regime with no other credible leverage. The Director of National Intelligence testified in March 2026 that Iran has not resumed enriching uranium. That is not winning. That is desperation.
One final observation. Across this entire exchange you have not once acknowledged the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in a single year across Africa and the Middle East. Not the 70 beheaded inside a Protestant church in eastern Congo. Not the villages burned in Mozambique. Not the 30,000 Iranians massacred by their own government in 48 hours. Not the gay men hanged from cranes in Iran. Not the women stoned to death under Islamic law in multiple jurisdictions today. Not one acknowledgement. Not one word of condemnation.
You opened this conversation calling for joining hands. That requires naming what is happening within the tradition you are defending. Until the atrocities above can be condemned as clearly as you condemn the sins of Christian history, the gesture remains empty.
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