Mary Astell Quotes
Certain I am, that Christian Religion does no where allow Rebellion.
Astell, Mary. An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom. R. Wilkin, 1704, p. 27.
This verse has been one of the bases of Muslim theocratic states like Iran’s claim to legitimacy.
He was stating for France what the English King James I had said a few decades earlier. See {616307}.
Niemoller, a World War I U-boat commander and clergyman, was jailed for rejecting the National Socialist ideology and for appealing to German Christians not to embrace the new paganism of Nazism and Fascism.
The People of Basra were not Christians or Jews. Most were then Zoroastrians who the Prophet also allowed to maintain their religion if they paid the special tax.
The political control technique of establishing a religion where by God himself ordains the ruler was not unique to the Christians and Muslims. The technique was also used in the Inca Empire of Peru. The first Inca who came up with this creative theocratic concept did so in about 1200.
This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.
This concept is not terribly different from the concept of the theocracy of the Islamic government of Iran in the 21st century. There is a civil government but it serves and is “under the direction of the spiritual power.”
Mary Astell was an English protofeminist writer, philosopher, and rhetorician. Her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women has earned her the title "the first English feminist."
