Re: [OT] Understanding the Middle East from the Arab/Muslim point of view

The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:

. . .

As for temples now occupied by Muslims, the Jerusalem Temple Mount is
far from the only temple of another faith now occupied by mosques. The
best known of all is the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul but there are literal
thousands of holy places in India that were Hindu but have mosques
built on them. There is currently a lot of strife in India since there
are 200+ million Muslims in India while Modi wants to restore all
former Hindu temples back to Hinduism. Needless to say Indian Muslims
don't like that.

That's not entirely true. Modi has come up with false religious claims
that modern mosques were built on sites that had some connection to Hindu
beliefs and riled up the local population to drstroy the mosque. The
vast majority of the anti-Muslim attacks Modi is indirectly responsible
for are unrelated to forced religious conversion into Islam.

No other religion has taken over the holy places of other religions on
the scale of Islam and Islam takes the position that any place (not
just temples) that has EVER been Muslim controlled MUST be regained
for Islam. They seem to have made an exception for Spain but that's
the only exception I know of. They have NOT made an exception for
Israel (and the Jews were driven out of modern day Israel by the
Romans 600 years before Muhammed) and that's at the root of a lot of
the strife.