“Allah’s sun over the Occident”

This from the Brussels Journal with a H/T to AA to bringing it to my attention.

A Multicultural Conference Hijacked By Islamists

During the last weekend of October, a conference in Antwerp got a lot of resonance in the Arab world. The same conference was virtually ignored in Belgium, even within the local Muslim community.  “The place of Islam in the new Europe” was the title of the conference which was widely reported on Al Jazeera (see video below this article) and the Moroccan newspaper Le Matin.  In Belgium, only Gazet van Antwerpen published a short article on the local pages in three of its six regional editions. Make no mistake: this was a conference to promote multiculturalism en mutual understanding between the Islamic world and Europe.  The conference was organized by the Institute for Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies of the University of Antwerp, abbreviated as “IMaMs“.

CHAOTIC

The conference was announced as a big event, but its course was chaotic. Jacques Attali was announced as the keynote speaker, but he didn’t come.  The program and the panelists were very different from what was announced in the invitation, and a complete schedule was distributed on paper only halfway through the conference.  What should have been a conference on an academic level, turned out to be an event with very few high-level scholars and with very few references to scientific studies, statistics or serious references.

REFERENCE TO NAZI SCIENTIST

Already at the opening session, the first blunder was heard, even though most of the audience never noticed it.  Speaker Muhammad Bensalah highlighted the contribution of Islam to European civilization, and suggested that few Western scholars fully recognized the Islamic contribution without covering it up.  He named three: the American John Esposito, the German Sigrid Hunke and the Belgian George Sarton.  Now, Sigrid Hunke was an employee of the scientific department of the SS under the Nazi regime, where she was researching racial psychology.  In that position she came in contact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who openly advocated the extermination of the Jews.  In her book “Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland” (“Allah’s sun over the Occident”) she asserted that the roots of European civilization were not Christian, but are a mix of Islamic, pagan-Celtic and Germanic elements.  She illustrates this argument with now discredited theories like the sea map of Piri Reis allegedly used by Columbus, and the fact that in German and Dutch one does not say “twenty three” but “three twenty” (Dreiundzwanzig, drieëntwintig), because in Arabic, one reads from right to left.