William Smyth Quotes
… toleration is the best and only policy; … it is best to suffer colonies or inferior nations to retain their own particular creeds and rites and ceremonies in religion, and their own particular modes of administering justice in civil or criminal matters; that improvements may be proposed to them, but not enforced; that till they can be properly enlightened, they must be left to indulge their own particular notions.
William Smyth, 1765-1849, English Historian, Modern History: Volume II
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation illustrates that a narrow orthodox view of Islam is not the only one in Arab nations. Khaled is not an obscure cleric, but a popular television personality. While his views are considered heresy by many orthodox Muslims, the narrow view is by no means universal. Orthodox Islamists believe that God has commanded that all mankind be Muslims and the ones who are not are either ignorant so need to be “educated”, or evil and therefore should be killed. However, Muhammad ordained that an exception should be made for “Children of the Book”—Jews and Christians who revere the Old Testament. This was at a time when Christians would not allow any other form of worship but Christianity. Christianity, Judaism and most other religions have become tolerant of other religions and allow open alternative worship. Islam which early on led the way to tolerance, has in many countries gone back to the intolerance that existed amongst many Christians at the time of Muhammad.
He was referring to whether or not Iraq should be a Muslim state.
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. This quote is historically very important as it is one of the first expressions of religious tolerance. Tragically, this principle was ignored by most Christians for over a millennium. Some Christians still ignore it. See {626754} for a modern example.
The Punjab had been partitioned into a Pakistani part and an Indian part. The latter was a major province of the new state. But in the political process of drawing the boundaries, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had used fanatic Muslim terrorists to massacre Sikhs and Hindus to ethnically cleanse areas and intimidate the ruling Indian Congress Party and the British government to obtain more area and resources for the Muslim state. However, at this point he had to govern, and there were still many Sikhs and Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists in the new Muslim state. Jinnah's new state needed all the help it could get from the U. S. and others, and Jinnah started sounding like a passionate democrat. On paper religious freedom was guaranteed in Pakistan. However Pakistan became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for non-Muslims. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
William Smyth (or Smith) was Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield from 1493 to 1496 and then Bishop of Lincoln until his death. He held political offices, the most important being Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches. He became very wealthy and was a benefactor of a number of institutions. He was a co-founder of Brasenose College, Oxford and endowed a grammar school in the village of his birth in Lancashire.
