Well I'm finding the series interesting - a lot of facts gathered, no overtly prejudiced depiction of anybody (which is a Good Thing, whatever your opinion).  I agree with Amaral re the mood music, but there you go.

@ GC Mandrake - I can't remember all the historians' names.  There's Hillel Cohen, but also a few others.

Islam had a bit of a set back several hundred years ago when a school that banned interpretation of the Qur'an gained dominance.  It was as much a political struggle as anything, but the outcomes have been fairly dire.  So the short answer is: there are tendencies to reason (including moral reason), but they have not been dominant beyond a very brief moment hundreds of years ago, and have been increasingly marginalised in the present day.

Very perceptive!

Go further and say "place the Qur'an in history".

What I'm sure everybody is wondering is whether Joan will have Hainan Chicken Rice every day or only almost every day.

Nobody's likely to say it was you.  Perhaps that's the difference.

I'm glad you posted this Judith.  

Well it's certainly one of the bigger ones.

I might show up one day and surprise you Israel!

Though to be fair some of the results would be found in Lebanon.  True?

Oh come, Tom. You wouldn't write off the Catholic Church based on the behaviour of some paedophile priests, would you?  Extrapolate.

[I am not sure of the validation of having opinions on history, when with history we must deal in facts.]

Very true - and when disagreements stems from a different understanding of the facts, surely it's a good thing to set out what one believes the facts to be - to be refuted or agreed with, as the case may be, and then discussed for relevance.

[I doff my cap to you sir for doing the unspeakable - engaging primary sources!]

Seconded.

[What UK needs is an armed citizenry.]

Except imagine how many more people those two could have killed with easy access to guns.

And it's back again!

Your point re Wahhabism is true, though the Ahmadiyyas are being killed rather than subverted.

(On a segue, the link showed a mosque with a minaret claiming to be in Zurich.  Didn't the Swiss pass a no minarets referendum or some  such?)

Curses! I've lost my quote button again!

Midge

"But one faith has that option open and the other does not. Isn't that an intrinsic difference?"

Sure, but how consistently significant is the option to outcomes?

There are very few places where one can actually contrast and compare the two with 'all else being equal'. The only place that comes to mind is the Balkans, and the outcomes there were quite horrrific.  Ditto the Lebanese civil war.

Of course it's not okay, and it certainly isn't a justification.  The question was whether one religion was equal to the other.  My point was that over the years their outputs on earth have been similarly good and bad - so judging by outputs over their 'lifetimes', they are pretty similar.

That poor soldier, brutally killed in his own country.

Boris Johnson is running a city that is 13% Muslim - he cannot responsibly respond to this without parsing his words carefully.

Midge, that's more a difference between the options open to Christians and Muslims who want to reform their faiths.  But okay.